The History of Philosophy, page 43
The idea that in external relations the relata are independent of and unaffected by the relations in which they stand seemed incoherent to Bradley. If the relation R is separate from the relata A and B, then – as above – there has to be a relation to relate the relata to R … and therefore regress. So much for external relations. He then shows that the idea of internal relations is equally incoherent. If these are ‘grounded’ in the nature of their relata then there must be some aspect of the relata which grounds them. For example, for there to be a relation of ‘brother of’, the person standing in this relation to someone else must be male and must share at least one parent with the other person; but then these ‘parts’ of the relatum – the maleness, the shared genetic inheritance – stand in a relation to each other too, and each of them to the relation of being a ‘brother of’. And if so, on both counts regresses again ensue.fn6
The incoherence of the concept of relations, as Bradley sees it, is his reason for rejecting pluralism. If there is not a plurality of independent things, then holism is true: there is just one thing; and this one thing is therefore everything. Bradley’s reason for thinking that this one thing is experience or sentience could be reconstructed (he does not give an argument as such) by saying that if it were not experience or sentience, then it would not be one thing, because there is experience (he and you and I have it) and if reality is not itself experience then there would be more than one thing – experience, and what is experienced, which by hypothesis is itself not experience. But if there is only one thing and there is experience, then experience must be that one thing. He argues that the appearance of diversity and plurality is an artefact of our finite and partial thought, which imposes distinctions and differences. But these, and the contradictions we soon notice when we try to think about them rationally, are reconciled and included in the whole: all contradictions are holistically overcome and resolved in the Absolute.
In his ethical thought Bradley addresses the question Why should I be moral? Note that this question appears to presuppose that there is morality, and asks why one should conform one’s life and actions to it. His answer to the question is that to be moral is to achieve self-realization, and self-realization is explored in the dialectically arranged essays in his Ethical Studies (1876), each of which takes up a suggestion from another ethical doctrine only to reject it as such, while nevertheless retaining some aspect of it which is helpful. On the way there are highly interesting discussions, particularly in the essays ‘Pleasure for Pleasure’s Sake’ and ‘My Station and its Duties’, but the terminus of the discussion is an unsatisfactory one, for it is that the ideal self – the ‘good self’ – is unattainable because it depends for its existence on the evil it must overcome to be what it strives to be; and since this is so, ultimate goodness is unachievable, because evil has to exist.
Of the names mentioned above as among the leaders of idealist thought, one has bequeathed a problem which still bedevils philosophers. This is the proof offered by J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925) that time is unreal.
McTaggart’s first works were extensive studies of Hegel. He published three books and a significant short monograph on Hegel’s philosophy before setting out in substantial form his own version of idealism in his chief work, The Nature of Existence (first volume 1921, second volume published posthumously 1927). He was also an admirer of Bradley, and much influenced by him. Despite these acknowledged influences, the views he developed were distinctively his own.
The interest some folk take in the oddities of philosophers would be much tickled by McTaggart. He had an odd appearance – a large head and a shuffling sideways walk – and he rode a tricycle around Cambridge and was scrupulous about greeting cats whenever he saw them. (By contrast, Bradley in Oxford shot at cats with his revolver if they ventured into the grounds of his college.) McTaggart was very shy, as was Bertrand Russell when young; the latter reports that when McTaggart first called on him at his rooms in Trinity College, Russell was too shy to ask him in and McTaggart was too shy to enter, and so there was a long stand-off with McTaggart hovering at the door.
The monograph that McTaggart published in 1893 – more a pamphlet than a book – entitled The Further Determination of the Absolute, argued that reality is spiritual and timeless, and consists in a community of mutually loving spirits. This idea remained his fundamental conception of reality throughout his work. Contrary to Bradley’s view, it is a pluralistic and relational version of the Absolute rather than a monistic and holistic one.
McTaggart had already stated in his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896) a commitment to the idea that there is no such thing as time, but the arguments he there offered are not the same as those set out in his enduringly famous paper ‘On the Unreality of Time’ in the journal Mind in 1908. His argument is as follows.
There are two ways of talking about time; one consists in an ordering of events as earlier than and later than, and the other turns on nominating the present and ordering events as past or as future relative to the present. He called the latter ordering, past–present–future, the ‘A-series’, and the former ordering, earlier than/later than, the ‘B-series’. He then argued that if time is real we need both series, though it might be said that the A-series is more fundamental than the B-series. The reason is that the place that events hold in the B-series is fixed: two events X and Y are such that if X happened earlier than Y then it is forever the case that it did so. But there is no time without change; and change involves events unfolding from the past through the present into the future. So there is only change if the A-series exists.
But the A-series involves a contradiction. This is because it will be true of everything that happens that it is all three of past, present and future from some given standpoint for each. If something is happening now, it was in the future before now and it will be in the past when it is over – but in the past it was now and the current now was will be from that point of view – and now will be past when the event has passed into the future. So for any event X we can say that all three descriptions ‘X is past,’ ‘X is present’ and ‘X is future’ apply, and which of these three is ‘now’ applicable is relative to a choice of when ‘now’ is. No two of these descriptions can simultaneously apply without contradiction; but because it is arbitrary how the ordering is made as to which is past, which is present and which is future, we cannot say which description is preferable let alone correct.
Put another way: if you try to argue that X is past, present and future at different times, then you have to use the A-series concepts to select a point from which X can be said to be past or present or future; but to use the A-series descriptions to position that point – call it Point 1 – in the time-series both begs the question (is circular) and generates a regress: as one can see, to justify choosing Point 1 you need to invoke the series to choose a Point 2 in order to fix Point 1, but then to justify invoking a Point 2 from which to fix Point 1, you need to invoke the series to fix a Point 3 … and so endlessly on.
So the A-series is contradictory; and if there cannot be change without the A-series, there is no change; and if there is no change, time does not exist. From the point of view of the way the world (misleadingly, as all idealists think) appears to us in experience, descriptions of events in B-series terms as earlier and later have a certain usefulness, as indeed does use of the A-series concepts, if we are given an arbitrary specification of ‘now’; but the B-series does not allow for change and is therefore less fundamental than the A-series. The latter is essential to the nature of time if it exists, which is why its contradictory nature is fatal to the idea of time itself.
However, the usefulness of the B-series for our dealings with the way the world (misleadingly) appears to us requires that we explain how this can be. McTaggart does so by offering what he calls the ‘C-series’, which is the B-series understood without reference to time – that is, without reference to the idea of change. The C-series puts events into an earlier/later ordering that is fixed, linear, asymmetrical and transitive, which is what the B-series is, except that our normal use of the B-series concepts carries the implication, which the C-series dispenses with, that things that were ‘earlier than’ became or changed into being ‘later than’ – that is, it quietly assumes the A-series.
C-series perspectives on (apparent) events are thoughts or experiences, and McTaggart suggests (in The Nature of Existence) that they are perspectives particular to individual minds – the minds which, mutually related by love, constitute reality; which suggests that although C-series experiences are individual to each mind, nevertheless they somehow coordinate.
Philosophers still struggle with McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time. Even those who wish to find a way of proving time to be real accept that the A-series/B-series distinction has to be the starting point for discussing the matter.
One might briefly mention ‘the last idealist’, the remarkable T. L. S. (Timothy) Sprigge (1932–2007), whose views, although chiefly influenced by Spinoza, Bradley, William James and Santayana, were somewhat like McTaggart’s in that he believed that reality is fundamentality a community of minds which in their interrelationships constitute the Absolute: reality is ‘a single divine consciousness within which an inconceivably vast number of streams of finite experience interact and interweave’. His metaphysics made a genuine difference to how he lived his life: if reality is the totality of experience, the experience of everything – animals, and nature itself – is of great value. His book The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984) stands as so far the last monument to a tradition of philosophy that was otherwise swept away by the Analytic movement which was in part a reaction to it, though it was also a continuation, empowered and enhanced by developments in logic and science, of the empiricist tradition that idealism sought to supplant.
PRAGMATISM
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, contemporary with the British idealists, a group of philosophers in the United States – Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910) prominent among them – evolved a philosophical outlook to which they gave the name ‘Pragmatism’. A somewhat later adherent of this outlook, John Dewey (1859–1952), continued the line of thought they proposed, and was influential in the period between the First and Second World Wars. The movement thereafter went into abeyance for a time before some of its themes resurfaced in the work of several American philosophers in the later twentieth century.
Peirce recorded how he and some friends started a ‘Metaphysical Club’ in the 1870s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss philosophy. It met either in his study or in that of William James, and its other members included Chauncey Wright, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and Nicholas St John Green, to whom Peirce gives the credit for being ‘the grandfather of pragmatism’ because he insisted that the group take seriously the definition of ‘belief’, given by the psychologist-philosopher Alexander Bain, as ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act’. Peirce wrote, ‘From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary.’ Alexander Bain (1818–1903) was a Scottish philosopher and psychologist who was one of the first to apply scientific methods in psychology (and was a major influence on William James in this respect). Bain held that it is natural for people to believe, and that doubt is an uncomfortable condition from which enquiry liberates them by leading to what he described as the ‘serene, satisfying and happy tone of mind’ which is believing. Peirce adopted this view because it fitted well with his opinion that enquiry is a process aimed at correcting and adapting behaviour so that it is more effective in the world. Problems arise when our conduct is inadequate for achieving a goal; the solution to the problem is finding a rule of action that overcomes the problem and advances us towards the goal. And that is the aim of enquiry: the acquisition of stable and enduring beliefs. Such beliefs we call ‘true’, Peirce said, and we give the name ‘reality’ to what they are about.
Peirce acknowledged that people employ different methods to try to arrive at stable beliefs – chief among them appeals to authority and a priori reasoning. But he insisted that the methods of science are the best way to settle differences of opinion about what to believe, because all who use such methods will ‘converge’ on the most stable beliefs in the long run. ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate is what we mean by truth,’ he wrote, ‘and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’
One of the most influential of Peirce’s writings is a paper entitled ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’. In it he enunciates the ‘pragmatic maxim’, as follows: ‘Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’ For example: our idea of ‘hardness’ – of something being ‘hard’ – is just our idea of what this means in practice, such as how difficult it is to break, scratch or pierce a hard thing. To define ‘hardness’ in this way is similar to what is called an ‘operational definition’, or relatedly to saying what a thing is by saying what it does. When we consider the meaning of the word ‘hard’ and distinguish its meaning from other words, says Peirce, we see that ‘there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.’
Note that this is a theory about meaning, not truth, for obviously both true and false beliefs are meaningful. But it guides us towards the appropriate conception of truth; truth is attained when the application of scientific method has eliminated beliefs of no practical worth, and settled on those that prove their utility.
Peirce had to acknowledge that beliefs widely held at one time might come to be revised, and therefore he accepted a fallibilist epistemology, although his doing so was chiefly directed against those ‘foundationalists’ who argued that there are firm starting points for knowledge – innate ideas, as some rationalists argued, or the ‘givens’ (data) of sensory experience, as empiricists argued. This poses a problem for his view, because it implies that to fix the sense of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ something else has to be at work in addition to convergence among enquirers. William James attempted to deal with this problem, but his doing so resulted in a rather different viewpoint.
Instead of focusing on convergence, James focused on a belief’s effectiveness. Truth, he said, is what works: ‘The “true” is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the “right” is only the expedient in our way of behaving.’ The choice of terminology in the case of ‘what is (morally) right’ seems rather shocking, but the idea that we call expedient beliefs ‘true’ is a natural enough view for a pragmatist to take. The objection to it is, however, obvious: there are useful falsehoods, and there are truths that have no practical utility, so the fact that believing something turns out to be useful is no guarantee of its truth.
James thought that he had solved a problem left unsolved by those who assert the truism that, in some sense, truth is ‘agreement’ between our ideas and reality. He asked, What is this ‘agreement’, and what is this ‘reality’? The nature of the relation of ‘agreement’, ‘correspondence’ or ‘match’ between what is in our heads and what is out there in the world (or in some other realm, for example the realm of abstract objects such as numbers) has always been extremely difficult to specify. If you deny that the mind is merely a mirror that somehow reflects reality, but instead interacts with reality for practical purposes, then you see how ‘truth’ can be regarded as jointly constituted by that relationship. How we carve up reality, and what we believe about it, has a great deal to do with our needs and interests, and of course with the perceptual and cognitive faculties that have evolved in their service. There is a distinct Kantian flavour to this view.
James’ motivations for adopting pragmatism have much to do with the intellectual climate of the second half of the nineteenth century. Following the rise of science and the work of Darwin, there were tensions between the worldview implied by science and the traditional worldviews of religion and the moralities associated with them. He described those who insisted upon the scientific approach as ‘tough-minded’ and the others as ‘tender-minded’. He accepted the deliverances of science, but wanted there to be room in its worldview for religion too. He saw pragmatism as the answer, because while conforming to the demands of a tough-minded stance it offers a defence of tender-minded views also, by noting that they are useful and beneficial to believe. This was challenged by Bertrand Russell, who argued that it committed James to holding that the proposition ‘Santa Claus exists’ is true.
Dewey developed Peirce’s view of enquiry as the quest for ‘settled belief’ by describing it as beginning in an unsettled ‘situation’ and aiming to transform that situation into a coherent one. The unclarity in which enquiry begins is not solely a matter of the enquirer lacking appropriate beliefs, but rather is a function of both the enquirer’s inadequate beliefs and the objectively unsettled nature of the situation in which she holds them. They thus jointly prompt the need for the situation to be rendered determinate. This implies that ‘situations’ are objective states of which the enquirer and her beliefs are part; it relates to the further idea, shared by all the pragmatists, that experience – perception, thought and enquiry – is a whole in which we are not merely passive recipients of sense-impressions, but actively inferring and conceptualizing a world, and justifying our beliefs about it by reference to how they hang together – a ‘coherence’ view of justification. Dewey pointed out that we start from the perspective of participants in the world, in the midst of things we are already interacting and dealing with, even before we start to philosophize; we do not start from a ‘blank slate’ position.
