From a Philosophical Point of View: Selected Studies

From a Philosophical Point of View

ALSO BY MORTON WHITE

The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism Social Thought in America The Age of Analysis (ed.) Toward Reunion in Philosophy Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning The Intellectual versus the City (with Lucia White) Foundations of Historical Knowledge Science and Sentiment in America Documents in the History of American Philosophy (ed.) Pragmatism and the American Mind The Philosophy of the American Revolution What Is and What Ought to Be Done Journeys to the Japanese, 1952–1979 (with Lucia White) Philosophy, “The Federalist,” and the Constitution The Question of Free Will A Philosopher’s Story A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism

From a Philosophical Point of View SELECTED STUDIES

MORTON WHITE

P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S P R I N C E T O N A N D O X F O R D

Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data White, Morton Gabriel, 1917– From a philosophical point of view : selected studies / Morton White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-11959-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy. I. Title. B21.W48 2005 191—dc22 2004044335

British Library cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Goudy Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

TO THE MEMORY OF ISAIAH BERLIN WHO HELPED ME MORE THAN MAY BE EVIDENT IN THESE PAGES

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: What I Have Learned by Rereading These Essays

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PART I: PROLEGOMENA

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1. 2. 3. 4.

Prologue to A Philosophy of Culture (2002) Philosophy and Man: An Exhortation (1955) The Social Role of Philosophy (1952) New Horizons in Philosophy (1960)

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PART II: HISTORY

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5. 6. 7. 8.

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A Plea for an Analytic Philosophy of History (1953) Historical Relativism and the Evaluation of Histories (2003) Historical Inevitability (1956) Tolstoy the Empirical Fox (2003)

PART III: RELIGION, EDUCATION, AND POLITICS

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9. John Dewey: A Great Philosopher of Education (1966) 10. Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning (1954) 11. Religious Commitment and Higher Education (1957) 12. The University in Transition (1966) 13. Philosophy in a Utopian Institute for Advanced Study (1989)

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PART IV: ANALYTICITY, MORALITY, CAUSALITY, AND LIBERTY

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism (1950) Ontological Clarity and Semantic Obscurity (1951) On the Church-Frege Solution of the Paradox of Analysis (1948) Oughts and Cans (1979) Causation and Action (1969) Hart and Honore´ on Causation in the Law (1960) The Question of Free Will: Some Preliminary Remarks (1993)

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PART V: PRAGMATISM

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21. 22. 23. 24.

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Harvard’s Philosophical Heritage (1957) Experiment and Necessity in Dewey’s Philosophy (1959) Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis (1949) Desire and Desirability: A Rejoinder to a Posthumous Reply by John Dewey (1996)

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25. Peirce’s Summum Bonum and the Ethical Views of C. I. Lewis and John Dewey (1999) 26. Normative Ethics, Normative Epistemology, and Quine’s Holism (1986) 27. Holistic Pragmatism and Ethics (2002) 28. The Psychologism of Hume and Arithmetical Truth (2003)

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PART VI: HISTORY OF IDEAS

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29. Why Annalists of Ideas Should Be Analysts of Ideas (1975) 30. The Revolt against Formalism in American Social Thought of the Twentieth Century (1947) 31. Pragmatism and the Revolt against Formalism: Revising Some Doctrines of William James (1986) 32. The Politics of Epistemology(1989) 33. Original Sin, Natural Law, and Politics (1956) 34. Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Progressive Era (1988) 35. The American Intellectual versus the American City (1961) 36. The Philosopher and the Metropolis in America (1963)

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227 243 255 270 284 299 310

PART VII: PHILOSOPHERS

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37. William James (1986) 38. The Later Years of George Santayana (1963) 39. English Philosophy at Midcentury: An American’s Impressions (1951) 40. Memories of G. E. Moore (1959) 41. W. V. Quine (2001)

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Acknowledgments

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Index

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333 339 344

From a Philosophical Point of View

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

What I Have Learned by Rereading These Essays

IN THIS VOLUME, I have gathered together several studies that I have written over many years on widely dispersed subjects, and while rereading them in search of a general theme I have come to see that I have never lost the desire to philosophize in the manner of John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and William James. Although I have sharply disagreed with some of their views, I have nonetheless kept their wide-ranging ambitions in the back of my mind even while working on the problems of metaphysics and epistemology. Of course, they worked with great distinction on such problems, but they encouraged me to think that philosophers need not focus on them alone. What more may philosophers do? I think we may critically examine the history of our discipline with an eye to formulating what James called our stock of fundamental beliefs; that we should use this stock not only while reflecting on mathematics and natural science but also while examining other institutions such as politics, art, literature, history, law, education, and religion; and that we should recognize that our entrenched philosophical beliefs and those enshrined in those institutions may be revised in order to achieve what John Rawls has felicitously called reflective equilibrium in our thinking. Thus we need not limit ourselves to the more technical problems of philosophy but may also encourage fellow humans and fellow humanists to rely on well-supported beliefs while trying to make the world a better place. In doing so, philosophers will not become what Locke called dictators of principles but cooperative companions of all who seek to extend what Milton calls the domain of mind as widely as possible. As I review the pieces in this volume, I have become aware of how short of this high ideal I have fallen yet I am relieved to find that they do not strike me as the fugitive essays of one who has idly skated through an intellectual department store while aimlessly poking his nose into its various wares. Of course, I have not been working for more than a half-century with this ideal constantly before me but I think it has been in the back of my mind while writing what I reprint here. In settling these essays into their new home, I have attempted to iron out stylistic wrinkles, to correct as many errors as possible, to reduce repetition as much as I could without too much rewriting, and to make more evident the united purposes I have come to recognize in them. And while I was once disappointed by the failure of first-rate minds of the twentieth century to address problems of general concern, I have since come to exult in the fact that Isaiah Berlin, Nelson Goodman, Herbert Hart, and John Rawls worked so beneficially in the philosophy of history, the philosophy of art, legal philosophy, and the philosophy of politics—that is to say, in the philosophy of culture. Unlike W. V.

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Quine, who once quipped, “Philosophy of science is philosophy enough”, some of us who have been influenced by him have broadened our interests in a way that is well illustrated in the development of Nelson Goodman’s work. When in 1953 Berlin published his now famous distinction between hedgehogs who know one big thing and foxes who know many little things, Goodman asked, “What about me? I’m interested in one little thing”. Little, therefore, did some of his early admirers expect that he would one day write The Languages of Art as a complement to his important works in the philosophy of science. In illustration of the ideal I have sketched, I have included pieces that show how an interest in seemingly narrow problems may lead to broad conclusions about the scope of philosophy. Thus an inquiry that led me to question a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic truth also led me to see that philosophy is epistemically continuous with science, and therefore an empirical discipline rather than a purely dialectical effort to penetrate essences without recourse to experience. In this spirit I have reprinted studies in semantics, ethics, and epistemology, as well as essays in the philosophy of history, the history of pragmatism, and the history of legal, social, and political ideas. I have also reprinted essays on the controversial subjects of religion, politics, education, and the city, a place ironically despised by some philosophers in spite of being the home of the civilization that nurtured them. In many of these essays and elsewhere, I have expressed dissatisfaction with the idea that beliefs in the three traditional disciplines of logic, physics, and ethics are tested in radically different ways, and in its place I have espoused what I call a methodological monism along with a holistic pragmatism that goes beyond that advocated by one of its founders, Pierre Duhem. While Quine and Alfred Tarski were content to extend Duhem’s holism by epistemically uniting ontology, logic, and natural science, I have extended it to cover ethics in Toward Reunion in Philosophy, What Is and What Ought To Be Done, and The Question of Free Will, and still further in A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism. In the last work, I defend my version of epistemological holism along with my view that philosophers may profitably study the major institutions of civilization. A tall order, I admit, but I believe that philosophers should at times hitch their wagons to stars with Emerson, and at other times imitate the turtle, who makes progress by sticking out his neck. In both cases they take risks, and by taking such risks, Mill, James, and Dewey became heroic exemplars of philosophy. In order to show more perspicuously how these studies illustrate my various but united views, I have divided them into groups. They do not appear here in logical or in chronological order, but I hope that my organization of them will help show what I have been about for more than a half-century, and that it will help the reader make his or her way through what might otherwise seem like a maze without a plan.

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Prolegomena In this opening part, I reprint a few programmatic pieces, including the prologue to my book A Philosophy of Culture and the concluding chapter of my Age of Analysis. To help the reader with some allusions in the latter piece, I should point out that earlier in the book from which I had excerpted it, I had made use of Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor about hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many little things, while urging Anglo-American analytic philosophers to use their techniques on the problems treated by more humanistically oriented Continental thinkers. In this same spirit, I recommend in “The Social Role of Philosophy” that modern empiricists should spread their interests as widely as Locke, Hume, and Mill did by including ethics and political philosophy among their concerns as well as epistemology; and in “New Horizons in Philosophy,” I argue that a philosophical interest in language should include an interest in aspects of culture other than natural science and formal logic.

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C H A P T E R 1

Prologue to A Philosophy of Culture (2002)

I BEGAN MY serious philosophical thinking under the influence of several major currents of thought, among them the pragmatism of John Dewey and the analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore. I found Moore a persuasive advocate of the view that the philosopher should analyze extralinguistic concepts, attributes, or propositions, and arrive at truths that are analytic and not dependent on experience for their support; but I soon discovered that Moore was unsure about the notion of analysis that underlay his main philosophical efforts, because he had developed serious doubts about the idea of an analytic statement. At about the same time, I came to know Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine, who, in reaction to their mentors—C. I. Lewis in Goodman’s case and Carnap in Quine’s—did not seek analyses of intensional entities such as concepts, attributes, and propositions, because they thought that reference to such entities was obscure and because they had no clear notion of how their identity was to be established. Sharing these doubts, I came to think that the philosopher’s task is an empirical enterprise requiring an examination of how we do and should use language rather than an effort to decompose concepts. Soon afterward, Quine, Goodman, and I concluded that the search for an empirical criterion of synonymy and therefore of analyticity was hopeless, and that if one ever did emerge, it would make the distinction between analytic and synthetic a matter of degree. I was also encouraged in this belief by Dewey’s epistemological gradualism and by the epistemological holism of the logician Alfred Tarski, who held that logical statements may be components of conjunctions tested by experience. Around the middle of the twentieth century, study of Wittgenstein’s later works, with their emphasis on the need for the philosopher to recognize the many different uses of language, as well as contact with J. L. Austin reinforced my view that philosophy is primarily a study of language and led me to think that Mooreian analysis of concepts was a remnant of classical rationalism from whose influence even James and Dewey did not wholly escape. Once I had shed the vestiges of rationalism in my own thinking, I came to see more clearly that Dewey was right to claim that much of the history of philosophy had been a fruitless quest for certainty; but I also saw that even he, perhaps under the influence of logical positivism, had unconsciously participated in that quest in his later writings when he accepted something like a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements in his Logic. At about this time, I was writing a book on American social thought that focused on what I called the revolt against formalism in the work of Dewey, the jurist Holmes, and others, so I was much interested in cultural history, which was certainly an empirical discipline. Thus the two souls within my breast—the philosopher and the histo-

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rian—were epistemically united. I tried to bring them together in a book on the philosophy of history, where I concentrated on the language of explanation and narration, with special attention to the roles of generalization and valuation in historical inquiry. Soon after that I began thinking seriously about Quine’s view that epistemology is a branch of psychology; this line of thought led me to believe that the philosopher may view moral thinking in a holistic way and therefore should not limit holism to thinking in natural science. From this I concluded that Quine was on the wrong track when he said, as Carnap had, that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. I also came to realize that James’s psychologically oriented investigations of religious experience and Dewey’s of artistic creation were philosophical even though they were not exclusively concerned with language, and I saw the error of Wittgenstein’s view in his Tractatus that “Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy than is any other natural science.”1 This position allowed me to see that philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, philosophy of law, philosophy of history, and philosophy of politics are coordinate with the philosophy of natural science, thereby buttressing a view I had already expressed. In an essay published in the early 1950s,2 I had observed that although there were many mansions in philosophy, the more splendid ones housed metaphysics, logic, epistemology, and ethics, which lived on a commanding hilltop, while somewhere downtown were the two-family dwellings for political philosophy and jurisprudence, the small apartments for esthetics, and the boardinghouses for philosophers of the special sciences. In reaction to this invidious ordering of the philosophical disciplines, I came to think that a more democratic division of housing should be devised, one that provided better quarters for the deprived disciplines. After I came to believe that metaphysics and epistemology were empirical disciplines, I had an even stronger reason for urging this reapportionment since I came to see more clearly that those privileged parts of philosophy could not defend their conclusions by a priori methods. I also came to believe that ethics may be viewed as empirical if one includes feelings of moral obligation as well as sensory experiences in the pool or flux into which the ethical believer worked a manageable structure (to use a James-like figure that Quine had once used when characterizing the purpose of science). As I reflected on my expansive conclusion about the various branches of philosophy, I began to think that the most interesting and most fruitful products of so-called linguistic philosophy were in the philosophy of culture. This appeared to me to be illustrated in Quine’s work in the philosophy of science, which he at one point called a study of a Wittgensteinian game or an institution; in Goodman’s work in the philosophy of art; to some extent in Holmes’s legal philosophy; and in Rawls’s work in the philosophy of politics. Consequently, I decided to 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London, 1933), 4.1121 (p. 77). 2 See “A Plea for an Analytic Philosophy of History,” in my Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 61. Reprinted below.

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write a critical history of recent philosophy of culture to show, among other things, how such work and my own in semantics, the philosophy of history, and ethics were part of an effort to escape the influence of classical rationalism. I saw this effort as the hallmark of a movement that included Hume and Mill; that was to some extent supported in the nineteenth century by figures I call thinkers, to distinguish them from the great philosophers who wrote about culture; that was encouraged to some extent by those I call half-hearted antirationalists; and that was impeded by irrationalists. Although [A Philosophy of Culture] is in part a historical study of the roles of reason, sensory experience, and sentiment in twentieth-century philosophy of culture, it is one in which I am mainly concerned to show why certain philosophical ideas about culture should be accepted and others rejected. Therefore, I do not hesitate to express both favorable and unfavorable opinions of some of the views I examine—all this in the interest of furthering the aims of the philosophy of culture. However, I am not concerned to explain by reference to social circumstances why certain philosophical beliefs arose at certain times and why others succeeded them. I leave that different and difficult job to others who, I hope, will not carry it out at the expense of gliding over philosophical views and the arguments offered in their behalf. In my opinion, the sociohistorical explanation of the emergence of philosophical beliefs depends on an understanding of them that can be gained only by a careful study of what philosophers have said. Philosophical beliefs are not black boxes whose historical antecedents and consequences can be discerned without knowing what is inside them, but inasmuch as the philosophical task of reporting the beliefs of a philosopher is empirical, it is not radically different from the task of historians who try to say why those beliefs arose when they arose and what their effects were on society. That is why annalists who deal with ideas would do well to study the work of analysts who work in what might be called cultural philosophy.3 I think cultural philosophy or philosophy of culture is more inclusive than philosophy of science because the latter is a study of only one cultural institution and therefore coordinate with studies of other institutions that make up a culture or a civilization. For this reason, I add a terminological point that will by now be obvious: I use the word “culture” as some have used the word “civilization”—to denote those institutions—and therefore not as some anthropologists use the term. About a half century ago in my Age of Analysis (1955),4 I said that nothing could be more important than applying the techniques of analytic philosophy to subjects in the philosophy of culture; but little did I expect that by the end of the twentieth century my hope would be realized in the work of several philosophers trained in the analytic, linguistic, and pragmatic traditions who managed to free themselves from the vestiges of rationalism in logical positivism. I think 3 See my essay “Why Annalists of Ideas Should Be Analysts of Ideas,” Georgia Review 29 (1975), pp. 930–47. 4 Morton White, The Age of Analysis: Twentieth Century Philosophers, Selected, with an Introduction and Interpretive Commentary (Boston, 1955).

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that this ironic development in the history of philosophy bodes well for its future, since it opens up new avenues for humanistic inquiry. It also shows that study of the many aspects of culture is not the exclusive preserve of muddle-heads, philosophasters, and charlatans. Indeed, the relation between sane, sound, and sober philosophy of culture and its competitors today is reminiscent of what David Hume said in the introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) when he compared the use of what he called experimental reason in discussions of logic, morals, criticism, and politics with that of its rivals: “Amidst all this bustle ’tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army.”5 I would prefer to use a less military figure, but I agree with what Hume was driving at as I scan the intellectual scene today. I also agree with Hume’s remark in his introduction that there is no question of philosophical importance “whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man,” and that “the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.”6 Would that Hume had remembered this when he distinguished sharply between statements that are based on “experimental reasoning” and statements established by “abstract reasoning.”

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David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888), p. xviii. Ibid., p. xx.

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Philosophy and Man: An Exhortation (1955)

THE READER OF MY BOOK The Age of Analysis has read about a dozen doctrines, as many methods, and a variety of concepts from essence to existence, life to language, logic to love, and practice to perfection. But within this welter several contrasts stand out: first of all, the fundamental one between philosophers who strive to know big things and those who are less ambitious; and secondly, the peculiarly geographical character of this division. It does seem as though the continent of Europe is the land of what Isaiah Berlin calls the hedgehog while the English-speaking world is the home of the philosophical fox. No matter how one resists the idea of geographical determinism in intellectual matters, it is true that Bergson and Sartre span an enormous amount of French thinking in the twentieth century; that Croce was the spiritual leader of Italy for more than a generation; that philosophers like Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey encouraged the tradition of philosophical vastness in Germany for years, and that they were succeeded by Jaspers and Heidegger. Moreover, the continental philosophers’ interest in subjects outside of philosophy, particularly in biology, history, literature, and the social sciences, is naturally accompanied by an influence that extends well beyond professional philosophical circles, and in this respect they emulate Hegel without being hegelians. It is also true that English thinkers like Russell and Moore were engaged in a more deflationary effort, in whittling philosophy down to manageable size, while the main American philosophers like Dewey and James tried to blunt the point and the edge of scientific and analytic methods, to soften the blow at traditional philosophical sensibility. This is why so many English and American observers of the present philosophical scene in Europe have deplored the persistence of obscurity and pretentiously displayed learning that seem so irrelevant to the real problems of philosophy. It is also why so many continental philosophers—whether they are existentialists, marxists, or phenomenologists—regard English and American analysts and positivists as heartless philistines. Writing in the magazine Horizon in 1949, a distinguished Oxford professor, H. H. Price, said of the British philosophers’ concern with perception: “I have been told that Continental philosophers find this national pastime of ours very puzzling; and I have heard one of them suggest that it is connected in some ways with the Wordsworthian attitude to Nature, and with our national taste for landscape painting. Perhaps there is some connection (if there is, it is nothing to be ashamed of). But for my part I find it puzzling that so many Continental philosophers are not interested in perception at all, and prefer to spend their lives talking about dreary subjects like Kulturphilosophie.” And it is reported that when Henry Sidgwick, the last great utilitarian, was asked by a German philosopher

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how the English got along without an equivalent for the word “Gelehrte,” Sidgwick (a stutterer) replied: “We call them p-p-prigs.” But a match for both of these is the reply of the French existentialist who was asked for his comment on a particularly careful criticism of his views by a logical positivist: “He is a cow!” One wonders about the likelihood of effective communication between cows and prigs, or between hedgehogs and foxes, especially when they are of different nationalities. Nevertheless it is a mistake to think of this geographical division of the Western philosophers as more than a rough generalization having deep historical roots and understandable social and political concomitants. One should not conclude that it is psychologically impossible for courageous souls to penetrate the thick fog that has dropped between some philosophers of the continent and some English-speaking philosophers. For after all, much of contemporary Anglo-American interest in logical analysis, science, and language originates in the work of the Austrians Wittgenstein and Schlick, and the Germans Carnap and Reichenbach, who had learned a great deal from Russell, who in turn had learned from Frege in a more internationally minded period. Moreover, Dewey, Santayana, and Whitehead—three of the great English-speaking philosophers of the twentieth century—have been philosophers in the grand manner, and even the language of the existentialists, which seems so difficult to our ears, has its English translators and, I think, its affinities with developments in England and America. If there is any gulf between the style, the terminology, and the interests of philosophers all over the world, it cannot be laid up merely to difference of tongue, or location, or historical background, for we know that there are political forces which foster and indeed demand the continuation of such a gulf. The philosophers behind the iron curtain are forbidden to espouse any philosophy other than dialectical materialism, and there are religious institutions in the world which impose rigid limits upon the philosophical beliefs of their adherents. An honest man, therefore, can hardly point to philosophy itself and accuse it of an incapacity to come to universal agreement when such agreement is blocked by terror and orthodoxy. But let us perform an experiment in imagination—unfortunately only in imagination. Let us suppose that the various social and political curtains and bans have been lifted and ask whether philosophers of different lands and tongues might, even in this state of nature, understand each other—to say nothing about agreeing with each other. What then? Would we come to anything like the kind of cooperation that we find in the sciences? One must answer no, I think, but this time we are in paradise, so we cannot explain our failures by terror and orthodoxy. This time philosophers must look into themselves and there they will find divisions which are at least as effective as terror and orthodoxy in blocking philosophical communication. They will find the doctrine that there are methods of arriving at knowledge which transcend reason and experience; they will find a sharp and untenable dualism between reason and experience themselves enshrined in the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements; they will meet a similar contrast between the so-called normative statements of ethics and

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the descriptive statements of science. And all of this is the result of a desperate effort to maintain that there are fundamentally different methods of arriving at knowledge which correspond to the supposedly different subject matters of logic, metaphysics, ethics, and science—to say nothing of theology. The hedgehogs do not merely think they know one big thing; they think they know it in a special way; the self-appointed custodians of our morals think they know what they claim to know in a special way; and some logicians persuade themselves that they need only look at meanings or words when justifying their formulae. But let it be supposed for a moment that these dichotomies are surrendered and see how much of the fog can be lifted. Let it be recognized that a philosopher has as much responsibility to defend what he says by appealing to experience as a scientist or an historian, and that he has no special insights that set him above the crowd; let it be supposed that every statement is, as Wittgenstein says, part of a “form of life” and therefore that the decision to accept it or reject it involves reverberations beyond itself; let it be supposed that something analogous is true of the decision to accept or reject a moral judgment; let it be supposed, in short, that all of our knowledge, whether moral, metaphysical, logical, or scientific, is bound into one system, a way of life from which no statement escapes or enters without affecting, however remotely, the status of another. Then what? I suggest that the effort to draw sharp lines between the analytic and the synthetic, the metaphysical and the logical, the descriptive and the normative, will appear silly and futile. There will be judgments to which we attach more weight than others, of course, but they will come from many different fields, so that our stock of fundamental beliefs at a given moment will be pluralistically composed. It won’t be possible to isolate all of them as truths of logic, or truths of mathematics, or truths of metaphysics, or truths of science. Disciplinary labeling will not be a mark of certainty, and, indeed, the search for a sharp criterion of certainty or necessity will emerge as equally futile. Traditional preoccupation with finding a criterion of certainty and identifying it with a given discipline, whether it be mathematics or the empirical sciences, has gone hand in hand with the notion that such a solid criterion could provide a philosopher’s stone. In the medieval age of belief and the seventeenth century’s age of reason, we see classic examples of this effort to single out one faculty or one science as key to the universe or the intellectual globe. One kind of knowing is set up as a model whose method the others are asked to follow whether it be theology or mathematics. In the eighteenth century the triumph of Newton’s physics made mechanics king; in the nineteenth Hegel’s history and Darwin’s biology took on a similar importance, and toward the close of that century psychology made a strong bid to dominate philosophical studies. In place of this disciplinary imperialism, the twentieth century tends to be more democratic and pluralistic. Not only does it avoid setting up one kind of knowledge as central, but it even denies the centrality of knowing as a form of human concern. This is evident not only in the extreme vitalism of Bergson, but also in Wittgenstein’s effort to show that language has many different uses, which are all of interest to a philosopher. It is reflected in the pluralistic metaphysics of James and even in

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Dewey’s denial of what he calls the ubiquity of the knowing experience. It is illustrated by the later tendency of logical positivists to avoid what has been called the reductive fallacy. Once it becomes clear that there are no sharp lines of demarcation between the disciplines and that no one of them can claim a fundamental position in the scheme of knowing, and once it becomes clear that there are forms of human experience which are just as important as knowing, the way is open to a philosophical study of man in the broadest sense. If such a dream were realized, which means if the point of view outlined were to be generally accepted, can there be any question but that some of the conflicts and misunderstandings of contemporary philosophy would be resolved? If it were accepted, the grand philosophers would surrender the notion that they can know one big thing without knowing or feeling lots of little things, and the minute philosophers would make an effort to know big things. The analysts would have recognized the need and the importance of treating human behavior in a rational way. Science would no longer be the bugbear or the underling of philosophy but its companion. The philosopher would profit through knowledge of other disciplines, to say nothing of profiting through absorbing other experiences. Differences of all kinds might be drawn, but they would not be made in the sledgehammer fashion of the philosopher who announces that all ethical statements are like this and all scientific statements are like that in a manner that is more like simple Thales and the rest of the pre-Socratics than moderns prefer to admit. Each statement would be studied in its own right, but always in a context that transcends the single isolated statement itself. It should be realized, of course, that I am not calling for a revival of absolute idealism. But I am prepared to recognize an affinity between that wrongheaded doctrine and the one I advance. Idealism’s insight into the interconnectedness of all things should be transported to a linguistic level. Instead of saying that everything is mysteriously connected with everything else, it is better to say that all statements which express knowledge are logically connected with each other inasmuch as we can always reject some other statement than the one ostensibly under fire by feeling or experience. The significance of this point of view is obvious. If he takes it seriously, the philosopher is obliged to familiarize himself with more than one part of philosophy as traditionally conceived. The hedgehog may lie down with the fox, and the result need not be grotesque. So long as we think of philosophy as a tightly compartmentalized subject in which there are Sartres who move us, and Carnaps who prove for us, we are bound to see the philosophical world torn by something far more depressing than disagreement, and that is the complete incapacity of philosophers to understand each other. Throughout this volume [Age of Analysis], I have tried my hardest, with an excusable amount of irony in some cases, to present the views of some philosophers whose views are very far from my own. I trust that in my efforts at objectivity I have not succeeded in hiding the fact that my own philosophical sympathies are closest to the pragmatic and analytic traditions, but I must also add that I sympathize with the concerns of some of the philosophers in the first part of this volume. I believe, therefore, that nothing could be more important than reunit-

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ing these two contrasting elements in twentieth-century philosophy—the analytic, pragmatic, linguistic concern of the recent Anglo-American tradition supplemented by some of the insights and the more humane, cultivated concerns of the predominantly continental tradition. As long as they are kept separate, as long as the custodians of philosophical technique develop axes with which to sharpen other axes, they risk developing a sense of weariness and emptiness in themselves and in those who read them. As long as the more literate and more cultivated devotees of philosophy persist in ignoring the great achievements of Russell, Moore, Carnap, and Wittgenstein, in forgetting that the giants of the old days to whom they look back nostalgically—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, for example—were tough, technical thinkers as well as men of feeling and vision, they will impede the revival of philosophy’s strength. What Hegel saw in a Gothic dream and conveyed in a myth was a little close to the truth. For while a philosopher is not obliged to make himself an expert in all fields, and to produce dull or bogus summaries of all knowledge in the manner of Herbert Spencer or Hegel himself, he should be trained to discover the important similarities and the important differences between the chief activities of man. Knowing, as Bergson insisted, is not everything, and there are interesting general facts about feeling and doing which a philosopher might well relate to knowing— his main traditional concern. Should he heed the call to examine them without becoming a charlatan he will have done a great deal to bolster the strength of philosophy. We live in dreadful times, when a world in conflict seeks and despises that combination of technique and vision for which the great philosophers are justly famous; their successors should not shirk the responsibility to carry on with equal respect for logic and life.

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The Social Role of Philosophy (1952)

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY has witnessed a slow revolution in philosophy that has gone almost unnoticed by the layman. It has been part of its program to insist that philosophy cannot be carried on irresponsibly and pompously; it has said good-bye forever to the days of the fat, two-volumed Weltanschauung. Let those who yearn for those days try to read one of the classics of the glistering age of American philosophy—for example, Royce’s The World and the Individual—and they will see why the era of speculative metaphysics has lost its charm for the young American philosopher. The young American philosopher has become more and more absorbed in analytic philosophy, under which a variety of different doctrines are included, some of them positivistic and others decidedly antipositivistic in character. The temper and tone of the movement is deflationary and critical; its method linguistic and logical. While some of its sponsors emphasize the importance of reconstructing ordinary language, others insist on the need for describing the behavior of words as ordinarily used. What they all oppose, however, is the pretentious method of those who claim to conduct us to the Truth by way of labyrinthine metaphysical systems, aided by the flimsiest threads. This revolution has a highly respectable philosophical ancestry in spite of the concerted effort to discredit it as philistine. The names of Locke, Hume, Bentham, and Mill attest to that, but they also attest to a fundamental difference between philosophy as conceived by earlier empiricists and philosophy as conceived by their contemporary successors. Their successors have virtually abandoned all of the more humane philosophical disciplines. When one thinks of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Mill’s On Liberty, and even Hume’s History, one sees by contrast how narrow the empiricist tradition has become. The need for specialization, the need to probe more deeply into fundamental questions of logic and epistemology, has robbed most analytic philosophers of the time, energy, and inclination to think about social, political, and moral problems. They venture into mathematics and physics when stimulated by logical needs, and flirt with psychology in the theory of knowledge, but most of their finely ground axes have been used to sharpen other axes. Few of the redwoods of human concern ever fall before them. This loss of touch with cultural and political questions is one of the most striking features of Anglo-American philosophy in the last generation and it constitutes one of the most unfortunate concomitants of a brilliant period in the history of philosophy. While Marxists and Existentialists carry their street-corner battles into the university and beyond, the ablest Englishmen and Americans treat social philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of history as disreputable subjects which are worthy only of charlatans. This attitude has de-

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veloped to such an extent that even those who do metaphysics in desperate imitation of the grand manner no longer act out their dreams in social and political treatises but rather content themselves with using low-powered logic on traditional technical problems in an essentially quixotic way. There is some interest in esthetics, of course, but this frequently results in monstrosities which are rightly ignored by all who have any feeling for the arts and literature. The philosophical drift away from the humane disciplines has been made more dramatic by the fact that the American intellectual and the American college and university are more than ever searching for some kind of philosophical credo. Everywhere in the social sciences and humanities one finds a thirst for philosophy, and in just as many places one finds disappointment with professional philosophers. The immediate result is twofold: on the one hand, a lamentable development of philosophical pretentiousness among journalists, sociologists, historians, and physicists; on the other, too many dry, insensitive philosophers, ignorant of the sciences, indifferent to the history of their own discipline, and lacking feeling for matters of human concern. Among the amateur philosophers there is more undisciplined talk than ever on the problem of value, on the patterns of history, on the nature and destiny of man; and among the professionals a growing sense of embattlement while defending their inalienable right to talk only about sensedata, implication, and the synthetic a priori. This is the disturbing situation which faces the philosopher who wants to work in the great tradition of logical analysis without cutting himself off from the equally great tradition of social criticism, the philosopher who rightly remembers that Locke on property and Mill on liberty are easily as important as Locke on real essences and Mill on the syllogism. His situation reflects a larger problem: how can serious, technical philosophers honorably regain that position of leadership and respect among intellectuals and the general public which has slowly slipped from their hands? It should be said very quickly that philosophers will not buy this position. They will not sacrifice their right to investigate the most recondite technical questions; they will not cease writing for the Journal of Symbolic Logic and Mind in order to devote themselves exclusively to Sunday-supplement scholarship. And so the problem becomes one of uniting an interest in analysis with an interest in social and political affairs. It needn’t be a matter of every mathematical logician producing an axiomatized charter of human rights. Some of us are old enough to remember how Marxism pressured the American intellectual of the thirties into jobs for which he had no talent, and all of us are old enough to see the dangers of widespread intellectual Lysenkoism. It is rather a matter of living a life which is not spiritually and intellectually torn, since double roles in this instance can never lead to anything but double talk. There are those who can divide their lives with ease, much as some people play both the piano and the violin, but the philosopher is usually driven by a need for consistency and integrity; if he plays more than one instrument, he is more likely to be a one-man band than to double in brass.

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One way to bring about this unity is to encourage the young philosophical analyst to dig his honest and sharp instruments into those places which have so often been the lairs of charlatanry and obscurantism. While responsible philosophers have worked soberly and intensively in metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, the forum has been filled with wild talk on value, history, democracy, human rights, and liberal education. But if only a tiny part of the philosophical energy and clearheadedness which have gone into logic had been devoted to clarification of the issues which surround social and political questions, we might find ourselves closer to the solution of some of our pressing problems. There is one serious misunderstanding which must be identified and avoided. It would be a mistake to construe this suggestion as another example of philosophical pretentiousness, an expression of the view that philosophy is a lordly discipline which, if it should only decide to turn seriously to social questions, would produce all the answers. We must also avoid a philosophical myth about philosophy, unfortunately sponsored by too many analytic philosophers, according to which philosophy aspires to a higher kind of knowledge than that which the ordinary man and scientist can attain. On this view, philosophy consists of necessary propositions which are impervious to the demands of experience according to some, and indifferent to the demands of scientific convenience according to others. Fortunately, this myth is being challenged successfully by analytic philosophers themselves, so that they need no longer defend in modish language an outmoded conception of their task. Philosophy may be more abstract than empirical science and the ordinary man’s knowledge, and it may be especially concerned with definitions and descriptions of linguistic behavior, but the process whereby it justifies the acceptance of these definitions and descriptions is not radically different from that which goes on in science and ordinary life. For this reason, philosophers should approach the problems of law, political science, and history, not with the idea that they are supplying a method that is absolutely foreign to what already goes on in those disciplines but rather with the idea that they are carrying out more carefully and self-consciously what is an acknowledged part of the process of inquiry. On these terms, their cooperation with workers in other fields will be genuine and not a matter of pompous philosophical dignitaries stooping to conquer all of the difficulties which elude the ingenuity of lawyers and politicians. What I have been advocating so far will seem insufficient to some, for it amounts to nothing more than getting clear about the fundamental terms of social and political discourse. This is more of the same logomachy and scholasticism, it will be said. What we want from philosophers is a substantive ethic, not a series of abstract definitions that leave us just as far as ever from a solution of our practical problems. Now in spite of the childishness of expecting philosophers to produce dreary systems of ethical rules, there is a certain justice in this attitude. It serves to warn us of its equally absurd opposite, the view that philosophers are forbidden by the very definition of their calling to be concerned with the substantive problems of moral criticism. This is the killing formalism which often takes hold of lively movements. It is the attitude of analytic philosophers who leave

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moral criticism to those whom they call “moralists” or to social scientists who are just as anxious to palm off the job on somebody else. In this passing of the ethical buck, one can observe the preoccupation with a rigid classification of the sciences, the unproductive, scholastic division of the intellectual globe. “Here ends philosophy,” say the constables of the intellect, “and you shall go no farther.” The result has been a progressive narrowing of the scope of philosophy, with bloodless analysts doing their jobs on one side of the barrier, forbidden by the definition of their subject from engaging in cultural criticism. But when Locke spoke out against the divine right of kings, and Bentham against the legal outrages of his day, and Mill on liberty, they did not think they were entering a field sharply separated from philosophy. They were interested in the substantive questions which illustrated and gave practical significance to their efforts at analysis. And just this interest in the practical consequences of their analyses made them intellectual leaders of their age. A similar combination of interests has made Bertrand Russell and John Dewey great men in our own time. How can a moral philosopher test his analyses except by seeing how they square with political and ethical judgments that we make or are likely to make? It will be said, I know, that philosophy is the analysis of concepts and that we can know that the concept of man is identical with the concept of rational animal without ever examining a single man or knowing just who is or what isn’t a man. But this is another legacy of an outmoded view of philosophical analysis. One task of political philosophy is the clarification of fundamental words like “liberty”, “democracy”, and “equality”, but the success of such an effort at clarification is to be measured partly by examining its significance for concrete political judgments and action. Any definition of “democracy” which leads us to say that Soviet Russia is a democracy is obviously an absurd definition. And it is grotesque to say here with Humpty-Dumpty that we can define words as we choose, or that Russia is a democracy “on Stalin’s definition.” The philosopher’s need to accept or reject concrete ethical judgments flows directly from the fact that he can only test the adequacy of his analyses by checking them against the moral convictions which he and others share. The philosopher’s responsibility is analogous to that of the empirical scientist, except that the empirical scientist is more concerned with checking his theories against the evidence of the senses than against the language of science and common sense. The view that the relation between philosophical definitions and the language which they explicate is fundamentally different from the relation between scientific theories and the observed facts which they explain is another manifestation of the untenable dualism between the analytic and the synthetic which has dominated so much philosophy. In the case of ethics and political philosophy, it is responsible for much of the self-imposed helplessness which some philosophers feel in the presence of social questions. I am not urging that every philosopher turn himself into a full-time moral judge. Any philosopher who prefers the peace and quiet of mathematical settheory to ethics is welcome to it, and I hope the day will never come when a social or political tithe is exacted from those who cherish a life devoted to

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epistemology. What I am urging is that special interest in social and political problems need not constitute an abandonment of philosophy, and that those philosophers who choose to clarify or analyze social, political, and moral discourse must be familiar with the facts of political and social life. Moreover, they will enrich and improve their analytic work if they are familiar with those facts, not as a disengaged anthropologist knows the convictions of his primitives or as a psychoanalyst knows the fears of his patients but rather in a more direct and personal way. Such direct and personal knowledge can come with being engaged in social and cultural affairs. It need not mean abandonment of the calmness which is demanded by analysis, any more than looking robs an astronomer of the power to theorize. I have made two pleas so far. The first is for greater analytic interest in social and political ideas, in the description and understanding of culture and politics. This will not involve a fundamental change in the method of analytic philosophy; it will merely add to its subject matter. Of course, the enormous growth of our knowledge about society and politics since the days of Locke and Mill will make it impossible for a philosopher to go it alone. He will need training in history and in the social sciences like that which a philosopher of physics must have in physics. My second plea is more controversial because it calls for a greater concern with normative ethics than is fashionable among analytic thinkers today. Here I am not merely asking for an extension of the method of analysis to a neglected subject matter but rather for a realization of the fact that the line between the analytic and the synthetic is so blurred as to make it virtually impossible for an analyst of ethical notions to avoid being seriously concerned with the substantive questions of personal and social ethics. Furthermore, the prevailing notion that there is a set of specialists who are “moralists” and who therefore make it unnecessary for philosophers to treat moral questions seriously has opened the door to frauds and fools. The questions of substantive ethics are questions for all men; they should never become the private domain of professional moralists. If they do, one of the priceless legacies of western civilization will have been lost to the Grand Inquisitor. As if he were writing in order to confirm one’s gloomiest views of the future, a recent writer asks: “Is the intellectual obsolete?”1 and propounds an answer which is in striking opposition to the point of view for which I have been contending. A “freely speculating mind or intellectual,” he says, is one who seeks the truth and who follows the argument wherever it may lead, whereas a “mental technician” is a practical mind who serves a party, a leader, or a government so slavishly that he surrenders the right to criticize their aims and methods. The mental technician on this view may exercise ingenuity and skill in achieving the aims set for him by his employer or leader but he is, in the last analysis, a slave. We are given the impression that there is no mean between these two extremes 1 See an article by Stuart Hughes bearing this title in Commentary, October 1956. The remarks that follow are an adaptation of a response to Prof. Hughes in the January 1957 issue of Commentary.

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and we are given to understand that the kind of free, practical philosophy for which I have been pleading is hopelessly out of date. Now I have no doubt that there are many people who fit into one or the other of these neatly carved categories, but it seems to me that a third kind of “brain worker” is being squeezed out of the picture in an effort to simplify the past and future of the intellectual. I mean the man who uses his wits in an effort to further aims of which he approves, which he periodically re-examines, and which he feels free to reject whenever experience, feeling, or reflection lead to such a conclusion. This third type of individual is the nearest thing in the intellectual world to a free, rational, whole human being. He is neither a metaphysician nor an apparatchik. His interests fall between those of the speculative philosopher and those of the technician. He will not be obsolete so long as the ideal of the free man survives. He differs from the “freely speculating mind” in the degree to which he addresses himself to practical questions, and from the servile mental technician because of his refusal to sell himself into intellectual slavery. Intellectuals are more likely to secure the kind of influence whose disappearance is lamented, not by writing on Go¨del’s theorem, on the ontological argument, or on the synthetic a priori, but rather by dealing with questions of more immediate human concern. These are rarely “speculative questions” in the traditional sense. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was written by the man who wrote the Second Treatise of Civil Government in defense of the Whig cause, and his political influence arose from having defended that cause. Mill’s essay On Liberty was the main medium of his great influence as an intellectual, and not his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, which was addressed to specialists in epistemology. It was Bentham on legal outrages, and not Bentham on the theory of fictions, who assumed a role so rarely assumed by philosophers today. The lamentable fact of our intellectual life today is not the disappearance of the purely speculative thinker, for he continues to exist in profusion in universities throughout the United States. What we should be worried about is the disappearance of that in-between thinker who may be called the “free practical mind”, that is to say, the man who is interested in political questions but who refuses to attach himself to a party or government so obsequiously and so blindly that he gives up every right to criticize the goals or the methods adopted by them. One of our great problems arises from the difficulty intellectuals have in preserving their dignity and integrity as citizens and human beings while they work for the government. Having been kicked out of the government, having been prevented from riding on campaign trains, intellectuals are not doomed to remote scholarship, to joining only the American Association of University Professors, and to convincing “their fellow citizens of the responsibility and seriousness of their calling”. This is much too abject a surrender. It implies that the free intellectual’s social influence is a thing of the past, something which has been eliminated by the “vast impersonal forces” of history. With this I cannot agree. In my opinion this dubious argument closes every avenue by which the intellectual can carry out his traditional cultural functions.

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True, the free practical intellectual who tries to familiarize himself with the facts of social life, to defend a set of values, and to advance plausible solutions to social problems, runs the risk of dilettantism. But so does any human being in an effort to solve his personal problems. And why speak so disparagingly of “the production of bright ideas for essentially practical purposes masking as intellectual activity”? Why speak as though there were a contradiction between producing ideas for practical purposes and engaging in intellectual activity? This is a conclusion which can be drawn only by those who accept the dichotomy between the yogi and the commissar, the metaphysician and the intellectual goon, as an exhaustive division of the life of the mind. But surely somewhere between the metaphysical journals and the gossip columns there is a place where an intellectual can still perform his traditional social function—if he has ideas. This conclusion does not force us to minimize the importance of pure scholarship. But if we are thinking of the intellectual as an effective force in politics, we must acknowledge that pure scholarship, for all of its importance, is hardly the medium through which intellectuals have usually made their practical impact on the political world. We can pursue scholarship in a mighty fortress defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, but this of itself won’t win us the influence of an Erasmus or a Mill. We must regain those historic jobs of which we have been robbed. We can still be the spiritual custodians of what is good in our tradition and the implacable critics of what is bad. The tasks of the practical intellectual continue to be what they always have been: to pursue the truth, to expose sham and injustice, to seek ways of avoiding the destruction of the world, to help make it as happy and as sane as it can be. If such intellectuals are spurned by governments, by parties, by the public, or accepted only on impossible terms, they must go their own way and they must protest. But they cannot protest effectively unless they have something to say, and they cannot say anything worth hearing unless they have ideas. Therefore, let some practical intellectual produce the twentieth-century counterpart of Mill’s essay On Liberty, for example, and he will prove beyond doubt that the intellectual is not obsolete. Fortunately, there are signs of a new era in philosophy. I hope they are reliable. For if some analytic philosophers will apply their methods to social and political ideas, they will do a great deal to ward off the attacks on English and American philosophy which are now so common among those who fail to understand that the days of sentimental encyclopedism are over. If philosophers contribute to the clarification of some of the most serious problems of men and then try to deal with them, they may help those who must solve practical questions. Those who want more than this from philosophers reveal their own weakness, not that of philosophy. For the ultimate decision of what to do is to be made by each man for himself, and those who seek catechisms, confessors, and commissars should look elsewhere.

C H A P T E R 4

New Horizons in Philosophy (1960)

THE MOST ARRESTING and most distinctive feature of philosophy in the Englishspeaking world of 1960 is its concentration on linguistic and logical analysis. While dialectical materialism is the official philosophy of the Soviet bloc, and Western Europe continues to be strongly affected by existentialism, Britain and the United States are primarily the homes of what is called analytic or linguistic philosophy. Analytic philosophers are neither sponsored nor controlled by any government or political party, and they do not appeal to the Bohemian or the beatnik. They invite both Marxist and existentialist scorn because they spurn the pretentiousness and murk of much traditional philosophy. For good reasons, analytic philosophy has never become the favorite subject of the bistro or the espresso cafe´, and it needs no proof of its seriousness. It respects the values of the reasonable man rather than those of the irrational man, though it fully recognizes the existence of irrationality. Analytic philosophy begins with an awareness of the fact that philosophy is not a rival of science and that it cannot provide us with another way of studying the world with which the scientist deals. When in the nineteenth century natural science grew so highly specialized, it became evident that nobody could encompass the whole of knowledge. And so the drift of philosophy was away from encyclopedism, away from thinking that the philosopher was a superscientist, a universal genius, a know-it-all. Not only did it become evident that universal knowledge was humanly impossible but it was seen how dubious it was to think that one could construct a system in which all our knowledge could be derived from a few philosophical principles, as the geometrical theorems of Euclid are deduced from his axioms. It was this mistake which resulted in the illusion that philosophers could dominate all knowledge through the command of a few pivotal truths. This may be called the metaphysical illusion, the product of a vast inflation of the powers and prospects of metaphysics, one of the oldest and most mysterious branches of philosophy. According to tradition, metaphysics is the most fundamental of all disciplines. The first part of the word “metaphysics” is derived from the Greek meta, meaning “after”, so that the subject was conceived as that which went beyond the problems of physics. Physicists, some metaphysicians said, deal with material things, biologists with living things, mathematicians with numbers, points, and lines. But the metaphysician cuts a much wider swath; indeed, he takes the whole cloth as his province, for he studies being as such. Not any particular being or limited class of beings but just plain being, since the traditional metaphysician is the spectator of all time and eternity.

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It took philosophers a long time to realize that the number of interesting things that one can say about all things in one fell swoop is very limited. When you lump together such different items as kings, cabbages, bits of sealing wax, numbers, thoughts, and electrons in order to say what they all have in common, you are likely to discover that what they have in common is the fact that they exist. You say very little through the effort to become supremely general. Having reached this conclusion about the most central of philosophical disciplines, some philosophers asked themselves just what was left for them to do. If all of existence could be parceled out to different scientists who worked so effectively by specializing, and if the philosopher was unable to supply any significant first principles which could neatly order the tangled forest of modern science and information, what was the philosopher’s function in the intellectual world? Once philosophy was everything. Now it threatened to become nothing. Fortunately the story of philosophy did not end here. There were some who did not desert the battered, beleaguered ship. They knew that there were nonmetaphysical questions of large import which had always been asked by philosophers and which had to be asked more relentlessly than ever in an age of scientific specialization. One of these questions—short but powerful—was “What do you mean?” The patron saint of philosophy, Socrates, had spent most of his time asking it, often to the discomfort of those with whom he conversed in Plato’s Dialogues and to the immense delight of centuries of readers who watched Socrates puncture humbug and ironically examine ideas which could not stand the test of honest logical criticism. The question “What do you mean?” could be directed even at scientists. It was the tiny candle which had flickered since antiquity, which had never gone out even in philosophy’s darkest days. It was used to light a philosophical bonfire by a generation of thinkers at the turn of the century—Ernst Mach, the Austrian philosopher-physicist who influenced Einstein; Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in England; Charles Peirce and William James in the United States. They sparked the various new explosive movements of the twentieth century—pragmatism in the United States, logical positivism in Austria, and Cambridge analysis, so called in honor of the English university where it first flourished. No matter how far scientific specialization went, it left the possibility of asking Socrates’ question. In fact, the more the scientists specialized, the more their preoccupation with description, experiment, observation, and prediction robbed them of the time and energy needed for the clarification of their fundamental concepts. Physicists before Einstein had failed to be sufficiently clear about the notions of space and time, and biologists were not always prepared to give comprehensible answers to the question “What is life?” Even mathematicians were foggy about the idea of number and had fallen into serious paradoxes. Here, then, was an opportunity for philosophers to cooperate with scientists in an effort to elucidate the basic concepts of special sciences, instead of pretending that the philosopher possessed a mysterious key to all scientific doors. The revival of the Socratic question “What do you mean?” as applied to the words of the scientist, thus preserved for the philosopher a central but not regal position. He

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was no longer a surveyor of everything but rather a careful student of language who at this stage of the analytic movement tended to concentrate on the terms of natural science and mathematics. The most brilliant monument to this pre— World War I era in philosophy was the three-volumed Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead. After the First World War the harvest of this intellectual activity was reaped by younger philosophers who described themselves as logical positivists. Philosophy, they said in going beyond Russell and Whitehead, was nothing but the philosophy of science. And philosophy of science, as someone put it, was philosophy enough. A story was told of a philosopher of the old school who came into the office of his department during the thirties and overheard two of his younger colleagues arguing about the meaning of a physical theory. The disputants grew more and more intense, and just after one shouted, “What do you mean by saying that space is curved?” the other yelled, “What do you mean by saying it’s not?” The first, not to be outdone, then produced that classic in philosophical oneupmanship: “What do you mean by ‘mean’?” At this point the old professor could not contain himself and spoke up for his own generation as he interrupted the conversation to say, “Good morning, gentlemen. If that means anything to you.” The professor’s greeting pointed a moral. It revealed a grave limitation in the conception of meaning itself. For the logical positivist, a meaningful utterance was simply one that could be verified or falsified. And verifiability and falsifiability, it was said, were limited to scientific statements. Small wonder that a greeting like “Good morning” was said to be meaningless. But much more than “Good morning” was at stake. For by these same narrow standards, poetry and ethics, in addition to metaphysics, were all nonsense. At this point in its history, analytic philosophy was at its furthest from the humanistic tradition. The verifiability theory of meaning was to the positivist in the 1930s what the guillotine was to the French Revolution, and like the guillotine it destroyed indiscriminately. It was one thing to attack metaphysics, another to say that every poetic or moral utterance was meaningless. And it did not help to add that moral and poetic language had what was called “emotive meaning”, or the capacity to stimulate emotions. That was often a polite way of sweeping much of human language under the rug, to put it where the positivist could conveniently avoid it, indeed walk all over it while he puzzled about the meaning of “space”, “time”, and “number”. It soon became evident that the question “What do you mean?” had been conceived too narrowly. It tended to direct the philosopher’s attention only to language in which knowledge was communicated. Under Plato’s influence, philosophers had identified the meaning of a term with an abstract universal or form while thinking of the word on the page as expressing a cloudy entity in Plato’s realm of ideas. And therefore they tended to think that only declarative sentences, such as “Socrates is a man”, had meaning as they conceived it. On this theory, the command “Socrates, come here!” was strictly nonsensical. And so was the exclamation “Great Socrates!” because obviously it was hard to suppose

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that there was some weird resident of Plato’s realm called “Great Socrateshood” which could serve as the meaning of the exclamation. Partly because of these consequences and other more technical difficulties, and partly because of the intellectual mood created by the aftermath of the Second World War, the influence of logical positivism waned perceptibly in the forties. Unfortunately, however, the phrase “logical positivist” continued as an epithet which was wrongly applied to anyone with the faintest interest in the philosophy of language. For that reason, an entirely different attitude in analytic philosophy has been hidden from public view. It is dominated by the idea that the philosopher should ask of utterances and writings not what their Platonic meaning is but rather what their use is. This attitude is usually identified with the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was the leading philosophical figure at Cambridge University after the days of Russell and Moore, and who influenced philosophy mainly through his posthumously published writings and through his loyal disciples. As is so often the case in the history of ideas, a simple suggestion, undoubtedly present in the minds of many others who had failed to stress it sufficiently or to carry it out as brilliantly as Wittgenstein did, caught on among a great number of English and American philosophers after the Second World War. I am not a follower of Wittgenstein, and I regard a good deal of what he has said as dubious; but in the history of recent philosophy he was a liberating force. Once he said plainly and insistently that the main subject matter of the philosopher was the behavior of human beings trying to communicate with one another, a whole new world seemed to open up to the analytic philosopher, the many-sided world of language in all of its employments. Not just the language of scientific assertion and proof, for man does not communicate by assertion and proof alone. He greets, exclaims, exhorts, commands, judges, describes, promises, and does many other things with words. And all of these linguistic activities have now become fair game for the philosopher who has abandoned the Platonic version of the question “What do you mean?” What should the philosopher do, now that he has been shown these new horizons, now that he has been freed from the restrictive idea that he is merely a logician of natural science? In the remainder of this essay, I should like to formulate and illustrate my own answer to this vital question. Philosophers have an unprecedented opportunity to clarify the language men use in the writing of history, in morality, law, religion, politics, and education, to take the most challenging examples. And so I might label my viewpoint “institutionalism” in order to suggest that one of the primary tasks of philosophy is to analyze, compare, and contrast language as it is used for purposes of communication within these different institutions. While communicating in these situations, men use language in a variety of intertwined ways which express their beliefs, their hopes, their needs, and their values; and one job of the philosopher is to draw an intellectual map, to provide a coherent picture of the interconnections between these different modes of speech, feeling, and thought. Language is a cultural instrument, and it must be seen in its cultural setting. Those who fail to view it in this way and who instead regard it as a collection of

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dead sentences fall into two related errors. One may be called formalism and the other essentialism. Formalism is the tendency to view language as if it were an inscription on a scroll or a monument rather than as the living, complex, subtle tool that it is. Essentialism is the idea that the philosopher can look at these dead words and, without attention to their use, summarize the essence of complex forms of communication. Philosophers given to such oversimplification have said that religion is merely a belief in God. Law has been defined as the command of the sovereign. History has been glibly summarized as the effort to report what actually happened in the past. Questions in each of these areas have been separated sharply from questions of morality. The icy hand of overabstraction guides the writing of those philosophers who think that merely by examining the forms of words, they can characterize the essence of religion, history, or law. Their most common assumption is that by looking at any kind of language one can always single out those statements in it which are factual, objective, and descriptive, and separate them sharply from statements of value. And this assumption, I think, is a mistake, notably when it is applied uniformly to the writings of historians and the language of lawyers. It is often the result of a failure to study the actual processes of law and historical writing, a failure which is encouraged by the formalism and essentialism of which I have spoken. Of course, I do not wish to deny that sometimes we can make a distinction between statements of fact and evaluations in a given context. For example, two men can agree that someone has told a lie and yet judge his lying differently. In such cases, our conclusion about the lying may be reported in a conjunction of a factual statement and a moral statement, “Jones lied, and it was wrong of him to do so”. Here another person is logically free to agree with the first or factual part of the conjunctive statement, while he denies the second if his moral viewpoint is different from ours. But a careful study of communication, especially in history and law, brings to light a kind of blended or hybrid language which defies any effort to decompose it into factual and moral parts that may be accepted or rejected independently. There are, I believe, uses of language which are simultaneously descriptive and evaluative, and which cannot be broken down into the assertion of a factual statement and an evaluative statement which may be judged separately. The person who speaks or writes in this way is doing two inseparable things at once, stating a matter of fact and evaluating, and therefore his audience must take or leave his speech as a whole. To acknowledge this possibility is to abandon certain conventional modes of classifying language which have dominated the history of philosophy. My contention is that this hybrid kind of language is most commonly found in an institutional setting. It is too large, sprawling, and complex for textbooks of logic, for they are too often dominated by a passion for neatness and an interest in classifying isolated statements. Therefore, in order to illustrate and clarify what I have in mind, I shall turn to a basic problem in the philosophy of history and another in the philosophy of law. History is an institution insofar as no civilized society can live without some image of its past. And no one can deny the pervasiveness of legal institutions.

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One of the historian’s concerns is to report particular facts, and another is to present a connected picture of the past. The first expresses itself in simple declarative statements, such as “Caesar crossed the Rubicon”, and the second in lengthy sequential narratives about the life of some person or the development of a society or a nation. And narrative is not usually studied by formal logicians. It is one thing to report the simple fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but it is another to present Caesar’s biography or the history of Rome. By holding fast to this distinction between brief statement and narration, one can see a profoundly important distinction between two ways in which value judgments operate in history. When the historian is assessing the evidence for individual statements of fact, his value judgments—whether on political or religious matters—are properly distinguished from his factual conclusions. But when he is forming his narrative, the historian is often unable to separate these two parts of his thinking. To show this, let us consider some illustrations that are a little closer to home than Julius Caesar. If we say that George Washington crossed the Delaware, we make a statement which is as “objective” as most statements made in history books. It is accepted or rejected on grounds that are not likely to include the values of the historian who makes the statement. The situation changes dramatically, however, when we are asked to choose between two general narrative histories of the United States. Here we are not faced with a short descriptive question about one man’s actions at a certain time. And here our values do play a part in determining which of two general histories we should write or prefer. Take, for example, the difference between general histories of the United States which take the Federalist point of view and those which are Jeffersonian in their slant. Professor Samuel Eliot Morison points out that sixty years ago it was difficult to find a general history of the United States that did not, as he puts it, “present the Federalist-Whig- Republican point of view, or express a very dim view of all Democratic leaders except Grover Cleveland”. But by the middle of the twentieth century the fashion had changed, and it was then equally difficult to find a good general history of the country “that did not follow the Jefferson-JacksonFranklin D. Roosevelt line”. Morison says that he was converted to the latter as a young man when he discovered in his first researches on New England Federalism that “the ‘wise and good and rich’ whom Fisher Ames thought should rule the nation were stupid, narrow-minded and local in their outlook”. But is it not clear that Morison’s conclusion presupposed values which some other historian might not share? And is it not clear, therefore, that the historian who tells a story following a “line” is engaged in an undecomposable blend of description and evaluation? Something similar is true of the history of philosophy. The historian of philosophy does not expound the views of all human beings who have philosophized. Consciously or unconsciously, he adopts standards of philosophical excellence by which he judges who is to be admitted into his history. Doctrinal agreement with the historian is not the standard, but his history incorporates a judgment of importance and interest which rests on values that another historian of philoso-

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phy might easily reject. Any Catholic reader of histories of philosophy which skip lightly over the medieval period will understand what I mean. When a historian believes that a certain political tradition is superior to another, he tends to see the history of the country as a development of that tradition. And when we see that history in terms of another tradition, we are no more in a position to say he speaks falsely than we would be if he and we were to see certain trick figures in psychology books differently. The reader may have seen the illustration that can at one moment be seen as a rabbit’s head and at another as a duck’s. Well, the historian who tells the story of the United States in Jeffersonian terms because he admires that tradition is a little like the man who always sees the duck-rabbit as a duck because he likes ducks more than rabbits. And we who evaluate his history are likely to praise it in the degree to which he sees the past as we see it in the light of our values. I think that opposing narrative historians sometimes confront each other as rabbit-loving rabbit seers confront duckloving duck seers. Some historians are loath to admit this because they view the problem absolutistically. They think of the general historian of the United States as confronted with an “actuality” whose main line is either Federalist or Jeffersonian and not both. They tend to assimilate the logic of narrative history to the logic of historical statement, and to hold that the general historian of the United States who is preparing to write his book is faced with just as objective an “either-or” as the historian who is trying to decide whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon. They argue that the Jeffersonian line or the Federalist line is the line which the main stream of American life has followed, and they refuse to allow that anything as ambiguous as the duck-rabbit turns up in their subject. But can they define the notion of a main stream in a completely objective manner? Can it be explained so as to make it possible for historians to converge on it in anything like the way in which scientific students of rivers locate their main streams? I doubt that it can, even though I am willing to grant that no one has said the last or even the next-tolast philosophical word on this subject. Until those words are spoken, historians should admit that one man’s duck might be another’s rabbit. The historian must grant that in some parts of his work he engages in a blend of fact-finding and evaluation, and that when he pretends in such cases to be recording merely what happened, he is not being accurate about the nature of his enterprise. Moreover, it is hard to see what could be meant by saying that we can treat the narrative as a conjunction of factual statements and value judgments so that the reader can distinguish them and test them independently. It is very difficult to remove the Jeffersonian slant from a Jeffersonian history in order to see whether the remainder is factually true. And this is because the value orientation does not figure detachably in the narrative as it figures in the conjunction “Jones lied, and it was wrong of him to do so”. The value orientation pervades or colors the narrative and he who would call the narrative a good one must be sympathetic to this coloring and orientation. He must therefore judge the history as a whole, simultaneously guided by the evidence and his values.

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Historical narrative is not the only mode of discourse in which the language of value and the language of fact are not related conjunctively. The law presents us with a similar kind of complexity. Take the case of a statute forbidding the entry of a vehicle into a public park. One might be tempted to say that whether anything is a vehicle is a question of fact, settled by purely empirical means and having nothing to do with the values of those who are trying to find out whether it is a vehicle. One dictionary at hand says, “VEHICLE: That in or on which a person or thing is or may be carried”. But suppose that the statute had been enacted before the existence of roller skates. And suppose that a case were to come up in which it was necessary to decide whether a pair of roller skates was a vehicle. Surely the judge might hesitate before immediately saying with a straight face that because a pair of roller skates is something “on which a person or thing is or may be carried” it should be excluded from a park by the statute. When the judge reaches one of these puzzling examples, he might be moved to ask two questions. He might ask what the enactors of the statute would have said if roller skates had existed when they enacted the statute. This is a straightforward factual question but one of a kind that can rarely be answered with confidence. But even if it could be, its answer would not be decisive in all cases like this. For the judge might in some of these cases ask what social good or evil would be brought about by regarding a pair of roller skates as a vehicle and hence keeping it out of a public park. This shows that in the process of answering what is on the surface a question of fact, the judge may to some extent rest on his values or his own ideas of what is good for the community. What shall we call this hyphenated process of looking-at-the-roller-skatesand-deciding-whether-it-is-good-to-call-them-vehicles? We may not have a simple name for it, but it seems to be a mode of linguistic activity that is not easily analyzable into two activities like walking and talking. It is not analogous to the combination of separable processes that lead us to the conjunctive conclusion, “Jones lied, and it was wrong of him to do so”. If the judge in the roller-skate case were asked what he was trying to do, he might fairly reply, “Trying to decide whether roller skates are vehicles”. But if asked to break down the activity into two separate processes, one of which was merely looking and another merely evaluating, he might be unable to do so. What general significance should be attached to the existence of such hybrid processes in historical and legal thinking? First of all, they show that when we turn to language in a complex cultural setting—the telling of stories and the settling of legal disputes are basic to most civilizations—we find uses of language that cannot be adequately understood if we remain prisoners of an exclusive and exhaustive dichotomy of language into the factual and the evaluative. Some linguistic activities are in a sense both. Reflecting on such modes of thinking and language makes the philosopher aware of a certain narrowness in the traditional philosophical classification of language. The case of the narrative shows that there are modes of discourse which go beyond the simple, isolated statements treated by logicians in their textbooks. The philosopher of language

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who looks at law and history discovers modes of speech which require new philosophical categories. This is not all. The philosopher who moves in this direction comes to see that the philosophy of language is not a dreary grammatical exercise. For once he begins to think about modes of discourse in a cultural setting, he will come to see that there are many others which transcend the word and the statement. The religious believer finds it impossible to characterize his religion merely by reference to a few propositions that he accepts. For religion is an organic unity of theological belief, moral attitude, emotional reaction to liturgy, view of human nature, and much more. Those who accept the same religion agree on many issues of value and fact which cannot always be separated. The philosopher who tries to understand the use of religious language will meet in even more complicated form the sort of thing encountered in our discussion of history and law. He will find himself more and more concerned with the description and the evaluation of blends of thinking, feeling, and doing. In short, with ways of life. And by dealing with ways of life he will come closer to the concerns of the ordinary man. The philosopher who begins by recognizing that a narrative is more than a mere conjunction of factual and evaluative statements, or who sees that some linguistic activities of lawyers fall under hybrid categories not usually acknowledged by philosophers, will soon see a whole new world of language opening up before his eyes.

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P A R T I I

History The essays in this part are efforts to carry out the program of Part I by studying problems in the philosophy of history. A plea for such study is followed by reflections on historical narration and an essay on the notion of historical inevitability that anticipates some ideas on free will that I developed later.

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C H A P T E R 5

A Plea for an Analytic Philosophy of History (1953)

THERE ARE MANY MANSIONS in philosophy, but some are more luxuriously outfitted, larger, and better situated than others. High on a broad hilltop are the great homes of metaphysics, logic, epistemology, and ethics, while somewhere down below, huddled together on narrow streets, are the two-family dwellings of political philosophy and jurisprudence, the modern apartments of esthetics, and the boarding-houses for philosophers of the special sciences. The philosophy of history has never lived on the hill, not even in its most affluent days. Like esthetics and others among the poor relatives it has welcomed guests from the hill late in the day, often when they were weary and propelled by nothing more than the tourist’s desire to see everything or the desire to say that he has seen everything. The structure of the philosophical community is similar throughout the West and the plan just presented is as accurate a description of the American tradition as it is of the European. Rightly or wrongly, few great Western philosophers have been concerned exclusively or even primarily with the subsidiary disciplines in the philosophy of culture. Hegel, for all of his preoccupation with history, was primarily a metaphysician of process and becoming. Even Soviet Russia, where the philosophy of history is held in such esteem, provides no significant exception if we are to judge by the way in which a metaphysics like dialectical materialism holds sway over the official philosophy of history. At most the Russians move the philosophy of history a little closer to the mandarin disciplines, rightly pointing out that elsewhere it is a vagrant, wandering aimlessly through the streets of philosophy and history. Hence its ambivalence and confusion. Like many poor relatives of the great, the philosophy of history spends half its time protesting its famous lineage and the other half offering its services as a sort of plumber’s helper. One day it is the noble figure of universal history (“The subject of this course of lectures,” said Hegel in his Philosophy of History, “is the Philosophical History of the World”), on the next it offers to tutor the historian in the most elementary rules of method. Partly because of the tendency to think the philosophy of history is one of the less fundamental disciplines, it was never studied systematically by any of the distinguished thinkers who came upon the American scene after the Civil War and who inaugurated what is sometimes called the golden age of American philosophy: John Dewey, William James, Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana. All of them were interested to some extent in the problems of the philosophy of history, but no one of them, with the possible exception of Santayana, has left a large-scale contribution to it of the speculative or epistemological kind. Unlike Hegel, they avoided writing the philosophical history of the world, and unlike Dilthey, they did not try to write a “critique of historical reason.” One

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might offer many explanations for this, but one is the fact that they thought of themselves as students of more central problems of philosophy. In the revolutionary period, Jefferson tried to build a political philosophy on foundations provided by Locke and his successors, while in the first half of the nineteenth century Emerson and his friends looked to the German romantics for a world-view that would support their moral and esthetic attitudes. By contrast, American philosophers of the end of the nineteenth century were more technical and less derivative in their thinking: they sought to devise original techniques for mining metaphysical, logical, and ethical gold. Royce, a Californian, dug the deepest shafts and emerged with his World and the Individual (1899); Santayana, an Americanized Spaniard, sought his philosophical fortune in the natural bases of morals and produced his Life of Reason (1905); while the easterners James, Dewey, and Peirce formed a pragmatic corporation which originated and developed America’s most distinctive philosophy. For over a half-century, these thinkers, especially the pragmatists and the naturalists among them, dominated American philosophy, but their effect on the philosophy of history was felt mainly through the work of younger Americans with a more sustained interest in historical research. How did the major philosophers of this period encourage interest in the philosophy of history even as they remained aloof and worked on other problems? For one thing, like so many who came to maturity in the nineteenth century, most of them shared a deep respect for the accomplishments of history. This emerges most clearly in Royce’s lectures The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892) and in his essay Herbert Spencer (1904). He pointed out sympathetically that the nineteenth century was more intensely interested in the historical aspect of things than in their permanent nature, that it was the century of the organic and humane sciences, that it added the motto “And yet it does grow” to Galileo’s “And yet it does move.” While Royce criticized Herbert Spencer’s crude evolutionary philosophy, he respected the great new science of Darwin and believed that the emergence of evolutionary biology had been blocked not so much by the theological idea of special creation or by post-Kantian idealism as by the prevalence of mathematical and mechanical conceptions that prevented interest in the concept of growth. Even Santayana, the disciple of Spinoza and the Greeks who scorned what he called Royce’s idealistic theodicy, imagined himself under the spell of history. He tells us of his early absorption “in the historical spirit of the nineteenth century, and that splendid panorama of nations and religions, literatures and arts, which it unrolled before the imagination,” and also of the influence Hegel exerted on him in spite of the “myth and sophistry” of Hegel’s system. In his Life of Reason, which was subtitled “The Phases of Human Progress,” Santayana tried to carry out something like the Hegelian program without dialectical tears and the result, in Santayana’s metaphor, was a moral review of science, art, religion, and society in which he looked at Western civilization as a party from which he picked out his friends. The Life of Reason was, he said, an essay in retrospective politics, using the results of what, with Aristotle, he snobbishly called the servile science of history. For all of his announced affection for the historical outlook of the nine-

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teenth century, he lacked interest in the growth of things. What he admired about the nineteenth century was its presentation of panoramas, of static pictures at an exhibition, rather than its effort to give life and meaning to those pictures. His interest in them is essentially that of a museum visitor who appreciates the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles but who is wholly uninterested in their histories and their times. If any philosopher was distinguished by his active interest in historical method, it was John Dewey. A Hegelian in his youth, an admirer of Darwin, an educator, a psychologist, and a politically active intellectual in addition to being a great philosopher, Dewey took seriously the nineteenth-century concepts of growth and culture. It was Dewey who absorbed something from Hegel without missing his main point. Dewey’s work in philosophy, along with the antiformalistic jurisprudence of Justice Holmes, the anticlassical economics of Thorstein Veblen, and the economically oriented political science and history of Charles Beard and others, formed a coherent liberal American ideology in the first quarter of the twentieth century. These thinkers not only admired the dynamic histories prepared by nineteenth-century economists, biologists, and historians but tried to use them in an effort to reform the world and our beliefs about it. Like Santayana, many historians rejected the rigidity of the Hegelian dialectic, but in doing so imagined themselves pushing the historical attitude to its proper conclusion rather than abandoning it. They rejected speculative theories of history, but they did not write mere chronicles or systems of “retrospective politics”; instead they sought documented syntheses like Beard’s Rise of American Civilization (1927) and developed fruitful concepts for the investigation of American society like that of F. J. Turner’s “Frontier.” Those who recognized that such an enterprise required a selection of facts based on interest tried to reconcile such unavoidable selection with their disapproval of historical propaganda under political domination. This became a central problem for later American philosophers of history and historians, and it was related to a problem that occupied the entire pragmatic tradition: how to recognize the practical, experimental nature of knowledge without surrendering objectivity, without allowing pragmatism’s concepts of usefulness and workability to be distorted by those who used history as a political weapon. For more recent American philosophers, the problems of the philosophy of history were methodological or epistemological rather than speculative or metaphysical in character, and this reflected fashions and tensions within general philosophy. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, traditional metaphysics suffered severe blows in America just as it did in England. Chief among its assailants were logical positivists and linguistic analysts who attacked it sharply after pragmatism had softened it up. As a result, methodology and logical analysis came to dominate the work of philosophers on the nature of historical synthesis, on the problem of historical explanation, and on the relation between history and the social sciences. This epistemological orientation of the American philosopher combined with the monographic bias of many American historians to discourage the emergence

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of an American Spengler or Toynbee. The historian’s distrust of undocumented speculation and the philosopher’s suspicion of anything that might be labeled meaningless by positivistic or pragmatic standards both contributed to this tendency. During the 1930’s Marxism was influential, but since the decline of Marxism no single factor has caught the imagination of historians, and the result has been a sober pluralism, a tendency to say that all factors—economic, religious, intellectual, psychological, and political—enter into historical explanation without fixing on one as predominant. This might well have been a reaction to a sort of speculative history that was illustrated by the theological optimism of George Bancroft and what may be called the thermodynamic pessimism of Brooks and Henry Adams. Bancroft was one of the leading American historians of the early nineteenth century and he accepted a theological determinism that a later generation of tough-minded historians firmly rejected. He believed in the necessity of human progress under divine auspices and defended it with all the rhetoric at his command. The young Charles Beard singled Bancroft out as Goliath and aimed at him on behalf of many twentieth-century political scientists and historians. Beard was a close student of two critical periods of American history, that surrounding the Constitutional Convention and that following the Civil War, and his studies led him to reject Bancroft’s portrait of the universe. Like so many who have confronted optimistic theologians with the problem of evil, Beard in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) defended the thesis that the Constitution was mainly a product of economic interest rather than of high-minded ideals. But well before Beard had launched his crusade, a high-born New England heretic, Brooks Adams, had published his Law of Civilization and Decay in 1896. He was not content to say merely that the doctrine of progress inspired by God was false, but defended the contrary thesis that Western history was going to a kind of frozen hell. In doing so, however, he set up another system against which the sober reacted. With Bancroft’s optimism and the pessimism of the Adams brothers to choose from, a generation of historians retreated to their libraries, safe in the conviction that the truth, as usual, lay somewhere in between. Beard’s theory had a great deal in common with the economic emphasis of Brooks Adams, and it is not surprising that in 1943 Beard should have extravagantly called Adams’s book one of the most important of all time. It was far more audacious than anything by Beard himself, for Adams not only developed a theory of history based on social, psychological, and economic factors but he advanced a cosmic chemistry as its basis. On the social level, he maintained that Western society had evolved from an era which was originally “martial,” “emotional,” “imaginative,” and “artistic” to one in which the economic mind prevailed, and he said that the economic mind had expressed itself in several different historical types, the last of which was the usurer. The captains and the kings had departed, the artists and the priests had fled, and the reins of the ascendant usurer were his thinly disguised purse strings. Adams concluded that only a reinfusion of barbarian emotion could save us from a gray death under finance capitalism.

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For Brooks Adams all of this was the social expression of a more cosmic phenomenon. He did not develop this cosmology, but something like it became the fundamental concern of his more famous brother Henry, so much so that Brooks modestly acknowledged that while he, Brooks, might have originated the theory, it was Henry who perfected it. Henry exploited for all it was worth that grim law, the second law of thermodynamics, which combined with the iron law of wages to cast a pall over the nineteenth century. The former law says that in an isolated system with irreversible changes going on, heat energy tends to become less and less available for useful work. From this law, with the help of numerous scientists and savants, Henry Adams concluded that the world would ultimately become cold and dead, that we were inexorably headed for a doom even more final than brother Brooks had described, because Brooks held out the possibility of reviving hotheaded barbarism if only we could get hold of the proper serum whereas Henry did not. The second law of thermodynamics was one which only Maxwell’s demon could controvert, and so in the absence of demonic powers, Henry Adams was led to prophetic pessimism and from there to seeking a law which would inscribe it by means of algebra in the hearts of men. The Adamses foresaw the tragedy and turmoil of the twentieth century, but that gives credit to their political shrewdness and not to their theoretical genius. Successful scientific prediction is not just a matter of saying in advance what is then seen to be true but also of formulating principles which clearly imply these true predictions, and this the Adamses did not do. Their history was better than their chemistry. In their hands, the second law of thermodynamics was not a scientific theory to be confirmed and tested seriously but rather a stick with which to beat down the theological optimism of historians like Bancroft and, more important, the biological optimism of Spencerians and Darwinians who saw Evolution carrying us onward and upward. American academic historians, with justice I think, remained profoundly suspicious of this kind of theorizing, much as they may have admired some of the substantive historical contributions which appear in the work of the Adamses. One should not be surprised, therefore, to hear one of the most eminent historians of his generation, Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, say: “Very early in my professional career I observed a certain frustration in a historian whom I greatly admired, Henry Adams, who had spent much time and thought searching for a ‘law of history’. So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.” Morison rejected not only the speculative philosophy of history he found in Henry Adams but also revived the famous formula of Ranke: that the task of the historian is to report the facts as they really are. Apparently Morison started to cultivate his garden after abandoning two of the more philosophical concerns of American historians in the last half-century: the speculative cyclical theorizing of the Adamses and the pragmatism of a later generation of historians who followed Beard and Carl Becker in attacking Ranke.

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And while one cannot help sympathizing with Morison’s disappointment with Henry Adams’s results, his revival of Ranke invites scrutiny. It is always refreshing to hear that the historian wants to report the facts as they really are—to tell the truth. But while it is easy enough to announce this as the task of the historian when the truth of isolated statements like “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” is at stake, his task is more problematic when he evaluates total histories or syntheses. All historians agree that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but not all of them present the same “picture” of Rome; and historians say that some pictures of Rome are superior to others. Why? What is there about two pictures of an historical period that makes one better than the other when both of them can be shown to be truthful in what they say? Morison complains that Beard’s book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 contains no single statement which can be isolated as false but that it somehow gives a false picture of Roosevelt’s role in that war. We are tempted to introduce a counterpart to the legal concept of the whole truth and to try to discover which history comes closest to presenting it. But what is “the whole truth” about Rome or the coming of the Second World War? We cannot take the historical picture and compare it with a block of the past and see whether it accurately depicts that block. When we use the metaphor of a historical picture, we are not able to exploit any of its advantages; hence the disappointment with the picture theory of historical syntheses and the flight to pragmatism. Pragmatism, however, has its own troubles and it won’t do to apply it too crudely to historical syntheses. It won’t do to say merely that every history is written with the intention of solving problems growing out of present needs and then to conclude that satisfaction of these needs constitutes the truth of the historical picture, for we also want to say that no matter how much the rewriting of history may satisfy political needs, the result may not be an adequate historical account of what happened. Neither will it do to remind us that we become interested in certain aspects of the past as a result of certain needs in ourselves and our times. We all know that we try to study what interests us and that historians, like physicists, choose what problems to study, but this is not the kind of selection which creates the fundamental puzzle of the philosophy of history. That puzzle is created by our thinking that there is something called the whole truth about the period or event we are studying, that we can never speak this whole truth, that histories are good to the extent to which they approximate it, and therefore that some selections or approximations are objectively better than others. At this point it is easy to be attracted to a view which emphasizes the esthetic element in history. Since we speak of pictures, why not say that an historical picture is to be judged in the way we judge a Rembrandt or a Botticelli? And yet, no matter how much style may determine our admiration of a history, isn’t it grotesque to suppose that assessing an historical work is just like judging a painting or a novel? The historian doesn’t busily verify all of his isolated statements while they are on little cards and proceed to paste them together just for esthetic effect; moreover the combination with the best esthetic effect is often avoided by good historians in favor of something else. Many a history would be more artfully

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constructed if its author had carefully burned some of these little cards or replaced them with others, yet we don’t advise historians to carry on in this way unless they want to write romances or campaign biographies. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that true narration should be the central concern of the theorist of historical knowledge since that is what distinguishes history from other kinds of writing. While narrating he offers causal explanations and he reports facts of history, but the historian is more than a reporter of fact and a seeker of causes. If he were nothing more, discussion of the logic of his discipline might be assigned to general epistemology. But precisely because general theorists of knowledge concentrate on the logic of simple, isolated statements—whether statements about the past, explanatory statements, logical statements, scientific theories, or moral judgments—they overlook the narrative, which is a special kind of discourse deserving of special treatment. That is why I believe that if we succeed in clarifying the logic of narration, we shall have inaugurated a new era in the theory of historical knowledge. If we do succeed, the philosophy of history will no longer be a poor relative in the community of philosophical disciplines, for narrative history is a unique form of human discourse and those who study it will be entitled to a house on the hill.

C H A P T E R 6

Historical Relativism and the Evaluation of Histories (2003)

ONE OF MY MAIN TASKS in this paper is to present a framework for the discussion of a number of philosophical problems concerning narrative discourse. After outlining what seem to me to be the main features of a narrative, I try to clarify some philosophical questions concerning truth and objectivity in historical investigation, writing, and criticism. Many of my observations about narration are not new, but I try to place familiar as well as new observations in a fresh light by providing a logical context within which they arise. Although I try to keep in mind the ordinary use of the word “history” as well as the views of historians about what they take themselves to be doing, I occasionally make distinctions and use terminology that might at first sight—though not, I hope, at second or third—seem excessively abstract and remote to professional historians. One of my main aims is to show that although a historian tries to present causal truths about some subject in a narrative, he chooses what truths to link causally on the basis of value judgments that a fellow historian may not accept when telling a true story about the same subject. I begin by assuming that every history is a history of some entity that existed for a reasonably long period of time, that the narrator wishes to state what is true of it in a manner that distinguishes him from a teller of fictitious or false stories, and that his task is to give a connected account of the entity’s development in time. In other words, I assume that a narrative has a central subject and that one task of the narrator is to trace the development of that subject during a certain period. Because I assume that a history has a central subject, I focus on historical works that resemble histories of societies, biographies, or novels like Defoe’s Moll Flanders. E. M. Forster remarks that Moll Flanders “fills the book that bears her name, or rather stands alone in it, like a tree in a park, so that we can see her from every aspect and are not bothered by rival growths.”1 Limiting ourselves to this kind of history will not make our task easy, for in spite of this limitation we must face a number of philosophical problems that defy easy solution, especially that of saying on what grounds we choose to tell one true narrative rather than another equally true narrative about the same subject. In order to characterize a narrative or history of something like the United States of America, let us define the concept of a chronicle of a subject. A chronicle of it, I say, is a conjunction of singular noncausal factual statements that mention it and report what has been true of it at different times. I should add, 1

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), p. 88.

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however, that whereas all of the statements that compose a chronicle are singular and noncausal, some of them report states of the subject and some report events in its career. For example, a chronicle of England might begin with a statement that the ancient residents of England lived in small tribes under chiefs or kings; that they could not read; that they kept cattle, hunted, and fished; that they made baskets and pottery; that they grew barley in some places; that they mined for tin in Cornwall; that they were partially clothed in skins. Such a statement reports the conditions of life of the ancient British inhabitants of England, and is therefore different from the statement that Julius Caesar’s army came to England in 55 B.C., since the latter refers to an episode, an event rather than a state. If one conceives of a chronicle of England in this way, the chronicle is true just in case all its component statements are true, since a chronicle has been defined as a conjunction of statements; the truth of the chronicle is a function of the truth of its components alone. I turn now to the idea of a history or narrative. A history is distinguished from a chronicle because a history, unlike a chronicle, employs the notion of cause or explanation. As E. M. Forster also remarks, a chronicler leads his reader to ask merely “And then what?” whereas a historian leads him to ask “So what?”2 The chronicler is likely to tell us: “The King of England died; and then the Queen grieved; and then the Queen died; and then the Prince worried; and then the Prince died; and then the Princess felt very lonely; and then the Princess died”. But a corresponding history may read: “The King of England died, so the Queen of England grieved and died of grief. And because he worried so much about the Queen’s death, the Prince of England committed suicide; and therefore the Princess of England died later of loneliness”. Because a history contains words like “because”, a history is a logical conjunction of explanatory assertions of the form: “Because s was A at time t1, s was B at time t2. And because s was B at time t2, s was C at time t3, and so on”. In a history, each explanatory statement implies its components—that is to say, the statements connected by the word “because” which make up its chronicle. If we say in a history of Germany that England declared war on Germany because the Germans had invaded Poland, we imply that the English declared war on Germany and that the Germans had invaded Poland; for that reason, a history logically implies its chronicle but not conversely since a history’s implied or entailed chronicle may be true when the history is false because some of its causal statements are. Although the question whether a history or a chronicle is true is answered when we learn that their respective conjuncts are true, we may ask other questions about histories and chronicles that require examination of more than their truth-value. Thus a historian may prefer one of two equally true histories of the U.S.A., and since both histories are true, he may be asked why he prefers one of them—why he chooses to present it rather than an equally true rival history of the same subject. One answer to this question, and that upon which I concentrate here, is that he prefers his history because he prefers the chronicle it entails to 2

Forster, op. cit., p. 130.

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the chronicle entailed by a rival true history. This may be seen by thinking of the two rival histories of the U.S.A. as two conjunctions of causal statements having the same form. One historian says: “Because the U.S.A. was A at time t1, the U.S.A. was B at time t2, and so on through tn”, whereas the other says: “Because the U.S.A. was C at time t1, the U.S.A. was D at time t2, and so on through tn”. In the extreme case, the rival historians assert completely different causal truths about it at those times. While two histories may overlap, in extreme cases they do not, and when they do not overlap, they entail two chronicles that do not overlap. We may therefore say that a preferred true history of the U.S.A. is one that fills the above-mentioned form of a history with a preferred true chronicle, and that one of these histories is preferable because the true chronicle it entails is preferable. Therefore, we may ask on what grounds we may say that one true chronicle is preferable to another—on what grounds the first ought to be preferred to the second. Although I am not concerned here with whether a historian constructs his history or his chronicle first, I should point out that a historian may decide to begin his chronicle with one isolated truth that he knows about his subject, like “The King of England died”, and then follow one of the causal lines emanating from the king’s death by saying “Because the King of England died, the Queen of England grieved”, and so on, as above outlined. The historian may also begin with known truths about the middle and final years in his history, in which case he may fill in gaps once he has decided on his initially fixed truths, especially his terminus a quo and his terminus ad quem. But once he has written his history and its entailed chronicle, a critic may ask: “Why is this true history of the U.S.A preferable to that true history of it?” And this may boil down to the question: “Why is the chronicle entailed by this true history of it preferable to the chronicle entailed by that true history of it?” IS SUBJECTIVISM THE ANSWER? Different answers may be given to this question, and they may be assigned different philosophical labels. I begin with an answer that might be called “Subjectivism”, according to which the preferable chronicle puts the U.S.A in a better light. Thus one historian may include only truths that report what the novelist William Dean Howells once called the “smiling aspects of life,” and therefore maintain that a preferable chronicle records facts that are morally or esthetically attractive. In an essay on London, the novelist Henry James followed a similar path by trying to give what he called a genial summary of that city in the nineteenth century. He observed that London was immense and that one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. . . . Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak? Inevitably there must be a choice, and I know of none more scientific than simply to leave out what we may have to apologize for. The uglinesses, the “rookeries,” the brutalities, the night-aspect

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of many of the streets, the gin-shops and the hour when they are cleared out before closing—there are many elements of this kind which have to be counted out before a genial summary can be made.3

James’s effort to make a genial summary was that of a writer on only one period in London’s history, so if he were instead writing a history of London, he might present a chronicle or conjunction of genial summaries, one for each of several times in London’s development. Although such a chronicle may be imagined, it is not easy to construct a true one because, so to speak, genial events or facts, like genial people, may have unattractive antecedents and unattractive offspring. For similar reasons, it is difficult to construct a true narrative that entails a chronicle consisting exclusively of statements that supply admonitory or advisory information. When, in his famous inaugural lecture, J. B. Bury dissociated himself from Cicero’s view that history was magistra vitae, and from the view of Dionysius that history was “philosophy by examples,”4 Bury might have pointed to the difficulty of constructing a history composed exclusively of truths useful to the politician. In the abstract, it may be possible to select such truths and to connect them causally, but this logical possibility is almost never realized. IS ARISTOTELIAN ESSENTIALISM THE ANSWER? Under the circumstances, it may be said that the preferable entailed chronicle consists of truths that are deeper than others because they present the supposedly objective essence of the thing whose history is being written. A variety of historical essentialism that comes close to this is poignantly expressed in the following passage from Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed: Her literary scheme was as follows. Numbers of papers and journals are published in the capitals and the provinces of Russia, and every day a number of events are reported in them. The year passes, the newspapers are everywhere folded up and put away in cupboards, or are torn up and become litter, or are used for making parcels or wrapping things. Numbers of these facts make an impression and are remembered by the public, but in the course of years they are forgotten. Many people would like to look them up, but it is a labour for them to embark upon this sea of paper, often knowing nothing of the day or place or even year in which the incident occurred. Yet if all the facts for a whole year were brought together into one book, on a definite plan, and with a definite object, under headings with references, arranged according to months and days, such a compilation might reflect the characteristics of Russian life for the whole year, even though the facts published are only a small fraction of the events that take place. “Instead of a number of newspapers there would be a few fat books, that’s all,” observed Shatov. 3

Henry James, Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York, 1893), p. 27. J. B. Bury, “The Science of History,” Selected Essays of J. B. Bury, ed. Harold Temperley (Cambridge, l930), pp. 3–22. 4

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But Lizaveta Nikolaevna clung to her idea, in spite of the difficulty of carrying it out and her inability to describe it. “It ought to be one book, and not even a very thick one,” she maintained. But even if it were thick it would be clear, for the great point would be the plan and the character of the presentation of facts. Of course, not all would be collected and reprinted. The decrees and acts of government, local regulations, laws—all such facts, however important, might be altogether omitted from the proposed publication. They could leave out a great deal and confine themselves to a selection of events more or less characteristic of the moral life of the people, of the personal character of the Russian people at the present moment. Of course, everything might be put in: strange incidents, fires, public subscriptions, anything good or bad, every speech or word, perhaps even floodings of the rivers, perhaps even some government decrees, but only such things to be selected as are characteristic of the period; everything would be put in with a certain view, a special significance and intention, with an idea which would illuminate the facts looked at in the aggregate, as a whole. And finally the book ought to be interesting even for light reading, apart from its value as a work of reference. It would be, so to say, a presentation of the spiritual, moral, inner life of Russia for a whole year. “We want every one to buy it, we want it to be a book that will be found on every table,” Liza declared. “I understand that all lies in the plan, and that’s why I apply to you,” she concluded. She grew very warm over it, and although her explanation was obscure and incomplete, Shatov began to understand. “So it would amount to something with a political tendency, a selection of facts with a special tendency,” he muttered, still not raising his head. “Not at all, we must not select with a particular bias, and we ought not to have any political tendency in it. Nothing but impartiality—that will be the only tendency”.5

We may alter Lizaveta’s view as we altered Henry James’s by thinking of it as applicable to a history of Russia during a year while supposing that two rival chroniclers might attribute many different features to it for, say, each month in the year. Although each chronicle might attribute many nonessential features to Russia for each month, Lizaveta might have thought that one feature constituted Russia’s spirit, inner character, or essence in a given month, in which case her imagined chronicle would record its changing essence from month to month. Such a view would allow (with Vico and Marx) that the essence of a thing may change in time, but it would nonetheless share something with Aristotle’s view that we can present Socrates’ essence by saying that he is a man but not by saying he is featherless or bald. And if Lizaveta were to say that her chronicle would record Russia’s one essence or spirit for one whole year, she would also depart from Aristotle’s view of essence if her imagined chronicle were to attribute a different essence to Russia in the following year, and yet another in the year after that. Whichever variant of historical essentialism she might adopt, it would be subject to difficulties if she were to regard a singular essential truth as a necessary truth. 5

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed (Everyman ed., New York, 1931), vol. 1, pp. 124 ff.

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IS PRAGMATIC ESSENTIALISM THE ANSWER? There have been attempts at treating the notion of essence in a more empirical way, and I now consider one of them by William James. In his Principles of Psychology, he followed what he took to be Locke’s lead in trying to replace the Aristotelian view by what James called a teleological conception of essence. James argued that “all ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all, are equally true ways. There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing”.6 Therefore, James said, the question “What is that?” as the questioner points to a concrete thing may be answered in many true ways, depending on the practical concerns of the questioner. The thing upon which James was writing, he said, might be regarded as a surface for inscription, or as a combustible material, or as a thin thing, or as a hydrocarbonaceous thing, or as a thing eight inches by ten inches in size, an American thing, and so on, ad infinitum. What we regard it as depends, James said, upon our practical concerns, upon what we want to do with it. And since we can only do one thing with it at a time, James continued, we can regard it in only one of these ways at a time. As in the case of Lizaveta’s view, this pragmatic view may lead to reporting a series of changing essences or just one. According to the unitary view, the whole chronicle is related to a practical aim as James’s regarding his piece of paper as essentially a combustible thing was related to James’s need to light a fire. On this view, when we say that one chronicle of a subject is preferable to another, what we mean might be fully expressed by saying that that chronicle is preferable relative to the chronicler’s desire to do something to or with that subject, whereas some other chronicler might wish to do something else with it and therefore present a different chronicle of the subject. This is plausible as a view of a subject’s essence when it is present to us now, as his piece of paper was to James when he was penning his words, but what about the typical subject of the historian, the dead and buried individual or the extinct civilization? Surely we have no interest in doing something overt to it or with it, as James had an interest in lighting a fire, and therefore a Jamesian view of the chronicle of it fails in the case of a thing in the remote past. Even if James be right in holding that stating the essence of a contemporaneous thing “is first and last and always for the sake of . . . doing”, we cannot say something similar about a chronicle of ancient Greece.7 A view that is oriented toward doing something with or to a contemporaneous thing cannot be applied to a thing in the distant past since we cannot do something overt to or with ancient Greece. So far, then, we have seen that a preferable entailed chronicle is not one that records only genial facts about a past subject; that it does not record what 6 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890), vol. II, 333: James’s italics and capitals. For a more recent expression of a related point of view, see Nelson Goodman, “The Way the World Is,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 14 (l980), 48–56. 7 James, op. cit., p. 333.

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Dostoevsky’s Lizaveta regarded as inner facts about it; and that it does not record facts that guide efforts to do something with it. Under the circumstances, I turn to the idea that a preferable chronicle is one that records the whole truth about its subject. IS ENCYCLOPEDISM THE ANSWER? Should the chronicler amass more and more truths about his subject? In rightly opposing such a view, the historian Macaulay points out that it often happens that a historian “tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths”.8 Drawing an analogy with the imitative arts, Macaulay says there are lines in the human face that stand in such relations to each other that they ought either to be all introduced into a painting together or all omitted together; and he adds that a sketch in which none of these lines appears may be excellent, but if some are presented and others left out, there will be more points of likeness but less likeness with the face. Thus, Macaulay says, a bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a blooming face, but if you color the lips and cheeks while leaving the hair and eyes unaltered, you will make the similarity with the face less striking rather than more so. It should be noted, however, that neither the portraitist nor the biographer of a dead and buried subject is able to look at it, and therefore neither of them can judge by direct comparison whether the portrait or biography is a good likeness of the departed subject. This argues against Macaulay’s view that the best histories are those “which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole”; and if the task of the portraitist or the biographical historian is, as Macaulay implies, that of producing “the marked features of a countenance”, it is relevant to point out that the marked features of even a living subject may be identified differently by two different portraitists as well as by one who looks at the face at different times. For this reason, I find it hard to accept Macaulay’s version of the encyclopedist’s view of a preferable chronicle, and now consider the view that it is the preeminent, paramount, or predominant chronicle as identified by John Stuart Mill when he discussed historical method. IS THE PREFERABLE CHRONICLE THE PREEMINENT ONE? In his System of Logic, John Stuart Mill uses the term “state of society” to designate what he calls the simultaneous state of the greater social facts about a society: “the degree of knowledge, and of intellectual and moral culture, existing in the community and in every class of it; the state of industry, of wealth and its distribution; the habitual occupations of the community; their division into classes, and 8 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” Critical and Historical Essays (Boston and New York, 1900), vol. 1, p. 245.

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the relations of those classes to one another; the common beliefs which they entertain on all the subjects most important to mankind, and the degree of assurance with which those beliefs are held; their tastes, and the character and degree of their aesthetic development; their form of government, and the more important of their laws and customs”.9 Mill adds that the features of all these things, and of many more that will readily suggest themselves, constitute the state of society or the state of civilization at a certain time. However, the items Mill includes in a state of society are items that he deemed great or important but that others might not deem important enough to include in a chronicle of that society. Thus, a historian who includes the state of music in a chronicle of twentieth-century society may report on the state of classical music and say nothing about jazz because he likes classical music and does not like jazz, and a similar situation might prevail in the history of painting and even in the history of philosophy. Since the specification of a society’s Millian state would depend on the chronicler’s judgment of what is great or important, his chronicle of that society would reflect a value judgment by him. Even if a historian of twentiethcentury society used objective musicological criteria to identify jazz and classical music, his decision to describe the state of classical music in his chronicle rather than that of jazz would rest on a judgment of value that might vary from historian to historian. I shall return to the significance of this point presently. After identifying states of society as he does, Mill writes that when we call them a subject of science, “it is implied that there exists a natural combination among these different elements; that not every variety of combination of these general facts is possible, but only certain combinations; that, in short, there exist Uniformities of Coexistence” between these elements because of the influence exercised by every one of them over every other. There is, Mill says, a “consensus” of the various parts of the social body because “when one of the features of a society is in a particular state, a state of many other features, more or less precisely determinate, always or usually coexists with it”.10 Let us suppose, then, that a broadly gauged historian—a cultural historian he might be called today—writes a true history of a society or community, and that the true chronicle entailed by this history is a conjunction of truths about consecutive states of society in Mill’s sense. Each entry in the chronicle would specify a certain state of knowledge in the community at that time, a certain state of industry, a certain state of esthetic development, a certain state of laws and customs, and so on. Mill holds with Comte that these elements of one total social state are linked with each other by what he calls static laws of coexistence, and that the whole social state of an earlier generation produces the whole state of a later generation in accordance with dynamic laws. For Mill writes: “The mutual correlation between the different elements of each state of society, is therefore a derivative law, resulting from the laws which regulate the succession between one state of society and another; 9 A System of Logic: Collected Works of J. S. Mill, vol. 8, eds. J. M. Robson and R. F. McRae (Toronto, 1974), pp. 911–12. 10 Ibid.

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for the proximate cause of every state of society is the state of society immediately preceding it”.11 Mill means here that the static consensus or linkage between elements in one total social state is causally explained by deriving it from a consensus or linkage in an earlier state in accordance with a law of succession that is dynamic. Because Mill found it difficult to produce a static law that explains why the elements in one total state of society are joined with each other, and also difficult to provide a dynamic law that would link an earlier state with a later state, he said, with Comte’s view of history in mind: “It would evidently be a great assistance if it should happen to be the fact that some one element in the complex existence of social man is preeminent over all others as the prime agent of the social movement”. He goes on to say that we could in that case take the progress of that one element as “the central chain, to each successive link of which, the corresponding links of all the other progressions being appended, the succession of the facts would by this alone be presented in a kind of spontaneous order, far more nearly approaching to the real order of their filiation than could be obtained by any other merely empirical process”. Mill then says—with Comte’s view of the passage of society from a theological to a metaphysical to a scientific state in mind—that the evidence of history and what we know about human nature combine to show “that there really is one social element which is thus predominant, and almost paramount, among the agents of the social progression. This is the state of the speculative faculties of mankind, including the nature of the beliefs which by any means they have arrived at, concerning themselves and the world by which they are surrounded”.12 I have presented enough of Mill’s view to show why a historian of society might regard a preferable chronicle as one which is preeminent, paramount, or predominant in Mill’s sense since, from a chronicle that is predominant in Mill’s sense, we could presumably infer all the other chronicles of its economic, political, esthetic, and legal features. However, I repeat that in Mill’s view all chronicles record truths about society that are deemed great or important, and that the chronicler of the preeminent factor presents one which supposedly explains other chronicles constructed on the basis of the chronicler’s value judgment of the importance of what he records. Of course, it may be that all or most sociologists would regard the institutions listed by Mill as the institutions to be described when characterizing a social state—e.g., music, philosophy, and religion—but even if this be so, sociologists might disagree about what kinds of music, philosophy, or religion should be described in their chronicles because they disagree about the importance of different tendencies within music, philosophy, and religion. Such value-dominated selection is not peculiar to historians of music who prefer classical to jazz since it also occurs when historians regard one sort of philosophy as the important philosophy of a certain period. Thus, when historians of philosophy write histories of modern philosophy and speak of the age of classi11 12

Ibid Ibid., pp. 925–26.

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cal rationalism, the age of empiricism, or the age of analysis, they may limit themselves to presenting the views of philosophers whom they regard as the best rationalists—say Descartes and Leibniz—the best empiricists—say Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—and the best analysts—say Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein. Such historians would use a concept of what is good philosophy when they construct their chronicles, and since other historians of philosophy may reasonably disagree with them, it is hard to maintain that there is just one true chronicle of philosophy from era to era. As someone who has worked in the history of philosophy, I freely admit to relying on value-laden judgments when choosing the philosophers and philosophies to deal with in a history; and so, if we regard the truths recorded in a chronicle of society as those that are explained by the preeminent chronicle, we should recognize that such truths are recorded by a historian who has interests and values that may not be shared by another historian. This is not surprising when we recognize that history is an extension of memory, that memory is selective, and that memories are judged not only on the basis of accuracy or truth but also on assessments of the value of what is remembered. This simple truth lies at the heart of the view that a true chronicle may be called preferable on the basis of the memorability of what it records since to be memorable is to be worthy of being remembered. Thus Herodotus, the father of history, wrote that he published his work “in the hope of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on the record what were their grounds of feud”. Therefore, even if we (debatably) maintain that one predominant chronicle—whether it be Mill’s or Marx’s—explains the nonpredominant chronicles of a society, it will be hard to present a generally acceptable criterion for selecting those nonpredominant chronicles that are to be explained by the predominant one. The ideas about chronicles, and derivatively about histories, that I have been presenting may be made more persuasive if we think of a true chronicle of a thing as something like a true description of it. When we ask a person to describe something, we do not usually ask for the description of it. “Give me the description of it” is not what we usually say. We say: “Give me a description of it”, or “Describe it for me”; and when we make such a request, we may be interested in learning truths about the subject of a kind that do not interest our interlocutor. Analogously, when a historian constructs a history of a society, his history may entail a chronicle that interests him but not others. The historian’s situation is not unlike that in which an editor of a newspaper finds himself when he claims to present the news of the day, for when he says that he prints all the news that is fit to print, he records all the news he sees fit to print and that others may not see fit to print. To sum up: I have argued that the value of a true history depends on the value of its entailed chronicle and I have rejected several dubious views of what it is to be the preferable chronicle of a subject. I have said that when different historians write different true histories of one subject that entail different true chroni-

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cles, it is hard to present a criterion that will determine which of the two true chronicles is preferable and therefore which of the two true histories is. I have also said that even if one true chronicle is preeminent among others, we do not have an objective test for specifying which non-preeminent chronicles should be explained by that supposedly preeminent chronicle, and that is one reason why it is difficult to specify the grounds on which one true history of a subject is preferable to another. One historian may disapprove of another’s history of the United States because it entails a chronicle of what the first regards as unimportant truths, but what if the second historian replies that he finds those truths interesting or important? Can the first historian silence him by brandishing a criterion which says what historians ought to prefer? I doubt it. We may test the truth of histories and chronicles objectively, but the memorability of what they record is another matter, for it makes no sense to say “This chronicle is true for me but not for him” whereas it does make sense to say “This chronicle records what is memorable to me but not to him”. If this is historical relativism, I accept it because there is no rule of historical writing that reasonably dictates what a historian should be interested in. Even if he limits himself to the study of human social behavior, he will record truths about it that a fellow social historian may not regard as important enough to record. I grant, of course, that an individual historian or a group of historians may resolve that only certain truths about a subject are worth recording or remembering, but such professional exclusivism cannot be supported by appealing to something called the essence of history, to the so-called meaning of the word “history”, or even to the practice of all those who call themselves historians. That is why a true chronicle is kindred to a true description of a subject and not to something called the true description of it; and why historians should recognize that they present a true chronicle of their subject rather than the true chronicle of it. By viewing their chronicles in this liberal way, historians will recognize that their fellow historians, as well as future historians, may have interests and values that they do not have, and therefore reasonably present different true chronicles and different true histories of the same society. Although hydrographers may be able to locate the main stream of a river in an objective way, historical main streams are in the minds of historians who may have different ideas of what is memorable. Their evaluation of a chronicle, and therefore of a history, is not limited to stating its truth-value since it also includes a judgment of the importance of the truths it records. Therefore, a historian’s total judgment of what should be recorded in a history, and by implication in a chronicle, is a blend of two judgments: one of truth and one of memorability. Truth may be the stronger claimant and the more objective, but memorability is always a factor in spite of being subjective. The absence of an objective criterion of historical importance makes it very difficult to show that historical truths about a society’s economy or politics are more memorable than those about its philosophy. It also shows that there are more historical truths than are dreamt of by historians.

C H A P T E R 7

Historical Inevitability (1956)

SIR ISAIAH BERLIN’S BRILLIANT ESSAY Historical Inevitability is the product of an unusual combination of qualities in its author, a remarkable thinker who combines the logico-analytic skill that we associate with the tradition of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the historical insight and sensibility that are more usually associated with historians and philosophers in the Continental tradition. Berlin’s versatility reflects his own history, which is that of a Russian who was brought to England in his childhood, who became an influential friend of the philosophical revolution that converted Oxford into a center of linguistic philosophy, and who is one of the world’s most distinguished historians of Russian thought, the author of a biography of Karl Marx and of The Hedgehog and the Fox, a remarkable book on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. In his study of Tolstoy, Berlin first produced his suggestive contrast between the hedgehog—the man who knows one big thing, who has one central idea which organizes his beliefs and experiences, who has a large, rich vision of the kind that we associate with the great systematic metaphysicians—and the fox— the careful, meticulous, analytical student of profound and relevant detail. Tolstoy, Mr. Berlin suggested, “was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog,” and my own hypothesis is that Mr. Berlin is by nature a hedgehog who fortunately believes in being a fox. This, I think, may illuminate his bold but carefully reasoned book, the first Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics in 1953 and published in 1954. The philosophical world outside of Oxford first knew of Mr. Berlin as the author of articles on logical problems surrounding induction and on the positivist criterion of meaning, also as a person named in the preface of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, where he was thanked for having gone over every point of that flaming manifesto of logical positivism. For all that the reading public could tell, Berlin was one of those clever young men of the 1930s who felt the beneficial effect of logical positivism, who were trying to rid philosophy of the muddles of two thousand years, and who constituted a cadre of tough analysts, bent on pricking the bubbles of speculative philosophy, preoccupied with sensedata, and constantly minding the p’s and q’s of Principia Mathematica. They formed a no-nonsense school, a logical school, and an empirical school, a school of foxes. It came as a distinct surprise, therefore, to those who knew of Berlin only by way of footnotes, prefaces, and articles in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, to hear of the publication of his Karl Marx: His Life and Environment in 1939. For what could be further from one’s conception of a logical analyst than a biographer of such a turbulent subject? Does one think of Moore writing a life of Marx? Or Wittgenstein? One knows of Russell’s books on marriage, war, peace,

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freedom, and socialism; one knows of Whitehead’s brilliant histories of ideas. But Berlin’s book on Marx showed that he was an unusual philosopher in the Englishspeaking world, that he was deeply, and not just abstractly, concerned with the lives of other, suffering human beings. Moreover, it revealed a preoccupation with the philosophy of history and a familiarity with Continental thought and culture that one might easily understand in an idealist or phenomenologist but which seemed odd in an English friend of logical positivism. After the biography of Marx appeared, the war brought Berlin to Washington on a government mission, and there he is said to have produced a series of astonishingly penetrating reports on the American scene which were admired by all who read them, notably by Churchill. Since then his lectures at Oxford and Harvard on the history of Russian thought, his little book on Tolstoy, his studies of his favorite Belinsky, and his widely discussed Third Programme talks on romantic political theory have made it clear that he is one of the most original and interesting minds on the English scene. Moreover, they make it obvious that the logical Berlin of the 1930s was a hedgehog, a man of large, expansive, humanistic concerns who was confining himself to a genre that was too tight and restrictive for someone with his historical, political, and literary talents. This is one reason why the book under review is of special interest. In it Berlin picks up his logical tools once again, but this time he applies them to problems in a boggy field which is too often the preserve of pure hedgehogs, hedgehogs with no sense of logic. In approaching the philosophy of history with the devices of a logical analyst, Berlin confirms one’s hopeful suspicion that for all of his magnificently cascading sentences and in spite of his extraordinary genius at painting large, sweeping pictures of men and ages, he will never abandon his interest in reasoning carefully, sharply, and clearly. It is in this sense that he believes in being a fox and this is what makes him unique among historians and cultural critics today. The main purpose of Berlin’s lecture is to refute the doctrine of complete determinism. Its epigraph, “those vast impersonal forces,” is taken from T. S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture, and it is against the notion that we are all in the tight grip of such mysterious powers that Berlin argues in a most devastating way. But the proponents of such forces are not the only ones attacked by Berlin, since he is on the trail of more modest determinists, too. He is also shooting at those who, although they are just as vehement as he is in denouncing occult forces, maintain that all our choices are determined by causes of a less nebulous kind. For the sober determinist, these causes are not as colossal and vaporous as Hegel’s World Spirit but that is not enough of a retreat or concession for Berlin. He insists over and over again that some of our choices must be regarded as free in the sense that no forces or causes whatever, whether they be vast and impersonal or tiny and personal, produce these choices. He will not be satisfied with saying that we are free only in the sense that we can often do as we choose, that no shadow will fall between the choice and the act. He insists that at least some of our choices are themselves free, that is to say, uncaused and therefore unpredictable by scientific means. And his chief argument for this view rests on his contention that praising or blaming an action requires it to be free

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in this unqualified sense. “If I were convinced that although choices did affect what occurred, yet they were themselves wholly determined by factors not within the individual’s control . . . , I should not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy.” Berlin’s chief point is that complete determinism is incompatible not only with what he believes but also with what ordinary men and historians believe in their sane and sober moments: that if all of our choices were determined, none of our actions would be morally judgeable, which consequence Berlin regards as absurd. In the face of such an inconsistency between determinism and moral judgment, Berlin says, we might think ourselves free to choose either one of the horns of the dilemma—for example, determinism. But this is impossible, according to Berlin in parts of his lecture. He thinks of complete determinism as an expendable philosophical doctrine, but he regards praising and blaming as an inescapable part of our way of thinking and speaking. Therefore, he says, there is no alternative but to give up the offending philosophical doctrine. One might almost say that according to Berlin in some places we are forced to praise and blame, and therefore forced to regard ourselves as free. (There is irony here, but not inconsistency, since Berlin does not say that all of our choices are free.) The two main problems raised by Berlin’s argument are these: (1) Are moral judgment and complete determinism logically incompatible? and (2) Is moral judgment in the form of praise and blame an inescapable part of our thinking process? Let us consider the first question first. Is it logically inconsistent to praise or blame an action that we believe to have been determined by things outside of the agent’s control? If we do praise or blame such an action, is that like saying, ‘All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, but Socrates is not mortal’, or ‘Five is an odd number and five is not an odd number’? I think not, although Berlin seems to think it is. I think that someone who blames an action of this kind is doing something that we may find morally objectionable but certainly not logically inconsistent. If I believe that a man has done something wrong that is determined by causes beyond his control, I do not think it illogical to blame him but nasty, cruel, wrong, unfeeling. I think he does not deserve censure. And what this shows, I think, is that we have to do here not with the violation of a logical principle, as Berlin seems to think, but rather with the violation of a moral principle that is not a necessary truth. What is the bearing of this on Mr. Berlin’s main thesis? It suggests, I think, that his move from the statement that certain acts are praiseworthy or blameworthy to the antideterministic conclusion that some choices are free presupposes the moral principle, “Only acts chosen freely deserve praise or blame”. “Is it morally wrong?” we should ask, and not, “Is it logically absurd?” to blame a man for some hideous crime, even though we believe he was caused to do it. If we ask this question, I think we should answer in the negative because we rest on a moral principle that is not a necessary truth. I turn now to the second question raised earlier: is the language of praise and blame an inescapable part of our thinking process? I doubt that it is just as I

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doubt that the principle of determinism or universal causation is. Therefore, I think we may view the whole situation in a much more fluid way. Those who think deterministically can change their thinking if they wish to; those who pass moral judgments can give up that activity; and they can surrender the moral principle that makes it wrong to pass moral judgment on determined acts. What the matter comes down to, therefore, is a choice among several consistent systems of belief and practice. For unlike Berlin in places, I can imagine accepting universal causation, accepting the principle that “ought” implies “can” (in its moral version), and refraining from giving out moral marks; I can also imagine accepting Berlin’s way of thinking, in which one gives up universal causation, maintains the principle that “ought” implies “can,” and passes judgment only on those acts which are free. I can imagine accepting any of these self-consistent triads. The first serious question that immediately arises is: which triad represents our way of life? To this Berlin’s answer is simple: it is the one I have called his earlier. But even if it were, one might want to ask whether it should be, and yet Berlin almost thinks it silly to raise this question, since he says in places that we are psychologically forced into the language of praise and blame, that giving it up is psychologically impossible. However, there is a point at which Berlin says: “I do not here wish to say that determinism is necessarily false, only that we neither speak nor think as if it could be true.” And when one adds to this his statement that we are forced to speak and think in ways that are incompatible with determinism, one wonders whether Berlin is willing to accept a certain grim consequence of his two statements: that we might be forced to speak erroneously if determinism were true. Now I do not deny that the triad to which Berlin subscribes might be the most acceptable of them all. But if I affirmed that it was, I should not defend it as Berlin does. The fact that I give moral marks does not seem to me an unalterable fact of my psychology, nor do I think that the principle that we should not judge unfree acts is inescapable. Any one of the elements in what I have called Berlin’s way of life might be surrendered. In describing one’s way of thinking in this manner, one makes it clear that one is free to change it, at one’s own peril, of course; one also avoids the Rousseauian irony of Berlin’s position, which is that of saying that we are forced to regard ourselves as free. In arguing as I have, I find myself disagreeing with one of the things that Berlin says, and agreeing with another, which makes me suspect an inconsistency in his lecture. In his more rigid mood, he says: “My submission is that to make a serious attempt to adapt our words to the hypothesis of determinism is scarcely feasible, as things are now, and have been within recorded history. The changes involved are too radical; our moral categories are, in the end, little more flexible than our physical ones; we cannot begin to think out in real terms, to which behavior and speech would correspond, what the universe of the genuine determinist would be like, any more than we can think out, with the minimum of indispensable concrete detail (i.e., begin to imagine) what it would be like to be in a timeless world, or one with a seventeen-dimensional space” (p. 34). In his less rigid mood, the one I find more congenial, Berlin says: “All our categories are, in theory, subject to change. The physical categories—e.g., the three dimensions and infi-

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nite extent of ordinary perceptual space, the irreversibility of temporal processes, the multiplicity and countability of material objects—are perhaps the most fixed. Yet even a shift in these most general characteristics is in principle conceivable. After these come orders and relations of sensible qualities—colours, shapes, tastes, etc.; then the uniformities on which the sciences are based—these can be quite easily thought away in fairy tales or scientific romances. The categories of value are more fluid than these; and within them tastes fluctuate more than rules of etiquette, and these more than moral standards” (p. 56n). My submission is that the second passage quoted is philosophically sounder than the first, and that it goes a long way toward contradicting the notion, implied or stated so often in this lecture, that we cannot think determinism is true. Moreover, in the second passage, Berlin implies that moral categories are “more fluid” than physical categories while in the first he says that they are “little more flexible” than physical categories. At this point, we reach a matter which leads very naturally to the other main question of Berlin’s essay: historical relativism. Unfortunately, I have spent so much of my space on his exciting discussion of determinism that I cannot consider his profound treatment of relativism here. I hope that my disagreements with him on some of the matters considered will not obscure my estimate of his total contribution. In my opinion, this essay of Berlin’s is one of the most brilliant and provocative studies in the philosophy of history to have appeared in many years. Where one disagrees with him, one feels that further discussion would certainly narrow the gap, for one knows that one is dealing with a thinker whose interest in man and the cosmos is equaled by his respect for logic: in short, that Isaiah Berlin is a hedgehog who believes in being a fox.

C H A P T E R 8

Tolstoy the Empirical Fox (2003)

IT IS MORE THAN A half-century since Isaiah Berlin published The Hedgehog and the Fox, his brilliant and influential interpretation of Tolstoy’s view of history. Using a dark saying of the Greek poet Archilochus, Berlin argued that the great novelist was a fox who knew many things but vainly aspired in War and Peace to be a hedgehog who knew one big thing. Although I admire Berlin’s distinction between two kinds of intellect and have used it to advantage in some of my writing, I have concluded upon rereading the great novel that Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a fox, an empiricist who arrived at the big truth of metaphysical determinism, but who did not try to make intellectual contact with an inscrutable entity that Berlin says he felt but inevitably failed to identify. I stand in awe of Berlin’s knowledge of Tolstoy and disagree with him on this subject with great trepidation, but I believe that his philosophical antipathy to determinism as revealed in his published lecture Historical Inevitability may have led him to suppose that his hero paid only lip-service to that doctrine and therefore to think that as a philosophical thinker Tolstoy was after very different metaphysical game. Much of this essay will be devoted to showing why I think Tolstoy never tried in War and Peace to acquire knowledge of what Berlin calls a circumambient flow, but much of it aims at describing how Tolstoy’s view of history led him to regard determinism as an acceptable metaphysics. I do this without passing judgment on that metaphysics for its acceptability is a different matter altogether. Tolstoy’s interest in the philosophy of history was typical of an age in which Kulturphilosophie was a thriving intellectual industry, an enterprise in which philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey took part, along with figures like Marx and Engels. Unlike theorists of culture who sought to explain why different varieties of philosophy flourished under different social circumstances, Tolstoy boldly plunged into philosophy itself, propounded what he called a law of history, and defended the metaphysics of determinism. “Il philosophise”, Flaubert exclaimed in consternation about the Epilogue to War and Peace, where Tolstoy seeks to identify what he calls the force or the power that explains the events of history, to comment on the nature of historical explanation, and to ponder the question of free will. While reflecting on these matters, he proposes his law of history, and after defending it, he dilates on a number of related metaphysical and epistemological issues. Tolstoy’s philosophical views in War and Peace are not those of a novelist who thinks he has a special way of knowing truth that differs from that used by ordinary people or scientists. He does not think he rides on a high literary road to truth that cannot be reached or traveled by those who rely on logic and experience, and this is consonant with what Berlin calls Tolstoy’s dismissal of “Hegel’s

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writings as unintelligible gibberish interspersed with platitudes” and his sympathy with empiricist theories of knowledge. When Tolstoy defended determinism by appealing to considerations like those that led to the Copernican view of planetary motion, he did not in my view aim at a suprascientific awareness of the big thing that Berlin calls the historical flow. That is why I doubt that Tolstoy vainly sought contact with the circumambient stream described by Berlin, and I defend my doubt after presenting Tolstoy’s critique of ancient and modern historians, his law of history, and the metaphysical determinism to which he was led after formulating that law. I believe that Tolstoy’s big philosophical belief was his deterministic view of the world we live in, and that he did not quixotically strive to know something he could not possibly formulate about a stream or flow in which all sentient beings are submerged and whose pressure only some of us feel. We may see this by tracing Tolstoy’s steps en route to determinism, and by contrasting that doctrine with the truth about the big fluid that Berlin thinks Tolstoy vainly sought. In my view, the Tolstoy of War and Peace was not a bitterly disappointed fox who tried unsuccessfully to be a hedgehog, but a thinker who came to accept determinism by using the methods of a fox. If anything emerges in the novel as a big philosophical theme, it is determinism and not Tolstoy’s disappointed search for knowledge that neither he nor anyone else could attain. Unlike Berlin, I think Tolstoy had enough philosophical sense to see this and therefore not to embark on a futile effort to know the unknowable. ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Tolstoy’s excessively long and somewhat indirect path to determinism begins with an onslaught against historians in part 2 of the Epilogue to War and Peace. He first observes there that ancient historians thought that the divinely directed careers of individual rulers represented the lives of their peoples, whereas modern European historians, whom he was most anxious to refute, replaced those monarchs by other heroes. Modern historians, he said, focused on the lives of generals, ministers of state, orators, scientists, reformers, philosophers, and poets in an effort to epitomize the life of a nation, and therefore he challenged them to explain a number of facts. He noted that in 1789 there was a ferment in Paris that grew, spread, and found expression in a movement of peoples from west to east—a movement that soon collided with an opposing movement that finally reached Paris, where it subsided. For twenty years, Tolstoy said, an enormous number of fields were not tilled; houses were burned; trade changed its direction; millions of men grew poor, grew rich, and changed the places in which they lived; and thousands of Christians who professed the law of love murdered one another. Consequently, Tolstoy asked: What compelled men to act in this fashion? What force really moves nations? Since modern historians thought that some other force should replace the divine power in which the ancients believed, Tolstoy pointedly asked modern historians to say exactly what that force was. Tolstoy observed that three different kinds of modern historians tried to identify this force: biographers and historians of separate nations, writers of universal history who deal with all nations at once, and historians of culture. Biographical

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historians, he said, thought the force resided in the wills of heroes and sovereigns like Napoleon and Alexander, but historians of different nationalities viewed it differently; and because Tolstoy believed these national historians destroyed each other’s positions, he said that as a group they provided no acceptable answer to what he regarded as the basic question of history. Universal historians, he continued, also thought the explanatory force resided in heroes and sovereigns, but they regarded that force as the resultant of other forces. Therefore, he says, they could not argue that it explains the events of history. In effect, Tolstoy says—I think, fallaciously—that if force A is the resultant of two other forces B and C, we cannot say that force A itself caused historical events. By contrast, Tolstoy argues validly that it is a mistake to assert that the restoration of the Bourbons in 1813 was due to Alexander’s will alone while also asserting that the ideas of Fichte played a part in producing the restoration. Throughout his discussion of the force he is seeking, Tolstoy goes on at length about the composition of mechanical forces and about the workings of a locomotive when trying to say what historical explanation is. Denying that it moves because its wheels go around, he says that anyone who offers this explanation must explain why the wheels move, and here again Tolstoy depends on the dubious Hegelian idea that since the motion of the wheels is caused by the expansion of steam in the boiler, the motion of the wheels cannot be said to cause the locomotive to move. After arguing that biographers, national historians, and universal historians do not successfully identify the force that drives nations, Tolstoy sharply attacks European historians of intellectual activity for making a similar mistake. He says they do not show that philosophical theorizing caused the movement of peoples since they establish no connection between the murders of the French Revolution and the doctrine of the equality of man; they do not show that reading Rousseau’s Social Contract led the French to hack each other to pieces. Tolstoy grants that one might find some sort of link between the activity of thinkers and great historical movements, but he denies that such activity may be singled out as the sole cause of such movements, shrewdly remarking that intellectual historians may be led to believe it is because they find it agreeable to believe that intellectuals like themselves brought about a large historical event like the French Revolution. After criticizing these historians of intellectual activity, Tolstoy goes after historians who are influenced by the law. He grants that Napoleon had power over others that did not consist in his being physically stronger than they were, and that he did not have what Tolstoy calls moral power over them. However, he says, legally oriented historians influenced by theorists of the social contract regarded power over people as something held by someone to whom they have delegated that power, and he vigorously denies that such legal power is what produces historical events. Such historians maintained that a person ought by law to have power over people who delegated that power to him when government was formed, but Tolstoy points out that the power a person ought by law to have is not the power that actually moves nations; and what is more, he says, such a delegation never took place.

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Tolstoy also denies that the force he seeks is in the hands of any so-called representative person such as Napoleon or Catherine. He denies that they are representative merely because they happened to have left the greatest number of monuments, or because they promoted such goals as freedom, equality, enlightenment, and progress. He remarks that even if Napoleon and Catherine had those goals, historians have not shown that they were the goals of the peoples they represented, and he repeats that the activity of the millions of men who burned houses and butchered each other cannot be attributed to the activity of a dozen persons who did not burn houses and did not kill their fellow creatures. The ferment of the peoples and their rush to the east cannot be explained, he contends, by the activity of Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, and their mistresses, or by the life of Napoleon, of Rousseau, of Diderot, or of Beaumarchais. Tolstoy dismisses this view by saying: “The history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers . . . cannot be regarded as an epitome of the life of the people. . . . Even less explanatory of the life of the peoples is the history of the lives of writers and reformers”. Tolstoy insists that we do not learn from reading the life of Luther what made nations cut each other to pieces during the Reformation, or from reading Rousseau why men guillotined each other during the French Revolution. Against all historians who try to explain large social events by referring to the words of religious, political, or intellectual figures, Tolstoy maintains that we need a miracle to show that those words brought about the movements of millions of men. And after pointing out that the words of historical personages do not produce any such effect because their commands are often not executed and that the opposite of what they command often takes place, Tolstoy launches into a general discussion of commanding that ultimately leads him to his own view of the force or power he is seeking. According to Tolstoy, some historians collect a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and petty events, such as those that led the French armies to enter Russia, into one large event—an invasion—and they then collect a series of commands into a single one by Napoleon. After that, they declare that his armies invaded Russia because he ordered them to invade it, but Tolstoy observes that we do not find anything resembling one command of Napoleon to this effect. Tolstoy also maintains that even if such a command had been given, it could not have been the cause of a large-scale event like an invasion, as he launches his own answer to the question he has been asking. When men unite in combinations, he declares, the majority takes a more direct share while the minority takes a less direct share in the collective action in which they combine. Using an army as an illustration, Tolstoy introduces the figure of a cone to make this point. At its base, the horizontal area of the largest diameter represents the rank and file, the next higher horizontal cross-sections of the cone represent higher grades of the army, and the commander-in-chief is represented by the point at the apex. The soldiers at the base do the stabbing, hacking, burning, and pillaging they are ordered to do, but they never give orders. As we move up the cone, fewer persons perform overt actions but they give more orders, and finally we reach the commander-in-chief, who may order but who never stabs, hacks, or pillages. And

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governing this activity, Tolstoy argues, is a law of history which says that the more persons participate in an action, the less they command and the more numerous they are; and the less they participate in an action, the more they command and the less numerous they are. Tolstoy points out that an outcome which is brought about by the collective activity of many people will often be desired by one of them, and when that desire is fulfilled, it is often mistakenly maintained after the fact that that desire caused the event. If, for example, men are hauling a log and one of them expresses a wish that it be hauled in a certain way, then, if it is hauled in that way, that man will be mistakenly regarded as the one who ordered it and who caused it to be hauled in that way even though he never issued a command but merely expressed a casual wish to that effect; he will be falsely singled out as the commander whereas his less articulate partners will be forgotten. Tolstoy maintains that just as one log-hauler’s desire was retrospectively converted into a causative command, so the phrases of a few intellectual Frenchmen about the rights of man were factitiously turned into the cause of a mass killing. In this way, every collective action came to be viewed as the result of the will of one man or of a few men, and a large event was falsely said to have been brought about by monarchs, ministers, parliaments, or philosophers. According to Tolstoy, historians who adopted such a misguided point of view mistakenly concluded that wars and revolutions flow from the commands of the one person at the head of the cone. When Tolstoy asks what he calls two fundamental questions: What is historical force or power? and What force or power produces the movements of nations? he answers the first by saying in accordance with his figure of the cone: “Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less is his participation in that action”. And he answers the second by saying: “The movement of nations is caused . . . by the activity of all the people who participate in the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and vice versa”. He claims that the activity of all the people represented on the cone causes wars and revolutions when they combine in a relationship in which they all take part; and he declares that this is a law of history, a law the contradictory of which he calls “unthinkable”. TOLSTOY ON FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM Because Tolstoy believed in this conical law of history, he thought he should be a determinist rather than a believer in free will even though he was strongly pulled to the opposite pole. In the concluding sections of the Epilogue and also in “Some Words About War and Peace”, an article that appeared in 1868, Tolstoy explicitly defends determinism, the big philosophical belief of his novel. When he asks, as usual, why so many people were killed in Europe during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, he answers by saying: “it was such an inevitable necessity that in doing it men fulfilled the elemental zoological law which

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bees fulfill when they kill one another in autumn, and which causes male animals to destroy one another”. Such a belief, he says, is not only evident “but is so innate in every man’s consciousness that it would not be worthwhile proving it were there not another sentiment in man which convinces him that he is free at each moment that he commits an action”. In the article and in the novel, Tolstoy characterizes this belief in the necessity of the slaughter of millions of people as rational whereas he calls the attachment to free will a sentiment or a feeling, and in both places he concludes that the reasoned belief should triumph over man’s introspected feeling that he is free. In War and Peace this entire subject is broached in some detail after Tolstoy announces his conical law of history: “If history dealt with external phenomena”, he says, “the establishment of this simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our argument”. But, he continues, this law relates to the inner consciousness of man, who says “I am free, and am therefore not subject to the law” whereas a particle of matter cannot tell us that it does or does not feel an attraction or repulsion of the kind described by a physical law. The problem, Tolstoy says, is that when we regard man as a subject of external observation, we find that he is subject to law, but when we regard him from within ourselves, as what we are conscious of, “we feel” ourselves to be free. This feeling or consciousness, Tolstoy adds, is separate from and independent of reason and observation of the world; and when Tolstoy makes what he regards as the best case for the view that introspected feeling is the source of man’s belief in freedom, he writes: “You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall. Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable demonstration of freedom”. Compare this with what the Savoyard priest says in Emile (which Tolstoy regarded as the greatest book on education ever written). Rousseau’s priest says: “You ask me again, how do I know that there are spontaneous movements? I tell you, I know it because I feel them. I want to move my arm and I move it without any other immediate cause of the movement but my own will. In vain would anyone try to argue me out of this feeling, it is stronger than any proofs; you might as well try to convince me that I do not exist”. Here Tolstoy, like Rousseau’s priest, seems to identify freedom of will with what Hume and other philosophers call conditional freedom or hypothetical liberty, for when Tolstoy says that the will is free, he illustrates this point by saying merely that if he chooses to lower his arm (when it is not bound to his torso), he will lower it. Therefore Tolstoy does not explicitly acknowledge that other philosophers hold that one is free to lower one’s arm if and only if (a) one’s choice to lower it will bring about the lowering, and (b) one can make that choice. For, they say, suppose it is true that I will move my arm if I choose to move it, but that I cannot choose to move it because I am undergoing a seizure of epileptic automatism or a similar psychological disease. Should we not deny that I can move my arm? While disregarding this point, Tolstoy, like Rousseau’s priest, equates “I am free to lower my arm” merely with the conditional statement, “If I choose to lower my arm, I will lower it”, but in his article on War and Peace, Tolstoy seems to grant implicitly that his freedom or ability to lower his arm depends on his being free or being able to choose to lower it. He says that when

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he is alone he can lower his arm, but, he adds, “near me stands a child and I raise my hand above him and want to lower it with the same force onto the child. I cannot do this”. However, when Tolstoy says this, he seems to imply that the presence of the child beneath his arm causes him to choose not to lower it since the presence of the child does not directly cause him not to lower it. In between his seeing the child and his not lowering his arm, there is his choice or decision not to lower his arm, a decision he makes because he believes that a child will be hit. But since Tolstoy did not explicitly acknowledge that choice, or the fact that it was brought about by his belief, he said he knew merely by introspection that he could not lower his arm, thereby failing to acknowledge that he relied on causal beliefs that rested on beliefs that could not be established by introspection alone. Moreover, something similar holds for the case where Tolstoy can lower his arm. In that case he says that because he believes a child will not be hit by his arm, he chooses to lower it, and that because he chooses to lower it, he lowers it. Neither of these causal beliefs can be established by feeling alone despite Tolstoy’s apparent supposition that they can; they rest on general psychological truths supported by examination of many examples of Tolstoy’s behavior. However, because Tolstoy thought that his belief in free will was based purely on feeling whereas Kepler’s astronomy was based on reason and observation, he concluded that he should accept determinism in history by aping the method used by Kepler. Tolstoy wrote in a crucial passage: “As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause, lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality”. He also wrote: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at [Ptolemaic] absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at [Keplerian] laws”. That is why he says in the final sentence of War and Peace: “It was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case [of history] it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious”. On the basis of this argument, Tolstoy defended his conical law of history against antideterminists by declaring that we could not rely on a feeling of freedom to refute determinism; and once Tolstoy concluded that he had blocked this argument of the antideterminists, Tolstoy thought he could accept determinism. WHAT BIG THING DID TOLSTOY WANT TO KNOW? Although Berlin agrees that in the Epilogue to War and Peace Tolstoy accepts a deterministic view of the world treated by scientists and ordinary persons, Berlin also says that if we take into account what Tolstoy does in the whole of War and Peace we can see that he sought to know something about a very different big

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thing. Though he grants that Tolstoy explicitly held that all truth is in deterministic science, Berlin insists that this is not the view that in fact “underlies War and Peace or Anna Karenina or any other work which belongs to this period of Tolstoy’s life” (p. 65). But what, we may ask, is this other big thing whose presence Tolstoy and some of his characters vaguely feel? To answer these questions, Berlin, while speaking for himself, draws a line between what he calls the surface on which scientists concentrate and what he calls the depths. On one side of the line, he says, is the world of perceptible, describable, analyzable data that science can deal with, and on the other is the big fluid about which he thinks Tolstoy unsuccessfully sought to know truths. And what an enormous thing it is! According to Berlin, it contains and determines the structure in which we and all that we experience must be conceived as being set; it enters into our habits of thought, action, feeling, emotion, hope, and wishing as well as our ways of talking, believing, reacting, and being. We are, Berlin says, sentient creatures who “in part” live in a world of things we can discover, classify, and act upon by rational scientific methods, but, Berlin continues, we are “in much larger part” immersed and submerged in a medium that we cannot scientifically observe as if from the outside, cannot measure and seek to manipulate, and cannot be wholly aware of. Insofar as we are immersed in this flow, Berlin claims, we cannot observe it with scientific detachment as an object but only feel it vaguely (p. 68). One might suppose, Berlin goes on to say, that Tolstoy thought he could know truths about this flow in the manner of the Slavophil followers of Schelling, who held that knowledge could not be attained by the use of reason but only by a kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle or soul of the universe—the sort of experience that artists have in moments of divine inspiration (p. 45). But no, says Berlin, “Tolstoy stood at the opposite pole to all this. . . . he was against unintelligible mysteries, against mists of antiquity, against any kind of recourse to mumbo-jumbo” (p. 46), even though he tried to learn something about the big flow by nonscientific methods. This, Berlin argues, is shown by his portrayal of his heroes and by his vaunted ability to describe the real life lived by men. But how, we may ask, does Tolstoy’s portrait of the good people and the heroes of War and Peace show that he and they felt the presence of a medium that they could not describe? Berlin replies that Tolstoy’s portrait of them shows this because it depicts the Russian commander Kutuzov as wise whereas it makes the time-serving Drubetzkoy and Bilibin merely clever, and because it endows Pierre and Prince Andrey with a vision of the big flow, or at least a glimpse of it. What does that glimpse consist in? Berlin asks, and he replies: “Tolstoy does not tell us in so many words. . . . Yet no reader of War and Peace can be unaware of what he is being told” (p. 66). What the reader must recognize, Berlin says, is that the good people and the heroes of the novel—Pierre, Natasha, Nikolai Rostov, and Princess Mary—attain an understanding of the need to submit “to the permanent relationships of things, and the universal texture of human life, wherein alone truth and justice are to be found by a kind of ‘natural’— somewhat Aristotelian—knowledge” (p. 67). How, Berlin asks, do they attain this knowledge? Not by an inquiry of the kind that leads to Keplerian astronomy

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and determinism “but by an awareness, not necessarily explicit or conscious, of certain characteristics of human life and experience” (p. 67). Berlin tells us that these characters and Tolstoy their creator see the way the world goes: what goes with what; what never will be brought together; what can be and what cannot; how men live and to what ends; what they do and suffer; and how and why they act and should act. It seems to me, however, that this knowledge may be acquired by experience, and that the possession of it by Tolstoy and his heroes does not show that they felt the presence of Berlin’s big, inscrutable fluid. I see no connection between their knowing what they know about life and their feeling what Berlin tells us they feel about his grand medium, a mixed bag that contains our most permanent categories: our standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the central and the peripheral, of the subjective and the objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present, and future, and of the one and the many (p. 68). Nor do I see any connection between the commonsensical knowledge of Tolstoy’s heroes and Tolstoy’s supposedly unattainable goal of knowing truths about Berlin’s big flow or medium. Since Berlin thinks that Tolstoy could not express what he felt about this medium, naturally Berlin cannot present direct evidence to show that Tolstoy accepted its existence or that he claimed in so many words to have felt its presence. Berlin admits that “sometimes Tolstoy does speak as if science could in principle, if not in practice, penetrate and conquer everything; and if it did, then we should know the causes of all there is, and know that we are not free, but wholly determined—which is all that the wisest can ever know” (p. 69). However, Berlin dismisses this as mere “lip service” to science and insists that it was Tolstoy’s glimpse into the “depths” that led him to portray Kutuzov as a wiser— not a more scientifically knowledgeable—theorist of war than Pfuel or Paulucci, military advisers to the Russian emperor. Yet what I cannot see is that Kutuzov’s view of the way the world goes shows that he, like Andrey and Pierre, was in touch with Berlin’s big medium for, like Tolstoy himself, his heroes never say anything about it, nor do they claim that they attain “intermittent glimpses of it” (p. 71). According to Berlin, Tolstoy himself knows that the big medium is “there”, and not “here”—“not in the regions susceptible to observation, discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which Tolstoy is so much the greatest master of our time”. And that is why Berlin concludes that do what he might, Tolstoy has no vision of the whole; “he is not . . . a hedgehog; and what he sees is not the one, but always with an ever-growing minuteness, in all its teeming individuality, with an obsessive, inescapable, incorruptible, all penetrating lucidity which maddens him, the many” (p. 71). Nonetheless, Berlin says that Tolstoy dimly felt himself in touch with the medium in which human experiences, categories, frameworks, and much more are submerged, and therefore wanted to be a hedgehog and to create characters who also felt its presence and were aware, consciously or not, of “the permanent relationship of things”. Yet I find nothing in War and Peace that shows this, and I think Tolstoy would have dismissed belief in the existence of Berlin’s big

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fluid because he couldn’t say what that fluid was. It is hard to believe that the empirically minded, penetrating critic of modern historians, the sharp-eyed opponent of Hegel and Schelling, and the persistent analyst of free will and determinism would have asserted the existence of something he could not so much as describe. And it is even harder to believe that Tolstoy’s supposedly dim awareness of this entity somehow explained or illuminated what Berlin calls Tolstoy’s belief in “the reality of the moral life with its sense of responsibility, joys, sorrows, sense of guilt and sense of achievement” (p. 41). Moreover, I doubt that such awareness led Tolstoy to portray characters who knew the way the world goes; what goes with what; what can never be brought together; what can be and what cannot; how men live and to what ends; what they do and suffer; and how and why they act, and should act and not otherwise. In my view, the wisdom of Tolstoy and of his favorite characters in War and Peace was not illuminated or explained by saying that he dimly felt what Berlin calls deep currents in the big medium. I do not think that Tolstoy—who was, according to Berlin, “drawn irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below”—saw or felt anything down there that would account for his or his heroes’ wisdom or knowledge of the way the world goes or of any of the other things on Berlin’s list.

TOLSTOY’S DETERMINISM: HIS BIG TRUTH Earlier I said that Tolstoy did not think that the novelist had a special method of knowing truth, and this comports well with Berlin’s view that Tolstoy held that “all our knowledge is necessarily empirical”. But it does not comport well with Berlin’s view that Tolstoy believed that such knowledge is worthless and unintelligible “save in so far as it derives from and points to” a “very palpable kind of superior understanding [of the big flow] which alone is worth pursuing” (p. 73). I do not think War and Peace as a whole shows that Tolstoy sought such understanding, and when Berlin asserts that “Tolstoy comes near to saying what it is”, I find little or nothing in the novel to support this assertion. On the other hand, Tolstoy certainly accepted the big truth of determinism and, as Berlin remarks, held that the more we know about a given action, the more inevitable or determined it seems to us to be (p. 73). Therefore, Berlin continues, to think that man is free becomes harder and harder, for this involves thinking that a person would have done something other than what he did if he had chosen otherwise. Indeed, Berlin points out that determinism requires not only that our overt actions seem to be less and less free but also that “our thoughts, the terms in which they occur, the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined by the actual structure of our world” (p. 73). Here, however, the big thing is no longer the circumambient fluid in which we are all submerged and about which we cannot know truths but “the ‘inexorable’ unifying pattern of the world” (p. 75), the world about which we all know truths. Berlin tells us that Tolstoy was seized with “a passionate desire for a monistic vision” of this ordinary world, and it seems to me that his desire was satisfied to some extent when he

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concluded that all events in it are determined despite the fact that he felt that they are not. This was a big belief he thought the historian should accept in imitation of the astronomer who abandons “the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity”; this was the belief accepted by the Tolstoy who renounced “the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality” that was incompatible with his conical law of history; and this was a belief to which I think Tolstoy paid more than lip service. He explicitly accepts determinism in War and Peace, and that doctrine is about a world that is very different from Berlin’s stream or flow that contains categories, concepts, frameworks, standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the subjective and the objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present, and future, and of the one and the many—a flow that cannot be viewed as an object, according to Berlin, and yet a flow about which Berlin, not Tolstoy, manages to say a great deal. It seems to me, moreover, that Tolstoy never indicated in War and Peace that he had a special way of arriving at a big truth about this big flow, or even of feeling its presence. If he saw more than other novelists did, that was not because he had a special method of establishing contact with Berlin’s big stream but because he saw important things about human beings that were confirmed by experience. And since he thought his belief in determinism was removed only in degree from his belief in less general truths about the world we all live in, the Tolstoy who accepted determinism was not radically different from the Tolstoy whose novel teemed with so many profound insights into life and character. That is why he did not cease to be a fox when he moved his attention from the little to the big, or from the many to the one, and that is why I am inclined to doubt that he was a fox vainly intent upon apprehending Berlin’s big flow in the manner of a hedgehog. He was a fox who expanded his field of vision in order to arrive at the big belief represented by his conical law of history and at the even bigger belief of determinism. He may therefore be compared to an observant Tycho Brahe who managed to become a theoretical Kepler, not to a fox who sought to grow bristles. It is hard to believe that the Tolstoy who thought that Hegelian speculation was gibberish and who dismissed Schelling’s idealism, sought to learn something about a flow or medium that he neither mentions nor characterizes. And although I find it very difficult to disagree with Berlin, I find it more difficult to believe that the Tolstoy of War and Peace held that all our knowledge is empirical and also vainly sought to attain nonscientific insight into Berlin’s big flow. He was a fox who studied many little things to arrive at his big belief in determinism, not a fox who wished he were a different animal. Why, then, did Berlin think Tolstoy paid only lip service to the big truth of determinism for which Tolstoy explicitly argued, and why did Berlin maintain that Tolstoy unsuccessfully sought to know something about a circumambient stream or flow that Tolstoy never so much as describes? This is more a question about Berlin than about Tolstoy, and I ask it with little confidence in my ability to answer it satisfactorily despite having conversed, corresponded, and debated with Berlin on and off for many years on philosophical matters, as any reader of

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my memoir A Philosopher’s Story will know. I venture to say, however, that Berlin’s view of the big fluid that Tolstoy supposedly felt and his consequent playing down of Tolstoy’s determinism may reflect Berlin’s opposition to determinism, something he expressed in his lecture Historical Inevitability, published in 1954, a year after The Hedgehog and the Fox appeared. I speculate that when faced with his hero Tolstoy’s explicit defense of a philosophy he rejected, Berlin was led to underestimate the centrality of that defense and to see Tolstoy as one who felt or believed in the existence of a big medium that Tolstoy never expressed in so many words. I wish that I could say that Berlin and I differ merely in emphasis and that Tolstoy, like the figure of the duck-rabbit of Joseph Jastrow and the later Wittgenstein, may be seen as a deterministic fox by one reader and as a Berlin hedgehog by another. Indeed, I would welcome evidence that would so irenically settle my disagreement with a scholar from whom I have learned so much and whose memory I revere, but as matters stand now, I am afraid that I see the Tolstoy of War and Peace as practically all fox and almost no hedgehog.

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P A R T I I I

Religion, Education, and Politics In this part, I reprint a piece on teaching the young, a second on how to teach about religion in a secular undergraduate college, a third on teaching about it in a liberal divinity school, and a fourth on the university in transition. Finally, in a utopian piece on the task of an institute for advanced study, I argue that it should include a department of philosophy.

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C H A P T E R 9

John Dewey: A Great Philosopher of Education (1966)

WHEN I FIRST PICKED UP John Dewey’s Lectures in the Philosophy of Education: 1899, its title brought chilling thoughts of the darkest and loneliest parts of university libraries, those sad stacks devoted to what used to be called pedagogics. And as I had spent part of my youth studying the background of Dewey’s thought, I knew that a good deal of nineteenth-century philosophy could be dull beyond belief. From the pages of the editor’s accurate introduction, old forbidding terms and figures leaped forward—Froebelianism, Pestalozzianism, Herbartianism, William Torrey Harris, George Sylvester Morris—and my heart sank even deeper. Yet I pressed on in disregard of every counsel of prudence, and I am very glad that I did. When I began reading Dewey’s text, I was lifted high above its intellectual milieu and I marveled once again at a great thinker’s ability to speak across time to readers of another age. I was amazed by the contemporary relevance of a course of lectures that began just after the Spanish-American War. They were delivered by Dewey at the University of Chicago in the winter term of 1898–99 and were taken down verbatim by a student who hectographed them and sold them to other students eager to understand the master’s words by all means at their disposal. The published version, edited by Reginald Archambault, clearly demonstrates to those who need demonstration that Dewey was one of the most profound of all educational theorists. No really significant general principle escaped him, and it is obvious that he approached his task with more wisdom, learning, analytical power, and concern for the child than anyone has been able to marshal since his death. I can testify to Dewey’s insight on the basis of some experience I had while working on a collective project to revitalize the high-school curriculum in social studies. He knew that total coverage in history is an absurd goal and that much can be gained by the use of what he called “representative topics”, which bring structural unity to facts by using them as illustrations of concepts and generalizations in social and natural science. He also knew that by studying technology in its historical setting, the student can come to understand something about the interplay between scientific advance and social demands, and about the integrity of culture. In confirmation of Dewey’s views, I have seen how a tenth-grade class studying the Industrial Revolution can be captivated and learn a great deal while it examines the development of the steam engine from a technological, economic, and social point of view. Instead of being made to memorize the familiar

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dreary and mindless list of inventors’ names, they can be given an exciting and instructive exercise which leads them to see why the engine developed from the versions of Newcomen and Savery to that of Watt as a result of technical ingenuity and economic need. I can testify to the students’ ability to reinvent the steam engine after receiving some preliminary information about some of the devices and scientific knowledge that preceded it. I also know how delighted they can be to find that their history course deals with something they have also encountered in their science course, and how Dewey would have nodded with knowing approval at hearing about this. I am also convinced, on the basis of another part of the project I worked on, that we can “bring to consciousness the method of science”, to use Dewey’s phrase, by having high-school students examine Darwin’s theory of natural selection, its logic, and its revolutionary impact on the world. All of this and more Dewey anticipated in 1899. To his eternal credit, however, he was more than a pedagogical technician, since he saw the school as a force that would break down barriers of class, color, and nation of origin. He also knew before C. P. Snow that the humanities and the sciences are not two cultures, and a half-century before Wittgenstein he said that “a use of language that did not tell somebody else something would not be a language at all”. He saw that the child’s interest had to be captured before any education could begin, but he clearly distinguished between interesting a child and humoring him. Dewey argued that the child’s active nature cried out for sympathetic guidance instead of merely mechanical drill, but he knew the difference between sensible action and aimless activity. Dewey realized that the growth of urban industry and science were two of the most important facts of modern society and that its highest political ideal was democracy, but he knew how abrasive and divisive the modern city can be and that genuine democracy cannot flourish there in the absence of fraternal feeling. And, though he believed that the school, by cultivating local loyalties and neighborly feeling, might help re-create the sense of community that had prevailed in rural America, we can be sure that if he were alive today he would have condemned the kind of neighborhood parochialism that capitulates to prejudice and perpetuates segregation in the schools. When one sees how much energy Dewey devoted to the education of the young and their teachers, one is reminded that he was a professor who tried all his life to combine research, teaching, and social service at their highest levels. He wrote technical philosophical books and articles, he prepared assiduously for his classes (as these lectures show so well), he encouraged his students sympathetically, and he tried harder than any other American academic of his generation to leave society better than he found it. His service to society, however, was as liberal in spirit as his teaching and his research—for it was dominated by a desire to keep children, their parents, and even philosophers from leading stunted lives.

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And so, although I disagree with many of Dewey’s philosophical views, I admire him without reservation for the remarkable range of his intellectual interests and his unceasing efforts to apply the tools of philosophy to the problems of men. These lectures reveal a figure who towered over the age of McKinley and the educational thinkers of the gray nineties, for by 1899—the year, incidentally, in which Dewey published his School and Society—he had already demonstrated that he was one of the greatest of all philosophers of education.

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Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning (1954)

AMONG RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS in 1954, the most important question, the question that exercises them most even when it is not asked in this form, is not “Does God exist?” but rather “Should I be religious?” And this reformulation has been the source of both liberation and confusion, particularly in the sphere of higher education, where it has become increasingly fashionable to urge the importance of religious instruction for the undergraduate. If you adopt the more traditional way of stating the religious question, you cannot avoid asking yourself what evidence there is for belief in God or what arguments there are for the existence of God, and even if you say you have faith, you may be fairly asked why you have faith. If, however, you defend faith as a policy, you may be asked to supply evidence for the statement that it is an advisable policy, and once again you will be involved in a logical argument—that is to say, one in which you claim to know or believe something and therefore one in which you may be fairly asked to defend your claim or your belief. Now there is no doubt that a large and increasing number of religious intellectuals do not feel, or at any rate, do not say, that arguments of either kind are relevant to their religious beliefs. They do not use traditional proofs of God’s existence and are not likely to be moved by a request for a justification of faith. What, then, do they believe? Obviously not the simple, old-fashioned declarative statement of theology, that God exists, for then they might feel some compulsion to give arguments for what is not obvious to everyone. A reasonable suggestion is that they believe a moral statement for which they are willing to argue: that one should, or one ought, or that it is good, to be religious. In other words, the serious question to which they address themselves is the second one we have mentioned: “Should I be religious?” The educational implications of this transformation of the religious question are very serious, for those who wish to introduce religious instruction into the undergraduate college and who adopt this more recent way of construing religion must now ask themselves just what they mean by religion. Having abandoned the straightforward and simple definition of a religious man as one who believes in God and defends his belief, they must set forth an alternative view. The twentieth century has witnessed a number of efforts to redefine religion in the light of this religious distaste for traditional theology; they vary from an excessively narrow view of the religious life as a life of feeling (as opposed to knowing) to one that rightly regards religion as a total way of life—cognitive, esthetic, affective, moral, and even political. The first alternative is untrue to religion, as I shall try to argue in this necessarily brief essay on an enormous subject, while the second, if acted upon by those who are responsible in these matters, will be untrue to the

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aims of undergraduate education, and resemble instruction in (rather than on) Communism. Of the three analogous questions that may be formulated by using the words “religious”, “moral”, and “scientific”, “Should I be religious?” is probably the only one that is significant. Its counterparts “Should I be moral?” (meaning by that “Should I do what is right?”) and “Should I be scientific?” (meaning by that “Should I use the devices of experiment, observation, and deduction when I try to find out something about the world?”) have a prima facie emptiness about them which is confirmed by philosophical reflection. But “Should I be religious?” is of an entirely different order. It is meaningful and momentous, as William James said. It is the kind of question that even a clever philosopher would have difficulty in proving meaningless. But while it is surely not meaningless, it is not easy to say what it means. The history of the shift from asking bluntly, without “if”s and “but”s, “Does God exist?” to asking “Should I be religious?” is the history of the philosophy of religion in our time. George Santayana is as important a figure in its development as anyone in the twentieth century. He quotes Bacon’s aphorism “A little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds to religion,” and the jump from the word “atheism” to the word “religion” is symbolic of the transformation I have in mind. The point is that atheism is the belief in the nonexistence of God (or the nonbelief in the existence of God), while religion is, for Santayana, not theism. But if depth in philosophy bringeth one to religion, one must go even deeper to find out what the word “religion” means. I do not think that the traditional differences over the nature of God are any greater than recent philosophical differences about the nature of religion. Religion has meant all things to all philosophers and that is one reason why the modern transformation of the religious question has been confusing as well as liberating. Having escaped the difficult logic of theologians, religious intellectuals with no taste for scholastic disputation must now face the perplexing question “What is religion?” In the nineteenth century, it was fashionable to say that one knew that there was a God but that His nature was mysterious and unknowable. But plainly one cannot take the analogous way out when discussing tile nature of religion. One cannot say “I know that religion exists, but its nature is mysterious”. The answers to the question “What is religion?” have come trippingly in the twentieth century. It is a species of poetry (Santayana); it is a variety of shared experience (Dewey); it is ethical culture; it is insight into man’s nature. (The last is the view of a group that might be called “Atheists for Niebuhr.”) In short, being religious, as one might expect, is not the sort of attribute that one can identify easily by the method of genus and differentia: it is not immediately susceptible to the analytic methods that G. E. Moore has used on brotherhood (“To be a brother is to be a male sibling”), nor is it easily treated by the powerful definitional techniques of mathematical logic. What too many philosophers tend to suppose—wrongly—is that examples of religious behavior have a property in common, that we can easily identify it, and that the disputes of philosophers are

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differences about the essence or analysis of this property. But granting that this is a simpleminded view of the matter, is there no unity in all of the different aspects upon which different philosophers have seized? Even if none of their proposed definitions presents “the essence” of the religious life, is there nothing which they reflect that may help us formulate a more complex and therefore more adequate view of religion? One answer is that they all reveal a desire that underlies a vast amount of contemporary talk about religion: the desire, not only to avoid identifying religion with belief in one single assertion, such as “God exists”, but to avoid identifying religion with any claim to knowledge that might have to run the gauntlet of scientific test. (One might be tempted to except those who identify religion with insight into human nature, and therefore with something like psychology, but atheists for Niebuhr, like Niebuhr himself, think of their insight as transcending scientific psychology.) In other words, the various oversimplifications of religion—whether they make it mean just appreciating poetry, or just living in community, or just adopting a certain moral code, or just having the insights of a Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky, or a Pascal—are negatively motivated. They are dominated by a desire to make religion fill the void created by the dissolving effects of science, both physical, as at Hiroshima, and spiritual. This has been one outcome of the nineteenth century’s hot war between science and religion. It has ended in an uncomfortable cease-fire and in the creation of a line that would separate knowledge from all other human activities. Religion has too often agreed to accept the role of a nonscientific spiritual grab bag or of an ideological know-nothing, while science has promised to give up its control over feeling and will. Several observations are in order. First of all, it is plain that the various efforts to identify religion with poetry, community, liturgy, or morality by themselves are as misguided as the identification of religion with assent to one abstract proposition. Religion is not any one of these taken by itself. Religion is most faithfully viewed as a compound of all of these elements. In Wittgenstein’s phrase, they all have a deep family resemblance, in which case religion should be regarded as a holy family composed of all of these concerns rather than one of them by itself. Moreover, no seriously religious person can combine the liturgy of Roman Catholicism, the ethics of Judaism, and the Protestant theory of man since the result would be a spiritual monstrosity. And while their connections are not logical, like those between the axioms and theorems of a mathematical system, the elements of religion have organic connections with each other that make it very difficult to mix them modishly as we mix different styles of furniture. They make up a cultural pattern, and therefore cannot be torn apart and reassembled into homemade jalopies with Ford engines and Cadillac bodies. They may die when they are transplanted or when spiritual Burbanks begin their grafting. Revolutionary and hybrid religions may come into being, but they become real and moving for ordinary people only after heretics and reformers have created interesting new spiritual collages with the remnants of the past and items of the present.

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It follows that we must go one step further in our transformation of the religious question. If we ask it at all, we should not ask abstractly “Should I be religious?” but rather for example “Should I be a Jew?” or “Should I be a Roman Catholic?” or “Should I be a Protestant?” And when we have asked one of these more specific questions, the further question is bound to arise: must we not go back to asking, among other things, whether God exists, as he is conceived by these different religions? I suggest now that it is not only pointless to ask the question “Should I be religious?” without specifying a particular religion, but that we cannot disengage the purely affective and active elements of that religion from its cognitive or putatively cognitive elements. Even if theology be treated as myth, as Santayana treats it, it is different from the explicitly liturgical, poetic, moral, and social aspects of religion even though not separate from them. It is impossible, I suggest, to be a Jew in any serious way without accepting the Judaic picture of God, or to be a Christian without forming an image of Christ consonant with Christian ritual and morality. I must emphasize that this is not a matter of logical impossibility. Clearly, we may accept a large part of what is called “Christian ethics” without being forced deductively to accept its theological underpinnings, if only because one does not imply the other as the axioms of Euclid imply his theorems. That is almost obvious. But what is quite obvious is the fact that esthetic attitudes toward stained glass windows and Gregorian chant are possible in the absence of any great respect for St. Thomas’s proofs of the existence of God. If you admire the windows and the chants you may admire them as elements of the religious culture that inspires them, but you are not ipso facto a religious man. Moreover, this is no time to say that the artist sees the essence of Christianity better than the priest, or that we should redefine “religion” as the biologist redefines “fish” to suit our present purposes. It is for the acute anthropologist, the cultural historian, and the sensitive philosopher to tell us something about these difficult, nonlogical connections between a theology, its related poetry, and its associated customs. Recent philosophers of language have tried to say something about the connection between factual statements and value statements, but illuminating as it is, it is not enough for our purposes. What we need is insight into a connection which is even more unlike logical implication than the relation between fact and value, because it does not bind statements to statements, but statements to feelings, tastes, customs, attitudes, and action. Whatever it turns out to be on closer inspection, it underlies those compulsions and impulses which are uniquely associated with particular theologies, the compulsions that lead us to swallow our religions whole. I suggest, therefore, that the cease-fire proposed by the twentieth century for the war of the nineteenth, the attempt to arbitrate the nineteenth-century struggle by granting science a sphere of influence over knowledge and religion a sharply separated sphere of influence over feeling and will, is unworkable and necessarily unstable. For being religious in the sense of the question “Should I be religious?” involves commitment on all levels of experience, including one that is cognitive or taken to be cognitive by the religious man. Far from catering to the whole man in whose interest the cease-fire is often signed, the compromise

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view of religion as a purely emotive, or esthetic, or social affair encourages the most far-reaching kind of fragmentation. It is instructively ironic that Deism, the one great serious attempt to distill a nonhistorical essence of religion, has been highly intellectual in its emphasis. The effort of Lord Herbert of Cherbury to extract the core of all religions by listing its fundamental truths as: “(1) That God exists, (2) that it is a duty to worship Him, (3) that the practice of virtue is the true mode of doing Him honor, (4) that man is under the obligation to repent of his sins, and (5) that there will be rewards and punishments after death,”1 became the tradition of the Enlightenment, the period which has been attacked so violently by our darker theorists of religion. And the Enlightenment, as the author who summarizes Lord Herbert’s view points out, was not as interested in a “searching analysis of the living religious experience” as our latter-day philosophers of religion are. It was highly intellectualistic in its approach to religion and yet it failed to distill its theoretical essence. Think, therefore, how much more difficult it will be for those who identify religion with “the living religious experience” to propose an analysis of religion in abstraction from the particular living experiences and theological beliefs of Jew or Gentile. In a sense, the newer, antirationalistic view of religion merely makes the reverse error of the Enlightenment. It concentrates on feeling and will while the Enlightenment was fixed on the intellect in its attempt to define religion. I come at last to the implications of these reflections for higher education, and suggest that any educational effort to nourish religious feeling or to stimulate religious action by trying to present an abstract essence of religion, conceived as the life of feeling and willing (as opposed to knowing), will fail. From this I conclude that we should not make the effort in colleges which are not religious institutions, and that we become frankly sectarian in our teaching of religion and therefore limit higher religious instruction to the divinity schools; since divinity schools are more properly devoted to the study and the propagation of religions conceived as total ways of life, knowledge, emotion, and action. Plainly, it does not follow that we must abandon the effort to help undergraduates to develop their emotion, to find themselves, to help them develop habits of practical decision, and to appreciate humane values. These are certainly admissible concerns of all scholars and can very easily be the major concern of those who choose to do that sort of thing while they teach Plato and Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Epicurus, Kant and Pascal. Certainly the history of religion can be adorned with this kind of feeling if the teacher is willing to do it and able to communicate truth while he does it. But teaching about religion, or communicating moral feeling and esthetic appreciation while one teaches philosophy, literature, and history, no more constitutes teaching people to be religious than teaching about Communism amounts to propagating it. To teach people to be religious, I repeat, we must do something which is beyond the function of a nonreligious college simply because it involves inculcating a total appreciation of and belief in historical religions treated as the vast, all-embracing structures that they are. 1

G. C. Joyce, “Deism,” Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 4, p. 533.

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But are we prepared to lecture in Judaism 7, Catholicism 8, and Protestantism 9 while inculcating belief in them? My point may be made clearer by comparing the teacher of feeling and willing with the teacher of knowledge, and I select as an example of the latter the physics professor as the pre-eminent teacher of that kind. When he is teaching science, as opposed to the history of science, to the college student, the physicist must believe or pretend to believe the theory he teaches; and if he doesn’t believe it, as teachers of elementary physics might not, at least he must justify his noble pedagogical lie at some point in the young physicist’s scientific education. Newton’s theory may come first without the necessary qualifications, but when Einstein’s is presented the student should come to see the sense in which the latter supersedes the former—either by outright refutation or by absorption as a special case. What is the religious parallel to this total involvement of the physics professor in, say, theory of relativity, or quantum theory? Total involvement in one of the religions, I imagine. But if we are not willing, as many are not, to teach the undergraduate religion in this way, because it is not our proper function, can we justify teaching what might seem like the religious counterpart to courses in the history and methodology of science? In other words, are there subjects that stand in relation to the different religions as general methodology does to the individual sciences? There are. For example, there is the history of religion, comparative religion, anthropology of religion, a course in the philosophy of religion, or, if a genius is available to teach it, a course in general religion which will embrace all of these and more synoptically. But will such wholly justifiable courses teach people to be religious in the way that concentration in physics should teach people to be physicists? No, and for the same reason that courses in general methodology don’t teach people to be scientists. At best the course in methodology of science gives the interested student an introduction to the spirit of science, but surely nothing that makes him a scientist. It may communicate a feeling of what the scientific life is like, but if he has not had serious contact with some one science and lived in it for even a short time, no amount of methodological tourism will make him a scientist or scientifically minded. The parallel in the case of religion is obvious. If it should be said after all this that religious instruction is not supposed to make people religious, but simply to give them some understanding of the religious life, that can be achieved, not by teaching students how to feel and act religiously but by teaching them what they should know about religious feeling, action, and belief. If in absorbing this knowledge, students develop deep religious feelings, it will happen per accidens, as it were, and not as a result of the concerted efforts of the professors of feeling and willing. If the comparison with science does not illuminate the matter, perhaps an analogy with politics will. Take, for example, the current debate in 1954 over whether the colleges should offer courses on Communism as opposed to courses in Communism. Isn’t this an illuminating parallel to the question whether we should offer courses in religion rather than on it? The important point is that Communism is very close to a religion, with its theology (dialectical materialism), its conception of community (the dictatorship of the proletariat), its myth

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and its liturgy (Red Square, Stalin’s pictures, and Lenin’s Tomb), and its poetry. And if we should give lessons in Communism, we would be going beyond our function as teachers in a college, just as we would if we should try to give lessons in Judaism, Catholicism, or Protestantism. Those who know the defects of Communism have an extra argument in the hole, but the card that shows is enough and in a sense more powerful for our purposes. Communism, like all of the traditional religions, should not be propagated in educational institutions, which are not fundamentally devoted to the advancement of Communism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, though all of them should be studied objectively in their many different aspects. That is the fundamental point. I do not believe that the struggle between the free world and Soviet Russia may be glibly identified as a struggle between Christianity and Communism, or that one cannot fight Soviet tyranny effectively without being religious, but if either of these contentions were true, they would merely accentuate the importance of studying both Communism and traditional religion objectively in the undergraduate college. In studying religion, the student will be studying something for which he may be sympathetically prepared but may not fully understand; in studying Communism, he will be studying something he may oppose but also fail to understand. The function of a teacher of undergraduates in any institution which is not dominated by religious aims is to study and analyze both religion and Communism. We should not be excessively Spinozistic on the point and say that we must neither laugh nor cry, but only understand. We may laugh about one and cry about the other, but our central function is understanding and the communication of that understanding to our students. I should not like to end on a note that depends on the difficult notion of central function, for colleges are manmade and their functions may be changed by men, especially men who can turn plowshares into swords and electrons into bombs. But we must remember that the colleges and the universities have lived through crises before, and that some of the severest blows at their greatness and their usefulness as social institutions have come when it seemed necessary to change their function under the influence of religious or political passion.

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Religious Commitment and Higher Education (1957)

THE MAIN CONCERN OF the previous essay was undergraduate religious instruction. In the present essay, I should like to offer a few related reflections and proposals on the distinct, but closely connected, problem of instruction in a divinity school which is part of a large university. I have no particular divinity school and no particular university in mind and my proposals may be utopian, but I wish to exercise the philosopher’s right to sketch an ideal which, I hope, is not too remote to be carried out some day. To my limited knowledge, it has not yet been tried in a serious way. In the previous essay, I argued that religions are total ways of life, and therefore that teaching someone to be religious not only aims at conveying knowledge but also at inducing him to adopt certain moral and esthetic attitudes, certain views of man and society, and possibly even certain political beliefs. I therefore maintained that if religions are such total and intricately woven cultural configurations, religious instruction is likely to be specific. That is to say, those who aspire to teach someone to be religious are likely to teach him to be a Jew, a Catholic, or a Protestant, for example. “The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language,” says Santayana, “is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.” I concluded that such religious persuasion should not be attempted by any college which was not denominational in the narrowest sense, for unless the faculty of such a college were prepared to endorse and advocate one religion as the true religion, it would have no good reason for inculcating the precepts and practices of that religion alone. I maintained, moreover, that the distinction between teaching an undergraduate to be religious and teaching him about religion was cardinal and that this, in another sphere, was precisely the distinction drawn by those who do not confuse instruction in Communism with instruction about Communism. Instruction about many religions is an indispensable part of any educational program, but it is wrong, I argued, to expect a college to offer courses in many different religions. Not only because of the difficulty of deciding on generally acceptable grounds which religion or religions to teach but, more importantly, because it is not the function of such an undergraduate college as I was considering to inculcate that vast unity of belief, feeling, and action which we identify with a religion. In passing I urged that we limit instruction in religion to schools of divinity and theology since they are properly devoted to the study and the propagation of religions conceived as total ways of life, knowledge, emotion, and action. In this essay, I wish to develop this last point further and to raise a number of questions connected with the view that a professor in the divinity school of a

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large and predominantly secular university should be what is sometimes called a committed man. I shall begin with the second matter for it will lead very naturally into the first. Can a teacher give instruction—excellent instruction—about a given religion without being committed to that religion? Can a scholar successfully study a given religion without being committed to that religion? The questions may be answered simply by appealing to the history of education and scholarship. Scholars and students of an earlier generation will recall George Foote Moore’s great studies of Judaism and those in our own day will think of Harry Austryn Wolfson’s great work on the philosophy of the Church Fathers. Such scholars and teachers answer our questions immediately and affirmatively, for neither of them accepted the religious doctrines they studied and taught about so brilliantly. Indeed, so affirmatively do Moore and Wolfson answer our questions that it is hard to know what is meant by those who maintain that one must be committed to a given religion in order to study it and to teach about it fully. Their error is just the reverse of those who say that an objective study of a religion can only be made by those who reject it. But this is just as erroneous as the contention that the only satisfactory teacher-scholar is one who adopts, who is committed to, the views he describes and analyzes. We are obviously in no position to generalize in this respect. There have been great Catholic students of Catholic theology and great non-Catholic students of it; there have been great Protestant students of Jewish theology; there have been great Jewish students of Catholic theology. All of the permutations can be illustrated. Moreover, I am told that the greatest scholars of certain Oriental religions are not adherents of those religions. I repeat that we are not in a position to generalize in this area, neither in regard to successful scholarship nor in regard to effective teaching. And because we cannot generalize we would do well not to set up tests for professors which would require them to be for, or require them to be against, the religions or theologies they wish to deal with in an objective, scholarly way. The point involved transcends the controversial cases of religion and politics. It applies to the case of the non-Aristotelian philosopher lecturing on Aristotle; to that of the professor of English who rejects Emerson’s transcendentalism, but who studies his work fully and lectures brilliantly on him; to the historian of Islam who is not a Muslim; to the Byzantinist who does not belong to the Greek Orthodox Church; to the anthropologist who is not a Zuni. In matters of scholarship and teaching about religion, literature, politics, philosophy, sociology, or morals, the doctrine “Credo ut intellegam” has no standing. We can understand Marxism without believing in it, we can understand Catholicism without believing in it, we can understand Judaism without believing in it, we can understand Protestantism without believing in it—certainly in that sense of the word “understand” which is relevant to teaching and scholarship in our free, secular colleges and universities. A scholar and teacher must insist that it is possible to understand a statement without accepting it, to understand a style of literature without admiring it, to understand the motives of Napoleon, Caesar, or Stalin without praising them. Even if he should hold that such understanding requires

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putting one’s self in the place of the men whose views one studies, a scholar need not literally adopt the views and attitudes of those whom he studies. These remarks are intended to show—if there is any doubt about it—that at least one important part of the instruction offered in a divinity school or a school of theology need not be given by those who are committed to the religion they study, for one important part of such instruction is historical and therefore objective in intent. I turn now to a more difficult question. Must a teacher of systematic theology, as opposed to a historian of religion in a divinity school which is part of a predominantly secular university, be committed to a specific religion in order to pursue his studies and teaching successfully? No question is of greater importance, for its answer will determine whether and why a professor of divinity occupies a position unlike that of other professors in the university. At first sight, one might argue that commitment is belief in God, theology is the science of God, therefore a theologian will have to believe in the existence of God just as an astronomer will have to believe in the existence of heavenly bodies. There is a certain amount of dialectical power in this point (Would we ask someone who denied the existence of stars to teach astronomy?), but its power decreases directly with the distance between a religion which is dogmatic and authoritarian, and one which is more loosely knit. That is to say, where the conception of God is fixed by institutional authority or by sacred text in an unequivocal way the standard of commitment is only too clear. But where, for example, the divinity school is generally Protestant, where the very notion of God may vary with the professor who teaches systematic theology, the notion of commitment becomes ambiguous and shifting. The variation is likely to be so great that one man’s God may be another’s Devil. I dare say that many who think of themselves as committed might have such feelings about Prof. Tillich’s “God above the God of theism.” What becomes of religious commitment then? Is there a univocal conception of it which will at one and the same time cover commitment to the God of theism and commitment to the God above him? I doubt it. By reflecting on such questions one sees how difficult it is to press the analogy with astronomy. Competent astronomers might differ about what logicians call the connotation of the words “heavenly body” but its denotation is comparatively fixed for them. Yet it is hard to say anything comparable about the relation between one theologian who is committed to belief in the “God of theism” and a colleague who is committed to the God above him. They worship different gods. Such difficulties are bound to arise whenever a religious outlook which has come a long way from dogmatism and authoritarianism tries to achieve structure and vitality. It cannot formulate a catechism to be accepted by all who would teach in its institutions of higher learning, and yet it wishes to achieve a certain integrity and to invest its educational program with a degree of passion and life. Its association with a liberal university makes it hard for it to set up rigid, doctrinaire tests for its professors, or definitions of the conditions under which religion must be studied. It has the problems of its virtues, and these problems are made even more acute if one conceives of religion as a total way of life. For in that

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case, commitment means more than cognitive assent to the bare propositions of a theology; it also means acceptance of the attitudes, moral, esthetic, and social, associated with the religion in question. So, if the religion is a loosely knit rather than an authoritatively organized affair, the problem of determining a single sense of commitment becomes even more difficult. We are forced to such a degree of freedom in our conception of commitment as to make it possible for one socalled committed professor to be an agnostic in the eyes of another. Having come this far, why not go a daring step further? Why not conceive of a divinity school which is part of a university, not as a school for instruction in one religion or family of religions but rather as a school in which any of a number of rival religions are taught and defended actively by men who believe in them? In this way, I suggest, a divinity school associated with a large university will be able to overcome with integrity the difficulties I have already mentioned; in this way, it will be able to bring itself into a viable and consistent relation with the spirit of the university as a whole. I realize that there are historical reasons which may make this impossible in the case of universities and divinity schools established or endowed under specific religious auspices, but I have warned the reader that I might be utopian. I now wish to begin the defense of my scheme by comparing the situation in a divinity school with that in a department of philosophy in a secular university, to which it is significantly similar. The difficulties faced by a divinity school are not altogether different from those that must be faced when it comes to defining a minimum requirement for membership in the philosophy department of a secular university. And yet Western, or at least Anglo-American, philosophy has achieved a certain degree of unity without commanding uniform commitment to specific doctrinal beliefs. Moreover, as only a cursory examination of Western philosophy in the last generation will show, some philosophers believe that most of the questions which their fellow philosophers debate are meaningless in a special sense of that much-abused word. What, then, can be the commitment which we require of a philosopher in the face of this welter of doctrines and points of view?—a welter, I should add, which is removed only by degree from that in which many theologians can find themselves even when they subscribe to the “same” religion. Can we transfer the philosopher’s solution of this problem—for I believe it is a solution—to the case of divinity schools? What is the philosophical solution? The required commitment of the philosopher is not to be measured by adherence to any fixed core of beliefs or doctrines of the kind that divide men into realists and nominalists, idealists and materialists, monists and pluralists, positivists and antipositivists. If there is any single required commitment it is to concern with the problems of philosophy, a dedication to them which can be and is shared even by those who spend so much time showing that these problems are meaningless, for they too are concerned with the problems. Professional philosophy in the secular tradition, therefore, is not a discipline in which one is required to hold certain canonical beliefs. It is

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rather a stubborn effort to deal with the problems to which different answers have been offered. My proposal for an ideal divinity school is that its professors be granted the same degree of freedom. One should certainly not demand commitment to a specific set of beliefs about God and then be satisfied with the most varied construals of the word “God”, construals which would allow theologians to disagree with each other fundamentally and radically while they gave the appearance of commitment to the same thing. That is literal double talk. In the divinity school which I have in mind, theology would be defined in terms of its concerns and not in terms of its conclusions. The required commitment of the professor of theology would not be to a set of specified theological beliefs but rather, as in the case of the professor of philosophy, to an interest in certain questions and problems. And therefore, if the problems of theology and religion should change, the commitment of its professors should change, too. The proposed requirement for a teacher of theology is in keeping with that sponsored by most of the other disciplines in the free, secular, modern university. Although I spoke earlier of astronomy as the science of heavenly bodies, it is not customary to regard such definitions of subjects as eternally binding. There was a time when mathematics was construed as the science of number and when physics was understood as the science of macroscopic bodies, but time has shown such definitions to be far too confining for the mathematics and physics of today. Moreover, it is exceedingly dangerous to imply that no one can practice a subject without believing in certain specified entities accepted at a certain period in the history of the subject. The problems associated with religion may vary, as the recent appointment of psychiatrist-theologians and the talk of a God above God both seem to demonstrate. The implications of my proposal are, I suppose, radical. The ideal divinity school I describe would permit—indeed would encourage—as much richness and variety as possible. Not only would its professors expound and defend Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and some of the less popular religions, but even agnostics and atheists might be given the opportunity to present their views. In this way a divinity school might emulate the freedom, the diversity, and the habits of controversy which characterize the rest of a great secular university. Unlike the undergraduate college, most of whose students do not enroll in order to be instructed in religion and whose faculty could not give such instruction successfully if it tried, the divinity school would be attended by students seeking the true religion and taught by professors who thought they had it. The common pursuit of truth under the instruction of those who differ, the competition of ideas and ways of life communicated in a scholarly way, would not only emulate the most attractive side of the modern university, but it might be a stimulant to creative religious and theological thinking. It might even help eliminate some of the tensions of our divided world, though I should hesitate to let its value depend on achieving that. The faculty of such a divinity school as I project might wish to circumscribe the required commitment further. But any narrowing that sets the divinity school

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apart from the rest of the university as a place in which prescribed religious beliefs must be held by all of its professors is bound to create an unfortunate gulf between such a school and the rest of the university. The effect would be similar if any one of the departments of the university were to congeal itself into a center of ideological uniformity on subjects where competent scholars might differ. Naturally, there will always be many qualifications for a professor, notably excellence in the theology or history of the religion he teaches. And therefore, at certain times, because of a lack of available talent, one might prefer to have no representative of a given religion on the faculty. Some philosophy departments have experienced similar situations in spite of strenuous efforts to avoid the congealment of which I have spoken. But in all such cases, whether a school or a department is involved, the decision as to whether the solid state has been reached should be in the hands of the faculty in question. Any one who is not arrogant enough to suppose that his own position represents final and immutable truth will wish to have distinguished colleagues who disagree with him, but he will consciously or unconsciously draw some kind of circle beyond which he does not look for colleagues. The chemist no longer votes for alchemists, the psychologist no longer votes for phrenologists, and the philosopher, I hope, draws the line at obscurantism. In the case of the theologian, the matter appears to be very difficult and I am in no position to say where he sets the limits of outer darkness. In summary, I should like to say that the most obvious point of my argument is that the scholar who studies religion objectively need not accept the beliefs he analyzes or whose development he traces. Requiring him to be committed to these beliefs would be grotesque in the light of our experience. The second and more important point is my proposal of a divinity school which will be dominated by no one of the historical religions and which will give a voice to all of them. In such a divinity school, even a professor of systematic theology would not be required to assent to any previously specified set of beliefs. I hasten to add that I am not urging the requirement of noncommitment. That is to say, I am not arguing that professors in the divinity school I envisage should have no beliefs. I am rather arguing against the requirement of a core of uniform belief, and these are two different things. It is obviously necessary to distinguish between the assertion that one and the same view should be required of all scholars and the assertion that they all should have some point of view of their own. I deny the former, but certainly affirm the latter. Creative work in any field is impossible without the adoption of a set of beliefs and attitudes and therefore it is not likely that a man, who has no firmly held convictions or deep feelings about the problems of his field will come to anything, whether he be a theologian, philosopher, or historian. But the history of scholarship and teaching, especially in theology, has shown the danger of codifying and calcifying the doctrines that a man must hold. Every creative scholar does and should begin with certain basic beliefs and commitments, but any attempt to legislate what they should be is bound to imperil our scholarly tradition and educational system. In an effort to navigate between the extremes of uniform belief and no belief at all, we should construe the required commitment of a professor in all parts of a free university—

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the divinity school included—in a way that transcends substantive belief. Such a commitment would imply no more than a serious, intellectually honest, dedicated concern with the problems of whatever subject he studies. If we demand more in the case of the divinity school, we separate its spirit from that of the rest of the university in a way that cannot be healthy. That is the moral of my utopianism.

POSTSCRIPT It has been said in response to the above argument (and in a less than utopian vein) that, after all, a divinity school is a professional school, devoted to the preparation of churchmen, and that if it were organized along the liberal lines described above, many churches would not accept its graduates. This may be a compelling argument to some, but I am not moved by it. For if we believe in the principles of the modern secular university, we should reply: so much the worse for such churches. If they are not willing to allow their ministers to be exposed to a variety of efforts at reaching the truth on religious matters, they acknowledge their spiritual distance from the tradition of liberal education and scholarship. Suppose there were colleges which refused to give positions in philosophy to Ph.D.’s who had been exposed to a similar variety of doctrines in a graduate school of arts and sciences. Would we take this to be a commentary on the narrow-minded college or on the graduate school which held fast to its tradition of free inquiry? The question answers itself here, just as it does in the case of the church and the divinity school.

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The University in Transition (1966)

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR. REPORTS in A Thousand Days that John F. Kennedy exclaimed soon after his election, “How am I going to fill these 1,200 jobs? . . . All I hear is the name Jim Perkins. Who in hell is Perkins?” At the time vice president of the Carnegie Corporation and later president of Cornell, James Perkins, it seems, was recommended for virtually every post Kennedy had to fill; and Perkins’s excellent book, The University in Transition, goes a long way toward explaining why. Its publication also makes it possible for everyone to discover that James Perkins is a distinguished administrator who had challenging ideas on a topic of vital concern today—the American university. The basic premise of Mr. Perkins’s argument is that the university is primarily concerned with knowledge, a truth so often neglected or so foolishly contested that he deserves great credit for calling it to our attention once again. We must also thank him for giving us none of the usual double-talk about the nature of knowledge. According to Perkins, it is won by rational inquiry, and he spares us the customary nonsense about how painters have knowledge in their fingers and how dancers have it in their toes, and how the heart has reasons that reason never knows. In its concern with knowledge, according to Perkins, the American university differs from similar institutions of the past and present because it accepts all three of the following jobs: acquiring new knowledge through research, transmitting it directly to the young, and making it available to society in the spirit of public service. The great German universities of the nineteenth century concentrated on research, while traditional Oxford and Cambridge were most occupied with undergraduate instruction, but none of them, says Perkins, supplied information or advice to those faced by practical problems, at least not on the scale we know today in America. Today (in 1966), when knowledge itself, the student population, and society’s demand for professional assistance are increasing at an astonishing rate, the American university is in a state of crisis unprecedented in the history of the academic world. Having agreed to run a three-ring circus, it is now watching the rings expand to the point where the tent is not big enough to hold them, where the clowns, the lion-keepers, and the animals dash about madly in all directions, and where the whole show often spills riotously into the streets. Mr. Perkins describes the crisis in more sedate prose. He says that the American university may lose its internal cohesion and therefore its capacity to run its own affairs. He also says that it may lose what everyone is afraid of losing these days— its identity. First, let us consider what Perkins proposes to do about the problem of internal cohesion. Essentially, he tries to cheer us up by telling us that bigness as such is

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not a curse, provided that the three main parts of the American university develop in proportion to each other. If, as it were, the torso should get bigger, he would make sure that the brain and the limbs become better able to direct and carry it. Therefore he rightly insists that the university should not accept outside contracts unless they result in the improvement of research and teaching. How this advance on three fronts can be accomplished he does not say in great detail, but leaving aside some reservations about his plan that I shall express later, I think it is sensible and that it may provide some much-needed guidance for those who must lead the advance. What about the university’s identity crisis? What should its distinctive role be in a world that is full of other knowledgeable institutions—foundations, institutes, research centers, and independent undergraduate colleges? Because the university is the only one of these organizations that discovers, teaches, and applies knowledge, Perkins rightly regards it as a unique and pivotal institution which stands halfway up the academic scale of being. Poised as it is, however, between the philanthropoids on Madison Avenue and the little angels who are undergraduates, the university must, like man himself, be more than versatile if it is to survive and prosper. It must unite with other universities to form what Perkins calls “systems,” which do more than cooperatively build and operate laboratories and synchrotrons. His moral is that if universities don’t hang together in this world of mounting costs and large-scale planning, they will hang separately. If they fail to unite, they will not be able to resist the inroads of unwarranted political authority, which is always ready, as the saying goes, to rush into a vacuum. Having indicated how much I admire the outline of Mr. Perkins’s argument, I must now add a few reservations about it. I am not sure whether they involve me in flat disagreement with him or whether our differences are simply those of emphasis, but I think they should be aired in either case. First of all, it seems to me that Mr. Perkins’s organic metaphor of the harmoniously functioning threepart university often leads him to suggest that the three parts are of equal importance, and this I cannot admit. He sometimes writes as though the American university should assign equal weight to research, instruction, and public service, but I would dispute this. I don’t think that our universities have come to this point and I don’t think they ever should. I sympathize with students who come to the swinging doors of government offices asking, “Is my teacher in there?” Having a drink at those heady springs is one thing, but staying out all night is another. Maintaining the harmony of the parts is fine, but harmony does not imply equality, and I would have been happier if Perkins had said in a loud and clear voice that the two principal functions of the university are teaching and research, with public service a distinct third. I would have been happier, too, if Perkins had said that in rendering public service the American university should not be too monotonous in its choice of customers. It should not work only or preponderantly for the military even if it should be the case—and I do not think that it is—that such circumscribed labor would best maintain its internal harmony or augment its power. Moreover, I

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think it should devote itself more than it now does to noble tasks like improving primary and secondary education, whose aims are, after all, more closely related to the university’s than those of any other institution in society. Finally, I come to a point which demands the greatest emphasis of all. Now that the American university is so active in supplying knowledge to other parts of our society, it has an inescapable responsibility to evaluate the ends for which that knowledge is to be used. Not only must it ask whether accepting certain contracts will redound to the benefit of the university but it must ask whether it will redound to the benefit of mankind. Some may say that this moral concern will require the university to abandon its primary concern with knowledge, but I disagree. I think that there is such a thing as knowledge of good, bad, right, and wrong, and that the university is as good a place in which to learn it and teach it as any in our society. Whatever one may think of student demonstrations and teach-ins, many of them reveal a heartening concern with the moral problems created by an increasingly heartless world. More than ever, therefore, it is the responsibility of the university to help students transform their more admirable feelings into defensible beliefs and actions, for by doing so it may keep both students and professors from becoming mere technicians in the service of goals they never examine. The truth about prime numbers, electrons, DNA, the Civil War, and mass society is not enough for today’s American university. It also needs the truth about what individuals and governments should and should not do with the knowledge that universities make available to them. In one of the places where Mr. Perkins addresses himself to such questions, he says that “the university’s function is to serve the private processes of faculty and students on the one hand, and the large public interests of society on the other”. But clearly the university that is to serve large public interests must try to determine what those interests are and what they are not. Engaging in moral analysis and criticism, therefore, is the logical consequence of that fateful step which the American university took when it moved beyond the limited roles of nineteenthcentury German universities and traditional Oxbridge. If it critically examines the ends it is asked to serve and serves only those that pass muster, it will go a long way toward convincing the American student that his teachers are still dedicated to liberal education, the civilized life, and the free society he is required to read about as a freshman but often advised to forget about when he becomes a graduate student seeking research grants. It will also keep faith with what Mr. Perkins rightly calls its ancient and noble ancestry, and in particular with a man called Socrates.

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Philosophy in a Utopian Institute for Advanced Study (1989)

IN HIS NOVEL THE PICKWICK PAPERS, Charles Dickens tells of an author who tries to compose an essay on Chinese metaphysics by consulting one encyclopedia article on China and another one on metaphysics; and some of you may suspect me of trying to do something similar in this talk. Ever since 1953 I have been a visiting member or a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and ever since 1952 I have come periodically to Japan in order to teach or discuss philosophy. So philosophy, Japan, and advanced study have been three interests of mine for many years, three interests that I hope to integrate more successfully in this talk than Dickens’s character could have integrated his information on China and metaphysics. Since one theme of this conference is “The Present and Future of Advanced Study”, I propose to sketch an ideal institute that will include a department of philosophy. I have been encouraged to do so by a remark of Dr. Okuda in his letter of invitation to me, where he says that the activities of the Japanese International Institute for Advanced Studies should not only be international but interdisciplinary, and that it should be the home of “a good combination of natural and human science”. Since I know of no such institute that includes a department of philosophy as well as departments of history, mathematics, natural science, and social science, I hope my Japanese colleagues will try to realize my utopian ideals. If they were to do so, they would be following the wishes of Fukuzawa Yukichi, who, at the end of his Autobiography, says that one of his hopes was that Japan would form “a large foundation created for the study of both the physical and metaphysical sciences”. It may be, of course, that somewhere in the world there exists an institute of the kind that I dream of, and if there is, I apologize to any representative of it among my readers. My impression is that there is no private independent research center in the world (1) which has a permanent faculty composed of departments that contain mathematicians, natural scientists, historians, social scientists, and philosophers who are totally free of teaching duties; (2) which annually invites visiting members to devote themselves exclusively to research and writing; and (3) which has nearby residential quarters in which visiting members and their families may live. Why should an institute for advanced study contain a department or school of philosophy? My answer is that philosophy is an ancient and important discipline which does not fit very easily into mathematics, natural science, social science, or historical studies as they are now conceived. Perhaps, it might be said,

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philosophers of mathematics, of natural science, of social science, and of history can find homes in the four departments I have mentioned, but to this I reply that such philosophers do not usually represent the full range of philosophy and, moreover, it is unlikely that even such philosophical specialists would be welcome in the departments I have mentioned. For example, I do not think that a department of history is likely to appoint a professor who specialized in the philosophy of history, by which I mean a discipline that asks questions such as “What is narration?”, “What is a historical explanation?”, and “What is the logical relationship between history and the social sciences?” Nor do I think that a physics department would welcome someone who concentrated in the philosophy of physics. So, if even philosophers of the special disciplines are not likely to receive appointments in departments devoted to those disciplines, imagine how hard it would be for a philosopher who works on more general questions in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics to be appointed in those disciplines. Generally speaking, philosophers cannot expect nonphilosophers to appoint them professors, and that is another reason why they should have a department or school of their own. That has been the experience of the modern university and I see no reason to think that an institute for advanced study is any different in this respect. Therefore, if a new institute were to be formed in Japan today, I would urge that it include a department of philosophy. Before defending this view, I should remark that many persons who are not philosophers are often influenced by an outmoded conception of that ancient but evolving discipline. They imagine that the philosopher pretends to be an overextended encyclopedic superscientist who claims to know fundamental truths from which all truths of the special scientific disciplines follow. Or they imagine that the philosopher claims to be able to formulate in a dogmatic way the rules according to which practitioners of the special sciences must think. However, the best philosophers of the present do not aspire to such a role. Today’s philosopher does not regard himself as a despotic custodian of the axioms of all scientific knowledge, nor as a haughty legislator of rules for the conduct of scientific inquiry. He may be interested in logic and therefore study the inferences made by his colleagues in the special sciences or he may be interested in the theory of knowledge and therefore try to characterize the relationship between the theories of special scientists and their evidence. But in following these interests, he does not operate as an intellectual tyrant or Grand Inquisitor; he does not claim to have powers of discovering or confirming truths that transcend those of the mathematician, the natural scientist, the historian, or the social scientist. Indeed, the philosopher is in my view a scientist in the broadest sense. While different from the practitioners of other disciplines, he does not use peculiar methods of reasoning; he uses the same methods of thinking that they use while focusing on different problems. The value of including philosophy in an institute which already contains the four other departments I have mentioned may be illustrated and defended by sketching a philosophical view that I hold. It is a view in the theory of

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knowledge that I call holistic pragmatism, which derives in part from ideas advocated by Pierre Duhem, a French scientist, historian of science, and philosopher of science. Duhem held that we do not test a scientific belief in isolation, but rather as a part of a conjunction or body of beliefs that is tested against our sensory experiences. If one of these experiences runs counter to a belief deduced from the conjunction, he said, the scientist has the option of rejecting beliefs in the conjunction which are different from the belief that seems to be the only one on trial. Duhem limited the scope of his theory to beliefs in natural science, but the American logician and philosopher, W. V. Quine, with the agreement of the Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski, extended Duhem’s views to include logical beliefs. According to Quine and Tarski, a so-called recalcitrant sensory experience may lead in principle to the abandonment of even a logical belief. And because I extend Duhem’s idea further than Quine and Tarski did, I hold that we may include moral beliefs as well as descriptive beliefs in a tested conjunction, and that such a conjunction is tested, not against sensory experiences alone but against sensory experiences and feelings of moral obligation. In my view, holistic pragmatism is a theory that may be applied to all disciplines that seek truth. It is not my purpose to develop that philosophical view here, but I wish to point out that a philosopher who accepts it might profit greatly by associating with historians, social scientists, natural scientists, and mathematicians; and, conversely, they might profit greatly by associating with such a philosopher. For holistic pragmatism says that testing a belief in one discipline may lead to rejecting a belief asserted in another discipline; indeed, certain phenomena encountered in quantum physics have been thought to justify the abandonment of a certain logical principle. According to my view, a moral feeling may lead to rejecting the belief that a living fetus is human rather than the moral principle that prohibits the killing of a human being. I know of no other philosophical view that is more consonant with a belief in the value of interdisciplinary cooperation, since holistic pragmatism encourages biologists who assume certain principles of physics to fraternize with physicists and it even encourages them to fraternize with mathematicians and logicians. For who can tell, before all interested scientists jointly consider the matter, whether an experience that seems to overturn an assumed physical belief might not better be used to overturn an assumed belief in logic? And since holistic pragmatism encourages interdisciplinary cooperation among the special sciences, what better way is there to permit such cooperation than to gather scientists and philosophically oriented logicians in one institute, free of the usual conditions that impede intellectual cooperation? Indeed, holistic pragmatism encourages interdisciplinary exchange within philosophy itself. For a conjunction of beliefs that faces experience may include ontological beliefs about the existence of the sets assumed by mathematicians just as it may include the beliefs of moralists. In short, the philosophy of holistic pragmatism provides a rationale for the coopera-

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tion of epistemologists, logicians, metaphysicians, and moralists, of philosophers and special scientists, and of different special scientists. Creating the sort of institute I have described will not be easy for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it might have to face an objection that philosophy has had to face for the more than two millennia since Socrates sipped his hemlock— that it endangers certain entrenched moral and religious beliefs. But such an argument should not carry weight with scientists whose predecessors have had to face similar objections. And how about the objection that adding philosophy would cost too much? To this I reply that philosophers come more cheaply than other scholars for whom government and business compete with their large emoluments. Of course, if there is no money, there is no money, but I repeat that I am being utopian and in utopia money is no object. How big, one might also ask in a practical vein, can an institute for advanced study become without destroying itself as an intellectual community? As someone has said that no town should consist of more residents than can be reached by the town-crier, so it might be argued that there is a limit to the number of scholars who can communicate with each other in one circumscribed institute. This is an argument that should be taken seriously by any planner of an institute. A pure utopian, of course, might answer that if we are planning from scratch, we should distribute professorial chairs equitably and therefore include philosophers in the first bunch, and that if we are planning to add chairs to an institute that already has other kinds of professors, we should add them with the claims of philosophy in mind. I come now to a question that is far more profound: are there enough intellectually distinguished philosophers in the world? I have no hesitation in answering that there are. I conclude these reflections by saying that even if no institute in any other country is prepared to add a department of philosophy, I hope that your Japanese institute will. If you do, you may be “Number 1” in an enterprise that may live longer than many others in the history of civilization. And my final words to you are suggested to me by a famous few that the legendary Dr. William Clark of Massachusetts offered to the Japanese in 1876: “Men and women, be ambitious, and create an institute for advanced study in which philosophy can take its rightful place alongside of the other major intellectual disciplines.”

P A R T I V

Analyticity, Morality, Causality, and Liberty In this part, I deal with a number of fundamental problems in the philosophy of language. An article on analytic truth and one on the paradox of analysis are concerned with pivotal concepts in semantics, and several other articles in this part treat the concepts of causal necessity and possibility, especially as they bear on the problem of free will. Though they are more technical than the preceding articles, I see in retrospect that the one on analytic truth encouraged me to think that there is no sharp epistemic distinction between analytic philosophy and disciplines that seek what some call synthetic or substantive truth. Believing this permitted me to see that the task of making substantive judgments is not sharply separated from that of analysis; and this in turn helped me see that my dealings in the preceding parts with topics like history, religion, morals, and education are well within the province of philosophy, contrary to the views of some logical positivists and other so-called philosophical analysts. I was also led to see that the ancient problem of free will cannot be brushed aside as meaningless if conceived in a certain way.

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The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism (1950)

JOHN DEWEY HAS SPENT a good part of his life hunting and shooting at dualisms: body-mind, theory-practice, percept-concept, value-science, learning-doing, sensation-thought, external-internal. They are always fair game and Dewey’s prose rattles with fire whenever they come into view. At times, the philosophical forest seems more like a gallery at a penny arcade, and the dualistic dragons move along obligingly and monotonously while Dewey picks them off with deadly accuracy. At other times, we may wonder just who these monsters are. But vague as the language sometimes is, on other occasions it is suggestive, and the writer must confess to a deep sympathy with Dewey on this point. Not that distinctions ought not to be made when they are called for but we ought to avoid making those that are unnecessary or unfounded. It is in this spirit that I wish to examine one form of a distinction which has come to dominate so much of contemporary philosophy—the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. It must be emphasized that the views which will be put forth are not strict corollaries of Dewey’s views; indeed, he sometimes deals with the question so as to suggest disagreement with what I am about to argue. But I trace the source of my own general attitudes on this point to Dewey, even though my manner and method in this paper are quite foreign to his. Recent discussion has given evidence of dissatisfaction with the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. A revolt seems to have developed among some philosophers who accepted this distinction as one of their basic tenets a few short years ago. So far as I know, this attitude has not been given full expression in publications, except for a few footnotes, reviews, and undeveloped asides. In this paper, I want to present some of the reasons for this decline of faith in such a pivotal distinction of recent philosophy, or at least some of the reasons which have led to the decline of my own assurance. On such a matter, I hesitate to name too many names, but I venture to say that some of my fellow revolutionaries are Prof. W. V. Quine and Prof. Nelson Goodman. As yet the revolution is in a fluid stage. No dictatorship has been set up, and so there is still a great deal of freedom and healthy dispute possible within the revolutionary ranks. I, for one, am drawn in this direction by a feeling that we are here faced with another one of the dualisms that Dewey has warned against. There is some irony in the fact that formal logicians have played a role in creating doubt over the adequacy of this great dualism—the sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic. It is ironical because Dewey has never looked in

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this direction for support; indeed he has shunned it. But such a phenomenon is not rare in the history of philosophy. Dewey has told of his attachment to Hegel’s language at a time when he was no longer a Hegelian, and in like manner the contemporary revolt against the distinction between analytic and synthetic may be related to Dewey’s antidualism. Perhaps this is the pattern of philosophical progress—new wine in old bottles. There are at least two kinds of statements which have been called analytic in recent philosophy. The first kind is illustrated by true statements of formal logic, in which only logical constants and variables appear essentially, i.e., logical truths in the narrowest sense. For example: (p or q) if and only if (q or p) p or not-p If p, then not-not-p

and similar truths from more advanced chapters of modern logic. With the attempts to define “analytic” as applied to these truths I shall not be concerned. Nor am I interested here in the ascription of analyticity to those which are derived from them by substitution of constants for variables. This does not mean that I do not have related opinions of certain philosophical characterizations of this type of statement, but rather that my main concern here is with another kind of statement usually classified as analytic. My main worry is over what is traditionally known as essential predication, best illustrated by “All men are animals”, “Every brother is a male”, “All men are rational animals”, “Every brother is a male sibling”, and “Every vixen is a fox”. I am concerned to understand those philosophers who call such statements analytic as opposed to true but merely synthetic statements like “All men are bipeds”, “Every brother exhibits sibling rivalry”, “Every vixen is cunning”. The crucial philosophical assertion is made when a predicate like “man” is said to be analytically linked with “rational animal”, but only synthetically linked with “featherless biped” while it is fully admitted that all men are in fact featherless bipeds and that all featherless bipeds are in fact men; when it is said that whereas the statement “All and only men are rational animals” is analytic, the statement “All and only men are featherless bipeds” is true but synthetic. And what I want to understand more clearly is the ascription of analyticity in such a context. What I will argue is that, a number of views which have been adopted as papal on these matters are, like so many papal announcements, obscure. And what I suggest is that the pronouncements of the modern, empiricist popes are unsuccessful attempts to bolster the dualisms of medieval, scholastic popes. From the point of view of an anti-dualist their distinctions are equally sharp, even though the moderns make the issue more linguistic in character. But the similarities between the medievals and the moderns are great; both want to preserve the distinction between essential and accidental predication, and both have drawn it obscurely.

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Quine1 has formulated the problem in a convenient way. He has pointed out (with a different illustration) that the statement “Every man is a rational animal” is analytic just in case it is the result of putting synonyms for synonyms in a logical truth of the first type mentioned. Thus we have the logical truth: (1) Every P is P From this we may deduce by substitution: (2) Every man is a man. Now we put for the second occurrence of the word “man” the expression “rational animal”, which is allegedly synonymous with it, and we have as our result: (3) Every man is a rational animal We may now say that (3) is analytic in accordance with the proposed criterion. Quine has queried the phrase “logical truth” as applied to (1) and the phrase “is synonymous with” as applied to “man” and “rational animal”, but I am confining myself to the latter. Quine has said that he does not understand the term “is synonymous with” and has suggested that he won’t understand it until a behavioristic criterion is presented for it. I want to begin by saying that I have difficulties with this term too, and that this is the negative plank on which our united front rests. I should say, of course, that the complaint when put this way is deceptively modest. We begin by saying we do not understand, but our opponents may counter with Dr. Johnson that they can give us arguments but not an understanding. And so it ought to be said that the objection is a little less meek; the implication is that many who think they understand really don’t. Now that the problem is introduced, a few preliminary observations must be made. First, I am not asking for a clear synonym of “is synonymous with”. I am asking only for a clear extensional equivalent. Therefore, I make rather weak demands on those who hold that the expression “is synonymous with” may be used in clarifying “analytic”. I ask them to present a usable criterion, a sufficiently clear expression which is extensionally equivalent to the expression “is synonymous with”—in other words, a term which bears the relation to “is synonymous with” that “featherless biped” bears to “man” according to those who hold that these last two terms are equivalent though not synonymous. Second, whereas Quine appears to require that the criterion for being synonymous be behavioristic or at least predicts that he won’t understand it if it’s not, I make less stringent demands. The term formulating the criterion of being synonymous will satisfy me when it attains a degree of clarity it does not now possess. It should be said in passing that Quine’s behaviorism would appear quite consonant with Dewey’s general views. 1

“Notes on Existence and Necessity”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 40 (1943), pp. 113–27.

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Third, it is obvious that if the problem is set in the manner outlined, then the statement “ ‘All men are rational animals’ is analytic” is itself empirical. For to decide that the statement is analytic, we will have to find out whether “man” is in fact synonymous with “rational animal” and this will require the empirical examination of linguistic usage. This raises a very important problem which helps us get to the root of the difficulty and to ward off one very serious misunderstanding. Showing that “All men are rational animals” is analytic depends on showing that it is the result of putting a synonym for its synonym in a logical truth. In this situation we find ourselves asking whether a statement in a natural language or what Moore calls ordinary language—a language which has not been formalized by a logician—is analytic. We find ourselves asking whether two expressions in a natural language are synonymous. But this must be distinguished from a closely related situation. It must be distinguished from the case where we artificially construct a language and propose so-called definitional rules. In this case, we are not faced with the same problem. Obviously, we may decide to permit users of our language to put “rational animal” for “man” in a language L1. (For the moment, I will not enter the question of how this decision is to be formulated precisely.) In that same language, Ll, which also contains the phrase “featherless biped” in its vocabulary, there may be no rule permitting us to put “featherless biped” for “man”. Thus we may say that in artificial language L1 “All men are rational animals” is analytic on the basis of a convention, a rule explicitly stated. In L1, moreover, “All men are featherless bipeds” is not analytic. But it is easy to see that we can construct a language L2 in which the reverse situation prevails and in which a linguistic expression which was analytic in L1 becomes synthetic in L2. Now no one denies that two such languages can be constructed having the features outlined. But these languages are the creatures of formal fancy; they are dreamed up by a logician. If I ask, “Is ‘All men are rational animals’ analytic in L1?”, I am rightly told to look up the rule book of language L1.2 But natural languages have no such rule books and the question whether a given statement is analytic in them is much more difficult. What some philosophers do is to pretend that natural languages are really quite like artificial languages, and that even though there is no rule book for them, people do behave as if there were such a book. What some philosophers usually assume is that the artificial rule book which they construct in making an artificial language is the rule book which ordinary people or scientists would construct if they were asked to construct one, or that it is the rule book which, in that vague phrase, presents the rational reconstruction of the usage in question. But suppose a logician constructs Ll and L2 as defined above, and now suppose he approaches L3, a natural language, with them. Can he say in any clear way that L1 is the rational reconstruction of L3 and that L2 is not? My whole point is that no one has been able to present the criterion 2 Even here, Quine asks, how do you know a rule when you see one? Only by the fact that the book has the word “Rule Book” on it, he answers.

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for such claims. And the reason for this is that no one has succeeded in finding a criterion for synonymy. The moral of this is important for understanding the new revolt against dualism. I hope it makes clear that whereas I understand fairly well the expressions “analytic in L1” and “analytic in L2”, where L1 and L2 are the artificial languages mentioned, I do not understand as well the phrase “analytic in the natural language L3”.3 More important to realize is that my understanding of the first two expressions in no way solves the serious problem of analyticity as I conceive it, and I want to repeat that my major difficulties will disappear only when a term is presented which is coextensive with “synonymous” and on the basis of which I can distinguish analytic sheep from synthetic goats. I want to repeat that I am not doing anything as quixotic as seeking a synonym for “synonym”. Those who refuse to admit the distinction between “analytic in L1” and “analytic in natural language L3” will, of course, disagree completely. But then, it seems to me, they will have to refrain from attributing analyticity to any statement which has not been codified in a formalized language, in which case they will find it hard to do analysis in connection with terms in ordinary language. They may say, as I have suggested, that people using natural languages behave as if they had made rules for their language just like those of L1 and L2, but then how do we show that people behave as if they had done something which they hadn’t done? As we shall see later, clearing up this problem is just as difficult as clarifying “analytic”, for it involves the equally vexatious problem of contraryto-fact conditional statements. I suppose it would be granted that those who use natural language do not make conventions and rules of definition by making a linguistic contract at the dawn of history. What defenders of the view I am criticizing want to hold, however, is that there are other ways of finding out whether a group of people has a convention. And what I am saying is that philosophers should tell us what these ways are before they dub statements in natural languages “analytic” and “synthetic”. The point at issue is closely related to one discussed at length by Prof. C. I. Lewis in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946). We agree in seeing a problem here which is overlooked by what I shall call crude conventionalism, but differ in our conception of where the solution must be sought. Lewis is led to say that whether “All men are rational animals” is analytic in a natural language depends on whether all men are necessarily rational animals, and this in turn depends on whether the criterion in mind of man includes the criterion in mind of rational animal. Lewis has dealt with this matter more extensively than any recent philosopher who advocates a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic, and his arguments are too complex to be treated here. In any case, his views are quite different from those upon which I am concentrating in this paper. He holds that I need only make what he calls an “experiment in imagination” to find out whether all men are necessarily rational animals. And when I try this experiment 3 For many years, Quine has also pointed to the unclarity of the phrase “analytic in L”, where “L” is a variable even over formal languages.

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I am supposed to conclude that I cannot consistently think of, that I cannot conceive of, a man who is not a rational animal. But how shall we interpret this “cannot”? How shall we understand “thinkable”? I suspect that this view leads us to a private, intuitive insight for determining what each of us individually can conceive. How, then, can we get to the analyticity of the commonly understood statement? Lewis’s most helpful explanation turns about the word “include” in the following passage: “The [answer to the] question, ‘Does your schematism for determining application of the term “square” include your schematism for applying “rectangle”?’ is one determined in the same general fashion as is the answer to the question, ‘Does your plan of a trip to Chicago to see the Field Museum include the plan of visiting Niagara to see the Falls?’ ” The inclusion of plans, furthermore, is a sense-apprehensible relationship for Lewis. One either sees or doesn’t see the relationship and that is the end of the matter. It is very difficult to argue one’s difficulties with such a position, and I shall only say that I do not find this early retreat to intuition satisfactory. I will add, however, that in its recognition of the problem Lewis’s view is closer to the one advanced in this paper than those which do not see the need for clarification of analytic in natural language. My difficulties with Prof. Lewis’s view are associated with the difficulties of intensionalism, but that is a large matter. I want to consider now two views which are avowedly anti-intensional and more commonly held by philosophers against whom my critical comments are primarily directed. (1) “Analytic statements are those whose denials are self-contradictory.” Consider this criterion as applied to the contention that “All men are rational animals” is analytic in a natural language. We are invited to take the denial of this allegedly analytic statement—namely, “It is not the case that all men are rational animals”. But is this a self-contradiction? Certainly looking at it syntactically shows nothing like “A and not-A”. And even if we transform it into “Some men are not rational animals” we still do not get a self-contradiction which is syntactically evident. It might be said that the last statement is self-contradictory in the sense in which “man” is being used. But surely the phrase “in the sense” is a dodge, because if he is asked to specify that sense, what can the philosopher who has referred to it say? Surely not “the sense in which ‘man’ is synonymous with ‘rational animal’ ” because that would beg the question. The point is that the criterion under consideration is not helpful if construed literally and if not construed literally (as in the attempt to use the phrase “in the sense”) turns out to beg the question. Let us then suppose that the criterion is not used in this question-begging manner. A self-contradiction need not literally resemble in shape “A and notA” or “Something is P and not-P”. All it has to do is to produce a certain feeling of horror or queerness on the part of people who use the language: they behave as if they had seen someone eat peas with a knife. Such an approach is attractive, but we need an account of the kind of horror or queer feelings which people are

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supposed to have in the presence of the denials of analytic statements. About this approach, however, I must ask a few questions and make a few observations. (a) Who is supposed to feel the horror in the presence of the opposites of analytic statements? Surely not all people in the community that uses the language. There are many who feel no horror at seeing people eat peas with a knife, just as there are many who are not perturbed at statements that philosophers might think self-contradictory. Who, then? (b) Let us remember that on this view we will have to be careful to distinguish the horror associated with denying firmly believed synthetic statements from that surrounding the denials of analytic statements. The distinction must not only be a distinction that carves out two mutually exclusive classes of sentence but it must carve them out in a certain way. It would be quite disconcerting to the philosophers I am criticizing to have the whole of physics or sociology turn out as analytic on their criterion and only a few parts of mathematics. (c) If analytic statements are going to be distinguished from synthetic true statements on the basis of the degree of discomfort that is produced by denying them, the distinction will not be a sharp one4 and the idea of a rigid separation of analytic and synthetic will have been surrendered. The dualism will have been surrendered and the kind of gradualism one finds in some of Dewey’s writings will have been vindicated. The most recent justification of the distinction between essential and accidental predication will have been refuted. It may be said that sharp differences are compatible with matters of degree. Differences of temperature are differences of degree and yet we may mark fixed points like 0° Centigrade on our thermometers. But it should be pointed out that a conception according to which “analytic” is simply the higher region of a scale on which “synthetic” is the lower region breaks down the radical separation of the analytic and the synthetic as expressive of different kinds of knowledge. And this is a great concession from the view that K. R. Popper5 calls “essentialism”. It is reminiscent of the kind of concession that Mill wanted to wrest from the nineteenth century in connection with the status of arithmetical statements. Once it is admitted that analytic statements are just like synthetic statements, except that they produce a little more of a certain quality—in this case, the quality of discomfort in the presence of their denials—the bars are down, and a radical, gradualistic pragmatism is enthroned. (2) “If we were presented with something which wasn’t a rational animal, we would not call it a man.” Such language is often used by philosophers who are anxious to clarify the notion of analytic in natural languages. In order to test 4 On this point, see Nelson Goodman’s “On Likeness of Meaning”, Analysis (October 1949), pp. 1–7. Also W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic (New York, 1950), section 33. (I should add here that readers of Goodman and Quine will know that since 1950 they have written further on this subject.) 5 The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, 1945), especially chap. 11 and its notes.

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its effectiveness in distinguishing analytic statements, let us try it on “All men are featherless bipeds”, which by hypothesis is not analytic. Those who use this criterion would have to deny that if we were presented with an entity which was not a biped or not featherless we would not call it a man. But we do withhold the term “man” from those things which we know to be either nonbipeds or non-featherless. Obviously, everything turns about the phrase “we would not call it a man” or the phrase “we would withhold the term ‘man’ ”. Again, who are we? And more important, what is the pattern of term-withholding? Suppose I come to a tribe which has the following words in its vocabulary plus a little logic: “man”, “rational”, “animal”, “featherless”, and “biped”. I am told in advance by visiting anthropologists that “man” is synonymous with “rational animal” in that tribe’s language whereas “featherless biped” is merely coextensive with it. I wish to check the report of the anthropologists. How do I go about it? In the spirit of the proposed criterion, I must show that if anything lacked rationality it would not be reputed a man by the people in question. So I show them coconuts, trees, horses, pigs, and I ask after each “man?” and get “no” for an answer. They will not repute these things to be men. I must now show that there is a difference in their attitudes toward “rational animal” and “featherless biped” vis-a`-vis “man”. I originally produced things which are not rational animals, but these very things also lack feathers and are not bipeds and so the negative responses of the natives might just as well be offered as an argument for the synonymy of “man” and “featherless biped” as for the theory that “man” is synonymous with “rational animal”. It seems that such crude behaviorism will not avail. They don’t call non-featherless bipeds men, just as they don’t call nonrational animals men. The criterion, therefore, is one that will not help us make the distinction. We might pursue the natives in another way if they have a few philosophical words in their language. We might ask them: “Would you call something a man if it were not a featherless biped?” To which they answer in the negative. “Would you call something a man if it weren’t a rational animal?” To which they answer “no” again. But now we might ask them: “Aren’t your reasons different in each of these cases?”, hoping to lead them into saying something that will allow us to differentiate their responses. “Aren’t you surer in concluding that something is not a man from the fact that it is not a rational animal, than you are in concluding it from the fact that it is not a featherless biped?” If the tribesmen are obliging and say “yes”, we have the making of a criterion. But notice that it is a criterion which makes the distinction one of degree. Not being a rational animal is simply a better sign of the absence of manhood than is the property of not being a featherless biped, just as the latter is a better sign than the property of not wearing a derby hat. It should be noticed in this connection that we are precluded from saying that the inference from “a is not a rational animal” to “a is not a man” is logical or analytic for them, since we are trying to explain “analytic”. To use it in the explanation would hardly be helpful.

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Probably the most helpful interpretation of this mode of distinguishing analytic and synthetic is that according to which we observe the following: when the natives have applied the word “man” to certain objects and are then persuaded that these objects are not rational animals, they immediately, without hesitation, withdraw the predicate “man”. They contemplate no other means of solving their problem. But when they have applied the word “man” and are then persuaded that the things to which they have applied it are not featherless bipeds, they do not withdraw the predicate “man” immediately, but rather contemplate another course, that of surrendering the hypothesis that all men are featherless bipeds. Now I suspect that this criterion will be workable but it will not allow us to distinguish what we think in advance are the analytic equivalences. It will result in our finding that many firmly believed “synthetic” equivalences are analytic on this criterion. I am sure that there are a number of other ways of constructing the criterion that are similar to the ones I have just considered. No doubt students of language who have thought of this problem can develop them. But I want to call attention to one general problem that criteria of this sort face. They usually depend on the use of, a contrary-to-fact conditional: something of the form “if . . . were . . . then . . . would be . . .” But in appealing to this (or any variety of causal conditional) we are appealing to a notion that is just as much in need of explanation as the notion of analytic itself. To appeal to it, therefore, does not constitute a philosophical advance. Goodman6 has reported on the lugubrious state of this notion. It is small consolation to reduce “analytic” to the contrary-to-fact conditional, for that is a very sandy foundation right now. After presenting views like these, I frequently find philosophers agreeing with me. Too often they are the very philosophers whose views I had supposed I was criticizing. Too often, I find, the criticisms I have leveled are treated as arguments for what I had supposed I was opposing. For example, there are some philosophers who construe my argument merely as an argument to show that words in natural language and scientific language are ambiguous—that “man” is synonymous with “rational animal” in one context and with “featherless biped” in another—and who immediately embrace the views here set forth. But this is beside the point. Many philosophers who defend the view I have criticized admit that a word may have many meanings, depending on context. For example, John Stuart Mill, who admits that a biologist might regard “mammiferous animal having two hands” as the synonym of “man”, and not “rational animal”. But Mill also holds that in common usage “rational animal” is the synonym. Because of this admission of a varying connotation, Mill regards himself (justifiably) as superior to the benighted philosopher who holds what has been called “the one and only one true meaning” view of analysis. If the benighted philosopher is asked, “What is the synonym of ‘man’?”, he immediately replies “rational animal”. If he is a Millian, he says it depends on the situation in which it is used. 6 “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 44 (1947), pp. 113–28; reprinted as chap. 1 of Goodman’s Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 2nd ed. (New York, 1985).

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I am not concerned to advocate this Millian view here because it is quite beside the point so far as the thesis of this essay is concerned. The difference between the Millian (if I may call him that without intending thereby to credit Mill with having originated the view) and his opponent (I would call him an Aristotelian if such matters were relevant) is comparatively slight. The Millian takes as his fundamental metalinguistic statement-form, “X is synonymous with Y in situation S”, whereas his opponent apparently refuses to relativize synonymy. The opponent merely says: “X is synonymous with Y”. What I want to emphasize, however, is that by so relativizing the notion of synonymy he is still far from meeting the difficulty I have raised. For now it may be asked how we establish synonymy even in a given context. The problem is analogous to the following one in mechanics. Suppose one holds that the question: “Is X moving?” is unanswerable before a frame of reference is given. Suppose, then, that motion is relativized and we now ask such a question in the form: “Is X moving with respect to Y?” But now suppose we are not supplied with a clear statement of how to go about finding out whether X is in motion with respect to Y. I venture to say that the latter predicament resembles that of philosophers who are enlightened enough to grant that synonymy is relative to a linguistic context, but who are unable to see that even when relativized it still needs more clarification than anyone has given it. I think that the problem is clear, and, that we may have to drop the idea of a sharp distinction between essential and accidental predication (to use the language of the older Aristotelians) as well as its contemporary version—the sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic. I am not arguing that a criterion of analyticity and synonymy can never be given. I argue that none has been given and, more positively, that a suitable criterion is likely to make the distinction between analytic and synthetic a matter of degree. If this is tenable, then a dualism which has been shared by both scholastics and empiricists will have been challenged successfully. Analytic philosophy will no longer be sharply separated from science, and an unbridgeable chasm will no longer divide those who see meanings or essences and those who collect facts. Another revolt against dualism will have succeeded.

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Ontological Clarity and Semantic Obscurity (1951)

THE AVERSION TO philosophical entities like attributes, propositions, powers, and substances is not new but it has been expressed more belligerently in the twentieth century than at any other time in the history of philosophy. Plato’s ideas, Descartes’ minds, and Aristotle’s substances have been attacked by nominalists, behaviorists, and phenomenalists with all the weapons of logical analysis; and now that we have given the smoke a half-century in which to clear, we may evaluate some of the gains that have been made toward the goals of the offensive. It is with one part of this evaluation that I am concerned here since I want to contrast what I shall call ontological progress with something else called semantic obscurity, thereby showing that linguistic philosophy has left a number of real problems unsolved. What is disconcerting about the present situation is the fact that a number of philosophers who pride themselves on ontological advance have not recognized the gravity of the remaining problems or have dismissed them as no problems of theirs. The partisans of clarity and economy have tried to eliminate a number of objectionable entities, but too often at the price of metalinguistic notions that are as obscure as the entities eliminated with their help. This appears most conspicuously in the case of problems that surround the concept of essential predication when that is supposedly solved by using the concept of analytic statement, and in the case of problems that emerge in recent discussions of subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals. Since these conditionals are used in the theory of dispositional predicates, they play a central role in phenomenalism and behaviorism. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to distinguish ontological advance from the semantic problems that remain, and to suggest that solving them may involve psychological investigation that is avoided by those who are concerned only with ontological clarity.

ESSENTIAL PREDICATION We are all aware of the contempt in which some philosophers hold those who say things like “It is the essence of man to be a rational animal,” or “The attribute of being a man is identical with the attribute of being a rational animal.” According to some critics of these statements, they imply that there are shadowy entities called attributes, and according to others such statements are meaningless. We shall not enter into the differences between these two ways of expressing hostility to traditional language since that is another problem, but we may proceed on the assumption that there is something wrong with this way of speaking

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because we can’t tell whether such statements are true or false. Phrased in such a way the objection proceeds from a desire to speak clearly, and under such auspices the attack on weird entities is derivative because the more fundamental aim is clarity. When some critics of traditional language hear their colleague talking in this objectionable way, they make silent translations to themselves, replacing his statements with something as allegedly clear as “The predicate ‘man’ is synonymous with the predicate ‘rational animal.’ ” The question whether we may always put this semantic statement in place of the one about attributes is a very difficult one since there is as strong an argument against saying that “The attribute of being a man is identical with the attribute of being a rational animal” is synonymous with “The predicate ‘man’ is synonymous with the predicate ‘rational animal’ ” as there is against saying that “Snow is white” is synonymous with “ ‘Snow is white’ is true.” Nevertheless the semantic statement asserting that two predicates are synonymous is said by some philosophers to be very much clearer than that asserting the identity of attributes, and that is the claim that concerns me here. Many philosophers suppose that they can treat the synonymy-statement as a surrogate for the one about attributes, but I believe that although the surrogate represents an improvement over the second, the surrogate contains a semantic expression which is itself quite obscure— namely, “is synonymous with.” When we ascribe ontological superiority to the statement that refers to linguistic predicates we do so because we do not wish to imply that attributes exist and because we believe that our semantic sentence is an improvement because it does not imply that attributes exist. We no longer quantify over attributes, to use Quine’s terminology, but rather over linguistic expressions, and this constitutes an ontological advance. But if we compare the expressions “is identical with” and “is synonymous with”, we see that the surrogate moves us in the direction of ontological clarity while leaving “is synonymous with” obscure.1 And since our aim is clarification, it is important not to be lulled by profits in the ontological column. We should not rest on our oars at this point because the statement about language has its own problems. There is no doubt that ontological advance is desirable since the elimination of ghosts is an achievement, but so long as synonymy is established by intuition or a “sense of language,” we still have far to go. If the linguistic approach had culminated not only in an elimination of attributes in favor of words but in a statement like “The predicate ‘man’ is shorter than the predicate ‘rational animal’ ” the situation would be quite different since we have a comparatively clear idea of length even in the absence of an exact definition of it. But there is no 1 See Morton White, “The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism,” John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom (ed. S. Hook), pp. 316–330, and W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review, 1951, vol. 60, pp. 20–43; also see Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine, “Steps toward a Constructive Nominalism” (Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 12, 1947, p. 108 note 8). My article is reprinted above.

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similar cause for complacency in the case of synonymy. We should not say: “Oh, well, we may not have a definition of ‘synonymy,’ but we can always say whether two expressions are synonymous”, for in fact we cannot. The result of such an exchange is not a clear statement in ordinary language but an obscure philosophical statement. We have left synonymy in a state analogous to that of temperature prior to the thermometer, so what remains is the task of providing a criterion for synonymy analogous to that which is provided by a thermometer in the case of temperature. This may be the task of the psychologist or linguist just as the analogous task in the case of temperature was the physicist’s, but philosophers must avoid turning their backs on the problem as if they had just succeeded in turning a tough customer over to a more gifted salesman. After all, this is our problem and if we want it solved we have a responsibility to turn to psychology. We should take pride in our ontological advance, but we should view it as only the beginning of wisdom. We may take delight in administering our ontological remedy to puzzled and puzzling Platonists, but so long as we acquiesce in an intuited relation of synonymy we are, as it were, linguistic Aristotelians, and that is no place at which to stop. MINDS AND DISPOSITIONS I have dwelt on the problem of essential predication because it is an excellent example of what I have in mind, but there are other cases of semantic obscurity on which deflationary philosophy often rests. We are all familiar with the ways in which contemporary philosophy has tried to avoid the hypothesis of the ghost in the machine, to use Prof. Ryle’s happy characterization of Cartesian dualism.2 Now the anti-Cartesian is a comrade of the anti-Platonist because one wants to find a usable surrogate for statements which commit us to the existence of shadowy minds while the other is devoted to depopulating Plato-land, where things are neither mental nor material. Just as the anti-Platonist resorts to the notion of synonymy in an effort to find a clear substitute for an obscure statement about attributes, the anti-Cartesian makes similar use of the notion of an abstract disposition. But the danger of moving from the ontological obscurity of Cartesianism to the ontological obscurity of abstract dispositions is obvious. The antiCartesian avoids saying “That body contains a mind” by saying “That body has a disposition to behave in a certain way”, but in that case he implies that abstract entities called dispositions exist. He may then say of course that the ontological obscurity that remains may be avoided by shifting one’s language from “That body has a disposition to . . .” to “That body is disposed to . . . .” Here dispositions disappear as entities, and one more step in this direction will lead the antiCartesian to use a counterfactual conditional by saying instead: “If that body were in situation S, it would . . .” But this philosophical move from minds to 2

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949).

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counterfactual conditionals resembles the move from attributes to synonymy because of the difficulties exposed by students of the counterfactual conditional, notably Goodman.3 I will not discuss these difficulties here, except to remark that they are as grave as those encountered in the discussion of synonymy and its sister-notion of analytic statement. In the case of analyticity, we are driven back to the difficult notion of synonymy while, as Goodman shows, the student of counterfactuals must confront the difficult notion of lawlike statement. One might say therefore that this domain is inhabited by something like a dark Freudian libido that may be repressed at one point only to emerge elsewhere. Platonic attributes appear to be eliminable only at the price of an obscure notion of synonymy; Cartesian minds give way to the problematic notion of scientific law, and, I would add, the individual substances of Aristotle are exchanged for nothing better than Mill’s permanent possibilities of sensation. PSYCHOLOGY AS A WAY OUT The examples offered suffice to show the need for not acquiescing in ontological progress that is made at the price of semantic difficulty. Sometimes that difficulty is so stubborn as to suggest that we are dissolving one problem only to usher in a similar one. If this is true, the theory of essential predication that appeals to analyticity and the theory of dispositions that appeals to the counterfactual conditional might founder on rocks on which every empiricism seems doomed to break. However, this is not the lesson I choose to draw, since I am inclined to view the situation more hopefully. The way of unaided metaphysics has been tried and it has failed, while the way of psychology has been spurned by recent philosophers through a failure to see its relevance to the problems I have been discussing. It is therefore unfortunate that contemporary empiricism has turned its back on Mill and Hume at points where they may have had the right hunches about essential predication and scientific law. I do not mean that we ought to adopt the special psychological theories they adopted, but rather that we ought to recognize, as they did, the psychological element in some philosophical problems. In abandoning classical empiricism on these points contemporary empiricists have been prevented from seeing the need for a psychological notion of synonymy and a psychological notion of lawlike statement. Psychological investigation of these concepts has been abandoned by our modern analysts because they have been unduly frightened by the bogey of “psychologism.” Despite believing as I do that the notions of synonymy and lawlike-ness are in such poor shape, I must admit that I cannot produce definitions of them which will show unmistakably that they are psychological in character. But I am inclined to say that if they are not psychological, the situation is hopeless. There is no turning back to subsistent Platonic attributes, to Cartesian substantial souls, 3 Nelson Goodman, “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 44 (1947), pp. 113–28.

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and to Kantian things-in-themselves, but in lifting ourselves into metalinguistics with the help of notions like synonymy and lawlikeness, we require further advances in the manner of empirical science. By contrast, the trouble with the language of the ancients is that in it all cows are black and progress seems hopeless. What we want, therefore, is some way of breaking through this circle of obscurity into the light of day. The way out of some linguistic philosophers is a step in the right direction because it brings us from obscure entities to words, but it is handicapped by the difficulties I have sufficiently elaborated, difficulties that may be removed by psychological investigation.

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On the Church-Frege Solution of the Paradox of Analysis (1948)

ALONZO CHURCH1 has proposed a solution of the paradox of analysis as formulated by C. H. Langford2 in which Church makes use of Frege’s distinction between the sense (Sinn) of a name and its denotation (Bedeutung).3 The main purpose of the present note is to show that a version of the paradox may be presented which is not directly solved by Church in his review but which, in turn, may be solved by using another distinction of Frege—that between the ordinary (gewo¨hnlich) and the oblique (ungerade) use of a name. The second part of the note will be concerned with the relative merits of Frege’s second distinction and W. V. Quine’s related distinction between purely designative occurrences of a name and occurrences which are not purely designative;4 they will be compared merely with respect to their effectiveness in removing or solving the paradox of analysis.

I. An analysis as here understood is a statement of identity of attributes of the following kind: (1) The attribute of being a brother = the attribute of being a male sibling. The paradox as it was formulated earlier arises as a result of putting the expression “the attribute of being a brother” for the expression “the attribute of being a male sibling” in (1) and concluding that (1) expresses the same proposition as that expressed by: (2) The attribute of being a brother = the attribute of being a brother. According to Church this puzzle is a special case of a puzzle of Frege when attributes rather than physical objections are said to be identical. He therefore uses Frege’s method in solving it. Church concludes from the fact that all names have a sense and a denotation that the names of attributes do. His solution 1

In a review in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 11 (1946), pp. 132–33. “The Notion of Analysis in Moore’s Philosophy,” The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schilpp, pp. 321–42. 3 ¨ “Uber Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, vol. C (1892), pp. 25–50. 4 “Notes on Existence and Necessity,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 40 (1943) , pp.113–27. 2

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depends on asserting that the sense of “the attribute of being a brother” is different from the sense of “the attribute of being a male sibling” although the denotations of these names are identical. It follows that we cannot conclude that (1) and (2) have the same sense (i.e., express the same proposition). It seems to me that this is conclusive as against the mode of reasoning used above if one is prepared to endow names of attributes with senses, but now I wish to present a closely related puzzle which can only be solved along these lines, so far as I can see, by using Frege’s other distinction. This puzzle begins with the assumption that the name “brother” expresses the attribute of being a brother, but does not denote it. A similar assumption is made about the name “male sibling.” It follows from (1) that these two names have the same sense. Church says elsewhere: “If a name forming part of a longer name is replaced by another having the same sense, the sense of the whole is not altered.”5 Accordingly, the sense of (1) is the same as the sense of (2), since sentences on Frege’s view are also names whose senses are the propositions they express; therefore we have a puzzle again. The solution of this puzzle follows merely upon introducing Frege’s distinction between the two uses of a name. The point is that the name “brother” in (1) is used obliquely and therefore does not denote the class of all brothers but rather the attribute of being a brother. Therefore it does not express or connote that attribute. The case of “male sibling” in (1) is analogous. It follows that “brother” as used in (1) does not have the name sense as “male sibling” in (1) because both are being used obliquely in that context. It follows that sentences (1) and (2) have not been shown synonymous by this new argument and that the second version of the puzzle is solved. Church has noted the need for a similar distinction in connection with predicates occurring in clauses like “that all men are mortal,” pointing out that “man” and “mortal” occur obliquely therein.6 My remarks are merely an extension of this point to the case of predicates within a context governed by the phrase “the attribute of,” and hence to the situation which has been most discussed in connection with the paradox of analysis.

II. The proposal to regard “brother” and “male sibling” as used obliquely in (1) is related to a problem of Quine’s.7 Since the number of planets = 9 we might expect by substitutivity of identity, according to Quine, to deduce from the truth: (3) The attribute of exceeding 9 = the attribute of exceeding 9. the falsehood: (4) The attribute of exceeding 9 = the attribute of exceeding the number of planets. 5

Review of Carnap’s Introduction to Semantics, Philosophical Review, vol. 52 (1943), p. 301. Ibid., p. 302. 7 Op. cit., p. 126. 6

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Quine’s conclusion is that names like “9” and “the number of planets” do not occur purely designatively in these contexts. The Church-Frege approach, judging from Church’s review of the article of Quine in which this distinction is drawn,8 would lead us to say that these two names are used obliquely in these contexts and hence that they respectively denote what would be their respective senses in ordinary usage, Since the two distinctions are so closely related one might propose the Quine method as a way of solving the paradox of analysis as restated in part I of this note. Since “brother” and “male sibling” are predicates which occur in a context governed by the phrase “the attribute of”, the Quine method suggests that we conclude that “brother” and “male sibling” do not occur in (1) in a purely designative manner. The possible effect of this on situations in which predicates appear within the scope of “the attribute of” may be seen better by choosing another illustration. Let us suppose the following statements to be true: (5) The attribute of being a man = the attribute of being a rational animal (6) rational animal = featherless biped9 And let us suppose that the following is false: (7) The attribute of being a man = the attribute of being a featherless biped. Quine’s method will prevent us from inferring the falsehood (7) from (5) via (6) and substitutivity of identity. It will do so merely by arguing that “rational animal” does not occur purely designatively in (5). But nothing that Quine says would exclude the claim that the meaning (sense) of “rational animal” is identical in contexts (5) and (6). I gather that on Quine’s view the predicate has the same meaning in all contexts, and if we ever construe it as denoting it will never denote what would be its sense in ordinary use. The important point here is that Quine’s theory does not allow us to change the sense of the predicate “brother” when we move it into a context governed by the phrase “the attribute of.”10 The conclusion that may be drawn is that while Quine’s method permits a solution of his own puzzle in connection with the inference from (3) to (4), it does not present any obvious solution of the paradox of analysis as restated in 8

The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 8 (1943), p. 46. The identity here intended would be more clearly rendered by “The class of all rational animals is identical with the class of all featherless bipeds”. 10 I mean here that Quine does not deal with this question explicitly in the paper referred to. It should also be observed that Quine is generally inclined not to think of predicates themselves as designating. This is in conformity with his practice of restricting designation to terms, i.e., expressions that are substituends of variables that are bindable. See his “On the Logic of Quantification,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 10 (1945), pp. 1–3 especially. Contrary to the Church-Frege view, then, Quine does not construe predicates as names. But he does construe them as having meanings; indeed, they have meaning only. The Church-Frege theory is forced to change the meaning (sense) of a name when that name shifts from a context in which it is ordinarily used to one in which it is obliquely used. But since Quine’s predicates, strictly speaking, are not names, they cannot change their denotation, and hence cannot change their meaning or sense in the Fregean manner. It would be worthwhile to consider whether Quine’s predicates might change their meanings in spite of lacking denotation, but the writer has not thought about this sufficiently to offer any proposals. 9

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the first part of these remarks. The Church-Frege method, on the other hand, would appear adequate to both puzzles. The virtue of the latter is the fact that it permits the sense of a name to vary with context. Frege’s ontology is, of course, well-populated, but it should be noted that the paradox of analysis starts by assuming the existence of attributes, and it would appear arbitrary, as Prof. Nelson Goodman has pointed out to me, to assume enough intensions to generate the paradox but not enough to solve it. It should also be pointed out that Quine’s own puzzle in connection with (3) and (4) also assumes attributes provisionally. The chief difference between the purpose of the two distinctions must be noted, however. Quine is led to make his in this context mainly to point out the limitations which we must impose upon inference from statements involving “the attribute of”. Indeed, if one should maintain that (1) and (2) are not synonymous and yet reject Frege’s solution of the puzzle, one will be forced to limit the application of intensional concepts even more severely than Quine does; one will conclude that putting synonyms for synonyms does not always yield synonyms. On the other hand, Frege’s distinction would seem to preserve this rule in the manner illustrated above, albeit with restrictions of the sort indicated; whether two expressions are synonymous will depend on context.”11 A POSTSCRIPT ON A DILEMMA It should be noted that the Church-Frege solution of the paradox of analysis may lead to regarding an analysis such as statement (1) above as synthetic a priori. For if “the attribute of being a brother” differs in sense from “the attribute of being a male sibling”, we may regard (1) as synthetic, just as Frege regards “The morning star = the evening star” as synthetic because the expressions flanking its identity-sign have different senses. However, Frege says that “The morning star = the evening star” is established empirically by observing the astronomical heavens, whereas to establish (1) we presumably have only to examine Plato’s ontological heaven and therefore not engage in empirical observation. If so, (1) is not a synthetic a posteriori truth but a synthetic a priori truth like Kant’s “7 + 5 = 12”. In that case, some philosophers would say that Church’s solution of Langford’s paradox of analysis leads to the untenable view that there are synthetic a priori truths. We are therefore faced with a dilemma: should we say that (1) is analytic, i.e., that “the attribute of being a brother” has the same sense as “the attribute of being a male sibling”, and fall into Langford’s paradox of analysis; or should we say with Church that these two expressions do not have the same sense and therefore say that there are synthetic a priori truths? 11 Since the above was written, Rudolf Carnap has proposed another solution of the paradox in ¨ ber Sinn and Bedeuhis Meaning and Necessity, pp. 63–64, and Max Black has translated Frege’s “U tung” in The Philosophical Review, vol. 57 (1948), pp. 207–30. I have used Church’s translation of “Sinn” as “sense” and “Bedeutung” as “denotation.”

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Oughts and Cans (1979)

FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS, Isaiah Berlin and I have discussed—in and out of print—the relationship between a moral statement that a person ought to perform a certain action and the statement that the action is voluntary.1 I have held that the relationship is not that of logical implication, and I have also held that the relationship is moral because I think it may be expressed by the moral statement “No action is obligatory if it is not voluntary.” But one may see from Berlin’s introduction to his Four Essays on Liberty that while he now seems to agree that the relationship is not logical, he continues to resist my idea that it is moral. And since he tries in some detail to tell us in that Introduction how he does view the relationship, I should like to examine what he says there on this difficult and important philosophical question. We must remember that one of the main theses of Berlin’s Historical Inevitability is that a statement that an agent is under obligation and a statement that the agent’s choice is determined or caused are incompatible; and that is why I had supposed at first that he was arguing in the following familiar way: “Brutus ought to have killed Caesar” logically implies “Brutus killed Caesar voluntarily”; “Brutus killed Caesar voluntarily” logically implies “Brutus’s choosing to kill Caesar was uncaused”; “Brutus’s choosing to kill Caesar was uncaused” logically implies the denial of determinism; therefore, “Brutus ought to have killed Caesar” logically implies the denial of determinism. And if this statement of obligation about Brutus logically implies the denial of determinism, then it is logically incompatible with it. Now I deny the first implication in this chain and I also deny that the statement that Brutus ought to have killed Caesar logically implies that Brutus could have made a different choice from the one he did make. But all of this seems to be beside the point in the light of what Berlin says in his introduction. For there he writes the following about the incompatibility which he asserts: What kind of incompatibility this is, logical, conceptual, psychological, or of some other kind, is a question to which I do not volunteer an answer. The relations of factual beliefs to moral attitudes (or beliefs)—both the logic and psychology of this—seem to me to need further philosophical investigation. The thesis that no relevant logical relationship exists, e.g., the division between fact and value often attributed to Hume, seems to me to be unplausible, and to point to a problem, not to its solution.2 1 See my review of Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (London, 1954), in Perspectives USA, no. 16 (Summer 1956), reprinted above; see my Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York, 1965), chap. 7 passim; also Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty, (New York, 1969), pp. xix–xxiii, xxxvi– xxxvii. 2 Four Essays, p. xii, note 1.

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It would appear from the first two sentences of this passage that although Berlin does not volunteer an answer to the question whether the incompatibility in question is “logical, conceptual, psychological, or of some other kind”, and therefore seems to leave open the possibility that the incompatibility he asserts is moral, later statements by him in his introduction seem to close this door. There he finds it implausible that “no relevant logical relationship” exists between a moral statement of obligation and a factual statement about freedom of choice, even though he seems to say that the relationship of incompatibility he asserts between obligation and determinism is not that which holds between “John is a bachelor” and “John is unmarried”. In the above quoted passage, Berlin seems to assert that the conjunction of the statement that a choice is caused and the statement that it is wrong is unintelligible. We see this most clearly when he advises us what to say to a person of another culture or, for that matter, to a person of our own culture—even to a Hobbes or a Hume—who accepts determinism and at the same time says that Brutus was (or was not) under a moral obligation to kill Caesar. According to Berlin, we should tell that person not that “he was logically contradicting himself . . . but that he was being incoherent, that we could not see what reasons he could have for using such terms, that his language, if it was intended to apply to the real world, was no longer sufficiently intelligible to us”.3 Here it seems that the incompatibility asserted by Berlin is not like that between “John is a bachelor” and “John is unmarried” (or between “John is a bachelor” and “John is not a bachelor”). It is another “logical relationship” that he illustrates first by applying the words “unreasonable” and “incoherent” to those who would say that Brutus ought to have killed Caesar and that determinism is true; “it is not rational”, Berlin also says, “both to believe that choices are caused, and to consider men as deserving of reproach or indignation (or their opposites) for choosing to act or refrain as they do”.4 In trying to understand this statement about incoherence, we are helped by the following passage, in which the connection between determinism and moral discourse is made somewhat clearer by Berlin: The supposition that, if determinism were shown to be valid, ethical language would have to be drastically revised is not a psychological or a physiological, still less an ethical, hypothesis. It is an assertion about what any system of thought that employs the basic concepts of our normal morality would permit or exclude. The proposition that it is unreasonable to condemn men whose choices are not free rests not on a particular set of moral values (which another culture might reject) but on the particular nexus between descriptive and evaluative concepts which governs the language we use and the thoughts we think. To say that you might as well morally blame a table as an ignorant barbarian or an incurable addict is not an ethical proposition, but one which emphasizes the conceptual truth that this kind of praise and blame makes sense only among persons capable of free choices.5 3

Ibid, p. xxii. Ibid. 5 Ibid., pp. xxii–xxiii. 4

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At least two questions are raised by Berlin’s views in this passage. What truth supposedly links the concept of a caused choice with the unintelligibility of which he speaks? And what is the status of this truth? The closest I can come to illustrating a clear singular truth of this kind is this: “If Brutus’s choosing to kill Caesar was caused, then the sentence ‘Brutus deserves praise (or reproach) for choosing to kill Caesar’ is unintelligible.” Generalized, this truth would take something like the following form: “Whenever a choice is caused, then a sentence used to assert that a person who makes that choice deserves praise (or reproach) is not intelligible.” This general truth links two predicates or, perhaps some would prefer to say, two concepts. One is the relatively simple concept of being a caused choice, but the other is more complex, since it is the concept of being a choice referred to in a moral sentence that is not intelligible. What is the status of this general truth? Leaving aside the first long quoted passage in the present essay—that in which Berlin seems to shy away from answering this question—I think we may say on the basis of the second quoted passage that he regards it as what he calls a “conceptual truth” which formulates what he refers to as “the particular nexus between descriptive and evaluative concepts which governs the language we use and the thoughts we think”. In what sense is this a conceptual truth? Surely it is not a so-called analytic truth such as “Every square is a rectangle” or “Every bachelor is unmarried.” It would be hard for those who confidently use the term “analytic” to say that the concept of a caused choice “contains” the concept of a choice which may be said to deserve reproach (or blame) only in an unintelligible sentence. And if we define an analytic truth as one which is true by virtue of the meanings of its terms, it is hard to see that the conceptual truth in question is analytic since its denial is not self-contradictory. I cannot believe, moreover, that Berlin would say that his conceptual truth is synthetic a priori. Berlin tells us that the moral judgment containing “ought” that he has in mind is of the sort that ordinary people make. Yet it is hard to believe that ordinary people hold that it is nonsense to say that a choice which ought to be made is caused since many of them think that nothing happens without a cause. On the contrary, they might be attracted to a view held by G. E. Moore, according to which a choice may be free and yet caused. While considering the view that a voluntary act is one that the agent would not have performed if he had chosen not to perform it and also an act that the agent could have chosen not to perform, Moore proposes two interpretations of “He could have chosen what in fact he did not choose” which logically permit the choice that the agent did in fact make to be caused, and hence not exclude the truth of determinism. According to one interpretation, this sentence means that the agent would have chosen differently if he had chosen so to choose; according to another, it means that no man could know for certain that the agent would not have chosen differently from the way in which the agent did choose. If either of these two interpretations of ordinary language is correct, how can one say that ordinary people think it is nonsensical to say of a caused choice to perform a certain action that the choice or the action is obligatory (or permissible)?

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Does Berlin maintain that no such view of free choice is tenable? Does he also maintain that a similar interpretation of “He chose freely” such as “He was not coerced to choose as he chose”, will produce nonsense when conjoined with a moral judgment of the agent’s action? If so, on what basis does Berlin say so? When he tries to explain why plenty of distinguished thinkers praise or reproach persons for making choices that these thinkers regard as caused, he says that this merely “shows that some normally lucid and self-critical thinkers are at times liable to confusion”. But what do they confuse when they say that a choice that is caused but not coerced is free, and that an action in accordance with such a choice is wrong? Why is it nonsensical to say that a caused choice of this kind is wrong? Up to now, I have questioned two major claims made by Berlin: (a) his claim that it is a “conceptual truth” that a caused choice is praised (or blamed) only in a nonsensical sentence; and (b) his claim that a free choice is analyzable only as an uncaused choice. I contend that no plausible interpretation of the phrase “conceptual truth” will justify claim (a). And claim (b) I have criticized by saying that Berlin has not shown that ordinary people, to whose habits of thought and language he so frequently appeals, believe that “free choice” is synonymous with “uncaused choice”. But let us suppose that Berlin were persuaded to accept some interpretation of “free choice” according to which a free choice may be a caused choice. And let us also suppose that Berlin were then to claim that it was a “conceptual truth” that a sentence in which we praised or blamed a choice that was not free was nonsensical? Would I agree with him? I am afraid not, because I deny that the principle “ ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ ” is conceptual, logical, analytic or logically necessary, and because I do not agree that the sentence “His choice was caused yet wrong” is nonsensical. Had Berlin consistently maintained the agnosticism he avows in the passage first quoted in the present essay about the incompatibility between determinism and moral judgeability, he might have allowed for the possibility that determinism and moral judgeability are morally incompatible rather than logically so. But, we have seen that, soon after he says that he will not volunteer an answer to the question “What kind of incompatibility this is, logical, conceptual, psychological, or of some other kind”, he argues against my view that it is moral. So, having said why I find it difficult to accept Berlin’s view of the relationship between moral statements and statements of freedom, I want now to turn to what he has to say about my different view of the relationship. He focuses on my contention that a person or a culture that does not accept the dictum that “ ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ ” does not make a logical blunder and therefore should not be accused, in the language of older philosophers, of failing to perceive a truth of reason. For this reason, Berlin asks me rhetorically whether I would find it “reasonable” to say to a kleptomaniac: “You cannot, it is true, help choosing to steal, even though you may think it wrong to do so. Nevertheless you must not do it.” Here I must point out that, the word “reasonable” being used as it often is, I would not think it “reasonable”. But such a reply would be compatible with my claim that “ ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ ” is a moral principle. On

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the basis of that moral principle, I might well refrain from passing moral judgment on the action of the kleptomaniac; and I might well say that it would be unreasonable to pass moral judgment on it. Therefore, Berlin cannot refute my view by asking me rhetorically how I could defend passing a moral judgment on an action which I admitted was unfree. The fact is that I would not pass such a moral judgment, because I accept the moral dictum that we ought not to pass such judgment, and in that sense regard the passing of moral judgment as unreasonable. Berlin also criticizes my view by remarking that I fail to recognize that blaming an incurable addict is like blaming a table, and therefore that I fail to see that the unintelligibility of such blame is based on a conceptual rather than an ethical truth.6 Therefore, Berlin says that “The addict ought not to have taken opium yesterday” is unintelligible for the same reason that “The table ought not to have fallen yesterday” is unintelligible. He appears to think that both these sentences are unintelligible because the addict’s taking of the opium and the table’s falling are both unfree in the same sense. But we know that although the table cannot choose to do anything, this is not true of the addict; when the table fell, it did not choose to fall, whereas the addict did choose to take opium when he took it. But since Berlin holds that a free act must be such that the agent could have chosen differently from the way in which he did choose, he could hardly apply the adjective “free” to the addict’s act.7 Since the table did not choose to fall, how could Berlin say that it could have chosen differently from the way in which it did choose? By contrast, the addict did choose to take opium yesterday, and so we may affirm that he could have chosen differently from the way he did choose. Therefore, when Berlin says that the addict’s taking opium yesterday was not free, he must mean something different from what he means when he says that the table’s falling was not free. If so, then the alleged unintelligibility of “The addict ought not to have taken opium yesterday” and “The table ought not to have fallen yesterday” cannot be based on the same considerations. The grounds for not blaming a table might be based on a “conceptual truth” if that kind of truth could be characterized clearly, but that would not touch my claim that the principle on which we do not blame the addict is moral and not conceptual. Under the circumstances, I am very sorry to say that Berlin and I are still far apart on two fundamental questions even though we understand each other far better than we did many years ago. We disagree on the status of “ ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ ” and we disagree on the interpretation of “can”, and either one of these disagreements is enough to divide us on the question whether the acceptance of determinism makes nonsense of certain moral sentences. But is there, I keep asking myself, anything that we could do to bring our views closer together? And the answer I keep coming up with is that Berlin and I had better go on talking with each other for many more years about oughts and cans and their connections with each other.

6 7

Ibid. Ibid., p. 64 note 1.

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Causation and Action (1969)

THE QUESTION WHETHER human actions are causally connected with choices and motives is at least as old as the debate over free will and determinism. Some philosophers have analyzed a voluntary action as one caused by a choice; others have analyzed it as one which would not have been performed if the agent had chosen not to perform it; and still other philosophers, with no explicit metaphysical axe to grind, have asserted that an action may be causally explained by citing a choice or a character trait. In all of these cases it has been argued, and I think correctly, that a causal connection is asserted, either by means of a “because” statement like “He did that because he chose to do it,” or by means of a contrary-to-fact conditional like “He would have done that if he had chosen to do it.” In its logical features the first sort of statement is said to resemble “This match lit because it was struck,” and the second to resemble “That match would have lit if it had been struck.” It has also been correctly argued that we make causal statements when we cite a state or attribute rather than an event in the antecedent of a “because” statement or in the antecedent of a contrary-tofact conditional. We may say “He did that because he was a generous man” or “He would have done that if he had been a generous man,” just as we may say “That match lit because it was dry,” or “It would have lit if it had been dry”. Finally, all of these causal statements have been analyzed, also correctly in my opinion, so as to reveal their logical connections with laws of nature. Those who accept the view that I have been outlining may hold different opinions about the detailed features of those logical connections, but such philosophers are nevertheless banded together in a Humeian community which seems to me to be on the right track. Arrayed against that community there has always been a vocal group of distinguished philosophers who implicitly or explicitly reject the view that choices and actions are causally connected, as well as the view that actions may be causally explained in a manner that requires appeal to laws. But in recent times they have come to sing their song in a particularly alluring and even sirenic manner by using certain techniques of linguistic philosophy. In this paper, therefore, I wish to address myself to certain widely accepted contemporary criticisms which are calculated to undermine the view outlined in the first paragraph above. Those criticisms I shall distinguish as follows: (I) a criticism which relies on what I think are the irrelevant features of certain first-person sentences; (II) one which is based on an excessively narrow view of causal explanation and of its relationship with laws or regularities; (III) one that may be called cryptocausal or cryptodeterministic because it seems to rely on the very notion of causal con-

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nection it purports to dispense with; and (IV) a pair of criticisms that appeal unsuccessfully to a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements or to an allied distinction.

I. The first criticism to which I address myself appears in an examination made by J. L. Austin of certain things said by G. E. Moore. Moore maintained in his Ethics that a voluntary past action is one that the agent was not bound to have done, that is to say, one that the agent could have not done, and (for reasons which we need not consider) Moore defines a voluntary past action as one of which it may be said that if the agent had chosen not to do it, he would not have done it. On the basis of other things that Moore says, it is pretty clear that he thinks of statements of the form “If the agent had chosen to do X, he would have done X” as causal in just the sense in which “If that match had been struck, it would have lit” is causal. And it is for holding such a view that Austin criticizes him. Before examining Austin’s criticism, I want to distinguish certain issues. One is whether the concept of voluntary action is correctly analyzed by Moore in his Ethics. A second issue is whether Moore successfully argued for the analysis given in his Ethics. A third is whether the contrary-to-fact conditional which appears in the analysans of Moore’s analysis is causal in character. Although Austin is concerned with all of these issues in his examination of Moore, it is the third issue that I am primarily concerned with in his paper. Even if Moore be wrong in his analysis of voluntary action and in his defense of that analysis, it does not follow that the contrary-to-fact conditional he includes in the analysans of his analysis is not causal. On that issue, I am convinced that he is right and Austin wrong. With this as preface, let me turn to the relevant parts of Austin’s critique of Moore. Speaking of Moore’s illustration “I should have walked a mile in twenty minutes this morning if I had chosen,” Austin first says that it seems to be “an unusual, not to say queer, specimen of English,”1 and I agree. I can also sympathize with Austin’s inclination to say that it means the same as “If I had chosen to walk a mile in twenty minutes this morning, I should (jolly well) have done so.” I disagree, however, when Austin construes Moore’s illustration as an assertion by the speaker of the speaker’s strength of character, as an assertion of the fact that he puts his decisions into execution. I also disagree with Austin when he says that he would certainly not understand the sentence to mean that “if I had made a certain choice, my making that choice would have caused me to do something.”2 To explain these disagreements, I should first of all point out what I do not think Austin denied, namely that a contrary-to-fact conditional in the third 1 2

J. L. Austin, “Ifs and Cans,” Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961), p. 156. Ibid., p. 157.

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person, like “If that powder had come in contact with a lit match, it would have exploded,” makes no assertion about the character of the powder, like “That powder is dry,” but it does imply that there are features of the powder which, with the feature expressed by “That powder came into contact with a lit match”, make up a conjunction that is connected by law with the feature expressed by “That powder exploded”.3 One of those features may, of course, be the dryness of the powder, but this is compatible with the contention that the dryness of the powder is not asserted by the contrary-to-fact conditional in question. We may now go further and say that the sentence “If that powder had come in contact with a lit match, it would (jolly well) have exploded” is just as causal as the same sentence without the “jolly well,” and that even the sentence with the “jolly well” does not assert that the powder was dry. We may now go still further and say that when I make the first-person statement “If I had chosen to walk a mile in twenty minutes this morning I should (jolly well) have done so”, there is still no more than the implication that I have attributes which, when conjoined with my choosing, lead by law to my walking. There is no more assertion of my having strength of character here than there is of my having had a good sleep the night before. In short, it seems to me that Austin, the past master of noncausal firstperson sentences, has not in this instance produced one that is not causal. Both it and its third-person analogue about the powder fail to assert that an individual has a particular characteristic like strength of character or dryness, and both may have “jolly well” added to them for emphasis and remain causal in character. I grant, of course, that there are other first-person conditional sentences which Austin rightly describes as not being causal, but these other ones do not count against Moore’s view. Consider, for example, what Austin says about “I shall (do it) if I choose (to do it)” in an effort to show that it is not causal. I think he is right when he contrasts it with “I shall ruin him if I am extravagant” by pointing out that while the latter contains a causal “if,” the former does not because it makes good sense to stress the “shall” in the former but not in the latter.4 But this difference disappears when we turn to the third-person counterparts of these sentences: “He will walk a mile in twenty minutes if he chooses” and “He (Smith) will ruin him (Jones) if he (Smith) is extravagant,” and therefore Austin can no longer use his argument about stress in order to distinguish these two sentences. I am sure that Moore would have used third-person illustrations throughout his discussion of free will had he anticipated Austin’s criticism that “I shall” in “I shall if I choose” is “not an assertion of fact but an expression of intention, verging towards the giving of some variety of undertaking.”5 Obviously, “He will run a mile in twenty minutes if he chooses” is not an expression of intention, and therefore what Austin says about “I shall if I choose,” even if it be correct, cuts no ice against Moore’s point when illustrated by the use of third-person sentences. After all, Moore engages in a discussion of “ifs” and “cans” in order to 3

See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Indianapolis, 2nd ed., 1965), chap. 1. Austin, p. 159. 5 Ibid., p. 161. 4

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analyze a feature of actions said to be right and wrong, namely, their voluntariness, and judgments of right and wrong and of the voluntariness of past actions are typically made in third-person sentences of the form “He acted wrongly when he did so-and-so” and “He acted voluntarily when he did so-and-so.” Similarly, when a person is about to perform an act that we think is voluntary, we may say “He will do X if he chooses to do X.” But the person of whom we say “He will do X if he chooses to do X” need never utter the words “I shall do X if I choose to do X,” and therefore the allegedly noncausal character of the latter sentence proves nothing about the former. We may conclude that Austin has not shown in the arguments I have considered that choices are not connected with actions by contrary-to-fact conditionals which are causal.

II. I come now to an effort to show that actions may be explained without the speaker asserting, implying, or relying on “because” statements (rather than contrary-to-fact conditionals) as analyzed by advocates of the regularity theory of explanation. Thus Mrs. Philippa Foot has argued that true statements like “That man gave one quarter of his salary to the United Fund because he is a generous man” provides a counterexample to the regularity theory of explanation simply because it is false that all generous men give a quarter of their salaries to the United Fund.6 But this argument rests on the supposition that advocates of the regularity theory must adopt what I think is a highly vulnerable version of their theory, and once this version is abandoned for a more tenable version of the regularity theory, the argument seems to collapse. The more tenable version I have in mind is one which says that the statement, “That match lit because it was struck,” is true if and only if there are features of the match which, together with its being struck, make up a conjunction that is connected lawfully with its lighting.7 If one adopts this version of the theory, it becomes clear that one may say “That match lit because it was struck” without implying the falsehood that all matches light when they are struck, and without abandoning the regularity theory. Something analogous is true of “This match lit because it was dry.” And once we see that we can assert “This match lit because it was dry” without implying that all dry matches light, we can also see that we can assert “That man gave one quarter of his salary to the United Fund because he is a generous man” without implying, to use Mrs. Foot’s words, “that where the character trait can be predicated the action will invariably follow.”8 If what I have called the less vulnerable version of the regularity analysis of singular “because’ ” statements is adopted, we may regard statements like “That man gave one quarter of his salary 6 Philippa Foot, “Free Will as Involving Determinism,” Philosophical Review, vol. 46 (1957), pp. 439–50. 7 See my Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York, 1965), chap. 3. 8 Foot, op. cit., p. 441.

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to the United Fund because he is generous” as causal and logically linked with laws, only the link is more complex than that envisioned by a simpleminded advocate of the regularity theory. We need not pause very long to show that this view allows us to see why singular “because” statements which refer to traits in their antecedents and events in their consequents are perfectly respectable causal statements. Moreover, we can see by inspecting ordinary language that it is false to say that an event can happen only because of an event. An automobile accident may have taken place because of the icy condition of the road and, as we now see, this may be true without it following that where iciness can be predicated of a road on which automobiles are traveling, automobile accidents invariably follow.

III. We may now turn to another argument offered by Mrs. Foot. She points out, I think correctly, that when we explain a man’s action by saying that he was acting out of revenge on a given occasion, we do not cite one of his character traits, and here, she seems to think, we have a clear example of an explanation which is not causal or deterministic. But I do not think that when Mrs. Foot analyzes it she shows that it is an illustration in her favor. This is where what I have called “cryptodeterminism” seems to emerge. It emerges in the course of Mrs. Foot’s attempt to show that a statement like “His motive in doing that was revenge” (which I take to be equivalent to “He did that out of revenge”) is not causal in the sense favored by advocates of the regularity theory of explanation. “Assigning a motive to an action,” she says, “is not bringing it under any law; it is rather saying something about the kind of action it was, the direction in which it was tending, or what it was done as.” 9 In other words, Mrs. Foot maintains that sometimes when we seek an explanation of an action by asking for its motives we are asking a question which is properly answered by our being told something about what kind of an action it was. In that case, she seems to say, the answer to our question will not be a “because” statement which may be analyzed as we have analyzed “That match lit because it was struck” or “That match lit because it was dry.” Mrs. Foot holds that in some cases “finding the motive will be . . . described as finding what was being done—finding, for instance, that someone was taking revenge” in, say, striking a person.10 Then, if the question is “Why did he strike her?” the answer may be “In striking her he was taking revenge on her.” How, now, do we find out whether he was taking revenge on her? According to Mrs. Foot, “We should take it that a man’s motive was revenge if we discovered that he was intentionally harming someone and that his doing so was conditional on his believing that that person 9

Ibid., p. 447. Ibid.

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had injured him.”11 But if this is how we discover that he was taking revenge on her, then the statement “He was taking revenge on her” is either logically equivalent to or supported by a causal statement—namely, “He intentionally harmed her because he believed that she had injured him.” And this is what I have called “cryptodeterminism,” for I do not see any plausible interpretation of “His harming her was conditional on his believing that she had injured him” which does not show it to be causal in precisely the sense in which “That match lit because it was struck” and “That match lit because it was dry” are. In short, the statement in which we explain the action by citing a motive is either causal or supported by a causal statement. If this is so, then Mrs. Foot has certainly not succeeded in excluding causal knowledge from our explanation of an action by citing a motive. She tacitly admits that in certain cases a person who explains an action by citing a motive must or may show that the agent did something because he believed something. Why, then, should we not conclude that the statement “In striking her he was taking revenge on her” made in answer to the question “Why did he strike her?” is equivalent to “He struck her because he believed that she had injured him,” in which case an explanation which assigns a motive to an action is obviously causal. It may not “bring the action under a law” in a simple way, but it implies the existence of a law just as “That match lit because it was struck” and “That match lit because it was dry” do. How else were the believing and the striking related if the latter was conditional on the former?

IV. Finally, I come to two arguments which unsuccessfully appeal to a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. First, I consider one offered by Mrs. Foot and then one that has been presented by Professor Melden. Mrs. Foot tries to show that intentions are not causally related to actions by employing a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Her illustration, with a slight alteration that does not affect the issue, is “His motive for going to the station last night was to take a train to London,” where his motive may be described as an intention. Mrs. Foot says: But where motives are intentions it is clear that they cannot be determining causes; for intending to do X and being ready to take the steps thought necessary to do X are connected not empirically but analytically. A man cannot be said to have an intention unless he is reconciled to what he believes to be the intermediate steps. We cannot speak as if the intention were something which could be determined first, and “being ready to take the necessary steps” were a second stage following on the first.12

What is being claimed here? The action is his going to the Oxford station last night. His intention (and his motive) was to take a train to London. So we may say “Jones went to the Oxford station last night because Jones had the intention 11 12

Ibid. Ibid., p. 444.

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of taking a train to London.” Now even the most hardened and confident user of that difficult term “analytic” cannot say that this statement is analytic on the ground that intending to take a train to London and being ready to take the steps thought necessary to take a train to London are connected analytically. Presumably the statement which Mrs. Foot believes is analytic is (a) “Because Jones intended last night to take a train to London, Jones was ready last night to take the steps he thought necessary to take a train to London.” But surely the analyticity of (a) does not imply the analyticity of (b) “Because Jones intended last night to take a train to London, Jones went to the Oxford station last night.” To show the analyticity of (b), one would have to assert not only that (a) is analytic but also assert the analyticity of (c) “Because Jones was ready last night to take the steps he thought necessary to take a train to London, he went to the Oxford station last night.” So even a philosopher who thinks “analytic” is a clear term will not say that (c) is analytic. It is logically possible that Jones was ready to take the steps he thought necessary to take a train to London and yet did not go to the Oxford station. Once we point out that Mrs. Foot has made a fallacious inference from the analyticity of (a) to the analyticity of (b), we have undercut the contention that explaining Jones’s action last night by citing his intention must be done in an analytic rather than a synthetic statement. The most that she has shown is that his having the intention to take a train to London and his being ready to take steps necessary to take a train to London are analytically connected. However, we were not concerned to explain his readiness to do something, but his doing something last night. Moreover, as we have seen, even though the intention in question and the readiness in question be connected analytically, the intention and the action are connected synthetically if the statement of readiness to do something of a certain kind does not analytically imply a statement that an action of that kind has been performed. Other philosophers have used the concept of analyticity or something close to it in an effort to refute what I have earlier called the Humeian view of the connection between choices and actions. Ironically enough, some of them appeal to Hume’s own more general views on causal connection in order to undermine his more specific view of the connection between choice and action, and between decision and action. The purpose of their argument is to show that neither “He would have walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday if he had chosen to walk a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” nor “She walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday because she chose to walk a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” is causal because each of them violates one of Hume’s conditions for being an empirical causal statement. The choosing, it is said by Prof. Melden, “must be logically distinct from the alleged effect—this surely is one lesson we can derive from a reading of Hume’s discussion of causation. Yet nothing can be an act of volition that is not logically connected with that which is willed—the act of willing is intelligible only as the act of willing whatever it is that is willed.”13 And elsewhere Melden says, “If I decide to do X, the decision is intelligible only as the decision 13

A. I. Melden, Free Action (London, 1961), p. 53.

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to do X. The reference to the doing is logically essential to the very thought of the decision.”14 From this I conclude that Prof. Melden thinks that both “He would have walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday if he had chosen to walk a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” and “She walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday because she chose to walk a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” are analytic, or that they have whatever property it is that he wishes to ascribe to such statements when their antecedents and consequents refer to things that are “logically connected.” Here I will not take the defensible but conversation-stopping tack of saying that I do not understand what he means by “logically connected.” But I must ask whether he supposes that “He would have walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday if he had chosen to walk a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” is seen to be true merely by examining the meanings of its component terms. And I would ask the same question about “She walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday because she chose to walk a mile in twenty minutes yesterday.” Does Prof. Melden want to say, in the familiar jargon, that the denials of these statements are self-contradictory or logically impossible? Does he really want to say that choosing to do X logically necessitates doing X? I can hardly believe this and therefore I am inclined to think that he has gotten into his predicament by overlooking the following points. Let us suppose that Prof. Melden is right in saying that we cannot understand a sentence of the form “He decided to X” without understanding the expression that is put for “X”. From this it does not follow that “Because he decided to X, he X’ed” is analytic or logically true. Perhaps an analogy will help make the point. It might be said that there is a sense of the word “understand” in which we cannot understand a sentence of the form “He believes p” unless we understand the sentence in place of “p”. But even if we should maintain this, we certainly would not say that “He believed he would climb the Matterhorn the next day” logically implies “He climbed the Matterhorn the next day.” William James seems to have thought that on certain occasions “p” was the case because “p” had been believed by him to be the case. Are we then to say that “James started to climb the Matterhorn at 9:29 on January 1, 1891, because James believed at 9:29 of that day that he would start to climb the Matterhorn that day” is analytic? Surely James’s belief that he would perform the action was not analytically connected with his performing that action even though the belief-sentence about James could not be understood unless the nonbelief-sentence about James contained in it as a part was understood. I am inclined to think that the situation is similar in the case of choicesentences, which are, I might add in passing, intensional contexts as beliefsentences are. “She chose to walk a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” may be construed as meaning the same as “She chose for it to be the case that she walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday.” But surely this does not logically imply “She walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday.” Choices are often frustrated. And 14

Ibid., p. 203.

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that is why we cannot argue that the first sentence cannot causally imply the second sentence by pointing out that we cannot understand the first without understanding the second. Even if it be true that we cannot understand the choice-sentence without understanding the action-sentence, the choice-sentence may causally imply the action-sentence. If I am correct, Prof. Melden has failed to see the difference between the implications of saying that you cannot understand the logical conjunction “She washed her hair yesterday and she walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” without understanding its second conjunct, and the implications of saying that you cannot understand “She chose for it to be the case that she walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday” without understanding “She walked a mile in twenty minutes yesterday.” In the former case, the fact that you cannot understand the longer sentence without understanding the shorter one may entitle you to say that the longer logically implies the shorter but in the latter case this is not so. Perhaps this also shows why one might well be leery about defining “analytic” in terms of the notion of not being able to understand one expression without understanding another. Those who are not leery about this might also ponder the fact that you cannot understand “A or B” without understanding “A.” Does it follow that “If A or B, then A” is analytic? Obviously not. This example shows, of course, that we need not cite intensional contexts in order to refute the view under consideration. Intensional contexts form only a subclass of those that do not behave as Melden might like them to behave. Think also of “If notA, then A.” In conclusion I should say that I have focused on the particular arguments I have chosen to rebut, not only because they have been advanced by serious philosophers from whose work I have learned much but also because they seem to me to reflect styles of argument that are more popular in contemporary philosophy than they are effective. They illustrate, I believe, three unfortunate tendencies in recent philosophy: an excessive reliance on the supposedly eye-opening features of first-person sentences, an excessively narrow view of the regularity theory of causal explanation, and a deplorable looseness in most philosophical talk about the analytic, the synthetic, and allied notions.

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Hart and Honore´ on Causation in the Law (1960)

CAUSATION IN THE LAW, by H.L.A. Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, and A. M. Honore´, Rhodes Reader in Roman-Dutch Law at the same university, is an excellent study of the main problems that surround the idea of causation in the law. It is an unusually careful and lucid treatment of a perplexing set of concepts and a splendid example of the way in which the tools of contemporary philosophical analysis may be fruitfully applied. Prof. Hart is a distinguished philosopher as well as a legal scholar, a representative of a point of view that now flourishes at Oxford and that lays great stress on the analysis of concepts employed in ordinary language. It is therefore not surprising to learn that Hart and his colleague Honore´ believe the statement, often made by the courts in England, that it is the plain man’s notions of causation with which the law is concerned. One of the authors’ two main objectives in this book is to analyze these notions in a logically acceptable manner, hoping to free them from the unclarity and ambiguity that has come to surround them through the unnecessary use of obscure imagery and metaphorical expression. Their other objective is to examine critically the view that the ordinary man’s causal language is hopelessly obscure and that the law must instead use language that makes explicit reference to considerations of policy, expediency, or justice in the determination of legal responsibility. According to Hart and Honore´ there are “three different concepts latent in ordinary thought from which the causal language of the lawyer . . . very frequently draws its force and meaning.”1 The first of these, which they regard as the central concept, is that of a contingency initiating a series of changes that exemplify general connections between types of events, as when we say “The explosion of gas caused the building to collapse.” The second concept is that of a man providing another with a reason for doing something: “He made him hand over his money by threatening to shoot.” And the third concept is that of providing an opportunity that is later exploited by someone, as when we say “The consequence of leaving the car unlocked was that it was stolen.” Because these are thought by the authors to be three distinct causal concepts, different analyses are provided for each, and since the first is said to be central, it receives the most attention from Hart and Honore´. They begin with an exposition of the doctrines of Hume and Mill, who made the idea of regular sequence or invariable connection central in the analysis of causation. The authors give special attention to Mill’s claim that the invariable connection upon which a causal statement depends is usually between a complex set of contingencies and 1

P. 2.

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the event explained. According to Mill, when one speaks strictly, one must specify all of the contingencies that are sufficient to produce the effect; and so, on Mill’s view, instead of asserting that the dropping of a lit cigarette was the cause of the fire, one should rather assert something like “The dropping of a lit cigarette on dry paper in the presence of oxygen invariably and unconditionally leads to fire.” Ordinary language, Mill held, is defective precisely because it singles out the so-called cause—the dropping of a lit cigarette in this case—from among several factors, some of which, like the presence of oxygen, are conceived as “mere conditions.” Mill went on to speculate about the basis on which the socalled cause was “selected” by common sense from among the several contingencies whose joint presence results in the effect, and, unfortunately according to the authors, encouraged the view that in ordinary language determination of the cause of an event is arbitrary to the extent to which there is no basis for distinguishing objectively between a cause and “mere conditions.” While the authors present an analysis of the central concept of causation which is in the tradition of Mill, they deny that all of the jointly sufficient contingencies are on a par and that the decision to call one of them the cause can only be made on extra-factual grounds. They therefore criticize and modify Mill’s analysis in great detail. They rest their own version of the traditional distinction between causes and “mere conditions” on two other distinctions: one between abnormal and normal conditions, and another between voluntary action and its opposite. They argue that a cause is typically sought when we wish to explain a departure from the normal course of events—a catastrophe or a disaster, for example—in which case the cause will also be an unusual thing, an intrusion, the thing that “makes the difference.” The train wreck is said to be caused by the bent rail even though it was the bent rail together with the fact that the train was going at a certain speed (and other facts, of course) that led to the wreck. To cite the speed—when it is the normal speed of the train—as the cause would be wrong precisely because it is normal and therefore present as a factor when trains are not wrecked. Hence it is a “mere condition” in this case. The authors introduce the idea of a voluntary action because it is thought by them to mark a limit and a goal in causal inquiries that distinguishes it from a condition. They say, “A deliberate human act is . . . something through which we do not trace the cause of a later event and something to which we do trace the cause through intervening causes of other kinds.”2 Of course, in saying that a cause is an abnormal contingency or a voluntary human act, or both, the authors do not wish to claim that such features of causes are always easily detected. Abnormality and voluntariness shade into their opposites in ways that often require judgment and a lively awareness of the context of the causal inquiry. Having prepared the reader so carefully in their opening philosophical chapters, Hart and Honore´ then lead him through legal decisions in a very detailed manner to support their contention that “over a great range of cases where causal connexion with harm is made an element in responsibility, the courts . . . have 2

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sought to apply the notion that an act is the cause of harm if it is an intervention in the course of affairs which is sufficient to produce the harm without the cooperation of the voluntary actions of others or abnormal conjunctions of events.”3 And once Hart and Honore´ have presented the plain man’s idea of causation as “a species of basic model in the light of which the courts see the issues before them,”4 they proceed to their second main objective, which is to examine carefully, and for the most part negatively, that policy-stressing view which they think Mill encouraged and which they designate as their main polemical target. According to this view, although legal rules specify the punishment that men shall receive or the compensation they shall make for the harm their wrongful acts have caused or “proximately caused,” as soon as it is determined that the wrongful act is one of the factors that jointly suffice to produce harm, the courts need not discuss any further causal question. On this view, “The only question is what limits the courts ought to impose on the wrongdoer’s liability, and no answer is to be found to this question by thinking about the meaning or meanings of causation.”5 In determining a wrongdoer’s liability for harm, the courts use language that is deceptive. They ask whether the harm was the “consequence” or “effect” or “caused by” the wrongful act, whether the harm was “too remote,” whether some extraordinary natural event was a “superseding cause.” But although such language gives the impression that the court is dealing with a question of fact, this is illusion for, according to the doctrine examined by the authors, “these questions are never questions of fact. They are to be answered, not by inquiring whether the facts of a particular case fall under some general definition of causal connexion, but only by inquiring what limit on liability or responsibility is required by ‘the scope’, ‘the purpose’, or ‘the policy’ of specific legal rules involved in the particular case.”6 It is important to be clear about the nature of the authors’ reply to this “newer doctrine.” They claim in effect that they have presented an analysis of the main concepts of causation as the concepts are used in ordinary life and in many judicial decisions that does make it correct to view many causal questions as factual. They acknowledge, however, that in some branches of the law—for example, when liability for negligence and breach of statutory duty are involved—transformations have occurred that virtually eliminate causal connection as an element in determining responsibility. They also acknowledge that a legal system need not make causal connection with harm a factor in liability, and they are prepared to admit that in some cases the law might do well to abandon the notion. But they deplore argument that rests on faulty philosophical analysis of ordinary causal language and, on failure to respect the thought processes by which many legal decisions are reached. Hart and Honore´ rightly point out that it is necessary to distinguish the claim that so-called policy decisions are all that should be in the 3

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minds of courts when discussing proximate causation from the claim that this is all that is or ever has been in their minds. They insist therefore on making a distinction between the proposal to replace causal notions by considerations of policy and the contention that there is nothing to replace. They rightly protest against the extreme view that seemingly causal questions are never questions of fact and always questions of policy, though they grant that in some borderline cases it is hard to say which kind of question is being asked and that in other cases factual considerations and policy considerations fuse. For insisting on such important truths and distinctions, Hart and Honore´ deserve the gratitude of lawyers and philosophers. By their painstaking examination of the idea of causation as it is used both in everyday language and the law, they have brilliantly illustrated the practical importance of philosophical analysis.

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The Question of Free Will: Some Preliminary Remarks (1993)

ANYONE WHO ASKS at the end of the twentieth century what free will is, whether we have it, and how we know that we have it, owes an explanation to those who may wonder why they should read yet another volume devoted to these antique and supposedly antiquated questions. In reply to those who so wonder I should say that my treatment of the subject is distinguished by advocating a combination of ideas that may make this study of interest even to hardened specialists on free will and to those who have studied the long history of philosophical thinking about it. I summarize these ideas while fully aware that some of them have been advocated by other philosophers and that no writer on free will can ever be sure that any of his or her ideas on this much-examined subject are absolutely original. But I do so because I assume that the reader would prefer to know now what he or she is getting into with me, even at the expense of being less surprised later on.

A MORAL PRINCIPLE LINKS “OUGHT” AND “CAN” Suppose that a moral adviser of Cicero tells Cicero that he ought to kill Caesar because Caesar is a tyrant and all tyrants ought to be killed by those who have an opportunity to do so. Does the adviser’s statement that Cicero ought to kill Caesar logically imply the statement that Cicero is free to kill Caesar? My answer is that it does not imply it in the sense in which some philosophers might say that the statement that Cicero is a man logically implies that Cicero is an animal. Instead, I believe that the inference from “Cicero ought to kill Caesar” to “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” rests on a moral principle which says that every action that one is morally obligated to perform is an action that one is free to perform. If the adviser assumes this moral principle and the statement that Cicero is morally obligated to kill Caesar, the adviser may of course validly deduce from these two premises that Cicero is free to kill Caesar. But the adviser cannot immediately, on logical grounds alone, deduce the statement that Cicero is free to kill Caesar from the statement that he ought to kill him. Nor can the adviser correctly claim that the conjunction of the statement “Cicero ought to kill Caesar” and “Cicero is not free to kill Caesar” is unintelligible, as some have argued. In rejecting the idea that this conjunction is self-contradictory or unintelligible, I prepare the way for my own affirmative view of the connection between “ought” and “can”, or between “ought” and “free”.

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In addition to presenting this moral view of the relation between “ought” and “free”, I deal with the vexed problem of the relation between free will and determinism. I begin by examining the view that “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” logically implies “Cicero can choose to kill Caesar”, and that the latter statement logically implies that Cicero’s not choosing to kill Caesar is not causally necessitated by anything. After criticizing this attempt at showing that “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” logically implies the falsity of the principle of universal causation or determinism, I then examine a more recent argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. AN ASIDE ON THE ANALYTIC AND THE SYNTHETIC Since I have said that “Cicero ought to kill Caesar” does not logically imply “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” in the sense in which some philosophers say that “Cicero is a man” logically implies “Cicero is an animal”, I may appear to be departing from views that I have defended elsewhere.1 For it may be thought that by speaking in this way I give my support to the idea that the statement “If Cicero is a man, then Cicero is an animal” is analytic in a sense that I have criticized in other writings whereas “If Cicero ought to kill Caesar, then Cicero is free to kill Caesar” is synthetic. It may also be thought that in stating a view of what “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” means—which I will try to do later—I once again fall into a way of speaking that reveals conscious or unconscious acceptance of views of analyticity that I have sometimes attacked rather vehemently. For this reason, I want, at the earliest possible moment, to head off the idea that I am backtracking on this important philosophical issue. I continue to believe that the effort to demarcate sharply between the analytic and the synthetic by resting on alleged knowledge of the relationship between Platonic concepts or meanings is misguided, but I do not think that I am therefore forbidden to use philosophical terminology that is sometimes associated with the doctrine that such a demarcation is defensible. In other words, I think that I may say without fear of backtracking that “Cicero ought to kill Caesar” does not logically imply “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” without being committed to the view that a logical implication is true by virtue of the meanings or attributes expressed by the terms in the relevant sentences whereas a nonlogical implication is not. I may say all of this because, in calling an implication “logical” as opposed to “nonlogical” as I did earlier in this chapter, I record my view that it is one that I am very reluctant to surrender as opposed to one that I am not so reluctant to surrender. In other words, I say that the supposedly analytic statement “If Cicero is a man, then Cicero is an animal” is one that I am exceedingly reluctant to surrender whereas the supposedly synthetic statements “If Cicero is a man, then Cicero is a biped” and “If Cicero ought to kill Caesar, then Cicero is free to kill Caesar” are statements that I am less reluctant to surrender in the 1

See my Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), esp. chaps. 7, 8, and 9.

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face of what might appear to be adverse experience. This gradualistic view is closely connected with the holistic or corporatist theory of knowledge that I espouse, a theory which says that we test our beliefs against experience in conjunctions. So, if the two statements (1) “If Cicero is a man, then Cicero is an animal” and (2) “If Cicero ought to kill Caesar, then Cicero is free to kill Caesar” were both in a conjunction that led logically to a faulty prediction, and if the resulting defect in our conjunctive theory could be repaired by surrendering (1) or (2), then statement (2) would be surrendered and removed from our theory more readily than statement (1) would be. And this epistemological situation would not change in my opinion if one were to call (1) a logically true conditional statement and (2) a morally true conditional statement. I want to assure some of my readers that I continue to think that the distinction between so-called analytic and synthetic statements is best viewed as a matter of degree even though, in an effort to communicate with those who think otherwise, I use their terminology. Although the literature on free will contains terms that reflect the acceptance of views that I reject, I think I can state the issues and offer my own views on free will without lapsing into what I regard as errors regarding analyticity and allied notions. And where I seem to lapse into such errors, I hope that charitable readers will do me the favor of reading my terminology in a manner that will render what I say compatible with what I have said in this section.

WHAT HAVING FREE WILL IS It is sometimes said that “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” is synonymous with the statement “If Cicero chooses to kill Caesar, he will kill him”,2 but this view is not accepted by philosophers who rightly say that this conditional statement must be supplemented at least by the statement “Cicero can choose to kill Caesar” if we are to express what “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” means. Some philosophers who insist on such an addition go on to say that “Cicero can choose to kill Caesar” must be interpreted as meaning the same as “Cicero’s not choosing to kill Caesar is not causally necessitated by anything”. However, in my view, the added possibility-statement that Cicero can choose to kill Caesar need not be interpreted in this antideterministic way. In criticizing this argument for antideterminism, I point out that the added possibility-statement should rather be understood to say that Cicero’s not choosing to kill Caesar is not causally necessitated by certain specified things or by things of a certain kind. But this approach need not faze another kind of antideterminist, who says that determinism is to be rejected because it logically implies that whether Cicero chooses to kill Caesar or not, his choosing or his not choosing will be causally necessitated by things that happened before Cicero’s birth and over which he has no control. This antideterminist presents an argument against determinism that I shall also consider later on in this book [The Question of Free Will ]. 2

See G. E. Moore, Ethics (repr. London, 1949), chap. 6.

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Before proceeding any further it will be helpful if I say what I mean by the doctrine that we have free will. I mean simply that human beings are often free to perform actions; and when we say that a particular human being named “Hea” has this freedom, we mean to assert—for reasons that I shall later discuss—the following conjunction: (1) If Hea chooses to perform the action, Hea will perform it; and (2) Hea can choose to perform it; and (3) if Hea chooses not to perform the action, Hea will not perform it; and (4) Hea can choose not to perform it.3 Here the conjunction of (1) and (2) says that the agent can perform the action; the conjunction of (3) and (4) says that the agent can avoid performing the action; and the conjunction of (1), (2), (3), and (4) says that the agent is free to perform the action. If we wish to say merely that the agent is free to choose to perform the action, we need only assert the conjunction of (2) and (4). So if we should say that we have free choice (by contrast to free will), we mean that human beings often make free choices.

HOW WE KNOW WE HAVE FREE WILL As I have already indicated, another of the main ideas employed in this study is an epistemological doctrine that I have elsewhere called “corporatism”, a doctrine outlining the method whereby we justify the belief that we have free will as I understand it. This doctrine is closely connected with the holistic view of Pierre Duhem and W. V. Quine that scientists do not usually test isolated beliefs or statements but, rather, bodies or conjunctions of statements or beliefs.4 However, my corporatism differs from the view of some other holists insofar as I hold that moral beliefs may be included in a tested body of beliefs that also includes nonmoral beliefs. Let us suppose that a philosopher agrees with me that we cannot immediately deduce “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” from “Cicero ought to kill Caesar”. If, however, he begins his thinking about free will with premises—some moral and others not—that lead him to make a moral statement like “Cicero ought to kill Caesar”, he may infer from this moral statement and the moral principle that all obligatory acts are free the statement “Cicero is free to kill Caesar”. This same philosopher, however, may now part company with me and 3 Locke says “Liberty ’tis plain consists in a Power to do, or not to do; to do, or forbear doing as we will,” Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 270. And Hume says: “By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may” Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Hume’s Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1902), p. 95. To such statements, I add two statements about possibility of choice. 4 “See Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, Philosophical Review 60 (1951), reprinted in Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 20–46; also Quine, “Five Milestones of Empiricism”, in his Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 71. For Duhem’s views, see his The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1954), esp. pp. 187–90. My own view is presented in What Is and What Ought To Be Done (New York, 1981), esp. chap. 2, but I wish to take this occasion to say that I think my present view of free will is superior to the view I merely outline in that work.

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say, as I have remarked earlier, that he can deduce from “Cicero is free to kill Caesar” that Cicero’s not choosing to kill Caesar is not causally necessitated by anything. While reasoning in this way such a philosopher accepts a partly descriptive, partly moral body or conjunction of beliefs that should, I contend, meet certain corporatist standards of testing. And I hope to show by applying such standards that this philosopher’s conjunction of beliefs should be abandoned in favor of a conjunction that replaces the statement that Cicero can choose to kill Caesar by a denial of a statement that certain specific items causally necessitate Cicero’s not choosing to kill Caesar—for example, by a denial of the statement that Cicero’s not choosing to kill Caesar is causally necessitated by Cicero’s experiencing an attack of a choice-preventing mental disease. I think that such a conjunction is preferable to others for reasons similar to those that make one scientific theory preferable to another. I hope to show how the ideas I have sketched not only clarify but, I dare say, contribute to the solution of some of the most pressing problems concerning free will. I doubt that what I say will satisfy all readers, but I hope to formulate the main problems concerning free will in a way that will clarify alternative solutions that are open to all of us and call attention to considerations that should be weighed by anyone who proposes a solution. There is, however, no solution to these problems that all persons accept, and the main conclusions to which I come on these matters rest on views about which a consensus may be especially hard to reach. Many widely held views about what the connection is between a moral statement and a statement of freedom, and about how we should understand free action and free choice are views that are neither obvious truths nor deducible from obvious truths. If, however, we adopt a moral version of the principle that “ought” implies “free”, according to which it may be interpreted differently by different persons, and a related view of the variable meaning of a sentence such as “Cicero can choose to kill Caesar”, we may better understand why philosophers find it so hard to agree about the subject of this study. Like Hume, I think that the question of free will is “the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science”; but unlike Hume, I do not think that “by liberty . . . we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will”,5 since I believe that some determinations of the will or choices must themselves be possible in some sense if we are to have liberty or freedom of action. My method of specifying this sense of “possible choice” leads me to say with William James: “I . . . disclaim openly . . . all pretension to prove . . . that the freedom of the will is true”; I also agree with James “that its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.”6 Finally, I should emphasize that although many philosophers have held as I do that all obligatory actions are free, few philosophers maintain as I do that this is a moral principle which need not be accepted by everyone, and that sentences 5

Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 95. William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism”, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 115. 6

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such as “Cicero can choose to kill Caesar” may be expanded and analyzed in ways that may vary with the person who is doing the expanding and analyzing. The relativism or pluralism that underlies my saying this will, I hope, become clearer later on when I defend my view of the principle that all obligatory actions are free and when I explain the two-step process of expanding and analyzing a sentence such as “Cicero can choose to kill Caesar”.

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Pragmatism In the first essay in this part, I call attention to the more technical contributions of Harvard philosophers during its Golden Age in order to counteract the view that James, Royce, and Santayana were merely popular philosophers; and in most of the other essays I focus on the epistemological and ethical views of philosophers associated with pragmatism in different degrees. In “Experiment and Necessity in Dewey’s Philosophy” I critically examine Dewey’s views on epistemological and semantical topics, and in “Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis”, I compare the views of Dewey and C. I. Lewis on ethical concepts. Since Dewey left a posthumously published reply to my reservations about his ethical views, I respond to that in “Desire and Desirability: A Rejoinder to a Posthumous Reply by John Dewey”; and in “Peirce’s Summum Bonum and the Ethical Views of C. I. Lewis and John Dewey,” I comment on Lewis’s reaction to what I had said about his views in ethics. Next I reprint an essay on W. V. Quine entitled “Normative Ethics, Normative Epistemology, and Quine’s Holism,” to which Quine later replied; and after that I reprint my rejoinder to that reply in an excerpt from my book A Philosophy of Culture, where I maintain that logical, physical, and moral beliefs are holistically tested to see whether they collectively organize a flux that includes moral feelings and sensory experiences. I conclude this part with an essay in which I argue that unlike certain psychologically oriented philosophers of the twentieth century, Hume did not use his psychologism to blur the sharp distinction between mathematical truths and truths about nature but inconsistently used it in support of such a distinction.

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Harvard’s Philosophical Heritage (1957)

THE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHICAL movement that seriously influenced Vienna, Cambridge, and Oxford in the twentieth century could hardly have left Harvard untouched, and for this reason the following questions are asked by many whose conception of the subject was formed in an earlier generation: “What has happened to philosophy at Harvard? Where is the Alpine splendor of Royce’s absolute idealism, the playful practicality of James, and the literate Latin naturalism of Santayana? All melted away! And what do we see now but a wasteland of linguistic analysis, a verbalistic desert, a dusty retreat without even a Whitehead to blow the metaphysical bugle or to cover the stark logistics with clouds of wisdom?” This might be the reaction of a hostile, nostalgic critic of almost all of contemporary American philosophy. And although the invitation to write this article limits me to a description of philosophy at Harvard, what I have to say in response holds for a considerable part of the American philosophical scene. No discussion of Harvard philosophy can begin without a bow to the giants of the old days, not a pious ceremonial bow but one which sincerely celebrates their profound effect on the development of American philosophy in the twentieth century. Though this gesture may seem excessively ironical to those who see contemporary Anglo-American philosophy as depressingly different from philosophy in the Gay Nineties of the nineteenth century, it is a mistake to suppose that American philosophers have completely abandoned the traditional interests and humane concerns of Royce, James, and Santayana. Some Harvard philosophers are still interested in the problems of philosophical theology; in problems posed by the arts, politics, morality, education; and in the history of philosophy. And if they do not regularly issue large volumes reporting their discoveries, this is the result of a great change in the subject which was promoted by James, Royce, and Santayana themselves in their deeper moments, a change which has not only radically altered the interests of American philosophers but also forced traditionalists to set forth their views in a more guarded, less flamboyant way. From a literary point of view this change has been reflected in the fact that the article or essay has come to be a very important means of scholarly communication, much as it is in science and mathematics. This has happened partly because of the need to pursue individual points meticulously and to submit them quickly to the scrutiny of one’s professional colleagues, and partly because of a widespread conviction that philosophical reflection cannot always issue in a swollen, two-volume system which relates everything in the universe to everything else. This deflationary feature of contemporary philosophy is most striking in Great Britain and in the United States, where published collections of articles by many hands are far more common than they were fifty years ago. It represents

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a far cry from Royce, who, when he was once asked to write an article for a magazine, replied that he could not comply because he was “doing his thinking in book lengths”. Since Royce’s day the growth of rigor and the need for intellectual cooperation has affected the style of philosophy in a manner comparable to that in which it has affected the style of science, of history, and even of literary studies. In the natural sciences and mathematics, it is almost indecent to publish one’s results in a book, and we are all aware of the scorn for Toynbee’s massive productions which prevails among tough, monographic historians. And yet in spite of this universally acknowledged trend toward specialization in our time, philosophers are criticized for turning their attention to highly specialized questions. One is almost led to think that the self-doubts of the rest of the scholarly world in this regard have been concentrated and outwardly directed in resentment at the philosopher for not keeping up a practice which everyone else has been compelled to abandon. No doubt there is some historical justification for this attitude because philosophy has been the traditional custodian of the big questions, but a big question need not call for a big or pompous answer, as the dialogues of Plato show. The critic who nostalgically recalls the Harvard Philosophy Department at the turn of the twentieth century too often clothes the past in a warm mist that may obscure some important features of the philosophical accomplishments of James, Royce, and Santayana. He understandably thinks of them as they lived in their lecture halls or in their more popular works, unconstrained by the need for professional rigor or by the demands of the scholarly journal. And therefore the critic may not remember the labored pages in which Royce distinguished between the internal meaning and the external meaning of an idea, nor is he likely to recall those writings of James in which he struggled to expound his radical empiricism or to answer critics who asked him to say which of the thirteen varieties of pragmatism was his own. Because of an interest in the more popular aspects of their work, the layman may miss just those qualities which show how James and Royce continue to affect contemporary philosophy. James may have been very stimulating when he talked to teachers, and Santayana may have been brilliant in some of his reflections on the United States, but both of them aspired to greatness in their technical work, and it is this which I think will live longer in the history of American philosophy. In the same way, David Hume is not famous for his best-selling and now unread History of England but rather for his Treatise on Human Nature, which as he said, “fell still-born from the press”, and Kant is perpetually remembered for his work on space and not for his work on perpetual peace. In short, the great Harvard philosophers were not Sunday supplement scholars; they were primarily technical thinkers working on problems that baffled their predecessors from Plato to Hegel. In their effort to solve them or reconceive them, they laid the foundation for at least fifty years of vigorous, intensive philosophical investigation, and if philosophy in America is different from what it was at the turn of the twentieth century, it is not different because it has departed

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from the true spirit of the Harvard greats but because it has taken that spirit seriously. It has banked the gold of the golden age and left the gilt to others. A contemporary British philosopher has said that one of the most important changes in the last half-century of Anglo-American philosophy is what he calls the decline of the pontiff. But what is ironical about the “depontification” of philosophy in America is the fact that here it was initiated by the pontiffs themselves. This was strikingly true of Royce, the most magisterial of all the philosophers of the golden age, the most plush and world-encompassing of its pundits. For Royce was more than a metaphysical soothsayer, more than a philosopher of religion and of loyalty to loyalty: he was also a logician and a philosopher of science. He was one of the first American teachers of philosophy to recognize the importance of research in symbolic logic and to encourage its study both for its own intrinsic intellectual importance and as a philosophical tool. Some of his pupils, like C. I. Lewis and H. M. Sheffer, became distinguished Harvard contributors to this subject and founders of one of the most influential centers of logic in the twentieth century; and one of the main effects of such logical study has been the encouragement of exactness and precision in philosophy. Today’s philosopher is far less glib about saying “It follows” than his predecessors were a half-century ago. His “therefores” are scrutinized with as much care as those of mathematicians are, and for this reason he finds it much harder to pass off vast systems of deductive metaphysics on his wary colleagues. The irony is that on the day that he announced his first course in modern logic, Royce initiated a chain of events which makes it virtually impossible for any American philosopher to publish as rambling a piece of argument as Royce’s World and the Individual. As far back as the first decade of this century, his pupil Ralph Barton Perry was deflating the pretensions of idealistic metaphysics, its vagueness, and its fallacies with the help of techniques that Royce had introduced to the Harvard curriculum. Later Harvard philosophers turned more highly developed logical instruments on the realism of Perry and his friends, and very soon most American philosophers were made even more conscious of the fact that clarity begins at home. A whole generation of American philosophers came to worry about the nature and method of their subject, partly under the influence of modern logic and partly under the influence of another tendency which is deeply rooted in the Harvard tradition: pragmatism. Harvard pragmatism grew out of patient reflection on the procedures of the natural sciences. Its originator was Charles S. Peirce, who not only encouraged Royce in his logical interests but who first formulated the pragmatism which William James popularized and applied to subjects beyond the laboratory. Unfortunately for an earlier generation of Harvard students, they were protected from direct contact with the eccentric genius of Peirce because he was thought not to measure up to the moral standards required of a professor in the nineteenth century. Later the Philosophy Department made some amends by publishing Peirce’s Collected Papers posthumously, and they, together with the work of William James, contain the classic sources of Harvard’s pragmatic tradition.

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In their different ways, Peirce and James encouraged Harvard philosophers to seek the practical meaning of any statement. By doing so, they hoped, a great deal of idle and confusing language might be eliminated as meaningless because, as James and Peirce held, much philosophical talk cannot measure up to the pragmatic criterion of meaning and its appeal to empirical consequences. By using this criterion, philosophers who think they disagree may come to see that they do not, and philosophers who think they are saying something may come to an even more disappointing conclusion. This was one of the most influential contributions to twentieth-century philosophy, and it combined with the doctrines of that great admirer of James and Peirce, John Dewey, with the highly self-conscious linguistic emphasis of logical positivism, and also with the philosophy of physics called operationalism, which was expounded effectively by Prof. Bridgman of the Harvard Physics Department and made convincing by Einstein’s redefinition of basic scientific concepts. Pragmatism, logical positivism, and operationalism all encouraged a tighter, more scientifically oriented, less monumental conception of philosophy. The new conception turned the attention of a generation of American graduate students away from speculative philosophy and more and more in the direction of analytic philosophy, to an interest in the clarification of the fundamental concepts of mathematics, science, and everyday life. And this generation of philosophers, it will be admitted and emphasized in lamentation by the opponents of analytic philosophy, now dominates Anglo-American thought. This development may be viewed as ironical for Peirce and James did not foresee some of the consequences of their own pragmatic emphases. The more transcendental features of Peirce’s metaphysics and his Spencerian ambition of constructing a system of all knowledge now seem hopelessly antiquated, and James’s Will to Believe, by means of which he hoped to salvage a number of traditional religious convictions, is inconsistent with the most commonly accepted versions of pragmatism and dangerously like what most men call wishful thinking. The combined forces of logic and pragmatism have undoubtedly brought about a drastic and irreversible alteration in the aims and standards of many American philosophers. Although I believe that logic and pragmatism are two of the most powerful clauses in Harvard’s philosophical legacy, I do not wish to give the impression that they are the only elements represented in the present Harvard department. Here I do not speak for my colleagues, but as a historian of the philosophy of the recent past. Harvard philosophers, I hasten to point out lest I be accused of drawing a one-sided picture, speak for themselves in many different philosophical tongues; and this is in the Harvard tradition of diversity. James said “Damn the Absolute!” to Royce; Santayana was very critical of James; James described Santayana as “a representative of moribund Latinity”; and in a later generation Hocking, Perry, Lewis, and Whitehead may well have said similar things about each other. But the historical trend of Anglo-American philosophy has been such as to call for a tougher, more dialectically self-conscious defense of these diverging doctrines since the intensification of the logical, pragmatic, and linguistic tendencies I have described. Because of this, and despite all of their doctrinal differ-

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ences, Harvard philosophers share the conviction that the main instrument of philosophy is careful reasoning, and they resist the notion that its problems can be solved in a cheap and misleading way. They spurn the irrationalism and the double talk which can so often confuse the central questions of philosophy and theology, and for this reason they share a common platform with each other even when they cannot accept each other’s conclusions. This is what separates them from the many irrational, obscurantist tendencies which have swept over the western world in a time of troubles. Troubled times always dramatize the sheltered character of academic life, its preoccupation with questions that seem remote from the immediate demands of the society or the nation. And for this reason, I think, a philosophical tendency toward exactness which under happier circumstances could not but be regarded as salutary is suspect in the eyes of those whose historical perspective should be longer than it is. We are living in an age which is so tormented by the problems of the cold war that some critics of American philosophers think that they fiddle while the world freezes, especially critics who nostalgically recall that in the golden age philosophers were intensely occupied with practical and human questions. Such nostalgia is connected with something that a very shrewd observer of the American philosophical scene has recently noted: “Philosophers in America have been less sheltered and cloistered than in Britain, in this century at least, partly because the universities themselves have been less protected from external pressures. Consequently the tone of American philosophy, in James, Dewey, and Whitehead, for instance, has tended to be more earnest, more consciously responsible, more prophetic, and also loud and emphatic enough to reach a large and attentive audience. Since Mill, and always excepting Russell, British philosophy has often seemed to be a quiet exchange between adepts in some learned discipline; the rougher note of the lay preacher is seldom heard and is always disliked. The result has sometimes been philosophy that is more careful and modest, but also more faint and genteel, more easily left on one side in the larger movement of ideas. Within the universities philosophy was significant principally as a training in exact argument, but it generally left beliefs, and even habits of thought, undisturbed.”1 This observer goes on to point out, however, that certain technical tendencies within philosophy itself have brought English and American philosophy closer together, and this alone may make us realize how different American philosophy is from what it was fifty years ago. Even if one were to grant the premise of contemporary philosophy’s most severe critics, as I do not, one might point to the disadvantages of trying by artificial means to channel it into an exclusively practical and hortatory direction. There is, for example, the undeniable connection between logical research and the construction of the computing machines which played so great a part in the development of the atomic bomb, but it would be grotesque to justify the study of technical philosophical questions in this spirit. To accept connection with the bomb as a measure of philosophical achievement is to betray the ideals which 1

Stuart Hampshire, “American and British Philosophy”, Encounter (April 1957), pp. 78–79.

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link us with Socrates, Mill, and Kant, to say nothing of James, Royce, and Santayana, and wrongly to imply that when philosophers cannot claim such “useful” accomplishments, however indirectly, they have no reason for being. On the other hand, I think it fair to criticize those philosophers who have so narrowly conceived their subject as to rule out a priori the pursuit of certain social, moral, esthetic, and political questions. The technical philosophical advances of the twentieth century should be admired by all who can understand them, but they certainly do not prove that the broad, humane preoccupations of a Royce, a James, and a Santayana are forever beyond the borders of philosophy. Indeed, certain recent tendencies suggest that another view is developing within the very tradition that has made so much of the logical study of language. Instead of maintaining, as some positivists have, that the only type of language worth studying philosophically is the language of science, a number of philosophers have come to believe there are many important uses of language which are not scientific and which may be studied with profit. This view is becoming more and more popular among the youngest generation of American philosophers and it may turn out to be the medium whereby philosophy will regain close contact with the humanistic tradition. For once it is recognized that the problem of knowledge is not the only problem in philosophy, once it is recognized that there are other modes of human activity besides science which demand philosophical analysis and description, philosophy will cease to be equated with logic and the theory of perception. They will undoubtedly continue to be central subjects and no philosopher will risk the study of any subject without a firm grasp of their fundamentals, but they will cease to constitute the essence of the disciplines as they do for so many today. Esthetics, the philosophy of education, the philosophy of history, and philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and jurisprudence will flourish as serious philosophical concerns and not be regarded as “soft subjects”, fit only for lesser minds. When this happens on a larger scale in American philosophy, we shall have witnessed a new chapter in the development of the subject.

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Experiment and Necessity in Dewey’s Philosophy (1959)

JOHN DEWEY, more than any other thinker in modern times, viewed the history of Western philosophy as a fruitless quest for certainty, as a misguided effort to discover a class of truths which would be stable, certain, and self-evident. And for this reason the notion of a priori knowledge, or knowledge which is supposed to be independent of experience, was almost always suspect in Dewey’s philosophy. For more than a half-century, he campaigned against the view that there are two sorts of knowledge: one rational, necessary, unchanging, certain; and the other empirical, contingent, and merely probable. Preoccupation with the status of what other philosophers regard as a priori knowledge is therefore almost perpetual in Dewey’s thought. It dominates not only his work in logic and epistemology but also his discussion of basic political, moral, and educational problems. He criticizes proponents of the doctrine of Natural Law when they speak with confidence about self-evident principles, he opposes transcendental moralists who defend prejudice in the name of intuition, and he insists that the pedagogical separation of learning and doing is partly the result of a failure to see continuity in all kinds of knowledge from mathematics to geography. Dewey continued an old tradition in philosophy when he coupled belief in transcendent principles with a tendency toward political conservativism. To realize this, one need only recall the similar views of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. Both of these great empiricists felt obliged to undermine certain views on a priori knowledge, partly because they felt that these views were politically dangerous. And it was from Locke and Mill that Dewey derived a similar concern. Locke, Mill, and Dewey were all fearful lest an excessively anti-empirical view of knowledge encourage political and social tyranny because they thought that a tendency to think of practical matters in an excessively rationalistic way might give the upper hand to those whom Locke called “the dictators of principles”. John Stuart Mill testified eloquently to the liberal motivation of his own work in logic when he said: The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. . . . There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics and the cognate branches of physical science.1 1

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. J. J. Coss (New York, 1924), pp. 158–59.

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Dewey’s logical work was motivated, as Mill’s was, by a desire to examine the methods of natural science and mathematics in order to drive the rationalists and intuitionists from their stronghold. But, as I shall try to show, he does not always succeed in this effort. On the contrary, there is a part of Dewey’s theory of knowledge in which, without realizing it, he provides wonderfully elaborate quarters for a rationalistic Trojan horse. To see this, we must look into a number of questions concerning the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, which is so intimately associated with the problem of a priori knowledge. In a previous essay, I expressed my dissatisfaction with the distinction between analytic and synthetic as developed in the literature of logical positivism, but prefaced my argument by saying: It must be emphasized that the views which will be put forth are not strict corollaries of Dewey’s views; indeed, he sometimes deals with the question so as to suggest disagreement with what I am about to argue. But I trace the source of my own general attitudes on this point to Dewey, even though my manner and method in this paper are quite foreign to his.2

One of the first comments on the previous essay was from a devoted disciple of Dewey. It read: “Unless I have misread Dewey [your paper] is squarely in the context of his thinking. If I had time I could document this”, but as this person did not have time, the point was left undocumented. I took him to imply that criticisms like mine of the positivistic distinction between analytic and synthetic were completely Deweyan, and that my qualification about Dewey’s dealing differently with the question—on some occasions at least—was the product of ignorance. Since then I have looked into the relevant texts more closely, and I feel more confidently cautious in claiming Dewey as an ally on this point. An inspiration he undoubtedly was, as I have already indicated. But he says so many things which are either inconsistent, or objectionably dark, or unacceptable for other reasons, that I feel we cannot look to him for a complete view of the subject. In order to show what I mean, I must begin with a discussion of some general issues in the theory of a priori knowledge.

I. There are three terms that ought to be distinguished in the discussion of a priori knowledge: one is “a priori knowledge” itself; a second is “necessary truth”; and a third is “analytic statement”. Some philosophers have held that a priori knowledge is knowledge which is independent of sensory experience, that a necessary truth is one that cannot be false, and that an analytic statement is one that is true by virtue of the meanings of its terms. If one begins one’s philosophical reflections with these three terms in one’s vocabulary, one may advance a number of philosophical theses. For example, one may say that the class of necessary 2

See “The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism” above, p. 97.

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truths is identical with the class of truths known a priori, and then explain the existence of such truths by pointing out that they are all analytic. The argument would be that if a statement is true merely by virtue of the meanings of its terms, we do not have to consult sensory experience to know that it is true: we know a priori that it is true. And if the class of truths known a priori and the class of necessary truths are identical, then we have, in the course of explaining a prioriness, explained necessity as well. I need not add that a lot of damaging questions may be—and have been—asked about such an effort at epistemological explanation, but it represents a kind of thinking that has been very popular in Western philosophy. One of its elements, of course, is a denial that analytic truths are known by sensory experience. It begins with the assumption that there is such a thing as a priori knowledge and then appeals to the notion of analytic truth in order to explain the existence of such knowledge. However, if a philosopher begins with the supposition that there is no such thing as a priori knowledge, and hence with the supposition that all knowledge is a posteriori or dependent on sensory experience for its establishment, he has no epistemological need for a notion of analyticity of the kind previously mentioned. Obviously, if one thinks that all knowledge is established by recourse to sensory experience, then one cannot hold that some knowledge may be gained merely by examining the meanings of one’s words, since an examination of meanings is usually thought to be nonsensory because meanings are thought to be nonsensory. Often meanings are thought by such philosophers to be universals, abstract entities which are not the objects of sensation. I should say in passing that this way of thinking is often illustrated in the literature of logical positivism. And if one puts to the side Kant’s doctrine of synthetic a priori judgments, one sees that Kant shared this point of view. He too seems to have held that the analyticity of analytic judgments is what explains the fact that they are a priori and necessarily true even though he explained the necessity and a priori-ness of some synthetic judgments in a different way. I want now to outline my argument for the view that Dewey does not subscribe to one consistent position on these questions. First of all, I shall show that there are many places in which Dewey rejects the kind of thinking I have just described. In those places, he seems to deny the existence of a priori knowledge and therefore does not need to appeal to a notion of analyticity of the kind I have mentioned. I shall show this below in section II by considering what he has to say about the principles of formal logic and pure mathematics—those traditional exemplars of necessity and a priori-ness. There I shall show that Dewey sometimes rejects the view that the principles of logic and the principles of physics are established in fundamentally different ways. I shall argue in section III that elsewhere Dewey defends views that are inconsistent with the point of view described in section II. In certain places, for example, he seems to hold that there is a sharp distinction between what he calls “ideational” and “existential” propositions, a distinction that is reminiscent of the positivistic distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. This, I submit, is inconsistent with his denial that there is such a thing as a priori knowl-

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edge. But that is not all. When Dewey comes to apply his distinction between ideational and existential propositions, he moves in the direction of classical rationalism. In other words, he holds that laws of physics are what a positivist would call “analytic” and hence to be established by an examination of meanings. I should point out, of course, that it would be bad enough if he had merely reverted to a position like that of the positivists and Hume—that is to say, if he had merely said that the principles of pure mathematics and logic are established by examining meanings or ideas. But no, he goes further and says that principles of physics like Newton’s First Law of Motion are established in this way. He does this because he can find no better way of dealing with the difficult problem of scientific law or causal necessity, and the irony is that he treats physical necessity in a way that he once thought inadequate for the treatment of logical necessity.

II. At several places in his writings, notably in Reconstruction in Philosophy and in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey seems to deny that the truths of formal logic and pure mathematics are a priori. We find Dewey saying in his Reconstruction in Philosophy: “Mathematics is often cited as an example of purely normative thinking dependent upon a priori canons and supra-empirical material. But it is hard to see how the student who approaches the matter historically can avoid the conclusion that the status of mathematics is as empirical as that of metallurgy”. And a little further on in this same book Dewey says: “Logic is a matter of profound human importance precisely because it is empirically founded and experimentally applied”.3 Faced with these passages, one is led to say that Dewey does not believe that there are any a priori truths and therefore that he avoids both the problem of Kant and that of the logical positivists by denying one of their assumptions. It might be said in reply that Dewey’s use of the word “logic” is so different from that of Kant and the positivists that he would naturally, but irrelevantly, say that logic is a posteriori. For doesn’t he hold that logic is a science insofar as “it gives an organized and tested descriptive account of the way in which thought actually goes on”?4 And isn’t this why Peirce said that Dewey regarded logic as the natural history of thought and not as a normative science?5 The reply is certainly in order, but I do not think that it suffices to dismiss Dewey’s views on logic as altogether irrelevant to the traditional controversy. For in that same passage in which he says that logic is a descriptive science, Dewey says that it is an art, too. And when he calls it an art, he says he means that it “projects methods 3 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920), pp. 137–38; and chap. 2, The Quest for Certainty (New York, 1929). 4 Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 135. 5 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass., 1931–58), 8.190.

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by which future thinking shall take advantage of the operations that lead to success and avoid those which result in failure”.6 And when he speaks of methods, he is thinking also of methods of inference which are formulated by the principles of formal logic. Therefore, he does join issue with Kant and the positivist, as is even more evident in his Logic. The fundamental theory of that book is that “all logical forms . . . arise within the operation of inquiry and are concerned with control of inquiry so that it may yield warranted assertions”.7 And when Dewey speaks of logical forms, he says he is referring to principles like “if anything has a certain property, and whatever has this property has a certain other property, then the thing in question has this certain other property”,8 as well as to the traditional principles of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle.9 He is not speaking solely of statements that might normally be assigned to the “natural history of thought”. Dewey speaks of such logical forms or principles as “conditions”, “demands”, “postulates”, “requirements” of inquiry.10 To engage in an inquiry, Dewey says, is “like entering into a contract. It commits the inquirer to observance of certain conditions”.11 Having agreed to engage in an inquiry, so to speak, you bind yourself, or promise, or agree to proceed in a way that observes a “rule” or “logical law” like “if anything has a certain property, and whatever has this property has a certain other property, then the thing in question has this certain other property”. He says: “If you are going to inquire in a way which meets the requirements of inquiry, you must proceed in a way which observes this rule, just as when you make a business contract there are certain conditions to be fulfilled”.12 Such observance of logical rules is “at first implicit in the undertaking of inquiry. As they are formally acknowledged (formulated), they become logical forms of various degrees of generality”. This statement by Dewey may be used to bring out a number of important features of his view. First of all, and most important for the student of Dewey’s theory of a priori knowledge, is the fact that postulated logical forms (“principles” or “rules”, as Dewey calls them) may change in time. “Postulates alter as methods of inquiry are perfected; the logical forms that express modern scientific inquiry are in many respects quite unlike those that formulated the procedures of Greek science.”13 And here we seem to find a radical departure from a more traditional view of the truths of logic. The only sense in which they are necessary, for Dewey, is conditional: one must accept them at a given time if at that time our aim of successful inquiry requires us to accept them. Such principles are not imposed on inquiry from without, Dewey says over and over again; and therefore they are 6

Dewey, Reconstruction, p. 135. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938), pp. 3–4. 8 Ibid., p. 17. 9 Ibid., p. 11. 10 Ibid., pp. 14–19. 11 Ibid., p. 16. 12 Ibid., p. 17. 13 Ibid., p. 18. 7

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not “externally a priori”, and they are not “a priori principles fixed antecedently to inquiry and conditioning it ab extra”.14 He says of a logical principle that “while it is derived from what is involved in inquiries that have been successful in the past, it imposes a condition to be satisfied in future inquiries, until the results of such inquiries show reason for modifying it”.15 This means that logical principles for Dewey are neither “arbitrary” nor “mere linguistic conventions”. “They must be such as control the determination and arrangement of subject-matter with respect to achieving enduringly stable beliefs.”16 It is just this instrumental feature of logical principles which leads Dewey to deny a sharp distinction between a priori principles of formal logic and a posteriori principles of natural science, and, in a sense, to deny the very existence of a priori knowledge. This is most explicit in his statement of a view which he says he derives from Peirce. (Whether Dewey is right in assigning this view to Peirce is of no interest to me at the moment.) Dewey speaks of “leading principles” as articulations of habits of inference which may be narrower or wider in scope. “Material” leading principles, which are relatively narrow, correspond to empirical generalizations, while those which formulate habits involved in every inference, in spite of differences of subject-matter, are “formal”. But here Dewey does not draw a distinction between these two kinds of leading principles on the ground that the formal principles are a priori while the material principles are a posteriori. Insofar as the two kinds of principles differ only in width, they differ, we may say, only in degree and not in kind. Basing himself on the model of a craftsman who “learns that if he operates in a certain way the result will take care of itself, certain materials being given”, Dewey says that we discover that “if we draw our inferences in a certain way, we shall, other things being equal, get dependable conclusions”.17 In this context, Dewey does not formulate a radical distinction between an inference in accordance with a law of natural science and an inference in accordance with a law of logic. Both of them are governed or involve habits “that tend to yield conclusions that are stable and productive in further inquiries”.18 The fact that some leading principles are formal and others not does not lead Dewey to say that the formal principles are justified independently of experience while nonformal principles depend on experience. In his view, I infer, a physical principle like conservation of energy is not justified in a way radically different from the way in which logical principles are justified. The position taken [he says] implies the ultimacy of inquiry in determination of the formal conditions of inquiry. Logic as inquiry into inquiry . . . does not depend upon anything extraneous to inquiry. The force of this proposition may perhaps be most

14

Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 17. 16 Ibid., p. 18. 17 Ibid., p. 12. 18 Ibid., p. 13. 15

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readily understood by noting what it precludes. It precludes the determination and selection of logical first principles by an a priori intuitional act, even when the intuition in question is said to be that of Intellectus Purus. It precludes resting logic upon metaphysical and epistemological assumptions and presuppositions. The latter are to be determined, if at all, by means of what is disclosed as the outcome of inquiry; they are not to be shoved under inquiry as its “foundation.”19

It is hard, therefore, to distinguish the justification of such principles from the justification of those which are, say, physical, for physical principles will also be determined “by means of what is disclosed as the outcome of inquiry”. And so Dewey says: In the degree in which we understand what is done in inquiries that result in warranted assertions, we understand the operational conditions which have to be observed. . . . The conditions of the required operations (required in order that a certain kind of consequence may issue) are as much matters of experience as are factual contents: which are themselves also discriminated in order to serve as conditions of a warranted outcome. [My italics.]20

I conclude from passages like this in the Logic and from others in Reconstruction in Philosophy that Dewey, in some places at least, opposes a distinction according to which all truths of formal logic are a priori and all truths of natural science a posteriori, and, moreover, seems to deny the existence of a priori knowledge.

III. As I have already indicated, however, Dewey’s reflections on the matter do not end here. Having led us to believe that he cannot draw a sharp epistemological line between logical and nonlogical truths, he now proceeds to puzzle us by what he says about the distinction between “existential” and “ideational” propositions, as he calls them, and we become even more puzzled by his distinction between “generic” and “universal” propositions. For after implying that formal logic is just as empirical as physics is, Dewey now implies that the laws of physics are analytic and that they must be justified by experience. Let us examine the text in order to see how this comes about. In his Logic, Dewey makes a distinction between what he calls “existential” and “ideational” propositions which resembles that between synthetic and analytic statements. Thus Dewey says: Propositions . . . are of two main categories: (1) Existential, referring directly to actual conditions as determined by experimental observation, and (2) ideational or conceptual, consisting of interrelated meanings, which are non-existential in content in direct

19 20

Ibid., pp. 20–21. Ibid., p. 157.

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reference but which are applicable to existence through the operations they represent as possibilities.21

I realize, of course, that he follows this with a kind of pragmatic incantation, for he says that “in constituting respectively material and procedural means, the two types of propositions are conjugate, or functionally correspondent. They form the fundamental divisions of labor in inquiry”.22 But this is an experimentalist’s blessing of a distinction which one does not expect to find Dewey making after he has criticized the “sharp division between knowledge of matters of fact and of relations between ideas”. For all of Dewey’s aversion to “shoving” abstract meanings under logical principles, he surreptitiously shoves them under his “ideational propositions”, which might be called analytic by a positivist. And for all of his aversion, in the early pages of the Logic, to a sharp division between logical leading principles and material leading principles, does he not make this same sharp division when he formulates his distinction between implication and inference? Were this the only volte face in the later pages of his Logic, one might say that Dewey is merely reverting to a position like that of Hume and the logical positivists. But once Dewey begins to fall, there is no stopping him and before he is finished he is, I submit, a rationalist in the worst sense of that word, one who thinks that the laws of natural science are established by examining the relations between concepts alone.23 We may see why by asking what sorts of statements he calls existential and ideational. Like so many of his predecessors (and successors) in the history of philosophy, Dewey is struck by a distinction between two kinds of statements which begin with the word “all”. He speaks of “the ambiguity of ‘all’ as sometimes having existential reference, in which case it represents an inference having at best a high order of probability, and sometimes having nonexistential reference, when it stands for a necessary relation which follows, by definition, from analysis of a conception”.24 In effect, he calls existential “all”-propositions “generic” and ideational “all”propositions “universal”. Thus he says that the statement “All men are mortal” may be construed as meaning either “All men have died or will die”—in which case it is, according to Dewey, a “spatio-temporal proposition” and generic; or it may be construed as meaning “If anything is human, then it is mortal”, in which case it is universal and states, says Dewey, “a necessary relation of abstract characters”.25 On the first interpretation, Dewey goes on to say, the statement is inductive and matter-of-fact; on the second it is valid, “if valid at all, by definition of a conception”.26 The pervasiveness of the error into which he has fallen becomes 21

Ibid., pp. 283–84. Ibid., p. 284. 23 See Prof. May Brodbeck’s trenchant article, “The New Rationalism: Dewey’s Theory of Induction”, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 46 (1949), pp. 780–91. 24 Dewey, Logic, p. 296. 25 Ibid., p. 256. 26 Ibid. 22

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clearer when we discover that he also construes contrary-to-fact conditional statements of science as universal and hence as valid “by definition”. He says: In science, there are many propositions in which the clause introduced by “if’ is known to be contrary to conditions set by existential circumstances; that is, to be such that they cannot be existentially satisfied, as “If a particle at rest is acted upon by a single moving particle, then,” etc. In such propositions, if and when designate a connection of conceptual subject-matters, not of existential or temporo-spatial subject-matters. If the word “conditions” is used, it now refers to a logical relation, not to existential circumstances.27

Throughout the later chapters of his Logic, Dewey speaks of the necessity of universal propositions as opposed to the contingency of generic propositions, and of the analytic and definitional nature of the former. He also appears to hypostatize meanings in spite of his protest against other philosophers who do the same thing. Speaking of definitions, he says that “in a definition a single symbol having a total meaning is resolved into an interrelation of meanings”.28 He adds that in definition “conceptual meanings . . . are resolved into characters that are necessarily interrelated just because they are an analysis of a single conception”.29 He also tells us that mathematical statements are universal because they are abstract hypothetical propositions. And the grand climax of that part of Dewey’s Logic which flows from his contrast between existential generic propositions and ideational universal ones—a part which begins roughly around page 254 and continues remorselessly through about page 486—is the statement on page 453 that all physical laws state a relation of characters, preferably in mathematical equations, and that “while the latter have ultimate existential reference, through the possible operations they direct, they are non-existential (and hence non-temporal) in their content”.

IV. How shall we sum up? I am inclined to say that Dewey’s view of so-called a priori knowledge is inconsistent. The view set forth in Reconstruction in Philosophy, in The Quest for Certainty, and in about the first 150 pages of his Logic, is that there is no such thing as a priori knowledge. But if there isn’t, then one might say that Dewey has dispensed with the need for a concept of analytic truth. Yet Dewey’s distinction between generic and universal statements is not only founded on a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements but it also leads Dewey to say, in effect, that there are analytic a posteriori statements. Therefore, he simultaneously disassociates himself from philosophers who have campaigned against positivistic complacency about the notion of analytic, and from those 27

Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 343. 29 Ibid. 28

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partisans of positivism who, while they are happy with analyticity, are horrified at the thought of an analytic a posteriori statement. Dewey seems to think that the laws of natural science are universal and therefore analytic and “definitory”.30 The question naturally arises: how does Dewey get himself into his predicament? I can suggest one answer to this question without being sure of its diagnostic power. I believe that Dewey was unsuccessfully seeking a solution to the problem of lawlike statements, as it has been called more recently. This is suggested by the fact that his generic statement “All men have died or will die” differs from his universal “All men are mortal” in a way that is reminiscent of Nelson Goodman’s distinction between a non-lawlike and a lawlike statement.31 It is confirmed by the fact that Dewey proposes contrary-to-fact conditionals as examples of universal propositions and that Goodman characterizes a lawlike statement as one that supports a contrary-to-fact conditional. Dewey was rightly aware of the fact that contrary-to-fact conditionals assert a connection between antecedent and consequent, in a sense a necessary connection. But, since he seems to have been tied in one part of his Logic to the positivistic view that all necessary connections are analytic and definitional, he could find no better way out than to call scientific laws definitional and analytic. For all of these reasons, I think that Dewey was a valiant figure in the struggle to solve the problem of necessity, but he was not the source of final truth. In one part of his thinking, he was led to say that we cannot neatly characterize all of logic as a priori and all of natural science as a posteriori. But when he was trapped into saying that all of the laws of natural science are analytic, he revealed his confusion—so much confusion that it is hard to see how he could have consistently sustained his attack on social philosophies like that of Natural Law. Dewey, of course, was always suspicious of social doctrines dominated by what he calls “the conceptual approach”. Even after his defense of the view that the laws of empirical science are necessary because analytic, he makes critical allusions in his Logic to those who defend the doctrine of Natural Law and the theory of intuitions of a priori necessary truths. He charges them with a failure to recognize what he calls “the three indispensable logical conditions of conceptual subjectmatter in scientific method”: (1) the status of theoretical conceptions as hypotheses which (2) have a directive function in control of observation and ultimate practical transformation of antecedent phenomena, and which (3) are tested and continually revised on the ground of the consequences they produce in existential application.32

But, one may finally ask, doesn’t Dewey want to eat his cake and have it? He wants the hypotheses of social scientists (and moralists, too) to be subject to alteration as circumstances and evidence changes, yet in his logical description 30 See Ernest Nagel, Sovereign Reason (Glencoe, Ill., 1954), pp. 145–46, for a different interpretation of Dewey’s views. 31 Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 2nd ed. (New York, 1985), chap. 1. 32 Dewey, Logic, p. 506.

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of the aim of science, he says that scientists seek analytic connections between abstract characters. How, in all consistency, can he say that such a connection will be falsified by appeal to experience? How can he consistently attack partisans of Natural Law like Aquinas?33 One is bound to say that his doctrine of generic and universal propositions is not only untenable but that it leaves him naked to his ideological enemies. No amount of pragmatic talk can undo his capitulation to rationalism in the later pages of his Logic. And while there are problems created by the more empiricistic doctrine set forth in Reconstruction in Philosophy, in The Quest for Certainty, and in the earlier parts of his Logic, I believe that these texts represent a healthier strain in Dewey’s thinking on this subject.

33 See the epilogue to the paperback edition of my Social Thought in America (Boston, 1957); reprinted below, pp. 270–83.

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Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis (1949)

THE APPEARANCE OF Prof. C. I. Lewis’s Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, with its forthright defense of the thesis that all statements of value are empirical, presents an opportunity to examine the present state of pragmatic value theory and ethics. In particular it presents an opportunity to compare Lewis’s views with those of Dewey on the relation between value and obligation. The third book of Lewis’s Analysis contains a carefully worked out doctrine which closely resembles the one Dewey outlines in the tenth chapter of The Quest for Certainty, but these doctrines exhibit a great difference as well. The agreement and difference between them may be summarized by saying that whereas both Lewis and Dewey defend the view that value statements are empirical, Lewis, unlike Dewey, makes a distinction between value statements and ethical statements, according to which the latter are not empirical. The purpose of this article is to make some observations on this entire issue. Dewey’s central concern is to distinguish between the desirable and the desired in a way that guarantees a clear distinction between what he calls “de jure” statements and what he calls “merely factual” statements; a de jure statement asserts the desirability of an object, whereas a merely de facto statement asserts that it is desired. I do not think he makes this distinction successfully, and I will try to show why in the first part of this article.1 Lewis, in spite of the similarity between his position and Dewey’s, avoids what I think is Dewey’s error, but the manner in which he avoids it creates a problem for his theory of knowledge. Dewey is anxious to distinguish between the satisfying and the satisfactory, the enjoyed and the enjoyable, the desired and the desirable. Most of us would agree that the last of these pairs of concepts illustrates an important difference indeed one of the most important differences in the theory of the subject. Dewey objects to what he calls an “empirical theory of values”, according to which values are constituted by liking and enjoyment, so that “to be enjoyed and to be a value are two names for one and the same fact”.2 But, although he denies this theory, he maintains that there is a connection between value and being desired, for he says: “I shall not object to this empirical theory so far as it connects the theory of values with concrete experiences of desire and satisfaction. The idea that there is such a connection is the only way known to me by which the pallid remoteness of the rationalistic theory, and the only too glaring presence of the 1 This problem has been discussed by C. L. Stevenson from another point of view. See his Ethics and Language (New Haven, 1944), pp. 253–64. 2 John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York, 1929), chap. 10

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institutional theory of transcendental values can be escaped”.3 In connecting the desirable (value) with the desired, he tries to show that whereas the statement “a is desired now” is merely a statement of fact, the statement “a is desirable” is a factual statement which also has a “de jure quality”. His problem, then, is to give an analysis of “a is desirable” when it is construed as meaning that a ought to be desired, which will render it an empirical statement, a statement which conveys empirical knowledge. What I will argue here is not that this is in general impossible, but rather that Dewey’s particular method of solving the problem as set forth in the tenth chapter of The Quest for Certainty does not accomplish this difficult task. The relationship between the desirable and the desired is not identified by Dewey in a way that makes me wholly confident of my interpretation of his view, but in many passages Dewey seems to suggest that this relationship resembles the connection between what Lewis calls “Value in Objects” and what he calls the immediate experience of satisfaction. “As a first approximation,” Lewis says, “we might say that attributing value to an existent, O, means that under circumstances, C, O will, or would, lead to satisfaction in the experience of somebody, S.”4 Now it seems to me that there are many occasions on which Dewey speaks as though he holds this kind of theory of objective value. For example, he says: “A feeling of good or excellence is as far removed from goodness in fact as a feeling that objects are intellectually thus and so is removed from their being actually so.”5 Many statements of this kind lead me to believe that Dewey’s view of the relation between what is desirable and what is desired identifies it with the relation which holds between the objective property of being red and the appearance of red. It would seem that according to Dewey we cannot infer validly that an object has value simply on the basis of enjoying it casually, without having instituted tests analogous to those which are instituted by the careful investigator of the objective color of something. And it would appear that according to Dewey only an object which satisfies us under conditions which are analogous to the normal conditions involved in testing colors has value in his sense. Although there are other passages which present difficulties for this interpretation, I believe there is considerable evidence for holding that it does render Dewey’s meaning in some places. This interpretation helps us understand what Dewey means when he says that a judgment of value involves a prediction; it also makes clear his 3 Ibid., p. 258. It should be pointed out that my chief criticisms of Dewey are not affected by the conclusions of his controversy with P. B. Rice in The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 40 (1943), for there Dewey reiterates his belief that there is a connection between value and satisfaction. What I am concerned with here is this connection rather than the nature of satisfaction. For this reason, I do not consider Dewey’s views on introspection and the subjective: they are not relevant in my opinion. If I were to enter this vexed problem, no doubt important differences would turn up between Dewey and Lewis, but no difference of that sort would interfere with their maintaining the agreement I discuss in the present article. 4 C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, Ill., 1948), p. 512. 5 Dewey, op. cit., p. 265.

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analogy between statements of what is immediately satisfying and statements which report what he calls immediate experience in the perception of colors. In addition, however, Dewey maintains that adjectives like “desirable” and “admirable”, appear in sentences which express what should be the case. He says: “A judgment about what is to be desired and enjoyed is . . . a claim on future action; it possesses de jure and not merely de facto quality. It is a matter of frequent experience that likings and enjoyments are of all kinds, and that many are such as reflective judgments condemn. By way of self-justification and ‘rationalization’, an enjoyment creates a tendency to assert that the thing enjoyed is a value. This assertion of validity adds authority to the fact. It is a decision that the object has a right to exist and hence a claim upon action to further its existence.”6 However, I want to show that this view is subject to a serious difficulty, and in order to do so, will formulate Dewey’s view as clearly as I can. As I have said, Dewey distinguishes between a report of immediate sensation and a statement about an objective property of a thing. He seems to hold that if I look at an object a and say that a looks red to me now, my statement: (1) a looks red to me now is a report of a sensation, whereas if I say: (2) a is really red, I am not making a report of an immediate sensation. Dewey also seems to hold that statement (2) is equivalent to a statement that contains the expression “a looks red to y”, for he seems to accept the following statement: (3) “a is really red” is equivalent to “For every normal person y, if y looks at a under normal conditions, then a looks red to y”. Now, as I understand Dewey, these three statements have the following analogues: (1′) a is desired by me now (2′) a is desirable (3′) “a is desirable” is equivalent to “For every normal person y, if y looks at or considers a under normal conditions, then a is desired by y”. However, if Dewey rests his case on (3′), he does not show that (2′)—“a is desirable”—has any more de jure quality than (2)—“a is really red”—has. Sentence (3′) tells us that “a is desirable” is equivalent to a general statement about what a normal person will desire under normal conditions, and sentence (3) tells us that “a is really red” is equivalent to a general statement about what a normal person will see under normal conditions. That is why I am led to wonder whether Dewey has, in accepting (3′), shown that “a is desirable” is a statement that “possesses de jure and not merely de facto quality”, for on his own showing, the statement “a is desirable” is no more de jure than “a is really red”. For this reason, 6

Ibid., p. 263.

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I wonder whether the left-hand side of the equivalence (3′) shouldn’t be “a is really desired” rather than “a is desirable”. Another way of making the same point is to say that if we accept (3′), then the left-hand side of the equivalence (3) should be “a ought to look red”. But when we say that a looks red to a normal person who looks at it under normal conditions, do we mean that he has a moral duty or obligation to see a as red? I do not think so. This statement expresses no moral claim and for that reason when we say that a is desired by any normal person who looks at it under normal conditions, we do not seem to be asserting a moral obligation. I am not, I should repeat, concerned here with the general question whether “desirable”, in the sense of “ought to be desired” or “worthy of being desired”, can be analyzed so that statements like “a is desirable” are shown to convey empirical knowledge. I am merely interested in pointing out that the analysis of it which Dewey gives in the tenth chapter of The Quest for Certainty is defective in a subtle way. I am not concerned to criticize all of Dewey’s writings on this theme, but I am not aware of any that supplements the view expressed in The Quest for Certainty in a way that obviates the difficulties in it. My chief criticism depends on the fact that the relation between “desirable” and “desired” is held by Dewey to be identical with that between “really red” and “appears red”. But “a appears red” and “a is really red” do not differ in any way which would allow us to say that the first has a merely “de facto” quality, whereas the second has a “de jure” quality, to use Dewey’s language. The fact that a is really red, to put the point in other words, is no more normative than the fact that a appears red now. And since the fact that a is desirable (as Dewey construes it) is related to the fact that a is desired in precisely the way that the fact that a is really red is related to the fact that a appears red, it follows that “a is desirable” is no more normative than “a is desired”. I conclude, therefore, that Dewey has not succeeded in correctly analyzing “desirable” in the sense of “ought to be desired”. I do not see how the statement “a is desired under normal conditions” can be viewed as synonymous with “a ought to be desired” without viewing “a appears red under normal conditions” as synonymous with “a ought to appear red”; and since I think that this consequence is absurd, I cannot accept Dewey’s view. Some philosophers who share my opinion on this might conclude that any socalled naturalistic definition of “ought to be desired” is refuted by an argument which is similar to the one I have offered above, but I am not convinced of this, and I want to repeat that my argument is directed solely against Dewey’s naturalistic proposal. Some of the difficulties involved in a blanket rejection of the naturalistic program for analyzing “ought to be desired” appear in Lewis’s work, I think, and so I turn now to his views on this question. So far as I can gather, Lewis agrees with Dewey in construing objective value as a potentiality of objects whose realization takes place in immediately experienced satisfactions, but he does not think value is identical with being desirable in any way that confers “de jure” status on judgments of value. However, Dewey does, and it is here that my difficulties with Dewey arise. Dewey is anxious to give an analysis of “desirable” in the “de jure” sense which will result in construing it as

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an empirical predicate. However, Lewis does not attempt to do this because he holds that judgments of what ought to be, in particular judgments of what ought to be desired, are matters of ethics rather than of value. He says: “The problem which delimits the field of ethics is not that of the empirically good or valuable but that of the right and morally imperative. To be sure, there is essential connection between rightness of action and goodness in that which this action is intended to effect. At least, it is with this general conception that rightness of action derives from value in the end, with which we should agree. But just at this point we should be careful that we do not illicitly connect the right and the good, before ever we have distinguished them.”7 Here we see the gap between Lewis and Dewey, but it is here that problems arise for Lewis. Lewis holds: “Valuation is always a matter of empirical knowledge. But what is right and just, can never be determined by empirical facts alone”.8 But if we juxtapose this with Lewis’s belief that there are only two kinds of knowledge— knowledge of empirical propositions and knowledge of analytic propositions— we find it difficult to see how he will classify ethical knowledge—knowledge of what is just, what is right, what ought to be. He has cut himself off from regarding ethical knowledge as empirical by definition of what is ethical, but can he regard all true ethical statements as analytic? To be sure, Lewis regards some ethical statements as analytic, e.g., “No rule of action is right except one which is right in all instances, and therefore right for everyone”. But it is not at all clear that he is willing to call every true statement which contains the word “right” analytic, e.g., “It was right of Brutus to stab Caesar.” In any case, it does not follow from the fact that some statements of ethics are analytic that all ethical statements are. “No rule of action may be right except one which is right in all instances,” may be an analytic statement for Lewis, but clearly the fact that it is analytic does not imply that the statement about Brutus is analytic. Therefore, true ethical statements about actions that are not analytic for Lewis must be empirical, just as some statements about value are. Under the circumstances, he might surrender the view that all knowledge is exclusively and exhaustively divisible into the analytic and the empirical, but he seems to hold this view too confidently for us to expect that he will do that. The main points of this article may therefore be summarized as follows. Dewey believes that statements of the form “a is desirable” are empirical statements since he regards the property of being desirable as a disposition that is analogous to the objective characteristic of redness as distinct from appearances of red. This, I have argued, does not successfully clarify or define “desirable” in the sense of “ought to be desired”. And although Lewis regards “value” as an empirical predicate, he claims that some statements of what ought to be desired are not empirical. However, Lewis divides truth into the analytic and the empirical and excludes anything like synthetic a priori truth. How, then, can he consistently regard nonanalytic statements about what ought to be desired or what is rightly 7 8

Lewis, op. cit., p. 552. Ibid., p. 554.

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desired as nonempirical? In short, I have argued in this paper that Dewey does not present an acceptable naturalistic account of obligation and that when Lewis forsakes that task as impossible, he is forced by his sharp distinction between the analytic and the empirical to attribute analyticity to ethical statements that I assume he would not want to call analytic. POSTSCRIPT ON DEWEY AND MILL In the original version of this article I made some remarks about the relationship between Dewey’s views on the desirable and John Stuart Mill’s views on this concept. In the present version, I have withdrawn these remarks from their original position in the article because they interrupted the argument in a confusing way. However, because I think the remarks are still worth making, I present them here. I have, I think, presented them more clearly here than I did in the original version. In a famous passage in his Utilitarianism, Mill held that we can prove that a thing is desirable by showing that people desire it. He there leads us to suppose that he accepted the generalization: (a) Whatever people desire is desirable. For how else could one justify the idea that one could prove a thing to be desirable simply on the basis of its being desired by people? Mill also said that one could prove that an object is visible by showing that people see it, and that the relationship between being desired and being desirable is the same as that between being seen and being visible. Therefore Mill may be thought of as accepting the statement: (b) Whatever people see is visible. One way of lodging a familiar complaint against Mill is to say that he overlooked an important difference between two kinds of adjectives ending in “ble”: those that are dispositional terms like “visible” and those that are normative terms like “desirable.” And it might be supposed that I lodged the same complaint against Dewey by protesting that he did not capture the normative element in the term “desirable” when he said in statement (3′) above that “a is desirable” is equivalent to “For every normal person y, if y looks at a under normal conditions, then a is desired by y”. For, someone might contend, asserting such an equivalence is tantamount to asserting that “desirable” is a dispositional term. Why? Because this equivalence is modeled on the equivalence asserted in (3) for “a is really red”, an equivalence which shows that “really red” is a dispositional term. After all, when we say that a will look red if a normal person looks at it under normal conditions, we do assert that it has a certain disposition to appear in a certain manner under specified conditions. Nevertheless, I want to say that the complaint I lodged against Dewey is not identical with that usually lodged against Mill. The point is that Dewey’s analysis

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of “a is desirable” does not force him to say that whatever people desire is desirable, just as the analogous analysis of “really red” does not lead to the conclusion that whatever looks red to people is red. For a really to be red according to this analysis, the people to whom a looks red at a certain time must be people who are normal and who have looked at a under normal conditions. For a to be desirable, the people who desire a at a certain time must be people who are normal and who have looked at a under normal conditions. That is why we can’t infer “a is really red” from “a looks red to me now”, and can’t infer “a is desirable” from “a is desired by me now”. However, the fact that Dewey may be said to have given a dispositional analysis of “desirable” which is not subject to the same strictures as those that are sometimes leveled against Mill shows that there are two uses of the expression “dispositional terms” which must be distinguished. In order to show this, I want first to contrast the terms “soluble” and “soluble in water”. To say that a is soluble (period) is to say that a is capable of being dissolved. We mean merely that a will dissolve under some circumstances—and we do not say which. To say that a is soluble in water is to say that if a is put in water, it dissolves, and here we specify the condition that will result in a’s dissolution—namely, putting a in water. On the basis of this, we can say that whereas we may not infer “a is soluble in water” from the statement that a dissolved at a certain time, we may infer “a is soluble (period)” from the statement that a dissolved at a certain time. If a dissolved yesterday, we suppose that there were circumstances which led it to dissolve and hence that it is soluble (period). But if we don’t know that its having been in water led to its dissolution, we may not conclude that it is soluble in water. Similarly, we may conclude that what people see is visible, but we may not conclude that because a man has seen an object it is visible at a distance of three miles. Being visible is like being soluble, but being visible at a distance of three miles is like being soluble in water. It is now time to say that “really red” is a dispositional term like “soluble in water”, and not like “soluble (period)”. That is why we can’t infer “a is really red” from “a looked red to me yesterday”. Moreover, Dewey’s assimilation of “desirable” to “really red” is what protects him from the complaints usually lodged against Mill. Dewey is not forced to say that whatever people desire is desirable. His troubles are of a different kind.9

9 I am indebted to Nelson Goodman for helping me clarify some of my ideas on the difference between “soluble” and “objectively red”. Robert M. Browning’s interesting article, “On Professor Lewis’s Distinction between Ethics and Valuation,” in Ethics, vol. 59 (1949), pp. 95–111, came to my attention after my article had been prepared for publication.

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Desire and Desirability: A Rejoinder to a Posthumous Reply by John Dewey (1996)

SHORTLY AFTER HIS NINETIETH BIRTHDAY, John Dewey1 acknowledged receiving from me two publications in which I had criticized some of his views in ethics: my Social Thought in America, and my “Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis,” both published in 1949.2 Since I never heard anything more from Dewey about them, I surmised that he had probably not read them or that, if he had, he did not think it worth bothering to discuss my criticisms. I was therefore very surprised when I read in the final volume of his Collected Works that he had paid attention to them in a piece entitled “Comment on Recent Criticisms of Some Points in Moral and Logical Theory,” published in 1990 with other posthumous writings that testify to his remarkable intellectual vigor in old age.3 His editors indicate that Dewey’s reply was probably written as late as 1950, and this is confirmed by his reference in it to another criticism of my views by Sidney Hook in his article, “The Desirable and Emotive in Dewey’s Ethics,” published in that year.4 Despite the fact that all of this discussion took place more than forty years ago, I think that an examination of Dewey’s reply is warranted today, partly because Dewey said there that the subject of the discussion occupied “a central position in the theory of method underlying [his] views on all philosophical topics” (op. cit., p. 480), and partly because Alan Ryan, in his recent widely praised study, John Dewey and the High Tide of Liberalism, has referred to my differences with Dewey on the relation between the desirable and the desired in a way that needs correction.5 By publishing a rejoinder to Dewey at this late date, I may 1 Dewey wrote me on November 6, 1949: “Many thanks for a copy of your Social Thought in America which I’ve just received and [am] looking forward to reading soon. I want also to thank you for your reprint from the Philosophical Review. I had been waiting till I have had a chance to read it carefully, as I have been swamped and am only now beginning to get my head above water. I haven’t even yet been able to study it but shall soon.” This was the last letter I had from Dewey, the end of a cordial correspondence that began in 1941, when I was writing The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism (New York, 1943). It saddens me to think that he might not have written me again because he did not wish to say in a letter what he says in the piece to which I reply here. 2 Social Thought in America (New York, 1949); same pagination in paperback editions: (Boston, 1957) and (New York, 1976). “Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 58 (July 1949): pp. 321–29, reprinted with some alterations above; the altered version also appears in J. E. Tiles, ed., John Dewey: Critical Assessments, vol. 3 (New York, 1992), pp. 28–36. 3 In Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works: 1925–1953, vol. 17 (Carbondale, 1990), pp. 480–84. 4 In Hook, ed., John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom (New York, 1950), pp. 194–216. 5 (New York, 1995).

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make my exchange with him one of the longest-running ones in the history of philosophy as well as one in which he unfortunately cannot have the last word, but I think the current revival of interest in his thought fully justifies the attention I give here to ideas that Dewey regarded as fundamental in his philosophy. I am bound to say, however, that his reply does not convince me that my criticism of his view was unjustified. TWO DIFFERENT CRITICISMS OF DEWEY’S ANALYSIS OF DESIRABILITY At one point, Dewey writes: “The specific criticisms made by Dr. White already have been so amply and so adequately dealt with by Dr. Sidney Hook on the base [sic] of an extensive and critically accurate knowledge of my writings that I have only as concerns the particular views criticized to refer interested persons to Dr. Hook’s discussion and express my deep and grateful appreciation” (op. cit., pp. 480–81). Dewey then goes on to comment on what he, following Hook, calls “one variant” of my criticism of his views on the relation between “X is desired” and “X is desirable”. The variants of which Hook and Dewey speak are two different criticisms by me of what I regarded as two different versions of Dewey’s view of the relationship between what is desired and what is desirable, when the latter is understood as what we ought to desire or have a moral duty to desire. I dealt only with the first of these versions in the article mentioned earlier, but in the book, which appeared a little later in 1949, I dealt with it along with the second version. It seemed to me that, in the first version, Dewey regarded moral statements of the form “X ought to be desired” as synonymous with “If X is considered by a normal person under normal conditions, X will be desired by that person”, following the pattern used by some philosophers—notably C. S. Peirce—when analyzing the nonmoral statement “This is objectively red” as synonymous with “If this is looked at by a normal person under normal conditions, it will appear red to that person”. In so analyzing “desirable”, I said, Dewey had tried unsuccessfully to generate a moral de jure proposition by performing a logical operation on two merely de facto propositions. I said that Dewey had linked a de facto proposition such as “Adam considers this apple under normal conditions” and the de facto proposition “Adam desires this apple” as antecedent and consequent, respectively, of the conditional proposition “If Adam considers this apple under normal conditions, then Adam desires this apple”, and then Dewey asserted that this conditional proposition is synonymous with the moral proposition “This apple ought to be desired by Adam”. I thought that joining these two de facto propositions in a conditional proposition did not yield the equivalent of a moral proposition any more than joining them in a conjunction would, and I thought that if it did, it would also generate a related embarrassment for Dewey’s view. I pointed out that if the moral proposition “This apple ought to be desired by Adam” were synonymous with the conditional “If Adam considers this apple under normal

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conditions, Adam desires this apple”, then by parity of reasoning the conditional “If Adam looks at this apple under normal conditions, then this apple appears red to Adam” should be synonymous with “This apple ought to appear red to Adam”. This, I said, would make “This apple is objectively red” synonymous with a statement that is false or nonsensical, since “ought to appear red” contains the moral “ought” of “ought to be desired” and not the predictive “ought” of a sentence such as “The sun ought to set in a minute”.6 I added in Social Thought in America that Dewey seemed to defend a second version of the relationship between “desirable” and “desired” in which a thing is said to be desirable just in case we know the causal antecedents and consequences of desiring it (op. cit., pp. 216–17). In commenting on this reference to causal antecedents, I repeated what I had said about the first version—that knowing the causal antecedent of a desire not to smoke opium would not establish the moral desirability of not smoking it because knowing that my desire not to smoke opium came about after I had considered not smoking it while in a normal state and under normal conditions would not make that desire morally obligatory. And merely knowing in addition the causal consequences of my desire if acted upon— such as preservation of my health—would not show that my desire was obligatory. Therefore, I wondered whether Dewey might say in reply that I ought to desire not to smoke the opium just in case I knew the causal antecedents of my desire not to smoke it and also knew that the consequences of this desire would be. . . , where the dots were to be filled in by Dewey himself. First, I asked whether Dewey could correctly complete the sentence by putting the word “desirable” in place of the dots. No, I said, because that would produce a circular definition or analysis of “desirable”. And when I asked whether Dewey should instead put “desired” in place of the dots, I made some observations that I now expand in order to facilitate later discussion of my exchange with Dewey and Ryan’s account of it. If Dewey were to put “desired” in place of the dots, then saying “Not smoking opium is desirable” would be false if one did not desire the consequences of desiring not to smoke. If I said that not smoking opium was desirable and learned that my desire not to smoke it had consequences that I did not desire, I would have to recant my statement. To my mind, this raised a question about putting “desired” in place of the dots in the definiens of “desirable”, because doing so would require that the consequences of a desire for X be desired and not that they be desired by a normal person under normal conditions or be desirable. I wondered, therefore, whether Dewey would be willing to say that knowledge of this raw desire, so to speak, for the consequences of the original desire could play this role in his analysis of the desirable. On the other hand, as we have seen, if Dewey were to insert in the definiens of “X is desirable” that the consequences of X were desirable, he would be involved in the circle of including “desirable” in the definiens of “desirable”. 6

See my “Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis,” above pp. 165–66.

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DEWEY’S VIEW AND MILL’S COMPARED AND CONTRASTED In order to discuss Ryan’s views about my differences with Dewey in an intelligible way, I must repeat what I said in my original paper concerning the relations between J. S. Mill’s views and those of Dewey.7 I said that although these views were more alike than is usually supposed, Mill held that we can prove that something is desirable by showing it is desired, whereas Dewey avoided this view in the first version of his definition of “desirable” since there he held that a thing may be desired without being desirable if the desire were not that of a normal person under normal conditions. After pointing this out, I made some remarks on a difference between the so-called dispositional terms “soluble” and “objectively red” which I thought would illuminate the relationship between Dewey’s first version of desirability and Mill’s view. I said that we can infer “a is soluble” from “a is dissolving now” whereas we cannot infer “a is objectively red” from “a appears red now”, because “a is soluble” means that there are conditions under which a dissolves whereas “a is objectively red” does not mean that there are conditions under which a appears red, but rather that a appears red under specific conditions—namely, to a normal observer who looks at a in white light. That is why Dewey’s view that the analysis of “desirable” resembles that of “objectively red” does not license the inference of “a is desirable” from “a is desired now” alone. Mill, I said, thought that “desirable” resembled “soluble”, whereas Dewey avoided Mill’s error by saying that “desirable” resembled “objectively red”. Nevertheless, I said, Dewey’s first version was defective for the reasons I have given earlier, even though Dewey had not been misled by the “ble” at the end of “desirable” into thinking that it was a dispositional predicate like “soluble”, but had made the more subtle error of thinking that “desirable” was a dispositional predicate like “objectively red”. All of this makes it comparatively easy to see a misunderstanding in what Ryan says about my exchange with Dewey. Ryan writes: “Dewey, said White, had committed the same mistake as Mill and had confused the desired with the desirable. Dewey thought the ‘data’ of ethics were our likings and wishings and longings and seemed to be reducing ethical argument to the discussion of what we desired rather than what we ought to desire” (op. cit., p. 337). This, I submit, is a very inadequate summary of my view. In my discussion of the first version of Dewey’s view, I objected to Dewey’s effort to assimilate “desirable” to “objectively red” while stating explicitly that Dewey did not make Mill’s error of inferring “a is desirable” from “a is desired” or that of confusing them. Nor in my examination of the second version did I accuse Dewey of doing this, for there I merely asked whether Dewey wished his definition or analysis of desirable to require that the consequences of desiring a thing be (1) desirable or (2) desired, and I pointed to difficulties in both answers. I must therefore protest against Ryan’s defense of 7

Ibid.

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Dewey’s view as “infinitely far from collapsing the desirable into the desired” (op. cit., p. 337), as if to imply that I had accused Dewey of confusing the desirable with the desired or of collapsing one into the other. TWO INEFFECTUAL CRITICISMS OF MY VIEW BY DEWEY Now I turn to Dewey’s own effort to answer my criticisms. He begins by referring to what he calls a fundamental methodological difference between my view and his, but in stating that difference he unfortunately relies too much on what Hook claims I say. This leads Dewey to misunderstand my statement that the second version of his definition of “desirable” might be circular. Because he accepted Hook’s misleading summary of my view, Dewey wrongly took me to hold that “knowledge of the causes and consequences of our desire and of what is desired does not make the desired desirable unless we can get back to some rock bottom desirable in itself” (op. cit., p. 481). In other words, Dewey mistakenly took me to hold that the expression “desirable in itself” must appear in the definiens of “desirable”. Under this wrong impression, Dewey then attributed to me what he probably regarded as two of the most objectionable ideas in the history of philosophy, saying that my alleged “dependence upon that which is ‘desirable in itself,’ that is, in complete independence of and isolation from investigation of the existential context of ‘conditions and consequences’, involves the assumption of what has been known in ethics as the method of Intuition and in epistemology as the necessity of the a priori to warrant the validity of statements made on empirical grounds” (op. cit., p. 481). In my book and article, however, I never appealed to the notion of desirable in itself. Indeed, if the phrase means something different from “desirable”—as it seems to for Dewey—I would not have complained that its introduction into the definiens of “desirable” created a circle. Furthermore, I did not defend ethical intuitionism and was probably less of an advocate of the necessity of the a priori than Dewey himself was.8 So much, then, for one of Dewey’s ineffectual criticisms of my views. I turn now to another such criticism that emerges in Dewey’s response to my claim that he had generated a normative or de jure proposition by performing a suitable operation on merely de facto propositions. He admits that such generation would constitute “a variety of intellectual magic” (op. cit., p. 482) but does not admit that his view is open to this criticism. Instead, he uses my remark about performing an operation on propositions as an occasion for complaining that in using the word “operation” in this way I completely neglect a view of his according to which an operation is performed not on propositions but with them (op. cit., p. 482). I knew, of course, that Dewey had used the word “operation” 8 When I say that I was probably less of an advocate of the necessity of the a priori than Dewey, I have in mind some views I set forth in “Experiment and Necessity in Dewey’s Philosophy,” reprinted above.

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differently from the way in which I used it, but this hardly affected the point I made while using “operation” as I used it. Therefore, Dewey’s remark about his operating with propositions rather than on them fails to rebut anything I said in criticism of his views.

DEWEY’S MORE SERIOUS ARGUMENTS After Dewey ironically says that I have the “personal right to take” a position which is a “heritage from times when scientific method as now practiced did not exist and when the rational as distinct from the observational had to be invoked to guarantee the validity of beliefs and statements,” he adds that the method he “employed in making the distinction between the de facto desired and the de jure desirable is simply the method pursued in all sciences which conduct inquiries intended to find out what is fact—‘objective’ fact to indulge in a pleonasm—and in distinction from what is taken to be fact apart from inquiry into ‘conditions and consequences’ ” (op. cit., p. 482). Dewey also says: “Dr. White’s reduction of the desirable to that which is desired” under normal conditions” is wholly satisfactory to me provided the literally terrible ambivalence in normal is cleared away—which I do not find he even tries to do” (op. cit., p. 483). I shall temporarily postpone dealing with Dewey’s view of the word “normal”, but I wish to emphasize here that he accepts the wording of the analysis of “desirable” I attribute to him as well as the similarly worded analysis of “objectively red” or “really red” I attribute to him. But since I maintained that his analysis of “This apple is desirable”—where “desirable” is synonymous with “ought to be desired”—is not acceptable whereas the parallel analysis of “This apple is really red” is acceptable, Dewey tries to show that they are both acceptable because, he says, both reflect the method used in science “to find out what is fact . . . in distinction from what is taken to be fact apart from inquiry into ‘conditions and consequences’ ” (op. cit., p. 482). Unlike Dewey, however, I think that the distinction between what is taken to be fact and what is fact is involved when we distinguish between the statements “This appears to be red” and “This is really red”, but that it is not involved when we distinguish between the statements “This is desired” and “This is desirable”. Indeed, I think Dewey’s main error is to identify the distinction between the de facto “This is desired” and the de jure “This is desirable” with the distinction between what is taken to be fact and what is fact. Therefore, one way of stating my criticism of Dewey in traditional philosophical language might be to say that the distinction between the de facto and the de jure is not the same as that between the apparent and the real. I elected to say in less traditional philosophical language, however, that though the statement “This apple is really red” may be analyzed (following Peirce) as synonymous with the statement “If this apple is put before a normal eye in daylight (normal light), it looks red”, the statement “This apple is desirable” is not synonymous with the statement “If this apple is considered by a normal person under normal circumstances, it is desired”.

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In arguing that the de facto/de jure distinction is not the same as the apparent/ real distinction, I might have said that the expression “de facto” does not mean the same as “apparent” and that the expression “de jure” does not mean the same as “real”. But I chose another way of arguing the point because I did not wish to use terms like “apparent” and “real” that some readers might find obscure, and so I argued instead that, if the correct analysis of the moral statement (a) This apple ought to be desired (is desirable). is given by (b) If this apple is considered by a normal person under normal circumstances, it is desired. then the statement (c) If this apple is put before a normal eye in normal light, it looks red. should be the analysis of (d) This apple ought to be seen as red (ought to look red). But since (c) by hypothesis gives the analysis of (e) This apple is really (objectively) red. then (e) should also be synonymous with (d). In that case, a statement of the real color of an object would become synonymous with the ethical statement (d) because its “ought” is, as I have said, the “ought” of (a). This would be absurd, however, and would lead us to say that all attributions to objects of their real or objective colors are made in statements synonymous with ethical statements and therefore lead to the unacceptable conclusion that obviously nonethical descriptive scientific truths are ethical. Here I was not arguing against ethical naturalism construed as asserting that all ethical statements are synonymous with scientific statements of behavioral science; I was protesting against a view that had as a logical consequence the implausible view that “This apple is really red” is an ethical statement. Parenthetically, I suggest that the statement “If this apple is considered by a normal person under normal circumstances, it is desired” might be regarded as the analysis of the statement “This apple is really desired” by those who seek an analogue involving desire for Peirce’s analysis of “This apple is really red”. One of these analogous analyses would say that the real color of an apple is the color it appears to have in the eye, so to speak, of a normal beholder under normal circumstances; the other would say that the real attitude of desire toward the apple is the attitude the normal reactor to it has under normal circumstances. I merely suggest this, as I say; I do not advocate it. But I do continue to maintain that although the Peirceian approach connects the real color of an object with the way in which the object looks or appears, it does not connect the attitude we ought to have toward an object with the attitude we do have toward it.

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I turn now to the difficult and crucial concept of normativeness that figures in Dewey’s reduction of the desirable to what is desired under normal conditions, for his reflections on it contain the heart of his argument against my view. In my opinion, only the outlines of that argument may be made out with confidence. Dewey thinks that the word “normal” is used normatively, so to speak, when it appears in the conditional statements (b) and (c) above, and from this he concludes that (a) and (e) are both normative in a sense that allegedly undermines my contention that (b) does not give the correct analysis of moral statement (a). Dewey never answers my complaint that his view leads to the absurd conclusion that statements about real colors are ethical, but since he insists that (a), (b), (c), and (e) are all scientific and therefore all normative, I shall now look more closely at his idea of the normal as normative to see whether it can sustain the great philosophical load he puts on it. Dewey tells us that “normal” in the sense of what happens usually or on the average is “certainly de facto” and therefore not normative. But then, as I have pointed out, he says that a statement like (e) of the form “X is objectively (really) red” is normative and that the expression “normal” in (c) has what he calls normative force. He also says in a crucial passage that the normal conditions referred to in statements like (c) are “not those of a majority or even the total number of cases in which X appears red. They are conditions instituted by continued experimental inquiries conducted for a definite end-in-view” (op. cit., p. 483). Dewey seems to imply here that Peirce’s condition of being before a normal eye in normal light applies neither to the majority of cases in which X appears red nor to the total number of such cases. I doubt whether Dewey is correct in saying that the number of cases in which X is before a normal eye in daylight does not constitute the majority of cases in which X appears red, but I shall not quarrel about that since I do not know how to settle the issue. Dewey needs to say, however, that some cases in which X looks red are cases in which X is not before a normal eye in daylight, since that will allow him to say that an experimenter must put X before a normal eye in normal light in order to discover whether a statement such as (c) is warranted. Dewey seems to think that the condition “is before a normal eye in normal light” has normative force simply because it is a condition which is not always met, and therefore the scientist must put X into such a condition in order to test (c) and its synonym (e). Dewey’s point seems to be that because objects that appear red are not always before a normal eye in normal light, the scientist puts them there to see whether (c) and therefore (e) are true. Once it is recognized that normal conditions are normative in his sense, Dewey says he welcomes “the formal or methodological identification of the statement “X is desirable” with “X is objectively red”, for if “objective” has any distinctive relevant sense in the latter proposition, that sense, like that of “normal” as having any relevance to the point at issue in the phrase “normal conditions”, is itself intrinsically normative or de jure” (op. cit., p. 483). Furthermore, Dewey says he welcomes the “identification when its direction is completely reversed,” which means, I think, that Dewey assimilates the analysis of “X is objectively red” to that of “X is desirable”. In short, he seems to hold that (a) and (e) are both

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normative because they are respectively synonymous with (b) and (c). These two latter statements seem to be normative for him because the generalizations that support them, respectively, are the following allegedly normative scientific statements: (b′) Whenever this apple is considered by a normal person under normal circumstances, it is desired. and (c′) Whenever this apple is put before a normal eye in normal light, it looks red. And Dewey says these generalizations are both normative because their “whenever” clauses express conditions that require institution by an experimenter for a reason that Dewey conveys at the end of his “Comment”: “Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, ‘normal’ conditions for and of an experiment that yields a warranted conclusion do not lie around nor force themselves upon us. They are obtained by undertaking the kind of activities which the best available knowledge at the time informs us should be tried in order to find out their specific consequences in and for further knowing” (op. cit., p. 484). Dewey’s use of the phrase “should be tried” conveys his idea that the activity of putting an apple before a normal eye in daylight is dictated by a normative judgment, but I say it is not a moral judgment. Having said as much as I can in elucidation of Dewey’s view as to why (a), (b), (c), and (e) are all normative in the same sense, I now ask whether he succeeds in showing that all scientific propositions are normative in a way that undermines my claim that his analysis or reduction of “ought to be desired” cannot be modeled on the Peirceian analysis of “really red” or “objectively red”. I answer no because even if one accepts what Dewey says, it is hard to see how it makes statement (a) a statement of moral duty. Moreover, according to a strict application of Dewey’s own criterion for being normative, the “whenever” clauses in statements (b′) and (c′) are normative in his terminology, since his word “normative” strictly applies only to statement forms like “X is considered by a normal person under normal circumstances” and “X is put before a normal eye in normal light”. But how does it follow from the fact that the tester of (b′) and (c′) must institute their antecedent conditions to discover the truth of (b′) and (c′), that statement (b′) is a moral statement? And if it does follow, why should it not follow for the very same reason that (c′) is a moral statement—a consequence I have said is absurd? So far as I can see, Dewey has no answer to these crucial questions; he does not escape this reductio ad absurdum. Furthermore, I am not convinced that Dewey’s characterization of all scientific generalizations is adequate. I am not sure that all statements of the form “For every X, if X is A, then X is B” are scientific if and only if an experimenter must put things in normative condition A in order to see whether they are also in condition B. “All bodies attract each other” is a scientific generalization yet I cannot imagine an experimenter saying “Let us put X and Y into the condition of being bodies to see whether they attract each other”. This is not to say that

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the law of universal gravitation is not tested empirically, but it is to say that it is not tested in the manner described by Dewey. I want to emphasize, moreover, that even if he were right about how we test scientific generalizations, he would not answer my criticism of his view of moral duty. Even if all scientific generalizations were to contain antecedent conditions that are normative in Dewey’s sense—which I doubt—that would not show that they support statements saying that we have a moral duty to desire certain things—that they are desirable. For if they did show that, they would also support the absurd statement that we have a moral duty to see certain things as red. ETHICAL NATURALISM: REDUCTIVE AND HOLISTIC Throughout my earlier discussion of Dewey’s ideas on this matter, I assumed that his views on what is objectively red and what ought to be desired were analytic or reductive. I based this on Dewey’s favorable quotation of a passage in which Peirce asks: “Of the myriads of the forms into which a proposition may be translated, which is that one which is to be called its very meaning?” to which Peirce replies: “It is, according to the pragmaticist, that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct” (ibid., p. 303).9 And I also had in mind passages like the following one in Peirce: “to say that a Jacqueminot rose really is red means, and can mean, nothing but that if such a rose is put before a normal eye, in the daylight, it will look red” (ibid., p. 194).10 Therefore, I feel vindicated in my interpretation of Dewey when he says: “Dr. White’s reduction of the desirable to that which is desired ‘under normal conditions’ is wholly satisfactory to me,” even though Dewey goes on to say things about “normal” that I do not accept. However, readers of my later work might see some irony in my speaking of such “reduction” because in What Is and What Ought To Be Done and The Question of Free Will: A Holistic View11—especially in the first—I urge that we abandon the reductive search for the meanings of ethical terms partly because of my increasing doubts about analyticity and analysis as expressed in my Toward Reunion in Philosophy.12 I therefore came to focus on the epistemology rather than the semantics of ethics, which I later approached holistically in A Philosophy of Culture while extending the ideas of Pierre Duhem, W. V. Quine, and Alfred Tarski.13 When I approached ethics in this way, I maintained that the purpose of ethical thinking was to organize a heterogeneous flux that contained not only sensory experiences but also moral feelings, and also that heterogeneous systems or bodies 9 “The Pragmatism of Peirce,” in Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic, M. R. Cohen, ed. (New York, 1923). 10 Collected Papers, A. W. Burks, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). 11 (New York, 1981) and (Princeton, 1993). 12 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). 13 Duhem, La The´orie physique: Son objet, sa structure, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1914), pp. 278–89; Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,”Philosophical Review, vol. 60 (1951), 20–43; and my “A Philosophical Letter of Alfred Tarski,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 84, 1 (January 1957), 28–32.

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of statements which organize such a flux contain not only logical statements and those of descriptive science but also moral statements. Just as Quine’s holism and Tarski’s are used by them to argue against a sharp epistemological distinction between the method of testing logical statements and that of testing statements of natural science, I use my holism to argue against a sharp epistemological distinction between the methods of testing normative and descriptive theories. By regarding ethical theory in this holistic way, I have come to a view like that of Dewey insofar as the aim of his analysis of “This is desirable” was to erase a sharp epistemological distinction between the method of testing it and the method of testing “This is objectively red”. However, because my holism requires the testing of conjunctions of statements by experience, I call myself an ethical naturalist but not a reductive naturalist like Dewey, for he seems to seek synonyms for statements asserting moral duties and for statements attributing objective colors while engaging in what he calls reduction in his reply to me. Because I think scientists test conjunctions rather than isolated statements, Dewey’s view that all “scientifically grounded propositions” contain or need experimental directions for testing them individually strikes me as excessively isolationist, so to speak. I say this because he regards each scientific generalization or law as experimental in a way that I criticized earlier, and because I do not think that such a criticism may be justly made when a scientific theory is viewed as a conjunction of statements that is confirmed as a whole by experience and not by separate experimental testings of each generalization contained in that whole. I believe that there is an important affinity between my later rejection of a sharp distinction between testing moral statements and testing descriptive statements, and what I took to be the antidualistic, naturalistic motive behind Dewey’s effort in The Quest for Certainty and elsewhere.14 Like him, I do not think that the moral judge has any data except sensory and emotional experiences against which to test his theories, but I do think that Dewey’s ethical naturalism is unacceptably reductive just as phenomenalism is. In concluding, I want to say something about Dewey that Bertrand Russell once said so felicitously about William James after criticizing his views.15 I wish “to express, what in the course of controversial writings does not adequately appear, the profound respect and personal esteem which I felt for [Dewey], as did all who knew him. . . . For readers trained in philosophy, no such assurance was required, but for those unaccustomed to the tone of a subject in which agreement is necessarily rarer than esteem, it seemed desirable to record what to others would be a matter of course” (ibid., p. v). I say this about Dewey on the chance that even readers trained in philosophy might need such assurance while reading the present article, and I wish to add that I owe him a great intellectual debt as well. He was a towering figure in philosophy, one from whom I learned an enormous amount even when I disagreed with him.

14 15

(New York, 1960). Philosophical Essays (London, 1910).

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Peirce’s Summum Bonum and the Ethical Views of C. I. Lewis and John Dewey (1999)

THIS IS PRIMARILY a note on the ethical views of C. I. Lewis in which I compare them with some ideas of John Dewey and with some remarks of Charles Peirce about the summum bonum.1 In a letter to me in 1963, Lewis hints at a way of dealing with an objection of mine to his views by appealing to an idea of Peirce, but before turning to Lewis’s letter I want to say something in the first two sections below about the background of my differences with him, especially insofar as they involve the views of Dewey, Peirce, and Kant. In later sections, I concentrate on some questions that are raised by Lewis’s appeal to Peirce. DEWEY AND LEWIS ON THE USE OF PEIRCE’S PRAGMATISM IN ETHICS Dewey thought that statements expressing goodness or value and those expressing moral obligations or duties can be established empirically by using scientific method as he understood it, whereas Lewis held that statements of the latter kind are not empirical.2 Dewey also thought that ethical statements of the form “This ought to be desired” can be analyzed pragmatically, much as the empirical statement “This is really red” can be according to Peirce,3 but it is evident that Lewis had to deny this because he believed that statements about what is obligatory, just, or right are not empirical. In 1949 I tried to sort out some of the differences between Dewey and Lewis on this subject and I also offered some criticisms of their views.4 In criticizing Dewey’s analysis of the ethical statement “This ought to be desired” as synonymous with “If this were considered by a normal person under normal circumstances, it would be desired by that person”, I said that an analogous analysis of “This is really red” as synonymous with “If this were looked at by a normal person under normal circumstances, it would 1 I am very grateful to Profs. Susan Haack and H. S. Thayer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, Ill., 1946), p. 554. Lewis wrote: “Valuation is always a matter of empirical knowledge. But what is right and what is just can never be determined by empirical facts alone”. Also see note 4 below. 3 Peirce wrote: “. . . to say that a Jacqueminot rose really is red means, and can mean, nothing but that if such a rose is put before a normal eye, in the daylight, it will look red”. Collected Papers, ed. A. W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 8.194. 4 “Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis,” Philosophical Review, vol. 13 (July 1949), pp. 321– 29, reprinted above.

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appear red to that person” would render the statement “This is really red” synonymous with an ethical statement—something like “This ought to be seen as red”— and this analysis seemed defective to me. On the other hand, in criticizing Lewis’s view that “what is right and what is just can never be determined by empirical facts alone”, I said that Lewis—who insisted that statements about what is right express knowledge and that all knowledge is expressed in empirical synthetic statements or in a priori analytic statements—seemed to be driven to the odd conclusion that an ethical statement such as “This ought to be desired” is analytic if true, that is, true by virtue of the meanings of its terms. In 1950 Dewey wrote an answer to my criticism of him which was published posthumously in 1990,5 an answer to which I replied at length in 1996.6 And in 1963, after I had repeated my earlier criticism of Lewis in an article on pragmatism and the scope of science, Lewis wrote me that he hoped to escape what he acknowledged as his “predicament” by using some ideas in an article by Dewey on Peirce’s pragmatism, an article which was reprinted as a supplementary essay in Peirce’s Chance, Love, and Logic.7 In appealing to Dewey’s article, Lewis did not try to apply Peirce’s pragmatic theory of meaning to statements about rightness or obligatoriness but sought help from statements of Peirce about the summum bonum whose efficacy in getting him out of his predicament I find dubious. When I criticized Lewis in 1963 I repeated what I had said in my paper on value and obligation in Dewey and Lewis, a paper to which Lewis never responded. I wrote in 1963 that Lewis “is involved in a serious problem over the status of statements about what is right and just. He contrasts them with value statements because he claims that value statements are empirical. Yet I do not think that he can successfully hold that all statements about the rightness or wrongness of actions are analytic, seen to be true merely by an inspection of the meanings of their component terms. Moreover, he seems to reject the view that ethical statements express no knowledge at all. Therefore, he has entered a quandary from which he has not yet successfully emerged”.8 In reaction to this comment and to some general comments of mine on pragmatism, Lewis wrote me as follows on September 10, 1963: I read your article, and the one on which you and Lucia collaborated,9 as soon as I received “Paths of American Thought” with the ‘Compliments of the Author’ card. Thank you for putting me on the list. 5 “Comment on Recent Criticisms of Some Points in Moral and Logical Theory,” in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 17 of Collected Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Ill., 1990), pp. 480–84. 6 “Desire and Desirability: A Rejoinder to a Posthumous Reply by John Dewey”, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 93 (May 1996), pp. 229–42, reprinted above. 7 John Dewey, “The Pragmatism of Peirce,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 13 (1916), pp. 701–71; reprinted in C. S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen (New York, 1923). 8 “Pragmatism and the Scope of Science,” Paths of American Thought, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Morton White (Boston, 1963), p. 198. 9 This refers to an article by the late Lucia White and me, “The American Intellectual versus the American City”, in Paths of American Thought, pp. 264–68, reprinted below.

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As you know, I am a most dis-agree-able person, but I find that I fully agree with everything you have said about Pragmatism; including observation of my present predicament with respect to ethics. (I am hoping that my waning energies are going to allow me to finish a book which will accomplish a little on that point. If you should reread Dewey’s “Supplementary Essay” (8 pages) to Morris Cohen’s collation Chance, Love, and Logic, I think you might guess a little the drift of that. Emphasis on pp. 302–4.) I have always misdoubted any claim I could make to be classed as a pragmatist, but think I have followed out some of Peirce’s more basic thoughts.

What was the “drift” that Lewis said I might guess a little and which he thought might accomplish a little to help him out of his predicament? Before I try to answer this difficult question, I want to say something about the attitudes of Dewey, Peirce, and Lewis toward certain ideas of Kant, attitudes that may help us understand the historical background of Lewis’s predicament. KANT, PEIRCE, DEWEY, AND LEWIS ON THE PRACTICAL AND THE PRAGMATIC When Dewey expounded Peirce’s pragmatic theory of meaning in “The Pragmatism of Peirce”, he noted in passing that Kant called laws of morality practical and a priori by contrast to counsels of prudence, which latter, Kant said, were pragmatic because, as Dewey put it, they had to do with welfare. Dewey seemed to approve of Peirce’s well-known remark that the experimentalist type of mind deliberately turns his back on what Kant called practical truth, and therefore to approve of Peirce’s refusal to call himself a “practicalist”. Dewey quoted Peirce’s explanation that to one like himself “who still thought in Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles, the former belonging to a region of thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter expressing relations to some definite human purpose. Now quite the most striking feature of the new theory [pragmatism] was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and human purpose”.10 Dewey emphasized that Kant regarded categorical practical laws of morality as a priori but regarded hypothetical counsels of prudence as pragmatic because they bid us to perform actions that are good as means to a purpose that we all have—namely, our own happiness;11 and, of course, he might have added that Kant’s categorical imperative commands the performance of an action that is good in itself, having no relation to a further purpose.12 In this connection, however, it is worth noting that because Lewis seemed to think that attributions of rightness or obligatoriness to actions are not pragmatically translatable into empirical statements, he seemed to hold a view that resem10

Chance, Love, and Logic, p. 302. H. J. Paton, The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (London, 1955), p. 83. 12 Ibid. 11

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bled a Kantian view of statements about what ought to be done though, of course, his general philosophy prevented him from saying that they were synthetic a priori. Indeed, that is why I suggested that he might be forced to the odd conclusion that they were analytic a priori. In eschewing the label “practicalism”, Peirce held that the pragmatic, hypothetical, a posteriori statements into which he translated statements like “This is really red” and “This is hard” were markedly different from Kant’s practical, categorical, a priori laws of morality.13 Peirce held that when we translate “This is hard” or “This is really red” into a proposition that is applicable to human conduct, we give “[the] very meaning” of the translated proposition. Such a pragmatic translation, he said, is a general proposition which says that every action of a certain description will have a certain kind of experimental result, and, according to Peirce, only the logical consequences of such a general proposition which concern the future can guide conduct that the self can control. Peirce says that “whenever a man acts purposively, he acts under a belief in some experimental phenomenon”.14 In other words, a man who purposefully performs an action, performs it because he believes the general proposition that whenever he does something of a certain kind, he will bring about a certain kind of result. I repeat, however, that Lewis, unlike Dewey, did not translate “This diamond ought to be desired” in this Peirceian pragmatic way. In his published writings Lewis, like Kant, distinguished sharply between the status of the de facto statement “This diamond is hard” and that of the de jure statement “This diamond ought to be desired”, and because Lewis did not regard the latter statement as de facto, he seemed forced to regard it as analytic if true. PEIRCE ON THE SUMMUM BONUM Now I turn to Peirce’s view of the summum bonum that Lewis seemed to think would help him in his effort to escape his predicament. Underlying Peirce’s view is the idea that because a pragmatic translation is a general proposition of the form “Whenever you do something of kind A, you get a result of kind B”, it supports a belief in the reality of some universals or generals since he seems to have counted this proposition as a general or universal. He said that the summum bonum consists “in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals”, which Peirce calls “destined”.15 When introducing this notion of being destined, Peirce said that “conduct controlled by ethical reason tends toward fixing certain habits of conduct, the nature of which 13 I avoid trying to link Peirce’s hypotheticals with Kant’s in all respects, in part because of the complications created by Kant’s view that imperatives of skill are analytic and that if it were easy to find a determinate concept of happiness, the imperatives or counsels of prudence would also be analytic (Paton, op. cit., p. 85, p. 138). By contrast, Peirce’s hypotheticals (e.g. “If this rose is put before a normal eye in daylight, it looks red”) are not said by him to be analytic. 14 Collected Papers, 5.427. 15 Collected Papers, 5.430.

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does not depend upon any accidental circumstances, and in that sense may be said to be destined”—for example, the fixing of peaceable as opposed to quarrelsome habits in the history of mankind. Peirce went on to say that in an analogous way “thought, controlled by rational experimental logic, tends to the fixation of certain opinions, equally destined, the nature of which will be the same in the end, however the perversity of thought of whole generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate fixation”.16 In other words, Peirce held that the history of thought controlled by rational experimental logic will follow a pattern like that followed by the history of conduct controlled by ethical reason. Thought will ultimately arrive at destined opinions just as conduct will arrive at destined habits of conduct, but, according to Peirce, if thinking is bound to arrive at those opinions no matter what some people may think, the opinions must refer to entities which are real. Their being destined, he adds, is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable and, as I understand Lewis’s remark in his letter, he was attracted by Peirce’s view that generals will become more embodied in “the existent” during the evolutionary process that constitutes the summum bonum. In “The Pragmatism of Peirce”, Dewey noted that Peirce also held that some generals are not only real but physically efficient. Peirce said that my thought that the air is stuffy may cause the window to be opened, and that although this thought is an individual event, “what determined it to take the particular determination it did, was in part the general fact that stuffy air is malsain, a physical effort was brought into existence by the efficiency of a general and nonexistent truth”. Peirce held that whereas the physical effort existed and the general truth was real, the latter could not be said to exist precisely because it was not an individual. Moreover, he said, the fact that a general truth can bring a physical effort into existence had “the immense advantage of not blinding us to great facts—such as that the ideas ‘justice’ and ‘truth’ are, notwithstanding the iniquity of the world, the mightiest of the forces that move it”.17 LEWIS ON THE GROUND AND NATURE OF THE RIGHT Before inquiring whether Peirce’s view of the summum bonum can help Lewis escape the predicament described earlier, we should recall what that predicament was. Lewis held (1) that “what is right and what is just can never be determined by empirical facts alone”; (2) that we can know what is right and what is just; and (3) that we can know only empirical synthetic truth or analytic a priori truth. That is why I thought Lewis might have been forced to hold (4) that a statement like “It was right of Brutus to stab Caesar”, or “Brutus ought to have stabbed Caesar”, is analytic if true. Since I doubt that Lewis ever seriously entertained the surrender of (2) or (3) in order to avoid accepting (4), I believe that the only course seriously open to him was to surrender (1). However, it would seem that 16 17

Ibid. Collected Papers, 5.431.

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Lewis sought to avoid surrendering (1) by emphasizing the word “alone” in it. In other words, he maintained that what is right and just is determined by empirical facts and by something else. And what was that something else? In his book The Ground and Nature of the Right (1955), which appeared after I had criticized his views in 1949, Lewis says: “It takes two things . . . to determine the rightness of action: a rule or directive of right doing, or something operative in the manner of a rule, and a judgment of goodness to be found in the consequences of the act in question”.18 Lewis holds in that book, as he does in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, that the judgment of goodness or value he mentions is empirical, whereas he denies that the rule or direction he mentions can be established empirically.19 Before considering whether Peirce’s remarks on the summum bonum can help Lewis out of his predicament, I want to say something about his view that a judgment of rightness or justness must be established by referring to two things: (1) empirical facts and (2) rules or principles. Since Lewis seems to hold that rules cannot be established by empirical fact, the question arises: how does Lewis determine that it was right of Brutus, or his duty, to stab Caesar? Does Lewis think we empirically determine the goodness of the consequences of the stabbing and, in addition, determine something else nonempirically about the truth or acceptability of the relevant rules or principles? According to Lewis, however, we establish something nonempirically by establishing the truth of an analytic statement, but what sort of analytic statement would figure in the case at hand? Does Lewis think that the moral principles we invoke when we determine that Brutus had a duty to stab Caesar are all analytic in his sense, that we know that they are true merely by examining the meanings of terms? In that case, it would seem that he merely shifts his earlier predicament concerning the status of “It was right of Brutus to stab Caesar” or of “Brutus had a moral duty to stab Caesar” to one concerning the status of whatever moral rules or principles he thinks we have to establish in order to defend these singular moral statements. Consequently, we may ask whether he is committed to saying that all of the moral rules that help us establish this are analytic. If he is, I emphasize, he is committed to a view that is just as peculiar as the view that “Brutus ought to have stabbed Caesar” is analytic if true. In commenting on what he calls principles of right, Lewis says: “Time out of mind, men have sought to find and demonstrate an ultimate ground of the right. But the right is sui generis: if the formulation of it be a kind of fact, still it is fact which is like no other; and what is right cannot be proved right by summoning premises which themselves say nothing about right and wrong. If there are any first principles of right, or first principles of the various categories of the right— and it is, of course, such first or comprehensive principles which we would seek— it lies in the nature of the case that the validity of them will be indemonstrable. 18 19

The Ground and Nature of the Right (New York, 1955), p. 75. Ibid., p. 97.

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How prove valid the most general of all formulations of any give sort”.20 But are the first principles of right analytic in Lewis’s sense? Why shouldn’t they be analytic for Lewis if they refer to facts of a kind which are not empirically discovered? And if he does not regard them as analytic, is he not committed to saying that there are three mutually exclusive kinds of truths: analytic a priori, synthetic a posteriori, and normative? In that case, of course, he is certainly in the same old predicament. I know that Lewis says that “the ground of validity of imperatives must somehow lie in our human nature”. But how do they lie in our human nature? What is the status of the grounding judgment in which the terms “human nature” and “validity of imperatives” are connected? Is it synthetic or is it analytic for Lewis? Is this concept of validity as applied to moral imperatives contained in the concept of human nature as the concept of animal is supposedly contained in the concept of man? I wonder. Is it analytic, according to Lewis, to say, for example, that every human being ought not lie? Presumably, Lewis would say that “Every man is rational” is analytic, but would he not need to say in addition that “Every rational being has a duty not to lie” is analytic if he is to extract the attribute of having a duty not to lie from the attribute of being human? I find it hard to call that statement analytic when I try my hardest to regard the term “analytic” as a clear one. At times Lewis seems to justify true moral imperatives in a manner that is reminiscent of Kant’s view that a fully rational agent would necessarily act in accordance with such imperatives. But whereas Kant thought that his statement about the connection between being fully rational and acting in accordance with such an imperative is synthetic a priori, Lewis would seem forced to say that it is analytic if a priori.21 LEWIS’S APPEAL TO PEIRCE’S SUMMUM BONUM It is now time to ask how Lewis can be helped by Peirce’s doctrine of the summum bonum as referred to in Dewey’s paper on Peirce. It will be recalled that Peirce says there that the summum bonum consists in that process of evolution “whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals . . . said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable”. It will also be recalled that the generals Peirce has in mind here are general propositions which have the form: if one performs an operation of a certain kind, one will get a certain kind of result, and that a destined general proposition is one that is true because it will ultimately be believed. But how might Lewis be helped by the statement that the summum bonum is the evolutionary process described by Peirce? How might it help Lewis avoid the view that a true statement about what is obligatory, right, or just must be analytic? It might be said that accepting Peirce’s view would make such a statement empirical and thereby undermine 20 21

Ibid., pp. 84–85. Paton, op. cit., pp. 28–29.

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much of what Lewis says in The Ground and Nature of the Right. For it seems to me that the statement “The universe is becoming more and more orderly” (which is what Peirce seems to mean when he says that the existent comes more and more to embody destined generals) is an empirical statement, and therefore if Lewis were to say “Brutus ought to have stabbed Caesar” is synonymous with something like “Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar contributed to the process whereby the universe becomes more orderly”, Lewis would have to abandon the view that “Brutus ought to have stabbed Caesar” is not empirical. He would be committed to a variety of evolutionary naturalism that would not be compatible with the main thrust of The Ground and Nature of the Right. Of course, Lewis might have been influenced by a remark of Dewey’s to the effect that Peirce’s statement about the summum bonum was probably “an empirical rendering of the Kantian generality of moral actions”, and therefore Lewis might have been led to surrender his earlier view.22 But I do not think the idea that the summum bonum is the process whereby the “existent [my italics] comes more and more to embody” destined generals was thought by Peirce to be a competitor of a Kantian principle which purports to tell us on what maxims a wholly rational being would act. If we were to ask why we ought not kill, steal, or lie, I do not think Peirce would answer that not killing, not stealing, and not lying contribute to the process whereby the existent comes more and more to embody destined or real generals. Let us suppose that when Peirce characterized the summum bonum as he did, he meant that the existent is coming to have more and more properties that are real in his sense. How, then, could Lewis maintain that not lying, for example, is one of our duties because it contributes to the process whereby the existent comes to have more and more real properties? It seems to me, therefore, that if Lewis wanted to construct a naturalistic view of duty on the basis of Peirce’s view of the summum bonum, he was entering a very dark alley. Lewis’s position, I think, was as questionable as that of Dewey in his posthumous reply to me,23 and so I am inclined to think that neither of the most distinguished admirers of Peirce of the second half of the twentieth century succeeded in providing us with an adequate naturalistic account of moral obligation: Dewey failed when he tried to use Peirce’s pragmatic principle for that purpose, and, I fear, Lewis failed when he tried to use Peirce’s view of the summum bonum.24

22

Chance, Love, and Logic, p. 304 n. 4. See note 4 above. 24 For an effort to apply a holistic view to this very difficult problem, see my What Is and What Ought To Be Done (New York, 1981), The Question of Free Will (Princeton, 1993), and A Philosophy of Culture (Princeton, 2002). 23

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Normative Ethics, Normative Epistemology, and Quine’s Holism (1986)

IN THIS PAPER, I make some comments and raise certain questions about what Quine has called his epistemological “holism”.1 My chief aim is to persuade Quine to agree with me that we may include sentences containing expressions such as “ought”, “ought not”, “may”, “has a right to”, and “is entitled to” in certain bodies of sentences that may be tested in a holistic manner that I shall soon characterize. In my view, such sentences appear in normative ethics as well as in normative epistemology. For example, I regard the sentence “Newton had a right to defend his life” as a sentence in normative ethics whereas I regard “Newton had a right to accept the principle of universal gravitation” as a sentence in normative epistemology, and I hope to persuade Quine to agree that heterogeneous conjunctions of such normative sentences and descriptive sentences may be tested holistically. In my view, these heterogeneous conjunctions of sentences are not tested for their capacity to link sensory experiences alone—as systems consisting of purely descriptive sentences do according to Quine—but rather for their capacity to link sensory experiences with feelings of obligation. In sum, I hope that Quine will accept two views of mine: the view that holistically testable systems of belief may contain normative beliefs of ethics and epistemology, and the view that such heterogeneous systems may link sensory experiences with moral emotions.2 I must admit that I have a suspicion that Quine may not agree with me, a suspicion prompted by certain things he has written about ethics and epistemology. Thus, in the one piece on ethics that Quine has published—so far as I know—he writes of what he calls “the methodological infirmity of ethics as compared with science” and then goes on to say: “The empirical foothold of scientific theory is in the predicted observable event; that of a moral code is in the observable moral act. But whereas we can test a prediction against the independent course of observable nature, we can judge the morality of an act only by our moral standards themselves. Science, thanks to its links with observation, retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth; but a coherence theory is evidently the lot of ethics”.3 Quine has also maintained that when empiricism 1 I have in mind the view advocated by Quine in section 6 of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” as reprinted in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 42–46. See also the remarks on holism in his “Five Milestones of Empiricism”, Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 71–72. 2 The views to which I seek Quine’s reactions are defended in my book What Is and What Ought to Be Done: An Essay on Ethics and Epistemology (New York, 1981), esp. chaps. 2–4. I later defended them in The Question of Free Will and in A Philosophy of Culture. 3 W. V. Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values”, Theories and Things, p. 63.

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reached its fifth and most recent milestone it assimilated epistemology to empirical psychology.4 So, on the basis of Quine’s sharp separation of science and ethics as well as his insistence that epistemology is a branch of empirical psychology, I have some reason to think that Quine may not agree that normative ethics and normative epistemology as I conceive them may be tested holistically. But if he should not agree with my views before reading what follows, I hope that I can persuade him here to accept certain views that I advance in What Is and What Ought to Be Done. And if I do not succeed in persuading him, I hope that he will be good enough to say why. One of my main purposes in this paper is to persuade Quine to abandon a dualism between the methods of testing normative and descriptive statements which is as untenable as that between analytic and synthetic statements. I also want to say that if Quine thinks that his assimilation of epistemology to empirical psychology requires epistemologists to refrain from making normative statements about what they ought to believe or have a right to believe, and therefore to limit themselves to description, then I disagree. I believe that we make normative statements in epistemology, that we test systems that contain normative ethical statements holistically, and that nothing to which we appeal in this process or in the process of testing systems that contain normative statements should frighten Quine the empiricist or Quine the naturalist. There are no supernatural cards up my sleeve and I set up no supra-scientific tribunals, to use his phrase,5 when I urge him to recognize that we may make ethical as well as epistemological statements about what we ought or have a right to do and that we appeal to certain feelings along with sensory experiences when we test the systems that contain such statements. Before I begin my efforts to persuade Quine, I want to say something about his more recent comments on his holism in publications that appeared after What Is and What Ought to Be Done was published—comments that I had not known about while I was writing that book. First of all, I note with pleasure that he no longer insists—as he did in his deservedly famous paper, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”—that “the totality [my emphasis] of our so-called knowledge or beliefs”, or “the whole [my emphasis] of science”, is what is tested by experience according to his version of holism.6 In my book, I had taken him to espouse that view and had dissented from it, but upon reading his essay “Five Milestones of Empiricism” I now see that he has changed his mind in a direction that I applaud. That essay of his was first published in October 1981 in his Theories and Things, the preface to which he had signed in February 1981. In that essay, Quine writes that “it is an uninteresting legalism . . . to think of our scientific system of the world as involved en bloc in every prediction. More modest chunks suffice. . . .”7 Although I do not fully grasp the reference to legalism, I infer from this passage 4

Theories and Things, p. 72. Ibid. 6 From a Logical Point of View, p. 42. 7 Theories and Things, p. 71. 5

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that I should no longer dissent from Quine’s views on this point as I did in my book, the preface to which I signed in August 1980, well before I had learned of what he had said in “Five Milestones of Empiricism”. I am pleased to find that Quine qualifies his view that our whole scientific system is involved en bloc in every prediction; I am also pleased to see that Quine says something else in “Five Milestones of Empiricism” that accords with something that I had written while I was ignorant of what Quine had said in an unpublished version of “Five Milestones of Empiricism”. I have in mind Quine’s statement that we can make a conjunctive sentence of a whole theory and therefore regard a modest chunk of science as a single sentence even while subscribing to his holism.8 With these preliminaries behind me, I now want to begin my efforts at persuasion. Readers of Quine know that he acknowledges his debt to Pierre Duhem on the subject of holism, but neither Duhem nor Quine discusses what I call normative sentences or normative beliefs in this context.9 Both are preoccupied with descriptive sciences such as physics and therefore do not focus on the testing of heterogeneous systems or conjunctions that consist of normative as well as descriptive sentences. But impressed as I am by Quine’s use of Duhem’s holism to bridge the traditional epistemic gap created by the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, I try to use my own version of holism to bridge the equally traditional epistemic gap between the normative and the descriptive. In developing his version of Duhem’s approach, Quine has sometimes distinguished (a) the descriptive scientific thinker, (b) the body of purely descriptive science that such a thinker uses as a tool for organizing or linking sensory experiences, and (c) those sensory experiences themselves.10 By analogy, when I deal with normative belief, I distinguish (a′) the normative thinker, (b′) the body of descriptive and normative beliefs that the normative thinker uses as a tool for organizing or linking sensory experiences with each other and with certain emotions, and (c′) those experiences and emotions themselves.11 To anyone who might say that normative sentences are reducible to descriptive sentences and who would therefore try to assimilate the second element in my triad to the second in Quine’s I should reply that I cannot accept such reductionism if it rests on saying that all normative sentences are synonymous with descriptive sentences. Like Quine, I find the notion of synonymy excessively obscure, and no matter what other philosophers might maintain, I should certainly not expect Quine himself to use this route in assimilating my triad to his. Furthermore, because I include emotions in (c′), the third element in my triad is not the same as the third element in Quine’s. And if someone criticized my triad by denying that there are normative beliefs to be included in (b′), I should have to disagree. It seems obvious to me that many people not only believe that 8

Ibid. See Duhem’s La The´orie physique: son object, sa structure, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1914), pp. 278–89; also Quine, From a Logical Point of View, p. 41. 10 From a Logical Point of View, p. 44. 11 What Is and What Ought to Be Done, pp. 30–35. 9

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Newton had a right to defend his life but also that Newton had a right to, or was entitled to, accept the principle of universal gravitation, and I do not agree that they are mistaken when they say that they have such singular normative beliefs. Nor do I agree that they are mistaken when they say that they have beliefs such as those expressed by the normative ethical principle “One ought to keep one’s promises”; or that philosophers are mistaken when they say that they have beliefs such as those expressed by the normative epistemological principle “One ought to (or has a right to) accept a system of descriptive belief that organizes one’s sensory experiences in the simplest way and in a way that disturbs one’s previously held system of belief less than any rival system”. In what may be an untypical statement, Quine himself expresses a normative epistemological principle when he writes as follows of an “ultimate duty”: “. . . the purpose of concepts and of language is efficacy in communication and in prediction. Such is the ultimate duty of language, science, and philosophy, and it is in relation to that duty that a conceptual scheme has finally to be appraised”.12 That there are ethical and epistemological normative beliefs is as evident to me as it is that physicists hold the descriptive belief that all bodies attract each other. I am aware that some philosophers may try to defend the view that people do not have such normative beliefs by arguing that the sentences which allegedly express them lack cognitive meaning. But here, as in the case of the appeal to synonymy construed as the relation of having the same cognitive meaning, appeal is made to a notion that cannot support so bold a philosophical claim. At any rate, I should not expect Quine, who has inveighed so effectively against philosophically tendentious use of synonymy and cognitive meaning, to employ such notions in an effort to refute my view of the testing of heterogeneous systems of belief. Assuming that normative ethical sentences do express beliefs, I want first of all to present an example of ethical reasoning (that I have used elsewhere) and then to offer some comments on it.13 I ask Quine to suppose that the following argument is presented by a critic of abortion, bearing in mind that it does not make explicit any assumed logical truth that might be added by a holist who wanted to dramatize the fact that such logical truths were also elements of the system of belief in question: (1) Whoever takes the life of a human being does something that ought not to be done. (2) The mother took the life of a fetus in her womb. (3) Every living fetus in the womb of a human being is a human being. Therefore, (4) The mother took the life of a human being. Therefore, (5) The mother did something that ought not to be done. 12 13

From a Logical Point of View, p. 79. What Is and What Ought to Be Done, pp. 29–35.

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I now ask Quine to imagine that the mother who is criticized does not have the feeling of being obligated not to have done what she did. In my view, she might be justified under certain conditions in denying statement (5). In denying (5) she would, I contend, do something analogous to what a descriptive scientist, say a chemist, might do upon failing to have a sensory experience that was predicted by some chunk of purely descriptive belief. The chemist might deduce from a set of premises the statement that a certain piece of litmus paper was red and add that any normal person in a normal state who looked at a red object in white light would have the sensory experience of redness. But then the chemist might go on to say that although he was normal, in a normal state, and looking at the piece of paper in white light, he did not experience redness but greenness. Thus the chemist would, to use Quine’s language, have a recalcitrant sensory experience whereas I would say that the mother mentioned in my ethical example would have a recalcitrant feeling. Quine says that a descriptive scientist having such a recalcitrant experience might plead hallucination—in other words, plead that he was not in a normal state—but then he might not so plead.14 If he did not, and therefore denied that the litmus paper was red, other alternatives would be open to him, alternatives that have their analogues in those open to the mother. As soon as we grant that after denying (5) the mother may deny the conjunction that implies it, we may say that the mother, or anyone else engaged in such thinking, may amend or surrender a law of logic such as that which gets us from (2) and (3) to (4), an ethical principle such as (1), or a descriptive statement such as (2), (3), or (4). Any one of these moves will bring about what may be called a Duhemian alteration of the original body of beliefs in response to a recalcitrant feeling. Because we need not deny or alter (1), we exchange our conjunction of beliefs for a new one by denying a descriptive belief, but it should be emphasized that we deny that descriptive belief because we reject a normative conclusion that follows from our former assumptions. Thus the denial of (5), which denial expresses a normative belief, may play a part in determining what descriptive beliefs appear in our chunk of beliefs, since the denial of descriptive statement (3) is also descriptive. We have changed our chunk by adopting the descriptive statement that not every living fetus in the womb of a human being is a human being because we have adopted the normative statement that in killing the fetus the mother did not do something that ought not to be done. And this is similar in a certain crucial respect to a physicist’s amending or rejecting a previously accepted logical belief because of certain data of quantum mechanics—an example mentioned by Quine. In my view, the right to alter one’s description of an act in response to certain feelings about an act is analogous to the right to alter one’s logic in response to certain sensory experiences arising from physical experiments. Here we see an analogy between Quine’s permitting a recalcitrant experience to lead to the abandonment of a logical statement and my permitting the abandonment of a descriptive statement because of a recalcitrant feeling. 14

From a Logical Point of View, p. 43.

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Of course, I am not saying that the denial of (5) logically implies the denial of (3) and therefore do not hold that descriptive (3) itself logically implies normative (5). The statement “Every living fetus in the womb of a human being is a human being” does not imply “The mother did something that ought not to be done”. The latter is implied by the conjunction of premises in the illustrative argument and not by any one of them taken by itself. Because some philosophers—for example, Hume—think it fallacious to deduce an “ought”-statement from an “is”-statement, I want to say that I do not license such a deduction. I merely assert that if a conjunction containing descriptive and moral statements logically implies a moral conclusion which is denied, we may alter the conjunction by surrendering either a moral or a descriptive statement. Just as a logical statement is rarely recanted in the light of the rest of one’s theory, I am prepared to admit that a descriptive statement is rarely recanted in the light of a moral statement. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that, rarity aside, such recantation is permissible according to my view and that its very permissibility is of great philosophical significance. If Quine should grant the permissibility of such recantation, I think he should be led to reconsider a statement of his that I quote earlier in this paper. It will be recalled that after granting that the empirical foothold of scientific theory is in the predicted observable event and that of a moral code is in the observable act, Quine says that whereas we can test a prediction against the independent course of observable nature, we can judge the morality of an act only by our moral standards themselves, adding that science “thanks to its links with observation, retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth; but a coherence theory is evidently the lot of ethics”.15 However, if Quine should accept my earlier comments about ethical reasoning, I think he would have to acknowledge, first of all, that even though our moral standards (principles) play some part in guiding us to singular statements such as (5) about the morality of an act, those moral principles do not do so without the help of descriptive statements. Secondly, he would have to acknowledge that heterogeneous chunks of belief are to be tested by seeing whether they organize sensory experience-cum-feeling. In that case, he would have to withdraw his remark that a coherence theory is the lot of ethics. For if science—that is to say, descriptive science—retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth “thanks to its links with observation”, then ethics should retain some title to a correspondence theory of truth thanks to its links with observation and feeling. Like Quine, I think ethics has a foothold in the observable act which corresponds to descriptive science’s foothold in the predictable observable event; however, just as we ought to test chunks of descriptive science by appealing to what is observed, we ought to test chunks of what I am prepared to call normative science by appealing to what is observed and what is felt. Once we let feeling play the part that I assign to it, a coherence theory is not the lot of ethics, and it does not suffer from the “methodological infirmity” 15

See note 3 above.

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of which Quine speaks. It may well have ills, but I do not think that the disease known as the coherence theory of truth is one of them. Having assured Quine that I believe nothing that should scare a naturalist or empiricist, I should point out to other philosophers that I have not tried to reduce normative ethical statements to allegedly synonymous descriptive statements. My view may be termed naturalistic not because I advocate such reduction but rather because I do not assert or imply the existence of anything beyond the confines of nature as usually conceived. And yet, although I avoid naturalistic reductionism in ethics, I maintain that there are rationally testable ethical beliefs, whereas I think that Quine sharply distinguishes between rationally testable beliefs and moral valuations. I think he holds that the typical moral situation is one in which a person believes scientifically that a certain action will cause a certain effect which the person merely values while not asserting anything scientific about that effect. Moreover, Quine accepts “the deep old duality of thought and feeling, of the head and the heart, the cortex and the thalamus, the words and the music”.16 He appears to hold that we may value furthering our neighbor’s welfare and that we may learn in a scientific way how to further our neighbor’s welfare while we deny that the sentence “We ought to further our neighbor’s welfare” expresses a belief. In that case, what does Quine, an epistemologist who is anxious to present a general theory of how beliefs should be tested, say to people who believe that in asserting normative moral principles they express beliefs? Presumably that they are mistaken. But what reasons would he give them for saying that they are mistaken? I am not sure, but, believing as I do that Quine could not successfully argue for the nonexistence of such normative beliefs, I think that it would be better for him to recognize that moral normative beliefs appear in systems which are holistically tested, and also to broaden the flux that normative thinking is supposed to organize by recognizing that such a flux contains feelings. In this way, he would help us to hold on to the deep old belief that we have ethical beliefs and thereby disturb our view of the world as little as possible. Here I might remind Quine, who once abandoned nominalism because he thought that arithmetic was something to reckon with, that rational normative ethics is something to conjure with. It permits us to defend singular moral beliefs about what we should do on specific occasions by appealing to heterogeneous conjunctions of beliefs. Having said what I hope is enough on the subject of normative ethics, I now turn to normative epistemology. I believe that I make a statement in normative epistemology when I say that one who denies statement (5) is entitled to accept the denial of (3) and thereby to alter the body of statements from which (5) is deduced. I also make a statement in normative epistemology when I say that an ethical thinker ought to accept a system of belief which organizes his sensory experiences and his feelings with due regard to the demand for scientific simplicity and the demand that we disturb a prior system of belief as little as possible. 16

Theories and Things, p. 55.

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Moreover, I think that Quine makes a statement in normative epistemology when he says: “A recalcitrant experience can . . . be accommodated by any of various alternative re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system”.17 I regard this “can”-statement as normative because I do not think it is a statement in formal logic or natural science. I think that Quine is here telling us that we may, that is to say, have a right to, accommodate a recalcitrant experience in different ways. I do not wish to discuss at length the question whether he is asserting a moral right. I have argued elsewhere that the generic notion of a duty or that of a right is neutral, thereby allowing that we may use the words “duty” and “right” univocally in moral and epistemological contexts even though moralist and epistemologists usually focus on different sorts of acts.18 This, in my opinion, is analogous to the univocal use of the word “exists” by mathematicians and physicists who assert the existence of things as different as numbers and electrons. But whatever view we take of an epistemic right or duty to accept a body of belief under certain conditions, I believe that a statement that every thinker has such a right or duty does not describe what every thinker in fact does under those conditions. For this reason, I question Quine’s statement that epistemology may be assimilated to empirical psychology if he thinks that empirical psychology does not contain normative statements of ethics or epistemology. Moreover, I think that the “assimilation” of normative epistemological statements to statements in descriptive psychology might require the use of the discredited notion of synonymy just as an analogous assimilation of normative ethical statements would. The unassimilated epistemological principle that a scientist should check a body of beliefs against experience is normative. It tells us what a scientist should do, as Quine seemed to think when he said that the “ultimate duty” of language, science, and philosophy is to communicate and predict efficaciously. It is a general normative principle to which we must appeal when we say that we ought to accept a given body of belief. We cannot justify such a singular epistemic statement without appealing to epistemic normative principles that contain the word “ought”. We cannot answer the question whether a given body of scientific beliefs ought to be accepted by fallaciously reasoning as follows: “This is a scientific theory; scientific theories are accepted if and only if they have characteristics A, B, and C; this has characteristics A, B, and C; therefore, this ought to be accepted”. How can we defend deducing that a scientist ought to accept a given theory, or that he has a right to accept it, without deducing our singular normative epistemic statement from a conjunction which contains at least one normative epistemic rule as a conjunct? After having asked this rhetorical question, I may well be asked how normative epistemic rules are to be tested so as to allay Quine’s fear that I may be setting epistemology on too high a pedestal, converting it into a “supra-scientific tribunal”. And my answer is that I view normative epistemology much as I view normative ethics because I believe that there are systems of normative epistemo17 18

From a Logical Point of View, p. 44. What Is and What Ought to Be Done, p. 82–83.

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logical reasoning which are analogous to the argument from (1) through (5), and that there is a flux of sensory experiences and emotions which may be organized by a normative epistemologist who argues in a manner that is analogous to the manner in which the moralist argues in statements (1) through (5). Accordingly, I think that Einstein the determinist believed that no physicist ought to accept as final a chunk of belief that is nondeterministic in the way that modern quantum mechanics is. And in stating this normative epistemic belief, Einstein did not describe how twentieth-century physicists do think, for he was quite aware that they did not think as he believed they should think. By analogy with the ethical argument presented earlier, Einstein’s reasoning might be represented as follows: (6) No physical system which is nondeterministic ought to be accepted as final. (7) Quantum theory is a physical system which is nondeterministic. Therefore, (8) Quantum theory ought not to be accepted as final. Now if (8) should be rejected, it is open to us to reject (6), (7), or the unexpressed logical principle of the above argument. Furthermore, the basis on which we may accept or reject (8) is analogous to the basis on which we may accept or reject (5) in our earlier illustration. In other words, we have what may be called epistemic feelings of obligation to accept or not to accept certain physical theories which are analogous to our moral feelings of obligation to perform acts of the kind treated in ethics. Moreover, one who describes a body of physical beliefs as deterministic or nondeterministic has sensory experiences that are analogous to the sensory experiences of a normative moralist who describes acts as mendacious. We must look at theories to discover whether they are deterministic. Therefore, the normative epistemology system represented by (6) through (8) should itself be tested by seeing whether it organizes a relevant flux of experiencecum-feeling. For this reason, an opponent of Einstein who has a recalcitrant epistemic feeling may, like the mother in our ethical example, reject or alter a normative principle such as (6), a descriptive statement such as (7), or a principle of formal logic. To increase the likelihood that Quine will agree, I point out that, so far from making normative epistemology a “first philosophy” or a “suprascientific tribunal”, I let its acceptability depend in part on its capacity to organize such sensory experiences and feelings of obligation as Einstein might have had upon contemplating a nondeterministic system and deciding that he ought not accept it as final.19 In other words, one who is faced with deciding whether to accept a heterogeneous body of belief such as that represented by (6), (7), and (8) must do something analogous to what a moralist must do when faced with deciding whether to accept the set of premises used in the earlier discussion of 19 In “Five Milestones of Empiricism” Quine regards the fifth milestone as one at which empiricism abandons the goal of a “first philosophy” and sees natural science as not being answerable to any “supra-scientific tribunal”. See note 5 above.

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abortion. When testing a hypothetico-deductive argument in ethics or in epistemology, we ought to appeal to sensory experience and feelings of obligation or entitlement. In trying to persuade Quine, I have not used such terms of his as “surface irritations”, “sensory receptors”, and “nerve endings”. I hope that Quine will not object to this in spite of a statement by him that his “non-committal term ‘experience’ ” in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” awaited his later theory that invoked surface irritations and other such entities.20 I feel no qualms in not using the language of neurological psychology because I believe that the terms “sensory experience” and “feelings of obligation” refer to things that I have, that Quine has, and that other human beings have. Since he has managed to his own satisfaction to construct a theory which avoids “phenomenalistic interpretation” by invoking surface irritations rather than experiences, he might—if he were to accept what I have said so far—be able to work a similar transformation on “feelings of obligation” if he finds that term subject to a defect of the kind he finds in “experience” because of its association in his mind with phenomenalism, Naturally, I am not urging Quine to direct his psychological talents toward this end if he does not find it desirable or possible to do so, but I hope that he will not reject my assumption of the existence of feelings of obligation merely because they are not incorporated into his neurological scheme of surface irritations or the triggering of sensory receptors. I say this for a number of reasons of different kinds. For one thing, I think that an epistemologist should take account of what I shall call the typical situation of a thinker who seeks guidance from normative epistemology, just as a moralist should take into account the typical situation of a thinker who seeks guidance from ethics. When one is faced with the question whether to accept a certain body of beliefs, one asks: “Should I accept this body of beliefs”, and one may rightly expect an answer that does not depend on one’s knowing anything about neurology. Quine himself writes that when he referred to surface irritations in Word and Object, he was not supposing “that people are on the whole thinking or talking about the triggering of their nerve endings; few people, statistically speaking, know about their nerve endings”.21 Obviously, therefore, Quine would not require a physicist who is trying to decide whether to accept a physical theory to examine his nerve endings as well as the objects dealt with in the theory. And even if Quine were to discover neurological counterparts of the epistemic feelings of obligation that an Einstein might have in defending (8), Quine would not require Einstein to examine those neurological counterparts. Nor should I expect Quine to insist that the mother in my moral example engage in analogous neurological inquiry before deciding whether she should or should not have committed an act of abortion. Whatever merit Quine sees in moving to neurology, such a move would not—if I understand him correctly—eliminate the duty of Einstein 20 21

Theories and Things, p. 40. Ibid.

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and the moralist-mother to test their heterogeneous bodies of belief by discovering whether those bodies organized their sensory experiences and feelings. However, even if Quine were to insist that the language of neurology produces much improvement in our description of the process of thinking, I should insist that the use of such language would not eradicate the difference between saying that one ought to accept a body of belief under certain conditions and saying that one does accept it under those conditions. If Quine thinks that my reference to feelings is too noncommittal, he is welcome to handle my feelings by doing something analogous to what he does when he replaces his experiences by surface irritations. That is to say, he is welcome to produce a neurological term that would stand to the term “feeling of obligation” as “triggering of sensory receptors” stands to “sensory experiences”. But producing such a term would not assimilate normative epistemology to descriptive psychology, any more than it would reduce normative ethics to descriptive psychology. The production of such a neurological term might lead us to replace the word “feeling” by that neurological term in normative epistemological statements, but it would not force us to eliminate the terms “ought” or “may” from such statements. If Quine’s pre-neurological epistemological thesis was that scientists have a duty to accept only bodies of belief that link experiences to each other, his newer neurological thesis, as I see it, would be that they have a duty to accept only bodies of belief that link sensory stimulations to sensory stimulations. The survival of the word “duty” after Quine’s move to neurology is related to the fact that there is a difference between saying that a thinker does accept a body of belief only if it has certain characteristics and saying that he ought to or may accept it only if it has those characteristics. I venture to say that even if every physicist were in fact to stop accepting bodies of statements that linked sensory stimulations to sensory stimulations according to Quine’s view, and were to begin accepting only those bodies of statements that they were told by Ronald Reagan to accept, Quine would not revise his philosophy by surrendering some of his epistemological statements even though he might well revise his descriptive psychological account of how scientists do behave. Why? Because Quine’s fundamental principles of epistemology express norms or standards which should be formulated in statements containing such words as “duty”, “ought”, and “may”, and such statements are therefore not to be rejected merely by pointing out that some physicists in fact support their theories on presidential authority. I view Quine’s epistemology as one that might conceivably be pitted, for example, against the view of those who advocate what Peirce called the method of authority. In other words, I believe that Quine’s holism might be viewed as taking the following form: “Bodies of belief ought to be accepted if and only if they satisfy condition Q”, in which case authoritarian holism would take the form: “Bodies of belief ought to be accepted if and only if they satisfy condition A”, where “A” refers to a condition other than Q. Of course, this way of depicting the issue between two such epistemologies allows for the possibility that authoritarian holism is true whereas Quine’s holism is false; and since Quine regards his own epistemology as a fallible and corrigible inquiry into reality, he should not be

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fazed by this consequence of my view of the contest between his holism and authoritarian holism. As I understand Quine, however, his own view of such a contest would involve pitting his fallible and corrigible description of the conditions under which bodies of belief are accepted against other fallible and corrigible descriptions of such conditions. Insofar as Quine regards his epistemology as fallible and corrigible, I agree with him, but I doubt that he can, by examining the activity of accepting beliefs in which all persons called scientists engage, establish that all these persons in fact accept bodies of belief if and only if such bodies satisfy condition Q. The point is that there are scientists who accept bodies of belief which do not satisfy condition Q. And, of course, if Quine were to reply that he is describing the behavior of scientists who do what they ought to do as scientists, he would import a normative element into his enterprise. Furthermore, even if Quine were able to show that all scientists do accept those and only those bodies of belief that satisfy condition Q, he would leave open the question whether beliefs that are accepted on these grounds ought to be accepted on these grounds. And that open question, I believe, is the one to be answered by a philosopher who advises us to use the method of science rather than some other method in testing bodies of belief. Although Peirce did not attain the highest degree of clarity when he discussed this issue, he appears at times to see that what he presents as alternative methods of fixing belief—the method of tenacity, the method of authority, the a priori method, and the scientific method—are being assessed by him with the following question in mind: which of them ought to be used in the fixation of belief? True, Peirce seems to think that he can describe the method of science by examining the behavior of scientists, but he does not stop after he has supposedly described that method; he seems to think that he should say why he thinks that it ought to be used as the method of fixing beliefs.22 Now I do not urge Quine to accept the specific views that Peirce presents when singing the praises of the so-called scientific method. But I do urge Quine to recognize that even if he were able to tell us what scientific method is on the basis of an examination of the behavior of all scientists, there would be a further question to answer, namely—why should we use scientific method in fixing our beliefs? If Quine were to adopt this view of at least one problem of epistemology, he would see himself as asserting principles explicitly couched in normative terms, and when testing heterogeneous bodies containing such principles he would, I hope, appeal to emotions as well as sensory experience. By now it will be evident that I do not advocate the abandonment of the distinction between normative and descriptive sentences. On the contrary, I advocate its retention insofar as I question the reducibility of ethical or epistemo22 See “The Fixation of Belief”, Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, eds. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, Mass., 1931–1935), 5.358–5.387. This is a convenient place at which to note that when Duhem discusses the alteration of theories that face recalcitrant experiences, he says: “Le bon sens est juge des hypothe`ses qui doivent eˆtre abandonne´es”, op. cit., p. 330. I do not cite these statements by Duhem in order to endorse obscurantism in epistemology, but merely to show that the Ur-holist recognized not only the normative element in epistemology but also the role of feeling in it.

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logical “ought” sentences to “is”-sentences. However, although I retain this distinction, I use holism to avoid drawing an epistemological distinction between the testing of normative statements and the testing of descriptive statements. In this way, I do something analogous to what I think Quine does when he retains a distinction between logical statements and nonlogical statements while using holism to avoid drawing an epistemological distinction between the testing of logical statements and the testing of nonlogical statements. That is why I have conceived my task as two-fold: to show on the one hand that holistically testable systems of belief may contain normative beliefs of ethics and epistemology, and on the other to show that such systems ought to be tested by referring to their capacity to link sensory experiences and certain feelings. If Quine were to agree with me, he could do so without any fear that he would be viewing the epistemologist as an infallible inquirer whose views are incorrigible. In my view, moral principles are not a priori truths, not necessary truths, not analytic truths, not intuitively known. Nor can they be extracted by reflection on the so-called essence of man or on the so-called meaning of “man”. By parity of reasoning, the normative principles of epistemology as I view them are not to be extracted by reflection on the so-called essence of science nor on the so-called meaning of “science”. Chunks of belief containing them are to be tested holistically, just as chunks containing moral principles and physical principles are. If Quine were to accept my view of holism as applied to normative belief, he would travel to a new milestone of empiricism at which the deep old duality of thought and feeling is no longer used to support the deep old untenable dualism between the normative and the descriptive; he would help strike yet another blow for methodological monism.

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Holistic Pragmatism and Ethics (2002)

I WANT TO MAKE a case for applying the epistemology of holistic pragmatism to moral philosophy, but before doing so, I will make some remarks on the history of applying holistic pragmatism to science. Holistic pragmatism differs from James’s pragmatism in a way that Russell noted in 1908, when he said that James held in Pragmatism that there are two kinds of truths that are not subject to pragmatic testing, a view inconsistent with the pragmatic holism Russell attributed to James only a year later. One of these kinds of truth James illustrated by “1 and 1 make 2” and by “White differs less from gray than it does from black”; he calls these “eternal truths” that are “perceptually obvious at a glance” and in no need of “sense-verification”. The other kind of nonpragmatic truth, James says, is in accord with “the sensible facts of experience”. When characterizing these two sorts of truths, James writes: “Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order, our mind is thus wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles”. James then remarks that intellectualists—whom he also calls rationalists—”can raise no protest” to this view; and they cannot, of course, because James conceded that truths in accord with relations between ideas are not abandoned on empirical grounds.1 Whereas in 1909 Russell said in effect that James was a holist, or someone who thought that mathematics was part of a Duhemian conjunction that faces facts, a year earlier Russell had maintained that James exempted arithmetical truths from such a test. In 1908 Russell remarked of James’s view in Pragmatism, “It is only when we pass beyond plain matters of fact and a priori truisms that the pragmatic notion of truth comes in.”2 Russell went on to say that James held that statements which are neither a priori nor in agreement with the sensible facts of experience are true if and only if it pays to believe them, thereby limiting the class of statements we establish pragmatically. I shall not linger over the question of whether Russell fairly attributed this commercial theory of truth to James—enough ink has been spilled over that. However, I want to point out that while Quine later held with Tarski that mathematico-logical statements may be surrendered in the face of an adverse experience, he treated the beliefs that James said were coerced by the “sensible order” with much more respect than he accorded those that James said were coerced by the “ideal order”. Quine’s holism excluded what James called “sensible truths” 1 William James, Pragmatism, eds. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp.100–102. 2 Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays (London, 1910), p. 134. See my Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York, 1972), pp. 204–16.

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from the Duhemian conjunction that is tested by appeal to them, but his naturalistic epistemology, as he called it, led him to characterize them without saying that they are in accord with subjective experiences. However—and this is of most concern to me here—Quine differentiates more sharply than I do between an observation sentence like “That’s a rabbit” and the sentence “That ought not to be done” or “That’s outrageous”, its counterparts in my view of the confirmation of ethical beliefs. That difference between us reflects my inclination to emphasize the similarity between ethical and scientific thinking and Quine’s different inclination. In order to compare my view with his, I must first say something about Quine’s view of observation sentences.

OBSERVATION SENTENCES Well versed as Quine was in the history of logical positivism, he contrasted his views on this matter with those debated in the Vienna Circle over what to count as observation sentences, or Protokollsa¨tze. One position, he said, was that they were reports of sense impressions, a view close to that expressed by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where he called them reports of “subjective phenomena”. Quine also revealed the direct or indirect influence of James in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, when he wrote that manmade science is a tool “for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience”.3 “Experience” in that essay seems to refer to sensory experiences that James located in the “private breast”, but Quine later dropped James’s way of speaking and instead called observation sentences the public linguistic checkpoints of science, avoiding talk about sensory experiences. He labeled the old Viennese debates fruitless and turned his back on the question of whether observation sentences report sense impressions or are sentences like “Otto Neurath now sees a red cube on the table”. Quine tried “to view the matter unreservedly in the context of the external world” by eschewing talk about experiences within the mind,4 and therefore presented a view of observation sentences that resembled (1) his view that clear synonymy-statements should be behavioristic and empirical, (2) Tarski’s view that holism is a descriptive psychological theory about what we are prepared to surrender in the face of adverse experience, and (3) Goodman’s onetime view that the synonym of a term is the expression that we think is most likely to have the same extension as that term. Such views avoided referring to entities such as meanings, essences, attributes, or concepts in the mind, and in a similar spirit Quine avoided referring to private subjective experiences or sensedata when considering observation sentences. This approach survived Quine’s 3 W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 44. 4 W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), p. 85.

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rejection of phenomenalism and the positivistic distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and so he remained an empiricist about science insofar as he held that it is anchored by observation sentences that he separated from the conjunction of scientific sentences that they anchor, just as a real anchor is separated from a ship though connected to it. As a behavioristic epistemologist, Quine held that dispositions to assent to or to dissent from observation sentences are manifested in linguistic responses to the external world that are in closest causal proximity to our sensory receptors. Here especially Quine’s talk reminds one of James’s talk about coercions of the sensible order, since Quine holds that our verdicts about observation sentences are virtually forced on us under certain circumstances. Quine’s view of observation sentences also reminds one of Locke’s characterization of self-evident truths as propositions that “are generally assented to as soon as proposed, and the terms they are proposed in understood.” Locke adds that “all men, even children, as soon as they hear and understand the terms, assent to these propositions,”5 and the especially relevant feature of a Lockeian self-evident truth when compared with Quine’s observation sentence is that it is generally assented to as soon as proposed. Lockeian assent that comes simultaneously with understanding is a forerunner of Quine’s notion of assent to “That’s a rabbit” as a quick linguistic response to external stimuli on the part of witnesses who understand the language; according to Quine, all speakers who understand the language are disposed to return the same verdict on an observation sentence when given the same concurrent stimulation. Upon having their nerve endings stimulated, they tend quickly to assent to or dissent from “That’s a rabbit” if they understand that sentence. Thus their verdict does not hinge on what Quine calls collateral information that would in his view taint the observationality of the sentence if it played a part in bringing about the verdict. I turn now to my disagreement with Quine about ethics. Unlike him, I think that a conjunction containing a normative ethical principle and a descriptive statement may be viewed in a holistic fashion and tested empirically.6 It is obvious that it can be viewed in this way if we accept a reductionist form of utilitarianism according to which all ethical statements are deemed synonymous with statements of descriptive behavioral science, but my approach is different. Avoiding the view that ethical sentences are synonymous with sociological or psychological sentences, and being impressed by the failure of reductive phenomenalism as well as the power of holism to bridge the traditional epistemic gap created by the 5 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 1, sec. 17 (p. 56). 6 I advocate a form of this view of ethics in Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), in What It and What Ought to Be Done: An Essay on Ethics and Epistemology (New York, 1981), and in The Question of Free Will: A Holistic View (Princeton, 1993). According to Hilary Putnam, Peirce advocated a similar view; see Putnam’s “Comments” in C. S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. K. L. Ketner (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 55. Also see Peirce’s remarks on sentiment, p. 111.

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distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, I propose a nonreductive version of holism in order to bridge the gap between the moral and the descriptive much as Tarski and Quine had bridged that between logic and physics. In earlier writings in which he developed his use of Duhem’s approach, Quine distinguished (a) the scientific thinker, (b) the body of science that such a thinker uses as a tool for organizing sensory experiences, and (c) those sensory experiences themselves. Analogously, when I deal with moral belief, I distinguish (a′) the moral thinker, (b′) the conjunction of logical, descriptive, and moral beliefs he uses as a tool for organizing the flux of sensory experiences and feelings of moral obligation, and (c′) those sensory experiences and feelings themselves. In enlarging the tool of the moral thinker and the pool of that thinker’s experiences, I follow James’s view in Pragmatism, where he speaks of “the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass.”7 In accordance with this approach, I ask the reader to suppose that the following argument is presented by a moral critic of abortion with whom a mother disagrees: (1) Every human being who kills another human being does something that ought not to be done. (2) The mother killed a fetus in her womb. (3) Every live fetus is a human being. Therefore, (4) The mother killed a human being. Therefore, (5) The mother did something that ought not to be done. Next I ask the reader to imagine that the mother did not feel morally obligated not to have done what she did; indeed, she felt obligated—that is, felt that she ought—to have done it. She therefore denies statement (5), and this denial leads her to reject the moral principle (1) among the premises and to view the whole situation differently. She may argue as follows: (6) Every mother who is sane, who is in very poor physical health, who carries an unhealthy fetus, and who has been incestuously raped, ought to kill the fetus. (7) I was in very poor physical health. (8) I was carrying an unhealthy fetus. (9) I was incestuously raped. (10) I was sane. Therefore, (11) I had an obligation to kill the fetus. 7

James, Pragmatism, p. 93.

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The next step in the mother’s argument is to say “I feel obligated to kill the fetus,” which she deduces from (10) and (11) because she thinks that any sane person who has an obligation to do something normally feels obligated to do it. This is the counterpart of maintaining with Peirce (and Dewey, I think) that if a table is really brown, it will look brown to a person of normal vision. In my view, the mother’s dissent from (5) is similar to that of a physicist who has a sensory experience that runs counter to one predicted by a theory; the physicist has what Quine once called a recalcitrant sensory experience, and I say that the mother has a recalcitrant feeling when denying (5). I also say that she has a supportive feeling of obligation when she confirms (11) and the conjunction leading to it. Believing that after denying (5) the mother may deny the conjunction that logically implies it, I maintain that the mother may amend or surrender an ethical principle such as (1), or she may deny a descriptive statement among the premises that jointly lead to the singular ethical conclusion—for example, statement (3) that every live fetus is a human being. A logical statement is rarely recanted in the light of a recalcitrant experience, whether sensory or emotional, just as a descriptive statement in a moral argument is rarely recanted after we have such an experience. But I think that we sometimes reject or alter a descriptive statement in response to an adverse moral feeling, as when some participants in the debate over abortion deny that a fetus is a human being in order to accommodate their feeling that it ought to be or may be killed. Because I assign this role to feeling morally obligated or feeling that one has a moral right, I do not agree with Quine that whereas we can test a prediction in physics against the independent course of observable nature, we can judge the morality of an act only by our moral standards or principles themselves. For this reason, I disagree with Quine’s view that while science “thanks to its links with observation, retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth, a coherence theory is evidently the lot of ethics”.8 In my view, a coherence theory is not the lot of ethics, for if descriptive science retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth “thanks to its link with observation”, then ethics retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth thanks to its links with sensory observation and a feeling of obligation. Like Quine, I think that ethics has a foothold in the observable act which corresponds to descriptive science’s foothold in the predictable observable event, but I also think that just as we test conjunctions of descriptive science by appealing to what is sensed, we test systems of ethical thinking such as the conjunction of statements (6) through (11) above by appealing to what is sensed and what is felt as obligatory. Because the feeling of obligation plays the part I assign to it, I do not think that ethics is doomed to accepting the coherence theory of truth that Quine associates with it. Ethics is also anchored in experience when that includes feelings of obligation. 8 W. V. Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” in Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 64.

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To this argument, Quine responds by recalling that he has become a naturalistic epistemologist who eschews talk about experiences and who takes sentences as the checkpoints of science.9 He says that an observation sentence is what he calls an occasion sentence—true on some occasions, false on others—that elicits the same verdict from all witnesses who know the language; and despite some later conciliatory remarks about how being observational is a matter of degree, he seems to deny that the occasion sentence “That’s outrageous”, when uttered by a man who sees someone beating a handicapped person, is an observation sentence. Adopting for the sake of argument what he calls a best-case but unrealistic assumption that every one in our linguistic community (save perhaps the wrongdoer) is disposed to assent to “That’s outrageous” upon witnessing that act, Quine says that even if everyone were so disposed, “That’s outrageous” would not count as an observation sentence for him. Why? Because, Quine says as he levels what he regards as a decisive objection to my view, “That’s outrageous” applies not only to his illustrative act of cripple beating but also to acts whose outrageousness depends on collateral information that is seldom widely shared. By contrast, he says, the sentence “It’s raining” almost never hinges on information not shared by present witnesses and “That’s a rabbit” does so only seldom. Both of these sentences qualify as observational for Quine because being observational is “a status that is somewhat a matter of degree.”10 He also says that “He’s a bachelor” is at the other end of the scale from “It’s raining”, because verdicts on “He’s a bachelor” depend on information that is seldom widely shared. However, Quine adds, in what may be a concession to my view, that on this scale “That’s outrageous” lies between “That’s a rabbit” and “He’s a bachelor”. In response, I am willing to speak of sentences rather than experiences as checkpoints, and therefore make my point within Quine’s behavioristic framework. I would first remark that if being a scientific discipline depends on having observational checkpoints like “It’s raining”, and if being an observational sentence is somewhat a matter of degree, then the epistemic difference between ethics and science, like the difference between “That’s outrageous” and “It’s raining”, is somewhat a matter of degree. Granting that ethics may be called a soft science whereas physics is a hard science, I think the difference between soft and hard is obviously one of degree.11 Indeed, Quine’s epistemology is on his own view soft inasmuch as it is a branch of psychology, which he calls one of the softer sciences along with economics, sociology, and history. In these sciences, he says, checkpoints or observation sentences are sparser and sparser, to the point that their absence becomes rather the rule than the exception. It would appear, then, that ethics is not in completely unscientific company from his point of view, even though it is not as hard as physics; and, ironically, it may not be softer 9 W. V. Quine, “Reply to Morton White,” in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, eds. Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1998), pp. 663–65. 10 Ibid., p. 664. 11 On soft and hard sciences, see W. V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 49.

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than the epistemological science in which Quine calls it soft. Indeed, the sparsity of observation sentences in psychology that Quine mentions is illustrated by the difficulty he might have in marshaling many observation sentences to support his belief that “That’s a rabbit” is an observation sentence. For Quine’s epistemological sentence “ ‘That’s a rabbit’ is an observation sentence” is of course different from the sentence “That’s a rabbit” in his book, and it might be hard to present many observation sentences that serve as checkpoints for the holistic conjunction of which Quine’s epistemological sentence is a component—in which case Quine’s epistemological pot may be calling my ethical kettle black. I now want to go beyond what may be regarded as an ad hominem argument and show that Quine’s first arrow against my view—the one involving his bestcase assumption—can be dodged and that the sentence “That’s outrageous” or the sentence “That ought not to be done” is observational enough on his scale of observationality to call into question his view that we can judge the morality of an act only by our moral principles and that a coherence theory of truth is the lot of ethics. To that end, I shall argue that Quine’s best-case “unrealistic” assumption is less unrealistic than he supposes. Quine says that a sentence such as “That’s an elephant” is observational if and only if every fluent speaker of English is disposed to give a verdict on it quickly without any collateral information save that which is involved in understanding this sentence. But when faced with the fact that veteran experimental physicists quickly and jointly assent to “That’s a condenser” or “That’s an X-ray tube”, Quine allows that the condition of being a fluent speaker of English may be replaced by that of being a fluent speaker of the language of those physicists, thereby permitting “That’s a condenser” to be observational in that smaller community. However, Quine goes on to say that we can “always get an absolute standard by taking in all speakers of the language, or most”, remarking that he adds the qualification “or most” to allow for “occasional deviants such as the insane or the blind”.12 By contrast, however, when Quine formulates his best-case but allegedly unrealistic assumption about “That’s outrageous”, the stronger condition he imposes is that “all [my emphasis] speakers [be] disposed to assent to ‘That’s outrageous’ on seeing a man beat a cripple”, not most speakers.13 But is it unrealistic to say that most speakers in my community and Quine’s are disposed to assent to “That’s outrageous” under those circumstances? Since I believe most speakers in Quine’s and my linguistic community are so disposed, I believe the assumption is realistic if we are as liberal in our standards of observationality as Quine is when he relies on the responses of most speakers to “That’s a rabbit” or, of speakers in his community of veteran physicists, to “That’s a condenser”. If we weaken the requirement for observationality in this way, I submit that Quine’s best-case assumption is not all that unrealistic. Now I come to what I call Quine’s second arrow against my view. He says that even if his best-case scenario involving “That’s outrageous” were to be realized— 12 13

Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” p. 88 n. 7. Quine, “Reply to Morton White,” p. 664.

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even if all fluent speakers of the language were to declare it true—a second problem would arise for my view. We have seen that for Quine the sentence “That’s outrageous” applies to acts other than his illustrative act of cripple beating because it applies to acts “whose outrageousness hinges on collateral information not in general shared by all witnesses of the acts.”14 So let us assume that Pecksniff applies the sentence “That’s outrageous” to acts other than the act of cripple beating that Quine and I witness and call outrageous because Pecksniff has information about those acts that we do not have. We must remember that according to Quine, a sentence is an observation sentence if and only if all speakers who understand it are disposed to assent to or dissent from it upon concurrent stimulation without collateral information. Therefore “That’s outrageous” is not an observation sentence for Quine, because Pecksniff for one utters it about an act on the basis of information about the act that Quine and I do not have, information that is not widely shared. To this I reply that Quine’s second arrow may just as well be directed against the observationality of “That’s green”. Suppose Helmholtz uttered this sentence while pointing to a leaf and with the agreement of all other eyewitnesses of the ˚ ngstro¨m and his friends instead look at a leaf through leaf’s color. Now suppose A ˚ ngstro¨mites are disposed to say “That’s green” optical instruments and that the A in unison as soon as their instruments register that the light coming from the leaf has a wavelength of 5,461 angstrom units, which they know to be the wave˚ ngstro¨m and friends would be disposed to assent length of green. In that case, A to “That’s green” on the basis of information that Helmholtz and friends do not have; therefore Quine’s second arrow may as legitimately be directed at the observationality of the sentence “That’s green” as it is directed by him at the ˚ ngstro¨mites are disposed observationality of “That’s outrageous”. After all, the A to apply “true” to “That’s green” because they have collateral information that ˚ ngstro¨mites the Helmholtzians do not have. And if Quine were to say that the A are not direct eyewitnesses of the leaf and that their disposition to affirm “That’s green” is collateral because they assume certain physical laws governing their instrument, one might ask Quine how he regards the verdicts of witnesses who look through telescopes or eyeglasses. Do they utter them on the basis of collateral information that depends on the optics of lenses or not? I want now to say something related about Quine’s supplementary defense of his view when he distinguishes between sensation and emotion. He says that “sensation is nicely coordinated with concurrent, publicly accessible stimulation. Impacts on a certain range of surface receptors produce the sensation, and conversely, apart from occasional illusion, the sensation occurs only when thus produced”.15 But note Quine’s qualification “apart from occasional illusion”. Some hunters who worry about illusions do not give quick assent to “That’s an elephant” if and only if their surface receptors are hit in a certain way. They do not assent to it quickly because they have had hallucinatory experiences that they 14 15

Ibid. Ibid.

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do not distinguish from sensations they have while seeing elephants—experiences they have when their receptors are stimulated not by rays coming from an elephant but rather as a result of having seizures of delirium tremens. Quine disregards such illusions when characterizing sensation, and once he has brushed them aside as rare, he can of course say that we usually have a sensation just in case our receptors are bombarded in a certain way, and he can also deny that we usually have an emotion of outrage just in case our receptors are bombarded in a certain way. Why? Because he thinks human beings have an emotion like outrage as a consequence of having collateral information about an act and therefore by a causal route that differs from direct bombardment of their receptors. Notice, however, that if we take into account hallucinations, we may say that assent to “That’s an elephant” is caused not only by irradiation of our sensory receptors but also by attacks of delirium tremens when we are not looking at elephants. This duality of the causes of our sensations is paralleled by the fact that our emotions are caused by the direct stimulation of an act that elicits quick assent to “That’s outrageous” and by having information about the act that Pecksniff has but Quine does not have. Having an attack of delirium tremens and being stimulated by rays of light both cause hunters to say “That’s an elephant” is true. To make the situations more similar, suppose that several hallucinating drunks are disposed to apply “true” to “That’s an elephant” simultaneously, and that several sober individuals who have their receptors bombarded in the Quinian way are disposed to apply “true” to the same sentence. Underlying Quine’s inclination to distinguish as he does between “That’s outrageous” and “That’s a rabbit” is his belief that his observation sentences are more anchor-like than my feeling sentences are because “That’s a rabbit” is more likely than “That’s outrageous” to be called true or false without depending on collateral information that is inside what he calls the ship of science. In other words, Quine’s observation sentences are usually not dependent on accepting other statements in the Duhemian conjunction to be tested, whereas my feeling sentences often are. But I emphasize that this is a difference of degree, as I think Quine may admit. How big a difference of degree, I do not know, but I repeat that Quine’s observation sentences are understood by witnesses, and their understanding of such sentences may, he says, depend on information contained in the Duhemian conjunction or scientific ship that observation sentences collectively anchor. Because Quine’s anchor sentences are not completely separable from sentences inside his ship, it may be argued that this overlap calls into question the observationality of “That’s a rabbit” just as Pecksniff’s collateral information calls into question the observationality of “That’s outrageous”. In any case, I think Nelson Goodman has argued persuasively—and, I would add, holistically—that because the acceptance of so-called observation sentences are often contingent on the acceptance of other beliefs in what I have been calling a Duhemian conjunction, they are not so certain as to be unsurrenderable by contrast to sentences in the Duhemian conjunction itself. I turn now to Goodman’s views on their surrenderability and then argue that feeling sentences, like Goodman’s observa-

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tion sentences, may be surrendered—this in the interest of showing that natural science and ethics are not as different as Quine may think they are. Goodman says that a judgment he had made a few moments earlier that a reddish patch occupied the center of his visual field at that moment will be dropped by him if it conflicts with other judgments having a combined stronger claim to preservation. For example, if he had judged that the patch occupying the same region an instant later was bluish, and also that the apparent color of the patch was constant over the brief period covering the two instants, he would have to drop one of the three judgments (if he accepted a certain logical principle); and he might be led to drop the judgment that the patch was reddish. He says that he might conclude that the patch could not have been reddish after all, since he was looking at a blue jay in sunlight with his eyes functioning normally. In other words, his first observation sentence that the patch was reddish was withdrawn by him later because the statement that he was looking at a blue jay in the sunlight with his eyes functioning normally had a stronger claim to preservation.16 And what I maintain is that if the mother I mentioned were persuaded by the argument from (1), (2), (3), and (4) to say that (5) is true and that she felt obligated to kill her fetus as expressed in (11), she would reject an opposing feeling sentence that she might have accepted earlier. Here some more general observations about the issue between Quine and me would be useful. Quine seeks to formulate a criterion for identifying an observation sentence so that he can characterize what he calls a cognitive or scientific judgment by contrast to a moral judgment, but there is, of course, a respectable tradition in philosophy according to which moral judgments and physical judgments are both cognitive. I associate myself with that tradition and therefore do not think that its adherents can be dismissed as legalistic quibblers when they resist including physical thinking as cognitive while excluding ethical thinking. What separates Quine and me on this issue is not his behaviorism but his selective behaviorism, which is motivated by his initial philosophical inclination to regard knowledge more narrowly than I do and which impels him to build epistemic walls between science and ethics that I decline to build or buttress. It has sometimes seemed to me that if Quine were to discover that a proposed criterion for being cognitive did apply to ethical statements, he might count that as an argument against the criterion, whereas I am inclined to say that a criterion for being cognitive which leads to the conclusion that ethical statements are not cognitive is defective for that very reason. After all, most of us say that we believe, and some of us say we know, that ethical statements are true. That is one reason why I have argued that they are accepted as elements of a Duhemian conjunction which is anchored in sensory experience and emotional experience, and that in ethics we use a Duhemian conjunction to work a manageable structure into the flux of sensations and feelings of obligation. 16 Nelson Goodman, “Sense and Certainty,” in Problems and Projects (New York, 1992), pp. 60–61.

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The view I have defended is in a certain respect like one that Quine defended when he argued that ontological statements are as scientific as physical statements. Some logical empiricists had held that any philosophical theory which declared ontological statements to be scientific or cognitive was unacceptable on that very account; they advocated a so-called empiricist criterion of meaning because they regarded metaphysical speculation as cognitively meaningless and therefore wanted to show that being scientific and being ontologico-metaphysical are mutually exclusive, just as Quine wants to show that being scientific and being ethical are. My own inclination concerning ethics is to continue on a path like the one that Quine took when he questioned the epistemic separation of science and ontology, and that is why I do not share his inclination to distinguish between the cognitive and the moral by opening doors to “That’s a rabbit” which he closes to “That ought to be done”, “That ought not to be done”, and “That’s outrageous”. I am thus encouraged by his remark that the distinction between “It’s raining” and “That’s outrageous” is somewhat a matter of degree and by his willingness to put the latter sentence between “He’s a bachelor” and “That’s a rabbit” on his scale of observationality. For that reason, I do not agree with his view that we can judge the moral obligatoriness of an act only by our moral principles themselves, since such a position lends support to the view that our ethical principles are self-evident guarantors of singular moral judgments that have no anchor in our feelings. I avoid that view by anchoring a conjunction of moral beliefs and descriptive beliefs in a combination of Quine’s observation sentences and sentences such as “That’s outrageous”; and I avoid the view that a coherence theory is the lot of ethics by saying that experience includes feelings of obligation as well as sensory experiences. However, I do not believe that observation sentences as I conceive them form an absolutely inalterable anchor, since I think that a sentence reporting a feeling of obligation may be rejected under certain circumstances. Neither reports of feelings of obligation nor moral principles are immutable. Therefore, when our conjunction of logical sentences, moral sentences, and descriptive sentences comes into conflict with an observation sentence as I conceive it, we may reject or revise the conjunction or we may continue to hold on to the conjunction and repudiate the observation sentence that conflicts with it. I have occasionally called myself a methodological monist because I believe that we test both physical and moral beliefs by checking Duhemian conjunctions against a pool of experiences—in the former case a pool consisting wholly of sensory experiences, and in the latter a pool composed of sensory experiences and feelings of obligation. I decline to say with James that there are sentences which can be seen to be unsurrenderable merely by inspecting entities in what James called an ideal order, and I decline to say with him that observation sentences are seen to be true merely by noting “the sensible facts of experience” and concluding on the basis of such noting that they can never be surrendered. Earlier we saw that James held that our mind is wedged tightly between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order, and that Russell inferred from this that it is only when we pass beyond truths about plain matters of fact and a

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priori truisms that we reach surrenderable, pragmatically supported statements. However, I expand James’s wedged-in middle class and assert that some logical statements, some of James’s a priori statements, some of Kant’s moral principles, some of Quine’s observation sentences, and some of my feeling sentences are surrenderable. We may treat statements of any kind with great respect, but that is no guarantee that we will always respect them or kindred statements when trouble arises in a system in which they play a part.

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The Psychologism of Hume and Arithmetical Truth (2003)

DAVID HUME, the greatest empiricist of the Enlightenment and in my opinion its greatest philosopher, subscribed to two views that have had profound impact on the history of philosophy. One is the view called psychologism, according to which we may use the natural science of psychology to solve certain problems of philosophy; a second is the view that there is a sharp distinction between the methods of testing statements in arithmetic and those in natural science. Here I examine the impact of Hume’s psychologism on this distinction by comparing his views with some that emerged in the twentieth century. I argue that Hume’s psychologism leads him to hold unwittingly that the truths of arithmetic are contingent and a posteriori, and I also point out that in places he denies that they can be established by appealing to definitions. I therefore maintain that these views are incompatible with the view of some logical positivists that arithmetical truths are a priori and true by convention.

I. To show this, I begin by saying something about the views of W. V. Quine, the most distinguished advocate of psychologism in the twentieth century. In some places, Quine says that an analytic statement is true by virtue of the meanings of its terms but quickly makes clear that he has no use for meanings conceived as extralinguistic Platonic entities and therefore says that a statement like “Every bachelor is unmarried” is analytic because it is the result of putting a synonym for a synonym in a logical truth. His next step in some of his writings is to ask for what he calls a behavioristic criterion of synonymy; and therein lies an element of his psychologism. According to this view, when the terms “analytic” and “synonymous” are applied to linguistic expressions, they are terms of psychology broadly conceived; therefore the philosopher who says that “Every bachelor is unmarried” is analytic is a psycholinguist whose statement is empirical and contingent, and consequently incapable of supporting a supposedly necessary truth.1 I now want to show why Hume’s psychologistic approach leads, without sufficient acknowledgment on his part, to a similar result. He distinguishes between 1 W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review (Jan 1951); reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 20–46. Quine adds that a behavioristic criterion of synonymy is not available, but he holds that only by providing such a psychological criterion would those who assert synonymy be able to justify calling such a statement analytic.

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statements about “matters of fact” and arithmetical statements about “relations of ideas”, where the latter, he says, “are discoverable by the mere operation of thought” during which we do not depend “on what is anywhere existent in the universe”.2 One reading of this passage suggests that Hume’s ideas do not exist in nature or in the universe, but if ideas are faint or weak impressions, as he says they are, it would seem that they do exist in nature and the universe.3 They have a status like that of Newtonian particles, and that is why, when one discovers what Hume calls relations of resemblance, contiguity, and causality among ideas, one does something akin to what Newton does when he discovers the relations of attraction between planets. That is why I think Hume was unwittingly led to rest the supposedly necessary truths of arithmetic on contingent psychological statements about relations of individual ideas that resemble planets and not Platonic forms. While distinguishing his two kinds of truths, Hume says that we discover relations that depend entirely on ideas when we support necessary truths—among them the relation of resemblance—and D.G.C. MacNabb has tried to elucidate this view of Hume by referring to a map of the world in which places on the map are treated as analogues of ideas.4 The map of Cornwall, he notes, resembles that of Italy in shape. “How,” MacNabb asks, “would you remove this resemblance from the map except by altering the shape of one or both countries?” Let us suppose for simplicity’s sake that both Cornwall and Italy are rectangular. In that case, we can presumably remove the resemblance of the map-idea of Cornwall and the map-idea of Italy only by removing the rectangularity of the former or of the latter idea. But does this dependence of the relation of resemblance on ideas support a necessary truth? MacNabb doubts that it does, but I would go further and say that it does not. The statement “The idea of Cornwall is rectangular and the idea of Italy is rectangular” is just as contingent as the statement “Cornwall is rectangular and Italy is rectangular” if a Humeian idea is akin to a concrete Newtonian particle, and therefore Hume’s statement about ideas is a factual contingent statement about psychological entities that should not be offered in deductive support of a supposedly necessary truth of mathematics. In sum, I think that because Hume’s ideas are concrete entities, Hume’s psychologism led him unwittingly to undermine the sharp distinction between necessary truths and contingent truths about matters of fact, whereas Quine and others have knowingly treated so-called analytic truths in such a way as to undermine that distinction by pointing out that statements of synonymy about linguistic expressions that supposedly support analytic truths are empirical and contingent. That is why I believe that twentieth-century psychologistic legatees of Hume have explicitly done something akin to what Hume did without recognizing that he did so: they have recognized that semantical statements of synonymy are em2

Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 4, pt. 1, para. 20. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk 1, pt 3, sec. 7. 4 D. G. C. MacNabb, “David Hume,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3, ed. P. Edwards (New York, 1967), pp. 78–80; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk 1, pt 3, sec. 1. 3

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pirical and contingent whereas Hume failed to see that he was committed to the contingency of psychological statements about relations between ideas when he regarded them as weak impressions and therefore like concrete physical objects. In adopting a psychologistic view of the grounds on which we accept a necessary arithmetical truth and unconsciously calling into question his sharp distinction between truths about relations between ideas and those about matters of fact, Hume did not share the epistemic dualism of logical empiricists or positivists who have claimed him as their philosophical ancestor. This, I think, is supported by a passage in which Hume links the necessity of mathematical truths and that of causal truths in natural science. There he says: “Thus as the necessity, which makes two times two equal to four, or three angles of a triangle equal to two right ones, lies only in the act of understanding, by which we consider and compare these ideas; in like manner the necessity or power, which unites causes and effects, lies in the determination of the mind to pass from the one to the other”.5

II. In addition to abandoning a sharp distinction between the grounds on which we accept mathematical truth and those on which we accept causal physical truths, Hume explicitly denies—what some might be tempted to attribute to him—the view that mathematical propositions are true by definition. Hume criticizes Locke for holding that the proposition “Where there is no property, there is no injustice” is as demonstrable as a mathematical truth. For Hume maintains that the truth of Locke’s statement, unlike the truth of a mathematical statement, can be established by explicitly defining injustice as a violation of property, and therefore Hume says that it is known neither by intuition nor by demonstration.6 However, in an illuminating discussion of Hume’s ethical views, Barry Stroud writes: “For Hume, all demonstration proceeds by the comparison of ideas, so to demonstrate that a certain kind of act in certain circumstances is vicious we would have to show that the idea of vice is included in the very idea of an act of that kind in those circumstances”.7 If Stroud’s interpretation of certain passages in Hume is correct—and I think it is—Hume should have agreed that Locke’s proposition is demonstrable. But because Hume said “that the only objects of the abstract science or of demonstration are quantity and number, and that all attempts to extend this more perfect species of knowledge beyond these bounds are mere sophistry and illusion”,8 he put Locke’s proposition “Where there is no property, there can be no injustice” beyond the bounds of demonstration. Hume says that while the proposition “That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of 5

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk 1, pt 3, sec. 14. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 12, pt 3, para. 131. According to Hume, mathematical truths are established by intuition or demonstration. 7 Barry Stroud, Hume (London, 1977), pp. 173–5. 8 Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 12, pt. 3, para. 131. 6

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the other two sides, cannot be known, let the terms be ever so exactly defined, without a train of reasoning and enquiry”, in the case of Locke’s proposition “that where there is no property, there can be no injustice, it is only necessary to define the terms, and explain injustice to be a violation of property”. Just after saying this, Hume declares that “it is the same with all those pretended syllogistical reasonings, which may be found in every other branch of learning, except the sciences of quantity and number; and these may safely, I think, be pronounced the only proper objects of knowledge and demonstration”.9 I repeat, however, that if Hume thought—as Stroud says he thought—that we can demonstrate that an act of kind K is vicious by showing that the idea of vice is included in the idea of K, Hume should not have criticized Locke as he did. For according to Hume himself, Locke had said that the idea of a society without property—by which he meant a society in which there are no rights—contains the idea of a society without injustice—by which he means a society in which rights are not violated.10 That is why Locke regarded this proposition as he would have regarded the proposition “Where there are no windows, there are no broken windows”. Hume, however, denied that Locke’s proposition is demonstrable because Hume thought that only a definition was needed to establish it. Therefore Hume did not say, as Frege would have said,11 that Locke’s proposition followed from a logical truth by substitution and by definitions of “injustice” and “property” just as Kant would have said that Locke’s proposition was analytic because it was one “in which the connection of the predicate with the subject is thought through identity”.12

III. Now I want to connect my earlier observations about Hume’s psychologism with his refusal to regard all mathematical truths as true by definition. Since Hume seems to deny that they are true by definition because he thought they are so different from Locke’s proposition, might he have said with Kant that they are a priori? No, because he said they were true by virtue of relations between ideas that are as concrete as Newton’s planets and therefore a posteriori. For this reason, Hume’s view of arithmetical truths is more like Mill’s and less like that of the logical positivists than is often supposed.13 His psychologism required him to regard them as contingent and a posteriori, and his refusal to regard them as deducible from logical truths and definitions required him to regard them as synthetic.

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Ibid. Ibid. 11 The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950), p. 4. 12 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London, 1950), p. 48. 13 Mill, System of Logic, bk. 3, chap. 24. 10

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History of Ideas THIS PART BEGINS with my essay “Why Annalists of Ideas Should Be Analysts of Ideas”, in which I urge historians of ideas to be more philosophical in their treatment of them. This is followed by “The Revolt against Formalism in American Social Thought of the Twentieth Century”, where I discuss the methodology and moral views of social thinkers in diverse fields, and then by “Pragmatism and the Revolt Against Formalism”, where I link some of William James’s views with those treated in the preceding essay. Next I reprint “The Politics of Epistemology”, an attempt to show how questionable it is to correlate epistemologies with political views by arguing, for example, that empiricism is an inherently democratic philosophy; and following that, I reprint an article on the questionable use of the concepts of original sin and natural law in political thought. I also include “Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Progressive Era”, an essay in which I deal with the philosophical ideas of some of America’s founding fathers. In that essay, I show how the authors of The Federalist combined the empirical political science of Hume with the ethical rationalism of Locke’s theory of natural law, thereby creating a dualistic philosophy that I think should be abandoned for a holism of the kind I defend elsewhere. Finally, I show in “The Philosopher and the Metropolis in America” why philosophers as different as Josiah Royce and George Santayana feared the American city and I reprint an essay by Lucia White and me that deals with the tradition of literary hostility toward the American city.

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Why Annalists of Ideas Should Be Analysts of Ideas (1975)

ALTHOUGH I HAVE worked in the philosophy of history and in the history of ideas, I have rarely combined these interests by writing in the philosophy of the history of ideas. Recently, however, I have developed a few thoughts in this second-story subject that I will try to communicate here. My main point is that it is absurd to write the history of ideas without understanding them, and I try to support this point by critically examining the work of some intellectual historians. Readers who think this is a truism may stop reading here, but I ask others to stay with me for a little while longer, especially those who are appalled as I am by the number of histories of ideas in which we are introduced to the historical “background”, “foreground” “environment”, “context”, “origin”, and “impact” of difficult ideas without being given a reasonably clear account of what those ideas are. I have in mind works about the Italian enlightenment, or the American idea of civilization, or the English idea of liberty—not to speak of ideas like rationalism, empiricism, pragmatism, and idealism—in which ideas are wrapped in social and cultural wadding to the point where we lose sight of them. They become something like Kant’s things-in-themselves; indeed, we might call them “ideas-inthemselves”, kept beyond the grasp of readers who are nevertheless asked to believe that they are interesting because they were created by a neurotic man and important because they influenced a sick society, in short, that we should focus more on the origins or effects of such ideas than on the ideas. I don’t mean to suggest that I disapprove of situating beliefs in their historical context, or of tracing their origins and their effects in individuals and societies. But I do mean to imply that it is time to blow the whistle on the notion that the least important thing about a philosophical belief—or, for that matter, any kind of belief—from a historical point of view is what its author intended to say. A century ago in his Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), Bertrand Russell remarked on the “tendency—which the so-called historical spirit has greatly increased—to pay so much attention to the relations of philosophies that the philosophies themselves are neglected”, adding that the philosophies are sometimes compared “as we compare successive forms of a pattern or design, with little or no regard to their meaning” and that influences are sometimes traced by historians “without any comprehension of the systems whose causal relations are under discussion” (p. v). That tendency, I regret to say, has not disappeared but rather has increased This is a considerably revised version of an introduction to my Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (1949) in a paperback edition published by Oxford University Press.

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in the hundred years since Russell wrote this, and it is the tendency upon which I want to concentrate here. I want to emphasize, however, that I am not opposed to discussing philosophical ideas in relation to historical and social developments. This is evident in my Social Thought in America, where I certainly do more than analyze philosophical ideas. That book contains discussions that link Dewey’s philosophical beliefs with his educational and political beliefs, and with his impact on the political world; it also tries to situate the intellectual activity of figures like Holmes, Veblen, Beard, and Robinson in the society in which they lived. I point out there that the 1880s and the 1890s saw the growth in America of truculent capitalism, Social Darwinism, socialism, industrialization, and monopoly, and that these social and political phenomena help explain the concerns as well as the views of the thinkers with whom I was dealing. It is obvious that if unbridled capitalism had not been the economic system of Justice Holmes’s time, many cases would not have come before him, and that if Social Darwinism had not been its supportive ideology, he would not have been obliged to announce in one of his decisions that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics”. It is also obvious that Veblen would not have been writing on the struggle between the engineers and the price system if he were not working during that period of history, and clearly Beard would not have speculated about the connection between the economic interests of the men at the Constitutional Convention and the document they produced if he were not living at a time when that kind of speculation was rife. Moreover, the political philosophy, the educational philosophy, and even the epistemology of John Dewey have important connections with the technology and social relations of the age in which he lived. It is equally obvious, however, that the fact that a history of ideas is not exclusively devoted to the explication of ideas does not mean that it should not be devoted in part to that. An author who places ideas in a historical and social context must understand those ideas whether they are philosophical or not, and therefore anyone who thinks that the philosophical explication of such ideas proceeds from a perspective which is the opposite of that used in the psychology, sociology, or history of ideas must be confused about the nature of those disciplines or about the nature of explication itself. It is true that some historians of ideas go beyond analyzing them, but in that case they supplement the explication of ideas, they do not make it unnecessary. The scholar who tells us what the Protestant ethic is gives an analysis of it, and when he tells us how it is causally linked to capitalism, he advances a sociological or historical thesis about it. How, then, can the perspective of philosophical analysis and that of sociology of ideas be opposed? On the contrary, the history, sociology, and psychology of ideas presuppose rather than oppose the analysis of those ideas—all of which amounts to saying that if you are going to talk about the causes and consequences of philosophical beliefs, you had jolly well better know what those beliefs are. Strangely enough, however, there are students of the history of ideas who seem to deny this, and so startling does their denial seem to me that I want to devote some space to examining what some of them have said in this connection.

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One of the basic ideas of such historians is that a philosophical or so-called internal historian of beliefs approaches them “formalistically”, seeking their meaning in what some historians regard as a superficial way. Often the aversion or indifference that such historians display toward the philosophical clarification of beliefs is based on the notion that philosophical analysts focus on what those scholars call the apparent meaning of a belief whereas historians, sociologists, or psychologists deal with its real meaning. But such scholars often fail to say clearly what they have in mind when they distinguish between real and apparent meaning. Consider, for example, a statement by the eminent historian, Franco Venturi, who declares in his Italy and the Enlightenment (1973) that the historian of ideas “can be satisfied less and less with the apparent logic of intellectual forms and increasingly seeks to understand what the terms, words, concepts and myths really meant” (p. 2). Venturi is far from alone in making such pronouncements. He seems to think that because philosophically-minded historians deal with “the apparent logic of intellectual forms”, they stay on the surface of things whereas historians probe more deeply, and such an invidious contrast between the historian of philosophy and the professional historian, sociologist, or psychologist is often associated with the view that the historian of philosophy is some kind of innocent or simpleton who is content to present the apparent meaning because he is unable or unwilling to seek the real meaning to which his more knowing historical colleagues seek access. Every serious student of the history of ideas has met critics of “merely internal history of ideas” who work above (or below) the texts. Sometimes they are psychoanalysts who are prepared to tell us the real meaning of the ontological argument, of the categorical imperative, or of “esse est percipi”. Sometimes they are Marxists who offer to tell us the real meaning of the principle of gravitation, and sometimes they are historians of deism who try to tell us what it really is without the least understanding of what Toland, Tindal, or Collins said. I have known intellectual historians who could discourse pompously on the causes and effects of pragmatism without being able to give an exposition, not to speak of a critical exposition, of Peirce’s views in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” or of James’s views in Pragmatism. And that should not be surprising to readers of the following statement in the Rise of American Civilization by Charles and Mary Beard: “In his late years, William James went entirely over to the devastating pragmatism of Charles Peirce—a curious combination of chance, love, and law, hospitable to all pertinent ideas, trusting somewhat naively in the general good and the general run” (vol. 2, p. 758). In their efforts to situate pragmatists in “The Machine Age”, the Beards are reduced to embarrassing obscurity in their comments on Peirce and James, and that is one of the great dangers facing historians who flee from what they regard as the thinness or superficiality of pure exposition to the muddled profundity of social history of ideas. Calling Charles Peirce’s work “a curious combination of chance, love, and law”—that is the abysmal level to which they can sink when they abandon what philosophers intend to say for “the real meaning” of their words! We are injured when we are not given any analysis of what

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a philosopher says, but we are insulted when we are told that “the real meaning” of what he says is to be found in its impact on the machine age. Professional historians are not alone in avoiding the analysis of philosophical ideas while concentrating on their origin or impact. The literary historian Gay Wilson Allen in his William James: A Biography (1967) tries to forge a link between the philosophical life of William James and his emotional life while expounding James’s philosophical ideas without notable success. Such superficiality, as I have pointed out in my Pragmatism and the American Mind (1973), arises in part because studies of American philosophical ideas are often written by scholars who are inadequately trained in philosophy. And they are inadequately trained in part because of the vacuum which sucks them into the task for which they are inadequately trained: philosophers themselves are not interested enough in the history of American philosophy. While this vicious circle rolls along, those who write on Edwards and James, for example, without a proper understanding of them try to transcend their ignorance by offering “deep” interpretations of their hero’s thought. Hence they fail to communicate and analyze what the philosopher in question may have been most concerned to communicate, because the less one is able to expound the philosopher’s thoughts, the more one is impelled to dilate on his feelings alone. One begins by trying to connect the ideas and the feelings but soon one loses one’s grip on the ideas, and the whole enterprise collapses into . . . an entertaining biography which is adorned with useless snippets about Peirce, Darwin, Mach, Bain, Stumpf, Renouvier, Bergson, Pillon, et al., about whom the author knows very little and about whom, I venture to say, he couldn’t care less (p. 38).

Having mentioned studies of Jonathan Edwards, I must reluctantly say that even the late Perry Miller, for all his great learning, was quite capable of making the philosophical ideas of Edwards on free will appear trivial in order to justify burrowing beneath his text for a message about modern American culture. Miller tells us that through most of Edwards’s Freedom of the Will the author seems “to be altogether happy with Dr. Holmes’s characterization of it: that logic is logic is all he says”. Then Miller tells us that “the strength of the book is not the logic it says [sic], but the inner principle that sustains it. The surface play of dialectic is supported by a deeper and hidden flow of energy”. And, finally, Miller tells us in his Jonathan Edwards (1949) that this flow of energy was better discerned by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom (1941) than by Edwards’s own age (pp. 259–61). Once we are persuaded by Miller that Edwards’s “surface play of dialectic” merely issued in the truism “logic is logic”, we are supposedly prepared to see that the serious scholar’s task is to find the “deeper and hidden flow of energy” which underlay Edwards’s argument against the view that choices or volitions are not causally necessitated. Miller seems to think that the philosophical interpreter who tries to expound some of the more difficult and more profound passages of Edwards’ argument is missing the point. But what, according to Miller, is the point? It is that Edwards was trying to warn us obliquely that the doctrine of uncaused choices attributes to man a freedom from which he is bound to escape

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in the manner described by Fromm. All of this is linked with Miller’s view that Edwards’s “Freedom of the Will is an immense cipher” and that “Read as a cipher, as all Edwards’s writings must be, it is a penetrating analysis of modern culture, and specifically of the American variant” (ibid., p. 263). But Miller offers little convincing evidence for this view of Freedom of the Will and even less for the really ludicrous view that through most of that book Edwards was altogether happy to be thought of as saying that logic is logic. So far I have mentioned three social historians—Charles Beard, Mary Beard, and Franco Venturi—and two literary historians—G. W. Allen and Perry Miller—who on occasion have encouraged or engaged in the kind of approach to philosophical ideas that I have been criticizing. Now, in a further effort to clarify what I am concerned about, I want to say something more affirmative. When philosophers believe, they believe that something is the case, just as the rest of us do. The attitude of belief may be distinguished, therefore, from what is believed—sometimes called the proposition believed or the content of the belief. I have used language that might seem excessively Platonic because it seems to assume the existence of propositions regarded as extralinguistic abstract entities, but I do not wish to commit myself on that debatable issue here since the point I want to make may be made even if having a belief is regarded as having an attitude toward a sentence instead of a proposition. However one analyzes the notion of believing that something is the case, believing may be causally efficacious. When a man believes something, he may write something that causes a reaction in his readers, and so there may be a causal chain that begins with Bishop Berkeley’s sentence “To be is to be perceived”, which is read by others who then proceed to a political belief that leads them to engage in certain political behavior. The first thing to observe about the method of Franco Venturi, who invidiously contrasts “the apparent logic of intellectual forms” and what certain terms, words, concepts, and myths “really mean”, is that he may fail to see that a statement such as Berkeley’s is different from a causal consequence of reading it, which may be the acceptance of another statement and the performance of a certain action. For this reason, Venturi may think that only those political consequences of reading an epistemological statement like Berkeley’s are worth a historian’s interest whereas the logical implications of what Berkeley intended to say are not. I should emphasize therefore that I am not opposed to tracing the causes and effects of a belief, nor am I concerned to press Venturi too hard on his phrase “what the terms, words, concepts and myths really meant” for I can imagine his abandoning that unfortunate phrase and being content to say that a historian is interested in the political effects of a theorist’s statement. But, though I have no quarrel with a historian’s focusing on the practical effects of an author’s belief, I should like to point out that if a historian is to trace those effects, he must know how Berkeley’s reactionary readers, to continue with that illustration, understood his statement. If Lenin tells us that reading it led certain Russian idealists to engage in reactionary political behavior, we are entitled to ask what those idealists understood Berkeley to be saying, and this would require asking what

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they thought the logical consequences of his statement were. After all, the historian is not interested in Berkeley’s sentence as a mere stimulus; he is interested in it as an understood stimulus. So, if the Russian idealists misunderstood Berkeley, the historian should know what their mistaken interpretation was in order to support his belief that Berkeley’s statement had the political effect that he the historian attributes to it. That is what I have in mind when I say that the psychology and sociology of philosophical ideas presuppose rather than oppose the analysis of these ideas. Of course, I am aware that often the social historian of ideas may deal with a belief which is so clear that the historian may see no need to analyze it by spinning out its logical consequences. For example, if a historian tries to explain why a greedy person did something good for which he could not possibly be rewarded on earth by citing that person’s belief that he would be rewarded in heaven, we need no lengthy analysis of what the person believed; it is clear enough for our purposes and it might be sufficient to account for his action. And a historian of thought like John Dewey, who wished to explain certain features of German society in the nineteenth century—its combination of efficiency and idealism— by connecting them with Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, did not have to expound the whole of the Critique of Pure Reason to accomplish his purpose. What I protest against is the idea that the social history of philosophical ideas may be written with virtually no knowledge of what the philosophical ideas are on the misguided theory that one can assert and establish the causal connections between philosophical beliefs and society while ignoring the insides, so to speak, of those beliefs. In a sense, such ignorance is an extremely ironical development in the history of the discipline of history, which has recently become so open to the influences of other disciplines like demography, statistics, and economics, which are supposed to make the historian a real tough scientist. Since the historian is now willing to use numbers and count, why should he be wary of logically analyzing the ideas whose histories he writes? Too many historians seem bent on regarding the philosophical beliefs they study as so many black boxes into which they need not look as they pore over their outsides, but although we may see why a falling heavy box caused a dent in the ground without knowing anything about the contents of the box, it is impossible to see why Kant’s distinction between free noumena and causally determined phenomena made a dent on German society without knowing what that distinction was and how it encouraged the combination of idealism and efficiency of which Dewey speaks in his German Philosophy and Politics. Although I am heartily in favor of the historian’s disclosing the personal motives or temperamental features that prompt the beliefs of intellectuals, I must add that this is a very difficult thing to do and that most efforts of this kind are either ludicrously oversimplified or too complicated to be supported by the evidence that may be used by a responsible scholar. Here I am reminded of some observations made by David Hume in his essay “On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences”, where, in spite of his great interest in explaining phe-

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nomena by appealing to general laws, he wrote: “A man, who should inquire why such a particular poet, as Homer, for instance, existed at such a place, in such a time, would throw himself headlong into chimera, and could never treat of such a subject without a multitude of false subtilties [sic] and refinements. He might as well pretend to give a reason why such particular generals as Fabius and Scipio lived in Rome at such a time, and why Fabius came into the world before Scipio”.1 I confess to feeling very much like Hume when it comes to giving psychological explanations of intellectual phenomena. It is not that I am opposed to psycho-history, but like Hume I hesitate to throw myself headlong into chimera by trying to account psychologically for certain beliefs, especially beliefs which are not clear. I have used a number of figures in trying to describe the situation of which I have been complaining. Let me try another in which the historians who find “the real meaning” of historical beliefs are what may be called “forest-men” whereas the philosophical analysts of past ideas are called “tree-men”. In that case, I should make my point as follows. There are some historians who are so preoccupied with the size and shape of the forest in which philosophical treeideas grow that they can neither see nor touch those trees, not to speak of penetrating their barks. They are, as it were, helicopter-historians, who never touch ground as they fly over idealistic oaks and materialistic elms, content with pointing to their superficial differences or with measuring the length and the width of the forest. Often, therefore, they cannot tell a philosophical tree from a hole in the ground. Another figure puts the “real” historian in that hole, making him a mole who burrows and burrows without ever seeing much of what he works beneath. Once again, the intellectual effect is similar. The roots are investigated, but the oaks and the elms themselves are never observed or penetrated. I now want to deal with a standard reply to the kind of argument that I have been developing. There is a tendency among social historians of philosophical belief to say that what interests them is not the belief held by the philosopher in question but rather that version of his belief which trickles down to the politicians or workers who “make” history. In that case, it is more important, such historians say, to study the beliefs of less exalted thinkers. I have a number of comments to make on this view. First of all, I have no objection to a historian’s studying whatever it is that interests him. Popularizations of Newton written by lesser minds like Voltaire might well be of greater interest than Newton’s Principia to certain historians of ideas. All of that is obvious. But if the historian in question insists that the popularization has trickled down from the greater intellect’s work, then the historian must understand the greater intellect’s work to show that it has trickled down into the mind of the lesser intellect. Furthermore, if the historian seeks to establish that there was a causal chain that began with Newton’s work, continued with Voltaire’s interpretation of it, and then reached the “low life” of the French intellectual world in which the 1 David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, in Philosophical Works (edition published in 1854), vol. 3, pp. 122–23.

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historian may have his greatest interest, the historian has an obligation to support his contention that the chain was indeed causal. In offering such support he will have to understand Newton’s ideas, since saying that one work is a correct interpretation of another is analogous to saying that a portrait is a successful portrait of a person. And how can one make this last claim without knowing something independently about the original? No amount of casuistry will diminish the need to know that, unless the historian of ideas is prepared to give up the claim that he has shown the impact of Newton on French intellectual low life by way of Voltaire. One may, of course, surrender that claim by starting one’s investigation at Voltaire, by treating him as the terminus a quo of the remaining narrative, and by disclaiming any desire to show that Voltaire’s version of Newton was a correct version of Newton. In a sense, Richard Hofstadter did something analogous to that in his Age of Reform (1956), a valuable work on the same period covered by my Social Though in America. He indicates there that his study of the Progressive era “is not a study of our high culture, but of the kind of thinking that impinged most directly upon the ordinary politically conscious citizen”. Hofstadter adds that “Morton G. White in his Social Thought in America has analyzed the impact of the Progressive era upon more advanced speculation in philosophy, political theory, sociology, and history” whereas Hofstadter’s chief concern in the Age of Reform “is not with such work, not with the best but with the most characteristic thinking” (p. 6). An examination of Hofstadter’s book bears this out. The index contains no references to Holmes, and the more theoretical ideas of Dewey, Beard, and Veblen receive only the most cursory treatment. While I believe it is possible and often desirable for historians of the thought of one period to divide their labor so that one takes, so to speak, the high road and the other the low road—as Hofstadter suggests that our labor on the Progressive era was divided—the fact is that our studies are not related in that simple a way. True, my book deals with those whom Hofstadter regards as advanced thinkers of the Progressive era, but it also deals with kinds of thought that are close to what ordinary men in that era were thinking. It is therefore an example of intellectual history that moves from level to level since it links Dewey’s epistemology and ethical theory with his educational and political thought, and I do not see how anyone can give an illuminating account of the latter without analyzing the former. Dewey’s general antipathy to what he calls dualism, which is formulated in his epistemology and his ethics, lies at the heart of his educational and his political theory, and it is difficult to understand what Hofstadter calls middle-brow thinking without understanding its logical roots in high-brow epistemology and ethics. In this connection, I should point out that John Dewey recognized in his German Philosophy and Politics that it is one thing to expound Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds and another to say that such a distinction was causally related to what Dewey regarded as the chief feature of German civilization before the First World War: “its combination of self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency” (p. 28). In a summary of

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Dewey’s thinking on this matter, I wrote in Social Thought in America: “Given their high-powered mechanization and efficiency, one might have expected the Germans to run to materialism and utilitarianism more than they did. But they didn’t, because Kant revealed the limited sphere of mechanism. He put it in its place, so that Germany might end the paralysis of action arising from the conflict between science and spirit” (pp. 150–51). By arguing, said Dewey, that mechanical or causal necessity holds only in the phenomenal realm whereas the noumenal world of spirit is free, Kant provided a rationale for the German combination of idealism with technical efficiency. This account in German Philosophy and Politics of the connection between Kant’s “advanced speculation” and a certain feature of German society did not lead Dewey to conclude that the latter constituted “the real meaning” of Kantian speculation, even though Dewey comes close to saying things like that in his Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). In German Philosophy and Politics he was primarily concerned to show that in spite of “its highly technical, professional, and predominantly a priori character” German philosophy had close connections with the tendencies of German social life. Furthermore, I observed in Social Thought in America that according to Dewey, “the German university system placed an unusually high value on its philosophy of law and religion, and the universities trained the German bureaucracy. Thus German metaphysical ideas slid rapidly along a well-greased chute from the universities into the affairs of political life” (p. 150). Dewey’s causal sequence from the metaphysical beliefs of Kant to those of professors in German universities, to the actions of the German bureaucracy, to the affairs of German political life in 1914 represents a comparatively clear model of making connections between ideas and society without claiming that the behavior of the German street constitutes “the real meaning” of The Critique of Pure Reason. I do not advocate it as a model way in which all such studies should be conducted since such a way of proceeding may oversimplify the interrelationships among the various factors dealt with by a social historian of philosophical ideas. But it is like the model employed in Social Thought in America in at least two very important respects that bear on the main issues raised here. I do not deal there only with the epistemological and ethical beliefs of Beard, Dewey, Holmes, Robinson, and Veblen without linking them with the brass tacks, the staples, or the bread-and-butter of the Progressive era as conceived by its professional historians, but I do not confuse the contents of those beliefs with their causal origins or consequences. Of course, I am aware of the great difficulty involved in writing a book in which one analyzes the contents of beliefs, causally traces their consequences, and views them as parts of a movement that is linked to certain features of society and of the individual thinkers themselves. That difficulty is what makes the psychological or social history of ideas a very demanding discipline. On the other hand, it seems to me more honest and more helpful to acknowledge the difficulty of such a complex enterprise than to omit—and to produce bogus defenses of one’s right to omit—a straightforward explication of the ideas themselves. I think it is a mistake to write on the causes and effects of, for example, Dewey’s belief

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that ethics is an empirical science without giving a philosophical account of Dewey’s effort, especially in the tenth chapter of his Quest for Certainty (1929), to analyze the notion of being desirable or what ought to be desired in a way that would render judgments of value scientific. It is absurd to try to trace the origin and impact of Holmes’s belief that law is a science without giving a philosophical account of what Holmes meant when he said in “The Path of the Law”, “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law” (Collected Legal Papers, 1920, p.173). It is impossible, without analyzing Veblen’s conceptions of pragmatism and science, to explain causally why he wrote: “Pragmatism creates nothing but maxims of expedient conduct. Science creates nothing but theories. It knows nothing of policy or utility, of better or worse” (The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, 1919, p. 19). We cannot know why and to what effect Veblen adopted his philosophical views on pragmatism and science unless we know what those views were. And so, if Plato warned those about to enter the Academy not to do so unless they knew some geometry, we may warn those who go in for the psycho-history and sociology of philosophy that they had better know some philosophy. Even a little philosophy would do a lot for most of them in spite of Pope’s warning in An Essay on Criticism about a little learning. When Pope issued his warning, he wrote: A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

I suspect, however, that even a swig of what I’ve been prescribing would do wonders for some annalists of ideas.

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The Revolt against Formalism in American Social Thought of the Twentieth Century (1947)

HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN THOUGHT and critics of American culture have often noted a profound kinship between some of our distinctive currents of thought— pragmatism in philosophy, institutionalism in economics, legal realism in the law, economic determinism in politics, and what was once called the new history. When one examines these movements from a methodological, ethical and political point of view, one can see a striking similarity in the ideas of Charles Beard, John Dewey, Justice Holmes, James Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen. This similarity, which has been observed by several students of the progressive era, may be illuminated by calling attention to their joint participation in a revolt against formalism and their consequent acceptance of the central importance of historical and cultural analysis.1 It is very hard to give an exact definition of “formalism” in advance of our discussion, but what I have in mind will become clearer as we consider examples. When applied to movements in different fields such as law, philosophy, and economics, the term “antiformalist” does not retain precisely the same meaning, but there is what Wittgenstein calls a family resemblance among all of these movements. Antiformalists like Holmes, Dewey, Veblen, and Beard called upon social scientists in all domains, asked them to unite, and urged that they have nothing to lose but their deductive chains. Their attack on formalism is associated with two important elements in this current of thought—namely, their historicism, and what I shall call their cultural organicism. By historicism I mean a tendency to explain social facts by reference to earlier facts, and by cultural organicism I mean an inclination to look for explanations in disciplines other than the one which is primarily under investigation.2 The historicist reaches back in time in order to account for certain phenomena; the cultural organicist reaches into the entire social space that surrounds what is to be explained. Most of the figures I have in mind are under the spell of history 1 See M. Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York, 1943) chap. 22; V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1927), vol. 3, pp. 401–13; J. Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform, chap. 7; A. Kazin, On Native Grounds (N.Y., 1942), chap. 5. 2 See my “Historical Explanation,” Mind, vol. 52 N. S. (1943), pp. 212–29, and “The Attack on the Historical Method,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 42 (1945), pp. 314–31. I am aware that these terms have been used differently, and so I must emphasize that I mean only what I say I mean. In the light of the ambiguity of these terms, I suppose it would be desirable to find something fresh and neutral. I have searched for these without success. It should be pointed out, however, that the terms do have this much value: they indicate the strong ties that exist between these American thinkers and those whom we should call historicists and organicists. It should also be noted that this distinction owes much to that made by Comte and Mill between dynamic and static social generalizations.

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and culture since Holmes is the learned historian of the law and one of the heroes of sociological jurisprudence; Veblen is the evolutionary and sociological student of economic institutions; Beard urges us to view political documents as more than documents; Robinson construes history as the ally of all the social disciplines and the study of how things have come to be as they are; and Dewey describes his philosophy alternately as evolutionary and cultural naturalism. All of them insist upon coming to grips with life, experience, process, growth, context, function. They are all products of the historical and cultural emphases of the nineteenth century, following, being influenced by, or reacting against its great theorists of change and process—Darwin, Hegel, Maine, Marx, Savigny, Spencer, and the historical school of economics. In the present essay, I try to delineate the early roots of this community of outlook. I lay great stress upon the fact that Dewey attacked formal logic in his earliest writings, that Veblen devoted great energy to deprecating the abstractdeductive method of classical political economy, that Beard fought against a formal-juridical approach to the Constitution, and that Holmes proclaimed in 1881 what later became the slogan of generations of legal realists: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience”.3 The roots of Dewey’s rejection of formalism are quite evident. His early thought began under the influence of neo-Hegelianism, especially its condemnation of the formal and the mechanical, and he later supported some of his views by appealing to Darwinian biology.4 Dewey began as a disciple of the American idealist, G. S. Morris, his first philosophical work was under the influence of the British idealists T. H. Green and Edward Caird, and his views of logic, metaphysics, and political philosophy were squarely in the tradition of idealism.5 Like Dewey, Veblen was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins and he too listened to Morris,6 but Morris’s Hegelianism did not seem to influence him even though he shared Dewey’s admiration for the work of Darwin. Veblen often compared the Hegelian and Darwinian conceptions of change to the detriment of the former whereas there was a period in Dewey’s development when he tried to buttress his Hegelianism with Darwinian arguments.7 Moreover, Dewey and Veblen both reacted against British empiricism in their early work. One berates the philosophical wing of the tradition, while the other attacks its economists, and sometimes they converge on the same figures, most notably Bentham and John Stuart Mill. This aversion of Dewey and Veblen to British empiricism will surprise only those who think that they began as empiricists. In spite of their interest in history, they opposed British empiricism for a reason that Leslie Stephen may have put his finger on when he said that although the Utilitarians constantly appealed to experience, they had a low opinion of the value of historical study. This may also 3

The Common Law (Boston, 1881), p. 1. See my The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism (New York, 1943). 5 See Dewey’s The Ethics of Democracy, University of Michigan Philosophical Papers, Second Series, No. 1 (1888). 6 See J. Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1934), p. 39. 7 See Library of Living Philosophers (Chicago, 1934) vol. 1, p. 18 (ed. Schilpp). 4

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explain the historically oriented Holmes’s low opinion of the prime exponent of Benthamite Utilitarian jurisprudence—John Austin. As early as 1874, Holmes criticized Austin’s view of the law as the command of the sovereign.8 Moreover, when Dewey first published in ethics, it was hedonism and utilitarianism which he most severely attacked;9 when Veblen criticized the foundations of classical economics it was Bentham’s calculus of pleasure and pain that he tried to undermine; and when Beard said the Constitution was not an abstract system, he too was reacting against formalism. The fact that the historian Robinson did not find a comparable sparring partner among the Utilitarians may reflect the fact that there were no utilitarian historians of modern times as distinguished as Bentham, Mill, and Austin were in their disciplines. Dewey attacked the ethics, psychology, and logic of the Utilitarians for failing to study the actual workings of the human mind; Veblen attacked the felicific calculus of Bentham and his failure to study economic institutions in their wider historico-cultural setting; Beard opposed the analytical school of jurisprudence for treating the Constitution as if it were axiomatized geometry rather than an economic document; and Holmes regarded Austin’s theory as an inaccurate account of law as it was practiced. These reflections may help explain why I join all of these American social thinkers as antiformalist revolutionaries. I want now to turn to more detailed expressions of this attitude in their early writings, and in this way clarify as well as confirm my main thesis.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR. Because Holmes was the oldest of the antiformalists and the first of them to present a mature and clear statement of his position, I treat him first. I want particularly to consider some of the more general aspects of his work The Common Law (1881) in order to focus upon its important role in the revolt against formalism. His purpose, Holmes tells us on the first page, is to present “a general view of the subject”. And then, as if to dissociate himself from a view which might be attributed to him, he announces that “other tools are needed besides logic” in order to accomplish this task.10 May we infer that there were expositors of the common law who believed that only logic was necessary as a tool? I doubt it, but certainly there were some who conceived logic as the fundamental tool.11 Of 8 H. C. Shriver, ed., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers (1936), p. 21. 9 Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (Ann Arbor, 1891); The Study of Ethics (Ann Arbor, 1894). 10 The Common Law (Boston, 1881), p. 1. 11 John Stuart Mill, in his essay on Austin, says, “The purpose of Bentham was to investigate principles from which to decide what laws ought to exist—what legal rights, and legal duties or obligations, are fit to be established among mankind. This was also the ultimate end of Mr. Austin’s speculations; but the subject of his special labors was theoretically distinct, though subsidiary, and practically indispensable, to the former.” “Austin on Jurisprudence”, Dissertations and Discussions (Boston, 1864), vol. 4. “Jurisprudence, thus understood, is not so much a science of law, as the application of logic to law”. Ibid., p. 167.

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what logic is Holmes speaking? If it were not for the fact that he published his book in 1881, when the world was being swamped with two-volume studies in idealistic logic, such a question might not be raised, but I raise it to make clear that he was not referring to the discipline they claimed to expound but rather to traditional Aristotelian logic. According to Holmes, it was syllogistic logic that did not suffice for presenting a general view of the Common Law, but we can be sure that Holmes was not rejecting Aristotelian logic because of any failures which might be remedied by mathematical logic. Of the latter, he knew almost nothing, and in it he had little interest.12 No enrichment of syllogistic logic in the modern manner would have changed the situation for Holmes’s purposes; he believed that no kind of deductive logic sufficed when he wrote: “The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics”.13 According to Holmes, the law embodies the history of a nation and therefore cannot be treated deductively. Although he does not explicitly formulate them, we may distinguish two questions in order to get clear about what he is saying: (1) Can we formulate the law accepted at a given time in a deductive fashion, beginning with legal axioms or fundamental principles? (2) Has the law in its actual historical course developed in a logico-deductive manner? Holmes is primarily concerned with the second question, and his answer is negative because he thinks the law does not develop as if it were created by a logician.14 The life of the law has not been logic in this sense since other factors play a part in its development: “The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed”. Holmes’s theory in The Common Law is primarily a theory in the philosophy of the history of law, to use Mill’s phrase in describing Maine’s work, and it is antiformalistic because he rejects the view that it has evolved in accordance with a logical pattern.15 12 Holmes, like Dewey, never had a very high opinion of formal constructions. In a letter to Pollock, he has the following to say of Hohfeld’s attempt to classify jural relations: “Hohfeld was as you surmise an ingenious gent, making, as I judge from flying glimpses, pretty good and keen distinctions of the kind that are more needed by a lower grade of lawyer than they are by you and me. I think all those systematic schematisms rather bores; and now Kocurek in the Illinois Law Review and elsewhere adds epicycles—and I regard him civilly but as I have written don’t care much for the whole machinery”. Holmes-Pollock Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 64. 13 The Common Law, p. 1. 14 I am not suggesting that Holmes was not interested in the first question. Indeed he has considered it, too. But I wish to suggest that the antiformalism in The Common Law was the product of a negative answer to the second question. On this point, it may be instructive to examine Mill’s comparison of Maine and Austin. The latter is the logician of the law; the former investigates “not properly the philosophy of law but the philosophy of the history of law”. Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 4, pp. 161–64. 15 It should be pointed out that although Holmes would probably answer the first question in the negative, it is not at all clear that this is entailed by a negative answer to the second. One might

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The positive implications of this attack on formalism are fairly obvious. Holmes is led to an intensive study of the history and theories of legislation in order to explain the meanings of certain legal terms and rules and why they emerged when they did. The first chapter of The Common Law, for example, is an exercise in historical explanation, a study of early forms of liability in order to show that they are rooted in passion and vengeance. Moreover, The Common Law is permeated with the spirit of epoch-making work in anthropology. It followed the publication of E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture by ten years, when the impact of the latter was still considerable. Not only does Holmes cite Tylor on certain factual questions16 but he absorbs some of Tylor’s general ideas when remarking on what he calls a very “common phenomenon”, and one which is “very familiar to the student of history”: The customs, beliefs, or needs of a primitive time establish a rule or formula. In the course of centuries the custom, belief, or necessity disappears, but the rule remains. The reason which gave rise to the rule has been forgotten, and ingenious minds set themselves to inquire how it is to be accounted for. Some ground of policy is thought of, which seems to explain it and to reconcile it with the present state of things; and then the rule adapts itself to the new reasons which have been found for it, and enters on a new career. The old form receives a new content, and in time even the form modifies itself to fit the meaning which it has received.17

The point of view expressed here was closely related to Tylor’s conception of survival, treated at length in chapters 3 and 4 of his Primitive Culture, in which Tylor was motivated in part by a desire to ferret out just those elements of his own culture that were mere survivals of a more backward and less civilized age. He held that the study of the past is not archaeological or antiquarian since he urged that we try to get rid of those practices which have nothing to commend them but the fact that they are survivals of the past. It is for this reason that he concludes his great work with the following statement: It is a harsher, and at times even painful office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good formulate the two questions with the word “physics” in place of “law” and conclude that the answer to the second is no, but that the answer to the first is yes. The entire question of Holmes’s attitude toward logic in the law is a difficult one. Fearful of the effect that some of his statements may have had in furthering irrationality and illogicality, philosophers like Dewey and Morris R. Cohen have tried to interpret these statements in a manner consistent with their own views. See Dewey’s “Justice Holmes and the Liberal Mind”, New Republic, vol. 53 (1928), pp. 210–12 (reprinted in Dewey’s Characters and Events), and Cohen’s “Justice Holmes”, New Republic, vol. 82 (1935), pp. 206–9. Other problems are raised concerning Holmes’s relations with C. C. Langdell, often described as the great exponent of inductive methods in the law and yet someone of whom Holmes says: “. . . to my mind he [Langdell] represents the powers of darkness. He is all for logic and hates any reference to anything outside of it.” Holmes-Pollock Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 17 (letter written in 1881). 16 The Common Law, p. 11. 17 Ibid., p. 5.

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of mankind. Thus active at once in aiding progress and removing hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer’s science.18

Tylor’s view of the science of culture as a reformer’s science must be underscored if we are to appreciate the link between the historicism and the liberalism of our American thinkers, for Tylor’s statement shows that historicism was not always associated with a veneration of the past. The study of the past was thought to be instrumental in the elimination of contemporary irrationality, and therefore the student of the past did not always celebrate it, as the example of Marx and that of Tylor shows.19 It also shows that the evolutionary and historical orientation of Holmes, Veblen, Dewey, Beard, and Robinson must be distinguished from the historicism and organicism of European conservatives and reactionaries of the nineteenth century.

JOHN DEWEY In 1882, one year after the publication of The Common Law, Dewey’s first published contribution to philosophy appeared. With it he began a series of investigations in philosophy and psychology under the influence of British neo-idealism, which was to continue until the emergence of his distinctly instrumentalist, pragmatist, or experimentalist outlook.20 Dewey was even more of an antiformalist than Holmes. Under the influence of Morris, his teacher at Johns Hopkins, he came to scorn the epistemology of the British empiricists and to single out for attack their dualistic separation of mind from the object of knowledge. This separation was construed by Dewey as “formal” and “mechanical” and hence attacked in the manner of Hegel. The “New Psychology” was a movement, according to Dewey, which was to free psychology from the analytical dissections of associationism.21 Hegel provided this movement with the concept of a universal consciousness that embraced everything, and it created the link between individual consciousness and the objects of knowledge that supposedly showed them to be more than formally related. For Dewey, the absolute universal consciousness was central,22 and as he tells us later in life, this Hegelian view was the ancestor of his insistence upon the “power exercised by cultural environment in shaping . . . ideas, beliefs, and intellectual attitudes”.23 His view that all human action must be seen as taking place in a cultural matrix was kindred to Holmes’s view of legal development. Holmes was not a Hegelian, but he and Dewey were moti18

Primitive Culture, 1st Am. ed. (1874), vol. 2, p. 453. At a later date, Holmes explicitly announced his sympathy with this point of view when he said: “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than so it was said in the time of Henry IV”. “The Path of the Law” (1897), Collected Legal Papers, pp. 187. 20 I have treated this period in detail in The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism. 21 “The New Psychology”, Andover Review (Sept. 1884), pp. 278–89. 22 John Dewey, Psychology (1887). 23 Quoted in vol.1 of the Library of Living Philosophers (ed. P. Schilpp), p. 18. 19

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vated by similar considerations in their early attack on formalism, considerations that may help explain the admiration they later came to feel for each other as well as the convergence of pragmatism and legal realism in the twentieth century.24 It was in the 1880’s that Dewey and Holmes both attacked what they regarded as excessive respect for formal logic25 and the excerpt from The Common Law about the life of the law not being logic matched several in Dewey’s writings during that period, most notably Dewey’s claim in 1891 that formal logic was “fons et origo malorum in philosophy”.26 In addition to sharing Holmes’s negative attitude toward formal logic and his acceptance of what I have called cultural organicism, Dewey shared Holmes’s respect for the historical or genetic method.27 Dewey’s historicism and his antipathy to formal logic both originated in his Hegelian opposition to British empiricism, but contact with Darwin’s work led to an evolutionary emphasis in his genetic approach. This was especially true of his paper “The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality”,28 which not only linked him to Holmes but also to Veblen, as we shall see when we examine the latter’s regretful complaint in 1898 that economics was not then an evolutionary science. Dewey’s application of evolutionary method to morality is not only useful for establishing his connection with Holmes and Veblen, but it also helps us to see some of the ties between his experimentalism and his historicism, between his early Hegelian emphasis on change and history and his later pragmatic emphasis on experiment and control. In expounding the nature of evolutionary method, he tries to formulate the sense in which experimental method is itself genetic and his link between both methods is rather simple. In conducting experiments 24

The connections between the later Holmes and the later Dewey are well known. Indeed something of a literature has already grown up on the intellectual links between pragmatism and legal realism; for example see H. W. Schneider’s History of American Philosophy (chap. 41). Dewey has written of Holmes in several places (see M. H. Thomas, A Bibliography of the Writings of John Dewey). Holmes’s admiration for Dewey is expressed throughout the Holmes-Pollock correspondence and also in H. C. Shriver, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers. On some aspects of their intellectual links, see M. H. Fisch, “Mr. Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of the Law, and Pragmatism,” Journal of Philosophy (1942), pp. 85–97. Dewey was familiar with Holmes’s The Common Law quite early, citing it in his The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (1894) for Holmes’s treatment of legal motive and the “external standard”. It is also interesting to examine in this connection Dewey’s early essay “Austin’s Theory of Sovereignty”, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 9 (1894), pp. 31–52. In it Dewey criticizes Austin in a manner quite consistent with what I have called organicism. He objects to his view that “the residence of sovereignty can be found in a definitely limited portion of political society” (p. 42), and also objects to it for making “a complete gap between the social forces which determine government and that government itself” (p. 43). There is a related attack on Maine in “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888), cited above. 25 Dewey, “The Present Position of Logical Theory”, Monist, vol. 2 (1891), pp. 1–17. 26 Ibid., p. 3. The community that is expressed by these outbursts against formal logic does a good deal to explain the ease with which Roscoe Pound has united Dewey, Hegel, and Holmes in his own attacks on mechanical jurisprudence. 27 For a discussion of certain other aspects of this tendency in American thought, see Schneider, op. cit., chap. 33. 28 Philosophical Review, vol. 11 (1902).

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on the nature of water, he says, we perform certain acts of mixture and we see that water is formed as a consequence, that the entire process is one in which water is brought into being. The experimental process, therefore, is viewed as genetic in character, precisely because it brings into being certain phenomena as a result of experimental manipulation. However, there are some domains, Dewey thought at the time, in which experimental control is impossible. We are able to use experiment in chemistry, he argues, but we cannot apply it to “those facts with which ethical science is concerned”.29 “We cannot,” he says, “take a present case of parental care, or of a child’s untruthfulness, and cut it into sections or tear it into physical pieces, or subject it to chemical analysis”. What we can do, however, is study “how it came to be what it is”, that is, study it historically. History, therefore, is construed as “the only available substitute for experiment”: “The early periods present us in their relative crudeness and simplicity with a substitute for the artificial operation of an experiment: following the phenomenon into the more complicated and refined form which it assumes later, is a substitute for the synthesis of the experiment”. For Dewey at this time, historical investigation was the only available substitute for experiment and experiment itself was a kind of historical enterprise. Of course, the notion of history as a possible substitute for experiment was not original with Dewey; in fact his entire discussion is reminiscent of Mill’s System of Logic, where Mill considers the various methods—experimental or chemical, physical or direct deductive, historical or inverse deductive—and their applicability in the social sciences.30 Mill concluded that experiment was not possible in economics, but he argued that the best substitute was the abstract-deductive method, and not history, and this helps us see an important link between Dewey and Veblen for it was precisely this aspect of Mill’s methodology that Veblen attacked in his critique of classical economics since Veblen, like Dewey, appealed to history, to the need for “evolutionary science”.

THORSTEIN VEBLEN Like Holmes and Dewey, Veblen was strongly influenced by new developments in anthropology. If anything, he was more interested and more learned in that field than they were. So strong was this influence that he began his famous attack31 on all previous schools of economics by approving of the following statement: “Anthropology is destined to revolutionize the political and the social sciences as radically as bacteriology has revolutionized the science of medicine”. But economics, he complained, was not then in tune with this new note. In short, it was not an evolutionary science. 29

Ibid., 113. See bk. 6 of the Logic, entitled “On the Logic of the Moral Sciences”, in which these various methods are compared. 31 “Why Is Economics Not An Evolutionary Science?” (1898), reprinted in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. 30

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Now what, according to Veblen, is an evolutionary science and what was he opposing? To understand this we might best turn to John Stuart Mill for the light he sheds on Veblen’s lament, and in this way see how Mill represents, with Bentham and Austin, a view in methodology against which so many of the pioneers of American social science revolted. The doctrine of economic method associated with Mill was advanced in the System of Logic, but it was more sharply defined in a brilliant essay he wrote in 1829 when he was twenty-three years old, “On the Definition of Political Economy; and the Method of Investigation Proper to It”.32 For Mill, political economy is to be distinguished from what he calls social economy or speculative politics—the latter treating “the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state”. Political economy is rather a branch of social economy because it does not deal with the whole of man’s nature. It is concerned with man “solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means for attaining that end”.33 Moreover, “It predicts only such of the phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth. It makes entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive; except those which may be regarded as perpetually antagonizing principles to the desire of wealth, namely, aversion to labor, and the desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences”.34 A central point in Mill’s statement of the nature of political economy is his use of the subjunctive conditional mode of assertion in the following passage: “Political economy considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring and consuming wealth; and aims at showing what is the course of action into which mankind, living in a state of society, would [my italics] be impelled, if [my italics] that motive, except in the degree in which it is checked by the two perpetual counter-motives above, were [my italics] absolute ruler of all their actions”.35 I emphasize the subjunctive mood of the statement, for it makes clear that Mill is not saying that in fact the pursuit of wealth is the sole motive of man. Indeed, he goes on to say that the economist does not put this forth as a description of man’s actual behavior, and he denies that any “political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted”.36 But some future critics of Mill, among them Veblen and his followers, treated Mill’s view of the economic man as though it were an unconditional assertion in the indicative mood about man’s actual psychology. We can see, therefore, why Veblen rejects Mill’s view. He maintains that it represents the height of “faulty psychology”, and what is worse than a faulty psychology for an institutionalist? It is simply not true to say that man is governed by this single motive (even where the qualifications about countermotives are made), and since this is an “assumption” of classical economics which is false, everything which is “deduced” from it is suspect in the eyes of Veblen. 32

This appears in Mill’s Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy. Ibid., p. 137. 34 Ibid., pp. 137–38. 35 Idem. 36 Ibid., p. 139. 33

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There are other aspects of Mill’s methodology of economics which contribute to an understanding of what was troubling Veblen. Mill suggests that the economist ought to treat man much as the astronomer treats planets. The astronomer frequently talks about what would happen to a planet if it were not subject to the sun’s attraction. (This, of course, occurs when he considers it as a particle subject only to Newton’s first law of motion.) In this sense, Mill says, he abstracts and considers the planet as if it were a body outside the sun’s gravitational field (although he knows it is not). Just as astronomers pursue this method successfully, so, it is urged, may economists. By considering first how men would behave if they were simply dominated by a single motive, Mill believes that economists will come to a good approximation of how they do in fact behave. “This approximation,” he points out, “is then to be corrected by making proper allowance for the effects of any impulses of a different description, which can be shown to interfere with the result in any particular case”.37 There can be no doubt that this was the tradition against which Veblen was rebelling when he rejected the method of classical economics. I don’t think he ever clearly formulated for himself the methodological tenets of Mill in a way that left them defensible, but it was a doctrine of this kind that he rejected. I say of this kind, not to exclude the possibility that there were classical economists who were less able than Mill in methodology and less cautious about what they asserted about the actual psychology of man. In any case, it should be evident that classical economics was formalistic for Veblen in a sense related to that in which formal logic was formalistic for Dewey, and Austin’s jurisprudence was formalistic for Holmes. Dewey in his earliest attacks on it construed formal logic as a description of how we think, and contemptuously dismissed it. Holmes insisted that when we study law “we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession”, and what could be more mysterious than the abstract dicta of Austin, formally conceived and having nothing to do with the “bad man”—the man who pays the lawyer to advise him how to keep out of jail? It is for this reason that Holmes, Dewey, and Veblen found themselves arrayed against three apostles of empiricism—Bentham, Mill, and Austin—and for an ironic reason—they thought they weren’t empirical enough! When Veblen complained that economics was not an evolutionary science he was voicing precisely this attitude. Now what was evolutionary science as Veblen understood it? In his essay on it, he is, unfortunately, too occupied with asserting that all the traditional schools were not evolutionary, and little concerned with saying what an evolutionary science is. He insists that some things which might be expected to make a science evolutionary really don’t. Hence the historical school—Schmoller, Hildebrand, Ashley, Cliffe-Leslie—was “realistic” insofar as it dealt with “facts”, but this is not enough according to Veblen. They fail, in his opinion, to formulate a theory concerning those facts. For him an evolutionary 37

Ibid., p. 140.

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science must present a “theory of process, of an unfolding sequence”.38 When he comes to the classical economists, therefore, he finds that even where they do refer to empirical data, and even where they try to present a theory of process, they still fall short of the evolutionary ideal.39 What, then, is the difference? As we press on we find a statement that the difference is one of “spiritual attitude”— a rather tender expression for one so tough-minded as Veblen. We press further and find that what he is disturbed about in the classical economists is their addiction to natural law. He is opposed to their formulating an ideal state of affairs and generalizing about it without attending to actual economic facts. In some of Veblen’s writings, this seems to be an objection to the use of a subjunctive conditional like that used by Mill, since there, Veblen seems to urge, we should not make conditional statements with antecedents like “If man were subject to only one motive” or “If perfect competition prevailed”, because they are false. At other times, Veblen seems to object not so much to the use of such hypotheses in science but rather to the fact that certain classical economists also had a moral attitude toward them. They thought that they formulated socially and morally desirable states, or that society was tending toward those states. In both cases, Veblen held, some kind of belief in natural law was present—either a moral judgment about what sort of society is good or a faith that progress toward that sort of society is being made. We may become a little clearer about Veblen’s objection if we compare the situation of the student of mechanics with that of the classical political economist. The former tells us how the distance fallen by a freely falling body depends on the time it takes to fall. He points out, of course, that his law holds only in a vacuum. Thus far his procedure is analogous to that of the economist who insists that his laws hold only for economic vacuums, so to speak—cases where only one motive is in operation. But the physicist does not add “And indeed the vacuum is a highly prized state”, or “The atmosphere tends more and more toward a vacuum”. But the classical economist, according to Veblen, not only used ideal concepts like “economic man” and “perfect competition” but also admired these 38 Veblen, op. cit., p. 58; see also J. K. Ingram, A History of Political Economy, on the “realism” of the historical school, esp. p. 213 (N.Y. edition, 1888). For a recent discussion, see H. Grossman, “The Evolutionist Revolt against Classical Economics”, The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 51, nos. 5 and 6 (1943); this treats the revolts in France and England. H. W. Schneider considers Veblen in his discussion of general social philosophy in America, op. cit., chap. 33. 39 Naturally, some members of the classical school were sensitive to the growing historicism of the nineteenth century and made many attempts to connect with this tendency, e.g., Mill’s attempt to deal with dynamics in the Political Economy. But evolutionists and historicists were not satisfied with these overtures. Veblen’s attitude on this point is very similar to Dewey’s attitude toward the “inductive logicians” of the nineteenth century—e.g., Jevons and Venn—who tried to go beyond formal logic to formulate a theory of scientific method, ostensibly a goal he shared with them. Thus Dewey says, “that whereas we might expect ‘empirical logic’ to advance beyond formal logic, it virtually continues the conception of thought as itself empty and formal, which characterizes scholastic logic”. “The Present Position of Logical Theory,” Monist, vol. 2, p. 5; White, The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism, p. 91.

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kinds of men and states of society, and looked upon them as ends toward which man and society were moving. Thus far I have considered Veblen’s attack on the use of abstraction in classical economics, but I have not considered his attitude toward the use of a priori method in economics. To understand this I must return to Mill’s view. Mill distinguished between two types of minds—the practicals and the theorists, as he called them. The difference between them may be exhibited by an illustration. Suppose we are faced with the following question: are absolute kings likely to employ the powers of government for the welfare or for the oppression of their subjects? How would the practicals go about settling it? They would try, Mill says, to examine the conduct of particular despotic monarchs in history and to find out how they behaved. But the theorists, he says, “would contend that an observation of the tendencies which human nature has manifested in the variety of situations in which human beings have been placed, especially observation of what passes in our own minds, warrants us in inferring that a human being in the situation of a despotic king will make a bad use of power; and that this circumstance would lose nothing of certainty even if absolute kings never existed, or if history furnished us with no information of the manner in which they had conducted themselves”.40 The practical uses the a posteriori method, the theorist the a priori method”.41 We now see why Mill regarded economics as both abstract and a priori in method: abstract because it abstracted one aspect of man’s behavior and tried to discover how he would behave if he had only one motive; a priori because it avoided the laborious and painstaking methods of historical research. To verify hypotheses by reference to history was for Mill “not the business of science at all but the application of science” so it should be evident why Mill’s doctrine was opposed by historicists and institutionalists as well as why Dewey’s early views also ran counter to Mill’s. Dewey’s suggestion that we use history as a substitute for experiment where the latter is not available was clearly the method of the “practical” for Mill—an appellation which the later Dewey might have gladly accepted. It is evident now, I hope, how much the historical, evolutionary, cultural attitude united Dewey and Veblen against the abstract and a priori method of Mill. It is also clear why American thinkers rejected so much of the empiricism of Bentham and Mill:—because they were revolting against the least empirical elements of the empiricist tradition—a priorism, abstractionism, the felicific calculus, the formal jurisprudence of Austin. The grounds of Veblen’s rejection of the method of classical economists are very similar to those which led Dewey to 40

Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy”, loc. cit., pp. 142–43. This distinction, it must be urged in fairness to Mill, is not based upon the fact that one method “appeals to experience” and that the other does not. Mill is anxious to disown any mysticism, authoritarianism, or dogmatism. With reference to the phrase “a priori” he says in this essay: “We are aware that this expression is sometimes used to characterize a supposed mode of philosophizing which does not profess to be founded upon experience at all. But we are not acquainted with any mode of philosophizing, on political subjects at least, to which such a description is fairly applicable”. A similar point is made in the System of Logic, bk. 6, chap. 9, sec. 1. 41

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reject what he called scholastic formalism in psychology and logic. They also resemble the considerations which led Holmes to reject the so-called mechanical theory of the law as existing in advance and awaiting the judge’s discovery of it. Furthermore, to complete the pattern, Veblen also turns to history and culture, to a cross-sectional study of the institutional context of economic behavior as well as to a study of the temporal development of society.42 Like Dewey and Holmes, he looks to temporal antecedents and cultural concomitants. For this reason, we may say that Dewey, Holmes, and Veblen are united in an attempt to destroy what they conceive as three fictions—the logical, legal, and economic man. In this way, they begin a tradition in recent American thought, which Beard and Robinson continued in political science and history. JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON AND CHARLES A. BEARD The connections between Robinson, Beard, and the revolt against formalism were evident as early as 1908, the year in which they delivered lectures at Columbia University on politics and history, respectively, in a series devoted to science, philosophy, and art.43 Considered in terms of the revolt, Robinson’s work is an expression of historicism, the evolutionary movement in social science, and genetic method. Robinson was anxious to establish the scientific character of history, but at the same time to distinguish his own from Ranke’s version of scientific method in history.44 According to Robinson, the earliest historians from Thucydides to Macaulay and Ranke examined the past with a view of amusing, edifying, or comforting the reader. None of these motives, however, can be described as scientific, according to Robinson: He says: To scan the past with the hope of discovering recipes for the making of statesmen and warriors, of discrediting the pagan gods, of showing that Catholic or Protestant is right, of exhibiting the stages of self-realization of the Weltgeist, of demonstrating that Liberty emerged from the forests of Germany, never to return thither—none of these motives are scientific although they may go hand in hand with much sound scholarship. But by the middle of the nineteenth century the muse of history, semper mutabile, began to fall under the potent spell of natural science. She was no longer satisfied to celebrate the deeds of heroes and nations with the lyre and shrill flute on the breeze-swept slopes 42 In addition to Dorfman’s book, see the study of John S. Gambs, Beyond Supply and Demand: A Reappraisal of Institutional Economics. This last came to my attention after this paper was prepared. For a succinct statement on Veblen’s system, see K. L. Anderson, “The Unity of Veblen’s Theoretical System”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 48 (1933). Naturally, there is an enormous literature on Veblen, but I cite only items of general interest, especially since I am concerned only with a segment of Veblen’s career. 43 Dewey delivered a lecture entitled “Ethics” in the series. 44 For a recent discussion of the attitudes of American historians on this question and others, see Theory and Practice in Historical Study: A Report of the Committee on Historiography, published by the Social Science Research Council, esp. chap. 2 by J. H. Randall Jr., and Geo. Haines IV, “Controlling Assumptions in the Practice of American Historians” (1946).

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of Helicon; she no longer durst attempt to vindicate the ways of God to man. She had already come to recognize that she was ill-prepared for her undertakings and had begun to spend her mornings in the library, collating manuscripts and making lists of variant readings. She aspired to do even more and began to talk of raising her chaotic mass of information to the rank of a science.45

It is evident from this passage that Robinson was anxious to free historical research from moralism and estheticism, and this links him with Holmes and Veblen in their attempts to distinguish their disciplines from morals; it is also connected with the early (though not the later) views of Beard, who held in 1908 that “it is not the function of the student of politics to praise or condemn institutions or theories, but to expound them; and thus for scientific purposes it is separated from theology, ethics, and patriotism”.46 We must remember that this a-moralism occurs at a time when the confusion of factual and ethical questions was usually viewed as an instrument of conservatism and reaction, and when objectivity was eagerly sought. Social theorists wanted to expose, to rake the facts, and they were moved by a desire to achieve scientific status because they thought the facts would make us free. Indeed, on this point, they were not opposed to the tradition of Bentham, Mill, and Austin. Like the Utilitarians, they were part of a reforming movement, and they too sought to distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Nevertheless we should remember that the desire to make this distinction was not regarded as incompatible with the view that moral judgments are theoretically capable of empirical verification. Certainly this was Dewey’s view at the time.47 Although Robinson was anxious to exclude moral and esthetic considerations from the writing of history, he was also anxious to go beyond a mere report of what actually happened. Past historians, he says, “did take some pains to find out how things really were—wie es eigentlich gewesen, to use Ranke’s famous dictum”.48 Moreover, he says, “to this extent they were scientific, although their motives were mainly literary, moral, or religious”. What they failed to do, however, was to “try to determine how things had come about—wie es eigentlich geworden”. And so Robinson concludes that history has remained for two or three thousand years a record of past events—a definition, he says, which still satisfies “the thoughtless”. “It is one thing to describe what once was; it is quite another to attempt to determine how it came about”. 45 History (New York, 1908); also see J. H. Robinson, The New History, pp. 43–44, where this essay is reprinted, with alterations. 46 Politics (New York, 1908), pp.14–15. We must note here the difference between this and Beard’s later view concerning the relation between ethics and social science as expressed in The Nature of the Social Sciences. 47 See, for example, his “Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality”, Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, First Series, III (Chicago, 1903), pp. 113–39. This was reprinted in Dewey’s Problems of Men (New York, 1945). 48 History, p. 15.

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Robinson’s view of history as itself a genetic account of how things come to be emphasized the concept of development, and was therefore part of the movement I have called historicism. It was quite like Holmes’s conception of history as a discipline that furnished explanations of the emergence of legal rules; it was in accord with Veblen’s critique of the historical school; and it resembled Dewey’s view of history as a statement of “how the thing came to be as it is”. How did it compare with Beard’s view? Let us turn to the latter’s lecture on Politics, delivered in the same year, in the same place, and before much the same audience as Robinson’s lecture. Beard’s major complaint about his predecessors revolved about their error in studying juridical-formal relations in the abstract without attention to their roots in the social process. He warns his audience that “official acts are not really separable from other actions of the governmental agents themselves or from many of the actions of the citizens at large”.49 Political facts are organically related to the social process as a whole. “The jural test of what constitutes a political action draws a dividing line where none exists in fact, and consequently any study of government that neglects the disciplines of history, economics, and sociology will lack in reality what it gains in precision. Man as a political animal acting upon political, as distinguished from more vital and powerful motives, is the most unsubstantial of all abstractions. The recognition of this truth has induced students of politics to search in many fields for a surer foothold than law alone can afford”.50 And now just one more quotation to give the flavor of Beard’s early conception of political science: “We are coming to realize that a science dealing with man has no special field of data all to itself, but is rather merely a way of looking at the same thing—a view of a certain aspect of human action. The human being is not essentially different when he is depositing his ballot from what he is in the counting house or at the work bench. In the place of a ‘natural’ man, an ‘economic’ man, a ‘religious’ man, or a ‘political’ man, we now observe the whole man participating in the work of government”.51 Robinson and Beard together present us with a historicist view of history and an organic view of political science and so their link with the other antiformalists is obvious. Beard cites Holmes, Pound, Goodnow, and Bentley in the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) in order to show the intimate ties between his own cultural organicism and that of the key figures in some of the most important intellectual trends of the twentieth century—legal realism, sociological jurisprudence, and pragmatism. Some of them did not accept the main thesis of his book on the Constitution; for example, Holmes did not.52 But this should not obscure the broad grounds on which Beard was united with the rest in a struggle against what I have called formalism and in an attempt to break down 49

Politics, p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. 51 Ibid. 52 Holmes-Pollock Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 237; vol. 2, pp. 222–23. 50

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artificial barriers between the social disciplines. Like them he also embarked on a historical and cultural study of man. In this essay, I have tried to describe a particular affinity in the early work of some outstanding American social thinkers of the twentieth century, and have maintained that they were united in a common revolt against formalism that culminated in an emphasis on historical and cultural factors. This not only helps us understand some of their early doctrines but also accounts for a good deal of their mutual attachment in later years. Their use of history and culture as central concepts explains why they spread themselves; why Holmes was the most erudite and philosophical lawyer of his day; why Veblen was a sociologist, anthropologist, and economist; why Dewey was a psychologist and educator as well as a philosopher; and why Beard was a historian and political scientist. For this reason (and others), they towered over most of their contemporaries in American social thought of the twentieth century, and I have been concerned here not only to expound their views but to show why they focused on the historical, cultural aspects of human social behavior and why they rejected approaches that they regarded as excessively deductive, mathematical, and mechanical—in short, why they revolted against formalism.

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Pragmatism and the Revolt against Formalism: Revising Some Doctrines of William James (1986)

WHEN PROF. SHOICHI OSHIMO of Doshisha University was kind enough to encourage me to lecture about William James, he told me that I would probably be addressing an audience composed of persons with very different interests and very different backgrounds in philosophy. Therefore, I wish to apologize in advance if I should say what is obvious to some members of the audience and what may be difficult for others. Needless to add, any speaker in my situation faces the sort of task that James himself often undertook, for he wished not only to contribute to technical philosophy but also to make himself comprehensible to as many readers as possible. He tried to communicate what he thought was philosophically important and yet he hoped that his ideas could be understood and appreciated by anyone who would read him with care and sympathy. In this lecture, I want to talk about James in a way that I hope will interest historians of American thought, philosophers, and anyone else who is interested in philosophical ideas. THE REVOLT AGAINST FORMALISM REVISITED Let me begin by directing some remarks at those of you who are primarily interested in the history of American thought broadly conceived. Some of you may be familiar with a book of mine called Social Thought in America, subtitled The Revolt against Formalism.1 There I concentrated on five American thinkers: Charles Beard, John Dewey, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., James Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen, linking them as antiformalists who had been influenced by two powerful tendencies in nineteenth century thought which I called “historicism” and “organicism”. By “historicism” I meant a tendency to emphasize the continuity of the social past and to explain social phenomena by going back in time, whereas by “organicism” I meant a tendency of historians and social scientists to view society as a unified whole and therefore to seek explanations and relevant materials in social sciences which were not their own special disciplines. These two intellectual tendencies, I argued, were opposed to the excesses of what I called “formalism” in political science, in history, in law, in economics, and in philosophy: excesses which were attacked in different ways by the five subjects of Social Thought in America. In that book, however, I did 1 First published in New York, 1949. The most recent reprint of this work is in a Galaxy Paperback edition, New York, 1976.

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not deal with James at any length, believing that he was not primarily a social thinker and therefore not associating him with either historicism or organicism. But here I want to call attention to two aspects of James’s thinking that may be fairly labeled as psychological historicism and epistemological organicism. I shall concentrate on the second, but before I do so, I want to say a few words about the first. James’s historicism, or his emphasis on the flowing or continuous nature of consciousness, is fundamental in his psychology. In opposition to Hume, James held that consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits, so he said: “Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described”.2 Here James adopted a metaphor that was often used by his Hegelian contemporaries and he echoed Heraclitus by announcing that we can never descend twice into the same stream of consciousness. In doing so, James adopted a psychological view that resembled the historicism of the five American social thinkers I have mentioned. Like them, he was influenced by certain themes of nineteenth-century thought, especially the emphasis on continuity that was central to the evolutionary thought of Charles Darwin, whom James greatly admired. I should add that general acceptance of Darwin’s views, according to James’s colleague, Josiah Royce, had been prepared by the idealists’ emphasis on dynamic historical analysis,3 and Royce’s observation helps explain why John Dewey’s acceptance of Darwinism was facilitated by his having been a Hegelian in his youth. He was able to slip rather easily into Darwinism, he said, by reconstruing certain Hegelian concepts in naturalistic terms.4 The preoccupation with continuity that led psychologists and social thinkers of the nineteenth century to become historicists was, as I have said, accompanied by a related tendency to regard things as parts of organic wholes. This tendency, as will soon be evident, is illustrated by what may be called James’s epistemological organicism. By making this organicism explicit and by focusing on it, I want to show that James accepted a form of what Prof. W. V. Quine has called epistemological holism5 under the influence of Pierre Duhem’s views, and what I have sometimes called epistemological corporatism or holistic pragmatism.6 While showing this, I also hope to show how one of James’s central philosophical doctrines—his idea that our view of what ought to be may sometimes legitimately 2

Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 233. Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston, 1892), chap. 9, esp. pp. 284–87. 4 John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” Contemporary American Philosophy, vol. 2, eds. G. P. Adams and W. P. Montague (New York, 1930), pp. 13–27. 5 W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 41–46; also Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 13. 6 Morton White, What Is and What Ought to Be Done: An Essay on Ethics and Epistemology (New York, 1981), esp. chap. 2. Also see my Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York, 1972), pp. 204–16. And, most recently, A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism (Princeton, 2002). 3

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determine our view of what is the case—may be made more plausible than some of his harsher critics thought it was when they attacked his most famous book, Pragmatism. With this in mind, I shall propose a revision of James’s views that will make them less vulnerable to the taunts of some of his critics. One crucial link between James’s views and those of more recent philosophers may be found in the writings of the French philosopher and historian of science, Pierre Duhem. In James’s Pragmatism, first delivered in 1906 as Lowell Lectures in Boston, he makes favorable reference in a wholesale way to the views of a number of so-called inductive logicians or students of scientific logic, among them Duhem.7 In 1904 and 1905 Duhem had published a series of articles in the Revue de Philosophie which were later published in 1906 in his book entitled La The´orie physique: son object, sa structure.8 At one point in Lecture II of Pragmatism, James tells us that the philosophers F. C. S. Schiller and John Dewey were “riding . . . on the front of this wave of scientific logic” produced by Duhem, Mach, Poincare´, and others, and then James singled out for summary the views of Schiller and Dewey on the process whereby an individual settles into new opinions.9 According to the theory attributed by James to these thinkers, the individual has a “stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain”.10 The result is “inward trouble” for the inquirer. He tries to escape from this trouble by modifying his previous stock of opinions, but, James goes on to say, the inquirer saves as much of the stock as he can, thereby revealing the extreme conservatism affecting all inquirers. Then James says something else of great importance to the historian of twentieth-century philosophy. He tells us that the inquirer “tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously)”.11 These views that James applauded were very close to those of Duhem, who had argued that when we test scientific beliefs we do not test them individually but as a whole group containing the one which appears to be the sole belief under scrutiny. When we make a prediction in science, Duhem says, we do not put in jeopardy just one of our beliefs while we engage in testing. On the contrary, if we predict a phenomenon that does not occur, “the only thing the experiment teaches us is that among the propositions used to predict the phenomenon . . . there is at least one error; but where this error lies is just what [the experiment] does not tell us. The physicist may declare that this error is contained in exactly the proposition he wishes to refute, but is he sure it is not in another proposition? If he is, he accepts implicitly the accuracy of all the other propositions he had used”.12 7

William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 34. Translated into English by P. P. Wiener under the title The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1954). 9 Pragmatism, p. 34. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 35. 12 Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, p. 185. 8

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It seems to me that when James described the process of changing “first this opinion and then that”, he was accepting a variety of epistemological holism or corporatism, since James held that in any effort to correct a stock of opinions, the believer has the sort of freedom described by Duhem. Furthermore, when speaking of the conservatism of the believer or his inclination to save some of his beliefs, James said something quite similar to what Duhem had said about the physicist’s accepting the accuracy of all the other propositions he has used when he fixes on one proposition as the one that is shown to be erroneous by the recalcitrant experience. The propositions that are saved by James’s conservative believer are, I suggest, similar to those that Duhem’s physicist leaves untouched in the face of an experience that defies a prediction. Moreover, both James and Duhem adopt what I have called a limited corporatism, according to which we do not test all of our beliefs but only the limited body of them that we use to predict certain phenomena.13 I now want to say why I think that James, in further agreement with Duhem, adopted a view that I call “epistemological organicism”. First of all, I want to point out that Duhem summed up his views by calling physics itself an organism. He wrote: “People generally think that each one of the hypotheses employed in physics can be taken in isolation, checked by experiment, and then, when many varied tests have established its validity, given a definitive place in the system of physics. In reality, this is not the case. Physics is not a machine which lets itself be taken apart; we cannot try each piece in isolation and, in order to adjust it, wait until its solidity has been carefully checked. Physical science is a system that must be taken as a whole; it is an organism in which one part cannot be made to function except when the parts that are most remote from it are called into play, some more so than others, but all to some degree”.14 This view of Duhem naturally brings to mind James’s use of the biological word “stock” when describing the group of opinions that are strained by a new experience. A stock—as James used the term—is a trunk or a stem, and James said that when a believer responds to the strain of a new experience by successively altering different opinions, at last “some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter”.15 Here we see plainly that James uses a biological metaphor that reveals what I have called the epistemological organicism that he shared with Duhem. To historians of ideas in my audience, I want to say candidly that I cannot now show in a decisive way that the organicist language of Duhem influenced the organicist language of James, but whether it did or not, I think it fair to call James’s view on this matter a species of organicism. I say this with full awareness that James was an ardent individualist who once lampooned Hegel’s “principle 13 See What Is and What Ought to Be Done, esp. pp. 17–23. Also see my Science and Sentiment in America, p. 204, and A Philosophy of Culture, p. 56, where I point out that Bertrand Russell saw the holistic tendency in James’s thinking a very long time ago. 14 Duhem, op. cit., pp. 187–88; my emphasis. 15 James, Pragmatism, p. 35; my emphasis.

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of totality” and who denied that everything was linked in the block universe described by absolute idealists.16 Nevertheless, I think it fair to say that James, like Duhem, thought that ordinary thinking persons as well as scientists test organically unified stocks of opinions rather than isolated opinions. In sum, therefore, James’s view of the stream-like nature of consciousness and his epistemological organicism both link him with the rebels against formalism I treat in Social Thought in America. In concluding these remarks, which I direct primarily at historians of American thought, I want to add one about the relationship between James’s antiformalistic epistemology and the antiformalistic jurisprudence of his old friend Justice Holmes. I think it noteworthy that James in his Pragmatism drew an analogy between his epistemology of science and a view of the law that resembles that of Holmes. At one point, after saying that a stock of beliefs is revised with an eye to the demands of conservatism and novel experience, James declares that something similar goes on in law. He writes: “Given previous law and a novel case, . . . The judge will twist them into fresh law”.17 According to James, the judge plays a role in law which is comparable to that of the scientist for the judge is a “twister” whose counterpart is the scientific weaver of the fabric of belief. James also held that the rationalistic philosophy of science he rejected was much like a wrongheaded view of law that treats it as something which “the eternal” produces at it “unrolls” without any assistance from judges.18 In a similar spirit, Holmes scoffed at the idea that the law is “a system of reason, that it is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or what not, which may or may not coincide with the decisions”.19 Instead, he held that the decisions of the courts are crucial in the law, the development of which, he said in 1897, “has gone on for nearly a thousand years, like the development of a plant”.20 In equally biological language, James announced that “the ancient body of truth . . . grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium”.21 These two statements illustrate what I mean when I say that both Holmes and James were organicists, just as Duhem was an organicist in his view of physical theory. PRAGMATISM AND HOLISM Up to now I have addressed myself mainly to the historians of thought among you, and I can well imagine that some philosophers in the audience have been sleeping or grinding their teeth—depending, perhaps, on whether they are tender 16 See, for example, James, “On Some Hegelisms”, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 206. 17 Pragmatism, p. 116. 18 Ibid. 19 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “The Path of the Law”, Collected Legal Papers (New York, 1920), p. 172. 20 Ibid., p. 185. 21 Pragmatism, p. 36.

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or tough, to use James’s familiar words. But now I want to say something of perhaps greater interest to philosophers, hoping that what I say will not be too soporific or too irritating to specialists in American Studies. Taking my point of departure from the similarity between some of the things that James says and some of the things that Duhem says, I want to show that if we take seriously the idea that James’s pragmatism is a variety of epistemological holism or corporatism, we can revise it in a way that makes it more defensible. The crucial step in revising James’s pragmatism is to conceive of it, not as an effort to say what the word “true” means but rather as a doctrine about how we ought to apply the word “true” to statements, just as a normative ethical theory is one that tells us what sorts of actions we ought or ought not perform without providing a definition of “ought”. With this in mind, I want to make more explicit the holistic or corporatistic elements that are implicit in James’s pragmatism as he originally expounded it and to remark on his misguided departures from holism in the direction of trying to define truth as he did. He tells us at one point that if we hold to a stock of opinions which is defied by a novel experience, we “marry” old opinion and the novel experience in a way that will produce a minimum of jolt and a maximum of continuity.22 I would revise this by saying that we ought or should marry old opinion and novel experience in this manner, thereby emphasizing the normative element in epistemology, and I would expand this normative statement so as to make James’s holism more explicit. I would expand it into the statement that we ought to apply the word “true” to a new conjunction or stock of statements which will better accommodate the novel experience than the original conjunction or stock did. Such an expansion would make it clearer that a holistic or corporatistic epistemology does not culminate in a definition of truth even though James himself summarizes his view by saying that “‘to be true’ means only to perform this marriage-function” of linking the stock of older truths with novel experience.23 One trouble with James’s definition is that it is circular. To see this, let us assume that a scientist begins his inquiry with a supposedly true stock or conjunction of statements to each of which he has applied the word “true”. Let them be K, L, M, and N. Along comes the novel or recalcitrant experience which leads the scientist to add some new statement to his stock—namely, the denial of N. This will lead the scientist who accepts the logical truth known as the principle of contradiction to remove N from the original stock or conjunction and to replace that old stock or conjunction by the new conjunction of K, L, M, and not-N. Can we say that “Not-N is true” is by definition equivalent to “If not-N is conjoined with the true conjunction of K, L, and M, the resulting conjunction accommodates the novel experience more successfully than the old conjunction of K, L, M, and N?” Obviously not, if only because the word “true” appears in the definiens of this alleged definition, thereby rendering it circular. 22 23

Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 37.

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However, as I have indicated, this difficulty in defining “true” as James tries to define it does not prevent us from seeing in James’s Pragmatism the adumbration of a holistic or corporatistic epistemology. If James had confined himself to advocating such an epistemology, he would not have gone very much beyond Duhem, but since James had other philosophical axes to grind, I want to say something about those axes. I want to defend his idea that our view of what ought to be may sometimes legitimately determine our view of what is the case, bearing in mind that he once said: “If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence.”24 I want to show how epistemological holism or corporatism makes this statement by James less outrageous and more defensible than some might think. Let me begin this part of my sympathetic revision of James by remarking that when he says that a stock of opinions may be subjected to strain by a new experience, the word “experience” as explained by James in that context does not refer only to what is sometimes called sensory experience. When he illustrates what he means by a new experience that puts a believer’s opinions to a strain, James writes: “Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy”.25 The reference to desire as a component of experience is not that of philosophers who limit experience to sensory experience; it is not, for example, the view of Prof. Quine, who in other respects often sounds like James. The important point is that James says that one of the straining experiences may be a newly arisen desire that the opinions cease to satisfy. This has set many philosophers against James because they believe he may be leading his readers down the path of wishful thinking. How can a new desire of a believer, they ask, legitimately lead him to change an opinion about the world? Because I can understand critics who put such a rhetorical question to James, I want to take another tack in defending his idea that the affective or emotional part of our lives may have a bearing on what descriptive beliefs we are entitled to hold. By examining the views of James and Duhem on the issue before us, we can see that they both hold that when a conjunction or stock of beliefs encounters what Quine calls a recalcitrant experience, the scientist or believer may abandon or alter any one of the conjuncts. This is the case which is described by James as one in which the scientist “hears of facts with which they [the beliefs] are incompatible”, and on this issue neither James nor Quine moves far beyond Duhem. However, the question is whether we may have a stock of opinions that contains both descriptive and normative statements, and which, when it encounters a recalcitrant desire or emotion—as opposed to a recalcitrant sensory experience or fact—may be altered by changing or denying one of the descriptive beliefs in the stock. My answer to this question is in the affirmative and I main24 25

“The Dilemma of Determinism”, The Will to Believe, pp. 115–116. Pragmatism, pp. 34–35.

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tain that if we accept my answer, then we may vindicate a doctrine that I think is Jamesian in spirit. I hold that a believer may change a descriptive belief, not because he is faced with a recalcitrant fact or sensory experience but because he is faced with a recalcitrant emotion or feeling of moral obligation, and I defend my view by using an illustration of the following kind: (1) Whoever takes the life of a human being does something that ought not to be done. (2) The mother took the life of a fetus in her womb. (3) Every living fetus in the womb of a human being is a human being. Therefore, (4) The mother took the life of a human being. Therefore, (5) The mother did something that ought not to be done.26 In my view, we may say that the premises of this argument form a stock of opinions which may be strained by an emotion or feeling that prompts the denial of the conclusion. The denial of that conclusion would be justified by arguing that a normal human being would not under normal circumstances feel obligated not to take the life of the fetus just as the statement that something is objectively red may be denied if a normal observer does not see it as red under normal conditions. The whole mixed stock of opinions or premises may be denied and then altered in response to a recalcitrant moral feeling or emotion. And this leads me to a philosophical conclusion that accords with what I take to be James’s view that a descriptive belief such as the conjunction of (2), (3), or (4) may be denied if we deny, on emotional grounds, a normative statement such as (5). Upon this I base my defense of James’s view that affective or emotional considerations may lead us to alter or reject a descriptive or factual belief. Those of you who are familiar with Quine’s views know that he limits his Duhemianism to bodies of belief all of whose components are descriptive and subject to test by appeal to sensory experience. He maintains in this connection that we should not think that there is a limited set of sensory experiences which is associated with each individual belief in the tested stock of beliefs, but rather that the whole stock of beliefs is at the mercy of a larger set of experiences associated in a diffused way with the stock as a whole. And what I do is to add feelings of moral obligation to what Quine calls the flux of sensory experiences. I emphasize in passing that James’s stream of consciousness contains both sensory experiences and moral feelings, so that by adding such feelings to sensory experiences I remain faithful to his psychological historicism and to something kindred to his epistemological organicism. Once the Jamesian flux of experiences and moral feelings is viewed as what a moral thinker’s mixed stock of opinions organizes, we can see why such a mixed stock of beliefs may have its descriptive part 26

What Is and What Ought to Be Done, p. 30.

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altered in response to a recalcitrant moral feeling. We can see that a descriptive statement or belief in the stock which asserts what is the case, may be denied on the basis of our having denied a normative conclusion which asserts what ought or ought not to be done. And I feel greater confidence in using my corporatism to defend James’s view in this way when I find him writing that Duhem (in company with Mach and Ostwald) believed that there is “a flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass”.27 This is the mixed flux that I think a mixed stock of descriptive and normative opinions may organize. So far I have tried to show that James might well have permitted the rejection of a descriptive statement on normative grounds, but I have done so by a route that relies on a Duhemian view of the testing that goes on in normative ethics. Now, however, I want to show that James could have taken another route to a similar conclusion. Consider what James says in the sixth lecture of Pragmatism, the one entitled “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”. He tells us once again that our newly adopted theory “must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences”.28 But what is this “must”? It is not a physical “must” nor a logical “must” in my view. It is a normative “must” that may be replaced by the phrase “ought to”. In that case, we may take James to be asserting a normative epistemic proposition when he says that a theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences. The phrase “ought to” may also replace the word “must” in the following statement by James about a theory that is acceptable: “It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly”.29 Showing his acuteness, James then says that although the previously mentioned conditions for acceptability are very tight, there is need for other normative principles to guide the believer. Sometimes, he says, even though a theory meets the previously mentioned conditions, we are obliged to follow “elegance” or “economy”. He then remarks that Clerk Maxwell somewhere said that it would be “poor scientific taste” to choose the more complicated of two equally wellsupported theories, and then James sums up his view of truth as follows: “Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most imperious claimant”.30 This summary statement of what truth is has all the appearance of an analysis or definition of truth in science, and I think that James probably intended it as such. But I repeat that it would have been better if he had not tried to collect his views on truth into such a definition of it. Instead, I think he should have summed up his views by saying something like the following: “When altering a stock of previously accepted scientific beliefs to which we have applied the word ‘true’, we ought to alter our stock in a way that departs from that stock as little 27

Pragmatism, p. 93. Ibid., p. 104. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 28

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as possible, we ought to accommodate the novel experience, and we ought to be elegant or economical in our alteration. Moreover, the accommodation of the novel experience and the preservation of as much of our previous beliefs as possible ought to be regarded as having the most imperious claims upon us”. Once we think of this statement as summarizing the main principles which govern the acceptance of beliefs or statements as true, we can see that as principles of epistemology they state obligations (or rights); they are normative. This does not mean that they form a moral code, for the general notion of obligation, I think is wider than that of moral obligation; they are rules that govern the conduct of the understanding, to use that old-fashioned phrase, rather than the conduct of life in the manner of the Decalogue. But, obviously, these rules of epistemology are analogous to the rules of morality, and for this reason we can construct illustrative arguments concerning the acceptance of bodies of scientific belief, arguments which are quite similar to the earlier arguments about the mother and the fetus. For example, beginning with the summary of Jamesian normative epistemological principles that I formulated earlier, we might go on to say (a) that the Keplerian view of planetary motion departed from its Copernican predecessor as little as possible since the shift from Copernicus’s circles to Kepler’s ellipses was not so great; (b) that Kepler’s view accommodated certain experiences that were not accommodated by previous astronomy—the planets did not appear to move in circles; and (c) that Kepler’s view was simpler or more elegant than that of Copernicus’s in dispensing with epicycles. From the Jamesian normative epistemological principles as I have formulated them, and the descriptive statements about the relationship between Kepler’s view and that of Copernicus, we might deduce that Kepler’s view ought to replace that of Copernicus. Plainly, such a deduction would resemble our earlier ethical argument. So much so that we may now ask: What if an astronomer should deny the conclusion that he ought to replace the Copernican view by Kepler’s? What if he should not feel obligated to do so? I answer, in what I think is a Jamesian spirit, that such an astronomer might reject any one of the epistemological premises that led him to the original conclusion: the normative epistemological principle, which is his major premise, or the descriptive epistemological statements (a), (b), and (c) about the relationship between the Copernican and Keplerian views. In that case, after denying that he ought to abandon Copernicus’s view in favor of Kepler’s, he might exercise an epistemological right to reject a descriptive statement about the views of Copernicus and Kepler, just as the mother in our ethical example may exercise an epistemological right to reject the descriptive statement that the live fetus is a human being. In both of these examples, normative principles are saved, but they need not be saved. The mother might instead jettison a moral principle and the astronomer might instead jettison James’s normative epistemological principle because of a recalcitrant emotion. However, let us consider the case in which the epistemologically self-conscious normal scientist does feel obligated to accept the singular normative conclusion. His feeling of obligation and certain of his sensory experiences would form a mixed flux that is organized by his conjunction of normative and descriptive

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beliefs. What should be emphasized is that the normative statements of the epistemologist are themselves components of a Duhemian stock which organizes a stream of sensory experiences and emotions of a believer, and for this reason, the principles of normative epistemology are not to be viewed as they were by the rationalists whom James attacked. He was willing to say with them that a true proposition is one that we have an obligation to accept, but he also points out that this obligation is not purely formal.31 And although he says this in less than clear pages, I applaud him when he warns against the rationalistic dogma that we have obligations to accept propositions without regard to our experiences or emotions. For me—and for James, when read in a certain way—the principles of normative epistemology and the principles of morality are not immune to revision. They too must face the verdict of experience and emotion; they too may be subjected to a strain that might lead us to abandon them. How could James resist such a conclusion? And now, you may be wondering, what about my conclusion? How long can I resist coming to it, you may be asking yourselves? Let me assure you, therefore, that the end is near and that it will take the form of a brief summary of what I have been saying to historians, to philosophers, and to anyone else who has been kind enough to attend this lecture. In my role as historian of American thought, I have tried to show that James shared the historicism and organicism of my rebels against formalism. He thought that consciousness was a stream that included both sensory and emotive elements, and he is at his best—in my opinion—when interpreted as one who believed that we ought to test stocks of opinion which grow by our efforts to graft upon them whatever is dictated by our need to organize experience-cum-emotion with due attention to the demands of simplicity and the claims of older truths. And in my role as philosopher I have argued that when James is interpreted in this way, he need not be regarded as the patron saint of wishful thinking, or as the advocate of a dubious definition of truth, but as a forerunner of what I regard as a defensible epistemology of descriptive science, of morals, and of epistemology itself. According to this epistemology, a descriptive scientist is obligated to organize streams of sensory experience alone while disturbing the old truths as little as possible and seeking simplicity; and a normative moralist or a normative epistemologist is obligated to organize mixed streams of sensory experience and feeling in an analogous way. This is my revised view of the pragmatism of William James, the great American philosopher who created a philosophy that was not only right but readable. I hope that in interpreting him as I have in this lecture, I have helped you reorganize your experiences and your emotions about his contribution to philosophy. And by “you” I mean not only the historians of American thought and philosophers among you. James once said of his pragmatism: “you see . . . how democratic she is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature”.32 In 31 32

Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 44.

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keeping with his own flexibility, I think James would have accepted some of my friendly revisions of his pragmatism, for in my opinion, they go a long way toward avoiding certain errors that have been attributed to it, and they also lend support to James’s idea that a believer is a whole man who ought to unite his beliefs, his experiences, and his emotions while avoiding the excesses of empty formalism and blind romantic obscurantism.33

33 I am grateful to Jay David Atlas, H. S. Thayer, and Lucia White for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this lecture.

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The Politics of Epistemology (1989)

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN ASSERTED with great confidence that the purest parts of philosophy are political in nature, that even a theory of knowledge may be identified with a particular political point of view. Although this idea has been associated with the far left, anyone familiar with the history of philosophical thought knows that the far left has not been its sole advocate. John Dewey condemned Aristotle’s epistemology as antidemocratic; William James once exclaimed about how democratic pragmatism was;1 John Locke, as we shall soon see, thought that the doctrine of innate ideas was a tool of those he called the dictators of principles; and John Stuart Mill, as we shall also see, regarded reliance on experience as a tool of liberal reform. But how confidently can one defend such attributions of unique political significance to theories of knowledge? I want to add that I am not at all dubious about, nor concerned here with, attributions of a certain general political effect to something like Aristotle’s statement that some men are slaves by nature. Its undemocratic effect has reverberated through history for the past two thousand years, and I find it very hard to see how it could be inserted in any ode to liberty, unless that be the liberty of some men to oppress others. Rather, I am concerned here with historians or philosophers who speak of the exclusively undemocratic nature of Aristotle’s theory of knowledge, or of the democratic character of pragmatism, empiricism, or materialism by contrast to the allegedly conservative or reactionary character of, say, idealism.

NARROWING OUR FOCUS In order to discuss the problem in a manageable way, I am going to concentrate on the views of two of the most politically conscious epistemologists in the history of thought, Locke and Mill. I focus on their contentions that the epistemological views of their opponents were politically dangerous and reactionary whereas their own epistemological views were democratically oriented, progressive, and hence salutary. Each of them held that in testing a statement that every man has a certain right we must appeal to reason, even though they each construed reason differently. One of the effects of appealing to reason, they both seemed to say, was to allow many or most men to test the truth of moral judgments asserting their rights. Nevertheless, I shall try to show that there are, so to speak, loopholes 1 See, e.g., John Dewey, Quest for Certainty (New York, 1929), p. 40; see William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 44.

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in their theories of knowledge, loopholes through which those who are not democratic may easily pass. This idea—indeed—this irony, will be in the forefront of my mind as I examine the views of Locke, Mill, and other philosophers. Let me turn first to Locke.

THE DOCTRINE OF INNATE PRINCIPLES: HOW REACTIONARY WAS IT? Every reader of Locke’s Essay knows that after he delivered what might be called his purely epistemological attack on the doctrine of innate principles, he tells his reader that he has just done him a great political favor by destroying that politically pernicious doctrine. Locke held that the doctrine that certain propositions are inscribed on the mind from birth discouraged men from using their own powers of reason and encouraged taking the allegedly innate principles “upon trust without further examination”. “In which posture of blind credulity”, he goes on to say, “they might be more easily governed by, and made useful to some sort of men, who had the skill and office to principle and guide them”. Summing up his political opposition to the doctrine of innate principles, Locke said: “Nor is it a small power it gives one man over another, to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truths; and to make a man swallow that for an innate principle which may serve to his purpose who teacheth them”.2 Now it must be borne in mind that when Locke denied the existence of innate principles he was not denying the existence of self-evident principles. A selfevident principle for him is one which is accepted as soon as we understand the meanings of its terms, and because its truth is thus perceived by intuition, it is perceived by reason, since intuition is, for Locke, a branch of reason. By contrast, an innate principle, according to Locke, is one which is stamped by God, to use Locke’s metaphor, on the minds of men from birth. According to Locke, the defender of the view that there are innate principles may first persuade a reader that principles which are really self-evident are innate. Such a reader may therefore be prevented from seeing that he arrives at a selfevident principle through the use of intuitive reason, so he does not realize that it is “questionable”, that is to say, may have its truth questioned by the use of reason. Once the reader is led this far, the innatist or nativist may then get him to accept what Locke calls a “principle of principles”—namely, “that principles must not be questioned”. Finally, according to Locke, the innatist may persuade his gullible reader to stop using his own reason and judgment and to take on trust what the dictators say are principles. Once that happens, says Locke, “no small power” over the people is given to the dictators of principles. 2 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, bk. 1, chap. 4, sec. 24; for a fuller discussion of this matter, see my Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York, 1978), pp. 15–20.

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I call attention to the speculative character of Locke’s argument, for it is typical of the literature that concerns me here. Locke does not try to persuade us of the antidemocratic character of the doctrine of innate principles by showing us that, as a matter of fact, the acceptance of the doctrine of innate principles did, by a specified causal chain, lead certain people to become the dictators of principles over others who consequently became politically enthralled by those dictators. On the contrary, Locke merely tells us what sequence of events would or might unfold if people were to take the first fatal step of believing in the existence of innate principles. But—and this is crucial—it would seem that two can play that game when one is trying to attack an epistemology on political grounds. Since the first player— Locke—seems to be speculating about the likely antidemocratic effect of believing that there are some innate principles, why couldn’t the second player speculate about the likely democratic impact of accepting the idea that certain principles are innate or inscribed by God in all minds at birth? It is easy to imagine that a man who is convinced that his fundamental principles have been inscribed on his mind by God might thereby be protected against any dictator of thought who might try to bully him into thinking the opposite. Therefore, it is easy to paint the doctrine of innate principles in more democratic terms—to tell a story which emphasizes the democratic virtues of thinking that one’s principles are “unquestionable”. Once we reach this point in the discussion, we see how difficult it is to specify in this speculative way something called the political impact of an epistemology. For it looks as though Locke says: “There are easily imagined and easily realizable circumstances under which the doctrine of innate principles would become a tool of dictators of principles” whereas Locke’s opponent, without contradicting him, might say: “There are easily imagined and easily realizable circumstances under which the doctrine of innate principles would become a tool of democrats”. And those who think that it might be easy to estimate something called the doctrine’s net political impact by summing up the political vectors in both directions would be well-advised to tell us how to make the measurement. THE BELIEF IN SELF-EVIDENT PRINCIPLES: HOW DEMOCRATIC WAS IT? Having made this point about the allegedly undemocratic nature of the doctrine of innate principles, I emphasize that Locke thinks that his own doctrine of selfevident principles is by contrast democratic. The supposedly democratic effect of the doctrine of self-evident principles originated, according to Locke, because they had to be tested by reason and hence could not be rammed down the minds of people by dictators. Still, there was a potentially antidemocratic joker in all of this—the idea that a self-evident principle is immediately seen to be true only by a person who understands the meanings of its component terms. For not every one knows the meanings of the terms in such Lockeian self-evident principles as “It is impossible for a thing to be and not to be” or “The whole is greater than

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any of its parts”, and if Locke did not emphasize this feature of the doctrine of self-evident principles, Thomas Aquinas certainly did. According to Aquinas, a person who did not know the meanings of certain words might never see the truth of self-evident principles. Hence a proposition may be seen to be self-evident only by the learned because, according to Aquinas, “a thing is said to be self-evident in two ways: first, in itself; secondly, in relation to us. Any proposition is said to be self-evident in itself if its predicate is contained in the notion of the subject: although, to one who knows not the definition of the subject, it happens that such a proposition is not self-evident. For instance, this proposition, Man is a rational being, is, in its very nature, self-evident, since who says man, says a rational being: and yet to one who knows not what a man is, this proposition is not selfevident”.3 And in an unpublished Latin essay, Locke wrote that in the matter of natural law, “not the majority of people should be consulted but those who are more rational and perceptive than the rest”.4 It is easy to imagine how such a view of self-evident principles could be used by a dictator of principles. For even though Locke democratically implied that the detection of self-evident truth was possible to all men of sound mind, he was bound to hold that such detection was possible only to those who knew the meanings of terms like “man”, “liberty”, and “estate” when he was enunciating the principles of natural law in The Second Treatise. In that work, though not in all of his writings, Locke explicitly adopted the view that there are self-evident principles of moral, that is, natural, law, which are immediately seen to be true by those who understood their terms. And for this reason, Locke’s theory of the principles of natural law might easily play into the hands of antidemocratic forces. While trying to escape the reach of positive law, many revolutionaries were advised by Locke that they could appeal to heaven, by which he meant to natural law as the decree of God. But if, as we have just seen, the terms of the principles of natural law might require “learning” for their understanding, revolutionaries might have to seek out heavenly lawyers in order to combat the interpretations of natural law used by the dictators of principles. As soon as theorists of self-evident principles of natural law impose a restriction on those who can see self-evidence, these theorists in effect deny that everybody is entitled to have a voice in the matter. Furthermore, if the required credentials are in fact not possessed by the many and are difficult to acquire, the theorist has done something which can have the effect of turning his allegedly democratic epistemology into a weapon of the few who do have the stated credentials. Such specifications of credentials are typical of the history of liberal appeals to reason. I cite this fact not to refute such theories but merely to point out a critical route whereby theories created with one political purpose in mind can be used by people of another political persuasion. Such specifications of credentials are the 3 Summa Theologica, first part of the second part, question 94, second article, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. A. C. Pegis (New York, 1945), vol. 2, p. 774; see also my Philosophy of the American Revolution, pp. 20–23. 4 John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford, 1954), p. 115.

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epistemological counterparts of literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes.5 “It does not . . . follow”, Locke says, “that the law of nature cannot be known by the light of nature because there are only few who, neither corrupted by vice nor carelessly indifferent, make a proper use of that light”.6 The idea that it might require more than an ordinary’s man’s learning to see the self-evidence or the truth of self-evident propositions was only one variant of a philosophical technique which has been used to de-democratize, if I may use that word, the effect of a doctrine like Locke’s. For example, in Federalist Number 31, Alexander Hamilton said that often men—especially Hamilton’s political opponents—will not see the truth of a self-evident proposition because they are suffering from “some defect or disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice”. This was different from what Aquinas said, but it was in the same tradition. And Hamilton, perhaps the brightest and one of the least democratic of early American politicians, was clever enough and elitist enough to seize upon a distinction like that of Aquinas. Of all the founding fathers, Hamilton was most likely to resist the idea that every Lexington minuteman could see the truths upon which our government was founded. And even if a minuteman might be encouraged by Locke to use his reason in questioning something that Hamilton said was self-evident, the minuteman could easily be declared ignorant or mad, in which case Hamilton’s utterance would remain as “unquestionable” as an innate principle so far as the minuteman was concerned.7 I realize, of course, that so-called self-evident principles of natural law were often appealed to by those who would limit the powers of rulers.8 On the other hand, they were also used by those who defended rulers against the kind of views advocated by Locke and his revolutionary followers. Thus the doctrine of rational principles of natural law was, in Locke’s own time, appealed to by Sir Robert Filmer, the defender of the divine right of kings. The second chapter of Filmer’s Patriarcha—which provoked Locke into writing his First Treatise on Government—is entitled “It is unnatural for the people to govern or choose governors” (my emphasis). In that chapter, Filmer asks rhetorically, “If it be unnatural for the multitude to choose their governors, or to govern or to partake in the government, what can be thought of that damnable conclusion which is made by too many that the multitude may correct or depose their prince if need be?”9 Filmer held that “kingly power is by the law of God”.10 Moreover, in the early eighteenth 5 Thus Caroline Robbins writes in The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959): “By ‘people’ most seventeenth-century Republicans had meant people of some state and consequence in the community. Cobblers, tinkers, or fishermen were not people but scum to Whigs like James Tyrrell—who used the term—to Locke, Withers, and Trenchards” (p. 16); see also my Philosophy of the American Revolution, pp. 258–72. 6 Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, p. 135. 7 White, Philosophy of the American Revolution, pp. 78–94. 8 B. F. Wright, American Interpretations of Natural Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1931) p. 6. 9 Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, chap. 2, sec. 17; published as a Supplement to Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. T. I. Cook (New York, 1947). 10 Ibid., chap. 3, sec. 1.

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century, no less a figure than Bishop Berkeley produced a Discourse on Passive Obedience, alternatively entitled: “The Christian Doctrine of Not Resisting the Supreme Power, Proved and Vindicated Upon the Principles of the Law of Nature” (1712). Although he used as an epigraph the passage from Romans which read “Whosoever resisteth the Power, resisteth the ordinance of God”, Berkeley said, “I intend not to build on the authority of Holy Scripture, but altogether on the Principles of Reason common to all mankind; and that, because there are some very rational and learned men, who, being verily persuaded an absolute passive subjection to any earthly power is repugnant to right reason, can never bring themselves to admit such an interpretation of Holy Scripture (however natural and obvious from the words) as shall make that a part of Christian religion which seems to them in itself manifestly absurd, and destructive of the original inherent rights of human nature”. According to Berkeley, anyone “who hath the use of reason” and who takes “an impartial survey of the general frame and circumstances of human nature”, will see plainly that constant observation of the maxim “Thou shalt not resist the Supreme Power” leads necessarily to the well-being of mankind.11 Interestingly enough, Berkeley combined a utilitarian view of the ground of principles of natural law with the view that each such principle was as immutable as a proposition of geometry.12 However, I do not wish to focus on this aspect of Berkeley’s view but, rather, on Berkeley’s use of the principles of natural law to argue that rebellion is a villainous vice. And, more particularly, I want to call special attention to his notion that in order “to take a fair prospect of the order and general wellbeing which the inflexible laws of nature and morality derive on the world”— for example, the moral law forbidding rebellion—“we must . . .go out of [the world], and imagine ourselves to be distant spectators of all that is transacted and contained in it; otherwise we are sure to be deceived by the too near view of the little present interests of ourselves, our friends, or our country”.13 By taking what he called an “enlarged view of things” and rising above “narrow and interested views”, Berkeley thought that men would inevitably come to the conclusion that not resisting the supreme civil power is “an absolute, unconditioned, unlimited duty”. This shows clearly that the doctrine of self-evident immutable principles of natural law not only could be, but was, used by both rebels and those who were not. Moreover, Berkeley not only attacks Locke’s revolutionary doctrines as presented in The Second Treatise but he also constantly inveighs against leaving “everyone to be guided by his own judgment” in the settlement of moral questions, a mode of settlement which Locke sometimes saw as a democratic dividend of the doctrine of self-evident, rational principles of natural law.14 By contrast, 11 Works of George Berkeley, eds. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London, 1953), vol. 6, pp. 17–18, 24–25. 12 Ibid., p. 45. 13 Ibid., pp. 32–33. 14 Ibid., p. 32.

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Berkeley held that that doctrine may be correctly applied only by those who take an “enlarged” view of things—namely, a view which will lead them to see the fallacies in Locke’s defense of democratic rebellion. Before turning to John Stuart Mill, who urged that his own “enlarged” utilitarianism provided a justification of qualified liberty, I want to call attention to another politically interesting feature of Locke’s attachment to reason. OH REASON, OH REASON, WHAT CRIMES CAN BE COMMITTED IN THY NAME! Locke’s theory of natural law not only required rationality and sometimes learning for the perception of the self-evidence of natural law but it also applied the natural law only to rational beings. Here Locke was agreeing with the Cambridge Platonist, Nathaniel Culverwel, who held that beasts can have no obligations.15 The point is best understood when we realize that every principle of natural law stated a duty or a right of men, whom Locke, following tradition, conceived as rational animals. Although, in his view, a beast could not deliberately follow or violate a law of nature, Locke held in his Second Treatise that when a man did things prohibited by the law of nature he showed that he was no longer rational and hence was degenerate. Therefore Locke held that those violators of the natural law who become irrational enough not to see the truth of the law should not be protected by it, and indeed, might have their lives taken away. This is most dramatically shown when Locke says that in a state of nature every man is the executioner of the law of nature. This means that any man could kill any other man who violated the moral law which said that no one ought to take a man’s life, liberty, or possessions. Therefore, Locke holds, if I have a settled design on your life—which I may be presumed to have if I so much as try to rob you—you may destroy me. I have started a war against you and so you are entitled to kill me as you would a lion, a wolf, or any wild beast, and remember that it does not take much to make me out the aggressor. The basic point is that when a man violates the law of nature, which Locke also calls the law of reason, the violator becomes “degenerate and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature and to be a noxious creature”, a beast of prey.16 The use of the word “degenerate” indicates that the aggressor, according to Locke, loses the qualities proper to his original kind—mankind—and sinks to a lower kind in the scale of nature. Such a notion lies behind Thomas Paine’s reference to the English king as the “Royal Brute” of Britain, which status made him fair game to the revolutionaries when the state of nature was revived. It is also con15 See N. Culverwel, Of the Light of Nature: A Discourse, ed. J. Brown (Edinburgh, 1857), pp. 55, 59, and elsewhere, as indicated in W. von Leyden’s introduction to his edition of Locke’s Essays on the Law of Nature, p. 41 n. 1. Culverwel’s book was first published in 1652 and exerted, as von Leyden points out, a considerable influence on Locke. 16 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, sec. 10, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1970), p. 291; see my Philosophy of the American Revolution, p. 95.

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nected with the basis on which Locke rests his idea of equal rights. For Locke says that there is “nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection”.17 The Lockeian basis, therefore, for our having equal rights is the fact that we are all actual or, like children, potential rational animals, all in the same species. But if adults sink to the point of no longer seeing that the law of nature is true—which they do when they violate it—they have degenerated. Furthermore, as we see in other parts of Locke’s writings, a man who has degenerated and who may be killed may instead be enslaved by someone who has taken him captive in what is a just war against the degenerate who has started it with his act of aggression. Therefore, Locke not only justifies the killing of a degenerate—that is, a nonrational being—but also his enslavement. And the ultimate test of whether he is a degenerate is whether he has or has not seen the truth of what Locke regarded as a principle of reason. A lot, therefore, was riding on Locke’s interpretation of what was or was not a principle of reason and hence on his doctrine of self-evident principles. Could it not provide a remarkable opportunity for those whom Locke termed “dictators of principles”? We have seen that when Locke tells us that it is a law of nature and reason that in the state of nature “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, or possessions”, Locke means that no one ought to harm a nondegenerate in the ways mentioned.18 But who is to say what a degenerate is? Who is to say what a rational being is? Who is to say who is a rational being? Locke leaves the answers to those questions to the executioner of the law of nature himself, with no one to judge his powers of understanding save God himself. The executioner is allowed to use his own power of reason to determine what reason is, who has lost it, and therefore who may lose his head. Is it not obvious, therefore, how this epistemology could be used as a double-edged guillotine? And is it not obvious, therefore, how Madame Roland’s famous saying—“Oh liberty! Oh liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”—might be transformed into the saying “Oh reason, Oh reason, what crimes can be committed in thy name!”? It might be exclaimed in reply: “Oh reason, Oh reason, what noble deeds can be committed in thy name”, but I acknowledge that with equanimity for it proves the point I am trying to make. Democrat and dictator often can and do use the same epistemology. Bishop Berkeley not only revealed the antidemocratic uses to which natural law could be put when he defended passive obedience to earthly power but he also saw, when he visited Rhode Island in the early eighteenth century, how the idea that only the human species was protected by it could be used in defense of behavior which he deplored. He reports, in a sermon preached in London in 1732, “an irrational contempt of the blacks, as creatures of another species, who 17 18

Locke, Second Treatise, sec. 4, in Laslett, ed., p. 287. Ibid., sec. 6, in Laslett, ed., p. 289.

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had no right to be instructed or admitted to the sacraments”.19 Such colonial employers of natural law not only decided who was human enough to see what rights the natural law granted; they also decided who was rational enough to be granted those rights. But to criticize such colonists Berkeley would have had to urge them to adopt an “enlarged view” that would have also prevented them from regarding the king of England as a “Royal Brute”.

OH EXPERIENCE, OH EXPERIENCE, WHAT CRIMES CAN BE COMMITTED IN THY NAME! If the remnants of rationalism and scholasticism were alone responsible for the double political edge of Locke’s political epistemology, one might expect something very different from John Stuart Mill’s empiricism—our next stop on our historical trip through political epistemology. But if one expected this, one would be mistaken. For Mill’s epistemology, as I shall try to show, was also ambiguous in its impact on his political philosophy, ambiguous in ways that are analogous to those in which Locke’s was. Mill, as everyone knows, tried to cleanse his epistemology of all the scholastic and rationalistic remnants that plagued Locke’s theory of self-evident principles and his related moral philosophy.20 On the contrary, Mill held, most of our knowledge—even our pure arithmetical knowledge—rests on experience. Nevertheless, when Mill came to advertise the political virtues of his own philosophy, he continued to speak as though he, like Locke, wanted to free men so they would use their own reason and not accept the allegedly higher authority of those who claimed to have a superior intellectual power. Thus Mill wrote: The difference between these two schools of philosophy, that of Intuition, and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences, and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable part of his argument to show, how those powerful 19 Works of George Berkeley, eds. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London, 1955), vol. 7, p. 122, quoted in T. F. Gosset, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, 1963), p. 31. 20 It should be noted that Mill, in his essay “Coleridge”, claimed Locke as the leader of his own philosophical party because, he said, Locke held that there are “no truths cognizable by the mind’s inward light, and grounded on intuitive evidence”. This was a misleading statement about Locke’s philosophy. So eager, perhaps, was Mill to claim Locke as his leader against the forces of Coleridge that he averted his eyes from the rationalistic element in Locke’s thinking, failing to see that, according to Locke, some truths may be established by intuitive reason. See J. S. Mill, “Coleridge”, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto, 1969), p. 125 of vol. 10 of Mill’s Collected Works. Incidentally, it was Henry Sidgwick who once observed that “from a confusion between ‘innate ideas’ and ‘intuitions’ . . . it has been supposed that [Locke] must necessarily have been hostile to ‘intuitional’ ethics (Outlines of the History of Ethics [reprint, Boston, 1968], p. 175).

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feelings had their origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that of our reason.21

It is obvious that when Mill sharply distinguished between “the voice of Nature and of God” on the one hand and the voice of “our reason” on the other, he was diverging from the doctrine of Locke, who held that our reason was given to us by God in order to be able to see the truth of God’s law of nature or reason. The same point is evident when we recall that Mill says in the first chapter of his essay On Liberty: “I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions”.22 The determination of utility is for Mill an experiential matter, not to be settled by Locke’s version of reason, either intuitive or discursive. And that is why Mill’s appeal to reason—as he conceived it—was fundamentally different from Locke’s appeal to reason in defense of the right to be free. Locke sought to discredit advocates of innate ideas by arguing that man’s rights could only be established by intuitive or discursive reason, whereas Mill tried to bring political discredit to the Lockean view— whether he knew he was doing that or not—on very similar grounds. Locke said: Don’t listen to the dictators of innate principles, listen to your own intuition. Mill said: Don’t listen to the dictators of intuitive principles, listen to experience. Once again, we witness the projection of a political difference on to the plane of epistemology. This time, Mill advances an argument against the Scottish and Coleridgian doctrine of “intuitive truths” which is not unlike that advanced by Locke against the doctrine of innate principles. Mill thinks that entrenched authority, the establishment, will benefit by the acceptance of a doctrine of intuitive truths whereas he thinks that the reformer has more to gain by accepting the doctrine of experience. Mill says, for example, “The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions”.23 All of this might encourage an ardent democratic empiricist, and yet, I want to argue, Mill says a number of things which are strikingly analogous to what Locke says, things which might easily be exploited by those who did not share Mill’s political views. First, there is the passage in On Liberty where Mill, after saying in the first chapter that he will forgo any appeal to the doctrine of natural rights and will appeal only to utility, adds, “but it must be utility in the largest 21 Mill, Autobiography, in Collected Works, vol. 1, eds. J. M. Robson and J. Stillinger (Toronto, 1981), pp. 269–70. 22 Mill, in On Liberty, in Collected Works, vol. 18, p. 224. 23 Mill, Autobiography, in Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 233.

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sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people”.24 What, we are entitled to ask, is a progressive being? Whatever answer we are given, it would seem that the role which Mill assigns to his progressive being resembles that which Aquinas and Locke assign to the learned or wise man. The point is that just as Aquinas and Locke say, in effect, that self-evidence is selfevidence to the learned, so Mill says that utility is utility to the progressive. And the reason for this is clear. Just as intuitionists do not want to have knowledge of their political principles depend on the intuitions of any old being, so Mill does not want the acceptability of his principle of liberty to depend on the utility that may be reaped by any old being. The analogy between the views of Locke the moral rationalist and those of Mill the moral empiricist goes even further. After expounding his doctrine that a person may do as he pleases provided he does not harm others, Mill adds the following remark in his first chapter: It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.25

Mill’s excepting so-called barbarians from the scope of his principle of liberty is, I believe, the counterpart of Locke’s excepting the degenerate from the scope of the law of nature which says that no one ought to be deprived of his life or liberty. This is made clear by Mill’s statement that “liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion”. Furthermore, Locke’s willingness, indeed eagerness, to kill degenerates or to exercise despotic 24 25

Mill, On Liberty, in Collected Works, vol. 18, p. 224. Ibid.

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power over them is the counterpart of Mill’s willingness to exercise despotic power over barbarians. Once again, we see how a moral philosophy which is ostensibly dedicated to the spread of liberty can be used as an instrument of oppression. We must remember that Mill held that his empirical theory of reason was one of his chief weapons in the fight against conservatism because it encouraged the use of experience in fostering change and reform. But what Mill says about barbarians might be thought of not only as maintaining the status quo of those living in what he calls “backward states of society” but also as defending reaction. It would seem that, for Mill, the principle of liberty is not only justified by appealing to its utility to progressive beings but that its scope is limited to these same progressive beings. The situation is almost exactly the same with Locke’s rational beings or nondegenerates. Only if a moral principle affects a learned rational man in a certain way will Locke regard it as self-evident and only if a being is rational or potentially so will Locke’s law of nature secure his right to life and liberty. DOCTRINES OF PRIVILEGED ACCESS: THEIR DANGERS FOR DEMOCRATS If there is anything of historical or political importance that is revealed by our examinations of Locke and Mill, it is that liberally oriented epistemologists often refer to a being like Locke’s learned rational man or Mill’s progressive being, and in this way open a door to the very authoritarians whom they wish to strip of authority in moral and political matters. Here I do not wish to debate the philosophical question as to whether we can ever do without such reference in philosophy—that is an enormously difficult question—but rather to call attention to the fact that politics being what it is and society being what it is, a liberal thinker who is philosophically driven to making such a reference may well forge a political weapon for those who are constantly on the watch for whatever intellectual devices they can commandeer in support of their ends. Historians of philosophy, therefore, must keep this in mind as they make glib assertions concerning the democratic potential of these “liberal” epistemologies. I want to stress the peculiar vulnerability to which certain epistemologies and allied moral philosophies are subject, because it might be held that I am merely calling attention to a fate to which all language is subject—the possibility of misunderstanding or distortion. Thus it might be said that even the utterance “There is a fire in this hall” could have different and opposite effects, in which case it would be just as double-edged as the epistemologies I have considered. Now I grant that under certain easily imagined and easily realizable circumstances, my utterance of those words might cause a panic whereas it might also generate philosophical calm in those who walk and do not run to exits. I am aware that almost any utterance or writing could—in a very liberal sense of “could”—have an enormous variety of different and opposite effects. But there is a special kind of political ambiguity in philosophies that assign privileged access to certain beings. In such cases, words like “rational”, “learned”, and “progressive”

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easily lend themselves to tendentious interpretation which can convert a philosophy created with democratic intent into one with the opposite effect. A philosopher who is very much aware of the possibility of such tendentious interpretation might strive to diminish the chances that his text would be used for political ends of which he disapproved. But it must be realized that most philosophers who refer to learned, rational, or progressive beings in their philosophies do so because they seek what they think is an objective standpoint, as when Mill says that he is appealing to utility that is grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Philosophers often refer to such privileged beings because they fear that if they did not, those they regard as ignorant or brutish would have a word in deciding what was true, beautiful, or good. The history of philosophical thought on these questions shows that even the most liberal thinkers have feared the excesses of unbridled relativism and subjectivism. Just as Mill was driven to his notion of a progressive being in ethics, so he was led to equate the statement “This snowball is white” with the statement that the snowball always caused a sensation of white in a person whose organs were in a normal state.26 In a similar way, Charles Peirce, after inveighing against what he called the method of authority, the method of tenacity, and the a priori method, settled upon a version of the scientific method which required the postulation of a normal observer in the analysis of a statement like “This rose is really red”. So fearful was Peirce of a Protagorean resting of such judgments on an immediate sensation of redness which anyone might have, that he too referred to a normal observer in his theory of the meaning of singular objective statements.27 And Peirce’s politically liberal follower, John Dewey, advocated a Peirce-like moral philosophy in which he sought to avoid the extremes of transcendentalism and subjectivism. Dewey held that for something to have moral value it must do more than merely satisfy desire. It must give satisfaction to an individual who knows the conditions and consequences of desiring it, and this requirement, Dewey held, is not unlike that which Peirce imposed in his pragmatic theory of scientific statements. It is interesting, however, that although Dewey attacked transcendental moral philosophies for guiding action “only by consecrating some institution or dogma already having social currency”, it may not have occurred to him that his own insistence that the moral judge possess a good deal of knowledge might also be used to defend an outworn institution or dogma.28 It seems to me, therefore, that Dewey, like Locke and Mill, could have had his liberal intentions subverted through a politically tendentious interpretation of his analysis of ethical judgments. I should emphasize that I am not saying this in order to bring arguments against such theories but rather to call attention to their antidemocratic potential. My main concern is to point out that a man who claimed, because he possessed a certain kind of knowledge, to have privi26 Mill, System of Logic, bk. 1, chap. 3, sec. 9; this section appears in Mill’s Collected Works, vol. 7, pp. 65–67. 27 See C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. A. W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 8.194. 28 Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p. 265.

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leged access to real Deweyan value might exercise the same kind of arbitrary power as might have been exercised by the rational, learned dictators of Locke’s and Aquinas’s self-evident principles, as well as by the progressive dictators of Mill’s useful principles.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS In concluding, I want to stress that in saying that some so-called democratic epistemologies can be and have been used to support nondemocratic conclusions, and therefore that it is exceedingly difficult to give them unambiguous political labels, I do not mean to deny that other kinds of statements made by philosophers are more predictable in their net political effect. I repeat that when Aristotle said that some men are by nature slaves because they lack the deliberative faculty which their masters possess and hence are to be used as tame animals are used, he was saying something which was not usable to democratic effect. Nor, of course, did Aristotle think it was. I should also like to emphasize that although I have criticized glib descriptions of the political effect of an epistemology, I do not deny that the author of an epistemology might intend to support a certain political view by advocating that epistemology. However, one of my main concerns has been to show how and why the intended and actual political effect of such epistemology might be different. I should add that, although I have concentrated on Locke and Mill, their views are not the only ones subject to the kind of ironic interpretation of which I have spoken. Absolute idealism has sometimes been regarded as a liberating theory of knowledge and ethics because it allows men to appeal to a godlike being beyond the establishment, beyond brute force. And yet it is a cliche´ in the history of modern thought that Hegel’s idealism has been used in a reactionary way. It is also a cliche´ that Marxism gives the proletariat a role in epistemology and ethics which is analogous to that played by the Hegelian Absolute. Wherever the proletariat is thought to have privileged access to scientific, moral, or political truth, there we have another example of what I have been talking about. For wherever tyrants have used the proletariat’s alleged privileged access to truth as a device for establishing a dictatorship over the proletariat we have a dramatic example of how a supposedly democratic ideology can be transformed into its opposite. In offering such reflections as I have offered upon the philosophies of democratically oriented thinkers such as Locke and Mill, I do not mean to deny that some democratic philosophies may be more easily subverted than others. I suggest, however, that whether such a philosophy will be democratic in its effect depends on the ease with which the ordinary man can attain the privileged status described in the epistemology or the moral philosophy of the democratically oriented thinker. Where, because of social conditions, large numbers of persons in the community are not thought by such a philosopher to be able to see what their moral duties and rights are because they lack the attributes of a fully

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equipped moral judge, then the democratic intentions of the philosopher stand a good chance of being subverted. What I have said so far will not be news to historians who are aware of the unintended consequences of advocating certain ideas, since they often condemn the naive view that we can call a philosopher’s epistemology democratic merely because he said that he had created it with a democratic purpose in mind. But this does not mean that the historian of ideas can be content to study only the extratextual milieu in which philosophers operate. The historian of ideas must also understand philosophical ideas if he wants to discover the likely political impact of advocating them. That is why the student of the impact of Locke’s philosophy must know of his distinction between the allegedly undemocratic doctrine of innate principles and the allegedly democratic doctrine of rationally known self-evident principles. That is why he must know that for Aquinas some self-evident principles are self-evident only to the learned; that Mill depended on the notion of utility to a so-called progressive being; and that Dewey appealed in his ethics to the desires of a person who has a great deal of knowledge. Only by being familiar with such points in the history of philosophy will a historian be able to assess the possible or likely effects of certain epistemologies or moral philosophies on society. Because concepts such as self-evidence to the learned and utility to progressive beings provide gaping loopholes for those who might wish to use philosophy for their own political ends, the student of the history of philosophy must be familiar with those loopholes in order to understand what effect philosophy may have in the real world.

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Original Sin, Natural Law, and Politics (1956)

CREDO AND NON-CREDO Some years ago, in my book Social Thought in America, I reported on the declining reputation of American liberal thinkers like Dewey and Holmes, not realizing that I was noting a tendency that would soon swell into an effort to discredit totally the ideas of some of the most distinguished Americans of the present century. I still consider my criticism of Dewey and Holmes to be just, but the current intellectual atmosphere makes it plain that, for all my reservations, I have more in common with them than with most of their contemporary detractors. Social Thought in America is not the work of an empiricist turned transcendentalist, nor do I look back on it as the product of a temporary aberration. But recent events have brought the liberal outlook under a very different kind of attack. It should be said, therefore, that my book is in no sense to be identified with the more recent revivals of religious, conservative, and obscurantist thinking which have attempted to discredit and seriously lower the reputation of liberalism and secularism in social, political, and moral affairs. To underline this, I will consider in this essay the views of two distinguished critics of the liberal tradition: Reinhold Niebuhr, the most democratic and courageous opponent of secular liberalism on the American scene, and Walter Lippmann, who has bemoaned the disappearance of “The Public Philosophy” in a vein distinctly antithetical to the outlook of Dewey and Holmes. In criticizing Lippmann and Niebuhr I mean to align myself spiritually with Dewey and Holmes, even though I am not always prepared to defend the actual letter of their texts. I do not share Niebuhr’s faith, nor do I admire his Hegelian way of dealing with contradictions; I cannot accept the historical inevitability of sin, which is such an important part of his view; I deplore Lippmann’s revival of the ancient and obscure theory of essences and natural law. And, in general, it seems to me a sad commentary on American thought today that two of our most popular social thinkers can produce nothing more original or natural than original sin and natural law as answers to the pressing problems of this age. NIEBUHR, DEWEY, AND HUMAN NATURE It is sometimes said that Niebuhr’s reflections on human nature have provided a new generation of liberals with insights that transcend the limitations of Dewey. On the one hand, Dewey is pictured as a disciple of the Enlightenment, confident

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of the intrinsic goodness of human nature, one of the latter-day illuminati who see man everywhere in the chains of ignorance and who hold that scientific knowledge will usher in a millennial era of social happiness through democratic planning. On the other hand, Niebuhr is seen as a shrewd Pauline, aware of man’s selfishness, and of his inevitable incapacity to free himself from the effects of original sin through his own unassisted efforts. Supplied with this more accurate picture of human nature, Niebuhr is supposed to see the folly of placing too much trust in any central group of social planners, while Dewey, it is argued, was ineffectually innocent, a child of light in Niebuhr’s Biblical phrase, but unable to illuminate this wicked world of gas chambers and mushroom clouds. Niebuhr becomes the symbol of tough, Christian realism, while Dewey represents softheaded, complacent, dreamy, secular liberalism. What we must consider, then, is the relation between Dewey’s and Niebuhr’s views of human nature, the grounds offered for them, and their political consequences. Dewey is presumably a child of light, but what is a child of light in Niebuhr’s view? He is defined by contrast to children of darkness “who know no law beyond their will and interest.” By that contrast, “those who believe that self-interest should [italics mine] be brought under the discipline of a higher law could then be termed ‘the children of light’ ”; the children of light “may thus be defined as those who seek [my italics] to bring self-interest under the discipline of a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good.” Surely there is nothing wrong with being a child of light, then. To believe that one should bring self-interest under a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good is to act morally and surely the effort to act morally is not being attacked by Niebuhr. One can hardly believe that he opposes the effort to bring self-interest under law, in spite of his grotesquely false statement that “nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime.” Therefore, one seeks for a more plausible explanation of what he means. As we push on, we see that Niebuhr may escape absurdity, but only at the expense of making it silly to say that Dewey is a child of light and at the risk of making the whole distinction between the two kinds of children useless. In the last analysis, Niebuhr may mean by a child of light either (a) one who thinks it is easy to bring self-interest under law, or (b) one who thinks that we can bring self-interest completely under a higher law, that we will reach a time when men will always act so as to give only limited weight to their own desires. But on either view of a child of light, it is preposterous to suppose that Dewey is a child of light and doubtful to suppose that the contrast between children of light and children of darkness can illuminate the ideological struggles of our time. How can Niebuhr seriously represent his own version of the Christian view as the only one to navigate between idiotic optimism and equally idiotic pessimism, as if all rationalists and naturalists said that men were gods, while their opponents maintained that they were devils, and only Niebuhr knew the middle way? Dewey has never supposed that the way to social happiness would be easy, nor has he ever said that a time would come when all human action would be morally right

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and all tensions resolved. The following passage from Human Nature and Conduct may suffice to bring out the point: In Aristotle this conception of an end which exhausts all realization and excludes all potentiality appears as a definition of the highest excellence. It of necessity excludes all want and struggle and all dependencies. It is neither practical nor social. Nothing is left but a self-revolving, self-sufficing thought engaged in contemplating its own sufficiency. Some forms of Oriental morals have united this logic with a profounder psychology, and have seen that the final terminus on this road is Nirvana, an obliteration of all thought and desire. In medieval science, the ideal reappeared as a definition of heavenly bliss accessible only to a redeemed immortal soul. Herbert Spencer is far enough away from Aristotle, medieval Christianity and Buddhism; but the idea reemerges in his conception of a goal of evolution in which adaptation of organism to environment is complete and final. In popular thought, the conception lies in the vague thought of a remote state of attainment in which we shall be beyond temptation, and in which virtue by its own inertia will persist as a triumphant consummation. Even Kant who begins with a complete scorn for happiness ends with an “ideal” of the eternal and undisturbed union of virtue and joy, though in his case nothing but a symbolic approximation is admitted to be feasible.1

It is true that Dewey in his later writings tended to identify the intelligent solution of a social problem as one that dispenses with the use of force, and therefore seemed to imply that it was never desirable to apply force. If Niebuhr criticizes Dewey on this count, I can understand Niebuhr, but I reject another aspect of Niebuhr’s attack on Dewey’s attitude toward intelligence. Once we distinguish between the relatively specific conclusion that all political problems can be solved without the appeal to force, and the more general philosophical thesis that no conclusion about the ways of achieving certain ends should be arrived at except by the use of intelligence or scientific method, we see a far more profound issue between Dewey and Niebuhr. In other words, if one identifies the use of intelligence with the use of absolutely peaceful methods, one is accepting a dubious thesis within political technology itself, but if one identifies the use of intelligence with the use of what is commonly called scientific method in the evaluation of judgments of political technology, one can only ask: what other ways are there? One must remember, of course, that we are thinking of political technology as the discipline in which we ask about the best ways of achieving certain social and political ends, and that answers to such questions are statements that a certain kind of action is most likely to achieve a certain kind of result. HUMAN NATURE AND POLITICS So far, I see no reason to think of Niebuhr as having demolished or replaced Dewey as a social or political philosopher. But we have not yet dealt with what is thought to be Niebuhr’s chief distinction: his deeply “realistic” vision of man’s 1

John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York, Modern Library, 1929), pp 174–75.

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state by comparison with Dewey’s supposedly idle dreams. What can we say about this contrast after our earlier conclusions about Dewey’s relations to the children of light? Here it seems necessary to say, as one must so frequently say when one is bound by neither formula nor prejudice, that the differences which Niebuhr magnifies so dramatically and misleadingly are differences in degree of emphasis on the part of thinkers who see that man is not perfect. Some think that the resolution of social tension is extremely difficult and some are more optimistic; in short, there are disputes as to how heavenly earth can be. But can this bare, unqualified, banal dichotomy, if it is the real dichotomy between the children of light and the children of darkness, help us divide the intellectual or political globe in an interesting way? All we have here is the recognition that men are somewhere between the serpent and the dove, and while Niebuhr puts us closer to the serpent, Dewey puts us closer to the dove. But the serious question for political action is “How close?” in either case. Niebuhr’s more recent reflections lead him to answer: “Too close to the serpent to allow for successful central planning,” and for this reason some liberals who reject socialism in favor of Keynesianism now think of Niebuhr as one of the deepest political thinkers in America. It should be remembered, however, that Niebuhr has not always held his present political position. He defended socialism in his earlier work, when he held the same Pauline and Augustinian doctrine of man. What has happened since then is that Niebuhr’s skepticism about man’s power to help himself has deepened; Niebuhr has learned things about man and society which were not previously encapsulated in the view of man he inherited from Augustine and Paul. That view is consistent with a variety of political positions, and it is absurd to suppose that Niebuhr only recently began to wake up to “implications” that he should have seen in his salad days. Niebuhr saw Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in operation, and this, more than any theological speculation about man, must have brought home to him the dangers of limiting political freedom. In this respect, he is like Dewey and all human beings who learn by experience. It is therefore wrong to say that while Niebuhr has a theory which permits him to see that man is not perfect, Dewey is tied to a philosophy which prevents him from seeing the same obvious fact. The difference between Niebuhr and Dewey must be put in more concrete terms and once we put it in this way we shall be leaving relatively empty “theories of human nature” for the solid ground of politics. The contemporary liberal’s fascination with Niebuhr, I suggest, comes less from Niebuhr’s dark theory of human nature and more from his actual political pronouncements, from the fact that he is a shrewd, courageous, and right-minded man on many political questions. Those who applaud his politics are too liable to turn then to his theory of human nature and praise it as the philosophical instrument of Niebuhr’s political agreement with themselves. But very few of those whom I have called “atheists for Niebuhr” follow this inverted logic to its conclusion: they don’t move from praise of Niebuhr’s theory of human nature to praise of its theological ground. We may admire them for drawing the line somewhere, but certainly not for their consistency.

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HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY AND ORIGINAL SIN Precisely because of the emergence of Niebuhr as an influence on so many distinguished liberals of the present generation, there is a greater need for some of Dewey’s methodological exhortations. Dewey is committed to the use of empirical methods in discovering what man is or is not likely to achieve, while Niebuhr is, in the last analysis, a devotee of the a priori road that begins with a theology based on faith. Furthermore, Niebuhr is committed to a view of history which in its own way is as rigid as any promulgated by Marx or the more dogmatic theorists of the Enlightenment. Niebuhr constantly speaks of “the perennial and persistent character of human egotism in any possible society,” “the vast forces of historical destiny,” “inexorable historical developments,” and of social conflict as an “inevitability in human history,” in a way that leaves him open to all the arguments so powerfully deployed by Isaiah Berlin in his essay Historical Inevitability. It is true that Niebuhr often shows a fondness for citing historical evidence in support of his conclusions; he says, for example, that the doctrine of original sin “emphasizes a fact which every page of human history attests.” But such evidence as he does offer is surely not enough to establish the thunderous statement that man cannot conquer his selfish interests to the point of establishing a planned society. Niebuhr’s dark view of man’s estate is, in his own mind, a corollary of his doctrine of original sin, and that is a view of man which, as he says in his Nature and Destiny of Man, transcends the canons of rationality. If history should fail to support his view, or if it should at any moment appear to go against it, Niebuhr’s attitude toward his own doctrine would not be seriously affected, since his own conviction rests on faith. In this respect, it resembles all of the interpretations of history, like Augustine’s and Hegel’s, which are demolished in Berlin’s essay. But the matter should stand differently with those of Niebuhr’s admirers who have not yet been persuaded of the theology underlying Niebuhr’s reflections on history. How can those who are sober historians and who reject the pretensions of inevitability and necessity that they find in Toynbee or Marx, accept the block historical universe that Niebuhr portrays when he speaks of inexorable historical developments, vast forces of historical destiny, and inevitability in human history? FROM KIERKEGAARD TO HEGEL I have said little about the details of Niebuhr’s theology, except to point out that it rests on faith and that it implies the inevitability of sinfulness in history. And although there is hardly space for dealing with the labyrinth of Niebuhr’s theology, it is desirable to say something, however brief, about the inevitability of sin in Niebuhr’s view, if only to remind some of his more agnostic admirers once again of what he says in his more theological writings. It is to Niebuhr’s credit that he recognizes that “the Christian doctrine of sin in its classical form offends

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both rationalists and moralists by maintaining the seemingly absurd position that man sins inevitably and by a fateful necessity, but that he is nevertheless to be held responsible for actions which are prompted by an ineluctable fate.” Relying in the most difficult spots on Kierkegaard, Niebuhr begins by asserting that man is both creature and creator, made in the image of God and yet finite, caught in the necessities of nature and yet able to transcend them. Man’s freedom creates the temptation to sin, and this produces his anxiety. His anxiety leads him to try to escape from finitude to infinity, to try to be God rather than to subject himself to the will of God. Lacking faith, man tries to establish himself independently, and by doing so, by giving his immediate necessities a consideration which they do not deserve, he loses his true self. This is why the sin of inordinate self-love points “to the prior sin of lack of trust in God.” Man’s anxiety arises out of his finiteness and his freedom, but when he comes to the fork in the road, he chooses the wrong path rather than the right because he has also committed the “prior sin of unbelief.” And then all of the other sins come tumbling after. Finiteness and freedom by themselves would never lead to these other sins. The sin of unbelief is the extra factor and it, so to speak, lies behind the other sins of history. They are inevitable once we grant that we are doomed to be finite, fated to be free, and forced into unbelief. At best we can use our freedom to become aware of all this and to develop contrition, but even contrition is no permanent protection against slipping into the abyss that anxiety and unbelief prepare for us. Niebuhr says that none of this is to be taken “literalistically.” He criticizes what he calls literalistic distortions of Christian doctrine, such as the view that we inherit corruption. This criticism is connected with Niebuhr’s belief that we are not doomed to sin by natural causes, with his opposition to the Pelagian notion that original sin is a force of inertia in nature, and with his constant rejection of the view that man’s finitude is solely responsible for his sinning. All of this Niebuhr expresses by saying that “evil in man is a consequence of his inevitable though not necessary unwillingness to acknowledge his dependence, to accept his finiteness and to admit his insecurity,” and so it is important to say a few words on this contrast between the necessary and the inevitable, especially in the light of what was said earlier about Niebuhr’s views on history. The problem of necessity is one of the most difficult philosophical problems, and therefore one can never be sure of understanding even what the most clearheaded philosophers say on this subject. But there is a usage according to which what happens necessarily happens inevitably. Thus Webster, when he explains the meaning of “inevitable,” quotes Burke as saying: “It was inevitable; it was necessary; it was planted in the nature of things.” That is to say, we sometimes regard “inevitable” and “necessary” as interchangeable, even if as philosophers we are not altogether sure of what they mean. What, then, does Niebuhr want to bring out by distinguishing them? So far as I can see, that we do not sin necessarily in the sense of being determined by what he calls natural or physical causes, because we transcend nature. But Niebuhr says nevertheless that we cannot avoid sinning. His point is that we are driven to sin, not by physical events but by other things which are equally beyond our control. Niebuhr therefore

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demarcates one kind of unavoidable act, that which is caused physically, and calls it a necessary one, while he calls another kind of unavoidable act—the kind produced by our finitude, freedom, and lack of faith—inevitable. The important point is, however, that he believes (a) that we commit evil acts which are unavoidable, and (b) that we are morally responsible for them, that is, subject to blame for them. Now there have been philosophers who have tried to make the inevitability of an act consistent with praising or blaming it. And there are others like Prof. Berlin, who think that inevitability and blame are incompatible. But Niebuhr is a very different kind of thinker. He agrees that there is a contradiction between them, but, in his Hegelian and Whitmanesque way, he accepts it. The doctrine of original sin, he says, “remains absurd from the standpoint of a pure rationalism, for it expresses a relation between fate and freedom which cannot be fully rationalized, unless the paradox be accepted as a rational understanding of the limits of rationality and as an expression of faith that a rationally irresolvable contradiction may point to a truth which logic cannot contain. Formally there can be, of course, no conflict between logic and truth. The laws of logic are reason’s guard against chaos in the realm of truth. They eliminate contradictory assertions. But there is no resource `ın logical rules to help us understand complex phenomena, exhibiting characteristics which seem to require that they be placed into contradictory categories of reason.” Some readers may appreciate what Niebuhr means when he adds that “loyalty to all the facts may require a provisional defiance of logic, lest complexity ´ın the facts of experience be denied for the sake of a premature logical consistency,” but how long does he want us to wait? With such a modest remark Niebuhr may disarm even some of the most logically hardened of his readers, but he can’t help making them wince when he calls on Hegel’s dialectic in his defense: “Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ is a logic invented for the purpose of doing justice to the fact of ‘becoming’ as a phenomenon which belongs into [sic] the category of neither ‘being’ nor ‘non-being.’ The Christian doctrine of original sin, with its seemingly contradictory assertions about the inevitability of sin and man’s responsibility for sin, is a dialectical truth which does justice to the fact that man’s self-love and self-centeredness is inevitable.” How easy it is for the extremes to meet and what an irony of history it is that a follower of Kierkegaard—the great enemy of Hegel—should have to appeal to Hegel to save himself at the most vital point in his argument. ENTER LIPPMANN AND LOCKE In turning from the thought of Niebuhr to the recent writing of Walter Lippmann, we find a similar preoccupation with human deficiency, selfishness, and ineptitude, only this time the fault is said to lie not in power-mad leaders who plan us into totalitarianism but rather with the people, the masses who have secured so much power over government and turned statesmen into lackeys. In

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one respect, therefore, Lippmann and Niebuhr appear at opposite poles of the social thinking that has gained prominence since the work of Dewey and Holmes went into eclipse. Lippmann fears the masses and Niebuhr fears the leaders, so that while Niebuhr has replaced Dewey as the hero of some liberals who have abandoned socialism, Lippmann has come to replace Justice Holmes as the hero of the more conservative. Niebuhr uses the Augustinian doctrine of original sin while Lippmann appeals to the Thomistic concept of natural law. The doctrine of natural law is one of the oldest and most debated doctrines in the history of moral and political philosophy. It is the central theory of the Catholic Church on moral and political matters; it was adopted by John Locke; it influenced the language and thought of the Declaration of Independence; it was rejected by Dewey, Holmes, and Veblen; it has recently been revived by many thinkers who, like Lippmann, cannot bear the absence of a set of moral principles which are universally binding, certain, rationally established by the inspection of universals, essences, or meanings, depending on which outmoded epistemology or ethics is adopted. In holding certain “truths to be self-evident,” the framers of the Declaration of Independence were speaking the language of Aquinas and John Locke. The latter, because he was so confused on the fundamental philosophical questions touching on the status of natural law, is one of the most interesting thinkers in the history of the subject. His position is central in the American tradition, and his own puzzlement reflects the philosophical problems surrounding natural law. Aquinas believed that there are self-evident principles, which, as he says, are those principles whose “predicate is contained in the notion of the subject,” and which are self-evident only to the wise; and Locke believed that there are selfevident principles, which he explained as those to which we assent “at first hearing and understanding their terms,” or those which “the mind cannot doubt, as soon as it understands the words.” And although Aquinas and Locke agreed that there are self-evident principles, they diverged on the most important of all problems so far as natural law is concerned. In answer to the question: are there any self-evident practical, i.e.—moral—principles? Aquinas was quite consistent and answered affirmatively, but Locke wobbled on the issue. Sometimes Locke says that there are self-evident practical principles, viz., self-evident principles of natural law—and sometimes he denies that there are any self-evident practical principles. In a sense, Locke’s contradiction on natural law is the counterpart of Niebuhr’s in the case of original sin, only Locke did not have the benefit of Hegelian dialectic. I do not think that Locke saw this contradiction, but it should not escape the careful reader of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his Second Treatise of Government, both published in 1690. Locke tries to refute the belief that “there are in the understanding certain innate principles; some primary notions . . . characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man; which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it.” But an innate principle is quite different from a self-evident principle, according to Locke, and therefore

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he is not involved in any obvious inconsistency here, as some of his antagonistic critics have implied. It was perfectly possible, Locke thought, for a man who believed as he did that all our ideas arise out of experience, to hold that some true statements are self-evident. For example, the idea of red arises from experience, as does the idea of green; nevertheless Locke maintained that anyone who grasps these ideas, who understands the meanings of the terms “red”, “green”, and the others in the statement, “Nothing which is red all over is green all over”, will immediately assent to that statement. It is therefore self-evident but not innate. Locke’s blatant inconsistency consists in the fact that he says in the Essay that there are no self-evident practical principles but denies this in his Second Treatise. In the Essay, he holds that so far from there being innate practical principles, there are not even any self-evident practical principles. In the Essay, Locke says: I think there cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason [his italics]: which would be perfectly ridiculous and absurd if they were innate; or so much as self-evident [my italics], which every innate principle must needs be, and not need any proof to ascertain its truth, nor want any reason to gain it approbation. He would be thought void of common sense who asked on the one side, or on the other side went to give a reason why “it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be.” It carries its own light and evidence with it, and needs no other proof: he that understands the terms assents to it for its own sake or else nothing will ever be able to prevail with him to do it. But should that most unshaken rule of morality and foundation of all social virtue, “That one should do as he would be done unto,” be proposed to one who never heard of it before, but yet is of capacity to understand its meaning; might he not without any absurdity ask a reason why? And were not he that proposed it bound to make out the truth and reasonableness of it to him?2

It is puzzling after all of this to turn to his Second Treatise of Government and to find Locke saying that there is “nothing more evident [my italics] than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another.” Now clearly this is a moral or practical principle: the telltale word “should” indicates that. Therefore, according to the doctrine of the Essay many things are more evident than this natural law of equality; indeed, as we have seen, all self-evident speculative principles are more evident than it is. If it should not be obvious that Locke is contradicting himself, we have only to read a little further on where he says with approval: “This equality of men by nature the judicious Hooker looks upon as . . . evident in itself [my italics], and beyond all question.” What more do we need to show that the Locke of the Essay contradicts the Locke of the Second Treatise of Government, which appeared in the same year? The charge is simple: he at once affirms and denies that moral principles are self-evident. 2 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), book 1, chap. 3, section 4.

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“THEY ALL GO INTO THE DARK.” Mr. Lippmann is eager to revive the notion of self-evident natural law and to put it in the hands of wise statesmen who will not be so tied to the demands of the people. Presumably in agreement with Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, whose writing is favorably cited in The Public Philosophy and who has expressed similar views in a less winning way, Mr. Lippmann chastises positivist professors who have subverted natural law through a refusal to recognize that there is a realm of essences in addition to a realm of existence. It is ironical, therefore, that positivists like Rudolf Carnap have in recent times been the most active defenders of the notion of analyticity (the sister notion of self-evidence, as we have seen) as well as supporters of the view that meanings and universals exist. Positivists, of course, have used the notions of analyticity and meaning quite differently. They are mainly interested in showing that mathematical propositions are analytic—that is to say, true by virtue of the meanings of their component terms—and they vehemently (and laudably) deny that the principles of morality may be so viewed. But it is certainly wrong to say, as Lippmann does, that all of them deny the existence of the universals or meanings which are so essential for the philosopher of natural law. In opposition to Lippmann, Locke, Aquinas, and the positivists, to say nothing of a large number of other philosophers, I think that the notion of an analytic statement, the notion of a self-evident statement as conceived by Aquinas and Locke, and the meanings so dear to all of them and Lippmann, are first of all obscure in themselves and secondly incapable of sustaining the philosophical load which has been put upon them. I shall concentrate on the significance of this contention for the doctrine of natural law, though I can at best outline only part of my view here. Very few philosophers have taken the existence of meanings, conceived as universals, for granted. The usual pattern of philosophical argument is to assume that the reader believes in the existence of physical objects—the tables and chairs of epistemology books—but that he is too dull to see that universals like the attribute of being a table also exist. And so it is frequently pointed out that we couldn’t understand the general word “chair” unless it had a meaning quite distinct from every individual chair in the universe. In this way, the existence of meanings or essences construed as properties of things is supposedly proven. But then a new move must be made, for the ordinary man has a rather limited conception of existence; in other words, he uses the word “exists” narrowly, as applying only to physical objects which exist in space and time, and this won’t do. Having begun with a tolerance and a garden-variety understanding of the word “exist”, the ordinary man has now been led to the point where he supposedly must see that there are at least two meanings of “exist” and that this is the solution to the problem of understanding the general term “chair”. But can any one suppose that this postulation of Platonic meanings really illuminates the notion of understand-

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ing? We think immediately, and rightly so, of dormitive virtues “explaining” why opium puts people to sleep. Does Lippmann really suppose that he can prove that there are essences which, if properly unpacked, make the truth of moral principles evident? Even if he were to accomplish the first bit of required persuasion—that is to say, even if members of the public should be persuaded of the existence of essences—it would be another thing to show them that the principles of political morality are self-evident statements about men in which, as Aquinas says, “the predicate is contained in the notion of the subject,” or logically deducible therefrom. We know that Locke pleaded old age when he was asked to do this by his correspondent Molyneux, and there is a very touching letter to Molyneux in which Locke writes: The Gospel contains so perfect a body of Ethics that reason may be excused from that inquiry, since she may find man’s duty clearer and easier in revelation than in herself. This is the excuse of a man who, having a sufficient rule of his actions, is content therewith, and thinks he may employ the little time and strength he has in other researches wherein he is more in the dark.3

ETHICS WITHOUT ESSENCES The point is that all of this philosophical machinery is not so much an effective instrument for rational persuasion as for self-encouragement, useful for philosophical whistling in the dark. Having persuaded himself of certain moral principles and having discovered that some people in other places and at other times have doubted them, the weak man needs support. He needs to say that things in the realm of essence are so related as to substantiate or corroborate these principles of morality. Now we all have deep moral convictions: we firmly believe certain moral principles, which we try to act on to the best of our ability. They make up, along with others, the assumptions of our whole structure of belief; they constitute our terminal beliefs. We want them to be consistent with each other and to fit in harmoniously and simply with other, less confidently held beliefs; we want this structure to mesh with experience and feeling. But individuals and societies have surrendered many beliefs which they once accepted as terminal, and some of these beliefs are moral beliefs. What, then, is the purpose in inventing a mysterious realm of essence of which our terminal beliefs are supposed to be true? Wouldn’t it be wiser to recognize that we all have our ultimate convictions at any moment, that they are not absolutely immune to change (though we can resolve, at our own peril, to make them permanently immune), that some people adopt the same beliefs as terminal and others don’t? Who are the people we get along with? Very often the people with whom we have a great deal of agreement on these fundamental beliefs. Who are the people we quarrel with? Very often 3

See A. C. Fraser’s editio of Locke’s Essay (New York, 1959), p. 65, n. 1.

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those with whom we don’t share these beliefs. The point is that we and those whose logical lines end up at the same terminal shouldn’t need the kind of mutual encouragement that comes from inventing a realm of essences beneath (or above) the terminal: and those who go in different directions are the last people in the world who are likely to analyze essences in the same way even if they agreed that such things existed. I hesitate to assign all of this view to Holmes, but I think that it converges with what he says in his little essay “Natural Law.” First, when he says: If . . . the truth may be defined as the system of my (intellectual) limitations, what gives it objectivity is the fact that I find my fellowman to a greater or less extent (never wholly) subject to the same Can’t Helps. If I think I am sitting at a table I find that the other persons present agree with me; so if I say that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. If I am in a minority of one they send for a doctor or lock me up; and I am so far able to transcend the to me convincing testimony of my senses or my reason as to recognize that if I am alone probably something is wrong with my works.4

And also when he says: “The jurists who believe in natural law seem to me to be in that naı¨ve state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by them and their neighbors as something that must be accepted by all men everywhere.”5

PRINCIPLES WITHOUT DICTATORS As we have seen, in certain parts of theology Niebuhr may repair to the Hegelian dialectic too quickly and in others he may find it extremely difficult to beat a clear logical path to the world, but one cannot accuse him of the same sort of logical magic in discussing natural law. On that subject his view is deep and admirable, and he sees the antidemocratic potentialities of the doctrine even though it has been used by ardent democrats. Niebuhr decries Catholic as well as liberal confidence in natural law and shows the extent to which the doctrine can be twisted into special pleading and hypocritical justification of self-interest—especially when an institutional authority is set up as the custodian of morals. On this point, Niebuhr’s humility is encouraging even to those who cannot accept his theology. Niebuhr manages to give up “essentialism” in his theory of morality even though he maintains it in his discussion of original sin. After seeing the defects of the philosophy of natural law, it is but a short step to giving up the whole effort to distill the essence of man. Yet Niebuhr fails to take it. For that reason, the various Augustinian inevitabilities remain to plague Niebuhr even after the Thomistic necessities have departed. 4 5

O. W. Holmes, Collected Legal Papers (New York, 1920), pp. 310–11. Ibid., p. 312.

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By returning to Aquinas and Lippmann, we can see what Niebuhr means about natural law. Aquinas, as we have seen, says that some self-evident propositions are self-evident only to the wise, and Lippmann speaks of the principles of natural law as those which all men, “when they are sincerely and lucidly rational,” will regard as self-evident. But who are the wise and the sincerely and lucidly rational? In practice the devotees of natural law identify them by their willingness to say that certain specific moral principles are self-evident. It is not as though partisans of natural law identify wise or rational men on the basis of a clear criterion independent of the specific principles that are said to be self-evident. On the contrary, to be a wise man according to Aquinas is virtually to be one to whom the moral principles are self-evident. This is most strikingly illustrated in Aquinas’s statement that “to one who understands that an angel is not a body, it is self-evident that an angel is not circumscriptively in a place: but this is not evident to the unlearned, for they cannot grasp it.” By similar reasoning, some partisans of natural law must say that Justice Holmes couldn’t have understood what the term “man” meant because he did not find the principle “Every man has a right to live” self-evident. But consider what Holmes said on the point: The most fundamental of the supposed pre-existing rights—the right to life—is sacrificed without a scruple not only in war, but whenever the interest of society, that is, of the predominant power in the community is thought to demand it. Whether that interest is the interest of mankind in the long run no one can tell, and as, in any event, to those who do not think with Kant and Hegel, it is only an interest, the sanctity disappears. I remember a very tender-hearted judge being of the opinion that closing a hatch to stop a fire and the destruction of cargo was justified even if it was known that doing so would stifle a man below. It is idle to illustrate further, because to those who agree with me I am uttering commonplaces and to those who disagree I am ignoring the necessary foundations of thought. The a priori men generally call the dissentients superficial.6

It is ironic that while Locke believed in the self-evident principles of natural law his own attack on the doctrine of innate moral principles is a most profound statement of the dangers in the doctrine of natural law. He said: It was of no small advantage to those who affected to be masters and teachers, to make this the principle of principles—that principles must not be questioned. For, having once established this tenet—that there are innate principles, it put their followers upon a necessity of receiving some doctrines as such; which was to take them off from the use of their own reason and judgment, and put them on believing and taking them upon trust without further examination: in which posture of blind credulity, they might be more easily governed by, and made useful to some sort of men, who had the skill and office to guide them. Nor is it a small power it gives one man over another, to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teach of unquestionable truths; and to make a man swallow that for an innate principle which may serve his purpose who teacheth them.7 6 7

Ibid., p. 314. Locke, Essay, book 1, chap. 4, section 24.

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These words of Locke have more importance for us today than do all of his self-contradictory speculations about the natural law, for we live in an age that is crowded with dictators of principles who can read essences as easily as men used to read the stars. Whether one chooses to face them in the spirit of Dewey and Holmes or whether one chooses the faith of Dr. Niebuhr, is itself one of those ultimate questions which every man must answer for himself. In answering it and in settling upon his fundamental convictions, whether moral or metaphysical, a man will always run the risk of being called “unwise”, “irrational”, “ignorant”, or even “mad” by the dictators of principles. But this is not too great a price to pay for the liberty to think honestly and to act courageously.8

8 An expanded version of this essay appears as “Epilogue for 1957” in my Social Thought in America, Oxford University Press Paperback (New York, 1976).

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Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Progressive Era (1988)

I WANT TO BEGIN by thanking you for the very great pleasure and honor you have given me by asking me to deliver the second Edward J. Bloustein Lecture in Jurisprudence at the Rutgers School of Law. I should say at once that I come here not as a specialist in jurisprudence but as a philosopher and as a philosophical historian of American ideas. However, I shall come as close to jurisprudence as I can by talking today about the role that various branches of philosophy play in The Federalist, that great work in which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—collectively known as “Publius”—defended the Constitution of the United States. I might also say by way of introduction that although numbers of The Federalist began to appear in New York newspapers in the fall of 1787, the last number was published in those papers in the spring of 1788, during which year the first edition of The Federalist as a bound book was also published. The first volume, containing thirty-six numbers, was published on March 22, 1788; the second volume, containing the rest of the numbers, appeared on May 28, 1788.1 Therefore, it might be said that although 1987 was the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution, 1988 is the two hundredth anniversary of The Federalist.

I. In the first main part of my talk, I wish to show how philosophy was used in The Federalist. I should say quite candidly that in this part of my talk I shall be plagiarizing somewhat from my book, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution, which appeared in 1987. After I stop plagiarizing, I shall make a few remarks about some of Charles Beard’s statements concerning The Federalist, and then concentrate in the second main part of my talk on showing how William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and John Dewey viewed some of the philosophical ideas accepted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. James, Holmes, and Dewey were three great luminaries of American thought during the Progressive Era, a period during which many ideas of the founding fathers were subjected to re-examination, especially the philosophical ideas upon which they rested some of their political views. So, without further introduction, I turn to some of these ideas in The Federalist. 1

Introduction to The Federalist, pp. xiv–xv (J. E. Cooke, ed., 1961).

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RATIONALISM AND THE FEDERALIST Of the central branches of philosophy, epistemology—surprisingly enough—appears most explicitly in The Federalist; indeed, certain epistemological views lie on the very surface of Publius’s text. Hamilton begins Number 31 by referring to “primary truths” or “first principles” that “contain an internal evidence, which antecedent to all reflection or combination commands the assent of the mind”.2 His first illustrations of primary truths are “the maxims in geometry, that ‘The whole is greater than its part; that things equal to the same are equal to one another; that two straight lines cannot inclose a space; and that all right angles are equal to each other’ ”.3 Hamilton continues his list of illustrations by saying: Of the same nature are these other maxims in ethics and politics, that there cannot be an effect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end; that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose, which is itself incapable of limitation.4

Just after offering these examples of ethical and political propositions which are allegedly self-evident, Hamilton says that “there are other truths in the two latter sciences”, meaning ethics and politics, which, if they cannot pretend to rank in the class of axioms [primary truths], are yet such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common sense, that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiassed [sic] mind, with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistable [sic].5

The doctrine that there are primary truths or axioms which are seen to be true by using “internal evidence” prior to all reflection or combination is very similar to one that is espoused by both Locke and Hume—namely, that some truths are self-evident, known through the use of intuitive, rather than discursive reason, known merely by inspecting the ideas expressed by the words in a proposition such as “The whole is greater than its part”. According to this view, anyone who examines the idea of a whole and the idea of a part sees at once, without using discursive reason, or deduction, that the whole is greater than its part. But the more specific epistemological doctrine that appears in Federalist Number 31 is espoused by Locke but not by Hume—namely, that there are self-evident maxims which can serve as axioms of a demonstrative science of morality. Locke said that morality could be a demonstrative science, even though he admitted that he had never produced such a science, and Publius, or at least Hamilton, was in the 2

The Federalist No. 31, at pp.193–94 (A. Hamilton) (J. E. Cooke ed., 1961). Ibid, at p. 194. 4 Ibid. (emphasis added). 5 Ibid. 3

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same predicament.6 By contrast, Hume denied that morality could ever become a demonstrative science. After Hamilton tells us that there are self-evident maxims in ethics and politics, he says: “Though it cannot be pretended that the principles of moral and political knowledge have, in general the same degree of certainty with those of the mathematics; yet they have much better claims in this respect, than to judge from the conduct of men in particular situations, we should be disposed to allow them. The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject”.7 But even though Hamilton says here that, in general, moral and political principles lack the certainty of mathematical principles, he does seem to think that some moral and political principles are self-evident. By contrast, Hume regarded politics as an experimental science, and therefore he denied that it could be a demonstrative science.8 It follows that he could not consistently admit that there are self-evident political truths from which demonstrable political theorems can be deduced whereas Hamilton, in Federalist Number 85, points to what he calls “one of those rare instances in which a political truth can be brought to the test of mathematical demonstration”.9 I have no time to deal here with Hamilton’s questionable illustration, but I do want to emphasize that Hume did not allow that any experimental political 6

See, e.g., J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 549–50 (P. H. Nidditch, ed., 1975). In my opinion, Locke contradicts himself on the self-evidence of moral or practical principles. In this Essay, he says that no such principle is self-evident; Ibid., at p. 66. In his Second Treatise of Government, however, he says that the moral principle of “equality of Men by Nature” is self-evident; J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government p. 288 (P. Laslett, ed., 2nd ed., 1970). In the Essay, he says that speculative maxims such as “The whole is bigger than a part” are self-evident whereas the truth that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones is not self-evident; Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, supra, at p. 66. He says in the Essay that the “most unshaken Rule of Morality, and Foundation of all social Virtue, That one should do as he would be done unto” is not self-evident; Ibid. at p. 68. He adds that in this respect it resembles the theorematic truth that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles rather than the axiomatic truth that the whole is bigger than a part; Ibid. The Golden Rule is regarded in the Essay as a moral theorem for which a demonstration can be given even though Locke himself did not provide that demonstration. By contrast, since the equality of men by nature is regarded by him as self-evident in the Second Treatise, it does not need demonstration. In the Essay, Locke did not face the following questions: How can a practical principle such as the Golden Rule be deduced from axioms that are not practical; and if those axioms are practical, what happens to Locke’s view in the Essay that practical principles cannot be self-evident? I call attention to these matters in order to show that when Hamilton said that moral principles can be self-evident, he was in accord with the views that Locke advocated in this Second Treatise rather than with those advocated in his Essay. The same was true of Jefferson’s view in the Declaration of Independence that certain moral truths are self-evident. 7 The Federalist No. 31, supra note 2, at p. 195 (emphasis added). 8 See, e.g., D. Hume, “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding”, in Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 163–65 (L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., 3d ed., 1975) [hereinafter Human Understanding]. 9 The Federalist No. 85, at p. 594 (A. Hamilton) (J. E. Cooke, ed., 1961).

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truth could be mathematically demonstrated. I say this even though I am aware that in one of his Essays, “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”, Hume writes: So great is the force of laws, and of particular forms of government, and so little dependence have they on the humours and tempers of men, that consequences almost as general and certain [my emphasis] may sometimes be deduced from them, as any which the mathematical sciences afford us.10

Notice Hume’s qualifying phrase “almost as general and certain”. Obviously, he is not saying here that some political truths can be demonstrated—that is, deduced from self-evident political principles. It is a serious mistake, therefore, to argue, as at least one commentator on The Federalist has,11 that this shows that Hamilton’s “ideal” of science in Federalist Number 31 was the same as that portrayed in Hume’s essay “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”. The fact is that some of Hamilton’s rationalistic views about ethical and political knowledge were views that Hume sought to refute in his most serious works. It is not surprising that Publius was unable to organize either ethics or politics along the rationalistic lines outlined in Federalist Number 31. And because Publius never constructs, or even tries to construct, a demonstrative science of politics, we can see why the bulk of The Federalist is devoted to establishing political truths by appealing to history and experience. By contrast, Publius assumed, and sometimes explicitly asserted, some moral principles of natural law which he regarded as certain, necessary, immutable and immune to revision by experience. In Federalist Number 2, Jay said, in agreement with Locke’s views, that it is undeniable that whenever and however government is instituted, the people must cede to government some of their natural rights in order to vest government with requisite powers.12 And in Federalist Number 43, Madison referred to “the great principle of self-preservation; . . . the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim”.13 These and other passages in The Federalist show that Publius believed that men have natural rights and that government can come into existence only when men cede some of these natural rights. Both Madison and Hamilton believed in Lockeian natural law, in the Lockeian theory of social contract, and in the Lockeian doctrine that there is what Hamilton once called “an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensibly [sic], obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution”.14 Even though Publius spends little time on deductively expounding substantive 10 D. Hume, “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”, in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller, p. 16 (1987), 10 (1963). See also my Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution, 34–37 (1987). 11 G. Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist, pp. 90–91 (1981). 12 The Federalist No. 2, at p. 8 (J. Jay) (J. E. Cooke, ed., 1961). 13 The Federalist No. 43, at p. 297 (J. Madison) (J. E. Cooke, ed., 1961). 14 The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 1, p. 87 (H. C. Syrett, ed., 1961).

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principles of natural law, it is clear that he regarded some of them as self-evident axioms or as principles which are, in words I have previously quoted: such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common sense, that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiassed [sic] mind, with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistable [sic].15

EMPIRICISM AND THE FEDERALIST Publius’s belief in self-evident principles which express natural rights was closely associated with his main experimental inquiries. Since he believed it was selfevident that men have certain natural rights, among them the right to liberty and the right to pursue happiness, he offered an experimental theory of how to deal with factions and an experimental theory of the separation of powers. Both of these theories are concerned with ways of protecting these rights as well as others. Publius’s theory of factions formulated what he regarded as the best way to control the mischief of factions, famously defined by Madison in Federalist Number 10 as a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.16

Because Madison thought that factions by definition have impulses which would, if unchecked, lead them to violate the private rights of individuals or to act against the public good, he wanted to prevent factions from performing such immoral deeds. Just as Madison wanted to prevent factions from acting tyrannically, so he wanted to prevent a democratic government from acting tyrannically. His recipe for doing this was to separate the three branches or powers of government—the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary—so as to prevent any one of them from taking away unalienable rights, especially liberty, from the people. The basic strategy of Madison’s theory of how to check potentially tyrannical factions and potentially tyrannical governments was neatly conveyed in his letter of October 24, 1787, to Thomas Jefferson: “Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain qualifications, the only policy with which a republic can be administered on just principles”.17 15

The Federalist No. 31, supra, note 2, p. 194. The Federalist No. 10, p. 57 (J. Madison) (J. E. Cooke, ed., 1961). 17 Letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson (Oct. 24, 1787) in Papers of James Madison, vol. 10, p. 214 (R. A. Rutland, ed., 1977). 16

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Madison advocated such a policy in dealing with factions because he did not believe that a faction could be controlled merely by appealing to other motives that members of the faction might have. Since a faction is by definition impelled by morally objectionable motives, one might think, Madison says, that a faction would not act immorally if its immoral motives were overcome by other motives that it might have. Therefore Madison asks in his letter to Jefferson of October 24, 1787, whether a majority faction having a common objectionable interest, or feeling a common objectionable passion, “will find sufficient motives to restrain them from oppressing the minority”.18 And Madison answers that three motives could conceivably restrain such a majority but then proceeds to rule out each of them as insufficiently strong while revealing his less than optimistic view of human nature. He says: (a) a prudent regard for private or partial good as essentially involved in the general and permanent good of the whole will not in fact conquer a factious motive; (b) a regard for reputation will not; and (c) religion, even enthusiastic religion, will not do the trick.19 Therefore, Madison is led in this letter and in Federalist Number 10 to propose a so-called external restraint upon factions without limiting their political liberty; that restraint will come about, he said, by creating a well-populated society living in a large country. This combination of external factors, Madison thinks, will increase the probability that many factions exist, but it will also diminish the probability that any one of them will become a majority while united by an objectionable motive; and if, by chance, one does become a majority, then the largeness of the population and of the land will prevent it from successfully acting on its evil motives.20 Here I do not wish to discuss the merits of Madison’s proposal in experimental political science. Instead I want to focus more philosophically on Madison’s general theory of action and on some of his Humeian views on causation. Madison held that an individual human being (or a group of human beings) will perform a certain action if and only if the individual (or the group) has both a motive and an opportunity to perform it. It follows that an individual (or a group) will not perform the action if and only if an individual (or a group) (1) does not have the motive, or (2) does not have the opportunity. This theory of human action was regarded by Hume as a special case of a more general theory about the conditions under which any object, human or otherwise, will act (in the broadest sense of “act”). Thus a spark’s falling on a piece of paper would be the physical counterpart of Madison’s “actuating” motive or impulse in the case of a faction; the combination of all the conditions which join with the falling spark in causing the pieces to burst into flames would be the physical counterpart of Madison’s “opportunity”; and the paper’s bursting into flames would be the physical counterpart of a faction’s action. Since Madison believed that a factiously motivated group will not perform an action if it does not have the opportunity to do so, Madison wanted to deny 18

Ibid., pp. 213–14. Ibid., p. 214. 20 The Federalist No. 10, above, note 16, pp. 63–64. 19

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factions, especially majority factions, the opportunity to carry out their objectionable motives in action. And when he said that denying a faction the opportunity of residing in a small territory and in the midst of a small population would cause it not to act against the rights of individuals and the good of the community, he was relying on what he regarded as a true generalization in political science. That is to say, he believed it very unlikely that a faction—even though evilly motivated as it would be by definition—would, if it were part of a populous group living in a large territory, act against the rights of individuals or the good of the community. Such a generalization in political science was, according to Madison and Hume, based on history since political science, they both held, discovers general facts which may be supported by particular historical facts gathered by experience. Like physics and medicine, according to Hume, it inquires into “the qualities, causes and effects of a whole species of objects”,21 such as “wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions”.22 The Federalist was in great measure an inquiry of just this kind. It sought to discover empirical or experimental laws of political science and political technology which would, in conjunction with quasi-mathematical moral laws, justify the ratification of the Constitution.

II. I come now to the second main part of my talk. Using the word “philosophical” rather loosely by contemporary standards, I shall first consider some of the philosophical views in Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.23 In that work, Beard probably says more about The Federalist than does any other thinker of the Progressive Era, but unfortunately what he says often lacks historical accuracy as well as philosophical depth, especially when he is dealing with Federalist Number 10. MADISON, BEARD, AND ECONOMIC DETERMINISM When Madison focused in Number 10 on the causes of factions as opposed to the ways in which factions could be prevented from acting mischievously, Madison held that “the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property”;24 and Beard, one of the most eminent political scientists of the Progressive Era, regarded what he took to be Madison’s view in this passage as “a masterly statement of the theory of economic determinism in politics.”25 The fact is, however, that Beard was mistaken in his interpreta21

Human Understanding, above, note 8, p. 165. Ibid., p. 83. 23 C. A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 1913. 24 The Federalist No. 10, above, note 16, p. 59. 25 Beard, above, note 23, p. 15. 22

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tion of Madison because Beard, strangely enough, regarded the passage I have just quoted from The Federalist as though it had read: “the only source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property”. But even if Beard had read this passage correctly, he should not have thought, as he did, that Madison had anticipated the economic determinism of the Marxian philosophy of history. Madison never came very close to asserting what Marx later asserted in the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, namely—that “the mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life”.26 In Federalist Number 10, Madison never said anything about the mode of production determining anything; he merely said that the various and unequal distribution of property was the most common and most durable source of factions, which clearly implies that there are other sources of factions, some of them spiritual or ideological in Marx’s terminology. Beard might have seen this if he had been aware, as the historian Douglass Adar was later to become, of Hume’s influence on Madison.27 Had Beard known of the similarity between Madison’s Number 10 and Hume’s essay entitled “Of Parties in General”,28 Beard might have seen that Madison, like Hume, thought that factions could be based on intellectual differences as well as on differences of economic interest. But Beard was neither a great admirer of subtle philosophy nor a careful reader of it. Not only did he misunderstand the finer points of Madison’s Number 10 in 1913 but he misunderstood the finer points of Hamilton’s philosophical Number 31 in 1948. In 1948, Beard said in a book called The Enduring Federalist that Hamilton’s “primary truths” were derived by Hamilton and Madison from experience and observation, thereby overlooking the rationalistic strain in what Hamilton had said about his primary truths.29 That Beard should have overlooked this strain is not surprising when we learn in The Enduring Federalist of Beard’s contempt for impractical “closet philosophers”30 and “armchair” epistemologists.31 This rationalistic strain in Number 31 would certainly not have been missed by three of Beard’s more philosophically minded contemporaries. Of all the philosophical views I find in The Federalist, those that involved a belief in the possibility of a demonstrative science of ethics were most severely criticized by William James, John Dewey, and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Without taking direct aim at The Federalist itself, they participated in what I have called a revolt against formalism that led them to reject the idea that morality could be turned into a quasi-mathematical science presided over by self-evident truths. About a 26 Preface to K. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, p. 51 (T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel, eds., 1956). 27 D. Adair, Fame and the Founding Father, pp. 75–106 (T. Colbourn, ed., 1974). 28 Hume, “Of Parties in General”, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, above, note 10, p. 54. 29 C. A. Beard, The Enduring Federalist, p. 13 (1948). 30 Ibid., p. 20. 31 Ibid., p. 13.

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century after The Federalist appeared, their revolt was most clearly expressed in their attacks on the epistemology of ethics which the founding fathers had assumed in the Declaration of Independence and The Federalist. JAMES, HOLMES, AND MORAL RATIONALISM One of the most militant attacks on ethical rationalism appeared in William James’s essay, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, first published in 1891. In that essay, James said “there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say”;32 James also denied that there is “an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides”.33 James derided the idea that “something which we call the ‘validity’ of the claim is what gives to it its obligatory character”, and that this validity “rains down upon the claim . . . from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens”.34 According to James, moral truth does not reside in “a self-proclaiming set of laws or as abstract ‘moral reason’ ”.35 James also announced that “nothing can be good or right except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good or thinks it to be right”.36 In other words, James rejected ethical rationalism in favor of an ethical naturalism that rested ethical judgments on the attitudes of human beings. James’s boyhood friend Justice Holmes also expressed dissatisfaction with moral rationalism. Holmes wrote in 1901: The Federalist, when I read it many years ago, seemed to me a truly original and wonderful production for the time. I do not trust even that judgment unrevised when I remember that The Federalist and its authors struck a distinguished English friend of mine as finite.37

Exactly how Holmes would have revised his youthful judgment of The Federalist I do not know, but I do know that Holmes did not join with the authors of The Federalist in what he called “the jurist’s search for criteria of universal validity which he collects under the head of natural law”.38 Holmes did not regard the principles of natural law as a priori propositions, which, I venture to say, is how Hamilton must have regarded them when he said that they “contain an internal evidence, which antecedent to all reflection or combination commands the as32 W. James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, p. 184 (1896). 33 Ibid., p. 194. 34 Ibid., p. 195. 35 Ibid., p. 199. 36 Ibid., pp. 192–93. 37 O. W. Holmes, “John Marshall”, in Collected Legal Papers, p. 269 (1920). 38 Holmes, “Natural Law”, in Collected Legal Papers, ibid., p. 310.

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sent of the mind”.39 Moreover, Holmes was not fazed by the fact that “a priori men generally call the dissentients [such as himself] superficial”.40 Holmes did not regard the assertion that we all have the right to life—which he called “the most fundamental of the supposed pre-existing rights”41—as true a priori. He said, while writing in August of 1918, that the right to life is “sacrificed without a scruple not only in war, but whenever the interest of society, that is, of the predominant power in the community, is sought to demand it”.42 He also denied that Herbert Spencer’s statement that “Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors” was self-evident.43 Holmes stated his affirmative views on the question of moral belief very briefly when he said that “our system of morality is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion”.44 When Holmes expressed his opposition to a priorism in ethics along with an inclination to rest morality on attitudes of approval or disapproval, he probably had Kant in mind as his chief opponent rather than Locke or Publius, but Locke and Publius, no matter what their differences from Kant were, shared a variety of a priorism with him. While attacking Kant’s view that we should regard every human being as an end in himself and not as a means, Holmes wrote: I confess that I rebel at once. If we want conscripts, we march them up to the front with bayonets in their rear to die for a cause in which perhaps they do not believe. The enemy we treat not even as a means but as an obstacle to be abolished, if so it may be.45

Holmes remarked that he himself felt no pangs of conscience over such treatment of the conscripts or the enemy, adding, “I . . . naturally am slow to accept a [moral] theory that seems to be contradicted by practices that I approve”.46 And, in addition to rejecting Hamilton’s view that the moral law can be organized into a body of truths which may be deduced from self-evident axioms, Holmes rejected the idea that the positive law, as distinguished from the moral law, was “a system of reason . . . a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or what not, which may or may not coincide with the [judicial] decisions”.47 On the contrary, he declares in one of his best-known statements: “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law”.48 39

The Federalist No. 31, above note 2, pp. 194–95. Holmes, “Natural Law”, in Collected Legal Papers, above, note 38, p. 314. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Holmes, “The Path of the Law”, in Collected Legal Papers above, note 37, pp. 181–82. 44 Holmes, “Ideals and Doubts”, in Collected Legal Papers, above, note 37, p. 306. 45 Ibid., p. 304. 46 Ibid. 47 Holmes, “The Path of the Law”, in Collected Legal Papers, above, note 37, p. 172. Holmes attributes the view he was criticizing to “some text writers” but does not give their names. Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 173. 40

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When reciting this famous answer of Holmes to the question “What constitutes the law?”, we must always bear in mind that he had prepared his route to this conclusion by saying in his 1897 address, “The Path of the Law”, that when we study law we are studying a well-known profession.49 And, Holmes continued, the reason why it is a profession, or why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them about what judges will do “is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees”.50 “People”, he goes on, want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.51

If we are to understand Holmes as well as the relationship between his views and those of Publius, we must bear in mind that Holmes regarded the law as what a bad man pays a lawyer for knowing. Only if we understand this about Holmes’s use of the word “law” will we begin to understand why Holmes said that “the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law”. Those prophecies are what bad men expect lawyers to make when they pay them money. We must keep in mind, however, that there is a difference between denying that all moral truths may be deduced from selfevident propositions and denying that the whole of law, the positive law, can be so deduced. Let us now focus on Holmes’s denial of the second claim. If, as Holmes maintained, the positive law consists of predictions of what, for example, the Massachusetts courts or the English courts are likely to do in fact, then it will be hard to derive such predictions from a priori propositions which may be seen to be true merely by reflecting on Lockeian ideas or Kantian concepts. Even if we assume that the judges know such a priori truths as the axioms are said to be, we cannot be sure that the judges themselves will make the appropriate deductions from these axioms. The judge, after all, may not know all the facts of the case, and, in addition, he may be very poor at making valid deductions. Therefore, we cannot, merely by knowing some allegedly axiomatic or self-evident truths of moral or of positive law, predict with the help of logic alone what this judge in this court will do with the bad man who is before him and who is the lawyer’s client. We can now see more clearly, I hope, why Holmes denied that we could deduce what the courts will do from propositions such as those called “primary truths” by Hamilton in Federalist Number 31.52 49

Ibid., p. 167. Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 The Federalist No. 31, above, note 2, p. 194. 50

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DEWEY AGAINST MORAL RATIONALISM Along with James and Holmes, their younger contemporary John Dewey also attacked what he called an “opposition of empirical and higher rational knowledge” in his influential Democracy and Education.53 This was just the opposition that Publius assumed when he distinguished between demonstrative science and experimental science. According to Dewey, this distinction “corresponds to that of the intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned class remote from concern with the means of living”.54 In saying this, Dewey made an indirect, and typically Progressive, sociopolitical comment on the epistemology adopted by Hamilton in Federalist Number 31. Dewey further characterized this epistemology when he said: Purely empirical and physical things are often supposed to be known by receiving impressions. Physical things somehow stamp themselves upon the mind or convey themselves into consciousness by means of the sense organs. Rational knowledge and knowledge of spiritual things is supposed, on the contrary, to spring from activity initiated within the mind.55

Dewey’s reference to activity within the mind is reminiscent of Hamilton’s view that primary truths “contain an internal evidence” which, it is clear from other parts of The Federalist, would not usually be gathered by persons of lesser education or of lower socioeconomic standing. And Dewey’s idea that it would instead be gathered by a learned class remote from concern with the means of living reminds us that the theory of natural law assumed a view like that of Aquinas, according to which some propositions are self-evident only to the learned.56 It also assumed something like Locke’s view that if we wish to discover the law of nature, “not the majority of people should be consulted but those who are more rational and perceptive than the rest”.57 Finally, Dewey’s reference to “knowledge of spiritual things” in the passage last quoted from Democracy and Education is reminiscent of Madison’s reference in Federalist Number 43 to “the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God”,58 as well as Locke’s notion that primary truths may be known merely by inspecting ideas. When Hamilton said in Federalist Number 31 that the obscurity of some principles of moral and political knowledge “is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reason than in the subject”,59 he subscribed to a contrast between the intellect and emotions which Dewey also denigrated as dualistic. Dewey said of this dualism: 53

J. Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 389 (1916). Ibid, p. 389. 55 Ibid., p. 390. 56 See my Philosophy of the American Revolution pp. 9–96 (1978). 57 Ibid., p. 25 (quoting J. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature p. 115 (W. von Leyden, ed., 1954)). 58 The Federalist No. 43, above, note 13, p. 297. 59 The Federalist No. 31, above, note 2, p. 195. 54

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The emotions are conceived to be purely private and personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in apprehending facts and truths—except perhaps the single emotion of intellectual curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are a disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions turn inward to considerations of personal advantage and loss.60

For this reason, I do not think that I need say more in order to show that Dewey was quite hostile to some of the epistemological tenets that were stated or assumed in The Federalist and the Declaration of Independence. I say this even though Dewey took no occasion to say so in an introductory essay that he prefaced to his volume of selections from Jefferson’s writings, The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1940.

THE DUALISM OF THE FEDERALIST Around the beginning of the twentieth century, James, Holmes, and Dewey were not the only distinguished American thinkers to react to the sort of rationalism and dualism present in The Federalist. In his 1911 lecture, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy”, George Santayana, hardly a Progressive, contrasted what he regarded as the antiquated, genteel mentality of American’s philosophy from Jonathan Edwards to Josiah Royce with the vigor of its science and technology, adding that the left or philosophical hand of American culture did not know what the right or experimental hand was doing.61 In my opinion, something similar applies to The Federalist itself, since the philosophy of The Federalist contains the very epistemological dualism that Santayana had located in the whole of American philosophy. Publius, following Locke, supported his ethical science by appealing to what may be called the genteel power of intuition and logic to discover the relations between ideas. But Publius rested his methodology of political science on the empiricism of Hume while he followed Hume’s views on human nature in general and on factions in particular. The result is a hybrid system of thought, a system consisting, as James might have said, of tender as well as tough components. This same combination of rationalistic tenderness and empiricistic toughness is present in the widely held view that no belief about the success or failure of political means is immune to revision by experience whereas moral principles about political ends are immune to such revision. According to this view, moral principles are inscribed in something like granite or cement whereas principles of political technology are generally written in something like sand or mud. If we accept the moral rationalism of The Federalist, then no matter how much we sing the praises of using experience and history in political science, we shall find 60

Dewey, above, note 53, pp. 390–91. G. Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy”, in Winds of Doctrine, p. 188 (1957). 61

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ourselves dogmatically attributing self-evidence to opposing moral principles, as in the case of debates over abortion. Another danger of moral rationalism is that it may easily give rise to a predicament into which Locke himself fell. He held that in the absence of a demonstrative science of ethics, we must rely on the authority of the New Testament since Jesus by his miracles had shown that he was a messenger of God who transmitted moral principles laid down by God.62 Here, I think, Locke encouraged a form of authoritarianism. Because he needed some authority for moral principles that he could not demonstrate, he sent people, especially less educated people, to the Gospel for such authority and thereby encouraged a point of view that he deplored when he elsewhere attacked what he called “religious enthusiasm”. I hasten to add that I do not find this sort of theological authoritarianism in The Federalist since the references to God in that work are exiguous and perfunctory, and there are no appeals in it to Jesus. However, Publius’s seeming attachment to a demonstrative science of ethics put him in a predicament like that of Locke. Failing to produce such a demonstrative science and thinking that his moral principles were not supportable by appealing to experience, Publius had no defensible view on the subject.

A SKETCH OF AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW Can we nevertheless construct an acceptable epistemology which will replace Publius’s dualism of immutable moral principles and mutable statements of political fact? I think so, but here I can formulate this epistemology only in the sketchiest way. In my view, the moral thinker does not test isolated moral principles but rather conjunctions of logical principles, moral principles and statements of fact. In deducing a singular moral statement from such a conjunction, the moral thinker, using the hypothetico-deductive method, simultaneously tests a body of moral and descriptive premises for its capacity to organize our sensory experiences and our moral feelings. Accordingly, a moral feeling that leads the moral thinker to reject a moral conclusion may lead to the rejection of a moral belief which serves as a premise of the argument, or a descriptive premise, or, in extreme cases, a logical principle that guides the argument. There is no place in this corporatistic or holistic epistemology for immutable principles, whether of logic, of mathematics, or of morals. Like the statements of descriptive science, those of morals may be altered or abandoned in response to the demands of emotion or sensory experience. Therefore, such an epistemology erases the sharp boundaries created by those who, like Publius, think that all empirical method of testing is normally to be used in political science and a rationalistic one in ethics.63 62

See White, above, note 56, pp. 23–36. For a statement and defense of this view, see my What Is and What Ought to Be Done (New York, 1981) and my A Philosophy of Culture (Princeton, 2002). 63

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In this lecture, I have not tried to defend the epistemology I espouse. I have instead confined myself to the historical task of expounding the philosophy that I find in The Federalist and then showing that three distinguished American thinkers of the Progressive Era—James, Holmes, and Dewey—did much to undermine the view that morality is a demonstrative science based on what Hamilton called primary truths in Number 31 and what Jefferson called self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence. In doing so, these eminent antirationalists did much to remove certain epistemological barriers between moral principles and descriptive statements, and thereby paved the way for a more adequate general theory of knowledge, one that is in my opinion far superior to the dualistic theory espoused by the authors of The Federalist.

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The American Intellectual versus the American City (1961) WITH LUCIA WHITE

ALTHOUGH THE CITY has become one of the most absorbing and most intensively studied social problems in America in 1961, and although it is now fashionable for intellectuals to express an almost tender concern for its future, to hope that its decay can be arrested, and to offer plans for its revitalization, this has not always been the attitude of our greatest American thinkers.1 For a variety of reasons, they have expressed different degrees of hostility toward urban life in America, hostility which may be partly responsible for a feeling on the part of today’s city planner and urban reformer that he has no mythology or mystique on which he can rest or depend. We have no tradition of romantic attachment to the city in our highbrow literature, nothing that remotely resembles the Greek philosopher’s attachment to the polis or the French writer’s affection for Paris. And this fits very well with the frequently defended thesis that the American writer has been more than usually alienated from the society in which he lives, that he is typically in revolt against it. Throughout the nineteenth century, our society was becoming more and more urbanized, but the literary tendency to denigrate the American city hardly declined in proportion. If anything, it increased in intensity. Faced with this fact about the history of American thought, the contemporary student of the city can adopt one of two opposing attitudes. At his peril, he can turn his back on the tradition of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Dewey, in which case he will treat some of the American city’s profoundest critics as irresponsible literary men or as idle metaphysicians who fled the city rather than face its problems. Or he can regard this critical tradition as a repository of deep, though troubling, wisdom, one which raises basic questions for any urban reformer, partly because its premonitions and fears have been more than justified by the passage of time. There is no doubt that the second is the wiser course. Anyone who would improve the American city can only profit by an awareness of what some of our greatest minds have said, felt, and thought about one of the most conspicuous and most troubling features of our national life. 1 The theme of this essay was developed more fully in Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

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One cannot deny, of course, that there were pro-urban literary voices like Whitman’s, or that there were urban sociologists like Robert Park who tried to speak up for the city. But they are voices in “the city wilderness”, never comparing in volume with the anti-urban roar in the national literary pantheon. The urbanist must face the fact that the anti-urbanist does not live only in the Kentucky hills, in the Rockies, in the Ozarks, in the Cracker country, or the bayous. He lives in the mind and heart of America as conceived by the intellectual historian. The intellect, whose home is the city, according to some sociologists, has been the American city’s sharpest critic. Everyone knows that Jefferson once hoped to discourage the development of the city in America, but he was only the first of a long and varied list of critics of the city. Jefferson despised the manners and principles of the urban “mob” as he knew it in Europe, and he hoped to keep it from crossing the Atlantic intact. He certainly did not think of the city as “The Hope of Democracy”, as some Progressive theorists did at the turn of the twentieth century. He adopted a conciliatory tone about the city in his old age when he said in 1816 that we could not possibly depend on England for manufactures, as he had originally thought, and therefore we needed cities. But his does not show any love for the city. The country and its yeomen Jefferson loved all his life; in his old age, he grudgingly accepted the manufacturing city as a necessity. The same War of 1812 which led Jefferson to reassess his views was followed by a great expansion of the American city. It inaugurated a major phase of urban civilization between the Revolution and the Civil War. By 1860 the urban population was eleven times what it had been in 1820. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the decline of Jefferson’s empiricism among American intellectuals, and the emergence of philosophical transcendentalism, but a distaste for the city persisted among American writers. The growth of the city in the North produced an even sharper reaction in Ralph Waldo Emerson than the European city had produced in Jefferson. Emerson’s first philosophical work, Nature, appeared in 1836, in the middle of that interval which witnessed an eleven-fold increase in our urban population. Its very title was a protest against what he thought was happening. Partly under the influence of English romanticism, Emerson and some of his friends took to deprecating manufacture, art, and civilization, and so it was not long before they took to criticizing the city, the greatest of artifacts. The distaste for the city as an artificial creation was associated in Emerson’s mind, as it was in the case of many romantic thinkers, with doubts about the value of science as an avenue to truth. And yet Emerson agreed with the scientifically minded Jefferson about the nasty manners and principles of the city. Whereas Jefferson was given to arguing the defects of the city in common-sense political terms, Emerson sought to buttress his feelings by a metaphysical theory. Hence we may label his period as the metaphysical period of anti-urbanism. To be is to be natural for Emerson. In the wilderness, he said he found “something more dear and connate than in streets or villages”. The life of the city was “artificial and curtailed”; it destroyed solitude, poetry, and philosophy.

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One will find passages in which Emerson extolled the application of science and the virtues of civilization, the need for sociability to educate a man’s sympathies, and the advantages of specialization that allow each man to develop his own talents, and this suggests a more friendly view of the industrial urban society which was emerging in his own lifetime. But he always harped on the human failings of State Street and commercialism. At times Emerson could celebrate the artifice of pure technology, but he persistently attacked the debasement of moral standards by those who pursued nothing but wealth in the cities as he knew them. One is reminded of Thorstein Veblen’s praise of urban industry even as he attacked its financial captains, for it was Veblen who saw the modern industrial city as the locus classicus of conspicuous waste. Thoreau went even farther than Emerson in his distaste for civilization and the city, for Thoreau also attacked the village and the farm. Walden is a bible of anti-urbanism, in which Thoreau celebrates the life of the isolated individual, living in Nature and free of all social attachments. No wonder that Thoreau refused to visit the Saturday Club, which provided one of the few values of Boston in Emerson’s eyes: intellectual conversation. And when Thoreau refused, Perry Miller reminds us, he put his refusal in no uncertain terms: “The only room in Boston which I visit with alacrity is the Gentlemen’s Room at the Fitchburg Depot, where I wait for cars, sometimes for two hours, in order to get out of town”.2 No wonder Henry James said that Thoreau “was essentially a sylvan personage”.3 If Jefferson attacked the city on political grounds, and if Emerson and Thoreau may be represented as criticizing it from the point of view of transcendental metaphysics, what shall we say of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, all of whom may be added to our list of pre–Civil War critics of the city? They were far from political theorists or metaphysicians, but all of them saw the city as the scene of sin and crime. Speaking of them, Harry Levin says: “For our dreamers, America was a garden, an agrarian Eden, which was losing its innocence by becoming citified. Melville had located his City of Woe in London or Liverpool; Poe had tracked down imaginary crimes in the streets of an imagined Paris; and Hawthorne had exposed sins most luridly among the ruins of Rome”.4 As in Jefferson’s case, the urban models of extreme crime and sinfulness were not located in the United States by most of our pre-Civil War anti-urbanists, but they saw dark omens in the streets of American cities which made them fear that they might become like Paris, London, Liverpool, or Rome. The observant de Tocqueville expressed his worry about the American city in 1835, one year before Emerson’s essay Nature appeared. He said that the fact that America as yet had no dominating metropolis was one of those circumstances which tended to maintain a democratic republic in the United States and to counteract that great danger to which all democracies are subject—the tyranny of 2

Perry Miller (ed.), Consciousness in Concord (Boston, 1958), p. 46. Henry James, Hawthorne (New York, 1880), p. 80. 4 Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958), p. 234. 3

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the majority. But de Tocqueville thought that the “lower ranks” which inhabited Philadelphia (pop. 161,000) and New York (pop. 202,000) in the 1830s “constitute a rabble even more formidable than the populace of European towns. They consist of freed blacks . . . who are condemned by the laws and by public opinion to a hereditary state of misery and degradation. They also contain a multitude of Europeans who have been driven to the shore of the New World by their misfortunes or their misconduct; and they bring to the United States all our greatest vices, without any of those interests which counteract their baneful influence. As inhabitants of a country where they have no civil rights, they are ready to turn all the passions which agitate the community to their own advantage; thus, within the last few months, serious riots have broken out in Philadelphia and New York”.5 So seriously did de Tocqueville treat this matter that he said: “I look upon the size of certain American cities, and especially on the nature of their population, as a real danger which threatens the future security of the democratic republics of the new World; and I venture to predict that they will perish from this circumstance, unless the government succeeds in creating an armed force which, while it remains under the control of the majority of the nation, will be independent of the town population and able to repress its excesses”.6 If this could be the conclusion of the most astute foreign observer ever to visit our shores, it is not surprising that some of our great literary figures might have developed less than an admiring view of our urban culture between the Revolution and the Civil War. Optimistic empiricists like Jefferson, optimistic transcendentalists like Emerson, pessimistic believers in original sin like Hawthorne and Melville, all forgot their philosophical differences when they looked upon the American city, even before it developed into the industrial jungle it was to become between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1900 the urban population quadrupled while the rural population only doubled and, what is more staggering and significant, between 1790 and 1890, while the total population of the country increased sixteen times, the urban population increased 139 times.7 The great exodus from the countryside was in full force, and New England became the scene of deserted hill and village farms, while the city’s problems became the great social problems of the nation. The city became the home of the elevated railroad, the trolley car, the cable car, the subway, the apartment house, the telephone, and the skyscraper, while it continued to encourage what one physician called “American nervousness”. Among the most influential and most fastidious observers of this development were Henry Adams and the younger Henry James. Both were men of literary genius, both were members of cultivated families with wealth in their backgrounds, and for both of them the American city provided a profound spiritual problem. Because Henry Adams and Henry James lived in the age of the city’s supremacy, they did not speak of it, as Jefferson had, as a remote future phenome5

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1945), vol. 1, p. 289 note. Ibid. 7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Paths to the Present (New York, 1949), pp. 223–25. 6

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non or as something existing in Europe alone. And, unlike Thoreau, they did not feel as though they had only the American city and the American wilderness to choose between. Adams and James were both refined, civilized, indeed urban men whose animadversions on the American city are made more significant precisely because they were not opposed to cities in principle. They demonstrate what a hard time the American city had at the hands of nineteenthcentury intellectuals. For here at last were two city types who also found the American city sadly wanting. Their reaction to the American city is more esthetic, more literary, more psychological than that of their predecessors Jefferson and Emerson. The two most important documents for an understanding of the views of Adams and James are the former’s Education and the latter’s The American Scene. It is significant that the great problem of the Education of Henry Adams was to steer a course between the poles of town and country, between the Boston and Quincy of his childhood. “Town”, Adams tells us, “was restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing, and breathed by boys without knowing it”.8 Adams also tells us that he spent his life trying to choose between the ways of life they represented, without ever making up his mind. And yet, in a sense, he did make up his mind, or the social forces of America made it up for him. He could not go back to the Quincy house of his grandfather Adams. And, being no Thoreau, he had to live in the American city if he was to live anywhere in America. But what was the American city in his mature years? Surely not Boston but New York. And when Henry Adams looked at the New York of 1868, he tells us in a book which he wrote in 1905 that he felt swept aside by the forces pushing the country in a new direction. “His world”, he lamented, “was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Jaccob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, and intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war”.9 Adams felt like the dispossessed Indian and the buffalo in America after 1865, for it was a banker’s, and neither a buffalo’s nor a Bostonian’s world. To Henry Adams, New York symbolized the spiritual confusion of America at the end of the nineteenth century. Henry James, as one might expect, also complained about his birthplace, New York, after a period of flirtation with it. James attacked it most explicitly in The American Scene, published in 1907 as the report of an expatriate revisiting the country of his birth. He, too, spoke of the city’s chaos, and even the New York skyline insulted his very expressively complex sensibilities. He complained of the lack of history and of the lack of time for history in a way that reminds one of his early critical work on Nathaniel Hawthorne. The buildings, he said, “never speak to you, in the manner of the builded majesties of the world . . . towers, or 8 9

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 238.

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temples, or fortresses or palaces with the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration”.10 History had given way to commerce: “The great city is projected into its future as practically a huge continuous fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of the ancient graces”.11 The city lacked order, structure, dignity, history. James speaks of it as “a heaped industrial battlefield” and as a scene of “the universal will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price”.12 He missed what he called “organic social relations”,13 and he felt some pleasurable relief when he visited Philadelphia, because it didn’t “bristle”, and because “it went back”.14 In this spirit, he warned: “Let not the unwary . . . visit Ellis Island”15 as Henry Adams might have warned in his snobbish way. James was upset by what he called “that loud primary stage of alienism which New York most offers to sight”.16 And he dreamed “of the luxury of some such close and sweet and whole national consciousness as that of the Switzer and the Scot”.17 His final head-shaking conclusion was “that there was no escape from the ubiquitous alien into the future or even into the present; there was no escape but into the past”.18 Of course, one must not forget that Henry James was a cosmopolite, a lifelong inhabitant of cities, a man who is reputed to have dined out more than any resident of London in his day. One must be mindful of the fact that his novel The Princess Casamassima represents an effort to penetrate the depths of London, as does his famous admiring essay on that city. But James viewed the American city in an entirely different way. After his harsh handling of the Boston reformers in The Bostonians, the American city did not provide him with any serious material for a full-length novel because he found neither the uptown nor the downtown of the American city sufficiently interesting, as F. O. Mathiessen has pointed out.19 And even The Princess Casamassima shows a greater interest in the bizarre doings of weirdly inspired misfits and aristocrats, whose philanthropic concern with the slums James satirizes, than a sustained interest in the typical life of London. With characteristic delicacy and insight, he saw the crushing, oppressive defects of the British metropolis of his day, but he could never bring himself to the same kind of sympathetic concern with the American metropolis that we find in Dreiser, Crane, or Norris. Although we are primarily concerned with recording the theme of anti-urbanism in American writing and thinking, it would be absurd to argue that every 10

Henry James, The American Scene (repr. New York, 1946), p. 77. Ibid., p. 92. 12 Ibid., p. 84. 13 Ibid., p. 279. 14 Ibid., pp. 275, 280. 15 Ibid., p. 85. 16 Ibid., p. 86. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 115. 19 F. O. Mathiessen, Introduction to the American Novels and Stories of Henry James (New York, 1947), p. x. 11

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great writer or thinker in the American pantheon was hostile to urban life. The fact is that at the end of the nineteenth century there emerged a tendency to view the American city in a more friendly manner. By contrast to his brother Henry, William James had very little desire to escape from the American city into the past. His philosophy was one of hope, of optimism, of possibility—indeed, a little bit too much so—and it was this that allowed him to view the urbanization of America in a way that might encourage Americans to do something about urban problems. Unlike Henry, he did not adore the great cities of Western Europe. For ten days after his arrival in Florence in 1875, he “was so disgusted with the swarming and reeking blackness of the streets and the age of everything, that enjoyment took place under protest”.20 As for London, during his visit of 1889, he wrote his sister that he was “thoroughly sated” with it, and “never cared to see its yellow-brownness and stale spaciousness again”.21 William James loved the country, but his love of nature was tempered by a fondness for sociability, and therefore he was unable to subscribe either to Thoreau’s primitivism or to the ultracivilized sentiments of his brother. With Emerson he looked to the future, but unlike Emerson he did not think that the future excluded the possibility of a decent life in the cities of America. Many of William James’s reactions to the buzzing confusion of New York of 1880 and 1900 had been unfavorable because of “the clangor, disorder and permanent earthquake conditions” which he experienced on his customary daylong visits. But in 1907 he spent a longer time there and, as he says, “caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated mit, and found it simply magnificent”.22 He spoke of it as an “entirely new New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the great pulses and bounds of progress, so many in directions all simultaneous that the coordination is indefinitely future, give a drumming background of life that I have never felt before. I’m sure that once in that movement, and at home, all other places would seem insipid”.23 This was written to his brother, of all people, after the appearance of the latter’s The American Scene, but William had evidently read the manuscript, for he says: “I observe that your book—‘The American Scene,’—dear H., is just out. I must get it and devour again the chapters relative to New York”. William would not have liked them upon rereading them, and one can imagine how Henry must have winced when William exclaimed, “I’m surprised at you, Henry, not having been more enthusiastic, but perhaps the superbly powerful subway was not opened when you were there!”24 William James, like Walt Whitman, saw virtue and promise in the American city. Both William James and Whitman not only accept the city as an inescapable 20

Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, 1935), vol.1, p. 351. Ibid., p. 412. 22 Henry James (ed.), The Letters of William James (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, p. 264. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 21

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part of America but they enjoy it, as Jefferson most certainly did not. The year of William James’s discovery of what he called “the new New York” was 1907, when he delivered his most famous set of lectures, entitled Pragmatism, at Columbia after having given them in Boston a year earlier. James thought his philosophy would mediate between the views of those whom he called “tenderfoot Bostonians” and those he labeled “Rocky Mountain toughs” in philosophy. It is not too fanciful to suppose that James identified the great future city, along with his pragmatic philosophy, as a blend of, a compromise between, the insipidity of Boston and the craggy brutality of the Rockies. A livable city on earth, one is tempted to say, is the social counterpart of James’s pragmatism, and therefore he is one of the first great American writers to associate himself with the effort to accept what is good and to root out what is bad in the American city. He does not escape to the country with Emerson and Thoreau, or to the past with his brother and Henry Adams. He revives the wisdom of the older Jefferson after a century of transcendentalism, Brook-farming, and expatriation, and adds to it a love of the city. In doing so, he becomes the herald of a pragmatic phase in urban thinking. But this pragmatic phase, in which the city was joyfully described by Frederic C. Howe in 1905 as “The Hope of Democracy”, did not last very long. Indeed, Howe’s book contained within itself the classical argument for the central city’s impending destruction. “The open fields about the city are inviting occupancy”, Howe said, “and there the homes of the future will surely be. The city proper will not remain the permanent home of the people. Population must be dispersed. The great cities of Australia are spread out into the suburbs in a splendid way. For miles around are broad roads, with small houses, gardens, and an opportunity for touch with the freer, sweeter life which the country offers”.25 Howe calls the city the hope of democracy, but he is, it would appear, a suburban booster rather than a city-lover. He shares the basic inability of greater American intellectuals to go all out in their admiration of the modern American city. A more striking illustration of the same thing may be found in the writings of John Dewey, the disciple of William James who sympathized with so much of James’s interest in the American city. In his earlier writings, Dewey expressed a typically progressive interest in the city. This was part of the political liberalism of the period, with its interest in urban-planning, social work, socialism, the single tax, and muckraking. The city was not regarded as a perfect form of life, but it was seen as having promise. And, to the extent to which it showed promise, it became the concern of all sorts of people who could criticize it in a constructive spirit quite different from that which dominated the work of militant anti-urbanists from Jefferson to Henry James. For a variety of reasons, Chicago became the most conspicuous locale of this new way of looking at the city. It was the home of a great university, which had opened its doors in the 1890s and which became a center of urban sociology and, it might be said, of urban philosophy. One can understand, therefore, why William James looked to Dewey and other Chicago 25

Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy (New York, 1905), p. 204.

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intellectuals as his friends, and why they regarded him as their spiritual leader. For Chicago at the turn of the century was the home of James’s pupil, Robert Park, his worshiper, Jane Addams, and his disciple, John Dewey. As early as 1899, Dewey was urging that the congregation of men into cities was one of the most conspicuous features of the modern world and that no theory of education could possibly disregard the fact of urbanization. Indeed, the problem of education, as Dewey saw it in his School and Society, was how to adjust the child to life in the city. The earlier kind of rural environment, in which he had been raised as a boy in Vermont, had its virtues, he admitted. It encouraged habits of personal orderliness, industry, and responsibility; it led to a firsthand acquaintance with nature. But, Dewey said in 1899, “it was useless to bemoan the departure of the good old days . . . if we expect merely by bemoaning and by exhortation to bring them back”.26 The problem, as Dewey saw it, was that of retaining some advantages of the older mode of life while training the child to cope with the new urban world. The school, therefore, was to be a miniature urban community, a microcosmic duplication of macrocosmic Chicago, much as Hull House was in Jane Addams’s eyes. The essence of society, said Dewey—and in this he was joined by Robert Park and other sociologists—was communication, and therefore the school was to encourage and develop this peculiarly social phenomenon, this salient feature of the urban age. Dewey’s progressivism in educational theory was defined by his broad conception of communication, his idea that it takes place while children are building blocks, dancing, and cooking, as well as on the more intellectual level of learning propositions. Soon, however, a new and more critical attitude toward the city began to enter Dewey’s writing. In The Public and Its Problems (1927) he concluded that steam and electricity, the very forces that had created modern society, that had provided it with the means of transportation and communication that made urban concentration possible, were creating a situation in which communication at its most human level was being destroyed. The very forces which brought Bangkok and Chicago closer to each other and which brought people from isolated farms to urban centers had diminished the possibility of “face-to-face” relationships. The “primary group”, in the phrase of the sociologist, Charles Horton Cooley, was disappearing rapidly. And while Dewey did not use our current jargon, he said, in effect, that modern society was becoming a lonely crowd of organization men. Dewey warned: “Unless local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself”.27 But the local communal unit of which Dewey spoke now was not the enormous city as it was coming to be known in the twentieth century. It was more like the University Elementary School at the University of Chicago, or Hull House. “Democracy must begin at home”, Dewey said, “and its home is the neighborly community”.28 As a result, a curious reversal takes place in Dewey’s thinking. Instead of taking 26

John Dewey, School and Society (Chicago, 1899), p. 9. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (repr., Chicago, 1946), p. 216. 28 Ibid., p. 213. 27

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the city as the model for the progressive school, he almost speaks as though the urban community should be modeled on the progressive school. Jefferson wrote at the end of his life: “As Cato concluded every speech with the words, ‘Carthago delenda est,’ so do I every opinion with the injunction, ‘Divide the counties into wards.’ ” At the end of his life, Dewey seemed to conclude every speech with the words, “Divide the cities into progressive schools and settlement houses”. It is ironic to find the most influential philosopher of the urban age in America reverting to the localism of Jefferson, but no more ironic than the anti-urbanism of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, our most distinctive architects. For functionalism, like pragmatism, is one of a complex of American ideas that could not exist in a nonurban society, and yet its greatest spokesmen seem to hate the American city. Sullivan’s Autobiography records his distaste for Boston in his childhood, and in his Kindergarten Chats he fulminates against New York and Chicago. “Lieber Meister”, as Wright called Sullivan, bequeathed this hostility to his disciple, and the disciple, as everyone knows, added his own powerful spice to the brew of anti-urbanism. John Dewey may have reverted to Jefferson’s localism, but Wright was a little more partial to Emerson. Not only are there copious references to Emerson in Wright’s books but he adds as a red-printed appendix to The Living City a long excerpt from Emerson’s essay “Farming”, which concludes with a typically transcendental warning: “Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial”. And so the great American architect of the twentieth century went back spiritually to Concord, while the great American philosopher retreated to Monticello. One moral of this tale is that city-loving urban reformers will not find much boosting or sentimental admiration of city life in the writings of those who have been canonized in our national literature and philosophy. A brief flurry of prourban sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century under the encouraging eye of Walt Whitman and William James was swiftly buried by the exploding megalopolis, but after it our most sensitive and gifted intellectuals went on criticizing the American city. Readers who may feel that this story is based on an excessively narrow selection of writers and thinkers should remember that other readers will find in these pages the names of our greatest political thinker, our greatest essayist, our greatest philosopher, our greatest theorist of education, our greatest novelist, our greatest autobiographer, and our greatest architect, all of them throwing up their hands about the most distinctive and most pressing features of our national life. If their views should not be typical of the nation’s view on this topic, that in itself would be a fact that is worth recording and pondering. Moreover, it is impossible to produce a list of pro-urban American thinkers who remotely approach this collection in distinction and intellectual influence. In spite of the anti-urbanism of our literary and philosophical tradition, the city planner would make a grave mistake if he were to dismiss that tradition, if he were to treat it as a point of view from which nothing could be learned, if he were to forget it and disregard it. Those who must live in today’s American city or who like to live in it can profit by taking seriously the urban criticism of our

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great writers, for it was deep and many-sided. It was not only esthetic but also moral in character. Henry James spoke most persuasively for those who saw the city as a scene of chaos as it presented itself to “the painter’s eye”. It lacked order, structure, history, and dignity in 1907, and God knows that these virtues have not been miraculously supplied in the age of urban sprawl and suburban slums. But the city, as Robert Park said, is a state of mind as well as an esthetic object, and the profoundest critics of the American city have found other faults with it. When Jefferson warned of the dangers of what he called the city mob, when Emerson complained of the city’s artificiality and conventionalism, when John Dewey lamented the decline of neighborliness, all of them thought of the city as a place in which certain basic human values were being subverted, values which are as cherishable today as they were in the eighteenth century of Jefferson, the nineteenth century of Emerson, and the twentieth century of Dewey. And what are those values? Jefferson’s worry about the mobs of the city arose from doubt about the American city’s capacity to educate its inhabitants in a way that would preserve and extend the democratic process. And when Emerson worried about the growth of artificiality and conventionalism in the city, he was thinking, as were his contemporaries Kierkegaard and John Stuart Mill, about the increase in conformity, about the decline of individuality which was proportional to the increase of urbanization in America. Dewey’s main concern was with the improvement of human communication within the city, and by communication he did not mean the exchange of information alone. He valued the capacity to share feelings and experiences, the capacity to discuss with, to learn from and intelligently persuade others, and to live with them in the profoundest sense. Who can deny in 1960, then, that the great problem of the American city is to demonstrate at least three things: first, that it can solve the problem of education for the millions of people who are entering its gates, that it can absorb the Puerto Rican, as it has other immigrant groups, into the democratic process; second, that it can foster individuality, the capacity and the right of the human being to develop into a rounded personality who is concerned with more than merely commercial values; and third, that it can be more than a vast prison of unconnected cells in which people of different occupations, color, class, or creed fail to understand one another on the basic human issues of social life, let alone agree with one another. The moral message of the intellectual critic of the city today is not fundamentally different from what it was in the age of Jefferson, Emerson, and Dewey. For today’s serious thinker must also build upon a respect for the fundamental values of education, individuality, and easy communication among men. But, unlike his predecessors, he cannot deceive himself about the place in which those values must be realized today. The wilderness, the isolated farm, the plantation, the selfcontained New England town, the detached neighborhood are things of the past. All the world’s a city now and there is no escaping urbanization, not even in outer space.

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The Philosopher and the Metropolis in America (1963)

IN THE INTELLECTUAL VERSUS THE CITY, Lucia White and I argued that dismay and distrust have been predominant attitudes of the American intellectual toward the American city.1 This, we argued, is true not only of famous American novelists, sociologists, social workers, and architects, but also of influential philosophers and philosophically minded writers from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. In our book, we examined the views of philosophers side-by-side with those of social workers, sociologists, literary men, and other intellectuals who wrote during the same period, and therefore we presented no continuous examination of what our major philosophical thinkers said or felt about urban life in America. But there are good reasons for lifting Jefferson, Emerson, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, and George Santayana from the stream of American intellectual history and focusing on their views of the city. For one thing, they were all distinguished and influential minds, whose writings on urban problems have intrinsic interest, for another, they represent a great variety of philosophical doctrine and therefore demonstrate that distrust and fear of the American city is not the exclusive possession of one system of thought or one Weltanschauung. Also, the fact that they reacted critically to the American city shows how deep and pervasive anti-urban feeling has been in America, and that it cannot be identified simply with roughneck prejudice, ignorance, or philistinism. Not only farmers and their agrarian spokesmen have criticized the American city but also philosophers whom one might have associated with a very different set of attitudes on this question; on this issue, poet, peasant, and all sorts of philosophers were united. MAJOR PHASES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Before trying to defend this thesis, I must say a word about the different sorts of philosophies that Americans have espoused since colonial times. The history of American philosophy has gone through four major phases: the age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the age of Transcendentalism in the early nineteenth century, the so-called golden age from the 1890s to the First World War, and the present age of analysis and pragmatism. In the age of Enlightenment, the empiricism of the eighteenth century predominated and expressed itself with 1 Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); see also their “The American Intellectual versus the American City,” Daedalus, vol. 90 (1981), pp. 166–79, reprinted in The Future Metropolis, ed. Lloyd Rodwin (New York, 1981), pp. 214–32, and above.

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vigorous practical intent in the writing and thinking of Jefferson. But Emerson, Thoreau, and their Transcendentalist friends turned their backs on the philosophy that had nourished Jefferson and Franklin, and they used Coleridge’s interpretation of Kantian idealism to create a romantic world-view that was antithetical to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. After the Civil War, the influence of these American pundits was undermined by intellectual forces that corresponded to social forces that were radically transforming the American scene. In New England, after the death of Emerson in 1882, the transcendental era gave way to what has been called the golden age of American philosophy. It began with William James, who was later joined by Royce and Santayana at Harvard to form one of the most powerful triumvirates to dominate a single philosophical department. James spoke for pragmatism, Royce for idealism, and Santayana for materialism tempered by classical wisdom and good taste. James and Royce of the golden trio had been influenced by the erratic genius Charles Peirce, and all three had great impact on the monumental, scientifically oriented John Dewey. Partly under the influence of these figures, a new age of American philosophy emerged. In this essay, I wish to confine myself to the ideas of certain philosophers in the first three of these periods, and to ask what views of urban life they advocated and encouraged during the era of Enlightenment, the era of Transcendentalism, and the golden age. Even though they did not offer systematic sociological analyses of the city, they expressed deep feelings and thoughts about it from 1784, when Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia appeared, to John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, published in 1927.

JEFFERSON’S EMPIRICAL ANTI-URBANISM What were those feelings and thoughts? Let us begin with Jefferson. In the eighteenth century, the American city was too small and inconspicuous to cause him any great concern, but when he looked across the Atlantic at the European cities he knew, he expressed his anxiety about allowing such things to exist in America. In spite of his attachment to the values of civilization as conceived by enlightened philosophers of the eighteenth century, Jefferson despised the manners and morals of the urban crowd and prayed that they would not be imported to this country, the home of the brave and innocent farmer. Even when his concern for national interests led him to revise his views after the War of 1812, Jefferson did not change his view of the urban crowd when he came to respect the value of urban industry to a new country faced by threatening powers across the sea. Jefferson’s later acceptance of the American city was grudging rather than fulsome and loving. Moreover, Benjamin Franklin, of whom one thinks automatically when one thinks of colonial Philadelphia, was not an ideological partisan of urban life. Indeed, he was an agrarian pamphleteer who did not conduct an intellectual crusade against the country.

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For those who think of the Enlightenment as a period in which the values of reason and the graces of urban civilization were greatly admired, the reaction of Jefferson to the city may cause some surprise. He had to fight hard at times to convince himself that the nation should stay down on the farm, especially after he had seen Paris and had been enchanted by its charm and its concert halls, but Parisian chamber music, which he dearly loved, could not move Jefferson to change his mind about the dangers of urbanization. While he admitted that the great cities of Europe encouraged the fine arts, he thought that their elegance could not outweigh the danger of their sapping America’s moral and spiritual strength. Even after he conceded that we needed cities for our national defense, he continued to express horror at their spirit and style. Because Jefferson was an empiricist and an active political man, he could not assess the city in purely emotional terms, but the Transcendentalists who came after him in the history of American thought were literary men rather than statesmen, and their metaphysical aspirations were more abstract than Jefferson’s. They could not control their anti-urban animus as effectively as Jefferson controlled his after 1812. The aged Jefferson accepted the American city as a necessity, but soon afterward the trumpets of a more militant anti-urbanism were played by romantic metaphysicians with little sympathy for colonial epistemology and with no inclination to serenade the American city.

EMERSON’S METAPHYSICAL ANTI-URBANISM While Jefferson was an empiricist, Emerson repudiated British empiricism and French materialism, and he linked his Transcendentalism to his distaste for the city. Following the Kantian Coleridge, he distinguished sharply between the Understanding and the Reason. The Understanding, according to Emerson, “toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues; nearsighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the expedient, the customary”, while the Reason, which was for him the highest faculty of the soul, “never reasons, never proves; it simply perceives; it is vision”.2 Reason was for Emerson the soaring faculty of the forestphilosopher and the peasant-poet whereas the Understanding was that of the city-bound, lumbering scientist. Reason, Emerson asserted, is characteristically exercised in the country, while the Understanding is an urban faculty. The city, he declared, “delights the Understanding. It is made up of finites: short, sharp, mathematical lines, all calculable. It is full of varieties, of successions, of contrivances. The country, on the contrary, offers an unbroken horizon, the monotony of endless road, of vast uniform plains, of distant mountains, the melancholy of uniform and infinite vegetation; the objects on the road are few and worthless, the eye is invited ever to the horizon and the clouds. It is the school of Reason”.3 2

The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by R. L. Rusk (New York, 1939), vol. 1, pp. 412–13. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (Boston, 1909–14), vol. 5 pp. 310–11; see Sherman Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 79–82. 3

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Faith was another faculty that Emerson preferred to the empirical Understanding, and he found little faith in the city. In 1840 he wrote to Carlyle: “I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other’s secrets and each to keep the other’s madness in countenance. You can scarce drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason”.4 In 1854 he developed the same theme of urban deception in his Journal: “Rest on your humanity, and it will supply you with strength and hope and vision for the day. Solitude and the country, books and openness, will feed you; but go into the city—I am afraid there is no morning in Chestnut Street, it is full of rememberers, they shun each other’s eyes, they are all wrinkled with memory of the tricks they have played, or mean to play, on each other, of petty arts and aims all contracting and lowering their aspect and character”.5 Yet Emerson was too sociable and too instinctively democratic to shun cities altogether. He was a great conversationalist and was always prepared to give up a night in the country for elevating talk at Boston’s Saturday Club. So, while Jefferson came to regard cities as arsenals for the young Republic, Emerson admired them because they provided hotel rooms in which the Saturday Club might meet. Emerson’s view of the American city was linked with his idealistic worldview and epistemology whereas Jefferson’s was influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment. In his Notes on Virginia, he expressed great distaste for the ways of the citified, but he did not try to justify his distaste by appealing to a system of values in which the artificial city is regarded as inferior to untouched nature. As a child of the eighteenth century, Jefferson did not disparage artifice as such, nor did he share Emerson’s contempt for the empirical Understanding. For Jefferson, God is the great artificer whose existence is established by scientific inference from signs of design in the world, and therefore Jefferson did not regard artificiality as bad in itself. By contrast, Emerson wove his anti-urbanism into his metaphysics when he published Nature in 1836. He faced a more menacing American city than Jefferson had in 1812, and his reaction to it, like that of his comrade Thoreau, dominated much of American literature before the Civil War. Despite their philosophical differences, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau preferred life in Monticello, Concord, and Walden, and from those retreats they looked suspiciously at Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. JAMES’S CRITIQUE OF BIGNESS Having considered two stages in my story of American philosophy’s attitude toward the American city, I now turn to views of it after the Civil War, that great divide in our national history. In that period, William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana were professors who lectured to students, and their 4 The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1883), vol. 1, pp. 269–70. 5 The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston, 1937), p. 264.

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standards of philosophical rigor were far above those of their predecessors. The pragmatism of Peirce and James came upon the scene in the wake of Darwinism; idealism was armed by Royce with logical weapons that Emerson lacked; and Santayana bravely called himself a materialist. Science, technology, and logic were no longer scorned and philosophers lived in an America that was becoming more and more urbanized yet the earlier fear, dismay, and distrust of the American city continued. Of the Harvard philosophers, William James was the most sympathetic to what he called the new New York at the turn of the twentieth century; and, more than any other American of his generation, he was admired by new urban immigrants and their patrons in settlement houses. Unlike his brother Henry, he was not offended by what Henry called the primary stage of alienism, nor did he want to escape from New York into a cozier past. But in 1899 William penned a credo that served as a text for a whole generation of progressive reformers of the city. He wrote to a friend: “I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results”.6 While the big nation troubled James, fear of the brutal, hollow, and big city inspired admirers of his like Jane Addams to try to fill the urban void, and his distaste for bigness was part of a more general set of attitudes that he shared with Royce, his idealist opponent, and with Santayana, his materialist critic. So once again we find the American philosophical mind united against the city no matter how it might have been divided about God, freedom, and immortality.

ROYCE’S PROVINCIAL COMMUNITY While the reforming disciples of William James worked hard to combat the growing hollowness of American cities after the Civil War, his colleague Royce proposed a different solution. Royce admired life in the provincial community and thought a return to its spirit might eradicate the three main evils he saw in America at the turn of the twentieth century: one was the presence “of a considerable number of not yet assimilated newcomers” who were often a boon and welcome but who constituted a “source of social danger”;7 another was the leveling tendency produced by centralization and consolidation in an urban society; and a third was the spirit of “the mob”. In his Philosophy of Loyalty of 1908, Royce analyzed these evils with the help of Hegel’s concept of alienation or 6

The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, p. 90. Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (New York, 1908), p. 73. 7

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estrangement, much as Karl Marx had with a very different political goal in mind. Hegel, Royce recalled sympathetically, had pointed out that in certain periods of European history the social mind of the Spirit had become “estranged from itself”, notably during the decline of the Roman Empire and the period of political absolutism in the seventeenth and in the early eighteenth century. By contrast, Royce declared, the social spirit was not alienated in the time of our thirteen colonies, which were small provinces. “In the province,” he said, “the social mind is naturally aware of itself as at home with its own,” but in the twentieth century America had become the scene of urban alienation and the individual was confronted by powers that he could not understand and to which he submitted without love or loyalty.8 This spirit of alienation might be overcome, Royce thought, if the American spirit were to come to know itself better, if Americans were to combat the forces leading to detachment and loneliness by repairing to the provinces. In the romantic era, he said, the poet Schiller had hoped to escape from a self-estranged world to a world of dreams, but Royce was not drawn in that direction. Instead he found hope in the American province. “There must we flee from the stress of the now too vast and problematic life of the nation as a whole. There we must flee . . . , not in the sense of a cowardly and permanent retirement, but in the sense of a search for renewed strength, for a social inspiration, for the salvation of the individual from the overwhelming forces of consolidation. Freedom, I should say, dwells now in the small social group, and has its securest home in the provincial life.”9

SANTAYANA’S ARISTOCRATIC ANTI-URBANISM Royce’s pupil Santayana could not have been more different from him in philosophy. Royce was an idealist, Santayana a materialist; one was a logician, the other a poet. One received his nourishment from Kant and the post-Kantian idealists, the other went back to ancient Greece for philosophical insight and practical wisdom. And while Royce was a learned professor who was admired by students who looked forward to their own chairs in philosophy, Santayana was an esthete, a fastidious devotee of the arts who despised most of the eager professional aspirants who sat in his graduate classes. He was a high-brow counterpart of the unassimilated strangers whom Royce had in mind when he spoke anxiously of the newcomers who were filling American cities. Born a Spaniard and a Catholic, Santayana was not at home in the Protestant New England of his day. He was contemptuous of those who took a commercial path to success, and by temperament he was cool and detached. Throughout his writings, especially his autobiographical writings, he expressed his antipathy to what he calls “Judaism”, “Liberalism”, and “Positivism”, all of which were heavily represented in the New York 8 9

Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York, 1908), p. 239. Royce, Race Questions, pp. 97–98.

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he knew. And therefore New York was always a source of disturbance to him despite the admiration that some of its philosophers felt for his work. There, he said, everything was “miscellaneous, urgent, and on an overwhelming scale”; there, he complained, “nothing counts but realization”.10 The tendency to think of Santayana as urbane and antiromantic in his philosophy has obscured his hostile attitude toward metropolitan life in America. But the fact is that he thought of commercial towns as feeding on, and levying a toll on, everything transportable. “However much they may collect and exhibit the riches of the world they will not breed anything original.”11 Even nineteenthcentury London, which Henry James admired so much, was for Santayana a “Babel of false principles and blind cravings”, and Paris to him was “false, cynical and covetous”.12 He said he loved the earth while he hated the world, and he thought that ideal communities, like moral ideals, should be rooted in the earth. In the end, therefore, the poetic Santayana did not differ very much from the logical Royce in his opinion of the city. Santayana believed that the modern world had become monstrous in certain of its aspects and that a leveling tendency was abroad in the world. Being estranged from that world and lacking Royce’s reforming zeal, Santayana did not advocate a return to the provinces, but his views on the city were not far from Royce’s. Just as Santayana’s moral philosophy required that ideals be anchored in natural impulses, and that one must be a beast in order to be a spirit, so his ideal city was rooted in the land. Once again, we find a meeting of philosophical extremes against the city, an occasion for Royce the idealistic provincialist and Santayana the naturalistic alien to compose their differences in their Harvard classrooms while far from the madding urban crowd. JOHN DEWEY AND THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY So far I have considered the views on the American city of major philosophers with the great exception of John Dewey. Dewey’s views on the city, as one might have expected, resembled those of William James more than they resembled those of the other philosophers I have been discussing. As a pragmatist, Dewey admired many of the forces that were urbanizing America at the end of the nineteenth century: technology, science, industrialization, and the matter-of-fact outlook which they encouraged. And, as one who lived most of his adult life in Chicago and New York, he knew at firsthand the spirit of the metropolis. It was unlike anything that Jefferson could have known or dreamed of in Monticello, far from Concord and Walden, and a world away from the Cambridge of James, Royce, and Santayana. To the practical problems of the metropolis, Dewey addressed himself with more vigor and courage than any other major philosopher 10

The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill., 1940), pp. 580–81. George Santayana, The Middle Span (New York, 1945), pp. 25–26. 12 Ibid., p. 22. 11

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in our history. Like William James, he was free of prejudice against its immigrant residents; like James, he opposed urban corruption and national departures from high ideals; and like James, he loved the miscellaneousness of urban life. He was no agrarian, no Transcendentalist, no absolute idealist, no snob, no antisemite, no esthete. And yet he was worried by the forces of urbanization. That did not make him an anti-urbanist or a city-hater, but he had his links with the tradition of anti-urbanism in American thought. Dewey converged with Jane Addams and Robert Park, two other disciples and admirers of William James, since they all respected the values of what sociologists called the primary group; and they all tried to combat the hollowness and blind, brutal bigness of which James complained. In contrast to Royce, they advocated what Park called a new parochialism, a way of life that would re-create some of the values of an earlier world in an urban context. This helps explain Jane Addams’s attachment to the settlement house and Dewey’s idea that the schoolroom provided a device for improving our way of life. Perhaps the most articulate expression of this appears in Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927). Echoing some of Royce’s fears and those of Germans who distinguished between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, Dewey wrote: “The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a society but it is no community. The invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life”.13 An age that had expanded the physical means of communication, he said, had failed to use them properly. The revolution that had brought Bangkok and New York closer together had turned New York into a vast hotel in which neighbors did not communicate with one another in spite of having telephones in each room. And so the problem of America in 1927, according to Dewey, was to convert the Great Society into a Great Community. How this was to be brought about he did not say in detail, but, like Robert Park, he was an advocate of the new parochialism. Dewey emphasized the need for increased communication, and communication, he urged, was necessarily face-to-face in character. Immediate community had to be established if the great society was to be successfully converted into a great community. It should not surprise us, therefore, to find Dewey returning to two earlier figures in our story. He had always had a fondness for Emerson, whom he once called the moral philosopher of democracy, and he cited the Concord sage with approval at the end of The Public and Its Problems: “We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium”.14 The second familiar figure he cited was Jefferson. At the age of eighty-one, Dewey presented an exposition of Jefferson’s political philosophy in which Dewey insisted that Jefferson was not merely a spokesman for states’ rights as against the claims of the nation, but that he also attached 13 14

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York, 1927), p. 98. Ibid., p. 219.

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immense importance to self-governing communities that were smaller in size. Jefferson had been impressed by the virtues of the New England township and said that counties should be divided into wards if democracy was to work properly; and it was Jefferson’s affection for wards that captivated the older Dewey, who was a born Vermonter. Jefferson said that he might have concluded every speech with the words, “Divide the counties into wards”. And, in a similar spirit, Dewey might have concluded every one of his with the words, “Divide the cities into immediate communities”, just as Jane Addams might have declaimed, “Divide the cities into settlement houses”, and Park, “Divide the cities into primary groups”. This socalled new parochialism was their proposal in the first quarter of the twentieth century for the solution of some of the problems created by urbanization. It was an effort to fill the emptiness of the great city by building on the idea that the city lacked something that older preurban American communities possessed. It was not an effort to provide new forms of association for city dwellers, but rather an effort to plant older ones in an urban context.

TRANSCENDING ANTI-URBANISM I have now completed my survey of the major phases of philosophical reflection on urban life: the age of Jefferson, the era of Emerson, and the period of James, Royce, Dewey, and Santayana. I have tried to show that in different ways and in varying degrees American philosophers of very different points of view have been distrustful of, or dismayed by, the American city. Our nation’s philosophical history has been characterized by a persistent distaste for urban life that has been associated with a preference for the farmer’s life, for the hermit’s life, for life in the wilderness, for life in a provincial community, for life in soil-rooted cities, for life in wards as opposed to counties, and for life in communities served by settlement houses and progressive schools. I would add that the philosophers’ reactions to the American city were paralleled in other fields of intellectual and literary endeavor; that the philosophers I have dealt with grew up in a pre-urban phase of American history; and that we cannot explain anti-urbanism in purely ideological terms because very different kinds of philosophers have shared similar feelings about the city. In connection with this last point, we must recognize that the philosophers’ critique of the American city cannot be explained by the allegedly inherent romanticism of the American mind. The fact is that of all our major philosophers only Emerson may be called a romantic. Among the philosophers I have discussed, he alone tied his attack on the city to a belief that the country or the wilderness was superior to the artificial city. Even the idealist Royce refused to fly with Schiller to a romantic dream world, and both Dewey and James criticized the American city as partisans of civilization rather than as romanticists drugged by the love of untouched Nature. One of the more striking features of the philosophical criticism of the American city is the fact that after the Civil War it was

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dominated by a respect for the civilized values of order, rationality, and communication, and not by a love of the wilderness. The urbanization of the nation after the Civil War brought about a decline of romantic ideology in the highest reaches of our intellectual life, and therefore the city was criticized for reasons that were very different from those advanced by metaphysical Transcendental romantics. When the American city was found wanting by James, Royce, Dewey, and others who were not romantic metaphysicians, it was criticized on grounds that did not grow out of irrational prejudice or metaphysical doctrine. Philosophical students of the city were not all heirs of Natty Bumppo, not all worshipers of the forest, and therefore we cannot say that anti-urbanism is inherent in the American mind as illustrated by our philosophers. For that reason, we can hope that some day we may develop a coherent philosophy of urban life, a philosophy based not on distrust of the American city but rather on affectionate, sympathetic concern for its well-being. In creating such a philosophy, Americans will demonstrate that they can overcome the strain of anti-urbanism in our philosophical tradition and show conclusively that it is not a part of our national character.

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P A R T V I I

Philosophers In this part, I include a few pieces about philosophers I have greatly admired and from whom I learned much even when disagreeing with them. I reprint reviews of books on William James and Santayana, and an article on my reactions to philosophy in England shortly after the Second World War. After that I present some memories of G. E. Moore as a person, philosopher, and teacher, followed by a talk on W. V. Quine that I delivered at a meeting in honor of his memory.

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William James (1986)

IT IS MORE THAN a half century since Ralph Barton Perry published his magisterial and worshipful Thought and Character of William James, and for many years since then philosophers have hoped that someone would critically re-examine the thought of William James with a less adoring attitude than Perry’s, and, of course, with less ignorance and misunderstanding than one finds among authors who have written about James with only the foggiest ideas of what he stood for philosophically. Students of the history of American culture have similarly hoped that the life of William James would be carefully re-examined by a scholar who could not only understand James’s intellectual contributions but also evaluate the hypotheses advanced since the appearance of Perry’s book by literary critics, historians, and psychiatrists who have bravely delved into William’s complicated personal relations with his father Henry, his brother Henry, his sister Alice, and his wife Alice. In partial fulfillment of these high hopes, William James: His Life and Thought by Gerald E. Myers is the most informed study of William James’s life and thought to appear in the last 50 years. Myers writes about James’s life only briefly, but with sympathy and understanding, and without regarding William as the victimized son of Henry Sr., the victimizing brother of Henry Jr., the erotically flirtatious brother of his sister Alice, or the neurotically fugitive husband of his wife Alice. Myers’s first chapter is a scholarly and penetrating discussion of William’s life among the Henrys and the Alices; Myers rejects the more extreme views of a number of Freudians, but always with the serious inquirer’s advantage of having read pages and pages of Jamesiana in the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the logically acute philosopher’s advantage of knowing what it is to support a belief by supplying cogent evidence for it. Such knowledge leads Myers to pour cool, but not icy, water on the view that Henry Sr. caused William’s first neurotic symptoms by urging him to choose science rather than art as a vocation; it encourages Myers to question the view that throughout his life William harbored a deep animus against Henry Jr.; and it leads Myers to doubt that William’s engagement precipitated his sister Alice’s mental breakdown. Myers’s measured reflections on these and related matters help him avoid questionable hypotheses about what James was like as a human being. He shows us how this seemingly sunny “adorable genius”, as Whitehead once called him, handled his depressions and exhausting bouts of anxiety, and how he fought his way to become the foremost American philosopher of his time while suffering intensely painful backaches, insomnia, eye trouble, and other ailments that, according to Myers, have been dubiously diagnosed by amateur and

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professional psychiatrists, who have exaggerated the psychosexual significance of James’s symptoms. The image of James as a self-absorbed, enigmatic, depressed neurotic, “though not strictly incorrect, is lopsided”, says Myers. James, he continues, wrote prolifically, traveled in Europe, attended concerts and the theater, visited museums, hiked, spoke before large and enthusiastic audiences, mixed with distinguished company, and proudly fathered five children. Although Myers tries hard to tone down some of the more exaggerated claims about James’s psyche, his interest in James’s emotional life is altogether secondary to his interest in James the thinker. Once Myers has had his sensible say in chapter one about James’s life with father, brother, sister, and wife (mother, for some reason, is no big problem for the biographers), he quickly moves on to a very different sort of discussion of James’s philosophy and psychology. Myers is not systematically concerned with the intellectual influences on James’s thought, nor with the general cultural atmosphere in which he worked; he therefore says little about the philosophical connections between James, Peirce, and Dewey, and little about the impact of other thinkers on James. But even without the extra volume or two that Myers says he would have needed for a study of this impact, his book contains about 130 single-spaced pages of footnotes, which follow 480 pages of a text that teems with philosophical and psychological explanations. Certainly, therefore, Myers has every right to be pleased by the formidable amount of research he has done. But, unfortunately, he has no right to claim to have discovered a “previously unknown” manuscript, “The Foreboding Meeting; or, The Artist’s Fate”, in which James describes, with the help of his own charming drawings, an encounter with Emerson that is thought to have taken place in 1864; the fact is that this manuscript was reproduced photographically in 1920 by William’s son Henry in a limited edition of The Letters of William James that Myers has understandably overlooked. Luckily, however, for Myers, who needs a transition from his introductory biographical chapter to his discussion of James’s ideas, James explicitly linked his mental troubles to his philosophy when he indicated in 1870 that he had been helped out of a severe depression by adopting the view that the will is free. At the age of 28, James seems to have emerged from an early bout of his recurrent ailment after accepting the view of Charles Renouvier that we have free will insofar as we can sustain a thought because we choose to, when we might have other thoughts instead. James announced in his diary, where he reported “a crisis in my life”, that he would assume that he had free will in Renouvier’s sense and that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Myers’s account of this famous episode of 1870 enables him to move smoothly from his own biographical chapter to thirteen critically expository chapters about James’s views on consciousness, sensation, and perception, space, time, memory, attention and will, emotion, thought, knowledge, reality, self, morality, and religion. Of course, not all of James’s beliefs on these topics are regarded by Myers (or by James) as curative in the way that James’s beliefs on free will were supposed by him to be, but Myers rightly points out—as Perry did before him—that much of James’s think-

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ing was dominated by the idea that philosophy, if taken seriously, can alter one’s life, and Myers naturally observes that this goes a long way toward explaining why he was so popular a philosopher and so important a figure in American intellectual life. Myers is determined to probe James’s views in psychology and philosophy with an eye on more recent work in both of those disciplines. His determination to examine his subject exhaustively leads him to write much that is informative and illuminating, but also much that is repetitious, scattered, and confusing. Myers seems to have read virtually every word written by James and an astonishing amount in the commentaries on him, but too often it is either difficult to understand what Myers’s main points are, or it is all too easy to do so because he keeps making them over and over again. This is especially true when Myers treats certain sections of James’s two-volume masterwork, Principles of Psychology (1890). While discussing these sections, Myers often drives his reader to the writings of James himself, not only for enlightenment about what Myers is trying to say but also for comic relief. After all, how many psychologists illustrate their ideas by pointing to the similarity between the sounds of “Pas de lieu Rhoˆne que nous” and those of “paddle your own canoe”? Because Myers can at times be repetitive and verbose, many readers of his book will take to paddling through it selectively. They may feel quite justified, for example, in seeking other waters after reading: “When James said, ‘Space is really an indeterminate vastness,’ what did he mean? Because his treatment of this topic is minimal, we must conjecture somewhat.” A conscientious reader should feel only minimally guilty about letting Myers conjecture here by himself, for even such a reader, like a reviewer who is not granted an indeterminate vastness of space, will prefer to concentrate on more central ideas that worried James throughout his philosophical life. Although James is now the subject of renewed and energetic attention, when I was a student he was not regarded as a philosopher to be reckoned with very seriously. He was acknowledged to be a fascinating figure in the history of American thought, the author of a great work in psychology, a delightful stylist, and a remarkably generous man, but in the 1930s he was very much overshadowed by Charles Peirce and John Dewey, at least in the philosophical circles in which I traveled. Peirce was celebrated in those days as the anticipator of logical positivism, and as the author of a version of pragmatism that was thought to be superior to that of James; Dewey was widely heralded as a theorist of inquiry, as a philosopher of progressive education, and as a liberal political thinker whose ideas counted more heavily than James’s in the world of action. Influenced in part by such views and attitudes, I did not come to realize James’s greatness as a philosopher until the late 1940s; and now, stimulated by Myers’s rich and imposing work, I want to focus on some of James’s philosophical views that I think deserve special emphasis today. In my opinion, James’s greatest contribution was to lay special emphasis on the role of experience and of emotion in his reflections on the tasks of science, philosophy, and religion, and, as he grew older, to call more and more attention

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to the limitations of what he called intellectualism or rationalism. Yet in Principles of Psychology, James made many concessions to rationalism. He spoke there of abstract ideas or universals, such as redness and blueness as the meanings of the predicates “red” and “blue”, and he maintained that some statements, such as “No red thing is blue”, may be seen to be true merely by inspecting these abstract ideas or meanings, and without observing concrete physical objects. Accordingly, he was in some parts of his writing a dualist who thought that there were two radically different kinds of truths, some of them a priori and necessary because they do not require testing by sensory experience, and others a posteriori and contingent because they do. The truths of pure mathematics, he often said, fall into the first group, whereas the truths of natural science fall into the other. But there is an opposing strand of thought in James’s Pragmatism (1907), a strand to which I think Myers pays insufficient attention. In some parts of Pragmatism, James adumbrated an epistemology that serves to undermine his own dualism of a priori and a posteriori truth, even though he inconsistently subscribed to the very same dualism in other parts of the work. At one point in Pragmatism, James observes that every individual who settles into a new opinion comes to it with a stock of old opinions, and that sometimes a new opinion will emerge after a new experience subjects the stock to a strain. The new experience means trouble for the inquirer, who tries to escape from it by modifying the stock. But, James continues, he does so by trying to change opinions that resist change variously. Some of them, James says, are held very firmly, and are abandoned late in the day if at all; others are more quickly surrendered. When James speaks in this way, he seems to replace his sharp distinction of kind between a priori and a posteriori truth with a gradualistic distinction, or a distinction of degree. According to this sort of distinction, even the supposedly necessary and immutable truths of logic and pure mathematics cease to be necessary and immutable. To use James’s own word, they are “plastic”, in the sense of pliable; some of them are what he called “older truths”, to which we remain loyal but which we may alter or surrender if the need to deal with the challenge of experience becomes pressing enough. According to this strand in James’s philosophy, the process of coming to regard a new opinion as true is one in which we seek to find an opinion that will mediate between the old stock and the new experiences, and in this process any belief in the old stock, even one in mathematics, logic, or metaphysics, is at the mercy of experience. If we focus on this antidualistic element in James’s wobbly thinking on this subject, we can see how he anticipated ideas advanced by philosophers in our own time who have attacked the positivistic distinction between analytic and synthetic truth. And if, in the same spirit, we emphasize that in his gradualistic moods James shied away from the idea that concepts have essences that are analyzed in so-called analytic statements, we may better appreciate why James sometimes insisted, as Myers points out, that his pragmatic theory of truth was not an effort to define the essence of truth, or to present the meaning of the word “true”, but rather a “genetic” theory that specifies the motives that impel us to apply the word “true”. If—in spite of some of James’s own misleading words—we approach

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his theory of truth in this way, we can better understand why he regarded the believer as “a whole man” whose emotions play a part in deciding what beliefs to accept as true. When James says that a new experience will stimulate an individual to accept a belief that conveniently “marries” that new experience with a stock of old opinions, James construes the notion of new experience very broadly. Such an experience, he says, occurs when somebody contradicts the old opinions, or when the individual discovers in a reflective moment that they contradict each other, or when the individual “hears of facts with which they are incompatible”, or when “desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy”. Note well that last clause about unsatisfied desires, since it is an opening wedge for emotion in James’s views on science, metaphysics, and religion. When discussing the method of science, James says that if two new opinions or theories that accommodate a new sensory experience are equally compatible with our previous stock of beliefs, we may accept one of them simply because the other fails to satisfy our desire for elegance, simplicity, or economy. His inclusion of taste or elegance as a claimant in the process of deciding which of “two equally well-evidenced” opinions to accept could hardly have outraged students of scientific method among his readers. But James went much further. After noting the desire for scientific elegance in his discussion of the process of accepting beliefs, he militantly argued that all sorts of beliefs could be granted respectability under license of other emotions—chiefly certain metaphysical and religious beliefs that nineteenth-century positivists and agnostics such as Huxley and Clifford had sternly barred from entering the sacred precincts of science or its philosophy. James pushed hard on this opening wedge as he pressed the claims of “the whole man within us”. Probably the most brilliant example of his use of such pressure occurred in his discussion of free will after Renouvier had supposedly awakened him from his neurotic slumbers. James held that our choices are not determined, caused, or necessitated, but he did not think that he could defend his view by using sensory experience or logic alone. He regarded determinism and the belief in free will as two metaphysical opinions between which he had to choose—since he regarded them as incompatible—but he held that because neither logic nor sensory experience gave the palm to one of them, he had a right to rest his case for free will on desire, passion, and emotion. James did not argue that indeterminism is a simpler theory than determinism, as he might have argued if he were choosing between two competing scientific theories. Rather, he confronted his reader with a vividly described murder, and boldly announced to Huxley, Clifford, and their friends that he would not refrain from condemning it simply because metaphysical determinism—which his rationalistic opponents regarded as immutable and a priori—asserted that the murderer’s choice was determined from eternity because every event has a cause, and so on, forever. James vigorously denied that determinism had to be accepted in spite of clashing with what he felt as a moral right, or even obligation, to condemn the murderer’s decision. He assumed that he could not morally condemn a determined decision, since he believed that condemning it presupposed that the choice need not have been made. Therefore he felt obliged to give up determin-

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ism, which was, in his view, not an immutable truth but a plastic opinion that could be abandoned in the face of an opposing feeling. By looking at the debate between determinism and indeterminism in this way, James tried to give the heart a powerful voice in a traditional metaphysical debate, a voice that he used throughout his life against those whom he regarded as rationalistic bullies. James thus turned the tables on the bullies. He argued that determinism was deemed by them to be rational merely because it satisfied their desire for parsimony, for an economical and simple way of looking at the universe. It gave them relief, he said, merely because they felt the charm of believing that every event has a necessitating cause. But, James insisted, it relieved him to think that a wanton murder may be condemned, so why shouldn’t he pit his desire to condemn the murder against the determinist’s desire for simplicity? Once James construed the bout between himself and the determinist (or the advocate of what was called “uniformity of sequence”) as a clash of desires, he thought that the issue could be seen for what it really was. That is why he wrote: If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence, for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as subjective and emotional as the other is.

Since I think that James’s main philosophical contribution was to urge that we may follow the lead of emotion when logic or experience cannot decide between conflicting beliefs, I think it fair to ask whether he was correct in identifying those cases in which logic or experience cannot decide, that is, the cases in which we may appeal to emotion or feeling. Few scientists would deny that they often cannot choose between competing theories on the basis of logic or sensory experience alone, and that in such cases they may, while they respect their feelings, choose the more elegant theory. Yet in spite of the long history of controversy about free will, and in spite of the failure of metaphysicians to agree on that subject after more than twenty centuries of debate, many still think that the issue can be settled in a knockdown way merely by logical analysis and without appealing to moral feelings. I think that they are on the wrong track and that James was on the right one, not because I accept James’s indeterminism but because I think he was right in urging that metaphysicians ought not to decide whether to accept determinism without respecting the feeling that we have a right or an obligation to judge an act such as the Holocaust or the atom bombing of Japan. I happen to doubt that respect for this moral feeling will of itself spell decisive victory for the indeterminist. Still, like James, I think that this feeling is relevant in the debate between determinism and free will. Determinism, like any other plastic opinion, may be abandoned by one who thinks that certain moral feelings call for its abandonment. Moreover, this view of James’s might explain why so many philosophers have contended with each other for so long without reaching any consensus about free will. Once we recognize that the determinists and the indeterminists respectively rest their cases on different feelings

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that move them in opposing directions, we free ourselves, as James urged us to do, from a misconception of what the real issue is in this branch of metaphysics. On the other hand, I do not think that James was equally successful when he appealed to feeling in theology, where he persistently pitted his emotional faith in the existence of God against the views of agnostics. His Variety of Religious Experience (1902) is one of the greatest works ever written on the psychology of religious belief, but his philosophical arguments in defense of religious belief are distinctly inferior to his arguments in favor of free will. I have never been able to understand why James was so hard on Kant in Varieties of Religious Experience. James remarks there on the strangeness of Kant’s saying that we should believe, for practical reasons, in a God of which no one “can form any notion whatsoever”; James even goes so far as to refer to “this particularly uncouth part of [Kant’s] philosophy”. Now I certainly have no desire to defend Kant’s theological views, but it seems to me that when James argues on practical grounds for the existence of an unseen, supernatural world “in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained”, he is not very different from Kant. I hope it is clear, therefore, that I have not focused on James’s antipathy to rationalism because I sympathize with all manifestations of it in his thinking. Furthermore, as Myers rightly reminds us, James appears to hold that the philosopher, unlike the psychologist, is concerned to extract “the essence of consciousness”, a task that seems to require no more than rational reflection on abstract concepts. Myers also points out that the radical empiricism advanced by James at the end of his life was an effort “to analyze consciousness in terms of a notion of neutral experience”, and to show that “minds and bodies are reducible to pure experience, both made of the same kind of stuff”. Yet how can we explain James’s adoption of this seemingly rationalistic view of the task of the philosopher, who is here supposed to extract “essences”, to “analyze”, and to “reduce” the notions of body and of mind to that of pure experience? Only by recognizing that James was not consistent on this fundamental philosophical issue. There are, as I have said, two opposing strands in his thinking: first, the rationalism that is present in his Principles of Psychology and even in parts of Pragmatism; and second, the antirationalism in Pragmatism—and in A Pluralistic Universe (1909)—that led him to say that in fixing our beliefs, we try to accommodate both our sensory experiences and our emotions without resting on any supra-empirical insights into essences or meanings. I think that James’s antirationalism represented him at his best. In attacking rationalism he espoused a gradualistic theory of knowledge that led him to deny that there was a gulf between the method of philosophy and the method of science, or between the method of philosophy and the method of thinking used in ordinary life. James’s insistence upon such epistemological continuity was intimately connected with his view of pragmatism as a democratic philosophy, as a philosophy that could be of service “in this real world of sweat and dirt”. He was a whole man who philosophized not only about passion but with passion, while speaking out courageously on the political and social issues of his time. James was a Dreyfusard; he was sympathetic with the reforming muckrakers of his day; he was pub-

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licly concerned with the plight of minority groups, including American blacks and Jews; he spoke out bravely on the status of immigrants, the care of the insane, vivisection, imperialism, militarism, the Spanish-American War, and the annexation of the Philippines. He was, as Walter Lippmann said in 1910, the most tolerant man of his generation. And although he was often foolishly caricatured as a celebrant of American commercialism because he said “You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience”, he also complained about “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS”. He was not a philosopher for yuppies, inside traders, or double-talking politicians, and it is very hard to read Myers’s book in the sorry ’80s of this century1 without being painfully aware of how many Americans, both young and old, have abandoned the moral ideals of this great thinker and good man, whose word “pragmatic” has been so debased by callous opportunists and demagogues. Yet it is also very hard to read William James without being encouraged to think that someday—and the sooner the better— the candor and generosity that he personified will be more honored than they are today.

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I leave this chronological reference unchanged, but it saddens me to think that my statement is as true in 2004 as it was a generation ago.

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The Later Years of George Santayana (1963)

I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT that Bertrand Russell was right in not taking George Santayana seriously as an analyst of knowledge, of truth, and of essence—Santayana’s favorite concept1—and I have thought for a long time that William James and John Dewey were justifiably irritated by his snobbishness, coldness, and reactionary sentiment. As a metaphysician and epistemologist, Santayana lacked great depth and logical power, and for one who set himself up as a moralist he seemed to me strangely lacking in sympathy for human beings. Because Daniel Cory, who has edited the volume of letters, Santayana: The Later Years, has done little to expound or defend Santayana’s philosophy, he has not forced me to change my views of Santayana’s position in the history of metaphysics and epistemology, but he has certainly led me to see more warmth, wisdom, and generosity than I had ever seen in Santayana before. In the letters that Cory prints and in his description of his relationship with Santayana from the philosopher’s sixtythird year in 1927 to his death in 1952, Santayana does not appear as the representative of “moribund Latinity” that James knew, nor as the patent-leather stylist that Russell found so boring to read. We no longer find him generalizing waspishly on the subjects of Judaism, Positivism, Liberalism, Pragmatism, and all of the other failings that he identified with the city of New York—whose philosophers, with great forbearance, have been the first to praise him and the last to be offended by the rudeness of some of his published statements about their thoughts and attitudes. In these letters, another Santayana emerges in a story whose plot is relatively simple. A world-famous philosopher is living in Italy, having gone to Europe after abandoning his Harvard professorship fifteen years earlier. He receives an essay on his philosophy from the twenty-two-year-old Cory and replies by saying that it is the best interpretation of his thought he has ever read. The young and impecunious admirer expresses a desire to meet his hero; the hero offers to defray his travel expenses from England to Italy, and the admirer accepts. The “young Barbarian”, as Santayana praisingly calls him, plays pool (and later golf), and is much concerned about the standing of the New York Giants, but after six weeks Santayana asks him to become his secretary and to help him with the preparation of “The Realm of Matter”. Astonished, but thrilled and honored, Cory accepts. Before long another philosophical expatriate enters the story—Charles Augustus Strong, whose deceased wife was the daughter of John D. Rockefeller and 1 See Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (New York, 1956), pp. 94–95. However, Russell does acknowledge certain philosophical debts to Santayana in ethics, op. cit., p. 96.

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who therefore lives comfortably. Strong also hires Cory as secretary and companion, and by that time two old lonely men have brightened up their lives and lightened the financial burdens of a loyal, jolly friend who, among his other duties, criticizes their manuscripts, converses and corresponds with them, and brings them gossip of the outside world. For this Cory earns himself a lifetime fellowship set up in Strong’s will and a secure reputation as Santayana’s Eckermann. He also becomes the source for two stories that will never cease to interest Santayana’s future biographers. According to Cory, Santayana once said to him that he, Santayana, “must have been” a homosexual in his Harvard days, though “unconscious of it at the time”. Upon this, Cory comments: “If he was a man with the feelings of a woman, he was not aware (until well into middle life) what this might indicate to a Freudian expert”, and then adds in a protective spirit: “When he did finally suspect something ‘unconventional’ in his psyche, I am certain it only hardened a predilection to renounce the world as much as was compatible with living a rational life devoted to his labors”. Santayana’s renunciation of the world, as Cory makes clear in his second big story, meant no renunciation of Santayana’s naturalism. Just before his death, Santayana told Cory that if he should die while Cory was away, Cory was not to be misled by any reports about his last hours. He was, he pointed out, living in a Catholic nursing home, where it was expected that a man should die like a Christian, but Cory was warned that if he ever heard reports that Santayana had requested extreme unction he was not to believe them. Santayana added that it might be difficult to avoid receiving it—especially if he were in a semi-unconscious state—and “that he might even go so far as to nod his head in approval, if he felt that by so doing he could avoid all ‘fuss and bother.’ ” These stories are more touching than any I have ever heard about Santayana, and there are many others in the book that are equally so. They show, for example, that Santayana could be fatherly to Cory, sweetly understanding of poor old Strong, appreciative of the young Robert Lowell’s genius, and shrewdly objective about his own limitations and those of some of his admirers. He was, therefore, a better and wiser man than at least one of his readers had taken him to be. Just as Eckermann announced, “This is my Goethe”, so Cory might well say: “This is my Santayana”, but Cory’s Santayana is so much more winning than the one that many of us have been carrying around in our heads that we owe Cory a great debt of gratitude.

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English Philosophy at Midcentury: An American’s Impressions (1951)

TO A VISITING AMERICAN, one of the most striking things about English philosophy in 1951 is the complete triumph of the analytic movement associated with the names of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and the late Ludwig Wittgenstein. Of course, as we shall see, profound differences within this movement make it extremely difficult to present one doctrinal platform to which these great philosophers and their followers would subscribe, but there are a number of common traits of significance which are illustrated in their writings and teachings. One of the first things to notice is how hostile to speculative metaphysics English philosophers have become, and how often they insist that philosophy as they conceive it is not a rival of ordinary language or science, but rather an activity intended to clarify both. We can hardly fail to observe how little concerned they are with advancing a moral philosophy in the sense of a guide to life, and how intensely preoccupied they are with finding out what we mean by or how we use the words “good”, “bad”, “right”, and “wrong”. And having ventured this far in generalizing, we may observe how analytic philosophy in its later or positivistic phase has become absorbed with language; how it treats some traditional problems as the products of linguistic confusion and how it has drastically revised the formulation of others. Preoccupation with language was at one stage mainly a matter of formulating a so-called criterion of meaning. Since so much talk was to be prohibited as meaningless by positivistic standards, a criterion had to be devised which would allow a sharp separation of the meaningful from the meaningless. And since what was of major interest was something called scientific meaning, it had to be made perfectly clear that much of traditional metaphysics might evoke images or stimulate action and still be scientifically meaningless. In order to placate those who insisted on calling language meaningful even when it did not satisfy what looked like the clear-cut requirements of the theory of meaning, a new category was invented, that of emotive meaning. Into this category, poetry, metaphysics, theology, and sometimes ethics were conveniently dumped. The scientific and the emotive became the two great categories of language, and within the scientific another distinction was made between statements of mathematics and logic on the one hand, and statements of empirical science on the other. Statements of the first kind were said to be true by virtue of the meanings of their terms, and not on the basis of experiment or observation of the world while statements of the second kind were confirmable only by experiment and observation. This distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, as

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they were called respectively, together with that between emotive and scientific language, became the two great principles of positivistic analysis. “Is it meaningful?” was the first question to ask about any statement; if so, is it cognitive or emotive? And if cognitive, is it analytic or synthetic? The present period of analytic philosophy has still not recovered from the military charm of this method, and many philosophers still bark out these questions as if they were perfectly clear. But there are others who have come to have serious doubts about the extant versions of the positivistic criterion of meaning, and still others who question the clarity of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. The result is a way of doing philosophy which cannot be easily summarized in formulae. In my opinion, this is desirable, provided it does not result in a complete deterioration of the intellectual processes. After every dogmatic period of philosophy, there comes a period of withdrawal and hesitation. The rational mood often gives way to the mystical, and philosophers are unwilling to say anything definite for fear of distorting the situation or of misleading others. In such periods, it is hard to distinguish the genius from the quack, for ironically enough the quack flourishes in the protective mist created by the genius. Philosophical belief ceases to be a matter which others can check, but rather a matter of flair and smelling things out; a literary attitude dominates and the way of putting things becomes extremely important. My impression is that English philosophy is just emerging from such a misty period. There now seems to be a lively interest in saying things, in publishing books which others can examine carefully, and a certain amount of boredom with philosophy conceived as gesture. While it is difficult to discern any new catechism as arresting as that of earlier positivism, one thing is certain: English philosophy is not likely to return to anything like the metaphysical and epistemological speculation which preceded the emergence of analytic philosophy at the turn of the century. Responsible and careful linguistic analysis is here to stay, for a while at any rate. To visiting Americans the most striking evidence of the academic triumph of linguistic philosophy is the conversion of Oxford. The university we had always regarded as the last haven of idealism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and moral piety is now a philosophical boom town where linguistic analysis is all the rage. Cambridge, of course, is the university of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein, and has long been known to us as an analytic and positivistic center, but now Oxford out-Cambridges Cambridge; it has switched to a victorious cause in philosophy. In America we are experiencing a similar conversion, but a vast country is not easily conquered by new movements; old American philosophies, like certain American soldiers, never die—they do not even fade away. We have not yet come to the point where linguistic philosophy has attained the respectability it has in England, but we have come far in that direction. Almost all our able young philosophers have been influenced by some form of analytic philosophy. So much so that more traditional American professors are willing to sacrifice something they dismiss as cleverness and ingenuity for something else called vision, when they choose their successors. The partisans of traditional metaphysics and moral

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philosophy yearn for a bright young philosopher-prince who will come to slay all the positivistic dragons and restore philosophy to its ancient dignity and solemnity. I must confess that I have not met this attitude in England, but I am sure it must exist, and that there are many traditionalists who are patiently awaiting the day when the analytic movement will have spent itself. Precisely because of the triumph of analytic philosophy, it is no longer possible to speak of it as a single undifferentiated movement; sects and varieties have appeared with the advance of the century. Even the superficial historian is likely to distinguish at least three strains and each of them will probably be identified with one of the three philosophers I have mentioned. Russell is the legendary leader of those who apply the techniques of mathematical logic to the problems of philosophy. No matter how often he repeats words that resemble Marx’s “Je ne suis pas Marxiste”, he is the hero of those who build new, artificial languages for the solution of ancient and modern puzzles. G. E. Moore will always be the patron saint of those who respect ordinary language and who are anxious to examine it in an effort to produce clear synonyms for key philosophical expressions. Wittgenstein abandoned both programmes for something which only the most devoted of his disciples are supposed to understand,1 but which has been described as “therapeutic positivism”—the effort to get at the roots of the insoluble problems of philosophy in a way that will make us aware of how we come to ask our strange questions and, ultimately, to free us from the need to ask them again. I have been unable to detect any fourth strain which a historian is likely to add to this list, but I am struck by the fact that the Russellian wing is much less active in England than it is in America. Philosophical attitudes seem to be much more influenced by Moore and Wittgenstein. In the United States, there is considerable interest in mathematical logic, both as an independent discipline to be pursued for its own sake, and as an instrument for the solution of philosophical problems. But in England there is comparatively little interest in pure logic, and this is probably connected with a lack of interest in it as a tool for philosophy, though it would be hard to say which is cause and which effect. The attitude of the mathematical logician toward ordinary language is often one of contempt. He frequently believes, following Russell, that ordinary language is the source of confusion and paradox. He often maintains that philosophers are deceived by the grammar of ordinary language into outrageously fallacious arguments. For example, they begin by observing that there is no such thing as Pegasus and then they ask themselves what the word “Pegasus” denotes, because they hold the view (dictated by grammatical theory) that every true statement must be about something. But since by hypothesis Pegasus does not exist, it is difficult to say that the statement, “There is no such thing as Pegasus”, is about Pegasus. Yet grammar must be appeased, and so they conjure up something immaterial, like the idea of Pegasus or the possibility of Pegasus or what-not, in a 1 When this talk was delivered, Wittgenstein’s posthumous publications had not yet begun to appear.

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frantic effort to produce a denotation for the word “Pegasus”, and in this way a mysterious entity is invented, presumably because of the weaknesses inherent in the grammar of ordinary language. Just such invention has been the stimulus of a good deal of counterinvention on the part of logicians, and in Russell’s case it called forth his famous Theory of Descriptions, once called a paradigm of philosophy. The details of this theory need not detain us. It leads to the proposal that we translate a puzzle-producing statement like “There is no such thing as Pegasus” with the help of mathematical logic, and it is held that once we get it into philosophically disinfected language, we shall no longer be tempted to invent anything as weird as the denotation of “Pegasus”. “Pegasus” is defined as “the winged horse captured by Bellerophon”, and “There is no such thing as Pegasus” is then translated as “It isn’t true that Bellerophon captured one and only one winged horse”. In its new logically official formulation, the statement does not contain the word “Pegasus”, and so the need for appeasing the grammarian in philosophically absurd ways has been removed. The moral of this example is obvious. We must reformulate the infected parts of our language (and they are many, it is held); we must build a system which will be free of these puzzle-producing and entity-breeding features. In some of his writings, Russell has called the principle underlying this theory the supreme principle of philosophy—Occam’s Razor—whose purpose is the elimination of all the queer entities born of the grammatical features of ordinary language and uncritical science. Almost all analytic philosophers join with Russell in denouncing things as strange as the denotation of “Pegasus”. And underlying this denunciation is the great bond between many analysts of ordinary language and mathematical logicians with a philosophical conscience. I think a similar principle motivated Wittgenstein’s attack on the view that the meaning of a word (as opposed to its denotation) is some extralinguistic entity. It also explains Gilbert Ryle’s hostility to the view that the mind is a ghostly inhabitant of a mechanical body. In effect, both of them urge us to reformulate our statements about meanings and minds in ways that are less misleading, less liable to suggest the existence of queer entities. Where analytic philosophers usually differ is in their location of the source of the infection and hence in their views of the way to stop it. Those who follow Russell tend to blame the statements of ordinary language and accordingly advocate a policy of translating them into philosophically sanitary surroundings. Most English philosophers, however, join Moore in adopting a much more sympathetic attitude toward the habits of the man in the street. And many argue, therefore, that ordinary language has no part in the difficulties which inspired Russell’s theory of descriptions; they even hold that disembodied possibilities, meanings, and minds would never have been invented were it not for the linguistic confusions of Plato and Descartes. On this view, if only the habits of the man in the street had been seriously adopted, rather than the corrupt machinations of muddled philosophers, the elaborate constructions of the Russellians would never

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have been necessary. The result is a certain amount of hostility to the various devices introduced by Russell in accordance with Occam’s Razor. The theory of descriptions has been attacked by younger philosophers; they have criticized phenomenalism, the philosophy which Russell and his followers adopt in order to dispense with the traditional Aristotelian doctrine of substance; they regard so-called sense-data as bogus philosophical pills which are worse than the disease they are supposed to cure. It should be pointed out, therefore, that the hostility which these admirers of ordinary language feel toward the constructions of the logicians is not merely a matter of deploring the wasted energy involved in building new systems; it is also directed against the philosophical doctrines that have been smuggled into the artificial languages of some logicians. The one thing a hospital should not do is to spread disease, say the critics of logical reconstruction, and it must be admitted that many master-builders of supposedly disinfected languages have often forgotten or disregarded that maxim. For example, Frege, who was one of the greatest of all logicians and who is now being revived both in England and in America, has no qualms about postulating all kinds of queer entities. The queerest are called “The True” and its mate “The False”. Ironically enough, in America today this kind of talk is defended on so-called pragmatic grounds while the spirit of American pragmatism (with notable lapses on the part of William James and Charles Peirce) cries out against it. How it is justified by its admirers in England, I do not know. What this shows, of course, is that proficiency in mathematical logic is no guarantee of philosophical insight. But then neither is proficiency in the use of the English language. I think it absurd to say that all translation into logical terminology has been helpful, but I think it equally absurd to say that ordinary language is never responsible for philosophical confusion and error. And when ordinary language is responsible, philosophers rightly suggest alternative ways of talking which will avoid confusion, puzzlement, or the creation of bogus entities. To this extent, all of philosophy involves linguistic reconstruction. What may divide some philosophers from others is their different conceptions of reconstruction, because some are more friendly toward mathematical logic than others. In spite of the great achievements of Whitehead and Russell in the field of logical analysis, English philosophy, even of the analytic variety, is dominated by a suspicion of logical jargon. But this can hardly be justified by mere hostility to artificial terminology, because contemporary English philosophy is filled with technically used terms, like “meaning”, “rules”, and “category-mistake”, to mention only the favorites. Philosophy, like every discipline which uses terms not ordinarily used by the man in the street, has a jargon. What counts is whether the jargon contributes to illumination and clarification, and unfortunately we have no litmus test for that. American philosophers are more interested in science both as an object of philosophical analysis and as an aid to philosophy. Many of them freely use the parts of logic they find clear, and some even think that empirical psychology is

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relevant to philosophical problems connected with meaning. On the other hand, English philosophers are playing their important and traditional role of warning against the dangers of scholastic verbiage masquerading as science and philosophy. It is pleasant to report that this is carried on with great zest and vigilance at Oxford, where I spent most of my visit to England, and it is encouraging to know that, in England, free and critical examination of the remote questions of philosophy still goes on, especially in times like these.

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Memories of G. E. Moore (1959)

G. E. MOORE WAS at once the most distinguished and the most admirable philosopher I have ever known personally, and I am sure that my feelings are shared by many philosophers all over the world. I also feel sure that he would have wished me to confine myself to analyzing or criticizing his philosophical views on this occasion, but I am moved to talk also—even primarily—about Moore as a teacher, about Moore as a guide and inspiration to young philosophers, and about Moore as a man. I should like, in some of my remarks, to make those of you who knew him feel his presence once again and to give others some impression of his character and of his impact on several generations of philosophers in England and America. And I hope I can do this without indulging in the kind of sentimentality which he avoided so successfully all of his life, even though he was a man of deep and delicate feeling, as anyone could tell by listening to him sing Brahms and Schubert lieder. While he was lecturing at Columbia in the early forties, he and Mrs. Moore lived in a tiny flat off Amsterdam Avenue, and some of you will remember how, at a certain point in the evening, if you coaxed him just a little bit, he would go into his bedroom, where the piano was because the living room was so small, and play and sing while you listened in the living room. And in 1945, when he was seventy-two, he wrote me from Cambridge: “Now that our youngest son is living with us, I have the pleasure of constantly playing duets with him. I think you get to know music better if you play it yourself, however inadequately, than if you merely hear it”. Moore would have said the same thing about philosophy, I am sure. You get to know it better if you play it yourself, than if you spend your life merely listening to others, recording them, and playing them back to yourself and your students. It was this passion for doing philosophy independently that made Moore such an exciting and encouraging teacher. Young philosophers at Columbia were not altogether unprepared for Moore when he visited there in 1942. Some of our teachers had made us aware of the value of clarity in philosophy, but the accepted view was that philosophy required great learning in the sciences and history, or technical expertise in logic, or a professional fondness for wisdom. And Moore was deficient in all of these respects. We had been taught that the theory of perception was a waste of time, that antinaturalism in ethics was a dreadful heresy, and that Cartesian dualism was even worse. But Moore believed in them all. We had also been assured by political experts in the thirties that the situation in philosophy had become even more poverty-stricken than it was when Marx had described it so scathingly— that bourgeois philosophers were now not only not changing the world, they

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were not even interpreting it; instead, they confined themselves to interpreting words, under the counterrevolutionary influence of Moore and his allies. You can imagine, therefore, how militant young New York philosophers, raised on the teachings of Cohen, Carnap, Dewey, or Marx, might have been struck by a fresh dose of Moore. He deviated from almost every New York doctrine— pragmatic, positivistic, or naturalistic. He spent one term trying to analyze the concept of seeing and introduced us to the despised sense-datum. He spent another worrying about the ordinary use of the words “if-then”, after the logicians had assured us that nothing but the “horse-shoe” was worth talking about. He repeated (though with diminished confidence) his published statement that goodness was a nonnatural quality. He insisted that he was quite distinct from his body, and one day said that his hand was closer to him than his foot was. He showed no inclination whatever toward encylopedism. He announced to scandalized empiricists that he believed in the synthetic a priori. He seemed utterly unconcerned with changing the ways in which we speak about the world, to say nothing of the world itself. In short, Moore challenged most of our philosophical beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices. And yet knowing him and talking with him when he was about seventy and when I had just received my Ph.D. provided one of the most refreshing episodes in my philosophical education. Why? He did not persuade me, I am bound to say, of the validity of a single one of his main philosophical doctrines. But he was living proof of the importance of honesty, clarity, integrity, and careful thinking in philosophy. Moore never asserted anything that he did not believe was true; he never said that a statement followed from another unless he was absolutely convinced that it did; he never said that he understood when he didn’t. And how many philosophers are there of whom one can say this? These qualities of Moore meant more to me when I began to stand on my own philosophical legs than all of the machinery of Principia Mathematica, than all of the learning of the learned, than all of the wisdom of the ancients. When later I read John Maynard Keynes’s reminiscences of Moore as he was at the turn of the century, I could see how deeply ingrained Moore’s qualities were. I could also see why they had been so affecting in Cambridge, England, for I felt the same excitement and intellectual pleasure in Moore’s presence when he was seventy as Keynes and his friends had felt when he was thirty. The same purity, the same incredible simplicity, the same lack of bluff—they were all still there at the end of his life as they had been at the beginning. “Do your philosophy for yourself”, I have suggested, was one of Moore’s great messages to the young. And he helped you do it yourself. He gave you the feeling that there was something like a method in philosophy. And this made you feel the comparative unimportance of arriving at the same doctrines as he did. I believe that Moore, more than any of his distinguished contemporaries, communicated to his students the feeling that they should share his method even when they did not accept his philosophical beliefs. Characteristically, however, Moore shied away from talking of his method, as the following excerpt from a letter shows. It was written by William Frankena after a conversation with Moore in

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1949: “One bit of conversation was about Keynes’s Two Memoirs. I asked Moore if he knew at the time that he was having such an influence on Keynes, etc. He said, approximately, ‘No, I didn’t. I used to hear them speak of “The Method” sometimes, and understood that it was regarded as mine, but I never did know what it was’ ”. Moore may never have known what the method of his philosophy was, but Moore was unusually agnostic on such matters. It fitted in with his dislike of philosophical pomposity. A student of his, however, could not fail to observe a few characteristic gestures and grimaces. You watched him begin by disentangling the different senses of the expression in which he was interested, and then, after he specified the sense with which he was concerned, he would consider the various proposals for analyzing it. Almost all of them, it seems in retrospect, he found defective. “Surely, the word so-and-so doesn’t ordinarily mean that,” he said, as he wrinkled his nose. Or then there was that characteristic conversation-stopper as he wagged his head violently: “I shouldn’t have thought anyone could possibly say that that’s what we ordinarily mean by that expression!” Because he was so cautious about saying that one expression meant the same as another, Moore seemed to be left with a set of unanalyzable concepts in one hand, and in the other a set of concepts about whose analysis he was never certain. The result was that one of the greatest philosophical analysts of our age found it hard to point, in all honesty, to a single successful analysis of an important philosophical idea. Part of the reason for Moore’s failure as a constructive analyst is to be located in the difficulty surrounding the notions of meaning, synonymy, and analytic, which are so central to Moore’s conception of analysis. He may have been shy about characterizing his method, but in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore he was prompted to say something revealing about the nature of analysis as he conceived it—among other things, that you must be sure, before you can say that you have given an analysis of a concept, that the expression which expresses the analysandum is synonymous with any expression which expresses the analysans. Moreover, Moore says in the same place that a fuller discussion of the topic of analysis would require a discussion of the distinction between an analytic necessary connection and a synthetic necessary connection, because, he says, the necessary connection between the analysandum “x is a brother” and the analysans “x is a male sibling” is analytic, while other necessary connections are synthetic. At this point, he says: “It seems to me . . . that the line between ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ might be drawn in many different ways. As it is, I do not think that the two terms have any clear meaning”. I venture to call this support from Sir Hubert to those who have been campaigning against complacency about the idea of analyticity. But I am inclined to add that if the word “analytic” doesn’t have any clear meaning, then Moore’s phrase “giving an analysis” doesn’t either. And this is one reason why Moore had justifiable doubts about so many of the “analyses” he considered. Now I wish to insist that in spite of such fundamental difficulties in Moore’s method Moore was a pedagogical genius, because he allowed you to see that even if his own conception of analysis was too stringent or too obscure for effective

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use, something like analysis was of fundamental importance in philosophy. For then you might weaken the requirements for a successful analysis, as Russell and his followers do when they ask for no more than extensional identity between analysandum and analysans. Or you might say with Wittgenstein that the meaning of the term under consideration is its use, or that philosophers should look for its use rather than its meaning. But in either case you would be building on Moore’s conviction that clarification is a central task of philosophy. So pertinacious and candid was Moore in his search for clarity that he had to admit, as we have seen, that the notion of analysis which was so central in his thinking was itself unclear. It was this same candor and this same pertinacity which made him so admirable. A few typical stories may show why. In telling them I feel fortified by Moore’s own statement that “stories, whether purporting to be true or avowedly mere fiction, [had] a tremendous fascination for [him]”. The stories that follow purport to be true and are true, approximately. At Columbia in the early forties, Moore held an informal seminar to which students and members of the faculty came. One day, after Moore had made a particularly slashing attack on some doctrine in epistemology, a graduate student asked: “But, Professor Moore, why do you spend so much time refuting that doctrine; surely [this emphatic use of “surely” he had learned from Moore] no one holds it”. To which Moore replied, in a rising crescendo of rhetorical questions: “No one holds it? No one holds it? No one holds it? But Montague holds it—don’t you, Montague?” Prof. Montague rolled his eyes and nodded his head affirmatively. There was never a consideration, you see, which was to get in the way of finding the truth, never any sense that a distinguished colleague’s pain should get in the way of saying what was true. And this was of immense educational value. For Moore was not nasty in these belligerent moods. He was not sarcastic. He was a simple, direct Englishman who did not speak or write with his eye on the gallery. He made the young feel that by using their wits they might say things of value in philosophy. One day a Columbia colleague of Moore’s was looking for a book by Whewell—the famous Dr. Whewell who played such a great part in the history of Moore’s own college, Trinity. He met Moore as he was looking for the book in the offices of The Journal of Philosophy. As his colleague took the book down from the shelf he showed it to Moore, thinking that Moore would certainly know it, and asked him what he thought of Whewell. To which Moore replied without the slightest sign of embarrassment and even with a sly twinkle: “You know, I’ve never read Whewell. Should I?” I don’t remember what the colleague said in reply. Just two more typical stories. When I was staying with the Moores in Cambridge, England, in the spring of 1951, Mrs. Moore came into the room after dinner to announce that Bertrand Russell was about to speak on the BBC. Long silence. “Moore,” she asked (she called him “Moore” when she didn’t call him “Bill”), “Moore, don’t you think we ought to listen to Russell? I feel an obligation to listen to him. Don’t you?” And then there was another awfully long pause as

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Moore puffed on his pipe. One felt that Moore was tuning in on himself, to see whether he felt that obligation. After the pause, he reported with utter seriousness: “Dear, I don’t feel any obligation to listen to Russell tonight”. Lest this give a misleading impression of Moore’s attitude toward Russell—as expressed in my presence, at any rate—I should supplement it with a story which reverses the picture somewhat. One night in New York, Mrs. Moore was commenting on Russell’s lawsuit against Albert Barnes to recover his salary after their dramatic falling out in the forties at the Barnes Institute. Mrs. Moore said that while Russell was probably right, he shouldn’t have stooped to the point of suing Barnes. “Moore wouldn’t have done that. Would you have, Bill?” Once again there was the long puff on the pipe, but this time Moore said, “Oh yes, I should have, dear”. You will now see why I say that I have never known a philosopher with more integrity. Some in this audience may not agree with my high estimate of Moore as a philosopher. But I hope that no one—either in this room or out of it—will deny that he possessed in the highest degree those moral and intellectual qualities that every great philosopher should have. Once I heard a man say after a sharp exchange with Moore: “I hate Moore’s mind”. I can only say that I had many a tough bout with Moore that I lost, but I never came out of one with any doubts about how I felt about Moore or his mind. I loved them both.

C H A P T E R 4 1

W. V. Quine (2001)

IT SADDENS ME greatly to think that during the past year three Harvard philosophers who were very good and old friends of mine have left us: Nelson Goodman, Burt Dreben, and now, alas, Van Quine. I have spoken warmly of all of them elsewhere, but today I offer a special word of thanks to Van, who was my teacher. I learned more from him than I learned from any other teacher, both during my student days and afterward. I took his course on mathematical logic in 1938, which dated the beginning of a friendship I always prized. We ceased to be colleagues in 1970, when I left Harvard for the Institute for Advanced Study, but we kept up our friendship through correspondence and frequent meetings at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Neither his reaction to the Harvard bust of 1969, about aspects of which we differed, nor our disagreement about a highly controversial Ph.D. thesis diminished my respect or my affection for him. My impression of Van was made not only by his legendary quickness, his fertile mind, and his prodigious writing but also by his openness of mind, his wit, and his freedom from stuffiness and cant. When I entered the Harvard Department of Philosophy in 1948 with the support of Van, he was without question its most luminous figure; he encouraged me enormously, and he was always fun to be with. Nothing boosted my morale more than a favorable word from him about my work, or a proposal he once made in a letter, when he wrote: “I have thought lately that it might be fruitful if you and I were to team up our courses”—his Philosophy of Language and my Problems of Analytic Philosophy—so that the latter would be listed by him in the Course Catalogue as advised preparation for the former. I regarded that as praise indeed from Sir Hubert to a junior colleague. I have spoken of Van’s open mind, and what I mean is that he seemed willing to consider surrendering his most fundamental beliefs in any philosophical conversation I ever had with him. I don’t mean that he lacked confidence in his beliefs. I mean that he did not treat himself as an institution or as a philosophical pope, as constitutionally unable to listen to an opposing argument or unable to consider yielding a point to his interlocutor so long as he regarded him as serious and not as a mere debater or a point-scorer. Perhaps it was this trait of Van that led Nelson Goodman to say to me, somewhat peevishly, after Van had abandoned their once jointly held nominalism: “Van defines a philosophical belief as one that he is prepared to give up first”. For this reason, I find it ironical that the New York Times obituary of Van reported (perhaps apocryphally) that when asked why he was willing to have the question mark removed from his typewriter in favor of some logical symbol, he replied that he dealt in certainties. In my opinion, no logician ever questioned

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the certainty of set theory more than Quine did when he absorbed it into the Duhemian body of statements that faces what he called the tribunal of experience, and therefore allowed that parts of it might be surrendered under certain circumstances. I have said that Van was fun to be with, a trait that clearly appears in a charming letter of 1953, part of which was directed at my young sons. I had said in passing when writing to Van while he was visiting in Oxford and I in Princeton, that Steve at 8 was missing multiplication in his Princeton school after moving from Cambridge (Mass.) for the year, and that Nick at 11 had become very interested in geography. To that part of my letter, Van replied in a passage that requires me to write something on the board with some things lined out, a passage whose significance will soon be clear: 19 9 4 2 1

27 54 108 216 432 513

Van wrote in a way that evokes his presence and his charm: “Since Stevie misses multiplication, he may enjoy gorging on this one. Well, so you have these two numbers, see, and you want to multiply one of them by the other. O. K., so you write them down more or less side by side, as potential headings of two potentially parallel potential columns, roughly thus: 19

27

Then you go to work on the left one, cutting it in half. Write the half underneath. No fractions, though. If it was odd, just forget the fraction. If it was 58,537, just put down 29,268 as its half. That’s near enough. Then, under that in turn, put its half (ignoring, again, the fraction if any); and so on, until you get down to 1. That completes your left-hand column. 19 9 4 2 1

27

Then go to work on the right-hand number, making a column under it by exactly the opposite method: doubling each time. This could go on forever, but don’t let it. Keep your right-hand column lined up with your left-hand column, entry by entry, and stop as soon as you are opposite the bottom of your left-hand column. 19 9 4

27 54 108

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2 1

4 1

216 432

O. K., so now you have the two columns side by side. The next thing to do is to start in on the right-hand column and cross out a lot of it. Cross out all the entries which have even numbers opposite them in the left-hand column. Keep only those entries in the right-hand column which have odd numbers opposite them in the left-hand column. All right, now add up the right-hand column, what’s left of it after all the crossing out. The result, unless I have made a mistake somewhere, is the answer to your original multiplication problem. 19 9 4 2 1

27 54 108 216 432 513

[19 × 27 = 513]

It may be that this information reaches Stevie a bit too late to be altogether useful. If I had tipped him off earlier, he would never had had to learn the multiplication table. I can’t be equally helpful to Nicky, who is probably wondering what places to construe as the capitals of Bornu and Kamchatka. I did recently read, for the first time in my life, an article on Tibesti, but it doesn’t help a bit. I can say, though, that Roman Jakobson is an authority on the almost dead variety of Ainu language which is just barely spoken, but used to be spoken ad nauseam and very nearly to extinction, on the island of Sakhalin (Karafuto to you). This I did not learn from Roman, but from the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and Warden of Wadham, Sir Maurice Bowra; and only last evening at that. Bowra says it may be the oldest language in the world, and the Ursprache of the Red or North American Indian. If Roman would stick to sensational discoveries and leave the maundering about signans and signatum to you and me, it would be a better though saner world.” There you have Van: the brilliant expositor, the gentle teacher, the great philosopher, and the piercing wit. Although sixty-odd years have gone by since I sat at Van’s feet, I still feel the influence of his thinking. And so I would like to conclude by commenting on one of his philosophical one-liners and its role in my own thinking. This audience is of course familiar with many of them: “To be is to be the value of a variable”, “No entity without identity”, and “Philosophy of science is philosophy enough”. I would like to take the last one as the text of my concluding words in order to point to one of its ironic effects on me. Recall that philosophy of science for Quine is a psychological study of science as a cultural institution. But recall as well that there are other cultural institutions that philosophers have studied, such as art, religion, law, and politics, and in my view they too may be studied empirically and psychologically. In my view, philosophy of art, of religion, of law, of history, and of politics are all disciplines worth pursuing, in which case philosophy of

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science is not philosophy enough. I doubt that Van would have quarreled with this use of his one-liner, but my dialectical transformation of it into its negation has led me to think that it would not be a mistake to formulate a different oneliner: Philosophy of culture is philosophy enough. I hope that if Van is listening, he will agree.

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Here I indicate where essays first appeared, but I do not usually cite reprintings or translations. It should be noted that many previously printed essays have been revised and have been given new titles when revised considerably. 1. “Prologue to A Philosophy of Culture” is a slightly revised version of the prologue to my book A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism (Princeton University Press, 2002). 2. “Philosophy and Man: An Exhortation” is a slightly revised version of the final chapter of The Age of Analysis (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1955). 3. “The Social Role of Philosophy” is a slightly revised version of a lecture delivered at Tokyo University in the summer of 1952. It was first printed in Confluence, vol. 1, pp. 68–76 (December 1952), and in it I have interpolated a brief contribution to Commentary (January 1957). 4. “New Horizons in Philosophy” is a slightly revised version of an article first printed in The Saturday Evening Post, 17 September 1960. 5. “A Plea for an Analytic Philosophy of History” appeared in English in my Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning (Cambridge, Mass., 1959) after having been first published in Polish translation under the title “Filozofia historii w Ameryce” in Kultura, July–August 1953, pp. 173–82. 6. “Historical Relativism and the Evaluation of Histories” is a revised version of a paper entitled “The Logic of Historical Narration”, published in Philosophy and History, ed. S. Hook (New York, 1963). Because I have revised this paper considerably, I have given it a new title. 7. “Historical Inevitability” is a slightly revised review of Isaiah Berlin’s lecture of the same title published in Oxford in 1954. My review appeared in Perspectives USA, Summer 1956, pp. 191–96. 8. “Tolstoy the Empirical Fox” is an essay originally published in Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Spring 2003, vol. 22, pp. 110–26. 9. “John Dewey: A Great Philosopher of Education” first appeared in the New York Times Book Review, 24 July 1966. 10. “Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning” first appeared in Confluence, vol. 3, pp. 402–12 (December 1954). 11. “Religious Commitment and Higher Education” appeared originally in Confluence, vol. 6, pp. 137–46 (Summer 1957). 12. “The University in Transition” was first published in The New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 6 March 1966, p. 1 et seq. 13. “Philosophy in a Utopian Institute for Advanced Study” was a talk delivered on September 20, 1989 in Osaka and on September 22, 1989 in Tokyo under the auspices of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Japan. It is published here for the first time.

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14. “The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism” was first printed in John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. S. Hook (New York, 1950), pp. 316–30. 15. “Ontological Clarity and Semantic Obscurity” is a revised version of a paper that first appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, 7 June 1951, vol. 48, pp. 373–80. 16. “On the Church-Frege Solution of the Paradox of Analysis” first appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, December 1948, vol. 9, pp. 305– 8. I have added a postscript. 17. “Oughts and Cans” is a revised version of an essay published in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honor of Isaiah Berlin, ed. A. Ryan (Oxford, 1979), pp. 211–19. 18. “Causation and Action” is a revised version of an article first published in Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel, eds. S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes, and M. White (New York, 1969), pp. 250–9. 19. “Hart and Honore´ on Causation in the Law” first appeared as a book review in Columbia Law Review, November 1960, vol. 60, pp. 1058–61. 20. “The Question of Free Will: Some Preliminary Remarks” is a reprint of chapter 1 of my book The Question of Free Will: A Holistic View (Princeton, 1993), pp. 3–12. 21. “Harvard’s Philosophical Heritage” is a slightly revised version of an essay first published in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 9 November 1957, pp. 161 ff. 22. “Experiment and Necessity in Dewey’s Philosophy” first appeared in The Antioch Review, vol. 19, Fall 1959, pp. 329–44. 23. “Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis” first appeared in The Philosophical Review, July 1949, vol. 58, pp. 321–29; a postscript was added later. 24. “Desire and Desirability: A Rejoinder to a Posthumous Reply by John Dewey” first appeared in Journal of Philosophy, May 1996, vol. 92, pp. 229–42. 25. “Peirce’s Summum Bonum and the Ethical Views of C. I. Lewis and John Dewey” was originally published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, December 1999, vol. 59, pp. 1029–37. 26. “Normative Ethics, Normative Epistemology, and Quine’s Holism” first appeared in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, eds. L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, Illinois, 1986), pp. 649–62. 27. “Holistic Pragmatism and Ethics” is a slightly revised excerpt from chapter 10 of my book A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism (Princeton, 2002). It contains a rejoinder to Quine’s reply to my discussion of his views in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine cited above. 28. “The Psychologism of Hume and Mathematical Truth” is the result of abbreviating and revising my article, “The Psychologism of Hume and Quine Compared”, which appeared in the Proceedings, Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 7, Modern Philosophy, ed. M. D. Gedney (Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University, 2000). 29. “Why Annalists of Ideas Should be Analysts of Ideas” first appeared in Georgia Review, Winter 1975, vol. 29, pp. 930–47; it has been revised somewhat.

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30. “The Revolt against Formalism in American Social Thought of the Twentieth Century” appeared originally in Journal of the History of Ideas, April 1947, vol. 8, pp. 131–52; I reprint it with minor changes. 31. “Pragmatism and the Revolt against Formalism” first appeared as one of two Neesima Lectures delivered in 1985 at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and was published under the title Pragmatism and the Politics of Epistemology (Kyoto, 1986). 32. “The Politics of Epistemology” first appeared as the second of the Neesima Lectures mentioned in the previous note. 33. “Original Sin, Natural Law, and Politics” was first published in Partisan Review, Spring 1956, vol. 23, pp. 218–36. In considerably expanded form, it was the epilogue of a reprint of my Social Thought in America (Boston, 1957). 34. “Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Progressive Era” is a slightly altered version of the Second Annual Edward J. Bloustein Lecture, delivered at the Rutgers School of Law, Newark, on April 21, 1988. It was printed in Rutgers Law Review, Winter 1989, vol. 41, pp. 487–504. 35. “The American Intellectual versus the American City” first appeared in Daedalus, Winter 1961, vol. 90, pp. 166–79. 36. “The Philosopher and the Metropolis in America” first appeared in Urban Life and Form, ed. W. Z. Hirsch (New York, 1963), pp. 81–97; it is reprinted here with a few changes. 37. “William James” is a review of Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought. The review was published in The New Republic, 29 December 1986, vol. 195, pp. 25–30. 38. “The Later Years of George Santayana” is a review of Santayana: The Later Years, ed. D. Cory (New York, 1963); the review appeared in The New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 20 October 1963, p. 6. 39. “English Philosophy at Mid Century: An American’s Impressions” first appeared in The Listener, 11 October 1951, vol. 46, pp. 590 ff. 40. “Memories of G. E. Moore” first appeared in The Listener, 30 April 1959, vol. 59, pp. 757–58. It was delivered as a talk at Columbia University and on the BBC after Moore’s death. 41. “W. V. Quine” was delivered as a talk at a meeting in memory of Quine at Harvard University, 2 March 2001. It appears on Quine’s website: wvquine.org.

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I N D E X

Adair, Douglas, 291 Adams, Brooks, 36, 37 Adams, Henry, 36–38, 299, 302–304, 306 Addams, Jane, 307, 314, 317, 318 Allen, Gay Wilson, 220–221 Aquinas, Thomas, 76, 159, 258, 259, 265, 268, 269, 277, 279, 280, 282, 295 Aristotle, 13, 34, 44, 107, 110, 255, 268, 272 Augustine, 273, 274 Austin, J. L., 5, 122–124 Austin, John, 229, 230, 233, 235, 236, 238, 240 Bancroft, George, 36, 37 Beard, Charles A., 35–38, 218, 219, 221, 224, 225, 227–229, 232, 239–242, 243, 284, 290–291 Bentham, Jeremy, 14, 17, 19, 228, 229, 235, 236, 238, 240 Bergson, Henri, 9, 11, 13, 220 Berkeley, George, 49, 221, 222, 260–263 Berlin, Isaiah, 1, 2, 3, 9, 51–55, 56–57, 62–67, 116–120, 274, 276 Bury, J., B.43 Carnap, Rudolf, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 279, 340 Church, Alonzo, 112–115 Clifford, W. K., 327 Cohen, M. R., 340 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 311, 312 Comte, Auguste, 47, 48, 227 Cory, Daniel, 331–332 Croce, Benedetto, 9 Darwin, Charles, 11, 34, 35, 72, 220, 228, 233, 244 Descartes, Rene´, 13, 49, 107, 336 Dewey, John, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 17, 33–35, 71–73, 75, 97–99, 103, 141, 146, 147, 149– 185 passim, 203, 218, 222, 224–245 passim, 255, 267, 269, 270–274, 277, 283, 284, 291, 295, 296, 298, 299, 306–311 passim, 316– 319, 324–325, 331, 340 Dickens, Charles, 91 Diderot, Denis, 59 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 9, 33, 56 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 43–46, 76, 78

Duhem, Pierre, 2, 93, 137, 176, 188, 197, 202, 244–251 Edwards, Jonathan, 220, 221, 296 Einstein, Albert, 22, 146, 194–195 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 34, 82, 299, 300– 303, 305, 306, 308, 309, 310–314, 317, 318, 324 Filmer, Robert, 259 Foot, Philippa, 124–127 Forster, E. M., 40–41 Franklin, Benjamin, 311 Frege, Gottlob, 10, 112–115, 214, 337 Fromm, Erich, 220, 221 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 91 Goodman, Nelson, 1–2, 5–6, 97, 105, 110, 115, 158, 166, 200, 207, 208, 344 Hamilton, Alexander, 259, 284–287, 291– 295, 298 Hart, H.L.A., 1, 130–133 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 299, 301, 302, 303 Hegel, G.W.F., 9, 11, 13, 33–35, 52, 56, 65, 98, 144, 228, 232, 233n.26, 246, 268, 274, 276, 282, 314, 315 Herodotus, 49 Hobbes, Thomas, 117 Hofstadter, Richard, 224 Holmes, O. W., 5, 6, 35, 218, 220, 224–226, 227–234, 236, 239–242, 243, 247, 270, 277, 281–283, 284, 291–296, 298 Honore´, A. M., 130–133 Hook, Sidney, 167–168, 171 Howe, Frederic C., 306 Howells, William Dean, 42 Hume, David, 3, 7, 8, 13, 14, 49, 110, 116, 117, 127, 130, 137n.3, 138, 141, 144, 191, 211–214, 215, 222–223, 244, 285–287, 290, 291, 296 James, Henry, 42–44, 299, 301–306, 309, 314, 316, 323 James, William, 1, 2, 5, 9, 11, 22, 33, 34, 45, 75, 128, 138, 141, 143–148, 177, 199–202, 209, 210, 215, 219, 220, 243–254, 255, 284,

354 James, William (cont.) 291, 292, 295, 296, 298, 305–308, 310–311, 313–314, 316–319, 321, 323–330, 331, 337 Jay, John, 284, 287 Jefferson, Thomas, 34, 288–289, 296, 298, 299– 303, 306, 308, 309, 310–313, 316–318 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 78, 115, 144, 148, 151– 153, 178, 180–181, 184, 210, 214, 217, 222, 224–225, 272, 282, 293, 315, 329 Kepler, Johannes, 62, 66, 252 Keynes, John Maynard, 340–341 Kierkegaard, Søren, 76, 274–276, 309 Langford, C. H., 112, 115 Leibniz, G. W., 49 Lewis, C. I., 5, 101–102, 141, 145, 146, 160, 161, 163–165, 167, 178–185 Lippmann, Walter, 270, 276, 277, 279, 280, 282, 330 Locke, John, 1, 3, 13, 14, 15, 17–19, 34, 45, 49, 137, 149, 201, 213–215, 255–269, 276–280, 282–283, 285–287, 293, 295–297 Macaulay, Thomas B., 46, 239 Mach, Ernst, 22, 220, 245, 251 MacNabb, D.G.C., 212 Madison, James, 284, 287–291, 295 Maine, Henry, 228, 230, 233 Marx, Karl, 44, 49, 51, 52, 56, 228, 274, 291, 315, 335, 339, 340 Maxwell, James Clerk, 37, 251 Melden, A. I., 126–129 Melville, Herman, 299, 301, 302 Mill, John Stuart, 1, 2, 3, 7, 14, 15, 17–20, 46–49, 103, 105, 106, 110, 130–132, 147–148, 149–150, 165–166, 170, 214, 227–230, 234–238, 240, 255, 256, 261, 263–269, 309 Miller, Perry, 220–221, 301 Moore, G. E., 5, 9, 13, 22, 24, 49, 51, 75, 100, 118, 122–123, 321, 333–336, 339–343 Morison, Samuel E., 26, 37–38 Morris, George S., 71, 228, 232 Myers, Gerald E., 323–326, 329–330 Newton, Isaac, 11, 152, 186, 189, 212, 214, 223–224, 236 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 75–76, 270–277, 281–283 Park, Robert, 300, 307, 309, 317–318 Pascal, Blaise, 76, 78

I N D E X

Peirce, Charles S., 22, 33, 34, 141, 145–146, 152, 154, 168, 172–174, 176, 178–185, 197, 201, 203, 219, 220, 267, 311, 314, 324, 325, 337 Perkins, James, 88–90 Perry, Ralph Barton, 145, 146, 323, 324 Plato, 13, 22–24, 78, 107, 115, 144, 226, 336 Poe, Edgar A., 299, 301 Pound, Roscoe, 233, 241 Quine, W. V., 2, 5, 6, 93, 97, 99, 108, 112–115, 137, 141, 176, 177, 186–198, 199–210, 211, 212, 244, 249, 250, 321, 344–347 Ranke, Leopold von, 37, 38, 239, 240 Rawls, John, 1, 6 Reichenbach, Hans, 10 Renouvier, Charles, 220, 324, 327 Robinson, James H., 218, 225, 227–229, 232, 239–241, 243 Rousseau, J.-J., 58, 59, 61 Royce, Josiah, 14, 33, 34, 141, 143–146, 148, 215, 244, 296, 310, 311, 313–319 Russell, Bertrand, 9, 10, 13, 17, 22–24, 49, 51, 147, 177, 199, 209, 217–218, 331, 333–337, 342–343 Ryan, Alan, 167, 169, 170 Ryle, Gilbert, 109, 336 Santayana, George, 10, 33–35, 75, 77, 81, 141, 143, 144, 146, 148, 215, 296, 310, 311, 313– 316, 318, 331–332 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 12 Schelling, F.W.J., 63, 65, 66 Schiller, F.C.S., 245 Schiller, Friedrich, 315, 318 Schlesinger, A. M., Jr., 88 Sheffer, H. M., 145 Sidgwick, Henry, 9, 10 Spencer, Herbert, 13, 34, 218, 228, 272, 293 Stalin, Joseph, 17, 80, 82, 273 Stroud, Barry, 213 Sullivan, Louis, 299, 308 Tarski, Alfred, 2, 5, 93, 176–177, 202 Thoreau, Henry David, 299, 301, 303, 306, 311, 313 Tillich, Paul, 83 Tocqueville, A. de, 301–302 Tolstoy, Leo, 51–52, 56–67 Toynbee, Arnold, 36, 144, 274 Tylor, E. B., 231–232

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Veblen, Thorstein, 35, 218, 224–226, 227–229, 232–242, 243, 277, 301 Venturi, Franco, 219, 221 Voltaire, F.M.A., 223, 224 White, Lucia, 215, 299, 310

Whitehead, A. N., 10, 23, 52, 146, 147, 323, 337 Whitman, Walt, 300, 305, 308 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 24, 49, 51, 67, 72, 227, 333–335, 342 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 299, 308