Contents of A History of Western Philosophy

I. The Classical Mind, Second Edition

1 Pre-Socratic Philosophy / 2 Education Through Violence / 3 Atomism /4 Plato: The Theory of Forms / 5 Plato: The Special Sciences / 6 Aristotle: Metaphysics, Natural Science, Logic / 7 Aristotle: Ethics, Politics, Art / 8 The Late Classical Period

II. The Medieval Mind, Second Edition

1 The New Religious Orientation /2 Cfi'i-istloi1itYJ, The Formative Years / 3 Augustine: God the Creator / 4 Augustine: The Created Lini~~rje (~c-the Medieval I nterva I / 6 Thomas:

Metaphysics / 7 Thomas: PsychologW,6thics, Politics /8 The End of the Middle Ages

III. Hobbes to Hume, Second Edition

1 Renaissance / 2 Reformation /3 Science and Scientific Method /4 Hobbes! 5 Descartes /6 Spinoza / 7 Leibniz / 8 Locke / 9 Berkeley /10 Hume

IV. Kant and the Nineteenth Century, Second Edition, Revised

1 The Age of Reason / 2 Kant: Theory of Knowledge / 3 Kant: Theory of Value / 4 Reactions against Kantianism: Hegel and Schopenhauer / 5 Science, Scientism, and Social Philosophy / 6 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche / 7 C. S. Peirce / 8 William James / 9 F. H. Bradley

V. The Twentieth Century to Quine and Derrida, Third Edition

1 The World We Live In /2 Three Philosophies of Process: Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead /3 Moore and the Revival of Realism /4 Frege and the Revolution in Logic / 5 Russell / 6 The Tractatus / 7 Logical Positivism / 8 Husser! and the Phenomenological Tradition /9 Heidegger /10 Sarte /11 The Later Wittgenstein /12 Ordinary-Language Philosophy /13 Quine /14 Derrida

A History of Western Philosophy

The Twentieth Centu ry to Quine and Derrida

THIRD EDITION

w. T. JONES

California Institute of Technology

ROBERT J. FOGELIN Dartmouth College

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Although this edition of the fifth volume of A History of Western Philosophy lists two authors, it remains both in content and in style predominantly the work of W T. Jones. As second author, my charge was to extend the range of this work to include the writings of philosophers who came into prominence after World War II. To this end, I have added two chapters. Chapter 12 concerns ordinarylanguage philosophy and concentrates on the writings of J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, and Paul Grice. Chapter 13 examines the philosophy ofW V O. Quine. I have selected these philosophers not only because they are important figures in the development of philosophy in the second half of this century but also because their positions stand in important relation to the philosophy of the first half of {his century.

I have also made some additions to earlier chapters. To ensure that any mistakes I have made will not be attributed to W T. Jones, let me indicate briefly

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vi PREFACE

what these additions are. In Chapter 3, on C. E. Moore, I have added a section on his "A Defense of Common Sense." I have also included a discussion of Moore's so-called open-question argument. In Chapter 4 I have presented a considerably more detailed account of Frege's discussion of sense and reference. There is only the most minor tinkering in Chapter 5, which considers Russell. In Chapter 6, which concerns Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I have added a section explaining what Wittgenstein meant when he said that a proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions. There are no changes to the discussion of logical positivism in Chapter 7; I think that Jones has it just right in giving prominence to Schlick, Neurath, and especially Carnap.

The only place where Jones's views and my views diverge is in Chapter 11 where he examines Wittgenstein's later thought. For the most part, however, our differences are matters of emphasis, I rarely disagree with what he does say; I simply would have given prominence to themes that are muted in his presentation: the notion of rule-following, for example. In the end-except for some minor changes- I decided to leave the chapter as he wrote it, since it represents a clear and insightful interpretation of very difficult texts where disagreements on the correct interpretation have been the norm.

In the process of rereading the second edition of this work, I was constantly struck by Jones's ability to provide not only clear but elegant readings of texts that are sometimes ferociously obscure. This gift is nowhere more apparent than in the chapter he has written on Derrida, which concludes this volume.

Contents

Robert J. Fogelin

v Preface
xiii Introduction
1
The World We Live In
1 Four Ariadnean Threads through a Labyrinth
8 The Kantian Paradigm
2
15 Three Philosophies of Process:
Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead
17 Bergson viii CONTENTS CONTENTS ix
19 Limitations of Conceptual Knowledge 157 Sense and Reference
21 The Nature of Reality 167 Summary
25 The Evolution of Intellect
27 Intellect and Action
29 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 5
32 Mysticism, Asceticism, and a Universal Society
33 Bergson and the Spirit of the Age 169 Russell
35 Dewey 169 Russell and Moore
Concept of Human Nature 172 Russell's Program
37
174 Logical Analysis
41 Theory of Education
187 Philosophy as Criticism
42 Democracy
191 Philosophy as Synthesis
44 Attitude toward Metaphysics
The Nature of Reality: "Experience" 207 Ethics
47 Religion
213
57 The Nature of Value
66 Whitehead 6
67 The Function of Philosophy
73 Criticism of the Dominant Philosophical Scheme 216 The Tractatus
79 Whitehead's New Categorial Scheme
80 Applications of the Categorial Scheme 217 The Basic Orientation
83 Whitehead's Account of Value 218 What Can Be Said about the World
88 Religion 220 Logical and Pictorial Form
223 The General Form of a Proposition
225 Logical Propositions
3 229 Natural Science
232 Philosophy
90 Moore and the Revival of Realism 236 The Mystical
90 The Analytic Tradition
95 Moore and Analysis 7
105 Realism
119 Ethics 238 Logical Positivism
129 Moore's Philosophy of Common Sense
137 Moore's Influence 238 The Vienna Circle
240 The Verifiability Principle
242 Logical Construction
4 243 The Unity of Science
245 How the Positivists Read the Tractatus
139 Frege and the Revolution in Logic 246 What Do the Elucidations Elucidate?
254 The Shift toward Linguistic Analysis
140 Aristotelian Logic and Its Critics 263 Noncognitivism in Ethics and Religion
146 Frege on the Nature of Number 267 Verifiability Again
151 Ordinary Language and Formalized Language 270 The End of Positivism CONTENTS xi
X CONTENTS
409 Critique of Logical Atomism
8 415 Examples of How Philosophical Problems Are Dissolved
420 Wittgenstein and Husserl
272 Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition 422 Wittgenstein and Heidegger
423 Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Philosophy
272 The Phenomenological Tradition
276 Husserl and the Quest for Certainty
278 Criticism of Relativism 12
280 The Crisis of European Man
286 The Phenomenological Method 428 Ordinary-Language Philosophy
298 Phenomenology: The Science of Being
306 Husserl's Influence 428 The Emergence of Ordinary-Language Philosophy
433 Strawson v. Russell on Definite Descriptions
439 Three Theories of Definite Descriptions
9 440 J. L. Austin
468 Paul Grice
308 Heidegger
308 Heidegger and the Phenomenological Tradition 13
312 The Question of Being
316 Human Being in a Human "World" 484 Quine
331 The Human Predicament
342 From the Ontical to the Ontological 485 On What There Is
345 The Call of Being 488 Two Dogmas of Empiricism
498 Physicalism: The Single Option
502 Extensionality
10 505 Translation and Indeterminacy
510 Quine and Russell
358 Sartre
361 The Human Condition 14
370 Consciousness and Consciousness of Self
378 Sartre's Ontology 512 Derrida
382 Freedom and Action
388 Sartre and Marxism
531 Notes
1 1 549 Suggestions for Further Reading
391 The Later Wittgenstein 555 Glossary
394 The Nature of Language 563 Credits
401 Universals and Family Resemblance
405 The Question of Precision 567 Index Introduction

Studying the philosophy of the twentieth century is a matter of being surrounded by trees to such an extent that it is difficult to make out the shape of the woods as a whole. Nevertheless, despite all the diversity of movements and schools into which they are divided, we can still make out that philosophy in our times has a kind of unity. In the first place, since philosophy never develops in a vacuum but is part of the ongoing culture, all the various schools of twentieth-century philosophy have, as it were, a twentieth-century look. This distinctive look results from the fact that all twentieth-century philosophers, however much they differ philosophically, are resonating with and responding to the deep concerns of the society of which they are a part-its ambivalence toward science, its preoccupation with language, its worry over consciousness, and its loss of confidence. In the second place, almost all twentieth-century philosophers have been motivated by a

xiv INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION XV

desire to escape from the constructivism and relativism that was the nineteenth century's inheritance from Kant. Twentieth-century philosophers have wanted, above all, to reaffirm the possibility of knowledge-knowledge of an objectively existing universe, not merely of one that the mind constructs. Though the different schools of philosophy have taken different routes out of the Kantian paradigm (that, indeed, is why we can call them "schools") they are all characterized by a common aim: the recovery of objectivity (Chapter 1).

But these features that give philosophy in our time a kind of unity did not emerge full-blown as the century dawned. Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead, whose theories dominated philosophy in the early decades of the century, were, in many respects, men of the nineteenth century, sharing its optimism, its belief in progress, and its vision of a universe that is in process, ever evolving new forms. Like Schopenhauer, Bergson held that reality is disclosed in intuition, but he believed reality to be a fruitful and productive elan vital, not a blind and insatiable will. Hence, his view of man and of man's relation to the universe was far more optimistic than Schopenhauers. Dewey agreed with Bergson that intellect is instrumental to will and that "truth" is whatever satisfies the will, but he rejected both Bergson's intuition and his metaphysical tendencies. For Dewey, philosophy was not an inquiry into the nature of the universe; it was a way of making our traffic with nature and with other men and women more viable. In contrast to Bergson and Dewey, Whitehead was a rationalist. But his rationalism was very different from the traditional ideal of a complete deductive system. Rather, he worked out an open-ended "categorial scheme" that was designed to bridge the chasm between the world of ordinary experience and that of the physical and biological sciences (Chapter 2).

Though C. E. Moore was not much younger than the three process philosophers, his conception of philosophy was very different from theirs; he lived, in effect, in a different world-one that has become increasingly the world of twentieth-century philosophers. Whereas Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead conceived of philosophy as a large-scale enterprise and deliberately addressed themselves to nonprofessional audiences, Moore deliberately tackled only smallscale problems of a very technical nature and addressed himself to a professional audience. In an attempt to introduce precision into philosophy, Moore made use of a method he called "analysis." Analysis, as Moore practiced it, exposed some of the muddles of idealist philosophers but did not altogether clear up all puzzles about the status of sense data and about the relation between sense data and material objects, as Moore had to confess. Nevertheless we may take Moore's realism as representative of one very frequently traveled path out of the Kantian paradigm (Chapter 3).

Frege's theories represent a second route out of constructivism and relativism.

Although Frege was a mathematician and mathematical logician, his work in these technical fields-especially the distinction he drew between "sense" and "reference"-has had major repercussions on philosophical thinking. But Frege's main influence on philosophy was to give it a different orientation. Frege's basic

assumption was, to realists, the seemingly simple claim that some assertions are true and others are false. This being the case, it seemed to Frege to follow that to analyze the logic of assertions is to expose the basic structure of the universe: Logical analysis discloses what must be the case about the world if any assertion whatever is true. Thus, for Frege and his followers, logic replaces epistemology as the way out of Kantianism: For them the old epistemological question, "What do we know?" is replaced by a new question, 'What is the logic of 'know'?" (Chapter 4).

Like Moore, Russell had a strong realist bias; like Frege, he held that logical analysis would clear up most, if not all, philosophical problems by exposing the muddles of ordinary language, and his theories of types and of descriptions are brilliant examples of what logical analysis can do to resolve seemingly intractable puzzles. On the other hand, unlike Moore and Frege, he had deep metaphysical interests: He wanted to be another Descartes; that is, he hoped to put twentiethcentury science on a secure basis. In an effort to do this he distinguished between what he called "hard" and "soft" data. Hard data are indubitable; we have a direct acquaintance with them. Soft data are anything but indubitable, but they can-at least in theory-be replaced by logical constructions in which only hard data occur. (We replace "dog" by a family of canoid color patches.) Obviously, if this program could be carried out, the sciences would indeed rest on a firm basis, on the basis of indubitable hard data. But during his long life Russell repeatedly changed his mind about the kinds of hard data that exist. He had to admit, regretfully, that much of what he believed could not be proved. Russell ended as an antimetaphysician, but he was an antimetaphysician in spite of himself (Chapter 5).

Wittgenstein's Tractatus was, in many respects, the culmination of the logical route out of the Kantian paradigm. Wittgenstein maintained that from an examination of the conditions that must hold if any proposition at all is meaningful, it is possible to conclude that the world must have certain features. It must, for instance, consist in a number of atomic facts or states of affairs, and "from the existence or nonexistence of one state of affairs, it is impossible to infer the existence or nonexistence of another." It follows that there is a chasm between the a priori and the empirical. The propositions of logic and mathematics are necessary, but they are not about the world; they are tautologies. On the other hand, propositions with sense, such as those that occur in the empirical sciences, are not necessary:

"Outside logic, everything is accidental." These doctrines were congenial to Russell and to the Logical Positivists, but the Tractatus has another side that sets it apart from the mainstream of analytic thought. For Wittgenstein drew a distinction between what can be said and what cannot be said but only shown. About what can only be shown, we must remain silent. This is the domain of what Wittgenstein called the mystical; ethics and religion fall within this domain, and so does philosophy. Philosophy, properly understood, is not a kind of discourse, it is an activity-the activity of displaying the limits of what can be said. Hence, once the doctrine of the Tractatus is grasped, the book itself can be dispensed with: "The reader can throwaway the ladder after he has climbed up it." (Chapter 6)

xvi INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION xvii

The LOgical Positivists were the heirs of Russell. They undertook to carry out the program that he had only sketched. In this enterprise they used the Tractatus, or rather, those parts of the Tractatus that were devoted to what Wittgenstein held can be said, as a kind of handbook. If Russell's hard data could be identified with Wittgenstein's atomic states of affairs, it appeared to the early positivists that they need only formulate the sentences in which states of affairs are named (they called these "protocol sentences") in order to put the sciences on a firm basis. This line of reasoning underlay their Verifiability Principle, namely, the thesis that the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification. Sentences that are not verifiable, that is, which cannot be reduced to protocol sentences, are ruled out as meaningless. This includes the sentences of metaphysics and theology. These sentences may, some of the positivists allowed, have an emotional function (they may be bad poetry), but they are literally nonsense. Unfortunately it soon appeared that there were grave problems with the Verifiability Principle. Did the principle need to be verified? If not, why not? If so, how could one hope to verify it without becoming trapped in a vicious circle? Further, Carnap's Principle of Tolerance (the thesis that our criteria for distinguishing between what is real and what is unreal are related to language and that we can, and do, use different languages for different purposes) undermined the claim of the early Positivists that they provided the language for talking about the world. The Verifiability Principle now became merely a recommendation, thus taking the sting out of the Positivists' attack on metaphysics: Metaphysicians had only to reject the recommendation, and they were still in business (Chapter 7).

Chapters 3 through 7 have all been concerned with philosophers who, however much they may have differed among themselves, all belong to what in the text is called the analytic tradition. It had its roots in certain more or less implicit assumptions about the nature of the world that can be traced back to Hume and beyond Hume to Hobbes. Among these are the assumption that the universe is composed of a large number of very simple entities, that complex objects can be analyzed into the simple entities of which they are composed, and that these simple entities, being simple, are directly understandable whenever they are encountered. The next three chapters examine the second main movement that has dominated philosophical thinking in this century-what in the text is called the phenomenological tradition.

Husserl was the founder of phenomenology. Like many other post-Kantians, he held that reality consists in things-as-they-appear. But unlike the Hegelians and other objective idealists, he rejected the constructivist view of mind that Kant had introduced into philosophy. Like the realists, Husserl held that consciousness does not make a world; it merely displays the world. Accordingly, for him the task of philosophy is to describe the world that consciousness displays. But for thisand here he differed radically from the realists-a special method of "seeing," one that requires elaborate training, is necessary. This method of phenomenological seeing requires us to learn to "bracket" our experience, that is, neither to believe

nor to disbelieve in the existence of what we experience, but to suspend belief and examine the experience itself. When we do this, according to Husserl, we discover much that completely eludes us in the "natural standpoint," that is, in ordinary experience. We discover not only "essences" and many other kinds of intentional objects but acts of consciousness as well. The advantage of phenomenological seeing, according to Husserl, is that what appears in our experience when we bracket is indubitable; being simply there, it cannot be doubted. Phenomenology thus seemed to provide the basis for the "rigorous science" that Husserl was seeking (Chapter 8).

Heidegger learned the phenomenological method from Husserl but put it to a very different use. He was not interested in rigorous science but in harkening to what he called "Being." Phenomenology, in Heidegger's view, can uncover Being, which, in the dark age in which we now live, hides itself from us. The first step toward uncovering Being is to make a phenomenological analysis of Dasein (Heidegger's technical term for human nature). Why Dasein? Because Dasein alone of all beings is interested in Being. Dasein alone asks, "Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?" Heidegger's analysis of Dasein is often acute and sensitive (we experience things as ready-to-hand, he points out, not merely as presentat-hand), but it may be doubted whether he has uncovered the universal, a priori structure of human nature as he supposed, or merely given us an account of the experiential world of an anxious, concerned man. But in any event, even in Heidegger's own assessment, the road from Dasein's being to Being as such proved a dead end. He therefore shifted to poetry as a better clue to Being than ontological analysis. But even poetry proved inadequate, and in the end he decided that the ineffable nature of Being cannot be communicated in words. What is needed is "silence about silence." That would be "authentic saying" (Chapter 9).

Sartre is the third philosopher of the phenomenological tradition whose views are examined in this volume. Like Heidegger, he started from Husserlian phenomenology; like Heidegger, because he was less interested in rigorous science than in human ("existential") problems, he moved a very long way from Husserl. However, whereas Heidegger felt the presence of Being even when, as in the present age, it has withdrawn itself from us, Sartre is convinced that we live in a Godless world. The great question for him is not how to uncover Being and become open to it but how to live one's day-to-day life once one has purged oneself of all the illusions that make this life bearable. In Sartre's play The Flies, Orestes says, "Human life begins on the other side of despair." Sartre is far better at describing despair and the circumstances that lead to it than at dealing with life on the other side. The problem of how to live authentically would be difficult enough for a withdrawn individual like Heidegger, but for Sartre, who had been a political activist, it was particularly acute, and his writings suggest some relaxation of his earlier position. The difficulty of living authentically is no longer so much an existential problem, rooted in the nature of human nature, as it is a sociopolitical problem, a product of the "scarcity" that capitalism creates (Chapter 10).

xviii INTRODUCTION

When Wittgenstein finished writing the Tractatus he thought he had solved all the problems of philosophy. It was not long, however, before he concluded that the theory of meaning on which the whole analysis of the Tractatus had rested was an oversimplification. A picture, he said, had held him captive. This picture was the picture of language as a picture. Words, he had thought when he wrote the Tractatus, are essentially names, labels that we attach to objects. This picture of language, he now realized, was not wholly false: Some words do function as names. But if we want to understand language we must see that language functions in many different ways, depending on the "game" of which it is a part. Accordingly, we should look to the use not the meaning. But words do not have any specifically philosophical use. Philosophers ask, for instance, "What is time?" and become uneasy when they cannot answer. The cure for such philosophical disquietude is to put language back into use: Let us examine the circumstances in which people use the word "time." For instance, they say, "It's time for lunch," or ask, "What time is it?" There is no puzzle about what "time" means in these usages, and these usages are the only meanings that "time" has. Thus the age-old problem about the nature of time is dissolved-not solved, simply dissolved. The same is true for other philosophical problems. Philosophers, Wittgenstein thought, have been bewitched by language; Philosophical Investigations was intended as a kind of therapy to exorcise the psychological demons that bewitchment with language had generated. Though Wittgenstein's therapy was not quite as successful as he thought it would be (he did not put philosophy out of business) he clid radically change the way in which most philosophers now do their business.

From the perspective of almost a half-century later, we now see that the circulation of Wittgenstein's ideas was a major turning point in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Many philosophers fell completely under his spell, adopting not only his views but also his indirect and often challenging ways of expressing them. Others, most notably the so-called ordinary-language philosophers, who came to prominence at Oxford in the decades following World War II, though they took over many ofWittgenstein's ideas, developed them in a very different spirit. J. L. Austin, generally thought to be the central figure in this movement, had little patience with Wittgenstein's style of philosophizing. Austin and those who worked closely with him accepted Wittgenstein's leading idea that the meaning of an expression is its use in the language. They also agreed that philosophical problems often have their source in linguistic misunderstandings and thus can be resolved by removing these misunderstandings. Unlike Wittgenstein, however, they thought that this procedure could be carried out in a perfectly straightforward and systematic way. The various uses of language could be discovered and classified, much in the same way that entomologists have discovered and classified insects. This, for the ordinary-language philosophers, was not a matter of philosophical inspiration but of sustained hard work.

In their heyday, the philosophers of ordinary language thought that the fundamental nature of language could be charted and the philosophical problems

....

INTRODUCTION xix

based upon misunderstandings of language resolved in a relatively short period of time-perhaps in a few decades. This optimism faded as philosophical problems proved surprisingly resistant to linguistic cure. At the time the philosophers of ordinary language thought they had produced a revolution in philosophy. This now seems an overstatement. On the other hand, they did make important contributions to philosophy by pointing out cases where linguistic confusion did lead to philosophical muddles. Though not a cure-all, linguistic analysis was sometimes a cure. Furthermore, through their close examination of the ways in which language is actually used, they made substantial contributions to the empirical science of linguistics.

As this volume shows, the twentieth century began with a struggle between an entrenched idealism and an emerging reappearance of realism. The philosophical commitments of those on each side of the dispute came in two relatively welldefined packages. The idealists, inspired by Hegel, were holists, antiempiricists, and critics of formal (as opposed to dialectical) logic. They held that philosophical problems are resolved, to the extent that human beings are capable of resolving them, through understanding how mind or spirit unfolds or reveals itself in a dialectical process. The new realists, taking Bertrand Russell as our model, were, in contrast, atomists, empiricists, and champions of formal logic, in particular, in its new mathematical form that emerged at the turn of the century. For these new realists philosophical problems were resolved through analysis.

It might seem that the components in each of these clusters were made for each other. Holism, antiempiricism, and the rejection of formal logic sit comfortably together, as do atomism, empiricism, and a commitment to the methods of logical analysis. Yet as we approach the end of this century, we find a number of philosophers recombining these components in ways that were largely unthinkable at its beginning. Willard V. O. Quine is, perhaps, the most striking example of a philosopher producing such a realignment. Quine is a radical empiricist in epistemology, a physicalist in metaphysics, largely a behaviorist in philosophy of mind, and a leading figure in the development and application of methods of modern logic-all traits that suggest philosophical kinship with Bertrand Russell. At the same time Quine is a holist (or at least a strong contextualist) who, on this basis, argues for a wide range of indeterminacy. Instead of using the methods of logic to analyze the meanings of propositions, he maintains that the notion of propositions having meaning in isolation is a myth. For Quine there are no fully determinate answers to questions concerning what is meant, what there is, and what is the fact of the matter. All this is strikingly similar to holistic views accepted by Hegelian idealists. But Quine, as noted above, is not an idealist; he is an empiricist and a physicalist. It is this striking realignment of commitments, seemingly incompatible with one another, that gives Quine's position originality and strength.

The work ends with a chapter on Jacques Derrida. Derrida's writings present a radical critique of the central aspects of Western rationalism. In this respect

XX INTRODUCTION

they are part of the tradition that has Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger as central figures. One of the targets of Derridas critique is the concept of objective meaning. Thus, though it is hard to imagine two figures more different in philosophical temperament and outlook than Derrida and Quine, they are united in attitude toward the project of analyzing propositions in order to bring out their true or objective meaning. Both deny that this is possible.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

W. B. YEATS

Let's see the very thing and nothing else. Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash.

WALLACE STEVENS

CHAPTER 1

The World We Live In

Four Ariadnean Threads through a Labyrinth

Now that we have reached the twentieth century in our discussion of the history of philosophy, terrain that is within, or at most just beyond, our own horizon, it might be supposed that things become easier: at least we know where we are. Surely we understand our own world better than Athens of the fourth century B.C. or Renaissance Europe. But the world we live in is so close to us, we are so much a part of it, that we do not know how to distinguish what is important in the history of philosophy from what is only trivial, a major trend from a passing fashion. Because it is hard to see the woods for the trees, a few clues may be helpful as we begin our study of twentieth-century philosophy, four Ariadnean threads to guide us through the labyrinth.

2

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

FOUR ARIADNEAN THREADS THROUGH A LABYRINTH

3

LOSS OF CONFIDENCE

He had just begun to mount again when the expected happened, and the storm burst, the storm that had threatened so long. Or may one say "threatened" of the action of blind, nonsentient forces, which have no purpose to destroy us-that would be comforting by comparison-but are merely horribly indifferent to our fate should we become involved with them?"

Students of contemporary culture have characterized the twentieth century in various ways-for instance, as the age of anxiety, the aspirin age, the nuclear age, the age of one-dimensional humanity, the postindustrial age; but nobody, unless a candidate for office at some political convention, has called it a happy age. Most commentators, however differently they may diagnose the nature of the illness, agree that the twentieth century suffers from a serious malaise. The rise of dictatorships, two world wars, genocide, the deterioration of the environment, and the Vietnam War all had a share in undermining the old beliefs in progress, in rationality, and in people's capacity to control their destiny and improve their lot. Thus, our first Ariadnean threat is a collapse of confidence-a collapse that was already visible in the nineteenth century, but that has become much more noticeable in our own time. In fact, the underground man we saw emerging in the late nineteenth century-sick, spiteful, unsure of himself, lost-is now perhaps the representative and modern type.'

What is at the core of this collapse of confidence? It seems to be a growing feeling of the radical ambiguity of the human mode of being in the world. In the old days, when the religiOUS worldview was still unquestioned, human beings lived in a world that was familiar and meaningful because it was, they believed, organized for them and around their values. Thus, though Dante might encounter bitter personal disasters, he was persuaded that they were all part of a divine plan and that, as a result of this plan, there would sooner or later be a balancing out. The opening lines of The Inferno express this conviction clearly: midway through his life, Dante says, he became lost in a dark wood, but, black as that wood was, he did not despair of finding his way out, because, looking up, he could see the light of the sun falling on the top of a hill. That his dark wood was only a small maze in a coherent, well-ordered world, he never doubted. In contrast there is William Butler Yeats's disoriented falcon:

Again, in William Faulkner's short story "Old Man," a convict, who has been temporarily released from prison to help fight a flood, finds himself alone on the Mississippi in a small boat:

He was being toyed with by a current of water going nowhere, beneath a day which would wane toward no evening. . . . The skiff ran in pitch streaming darkness upon a rolling expanse which ... apparently

had no boundaries Wild and invisible, it tossed and heaved about

and beneath the boat, objects nameless and enormous and invisible

struck and slashed at the skiff and whirled on."

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.»

In the falcon's world the notion of justice is irrelevant. If some balancing out happens to occur, as a result of which a wrong seems to be righted, this is but chance-the accidental coincidence of "senseless" forces. So, in Joyce Cary's Horse's Mouth, Gulley Jimson comments on his brother-in-laws misfortunes:

"The trouble with Robert is he won't face facts, things if you like. He wants them to come and lick his feet. But they can't-they can't lick. They can only fall about like a lot of loose rocks in a runaway train."? In the dark wood of Robert's misfortune no hill and no sunlight are visible. Things, or facts, simply carry us with them, willy-nilly, what happens to us simply happens-it is no part of any "scheme of things."

This is what Gunter Grass seems to be saying in The Tin Drum. At the end of the novel, Oskar is fleeing from the police, who are seeking to arrest him for a murder he did not commit. His flight leads him to a Paris metro station, where he gets on an escalator only to realize that the police are waiting for him at the top.

Yeats's falcon is not lost in a private wood of its own making and from which there is an exit. In a world that has no center-and no falconer-the disorientation is cosmic, not local.

Contemporary literature is filled with protagonists who find themselves in the falcon's world: a hostile-or, even worse, an indifferent-universe. For instance, at the climactic moment in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp, "life's delicate child," pushes too far into the mountains and loses his way:

Higher and higher it bore me .... Outside it was raining, and up on the top stood the detectives from the Interpol. ... An escalator ride is a good time to reconsider, to reconsider everything: Where are you from? Where are you going? Who are you? What is your real name? What are you after?e

lSee Vol. IV, pp. 10-11.

As Oskar himself remarks, an escalator "is high, steep, and symbolic enough" to represent life as twentieth-century humankind perceives it. During the ride one may have the impression of going somewhere, but that is an illusion. The escalator merely goes round and round mechanically, without regard to the passenger's desires. Thus what twentieth-century people acutely feel-if we are to believe the evidence of novelists and poets-is the absurdity of their situation, the

4

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FOUR ARIADNEAN THREADS THROUGH A LABYRINTH

5

"disproportion," as Albert Camus put it, between human hopes and fears and the silence of the universe.'

from the rest of nature by its consciousness of what it does and what it experiences. But what was once regarded as a supremely valuable distinction-think of Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living" -has increasingly come to be regarded as a major misfortune. More and more people long to return to a simple unconscious mode of existence in which they are indistinguishable from the rest of nature instead of proudly separated from it. And since they realize that this mode of existence is impossible for them, they experience anguish and despair. So, in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel The Reprieve one of the characters, who is a homosexual, exclaims: "Why can't I be what I am, be a pederast? ... Just to be. In the dark, at random! To be homosexual just as the oak is oak. To extinguish myself. To extinguish the inner eye."g The inner eye is self-consciousness. And to be self-conscious is not only to be separated from the rest of nature, it is also to be divided within oneself, for one is at once both subject and object-this is the new perception. The protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground was one of the first to make this discovery. "I am a sick man .... I am a spiteful man. No, I am not a pleasant man at all." And he then proceeded-by means, ironically, of a highly self-conscious analysis-to show that his self-consciousness was the cause of his spitefulness and his illness. "Any sort of consciousness is a disease. . . . For the direct, the inevitable, and the legitimate result of consciousness is to make all action impossible, or-to put it differently-consciousness leads to thumb-twiddling."h

But Dostoevsky's underground man was only the first of a long series of antiheroes in fiction. What these characters seek-what Mersault in Camus's Stranger, what Birkin in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love are seeking-is to rid themselves of consciousness. If Birkin represents the kind of human being Lawrence admired, Hermione represents the kind he detested. "She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands ... a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness." Birkins condemnation ofher-"Knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions" -is Lawrence's own. What Birkin wanted-that men and women "like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness" - is what Lawrence wanted. But the tragedy of humanity is that men and women can never act in singleness, for consciousness divides them. Hence humanity must go.

CONCERN WITH SCIENCE

Some people-including some philosophers-have been disposed to blame science for these feelings of disproportion and disorientation. Think, for instance, of the me that I experience in introspection and in ordinary perception (by means of the naked eye, as it were)-a rich, thick, fruity sort of plum pudding of odors, tastes, colors, likings and dislikings, prejudices and passions. And contrast this with the complex structure of animo acids and polypeptide chains that I am told I am. Which is the real me? Or if both are somehow real, how are they related? Or think of our conviction that our own acts and those of other people are praiseworthy or blameworthy, and that the moral quality they have depends on our having been free to do them or to abstain from doing them. And then contrast this with the scientific view that human behavior is, in principle, as predictable as a solar or lunar eclipse. If we are not free to choose one act in preference to another, but, instead, our behavior is wholly the outcome of antecedent events in time, including our heredity and past environment, then the consequences are that the notions of obligation and responsibility are as inapplicable to us as they are to automobiles, rockets, or computers. No wonder the falcon is disoriented.

But does science in fact entail these consequences? Some people-including some philosophers-argue that it does not. Indeed, quite the contrary. According to these people, science reorients the falcon by locating it once and for all in the real world instead of the various false worlds of myth, superstition, and fancy. Thus science, far from causing metaphysical anxiety by destroying the old orientation, provides a way of satisfYing-and, for the first time in the history of culture, satisfying fully and securely-the ontological urge, the urge for objectivity. The falcon, then, has no reason to feel disoriented. It may indeed dislike the world in which science has disclosed that it is living. If so it must Simply learn to put up with things as they are.

Twentieth-century reactions to science have thus been varied-some favorable, some hostile, some ambivalent. But everyone in this century has been affected by science-not merely by technology (against whose adverse effects it is now fashionable to complain) but also, and even more deeply if less obviously, by the repercussions of the scientific view of the world on people's perception of themselves. Here, then, is a second of those Ariadnean threads by which we hope to make our way through the maze of philosophical theories we will examine in this volume.

THE DISSOCIATED SENSIBILITY

A third thread is the theme of the divided self or, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, the "dissociated sensibility." Humankind has always agreed that it is distinguished

I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched .... You yourself, don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?'

And this search for immediacy, in contrast to acceptance of an experience mediated by consciousness, is by no means confined to fiction. Much of the appeal of New Age religions, of sensitivity training, of encounter groups, and of the drug

FOUR ARIADNEAN THREADS THROUGH A LABYRINTH 7

6 THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

culture can surely be traced to a similar distaste for the psychic distance that consciousness interposes between human beings and the world.

But not everyone condemns consciousness; as with science, old attitudes survive to produce another division within the culture, this time with respect to the varying assessments of the divisiveness of consciousness. Nevertheless, whether consciousness be evaluated favorably, hostilely, or ambivalently, it has become a central concern of the twentieth century, in that more than ever it is in the forefront of attention-no longer a phenomenon that is taken for granted but one we must take account of and toward which, therefore, it is important to adopt a stance. And this is evident not only in literature and the general culture but also, as we shall see, in philosophy.

. . . raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.'

Let's see the very thing and nothing else. Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness

And say this, this is the centre that I seek."

Underlying this metaphor is a very different vision of the relation between language and reality from that expressed in Stevens's lines. For writers like Stevens, reality is essentially, intrinsically, independent of humankind. The problem of knowledge is the problem of finding, or framing, a language that is exactly isomorphic with this independent reality, language that has been purged of the distortions, the presuppositions, the built-in "evasions" of ordinary language. For writers like Eliot, the attempt to fashion a purified language fully adequate to reality is a hopeless quest. In the first place, reality and the would-be knower, these writers hold, are interinvolved. Knowers do not contemplate reality from outside; rather, they organize and articulate it (and themselves as well) from inside. In the second place, reality is too complex ever to be completely and finally articulated. Hence our attempt to understand the world and ourselves is an intolerable and never-ending "wrestle with words and meanings."m

These radically different visions of the relation between language and reality have not merely been expressed in verse; as we shall see, they also underlay and deeply influenced philosophical theory in the twentieth century. But the present point is simply that language-whether it be perceived as something to be got past, as something to be refined and purified, or as something to be put up with despite its limitations-can be seen as a central preoccupation of the twentieth century.

Freudian psychology probably had a good deal to do with this development.

Dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue are held to be a veil that covers the reality of inner states, but a veil that can be penetrated by those who realize that dreams, slips, and jokes are in fact a special kind of language whose symbolism must be learned. But the shift of attention to language is by no means limited to those who share the assumptions of psychiatry. The so-called New Criticism in literature (now no longer very new), Content Analysis in political science and SOCiology, Marshall McLuhanism, and General Semantics are all manifestations of this trend. Indeed, since it is now widely held that problems of all kinds in large measure arise from either the deliberately (as in propaganda and advertising) or the unintentionally obfuscating influence oflanguage, the current strategy for dealing with problems is to tackle them, at least initially, through the language in which they are formulated. A good example of this strategy is Bertrand Russell's reply to those who challenged him by asking what meaning life can have to an agnostic. "I feel inclined," he said, "to answer by another question: What is the meaning of 'the meaning of life'?"n

Here, then, are four themes that strongly marked twentieth-century culturea concern with science, a worry over consciousness, a preoccupation with

THE LINGUISTIC TURN

A fourth thread is language. Those who derogate consciousness as creating a fatal gap between the knower and the world are likely to perceive language as a distorting lens through which the knower peers in vain. But do we peer wholly in vain? Some hold that by a special method or on special occasions we can experience pure reality, uncontaminated by language. Wallace Stevens describedperhaps "celebrated" is a better term-this kind of experience in many poems. For instance, in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction":

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. ...

There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold-flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be)

And again in "Credences of Summer":

But if there are those who hope to penetrate past language to the very thing itself, there are others who, like Eliot, hold that the use of language is a never-ending

8

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THE KANTIAN PARADIGM

9

language, and an urge to recapture objectivity and so revive our belief in a universe that has purpose, direction, and proportion-one in which the falcon's flight is truly oriented. But even with these four threads to guide us, we shall find no easy path through the maze of twentieth-century philosophy, for the threads themselves crisscross in manifold and puzzling ways. For instance, among philosophers who have shared an interest in seeking clarity and have agreed that it can be attained by an "adequate" analysis, some have maintained that the language of science is our best-indeed, our only-resource, while others have preferred the ordinary language of ordinary people. Again, among philosophers who have agreed in assessing science favorably, some have emphasized its cognitive role and some its practical consequences for what John Dewey called our traffic with nature and with other people. And among philosophers who agree that scientific cognition is the ideal at which all cognitive enterprises should aim, there are further divisions regarding the role of philosophy: Is philosophy to be phased out and replaced by science? or is it to be reduced to tackling second-order problems regarding the methodology of science? or is there still a role for philosophy as scientia generalis, an inquiry that, starting from the basic concepts of physics (or biology or psychology), expands them into a universally applicable metaphysics of nature?

One reason for such diverse responses as these is obvious. Philosophers are no more disembodied cherubim than are other people. In their own way, and in their philosophical medium, philosophers articulate the hopes and fears of their times. Just as much as novelists or poets or painters, though perhaps less apparently, they resonate with the underlying-and often conflicting-themes of the culture.

The Kantian Paradigm

features of Immanuel Kant's view and then sketch the line of development from him through Hegel to the end of the nineteenth century.'

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was an attempt to avoid the formidable difficulties in which he saw that Cartesian dualism was enmeshed. Rene Descartes and his successors had held what seems at first a sensible and even selfevident view-that there are two fundamentally different entities in the universe: minds and material objects. A mind, according to the Cartesians, experiences only itself directly; it experiences objects (and other minds) only indirectly by means of mental states (variously called "ideas," "representations," or "impressions") that are caused in the mind by these objects acting on it via the sense organs and the nervous system. Knowledge of the external world depends on our ideas resembling the objects that cause them, and we can be confident that they do resemble their causes. God, Descartes maintained, would not allow us to believe in the resemblance of idea and object unless idea did in fact resemble object. That would be deception on such a grand scale that it is incompatible with God's goodness.

This line of reasoning, clearly, would appeal only to those willing to rest everything on divine intentions. David Hume was not and pointed out that if the mind knows only its own states, its own states are all that it knows. As a parallel case, consider the claim that some particular portrait is a good likeness of the sitter. If we have independent experience of the sitter, we can determine whether the portrait is a good or poor likeness. But if all we have is another portrait of the sitter, we can only compare portraits. Indeed, we cannot even be sure that the so-called portraits are what they claim to be-portraits. There may have been no sitter who was the subject of these pictures; they may be only figments of the artist's imagination. Similarly, if we have access only to ideas, we can never know that an external world, or that any other minds than our own, exist. Hume concluded that since the existence of other minds and of an external world are incapable of proof, our belief in them is wholly irrational.

It was at this point that Kant came on the scene. Hume's criticism of induction, he wrote, roused him from "dogmatic slumber." That is, Hume seemed to him to have shown that Cartesianism is incompatible with our having a knowledge of nature. Because Hume had demonstrated the breakdown of the hypothesis that minds and objects are independent of each other and that truth consists in the mind coming into agreement with objects, Kant proposed to try the opposite hypothesis that minds and objects are mutually involved in each other and that truth consists in the agreement of objects with minds.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects ... have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success . . . if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge .... We should then be proceeding

Yet, despite the influence on philosophical thinking of the diverse attitudes of society at large, philosophy in the twentieth century has had a kind of unity, inasmuch as all philosophical concerns cross, diverge, and cross again within the context of an attempt to escape from what we may call the Kantian paradigm. Despite a number of countermovements such as materialism, positivism, pragmatism, and existentialism, philosophy during the nineteenth century had moved largely within a Kantian framework, and moved there more or less contentedly= Only near the end of that century did a strong attack on Kantian thought begin. Because almost all of twentieth-century philosophy can be viewed as one of a series of attempts to break out of the Kantian paradigm, it is essential if we are to understand philosophy in our own time to understand the model from which it has been seeking to escape. The next few pages will first summarize the main

2See Vol. IV, pp. 14-19.

3See Vol. IV, Chs. 2, 4, 6, and 9.

10 THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

THE KANTIAN PARADIGM 11

precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the experience+ of objects. If experience must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori, but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty ... I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility,"

distinguish between what is wholly outside human experience and what is within human experience. Because Hume failed to draw this distinction it did not occur to him that we have good grounds for asserting that causality holds universally and necessarily within the domain of human experience, providing that causality is one of the organizing activities, or "categories," as Kant called them, by means of which the human mind structures its experience.

As we have seen, Kant likened this hypothesis about the knower and his or her relation to the objects of knowledge to Copernicus's revolution. Just as Copernicus had argued that motions attributed by the old astronomy to the sun and the other planets were better explained as being due to the motion of the earth, so Kant argued that features of experience (for instance, the substance-property relation), which dualism had attributed to the objects themselves and which it failed wholly to account for, could be satisfactorily explained by attributing them to the activity of mind. Copernicus's shift in perspective had momentous consequences; in calling his own hypothesis "Copernican," Kant claimed that it was an equally revolutionary shift in perspective. In this estimate he was correct, but paradoxically his hypothesis had an almost directly opposite effect. Whereas Copernicus's astronomical hypothesis had demoted the earth (and with it humankind) from the center to the periphery, Kant's epistemological hypothesis promoted humankind, as knower, into a place of prominence, as the constructor of experience. For Kant, the mind was no longer a Cartesian substance contemplating other Cartesian substances from outside and at a distance. It was not a "thing" at all but an activity, a number of "transcendental syntheses." And from this epistemological change there followed a profound metaphysical change. The so-called objective world (the objects of experience, not the world of things-in-themselves) is a construct, a product of the synthesizing activity of mind working on and organizing the materials of sense (what Kant called the "sensuous manifold").

Reactions to Kant's revolution were varied, but always strong. For some, it was liberating: in The Prelude, for instance, William Wordsworth emphasizes the active, synthesizing power of the mind in true Kantian fashion. What, Wordsworth asks, does a baby boy experience when he stretches out his hand toward a Howerr" He does not merely contemplate a neutral physical object out there in space, for "already love ... hath beautified that flower" for him. That is, the baby has fused together the physical flower and his response to his mother's loving, protective care. What Wordsworth saw in the Kantian revolution is that mind is active, not merely acted on. Mind does not merely receive impressions from outside; it organizes and synthesizes its experience to construct its own world. What is true of the "great Mind" that is the author of the whole universe is equally true of the baby boy and the tiny world of his experience:

In saying that the object must conform to our minds, Kant did not mean that truth of particular judgments, such as "This rose is red," depends on the agreement of the object (in this case, the rose) with the mind's belief that the rose is red. Obviously the truth of "This rose is red" depends on the rose being in fact red. Rather, Kant held that all particular judgments of the general form "This rose is red" (judgments in which some quality or property is attributed to a substance) depend, not on the objective world consisting in substances that own properties, for this can never be known, but on minds organizing their experience in a substance-property sort of way. The same is true as regards a judgment of the general form "A is the cause of B." Particular causal judgments, such as "Friction is the cause of heat," are indeed inductive generalizations that depend on experience, both for their formulation and for their verification. But inductive generalizations are possible only because causality is a mode of the human understanding, that is, only because we have the sort of mind that organizes experiences into cause-effect patterns, or structures.

To put this differently, knowledge of nature is possible, but only because the mind does not-as philosophers from Descartes to Hume have assumed-merely react, or respond, to a completely independent external world, but constructs the form-the structure, not the details-of the world of its experience. As Kant wrote, 'We can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them."p But knowledge of nature is possible precisely because we can know what we do put into nature, for example, the substance-property and the cause-effect ways of organizing experience.

It follows that, as regards whatever lies wholly outside our experience, we can know nothing, neither its structure nor the details. About things outside our experience (what Kant called "things-in-themselves") it is possible to say only that they exist; attempts to characterize reality-in-itself inevitably result in hopeless contradictions. Thus Kant's attack on "speculative metaphysics," which purports to assert necessary truths about ultimate reality, is even more devastating than Hume's, But where Hume went wrong, according to Kant, was in failing to

Emphatically such a Being lives,

Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,

4 [The German term translated here as "experience" is a technical term used by Kant and is usually rendered as "intuition." But in the present context "intuition" would be badly misleading and "experience" is close enough to Anschauung for our purposesAUTHORS.]

5See Vol. IV, pp. 335-36.

12 THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

THE KANTIAN PARADIGM 13

An inmate of this active universe.

For feeling has to him imparted power That through the growing faculties of sense Doth like an agent of the one great Mind Create, creator and receiver both,

Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds.s

Hegelianism was one of the first moves in this direction. Kant had conceived the role of mind in the construction of experience as limited to twelve "syntheses," which he held to be timeless and necessary features of all the mind's activities everywhere. G. W F Hegel, in contrast, maintained that mind has a history. It passes through a sequence of stages, to each of which there corresponds a particular pattern of experience-for instance, that of classical Greece, the Orient, and Renaissance Europe. It is true that Hegel held that these various patterns of experience succeed each other according to regular and necessary laws of logical development. Hence there was still something universal and objective about human experience, namely the sequential development that, he supposed, constitutes the history of culture. But this was much less than Kant had claimed and another big step on the path to relativism.

The next step, taken by Nietzsche, was even more relativistic: "We invent the largest part of the thing experienced," he wrote. "We are much greater artists than we know." That is, what each of us experiences (our world) is not merely a function of the social class of which we are members; it is a function of personal interests, and hence varies from individual to individual. "Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided by his instincts and forced along certain lines .... Every great philosophy has been ... a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs." Science, Nietzsche thought, is no better off than philosophy:

"PhYSiCS, too, is only an interpretation of the universe, an arrangement of it (to suit us, if I may be so boldl), rather than a clarification.":'

This, surely, was skepticism and relativism with a vengeance. But meanwhile, and independently of this process, other philosophers pointed out that if thingsin-themselves are unknowable, there can be no evidence that they exist. F H. Bradley expressed a commonly held opinion in his gibe at Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable":

It follows that in a profound sense all people are poets. It is true, of course, that most of us lose this "first poetic spirit of our human life"; as we grow older it is "abated or suppressed." But there is no fundamental difference between poets and ordinary people: the person we call a poet is only one who has managed to preserve this power "pre-eminent till death." Thus for Wordsworth-and for Samuel Taylor Coleridge-the Kantian revolution at once democratized the poetic spirit by extending it to all people and exalted it by likening it to God's creative power. Kantianism allowed them to assign a positive function to what Coleridge called "the primary Imagination," defined by him as "the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM."r In a word, the poet is no longer merely a pleasing imitator of nature, but a creative god, albeit a minor one.

For others, however, the Kantian revolution was profoundly disturbing. For instance, Heinrich von Kleist wrote:

Not long ago I became acquainted with Kant's philosophy; and now I must tell you of a thought in it, inasmuch as I cannot fear it will upset you as profoundly and painfully as me. We cannot decide whether that which we call truth is really truth or whether it merely appears that way to us. If the latter is right, then the truth we gather here comes to nothing after our death; and every aspiration to acquire a possession which will follow us even into the grave is futile .... My only, my highest aim has sunk, and I have none left. s

I do not wish to be irreverent, but Mr. Spencer's attitude towards his Unknowable strikes me as a pleasantry, the point of which lies in its unconsciousness. It seems a proposal to take something for God simply and solely because we do not know what the devil it can be."

These very different responses to Kantianism, representing very different temperaments, can be traced through the whole subsequent history of philosophy. To some, Kantian idealism and constructivism were exciting and liberating because they asserted that the world of our experience is in part our own creation. To others, as Friedrich Nietzsche noted, Kantianism led to "despair of truth," and "a gnawing and crumbling scepticism and relativism."! These latter saw in idealism and constructivism only the doctrine either that there is no objective reality at all or else that it is forever inaccessible to us, an unknowable thing-in-itself. It was this second response to Kantianism-the response that saw in Kantianism the defeat and frustration of the urge to objectivity-that emerged strongly at the beginning of this century. However, before this reaction occurred, idealism and constructivism had to run their course. This involved a steady expansion of the role mind plays.

Bradley replaced the Unknowable with the "Absolute," but since this Absolute was supposed to transcend all finite (that is, human) experience, it is not easy to see in what way it was an improvement on unknown things-in-themselves. Bradley was obliged, for instance, to admit that "fully to realize the existence of the Absolute is for finite beings impossible. In order thus to know we should have to be, and then we should not exist. This result is certain, and all attempts to avoid it are illusory.">

Bradley's Appearance and Reality was published in 1893. What had begun in the Critique of Pure Reason as a confident rationalism, convinced that it had found a way of validating the natural sciences, had collapsed less than a hundred years later in what seemed to many critics a radical skepticism and to others an equally radical, and hardly distinguishable, mysticism, disguised from Bradley

14 THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

himself only by his refusal to draw the conclusion that followed logically from his premises. This result was very far indeed from satisfying what we have called the metaphysical urge-the urge experienced by Yeats's disoriented falcon as it turned in its ever-widening gyre. Some philosophers sought certainty. Others made a more modest demand-they would be content if they could establish no more than the possibility in principle of a knowledge of reality. Yet for there to be even a possibility of knowledge of reality there has to be a firm distinction between knowledge and belief, and in the Kantian paradigm this distinction was blurred, if not abolished. The first desideratum, then, was to escape from idealism and constructivism, to reassert the existence of an objective world independent of us and of our beliefs about it. As it turned out, this pursuit of objectivity took three main paths: one a revival of realism, one based on a revolution in logic, and one starting from what came to be called the phenomenological methodand all three were underway by the time Appearance and Reality was published.

Thus by the end of the nineteenth century the initial moves were already being made in what was to become increasingly the preoccupation of philosophers in our time-the quest for objectivity. But before we trace the course of these movements, we must, in the next chapter, consider the work of three philosophers who, though they continued to publish well into the new century and though they deeply influenced their contemporaries, are nevertheless more closely associated with earlier developments.

CHAPTER 2

Three Philosophies

otProcess:

Bergson, Devvey,

and Whitehead

•

The three philosophers whose views are examined in this chapter differ markedly

among themselves. Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead represent the metaphysical interest that survived Kant's "criticism" and continued to dominate much of nineteenth-century thought. John Dewey, however, represents the empirical, antimetaphysical trend that, since Hume, has been an increasingly powerful influence on Western thought.

Bergson's metaphysics, which grew directly out of the materialism versus vitalism controversy that was a major issue in the late nineteenth century,' was an attempt to use scientific findings to sustain an essentially antiscientific conception of reality. His metaphysics was "Romantic" in its emphasis on dynamism and continuity, in its denial of the capacity of reason to know the inner nature

1 See Vol. IV, pp. 199-202.

16 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

BERGSON 17

of reality, and in its assertion that reality can nonetheless be known-in intuition. In all these respects, Bergson was close to Arthur Schopenhauer, but because he took the theory of evolution seriously as a doctrine of progress, he had none of Schopenhauer's exaggerated pessimism.

If Bergson was close to Schopenhauer, Whitehead was in many ways close to Hegel. Whitehead reaffirmed the capacity of reason to know reality, and he sought to establish a new categorial scheme of metaphysically valid concepts. But whereas Hegel had derived his categorial scheme by reflecting on the meaning of an alleged identity-in-difference, Whitehead attempted to generalize the concepts underlying modern physics. Hence (and this is symptomatic of the change in nineteenth-century thought) Whitehead claimed to be empirical and scientific in a way Hegel had scorned.

Though Dewey as a young man was influenced by Hegel, he became skeptical of both the possibility and the desirability of building philosophical systems; like Nietzsche, he regarded the system-building urge as a reflection of our human sense of insecurity. But, unlike Nietzsche, Dewey believed that philosophy is useful-provided that it is modeled on the natural sciences and is content with probability, instead of absolute certainty. His emphasis on the instrumental and pragmatic character of knowledge was closely related to his deep interest in social problems. More than either Bergson or Whitehead, Dewey represented the great drive for social reform that had developed in the late nineteenth century.

Despite such differences, these three philosophers have a number of important characteristics in common. They were born within two years of each other, before the American Civil War. Yet Bergson lived until the Second World War had started; Whitehead, until after it had ended; and Dewey well into the nuclear age. To a large extent they had a common culture and a common outlook on life. Though they were younger than Seren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and though they were in their own ways innovators, their break with the past was less radical than that of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for all three were members of the philosophical establishment. These philosophers (especially Dewey) were critics of the status quo, but they were not alienated from it; temperamentally, each of them was well adapted (too well adapted, critics might say) to his social environment. They believed in the possibility of progress, which they thought could be promoted by intelligent action on the part of individuals. They were reformers, not rebels.

Again, though each of these philosophers presumably had to face his own existential problem, this problem did not fill his whole mental and emotional horizon. These philosophers regarded existence as essentially a matter to be dealt with in private; philosophy, as they conceived of it, was concerned with public problems. In this respect they were inheritors and continuators of the tradition of philosophizing in the grand manner; they believed that the business of philosophers was to tackle the classical questions about the nature of reality, of knowledge, and of value, and to produce well-rounded, articulated treatises on metaphysics, ethics, art, religion, and similar topics. This belief was true of

Bergson and Dewey, both of whom attacked what they thought were the exaggerated claims of "reason," but it was especially true of Whitehead, whose philosophy of organism is the latest in a series of vast philosophical syntheses that began with Aristotle and continued with St. Thomas and Hegel.

More important, Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead shared an interest in process. The two developments in nineteenth-century philosophy that most deeply influenced all three of these thinkers were the notion of a dynamic, changing reality, and the prestige accorded to the natural sciences. These two trends came together in the concept of evolution, and these three thinkers were all philosophers of evolution. They recognized that thought, as well as its objects, evolves, that ideas have a history relevant to their present status, and that philosophical theories are outgrowths of culture rather than eternal truths discovered by disembodied spirits.

Finally, and if only because their lives covered so great a span of years, they have shared a fate: neglect. They grew up in one period and lived into a very different one. The world of their youth was confident and serene; there was general agreement among philosophers about the nature and the role of philosophy and widespread acceptance of it as an important part of the culture. They lived into a period in which confidence seemed increasingly naive and misplaced, and in which even philosophers had become divided and uncertain about the role of philosophy. Their theories, which had been in immense vogue in the early part of the twentieth century, therefore became increasingly outdated even while they still lived, and these three philosophers, who had once seemed bold innovators looked more and more like conservatives, whose views were remote from contemporary issues. In sum, they were transitional figures between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, which explains why we begin this volume on twentieth-century philosophy with a study of their views.

Bergson

Bergson's 2 starting point was an attack on conceptual knowledge very similar to Schopenhauer's; it too was rooted in the conviction that concepts falsify a continuous real by dividing it. And, like Schopenhauer, Bergson believed that there is a superior kind of knowledge, which he called intuition, by means of which people have direct and immediate access to the nature of reality.

2Henri Bergson was born in France in 1859 and lived and taught there all his life. When, after the fall of France in 1940, the Vichy government introduced anti-Semitic measures based on the Nazi model, it was proposed, because of Bergson's international reputation, that he be exempted from them. He refused to be treated differently, resigned his various honors, and, although at that time an enfeebled old man who had to be supported while standing in line, registered with the other Jews. He died a few days later, in January 1941.

18 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

LIMITATIONS OF CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE 19

[There are] two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to attain the absolute.

Consider, for example, the movement of an object in space. My perception of the motion will vary with the point of view, moving or stationary, from which I observe it. My expression of it will vary with the system of axes, or points of reference, to which I relate it; that is, with the symbols by which I translate it. For this double reason I call such motion relative: in the one case, as in the other, I am placed outside the object itself. But when I speak of an absolute movement, I am attributing to the moving object an interior and, so to speak, states of mind; I also imply that I am in sympathy with those states, and that I insert myself in them by an effort of imagination .... I shall no longer grasp the movement from without, remaining where I am, but from where it is, from within, as it is itself. I shall possess an absolute.

Consider, again, a character whose adventures are related to me in a novel. The author may multiply the traits of his hero's character, may make him speak and act as much as he pleases, but all this can never be equivalent to the simple and indivisible feeling which I should experience if I were able for an instant to identify myself with the person of the hero himself. ... Description, history, and analysis leave me here in the relative. Coincidence with the person himself would alone give me the absolute ....

It follows from this that an absolute could only be given in an intuition, whilst everything else falls within the province of analysis. By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects. To analyze, therefore, is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view .... In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn, analysis multiplies without end the number of its points of view ... , and ceaselessly varies its symbols that it may perfect the always imperfect translation. It goes on, therefore, to infinity. But intuition, if intuition is possible, is a simple act. ...

The inner life is all this at once: variety of qualities, continuity of

progress, and unity of direction. It cannot be represented by con-

cepts, that is by abstract, general, or simple ideas .... Concepts have

the disadvantage of being in reality symbols substituted for the object they symbolize .... Just in so far as abstract ideas can render service to analysis, that is, to the scientific study of the object in its relations to other objects, so far are they incapable of replacing intuition, that is, the metaphysical investigation of what is essential and unique in the object. ... Concepts, laid side by side, never actually give us more than an artificial reconstruction of the object. ... Besides the illusion [that they give us the object instead of only its shadow] there is also a very serious danger. For the concept ... can only symbolize a particular property by making it common to an infinity of things. It therefore always more or less deforms the property by the extension it gives to it."

Limitations of Conceptual Knowledge

Kierkegaard would have felt considerable sympathy with much of this discussion. For instance, the distinction Bergson draws in this passage between reading about a character in a novel and being that character is close to Kierkegaard's distinction between objective and subjective truth. Both thinkers derogated whatever is indirect, impartial, and neutral. Further, like Kierkegaard, Bergson believed that the prime example of intuitive knowledge is the self-and not the abstract and impersonal self of traditional philosophy, but the individual self of the intuitive knower. However, though Bergson believed that intuitive knowledge starts with the self, he did not think it stops there. Whereas Kierkegaard was interested exelusively in his own existential problems and in how subjective knowledge could illumine them, Bergson was interested in what philosophy has traditionally been concerned with-the nature of reality. Hence, unlike Kierkegaard, he developed a metaphysics.

Metaphysics ... is only truly itself when it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself from rigid and ready-made concepts in order to create a kind very different from those we habitually use; I mean supple, mobile, and almost fluid representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition ....

Concepts ... generally go together in couples and represent two contraries. There is hardly any concrete reality which cannot be observed from two opposing standpoints, which cannot consequently be subsumed under two antagonistic concepts [for example, the self is both a unity and a multiplicity]. Hence a thesis and an antithesis which we endeavor in vain to reconcile lOgically, for the very simple reason that it is impossible, with concepts and observations taken from outside points of view, to make a thing. But from the object, seized by intuition, we pass easily in many cases to the two contrary concepts; and as in that way thesis and antithesis can be seen to spring from reality, we grasp at

20 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE NATURE OF REALITY 21

the same time how it is that the two are opposed and how they are reconciled."

The Nature of Reality

But if we pass over this fundamental difficulty, the next question is, "What does intuition disclose the real to be?" The clue, as has already been seen, is the intuition one has-or is presumably capable of having-of one's own nature. We are, then, to look within. What we find when we do so Bergson variously called "duration," "mobility," and "life." It is an experience of change-not of states that change or of things with changing properties, but of change itself. It is an experience in which past infiltrates present through and through. This experience of duration, Bergson admitted, is very difficult to achieve. At best it is only momentary; furthermore, it is wholly private and incommunicable ("inexpressible" conceptually). Yet it is all the philosopher has to go on when setting out to construct a metaphysics.

The last few sentences obviously refer to Hegel's account of thought as a triadic movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis." Bergson believed that Hegel was correct in aiming at unity, in not being content with plurality and diversity. But he thought Hegel was mistaken in holding that the same cognitive process that develops the contradictions can resolve them. To reconcile thesis and antithesis, a radically different kind of cognitive process is needed-intuition.

Hegel had already dealt with this argument-at least to his own satisfaction.

Intuition is a lower, not a higher, level of cognition. To appeal to it is to return to the level of immediacy instead of rising to the level of self-mediation. In a word, Hegel took his stand on Kant's dictum that concepts without percepts are empty and percepts without concepts are blind. Intuitions are percepts without concepts-they are "the night in which all cows are black." Experience without the structure and organization that concepts supply is merely an undifferentiated "Aha!" The feeling may be powerful, moving, and exciting, but it does not know what it is or what it means.

Bergson was certainly not alone in rejecting this basically Kantian thesis. One of the central tenets of the Romantic movement was the belief that conceptual knowledge is distorting. But it is one thing for a Romantic poet to reject conceptual knowledge, or even for an existential thinker like Kierkegaard to do so, for the former is concerned chiefly with "expressing" feelings, and the latter focuses primarily on personal problems. It is another thing for a metaphysician to attack conceptual knowledge, for the metaphysician is committed to describing reality in general terms. To use a conceptual mode of discourse to argue that conceptual discourse is intrinsically distorting and inadequate is paradoxical. If reality is "unique," as Bergson claimed, this truth about it cannot be uttered. If reality is "inexpressible" by conceptual means, it is surely more appropriate to express its nature poetically than to expound a metaphysical and epistemological theory about its inexpressibility.

It is interesting in this connection to note that Bergson's writing is highly metaphorical. Though his reliance on metaphor is doubtless consistent with his derogation of analysis, Bergson did not recognize the limitations this imposed. It seemed to him that his metaphors functioned as a part of a reasoned argumentat least until they were challenged, at which point they became metaphors that were not to be taken literally. In his writings he gives the impression of having tried to make the best of both worlds. On the one hand, the reader is made to feel that what is presented is connected theory, not a poetic or mystic vision. On the other hand, as soon as the reader accepts it as a theory and looks for evidence, he or she is reminded that evidence is only a fiction created by intellect in its own image.

3See Vol. IV, pp. 124-26.

INTUITION OF THE SELF AS DURATION

I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else .... I change, then, without ceasing. But this is not saying enough. Change is far more radical than we are at first inclined to suppose.

For I speak of each of my states as if it formed a block and were a separate whole .... Of each state, taken separately, I am apt to think that it remains the same during all the time that it prevails. Nevertheless, a slight effort of attention would reveal to me that there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow. Let us take the most stable of internal states, the visual perception of a motionless external object. The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I had just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing-rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow ....

Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation .... In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so

22 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE NATURE OF REALITY 23

as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared-in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the halfopen door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares .... Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act."

when he maintained that the world is "really" will." But in Bergson's case the problem is complicated by his claim that duration not only flows but is also creative and efficacious-that it is the underlying cause of the various visible and empirical transformations that are studied in the sciences. The following passage shows the inadequacy of the evidence by which Bergson moved from duration as a psycholOgical characteristic of the self to duration as the metaphysical principle that explains all evolutionary change.

But if metaphysics is to proceed by intuition, if intuition has the mobility of duration as its object, and if duration is of a physical nature, shall we not be confining the philosopher to the exclusive contemplation of himself? ... To talk in this way would be ... to misconceive the singular nature of duration, and at the same time the essentially active, I might almost say violent, character of metaphysical intuition. It would be failing to see that the method we speak of alone permits us to go beyond idealism, as well as realism, to affirm the existence of objects inferior and superior (though in a certain sense interior) to us, to make them coexist together without difficulty, and to dissipate gradually the obscurities that analysis accumulates round these great problems ....

[Let us 1 place ourselves, by an effort of intuition, in the concrete flow of duration .... Strictly, there might well be no other duration than our own, as, for example, there might be no other color in the world but orange. But just as a consciousness based on color, which sympathized internally with orange, instead of perceiving it externally, would feel itself held between red and yellow, would even perhaps suspect beyond this last color a complete spectrum into which the continuity from red to yellow might expand naturally, so the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as pure analysis would do, brings us into contact with a whole continuity of durations which we must try to follow, whether downwards or upwards; in both cases we can extend ourselves indefinitely by an increasingly violent effort, in both cases we transcend ourselves. In the first we advance towards a more and more attenuated duration, the pulsations of which, being rapider than ours, and dividing our simple sensation, dilute its quality into quantity; at the limit would be pure homogeneity, that pure repetition by which we define materiality. Advancing in the other direction, we approach a duration which strains, contracts, and intensifies itself more and more; at the limit would be eternity. No longer conceptual eternity, which is an eternity of death, but an eternity of life. A living, and therefore still moving eternity in which our own particular duration would be included as the vibrations are in light; an eternity which would be the

To take knowledge of the self as the starting point for construction of a metaphysical theory has been a characteristic of philosophy since Descartes, and it is, of course, typical of post-Kantian views of the self to hold that self is activity and not a static, encapsulated substance. This view was as true of Hegel and Schopenhauer as it was of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. There is thus nothing new in Bergson's basic thesis; it differs, however, in important ways from earlier versions, chiefly because it was deeply influenced by Bergson's understanding of the theory of evolution. What impressed Bergson about this theory was not the struggle for survival but the emergence of new forms of life; what caught his imagination was the vision of a great energy pouring itself forth in endless fecundity, instead of being confined to a few eternal archetypes. It was this cosmic vision that he transferred-in miniature, as it were-to the life experience of the individual; the self that is revealed in intuition, he maintained, is the continuous unfolding of new experiences that include and incorporate the past while moving steadily into the future.

In emphasizing the self as a continuous flow, Bergson differed sharply from psychologists of the then-dominant associationist school, who tended to think of the psychic life as consisting of a number of discrete blocks, or units, externally related to one another. He also differed from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. They too rejected atomism in psychology and defined the self in terms of activity. But whereas Bergson viewed this activity as the continuous and relatively smooth unfolding of new experience, they viewed it as choosing and deciding. This divergence reflects the difference between an interest in the self that is primarily psychological and descriptive and one that is primarily concerned with existential problems. These differing views of the nature of the psychic life thus confirm Nietzsche's contention that our varied interpretations of the "original text" reveal our differing underlying values.

REALITY AS DURATION

But even if the self is correctly intuited to be duration, how do philosophers who have intuited this truth get outside themselves to a public reality? How can they know that the world is constituted of this same duration that they find in themselves? This is the problem Schopenhauer confronted and failed to solve

+See Vol. IV, p. 149.

24 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLECT 25

concentration of all duration, as materiality is its dispersion. Between these two extreme limits intuition moves, and this movement is the very essence of metaphysics."

evolutionary development he described was an objective fact. But the intellect that knows materiality has had a life history and has itself evolved. Hence the species and all their empirical unfoldings are merely appearances to intellects at a particular stage of their development. But this does not explain what is developing, and we are thrown back on our intuition of duration as the only real.

Let us examine the difficulties with this view. This assertion that species evolve is an empirical hypothesis, subject to verification or disverification by biological and anatomical evidence. The assertion that duration is the force underlying all this evolutionary development is not an empirical hypothesis but a bald metaphysical statement, for there can be no evidence for or against it. Moreover, the assertion is highly ambiguous: Bergson became trapped in the old puzzle about the relation between reality and appearance-between the process (experienced in intuition) and the things processing (the material and bodily structures experienced in sense perception and studied in science). At times, as in the passage just quoted, Bergson wrote as if "matter" were one phase ("attenuated") of intuition; this suggests that Bergson's view was a form of monism. At other times, he assumed that matter is what the living force experienced in intuition works on. This suggests that matter has an independent existence of sorts and that Bergsonianism was a kind of dualism:

The Evolution of Intellect

We may compare the process by which nature constructs an eye to the simple act by which we raise the hand .... Let us now imagine that ... the hand has to pass through iron filings which are compressed and offer resistance to it in proportion as it goes forward. At a certain moment the hand will have exhausted its effort, and, at this very moment, the filings will be massed and coordinated in a certain definite form, to wit, that of the hand that is stopped and of a part of the arm. Now, suppose that the hand and arm are invisible. Lookers-on will seek the reason of the arrangement in the filings themselves and in forces within the mass. Some will account for the position of each filing by the action exerted upon it by the neighboring filings: these are the mechanists. Others will prefer to think that a plan of the whole has presided over the detail of these elementary actions: they are the finalists. But the truth is that there has been merely one indivisible act, that of the hand passing through the filings ....

The greater the effort of the hand, the farther it will go into the filings. But at whatever point it stops, instantaneously and automatically the filings coordinate and find their equilibrium. So with vision and its organ. According as the undivided act constituting vision advances more or less, the materiality of the organ is made of a more or less considerable number of mutually coordinated elements, but the order is necessarily complete and perfect."

Though this is a fundamental difficulty, it may nonetheless be useful to give a brief summary of Bergson's account of the course of evolution. The life force is "limited"; it "remains inadequate to the work it would fain produce" and operates on "inert matter." As a result evolutionary movement is not simple: "The resistance of inert matter was the obstacle that had first to be overcome. Life seems to have succeeded in this by dint of humility, by making itself very small and very insinuating, bending to physical and chemical forces . . . , [entering] into the habits of inert matter." In this way Bergson sought to account, in terms of his metaphysical scheme, for the evolutionary process beginning not from fully developed organisms but from "tiny masses of scarcely differentiated protoplasm." Despite their simplicity, these forms nevertheless possessed a "tremendous internal push."g

These most primitive forms cannot, properly speaking, be called either plants or animals, but they were more plantlike than animal-like. The first divergence occurred when differences in "alimentation" emerged. Plants derive their food directly from air, water, and soil; animals cannot assimilate their food unless it has already been transformed into organic substances by plants. This means that animals must be able to move about.

Between mobility and consciousness there is an obvious relationship.

No doubt, the consciousness of the higher organisms seems bound up with certain cerebral arrangements ... , but ... it would be as absurd to refuse consciousness to an animal because it has no brain as to declare it incapable of nourishing itself because it has no stomach. . . . [Even] the humblest organism is conscious in proportion to its power to move freely. h

It is probably not possible to reconcile these different points of view. On the one hand Bergson spoke of "external resistances" to the living force; on the other, of "the materiality which it has had to assume."! Bergson wrote as if the

Another divergence occurred when some animals "renounced" the protection of an "armor-plated sheath" and relied instead on "an agility that enabled them to escape their enemies, and also to assume the offensive, to choose the place and the moment of encounter. . .. It was to the animal's interest to make itself more mobile."! This naturally called for a correspondingly more complex nervous system. And the great mobility resulted, also naturally, in higher forms of consciousness.

26 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

INTELLECT AND ACTION 27

The next divergence was the most important of all. It marked the different ways in which the nervous system developed to meet the needs of the new mobility. In one line of development, it was "distributed amongst a varying-sometimes a considerable-number of appendages, each of which has its special function." In the main line of development, it was "concentrated in two pairs of members only, and these organs perform functions which depend much less strictly on their form." j

Bergson was not interested in the actual evolution of the nervous system; nor did he know anything about these matters at first hand. All this descriptive detail was only a springboard to what did interest him-the "two powers immanent in life and originally intermingled," which (he was persuaded) have produced, respectively, the two types of nervous system just described. These powers, Bergson held, are "instinct" and "intelligence." But what, exactly, do these terms name? The two types of nervous system are observable facts, as are the specific behaviors associated with each. Unless "instinct" and "intelligence" are simply names for these behaviors, they do not name empirical facts. How, then, do these terms function in Bergson's writings? Bearing in mind Nietzsche's analysis of the meaning of "cause," 5 we may suspect that instinct and intelligence are "fictions" ("myths" was another term Nietzsche used) in which "the personality betrays itself"-that is, these concepts enabled Bergson to express his preference for unmediated experience and his dislike for an objective, conceptual approach.

But as soon as he started talking about "powers" as distinct from nervous systems Bergson shifted from empirically grounded concepts to speculation. Because he did not notice this drift, however, he was able to assume that the metaphysical generalizations he was developing did not differ in kind from the scientific generalizations he had taken over from the biologists and anatomists. The former, he thought, were merely of much greater scope and hence more important. Accordingly, he proceeded to use the contrasting ideas of instinct and intelligence as if they were scientific concepts.

Instinct, as it has developed in insects such as ants and bees, makes use of "organized tools," that is, tools that are a part of the insect's body and that are each designed to perform a specific function necessary for the insect's survival. There is thus a wonderful certainty, precision, and inevitability about an insect's knowledge.

Intelligence, however, which has reached its highest development in human beings, operates by means of "unorganized tools." "Considered in what seems to be its original feature, [intelligence] is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture." Thus, whereas the insect has a limited repertoire of actions, which it performs with great success, human beings have a much greater range of activities, but these are.less certain and less effortless. "The advantages and drawbacks of these two modes of activity" are precisely complementary; indeed, they "balance so

well" that "at the outset ... it is hard to foretell which of the two will secure to the living being the greater empire over nature." k

Intellect and Action

Consciousness occurs in its most complete form in intelligent animals because intelligence presents the animal with options. Alternatives exist-the animal can use this tool or that one. The insect, on the other hand, does not have to worry about choices-its bodily organs are either adapted or not adapted to the situation. Consciousness in the full sense is always connected with "hesitation and choice":

Consciousness is the light that plays around the zone of possible actions or potential activity which surrounds the action really performed by the living being. It signifies hesitation or choice. Where many equally possible actions are indicated without there being any real action (as in a deliberation that has not come to an end), consciousness is intense. Where the action performed is the only action possible (as in activity of the somnambulistic or more generally automatic kind), consciousness is reduced to nothing .... From this point of view, the consciousness of a living being may be defined as an arithmetical difference between potential and real activity. It measures the interval between representation and action. I

In a word, consciousness has a purely practical role. "Postulate action, and the very form of the intellect can be deduced from it." Because it is the function of intelligence (in contrast to instinct) to construct tools, intelligence must be especially competent to deal with matter.

Intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its chief object the unorganized solid ....

The intellect is never quite at its ease, never entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert matter. [But] what is the most general property of the material world? It is extended: it presents to us objects external to other objects, and, in these objects, parts external to parts."

In short, the primary function of intellect is to arrange and rearrange bits of solid matter in various spatial relations.

Now, because people live in communities, they must communicate with one another." This requires language, and it is natural that language and the concepts employed in it should reflect the prime characteristic of intellect just described.

5See Vo!' IV, pp. 242-43.

6 Insects also live in societies, of course. But because instinct has already produced the cooperation required for communal living, it is not necessary that language evolve among them.

28 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE TWO SOURCES OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 29

Intelligence, even when it no longer operates upon its own object [that is, the unorganized solid], follows habits it has contracted in that operation .... Concepts, in fact, are outside each other, like objects in space; and they have the same stability as such objects, on which they have been modeled»

completely sundered. "Everywhere we find them mingled; it is the proportion that differs. [Hence] there is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, ... no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe of intelligence." But instinct is sympathy; in contrast to intellect, which, as we have seen, "guides us into matter," instinct is "turned towards life" and thus gives us "the key to vital operations." It might be thought to follow that insects, in whom instinct predominates, are better metaphysicians than human beings and have a fuller understanding of duration. But this is not so. Though instinct is the basic element in intuition, it is not the only element. Intuition involves not just sympathy but "disinterested sympathy"; and to become disinterested, intelligence is required. Accordingly, intuition may be defined as "instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely." Hence it turns out that people are better metaphysicians than the hymenoptera. q

Bergson has traced the evolutionary development as far as humankind, the highest stage yet reached. It is quite impossible, he thought, to predict what form duration will take in the future, or when it will make another evolutionary leap. Although it is possible, after an event occurs, to show why it came to be what it is, one can never say in advance what it is going to be.

It follows that "intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life"-that life and motion "escape it altogether."o Thus examination of evolutionary development has "confirmed"-at least in Bergson's view-the thesis of the Introduction to Metaphysics; by tracing the natural history of intellect, Bergson believed he had explained why conceptual thinking has those disabilities pointed out earlier. Because intellect is tied down to the useful, to the manipulation of solids, it never can comprehend the true, inner meaning of anything. If men and women had to depend on it, they would remain forever in outer darkness.

The normal work of the intellect is far from being disinterested. We do not aim generally at knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but in order to take sides, to draw profit-in short, to satisfy an interest. ... To try to fit a concept on an object is simply to ask what we can do with the object, and what it can do for us. To label an object with a certain concept is to mark in precise terms the kind of action or attitude the object should suggest to us .... But to carry this modus operandi into philosophy, ... to use in order to obtain a disinterested knowledge of an object (that this time we desire to grasp as it is in itself) a manner of knowing inspired by a determinate interest, ... is to go against the end we have chosen. . . . Either there is no philosophy possible, and all knowledge of things is practical knowledge aimed at the profit to be drawn from them, or else philosophy consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition.r

Bergson's attitude toward consciousness is thus different from Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's. Whereas they derogated consciousness completely, Bergson held it to be useful at the level of action in the empirical world; it is seriously inadequate only when we mistakenly believe that it gives information about the inner nature of the things we encounter in our interactions with our environment. Given his presuppositions about evolution, Bergson was bound to assume that consciousness is useful: because it has survived, it must have some survival value. Doubtless this less critical evaluation of consciousness also reflects a temperament very different from Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's. Whereas they were deeply alienated, Bergson was generally sunny and optimistic. In his view the universe is basically good, and despite its infinite variety it is unified, for it is the expression of a Single life force.

These fundamental attitudes are also revealed in Bergson's insistence that, though intellect and instinct are divergent evolutionary paths, they are not

The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

As has often been remarked, a metaphysical scheme provides an overarching set of concepts that gives the various domains of experience a unified interpretation. This function of metaphysics can be seen plainly in Bergson's account of morality and religion. Just as he used his basic distinction between the creative force and the "deposits" on which this force works to describe and evaluate two different kinds of cognitive process, so he used this distinction to describe and evaluate two different kinds of morality and two different kinds of religion. The creative force results in a "dynamic" religion and an "open" morality; the external forms result in a "static" religion and a "closed" morality. The former is a religion and morality of love and freedom; the latter is one of obligation and law. Once again, however, these two sources are divergent rather than sheerly distinct. Elements of both can be found in contemporary morals and religions.

CLOSED MORALITY AND STATIC RELIGION

According to Bergson, the whole apparatus of human obligations, ranging from moral duties such as keeping promises to social customs such as kissing, has its origin in those social pressures by which societies hold themselves together. Societies can survive only by organization, discipline, and division oflabor. On the whole, social cohesion is provided far more adequately in insect societies than in

30 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE TWO SOURCES OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 31

The work done by intelligence in weighing reasons, comparing maxims, going back to first principles, was to introduce more logical consistency into a line of conduct subordinated by its very nature to the claims of society; but this social claim was the real root of obligation ....

[In civilized societies] social demands have ... been co-ordinated with each other and subordinated to principles. But ... the essence of obligation is a different thing from a requirement of reason. This is all we have tried to suggest so far. Our description would, we think, correspond more and more to reality as one came to deal with less developed communities and more rudimentary stages of consciousness .... Conceive obligation as weighing on the will like a habit, each obligation dragging behind it the accumulated mass of the others, and utilising thus for the pressure it is exerting the weight of the whole: here you have the totality of obligation for a simple, elementary, moral conscience. That is the essential: that is what obligation could, if necessary, be reduced to, even in those cases where it attains its highest complexity.

This shows when and in what sense (how slightly Kantian!) obligation in its elementary state takes the form of a "categorical imperative." We should find it very difficult to discover examples of such an imperative in everyday life .... So let us imagine an ant who is stirred by a gleam of reflexion and thereupon judges she has been wrong to work unremittingly for others. Her inclination to laziness would indeed endure but a few moments, just as long as the ray of intelligence. In the last of these moments, when instinct regaining the mastery would drag her back by sheer force to her task, intelligence at the point of relapsing into instinct would say as its parting word: "You must because you must." This "must because you must" would only be the momentary

feeling of awareness of a tug which the ant experiences-the tug which the string, momentarily relaxed, exerts as it drags her back. . . . In a word, an absolutely categorical imperative is instinctive or somnambulistic, enacted as such in a normal state, represented as such if reflexion is roused long enough to take form, not long enough to seek for reasons. But, then, is it not evident that, in a reasonable being, an imperative will tend to become categorical in proportion as the activity brought into play, although intelligent, will tend to become instinctive? But an activity which, starting as intelligent, progresses towards an imitation of instinct is exactly what we call, in man, a habit. And the most powerful habit, the habit whose strength is made up of the accumulated force of all the elementary social habits, is necessarily the one which best imitates instinct. Is it then surprising that, in the short moment which separates obligation merely experienced as a living force from obligation fully realized and justified by all sorts of reasons, obligation should indeed take the form of the categorical imperative: "you must because you must"]"

human societies. The systems of law, duty, and custom that operate in human societies are the rather inadequate reflections of the drives that operate instinctively in insects. Of course, human laws are more flexible and more diverse, precisely because the activities of human beings are more varied; but flexibility and variety are necessarily accompanied by a weakening of the drives for cohesion and by a strengthening of egocentric impulses. It follows from this view that philosophers such as Kant, who try to derive obligation from "reason," are talking nonsense. As a matter of fact, to the extent that reason and intelligence cause individuals to think of themselves as distinct from the community of which they are really an organ, they are disruptive of morality and order and must be counteracted by other forces. It is true that they have a positive (though subordinate) function in that they. help to determine what particular, concrete forms the underlying impulse toward social cohesion will take. But the ultimate sanction, the ultimate "categorical imperative," is always this social impulse.

There is, then, no reason for being moral-the basis for morality is merely a blind "you must because you must." And this imperative can never be "proved" by argument or "justified" by logic; it simply expresses the elementary urge to selfpreservation by which societies, like all other organisms, protect themselves from the "dis solvent power of intelligence."

This type of morality is accompanied by static religion, which functions to "reinforce and sustain the claims of society." By means of its myth making power, static religion counteracts the dangerous inhibitions against effective, forceful action that intelligence creates by making known to us "the inevitability of death."s

OPEN MORALITY AND DYNAMIC RELIGION

Open morality and dynamic religion have a wholly different source. In this case the impulse is not social pressure but the sense of life and movement that rare individuals possess. Here is still another modulation of the Hegelian theme of the great man, the creative individual who breaks down old forms and fashions new ones. It is interesting to see this theme appearing again and again in nineteenth-century thought and to see also how the paradigm of the great human being-whether it is Jesus, Socrates, Alcibiades, Napoleon, or Goethe-varies from one philosopher to another depending on that thinker's own creative individuality.

For Bergson the model of the great human being was not an artist or a warrior but a moral and religious leader such as Jesus or Buddha. The saints of all the religions of the world are, as it were, orifices through which wells up the life force itself. A saint thus has an enormous drive and energy-is able to "move

32 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

mountains," to inspire whole generations of lesser men and women to higher and nobler conceptions of morality. Such a saint is, in fact, just one of those creative leaps that the life force periodically makes and that is productive of a genuine novelty, like the leap by which animals developed out of plants. At such times the sense of obligation to some closed society is replaced by a morality of aspiration and love rooted in a feeling of our common unity.

The great moral figures that have made their mark on history join hands across the centuries, above our human cities; they unite into a divine city which they bid us enter. We may not hear their voices distinctly, the call has none the less gone forth, and something answers from the depth of our soul. ... It is these men who draw us towards an ideal society, while we yield to the pressure of the real one.'

After making such a leap into a saintly personality, the life force relaxes for a time; the great leader passes on and humankind relapses into static religion and closed social morality. But although most people are unable to live up to the ideals of the great personality who has departed from their midst, they remember the teachings and try to emulate them in their feeble way. Hence all actual moralities and religions are a blend of elements from these two sources. Thus, for instance, "justice [social morality] finds itself continually broadened by pity; 'charity' assumes more and more the shape of justice"; u and so on.

Mysticism, Asceticism, and a Universal Society

According to Bergson, humankind was designed "for very small societies .... Yet nature, which ordained small societies, left them with an opening for expansion." This opening is the capacity for "the mystic life," which appears whenever "the fringe of intuition surrounding [human] intelligence is capable of expanding sufficiently to envelop its object," and which points in the direction of a truly democratic, free, and peaceful society that incorporates all humankind. Is this merely an ideal? Or can it be hoped that the deeply rooted instincts pulling men and women down into closed societies finally may be eradicated? It is possible, Bergson believed, that they may be. For centuries men and women have made a cult of comfort and luxury, but it is possible that they may be approaching a new period of asceticism and mysticism. There are two reasons, at any rate, to believe this may come about. First, there is a "possible link" between mysticism and industrialism. Second, a "law of twofold frenzy" seems to operate. As regards the role of industrialism, Bergson believed that mystic intuition is liable to relapse into ecstatic contemplation unless the mystic has a sense of power. Industrialism and the "advent of the machine" may give the mystic this necessary "faith in

l

BERGSON AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE 33

action." Hence, "instead of turning inwards and closing, the soul [can] open wide its gates to a universallove."v As regards the "law of twofold frenzy," Bergson held that periods of asceticism and of luxury seem not only to alternate but to produce each other by their own excesses. In medieval times, the "ascetic ideal" led to such "exaggerations" that people finally revolted against it. Thus, since "one frenzy brings on a counter-frenzy," "there is nothing improbable in the return to a Simpler life."w And this simple life may be productive of a new "mystic genius," who

will draw after him a humanity already vastly grown in body, and whose soul he has transfigured. He will yearn to make of it a new species, or rather deliver it from the necessity of being a species; for every species means a collective halt. ... Let once the summons of the hero come, we shall not all follow it, but we shall all feel that we ought to, and we shall see the path before us, which will become a highway if we pass along it. ... It is always the stop which requires explanation, and not the movement!

Bergson and the Spirit of the Age

Nothing shows more strikingly Bergson's temperamental difference from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche than these points about industrialism and the return to a simpler and better life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had been deeply suspicious of the Enlightenment's idea of progress; Bergson was still committed to it, though not to the Enlightenment's belief in "reason." Whereas both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had given up the masses and concentrated whatever hopes they had on a few rare individuals, and whereas Nietzsche had held that industrialism was producing a race of factory slaves and preparing the way for the rise of totalitarian dictatorships, Bergson believed that humanity might be on the verge of making a new creative advance." Further, whereas Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were completely skeptical (though for different reasons) regarding the findings of science, Bergson believed that his views were as "scientific" as Charles Darwin's hypothesis about natural selection. Finally, Bergson was deeply committed to metaphysical inquiry, whereas Kierkegaard was indifferent to it and Nietzsche regarded it as phony.

Bergson, then, represented older, more traditional modes of thought that stem directly from the eighteenth century and ultimately from a tradition going back beyond the Renaissance to Plato and Aristotle. Yet, despite his differences from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, he shared several fundamental attitudes with

"Nietzsche made his grimly prophetic observations in the 1880s; Bergson's optimistic views were published only a year before Hitler became the German chancellor.

34 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

DEWEY 35

them that show him to have been deeply affected by the antirationalistic "countermovement" in which they participated. Bergson thought that his discussions of instinct and intelligence were scientific, but they were actually highly speculative. Bergson was, in fact, as hostile to the positivism that characterizes the actual procedures of working scientists as any Romantic poet had been. "It is one thing," he said, "to recognize that outer circumstances [like natural selection] are forces evolution must reckon with, another to claim that they were the directing causes." And in another place he remarked that, although scientific theories of evolution are true in a "limited way," they take "a partial view,">

This commitment to metaphysical entities, which a Comtean empiricist would have regarded as redundant or worse, was thus all-important for Bergson. There is nothing unusual, of course, in demands for answers to the "why" questions; attempts to link these answers into a systematic worldview have recurred in the history of the Western mind since Plato's day. What was unusual about Bergson's position (and very suggestive of the new climate of opinion) was his denial that answers to the "why" questions could be found within any of the traditional frames of reference-within a rational or even a teleological order. Instead, he sought and found the answers in the life force, a process as irrational and purposeless as Schopenhauers blind "will."

Like Goethe's Faust, Bergson wanted to probe deep below the surface to uncover those forces that bind the world together and that are the creative sources of all changes-forces of whose existence he was convinced on metaphysical grounds, not as a result of empirical observation. Like Faust, he was not content to be told how things evolve and change; he wanted to know why they do so. And, like Faust, he believed that it was possible to reach this deeper level of reality and of explanation in-but only in-intuition. As a result, Bergson's metaphysics took a nontraditional form. Explanation in terms of a systematic conceptual structure ("matter-form," "dialectic," or whatever) was replaced by a referral of all problems, all issues, and all questions to the same unintelligible source.

Further, Bergson's very quest for the nature of reality was undermined from the start by his attack on conceptual knowledge and his recognition that intelligence is always "interested." Bergson did not see and face up to the paradox that Nietzsche was delighted to accept; 8 this suggests the central tension in his position, as indeed in so much of the thought of our age. An antirationalistic metaphysics like Bergson's, in contrast both to the assured rationalism of the traditional metaphysics and to the confident antimetaphysical attitudes of positivism and pragmatism, is like the uneasy mixture of love and hatred that some people experience for their spouses or parents. It is one thing to throw out the "why" questions as phony; it is another thing to complain because intelligence cannot answer them. To complain that intelligence is inadequate suggests that it ought to be adequate; one then should look around for something better, or at least for a

substitute. But once one begins the pursuit of substitutes there is no telling in what "leap of faith" or other "absolute" one is going to end.? However much the views of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche differ from those of Bergson, which reflect a more unified and confident personality, one is conscious of a very deep affinity among them. For all three philosophers gave expression to the deep irrationalism, or at least the antirationalism, that seems increasingly to characterize contemporary culture.

Dewey

PRAGMATISM, PRAGMATICISM, AND INSTRUMENTALISM

Dewey's theory is one version-the latest and the most systematically worked out-of a group of views loosely identified as "pragmatic." It is sometimes said that pragmatism is a "typical" expression of the American ethos. But there were many pragmatists who were not Americans and many Americans who were not pragmatists, and, in any case, it was not sui generis. Many different strands of influence-Hume's empirical analysis, Kant's phenomena (but not his nournena), Hegel's phenomenology, the social orientation of the Utilitarians, the positivism of Comte, and Bergson's activism-can be detected as having played a role in the development of pragmatism. For these reasons pragmatism was anything but a well-defined, uniform "school." The earliest version of pragmatism was put forward by C. S. Peirce in 1878.

Peirce was a rigorous thinker, a mathematician, a logician, and a metaphysician. What pragmatism (or "pragmaticism," a term he introduced after he concluded that William James had bowdlerized the original concept) meant to him was similar to what subsequently came to be called the operational criterion of meaning. As a result of reflecting on the actual procedure of the empirical sciences, which Peirce regarded as far and away the best examples available to us of what knowledge is, he concluded that the way to find out what any statement means is to list the operations that verify it. For instance, the statement "All

8 See Vo!' IV, p. 248.

9It is interesting in this connection to note that Bergson himself ultimately turned to Catholicism. After the publication of The Two Sources (1932) his thoughts turned more and more to religious matters, and by 1937 he had reached the point where only the violent anti-Semitism of the age (which made him loath to give the appearance of abandoning his religious group) prevented his conversion and baptism. He asked, however, that a Catholic priest be permitted to pray at his funeral, and this was authorized. In view of his principal works having long been on the Index, and of the attack on conceptualism and dogmatism that was fundamental to his whole position, it might be supposed that his formal, official conversion would have occasioned some difficulties. But this is merely another episode in the old problem of reconciling mysticism and orthodoxy, in which the Church has had a rich experience.

36 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

CONCEPT OF HUMAN NATURE 37

bodies gravitate" is not about some force "gravity" that pulls, or attracts, bodies, for it is impossible to verify the existence of such a force. All that we actually find is that, as a matter of fact, bodies accelerate in such-and-such a uniform manner, and this is all that "All bodies gravitate" means. That is to say, a statement means what verifies it-nothing more, nothing less. It follows that any statement (for example, "The Absolute exists") that cannot be verified or falsified is literally meaningless. Though this rules out, at one blow, most of the traditional metaphysics, Peirce himself was far from being hostile to metaphysics. On the contrary, he was a realist of the strict medieval variety. He held that there is a real objective world, and that, though we can never know nature completely, we can, by means of the self-corrective method of science, approach it asymptotically!"

For James, who popularized pragmatism, what the pragmatic criterion meant was not that an assertion is true if it can be empirically verified but that it is true if it "works." The instrument that Peirce thought would lead us to an everexpanding knowledge of the real world became a device for justifying one's believing whatever one is deeply committed to. James was, in fact, far less interested in ascertaining the truth about the universe than he was in helping people in quandaries make a successful adjustment. And this is what "working" really meant to him. The deepest quandary in which people of his generation were entangled, he thought, was the conflict between their religious instincts and their desire to accept the findings of science, which seemed opposed to their religious instincts. James sought to show that the conclusions of science are not so authoritative as they seem to be, and that science, like religion, is based ultimately on commitment rather than on evidence. In his hands, then, pragmatism was not an epistemological theory, as it was for Peirce, but a therapeutic device.'!

Dewey's 12 version of pragmatism-which he called "instrumentalism," to distinguish it from both Peirce's and [amess=-was, like Peirce's and unlike James's, an attempt to deal with metaphysical and epistemological issues. But whereas Peirce was a medieval realist, Dewey had been brought up in the Hegelian tradition and was disposed to start with "experience," rather than with independently and objectively existing "reals." Like James and unlike Peirce, Dewey was deeply interested in "practical" problems, though the problems that chiefly concerned him were less those of the individual psyche than of society. Hence, instead of

10 For a more detailed study of Peirce, see Vol. IV, Ch. 7.

11 For a detailed examination of James's views, see Vol. IV, Ch. 8.

12John Dewey (1859-1952) was born in Vermont and grew up there. After graduating from the University of Vermont he went to Johns Hopkins University for his Ph.D. At the turn of the century he taught at the University of Chicago and directed the experimental school. From there his views on educational theory, with his emphasis on "learning by doing," spread across the country and had an immense influence on educational practice everywhere. In 1904 Dewey went to Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his active life. He was one of the organizers of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors, and he was active in many social causes, including the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti in the mid-1920s and of Trotsky after he had been denounced by the Soviet Union.

concentrating on personal adjustment, Dewey was concerned with the need for reorganizing the social and physical environment, and for this he held that sound empirical knowledge of the sort the sciences provide is indispensable.

Instrumentalism had both a negative thesis and a positive thesis. It was both an all-out attack on traditional philosophy and a vigorous "reconstruction" of philosophy on a new basis. The negative thesis can be stated in terms of the comment Dewey would have been disposed to make on Bergson. As has been seen, Bergson maintained that "the normal work of the intellect is far from being disinterested"; it follows, he held, that "either there is no philosophy possible, and all knowledge is practical, or else philosophy consists in intuition." 1.3 Bergson, of course, opted for the second alternative; Dewey, for the first. Because Dewey affirmed that all knowledge is "practical" and denied that intuition is knowledge, he concluded that "philosophy"-both in the traditional sense and in Bergson's sense-is impossible. Thus Dewey used the insight that intellect is "interested" in a negative way in destroying the old metaphysics. But he also used this insight in a positive way to rehabilitate empiricism by emphasizing the active, experimental, purposive elements in cognition.

In Dewey's view, intelligence cannot attain eternal truths; but, rightly understood and rightly applied, it is capable of dealing effectively with pressing social and political problems. Whereas Bergson had been interested in the esthetic enjoyment of "duration" as he experienced it in intuition, and whereas Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had been preoccupied with their personal existential problems, Dewey focused on the actual world and on what "interested" thought can do in it. He was concerned with our "traffic with nature," which he wanted to make "freer and more secure." Thus his motives were similar to those of such nineteenthcentury social philosophers as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and he shared their generally optimistic outlook about our capacity to act intelligently. But to this undertaking he brought a much more sophisticated grasp of the nature of intelligence; indeed, it is characteristic of his concept of intelligence that he preferred the term "inquiry," which reflected his view that mind is directive and active, not merely an observer and recorder of information. In this respect he shared Kant's and, to a greater extent, Hegel's belief that experience is a product in which mind plays a decisive role. Kant and Hegel, however, emphasized the construction of a world to be known; Dewey emphasized the construction of a world to be lived in and acted on.

Concept of Human Nature

The center of interest in Dewey's thought was men and women and their practical problems. And since they are not only active but social animals, Dewey's starting

13See p. 28.

38 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

point was social psychology. Three factors in this connection require examination: habit, impulse, and intelligence.

HABIT

A habit is a "mechanism" for dealing with certain recurrent "classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions." But a habit is not necessarily a mere automatic mechanism, like the machine that prints, folds, conveys, and does everything but read, newspapers. It is necessary to distinguish between "two kinds of habit, intelligent and routine." And "the higher the form of life the more complex, sure and flexible" the habit. Furthermore, habits involve a functional relation between organism and environment, "in which the environment has its say as surely as the [organism]." A habit is afunction between organism and environment by means of which life is furthered and maintained. It is possible, therefore, to look at habits as arts. "They involve skill of sensory and motor organs, cunning or craft, and objective materials. They assimilate objective energies, and eventuate in command of environment.">

IMPULSE

Habits are, of course, learned. What is original is impulse; habits are simply the shapings and canalizings of impulses. It is a mistake, according to Dewey, to suppose that any impulse has a specific character in itself. Impulses are indefinitely plastic and malleable. They acquire their meanings from the interaction of the organism with a "matured social medium." Under the influence of environment, that is, they develop into those relatively precise and specialized functions that Dewey called habits.

In the case of the young it is patent that impulses are highly flexible starting points for activities which are diversified according to the ways in which they are used. Any impulse may become organized into almost any disposition according to the way it interacts with surroundings. Fear may become abject cowardice, prudent caution, reverence for superiors or respect for equals; an agency for credulous swallowing of absurd superstitions or for wary scepticism. . . . The actual outcome depends upon how the impulse of fear is interwoven with other impulses. This depends in turn upon the outlets and inhibitions supplied by the social environment.

The traditional psychology of instincts obscures recognition of this fact. It sets up a hard-and-fast preordained class under which specific acts are subsumed, so that their own quality and originality are lost from view. This is why the novelist and dramatist are so much more illuminating as well as more interesting commentators on conduct than the schematizing psychologist. ...

T

CONCEPT OF HUMAN NATURE 39

In the c.a~e.e: of any impulse activity there are speaking generally three pOSSIbIlItIes. It may find a surging, explosive discharge-blind, unintelligent. It may be sublimated-that is, become a factor coordinated intelligently with others in a continuing course of action. Thus a ~st of anger may, because of its dynamic incorporation into disposition, be converted into an abiding conviction of social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic to carry the conviction into execution. . . . Such an outcome represents the normal or desirable functioning of impulse; in which, to use our previous language, the impulse operates as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulsive activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be "suppressed."

Suppression is not annihilation. "Psychic" energy is no more capable of being abolished than the forms we recognize as physical. If it is neither exploded nor converted, it is turned inwards, to lead a surreptitious, subterranean life .... A suppressed activity is the cause of all kinds of intellectual and moral pathology. a

INTELLIGENCE

. Properly understood, intelligence is merely an unusually flexible and finely adjusted habit that functions to improve the organism's relation to its environment. Specifically, it is a habit that intervenes when other, more routine habits fail to perform efficiently, Human beings are not passive, inert spectators of a neutral w~rld. T~ey are organisms ~lunged into an environment that infiltrates at every pomt their own nature. Habits are the functions by which people normally make n~cessary adjustments. But since the environment is immensely complex and anythmg but static, these habitual adjustments constantly require modification. Their modification is the work of intelligence.

The function of reflective thought is to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbance of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious ....

When a situation arises containing a difficulty or perplexity, the person who finds himself in it may take one of a number of courses. He may dodge it, dropping the activity that brought it about, turning to something else. He may indulge in a flight of fancy, imagining himself powerful or wealthy, or in some other way in possession of the means that would enable him to deal with the difficulty. Or, finally, he may face the situation. In this case, he begins to reflect.

The moment he begins to reflect, he begins of necessity to observe in order to take stock of conditions. . . . Some of the conditions are obstacles and others are aids, resources. No matter whether these

40 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THEORY OF EDUCATION 41

conditions come to him by direct perception or by memory, they form the 'facts of the case." They are the things that are there, that have to be reckoned with .... Until the habit of thinking is well formed, facing the situation to discover the facts requires an effort. For the mind tends to dislike what is unpleasant and so to sheer off from an adequate notice of that which is especially annoying.

Along with noting the conditions that constitute the facts to be dealt with, suggestions arise of possible courses of action .... [These lead] to new observations and recollections and to a reconsideration of observations already made in order to test the worth of the suggested way out. ... The newly noted facts may (and in any complex situation surely will) cause new suggestions to spring up .... This continuous interaction of the facts disclosed by observation and of the suggested proposals of solution and the suggested methods of dealing with conditions goes on till some suggested solution meets all the conditions of the case and does not run counter to any discoverable feature of it. ...

We shall illustrate what has been said by a simple case. Suppose you are walking where there is no regular path. As long as everything goes smoothly, you do not have to think about your walking; your already formed habit takes care of it. Suddenly you find a ditch in your way. You think you will jump it (supposition, plan); but to make sure, you survey it with your eyes (observation), and you find that it is pretty wide and that the bank on the other side is slippery (facts, data). You then wonder if the ditch may not be narrower somewhere else (idea), and you look up and down the stream (observation) to see how matters stand (test of idea by observation). You do not find any good place and so are thrown back upon forming a new plan. As you are casting about, you discover a log (fact again). You ask yourself whether you could not haul that to the ditch and get it across the ditch to use as a bridge (idea again). You judge that idea is worth trying, and so you get the log and manage to put it in place and walk across (test and confirmation by overt action) ....

The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning and a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation at the close ....

In between, as states of thinking, are (1) suggestions, in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution; (2) an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought; (3) the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis, to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material; (4) the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition (reasoning, in the sense in which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and (5) testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action."

Theory of Education

As has been said, all habits, including the habit called thinking, are learned. Unfortunately, most of them are learned unsystematically, with little care or forethought on the part of those who do the teaching. As a matter of fact, few people think of their behavior to others as being a form of teaching; fewer still understand the functional relationships, just described, that exist among habits, impulses, and intelligence. Even at the conscious, planned level, educational practice is often based on a mistaken conception of human nature. Is it surprising, therefore, that so many bad habits, so many maladjustments, and so many inefficient ways of functioning exist?

Very early in life sets of mind are formed without attentive thought, and these sets persist and control the mature mind. The child learns to avoid the shock of unpleasant disagreement, to find the easy way out, to appear to conform to customs which are wholly mysterious to him in order to get his own way-that is to display some natural impulse without exciting the unfavorable notice of those in authority. Adults distrust the intelligence which a child has while making upon him demands for a kind of conduct that requires a high order of intelligence, if it is to be intelligent at all. The inconsistency is reconciled by instilling in him "moral" habits which have a maximum of emotional empressment and adamantine hold with a minimum of understanding. These habitudes ... govern conscious later thought. They are usually deepest and most unget-at-able just where critical thought is most needed-in morals, religion and politics. These "infantilisms" account for the mass of irrationalities that prevail among men of otherwise rational tastes .... To list them would perhaps oust one from "respectable" society. . . .

When we face this fact in its general significance, we confront one of the ominous aspects of the history of man. We realize how little the progress of man has been the product of intelligent gUidance, how largely it has been a by-product of accidental upheavals."

Accordingly, one of Dewey'S primary interests was education-both in the narrow sense of curriculum reform and teacher training and in the more extended sense of the whole adjustment of the individual to the social and physical environment, including problems of SOciology, politics, and international relations. In this respect Dewey belonged to the mainstream of social thought, along with the Utilitarians and the Comteans. But he tackled the problem of improving our traffic with nature in a radically different way. For one thing, he was far more aware than these earlier philosophers had been of the functional, organic relationships that exist between us and our environment. Further, although their view was relatively empirical, their conception of knowledge was what Dewey called

42 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

the "spectator-type" of knowledge. 14 Differences about the nature of knowledge profoundly affect ideas of how knowledge should be put to work in the interests of reform. Thus Dewey agreed with Comte that the key to solving social problems lies in the application of the methods of natural science to those problems. And he was, if anything, even more optimistic than Comte had been about the possible fruits of such a social science. But his understanding of the nature of scientific method (and hence his conception of SOCiology) was more radically empirical than Comte's, Although Comte had reached the point of seeing that so-called natural laws are merely generalized descriptions of what happens, he held that it is possible to formulate general descriptions that are completely (and therefore permanently) adequate. He believed this to be possible because he took Newtonian physics as his model for social science. Just as the "law" of gravity is applicable to the universe at all times, so, Comte thought, the laws of sociology are applicable to human societies at all times. Hence he believed that once these laws are correctly formulated, they can be applied in a more or less mechanical manner.

Dewey rejected the idea of law even in this descriptive sense. He held that there are no final, or completely adequate, descriptions; there are merely more and more adequate instrumentalities for dealing with always changing and growing human situations. From this point of view there would be no danger of a doctrinaire application of oversimplified formulas to the solution of social problems. On the contrary, every application would be tentative, experimental, and hypothetical, capable of being adjusted in light of the new data that the preliminary solution generates.

Democracy

Dewey's assertion that there are no answers that are the answers had another important result. It led to his belief that social science is not the prerogative of a special elite who is to design the good life for the masses. In Dewey's view the good life is a matter of mutual makings. And precisely because human nature and human impulses are indefinitely malleable, it is possible to bring all citizens up to ever-higher levels of sensitive and responsible conduct. The problem of constructing the good life, therefore, is not the old Platonic problem of selection but the Christian problem of opportunity. Thus Dewey's conception of human nature was the basis for a fundamentally democratic political and social order rather than a humanely motivated authoritarianism. It might be said, indeed, that Dewey was trying to reinterpret, in a more empirical and practical spirit, the ideas of the founding fathers, which they had stated in the spirit of the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

14See p. 46.

DEMOCRACY 43

The political and governmental phase of democracy is a means, the best means so far found, for realizing ends that lie in the wide domain of human relationships and the development of human personality .... The keynote of democracy as a way of life may be expressed, it seems to me, as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together: which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals ....

The development of political democracy came about through substitution of the method of mutual consultation and voluntary agreement for the method of subordination of the many to the few enforced from above .... When [coercion] is habitual and embodied in social institutions, it seems the normal and natural state of affairs. The mass usually become unaware that they have a claim to a development of their own powers. Their experience is so restricted that they are not conscious of restriction. It is part of the democratic conception that they as individuals are not the only sufferers, but that the whole social body is deprived of the potential resources that should be at its service ....

The foundation of democracy is faith in the capacities of human nature; faith in human intelligence and in the power of pooled and cooperative experience. It is not belief that these things are complete but that if given a show they will grow and be able to generate progressively the knowledge and wisdom needed to guide collective action. Every autocratic and authoritarian scheme of social action rests on a belief that the needed intelligence is confined to a superior few, who because of inherent natural gifts are endowed with the ability and the right to control the conduct of others ....

While what we call intelligence may be distributed in unequal amounts, it is the democratic faith that it is sufficiently general so that each individual has something to contribute, and the value of each contribution can be assessed only as it enters into the final pooled intelligence constituted by the contributions of all. ...

I have emphasized ... the importance of the effective release of intelligence ... because democracy is so often and so naturally associated in our minds with freedom of action, forgetting the importance of freed intelligence which is necessary to direct and to warrant freedom of action. Unless freedom of individual action has intelligence and informed conviction back of it, its manifestation is almost sure to result in confusion and disorder. The democratic idea of freedom is not the right of each individual to do as he pleases, even if it be qualified by adding "provided he does not interfere with the same freedom on the part of others." ... The basic freedom is that of freedom of mind and of whatever degree of freedom of action and experience is necessary to produce freedom of intelligence.d

44 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

Attitude toward Metaphysics

Dewey thus had little interest in the traditional view of philosophical inquiry. In Dewey's view philosophical thinking, like all thinking, is "interested thinking." The problems metaphysics is concerned with are real problems, but the metaphysical solutions are fictitious and downright harmful. However much traditional philosophers differ among themselves, all of them-rationalists, empiricists, and intuitionists alike-believe they are exploring the nature of "reality." This whole enterprise, Dewey held, results from a maladjustment to environment. People have a fundamental urge to seek security. The pursuit of security is the real problem to which traditional philosophy provides only a pseudosolution. Instead of looking for security in the control of environment by scientific means, along the lines Dewey suggested, traditional philosophers flee to a dreamworld of their own creation, a never-never land of "absolutes" and "eternal verities." According to Dewey, philosophers of this type are unable to accept that security never is, and never can be, perfect-that even science never gives us the answers, and that life accordingly is a grOwing, living adventure. The traditional philosophers are simply individuals who are too weak to accept the world as it is, and their theories are nothing but a projection of their inner uneasiness, a flight from reality.

METAPHYSICS: A QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

Exaltation of pure intellect and its activity above practical affairs is fundamentally connected with the quest for a certainty which shall be absolute and unshakeable ....

Practical activity deals with individualized and unique situations which are never exactly duplicable and about which, accordingly, no complete assurance is possible. All activity, moreover, involves change. The intellect, however, according to the traditional doctrine, may grasp universal Being, and Being which is universal is fixed and immutable .... Man's distrust of himself has caused him to desire to get beyond and above himself; in pure knowledge he has thought he could attain this self-transcendence ....

Primitive [man] had none of the elaborate arts of protection and use which we now enjoy and no confidence in his own powers when they were reinforced by appliances of art. He lived under conditions in which he was extraordinarily exposed to peril. ... Men faced the forces of nature in a state of nakedness which was more than physical ....

In such an atmosphere primitive religion was born and fostered.

Rather this atmosphere was the religious disposition ....

The two dominant conceptions, cultural categories one might call them, which grew and flourished under such circumstances were those of the holy and the fortunate, with their opposites, the profane and the unlucky .... To secure the favor of the holy [was] to be on the road to

ATTITUDE TOWARD METAPHYSICS 45

success .... Because of its surcharge of power, ambivalent in quality, the holy has to be approached ... with ... rites of purification, humiliation, fasting and prayer ....

Prosaic beliefs about verifiable facts, beliefs backed up by evidence of the senses and by useful fruits, had little glamour and prestige compared with the vogue of objects of rite and ceremony .... Herein is the source of the fundamental dualism of human attention and regard. The distinction between the two attitudes of everyday control and dependence on something superior was finally generalized ... in the conception of two distinct realms. The inferior was that in which man could foresee and in which he had instruments and arts by which he might expect a reasonable degree of control. The superior was that of occurrences so uncontrollable that they testified to the presence and operation of powers beyond the scope of everyday and mundane things.

The philosophical tradition regarding knowledge and practice, the immaterial or spiritual and the material . . . had for its background [this] state of culture .... Philosophy inherited the realm with which religion had been concerned. . . .

If one looks at the foundations of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle as an anthropologist looks at his material, that is, as cultural subject-matter, it is clear that these philosophies were systematizations in rational form of the content of Greek religiOUS and artistic beliefs. The systematization involved a purification. Logic provided the patterns to which ultimately real objects had to conform, while physical science was possible in the degree in which the natural world, even in its mutabilities, exhibited exemplification of ultimate immutable rational objects. Thus, along with the elimination of myths and grosser superstitions, there were set up the ideals of science and of a life of reason. Ends which could justify themselves to reason were to take the place of custom as the guide of conduct. These two ideals form a permanent contribution to western civilization.

But ... they [also] brought with them the ... notion, which has ruled philosophy ever since the time of the Greeks, that the office of knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they arise.

It thus diverted thought from inquiring into the purposes which experience of actual conditions suggest and from concrete means of their actualization. It translated into a rational form the doctrine of escape from the vicissitudes of existence by means of measures which do not demand an active coping with conditions. For deliverance by means of rites and cults, it substituted deliverance through reason ....

Although this Greek formulation was made long ago and much of it is now strange in its specific terms, ... the main tradition of western culture has retained intact this framework of ideas ....

46 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE NATURE OF REALITY: "EXPERIENCE" 47

There is involved in these doctrines a whole system of philosophical conclusions. The first and foremost is that ... what is known, what is true for cognition, is what is real in being. The objects of knowledge form the standards of measures of the reality of all other objects of experience. Are the objects of the affections, of desire, effort, choice, that is to say everything to which we attach value, real? Yes, if they can be warranted by knowledge; ... as objects of desire and purpose they have no sure place in Being until they are approached and validated through knowledge. The idea is so familiar that we overlook the unexpressed premise upon which it rests, namely that only the completely fixed and unchanging can be real. The quest for certitude has determined our basic metaphysics.

Secondly, the theory of knowledge has its basic premises fixed by the same doctrine ....

The theory of knowing is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts light to the eye and is seen; it makes a difference to the eye and to the person having an optical apparatus, but none to the thing seen .... A spectator theory of knowledge is the inevitable outcome. There have been theories which hold that mental activity intervenes, but they have retained the old premise. They have therefore concluded that it is impossible to know reality .... It would be hard to find a more thoroughgoing confirmation than this conclusion provides of the complete hold possessed by the belief that the object of knowledge is a reality fixed and complete in itself. ...

All of these notions about certainty and the fixed, about the nature of the real world, about the nature of the mind and its organs of knowing, ... flow-such is my basic thesis-from the separation (set up in the interest of the quest for absolute certainty) between theory and practice, knowledge and actions."

since he did not feel divided and alienated, he was not personally involved in the discovery that most people experience deep insecurity. Rather, he looked at the situation from the outside, as a physician or psychiatrist might. He believed that the cure for insecurity was not (as Nietzsche had held) to bite the snake that had bitten one-to Dewey, this was a truly desperate remedy. The cure was to become involved in the day-to-day task of improving humankind's estate. Hence, though Dewey too affirmed life, he did not feel this affirmation to be particularly difficult or heroic. Further, the life that he affirmed did not involve a quantum jump to a level "beyond good and evil"; it consisted in a gradual, even "prosaic," advance to more-intelligent practice.

The Nature of Reality: "Experience"

NIETZSCHE AND DEWEY CONTRASTED

Dewey's anthropological and psychological analysis of metaphysics is obviously very similar to Nietzsche's. Both philosophers agreed that the objects of metaphysical thinking are "fictions" that function to allay the insecurity people feel in the presence of change, decay, and death. But they differed sharply in their attitudes toward this discovery about the basic insecurity in human nature, as is shown not only by what they said but by the very styles in which they wrote. Nietzsche's writing was metaphorical, contentious, and highly personal. He shared the underlying insecurity that others experienced but differed from them in choosing to face it rather than flee from it. He felt, as they did, that humankind is hanging precariously on the edge of an abyss; his response was to affirm life despite its terror. In contrast, Dewey's exposition of the roots of metaphysics was calm, detailed, and scholarly. Since he did not experience an abyss within himself,

Despite his "reduction" of metaphysics to the quest for certainty, and despite his belief that many of the traditional metaphysical problems are pseudoproblems, Dewey realized that instrumentalism could not escape dealing, at least in its own way, with some of the questions of "first philosophy." Here his position was much stronger than that of the earlier pragmatists, who were inclined to dispose of metaphysics by declaring that any metaphysics was true provided that it "worked."

Thus though Dewey did not ask, in the traditional way, "What is the real?" and 'What are the ultimate values?" he nevertheless recognized that he had to ask and answer equivalent questions. So far it has been said that Dewey emphasized that people live in, and must adjust to, their social and physical environment. But what is this environment, and how are they to evaluate the values that their interested activity is constantly realizing in it?

One answer to the first question is "experience"; another is "nature." But what are experience and nature, and how are they related? To begin with, like the Kantians and the Hegelians, Dewey regarded reality as a whole within which distinctions are made and meanings develop. Our experience and the nature of which it is the experience-subject and object, knower and known-"are not enemies or alien." "Experience is of as well as in nature .... [It] reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also had breadth and to an indefinitely elastic extent. It stretches. That stretch constitutes inference."!

EVENTS AND OBJECTS

In ordinary everyday experience of objects, Dewey held that "events" (or "existences") are distinguished from meanings. An event is an "ongoing"; its "intrinsic nature is revealed in experience as the immediately felt qualities of things." And events are not just the ingredients of ordinary experience. Science, too,

48 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE NATURE OF REALITY: "EXPERIENCE" 49

thinks in terms of events. "The tendency of modern science [is] to substitute qualitative events, marked by certain similar properties and by recurrences, for the older notion of fixed substances."g The concept of event may thus be said to have had the same pivotal importance and unifying function in Dewey's theory that substance had in the Cartesian metaphysics. This is an indication of the extent to which, as has already been suggested, process was becoming a fundamental modern idea.

"Event" seems a far more satisfactory metaphysical principle than "substance." Since a substance is by definition an independent, enclosed, and complete entity, any attempt to interpret reality substantivally runs into hopeless dilemmas. For instance, is there one substance or are there several? Either answer is unsatisfactory. If there is but one substance, it is impossible to account for the experienced diversity. If there are many substances, it seems impossible that they can be related in any significant way. In contrast, the concept of event allows for the flexibility, multiple-relatedness, and change of state that Nietzsche's "will to power" as a cosmological principle was intended to achieve. Yet it does this without the danger of anthropomorphism that is inherent in that notion.

So much for event. According to Dewey, an object (whether a "gross, macroscopic" object of ordinary experience or a "refined, derived" object of scientific experience) can be defined as an "event with meaning." Consider any of the things ordinarily called objects: "Tables, the Milky Way, chairs, stars, cats, dogs, electrons, ghosts, centaurs, historic epochs"-these are all events with meanings. Take, for instance, the event that a writer would call "a piece of paper." This is but one meaning of the event in question; it merely happens to be foremost in the writer's mind because he or she is concerned about something to write on. This same event

can now be seen to be a pseudoproblem. There is nothing unique, special, or privileged about essence; it is merely "a pronounced instance of meaning," hypostatized by our pursuit of certainty into an alleged eternal entity. "To be partial, and to assign a meaning to a thing as the meaning is but to evince human subjection to bias .... The very essence of a thing is identified with those consummatory consequences which the thing has when conditions are felicitous."i There is no more reason to say that the essence of an existent is "white surface for writing" than to say that its essence is "wood-pulp." Any such claim merely reflects the predominant interest that the definer happens to have in the existent in question.

This way of thinking also frees philosophy from the dualism of appearance and reality-another pseudoproblem. For instance, Galileo and the other early physicists held that the paper is "really" matter in motion and only "appears" to be a continuous, white surface. According to Dewey, they were simply giving preferred ontological status to one of two equally real meanings, which happened to be rooted in different frames of reference. Similarly, modern physicists might maintain that the paper is "really" electrons, but this merely reflects their preference for the electron frame of reference, possibly because of its practical significance or possibly because of its greater elegance.

STATUS OF UNIVERSALS

has as many other explicit meanings as it has important consequences recognised in the various connective interactions into which it enters. Since possibilities of conjunction are endless, and since the consequences of any of them may at some time be significant, its potential meanings are endless. It signifies something to start a fire with; something like snow; made of wood-pulp; manufactured for profit; property in the legal sense; a definite combination illustrative of certain principles of chemical science; an article the invention of which has made a tremendous difference in human history, and so on indefinitely. There is no conceivable universe of discourse in which the thing may not figure, having in each its own characteristic meaning. And if we say that after all it is "paper" which has all these different meanings, we are at bottom but asserting that ... paper is its ordinary meaning for human intercourse. h

Universals, then, are not things but instruments; they are, specifically, the instruments by means of which problems are solved and meanings built up. The universal "piece of paper" is an instrument for solving the problem of taking notes at a lecture. The universal "wood-pulp" is an instrument for solving the problem of producing more paper. The universal "electron" is an instrument for solving the problem of relating many different existents by means of a Single, generalized description. There is thus no intrinsic difference between ordinary commonsense thinking, as described by Dewey above, and scientific thinking. It is true that in their pursuit of certainty, philosophers and philosophically minded scientists sometimes suppose that they are exploring a realm of mathematico-material entities; but as a matter of fact "the history of the development of the physical sciences is [only] the story of the enlarging possession by mankind of more efficacious instrumentalities for dealing with the conditions of life and action."j

DEFECTS OF TRADITIONAL RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM

"ESSENCE": A PSEUDOPROBLEM

One of the test cases for Dewey's whole analysis is the nature and status of mathematical thinking. Is it, as the rationalists have always insisted, knowledge of an independent and intelligible order of eternal truths? Or are mathematical concepts simply instruments for implementing action, whose uniqueness lies in their very high degree of precision?

Dewey believed that the idea that an event can have many meanings provides a way of disposing of the traditional philosophical concern with "essence," which

Does the doctrine of the operational and experimentally empirical nature of conceptions break down when applied to "pure" mathematical

50 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE NATURE OF REALITY: "EXPERIENCE" 51

objects? The key to the answer is to be found in a distinction between operations overtly performed (or imagined to be performed) and oper-

ations symbolically executed .

For long ages, symbols were employed incidentally and for some

fairly immediate end .... They carried all sorts of irrelevant associations that hampered their efficacy .... The loose and restricted character of popular thinking has its origin in these facts; its progress is encumbered by the vague and vacillating nature of ordinary words. Thus the second great step forward was made when special symbols were devised that were emancipated from the load of irrelevancy carried by words developed for social rather than for intellectual purposes. ... Instead of being adapted to local and directly present situations, they were framed in detachment from direct overt use and with respect to one another. One has only to look at mathematical symbols to note that the operations they designate are others of the same kind as themselves, that is, symbolic not actual ....

Abstraction from use in special and direct situations ... is a process, however, which is subject to interpretation by a fallacy. Independence from any specified application is readily taken to be equivalent to independence from application as such .... This fallacy ... played its part in the generation of a priori rationalism. It is the origin of that idolatrous attitude toward universals so often recurring in the history of thought. Those who handle ideas through symbols as if they were things ... are ready victims to thinking of these objects as if they had no sort of reference to things, to existence.

In fact, the distinction is one between operations to be actually performed and possible operations as such, as merely possible. Shift of reflection to development of possible operations in their logical relations to one another opens up opportunities for operations that would never be directly suggested. But its origin and eventual meaning lie in acts that deal with concrete situations. As to origin in overt operations there can be no doubt. Operations of keeping tally and scoring are found in both work and games .... These acts are the originals of number and of all developments of number .... If we generalize what happens in such instances, we see that the indispensable need is that of adjusting things as means, as resources, to other things as ends.

The origin of counting and measuring is in economy and efficiency of such adjustments ....

The failure of empiricism to account for mathematical ideas is due to its failure to connect them with acts performed. In accord with its sensationalistic character, traditional empiricism sought their origin in sensory impressions, or at most in supposed abstraction from properties antecedently characterizing physical things. Experimental empiricism has none of the difficulties of Hume and Mill in explaining the origin of mathematical truths ....

Once the idea of possible operations, indicated by symbols and performed only by means of symbols, is discovered, the road is opened to operations of ever increasing definiteness and comprehensiveness. Any group of symbolic operations suggests further operations that may be performed. Technical symbols [e.g., "H20"] are framed with precisely this end in view .... They are selected with a view to designating unambiguously one mode of interaction and one only ....

Mathematical conceptions [e.g., "3"], by means of symbols of operations that are irrespective of actual performance, carry abstraction much further .... [Each such symbol] designates an operative relation applicable to anything whatsoever, though not actually applied to any specified object. ... The difficulties and paradoxes which have been found to attend the lOgic of number disappear when instead of their being treated as either essences or as properties of things in existence, they are viewed as designations of potential operations. Mathematical space is not a kind of space distinct from so-called physical and empirical space, but is a name given to operations ideally or formally possible with respect to things having spacious qualities: it is not a mode of Being, but a way of thinking things so that connections among them are liberated from fixity in experience and implication from one to another is made possible+

Though Dewey believed that "traditional rationalism" has misread the nature of thought more seriously than has "traditional empiricism," he did not spare the latter. Dewey conceded that it has one great advantage in that it at least deals with the actual; but he held that it makes two serious mistakes. The first is that it conceives of the actual as a static world. The ideas of traditional empiricism are "dead" because "their value and function are essentially retrospective," not forward-

. looking. Like rationalism, traditional empiricism fails to see that all ideas and meanings are instruments for dealing with concrete problems. A good example of this is empiricism's attempt to derive mathematical ideas by "comparing particular objects" instead of recognizing their practical and operational origins.

In order to understand the second mistake Dewey attributed to the traditional empiricists, it is necessary to consider Dewey's criticism of "traditional nominalism." He held that it does not understand that meanings are shared, that "language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong."! When A requests B to bring A something, the stimulus activating B is not the sounds uttered by A. It is, rather, B's "anticipatory share in the consummation of a transaction in which both participate. The heart of language is ... the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership." In Dewey's view, such facts as these reveal the defect of traditional nominalism: it fails to see that a word is "a mode of social action" and supposes it to be the "expression of a ready-made, exclusively individual, mental state .... Nominalism ignores organization and thus makes nonsense of meanings."m

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THE NATURE OF REALITY: "EXPERIENCE" 53

DEFECTS OF IDEALISM

cornerstones of Dewey's position, This is why he rejected Hegel's idealism as cloudy and unreal and insisted on the "irreducibility" of events. This is why he rejected Kant's compromise formula, according to which thought orders a sensuous manifold; in Dewey's view, the sensuous manifold is not sufficiently eventful. Although it doubtless saves meanings from dissolving into meanings of meanings of meanings, and so on, and thus performs a necessary cognitive function, it is hardly more than a limit. It is certainly not full-blooded, warm, and palpable. It fails to satisfy that aspect of reality that William James called its stubborn and irreducible factuality.

If these are the weaknesses of traditional rationalism and traditional empiricism, what about "idealism"? 15 The trouble with idealism, Dewey held, is, first, that it tries to do away with the existent. It tries to resolve existents into "combinations of meanings." But "to cause existences in their particularity to disappear into combinations of universals is at least an extreme measure." For his part, therefore, he preferred to "stick to the commonsense belief that universals, relations, meanings, are of and about existences, not their exhaustive ingredients."ll

Dewey's criticism can be stated in another way. In his opinion idealism assumes that thought is more real than anything else and hence concludes that thought's products have a superior ontological status as compared with the feelings and the "gross macroscopic" objects that thought articulates. For example, Hegel set out a doctrine of degrees of reality-"Being" is barely real; "Absolute Spirit" is the most real of all. But in Dewey's view this metaphysical interpretation of thought's function is simply another aspect of philosophy's quest for certainty. Far from having such an exalted mission, thought simply serves as "an intermediary between some empirical objects and others." Hence thought's products are no more real than thought's starting points, just as the sculptor's figure is no more real (though it may be more beautiful or more useful) than the clay from which it is fashioned.

Thought's products are more useful than thought's starting points-s-that is why we think! But they have utility precisely because they refer back to the empirical needs that generated the thought. Idealism, because it regards the "refined products" as more real, is "arbitrary and aloof" and "occupies a realm of its own without contact with the things of ordinary experience."

A first-rate test of the value of any philosophy which is offered us [is]:

Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before, and in depriving them of having in "reality" even the significance they had previously seemed to have? . . . It is the fact . . . that so many philosophies terminate in conclusions that make it necessary to disparage and condemn primary experience, leading those who hold them to measure the sublimity of their "realities" as philosophically defined by remoteness from the concerns of daily life, which leads cultivated common-sense to look askance at philosophy=

This sense of the actual and the active, which Descartes had faintly felt and which had made him unwilling to be a simon-pure rationalist, was thus one of the

DEWEY ON REALISM AND LOGICAL ANALYSIS

Though Dewey rejected idealism, he had no sympathy with the ways in which the realists and the lOgical analysts went about reaffirming objectivity. It is easy to see, from the passage already quoted on the nature of thought,16 how much Dewey differed from the logical analysts. Thought does not aim at truth but at the solution of some practical problem, such as the problem of getting across a stream, and thinking ceases when the present problem is solved. But new problems are bound to arise-that is what life is. We can hope, of course, by reflective self-criticism, to learn how to improve our problem-solving techniques and so solve our problems more efficiently, "Improving our problem-solving techniques" is advancing from commonsense, rule-of-thumb, trial-and-error methods to scientific methods (quantification, controlled experimentation, and so on); "learning how by reflective self-criticism to improve" is logic. That is, the norms in terms of which various human activities are assessed and evaluated are not abstract ideal rules; on the contrary, they arise in critical reflection on these activities and what they accomplish. Logic, in a word, is a human activity, and like all other human activities it reflects human needs, and it changes in response to changes in them.

Thus Dewey's conception of logic differed radically from that of the Russellians. They thought that Dewey psychologized logic, he thought that, in a quest for certainty, they etherealized it. They held logic to be the analysis of propositions, an analysis that terminates in logical Simples. Further, they held that "a proposition has one and only one complete analysis."p For Dewey, in contrast, far from there being only one complete analysis there are many "logics." Since logic is but the reflective criticism of actual problem-solving techniques, there are as many logics as there are different kinds of problems that need solving. There is, for instance, a logic of historical studies, which is the critical assessment, by historians, of their own methods of interpreting documents, and this logiC is quite different from the logic of physics. And, far from logic terminating in logical simples, there are no such Simples. Or rather, there are simples, but they are merely the end products of a particularly abstract and rarefied activity, the activity of logical analysis. They have no superior ontological status.

15By this Dewey meant, of course, views of the Hegelian type.

16See p. 39.

54 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

Realism argues that we [must] admit that something eulogistically

termed Reality is but a complex made up of fixed, mutually in-

dependent simples For instrumentalism, the alleged results of

abstraction and analysis are perfectly real; but they are real, like everything else, where they are real .... There is no reason for supposing that they exist elsewhere in the same manner.s

When, for instance, do we experience a blue sense datum? Typically, according to Dewey, when we are studying a cellular structure, and identify it by the blue color with which it has been stained. But recognition of a cellular structure is typical of those "units of thinking" that are intermediate between a confused and a cleared-up situation. Sense data "are not objects, but means, instrumentalities, of knowledge: things by which we know rather than things we know." The realists erect sense data into the ultimate constituents of the universe only because they "ignore the contextual situation." Their sense data "exist only within the procedure.:"

Naturally, questions about where sense data are located and about how they are related to physical objects-questions that were central perplexities for the realists-hardly arose for Dewey. Such questions come to the fore only when experience is analyzed into an independent object on the one hand and a passive consciousness that contemplates this object on the other. But for Dewey experience is not a passing show at which we are merely spectators. We are primarily agents and doers-not simply observers of objects but manipulators, alterers, and makers of them. Still less are we observers of consciousness-except under very unusual circumstances. Consciousness is not a transparent element that contains experience and that is therefore always present and available for observation. It occurs from time to time within experience, and just at those points where problems arise that impede action.

Consciousness is that phase of a system of meanings which at a given time is undergoing re-direction, transitive transformation. The current idealistic conception of consciousness as a power which modifies events, is ... but another instance of the common philosophic fallacy of converting an eventful function into an antecedent force or cause. Consciousness is the meaning of events in the course of remaking. . . . Its causation is the need and demand for filling out what is indeterminate.'

Hence consciousness is "only a very small and shifting portion of experience."!

PUZZLES ABOUT RELATION OF THOUGHT TO EXPERIENCE

Thus Dewey completely rejected the epistemology of realism as such, as he rejected the epistemology of idealism. If the trouble with idealism was that it tried to do away with the existent, the trouble with realism, and even more obviously with LOgical Positivism, was that it tended to identify the existent with sense data. To many people these criticisms will seem fair. But it remains to ask, What exactly

THE NATURE OF REALITY: "EXPERIENCE" 55

is an existent? One can feel it or (as with Bergson) intuit it. But how is it to be incorporated in a philosophical theory except on thought's terms? Thought, as Dewey of course saw, has a special status, and this special status is what theories like Kant's and Hegel's attempted to recognize-the notion that, as Dewey put it, "any experienced subject-matter whatever may become an object of reflection and cognitive inspection." Even the actual, even the intuited, insofar as it is known, has been taken up and included in the "all-inclusiveness of cognitive experience." Must Dewey not admit with Hegel that only thought and its articulations are real? Or at least agree with Kant that the notion of an other-than-thought is simply the concept of a limit? On the contrary. According to Dewey,

the emphasis [in the sentence just quoted] is upon "become"; the cognitive never is all-inclusive: that is, when the material of a prior noncognitive experience is the object of knowledge, it and the act of knowing are themselves included within a new and wider noncognitive experience-and this situation can never be transcended. It is only when the temporal character of experienced things is forgotten that the idea of the total "transcendence" of knowledge is asserted."

But this view is hardly an improvement over Kant's. Insofar as the noncognitive experience is in thought, it is articulated by thought (that is, it becomes an object, an existent with meaning); insofar as it is out of thought, it is not known (that is, it reduces to a pure existent). And though perhaps otherwise experienced, it is incapable of being included in a philosophical theory.

This difficulty can be stated in another way. According to Dewey, objects are existents with meanings. But what are they in themselves, when not articulated by thought? Thought is a "latecomer" in the evolutionary process. Moreover, it "occurs only under highly specialized conditions, such as are found in a highly organized creature which in turn requires a specialized environment."> If it be admitted that galaxies, solar systems, and our own planet had an immensely long development before consciousness ever appeared, what kind of existence did they have during all those millennia? If they were not objects with meaning, what were they? This puzzle recalls Kant's difficulty with the status of phenomenal objects.!? Phenomenal objects (planets, solar systems, galaxies) are needed to approximate anything like common sense and to escape a radically subjective view of experience. But how, according to Dewey's view of meaning, can there be phenomenal objects?

PUZZLES ABOUT NATURE OF TRUTH

Much the same sort of problem arises in connection with the nature of truth.

It is clear that any view that, like Dewey's or Hegel's, denies the ultimacy of the distinction between experience and nature will have to abandon, or at least radically revise, the commonsense notion that truth consists in the correspondence of

17See Vol. IV, pp. 48-49.

56 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

ideas with external facts. For it is no longer possible to say, with common sense, that the judgment "There is a centaur in my office" is true if it agrees with the facts and false if it does not. In Dewey's view, what common sense calls the "facts" (office, centaur) are not pure existents but objects-existents with meaning. Truth, it would seem, lies in the expansion of meanings. Or to put it another way, truth consists in the degree to which one meaning coheres with others.

But now another difficulty arises. If truth is a matter of the coherence of a judgment with other judgments, rather than of the correspondence of judgments with "external" facts, what is the difference between a judgment about centaurs and a judgment about horses? Is a judgment about horses "truer" than a judgment about centaurs merely because, as it happens, the former coheres with the very large body of judgments called the science of zoology, whereas the latter coheres only with the much smaller body of judgments called Greek mythology? Is the difference between the reality of a horse and the fictionality of a centaur merely a difference in degree of meaning-expansion? Dewey wanted, of course, to eliminate the possibility that his doctrine of experience would collapse into a version of "idealism."

The proposition that the perception of a horse is objectively valid and that of a centaur fanciful and mythical does not denote that one is a meaning of natural events and the other is not. It denotes that they are meanings referable to different natural events, and that confused and harmful consequences result from attributing them to the same events ....

Genuinely to believe the centaur-meaning is to assert that events characterized by it interact in certain ways with other now unperceived events. Since belief that centaur has the same kind of objective meaning as has horse denotes expectation of like efficacies and consequences, the difference of validity between them is extrinsic. It is capable of being revealed only by the results of acting upon them. The awareness of centaur-meaning is fanciful not simply because part of its conditions lie within the organism; part of the conditions of any perception, valid as well as invalid, scientific as well as esthetic, lie within the organism. Nor is it fanciful, simply because it is supposed not to have adequate existential antecedents. Natural conditions, physiological, physical and social, may be specified in one case as in the other. But since the conditions in the two cases are different, consequences are bound to be different. Knowing, believing, involves something additive and extrinsic to having a meaning.

No knowledge is ever merely immediate. The proposition that the perception of a horse is valid and that a centaur is fanciful or hallucinatory, does not denote that there are two modes of awareness, differing intrinsically from each other. It denotes something ... with respect to consequences, namely, that action upon the respective meanings will bring to light (to apparency or awareness) such different kinds of consequences that we should use the two meanings in very different ways."

THE NATURE OF VALUE 57

Since Dewey refused to follow Hegel in identifying truth and reality-though he agreed with him that truth is a matter of degree-he had to find a place somehow for the difference (which is a difference in kind) between the actual and the nonactual.

This he did by shifting the focus of the problem of truth from the coherence of meanings with other meanings, in the purely cognitive sense, to the coherence of meanings with events, in the sense of behavioral consequences. Accordingly, he was able to hold that there is a difference (of kind, not merely of degree) between the real and the fictional. The difference between "horse" and "centaur" is thus not merely a difference in their meaning-expansion coefficients. There is also a difference in the way the meanings operate. According to Dewey, "this is the meaning of truth: processes of change so directed that they achieve an intended consummation." Consider any scientific hypothesis or theory. What makes it true? That it "modifies old beliefs," that it converts "actual immediate objects into better, into more secure and Significant, objects.">

This definition of truth indicates where Dewey's interest lay-in social problems, and hence in truths and solutions that work. And this was not just a matter of a preference for one kind of philosophy over another. From his point of view, interest in truth in the traditional sense is merely a reflection of that quest for absolutes by which people seek to compensate for their sense of insecurity. But in what sense are Dewey's philosophical preferences better than those of moretraditional philosophers? Certainly, in the sense that they are more useful they are better, for this is the whole point of such preferences. But by the same logic traditional philosophers might claim that their view of truth is better in terms of their preferences. And is there not a sense in which one can ask whether it is true that such-and-such a view or solution is more useful than another-a sense, that is, in which "true" is not equivalent to "useful"?

The problem of escaping truth in the traditional sense parallels the problem, just discussed, of avoiding "the all-inclusiveness of cognitive experience," for truth (in the traditional sense) is a property of "cognitive experience." It would seem, then, that Dewey did not solve, except by shelving it, the problem of how the empirical and the rational elements in knowledge are related. If he seemed to many of his contemporaries to have done so, it was because they, too, were prepared to shelve it. IS

The Nature of Value

Dewey's view of philosophical discussions about value parallels his view of philosophical discussions about metaphysics: though there are questions about value that have genuine importance, most of the questions that have been traditionally discussed by philosophers are only pseudoproblems.

18 For the kind of reply Dewey might have made to this criticism, see p. 63.

58 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

Modern science, modern industry and politics, have presented us with an immense amount of material foreign to, often inconsistent with, the most prized intellectual and moral heritage of the western world. This is the cause of our modern intellectual perplexities and confusions. It sets the especial problem for philosophy to-day and for many days to come. Every significant philosophy is an attempt to deal with it. ...

I believe that the method of empirical naturalism presented in this volume provides the way, and the only way-although of course no two thinkers will travel it in just the same fashion-by which one can freely accept the standpoint and conclusions of modern science: the way by which we can be genuinely naturalistic and yet maintain cherished values, provided they are critically clarified and reinforced. The naturalistic method, when it is consistently followed, destroys many things once cherished; but it destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things-a flaw that always attended them and deprived them of efficacy for aught save emotional consolation. But its main purport is not destructive; empirical naturalism is rather a winnowing fan. Only chaff goes, though perhaps the chaff had once been treasured. An empirical method which remains true to nature does not "save"; it is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world.Y

VALUES ARE FACTS FOUND IN EXPERIENCE

Thus, according to Dewey, people discover values in nature just as they discover any other facts. "Experience actually presents esthetic and moral traits .... When found, their ideal qualities are as relevant to the philosophic theory of nature as are the traits found by physical inquiry." Such traits as poignancy, beauty, humor, annoyance, consolation, and splendor are as real as are colors, sounds, qualities of contact, taste, and smell. They all stand on "the same level"; indeed, in a way the former are prior: "Things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized."z

This doctrine is obviously connected to Dewey's denial of the all-inclusiveness of thought and his assertion of the reality of the actual. What is relevant here is its bearing on his theory of value. So far facts have been defined as ongoings, or events. But events are not only ongoings. They have beginnings and proceed to "endings," to "consummations." "The presence of uncertain and precarious factors" makes these ends "unstable and evanescent," but because they are ends and hence fulfillments, "there is a tendency to perpetuate them, render them stable, and repeat them." The intervening stages in a process toward an end come to be thought of as means; when they are brought under control they become "tools, techniques, mechanisms." Hence, far from being the foes of values, facts are the

THE NATURE OF VALUE 59

means for realizing them; they are also the criteria for "differentiating genuine aims from merely emotional and fantastic ideals.">

VALUE: A PRACTICAL, NOT A METAPHYSICAL, PROBLEM

Thus, according to Dewey, the problem of value is not a metaphysical problem about the "status" of value or about the rank of values in some eternal hierarchy. These problems seemed real to the traditional philosophers because in their quest for certainty they first erected a "realm of values" and then proceeded to locate especially precious things in this realm. As soon as they did this, the problem of the "two worlds" naturally arose: How is this realm of absolute values related to the spatiotemporal world of actual decision making? "Is the world of value that of ultimate and transcendent Being from which the world of existence is a derivative or a fall? Or is it but a manifestation of human subjectivity, a factor somehow miraculously supervening upon an order complete and closed in physical structure?" b

Some philosophers adopt the first alternative; from this point of View values are the only realities, and attention becomes focused on questions about the order in which the precious things supposedly exist in the special realm of values, instead of on questions about current practice. Other philosophers adopt the second alternative; then only "facts" are real; values become subjective preferences and there'is no basis for intelligent choice among current practices. Happily, a choice between these two alternatives "is arbitrary because the problem is arbitrary."

But if the problem of values is not a metaphysical question, what is it? Ac-

cording to Dewey, it is just the practical, social, and human problem of intelligent choice, and philosophy is nothing but the study of the methods of making intelligent choices.

The important consideration and concern is not a theory of values but a theory of criticism; a method of discriminating among goods on the basis of the conditions of their appearance, and of their conse-

quences .

Either the difference between genuine, valid, good and a coun-

terfeit, specious good is unreal, or it is a difference consequent upon reflection, or criticism, and the significant point is that this difference is equivalent to that made by discovery of relationships, of conditions and consequences. With this conclusion are bound up two other propositions: Of immediate values as such, values which occur and which are possessed and enjoyed, there is no theory at all; they just occur, are enjoyed, possessed; and that is all. The moment we begin to discourse about these values, to define and generalize, to make distinctions in kinds, we are passing beyond value-objects themselves; we are entering, even if only blindly, upon an inquiry into causal antecedents and

60 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

causative consequents, with a view to appraising the "real," that is the eventual, goodness of the thing in question ....

The other proposition is that philosophy is and can be nothing but this critical operation and function become aware of itself and its implications, pursued deliberately and systematically. It starts from actual situations of belief, conduct and appreciative perception which are characterized by immediate qualities of good and bad, and from the modes of critical judgment current at any given time in all the regions of value; these are its data, its subject-matter .... [Its] function is to regulate the further appreciation of goods and bads, to give greater freedom and security in those acts of direct selection, appropriation, identification and of rejection, elimination, destruction which enstate and which exclude objects of belief, conduct and contemplation."

Dewey's approach to values was, then, empirical and antimetaphysical. What would Dewey have had to say about Kierkegaard's existentialist approach, which was also antimetaphysical? He would certainly have agreed that finding "a focus and a center" for one's life is a genuine problem, but he would have considered it an empirical problem-no different in kind from the problem of deciding how to vote in the next election or how to spend a summer vacation. Fortunately, some individuals can solve their existential problem by immersing themselves in action-for instance, in social reform and other "good causes." Clearly Kierkegaard was not of this type. His writings reveal that his situation was desperate, as he himself recognized, But in Dewey's view Kierkegaard misunderstood the nature of the help that he needed; he should have sought not God's help but that of a competent psychiatrist. The solution to the existential problem, like that of any other problem, requires intelligence, not a leap of faith.

COMMENT ON THIS VIEW OF VALUE

We may agree with Dewey that values are facts, in the sense that enjoyings stand on just as firm a footing as any other aspects of our experience. We may also agree with Dewey that intelligence is the faculty of choice and that one of the criteria for evaluating intelligence is its success in forging instruments for resolving choice situations. Obviously, as the Utilitarians had pointed out, knowledge of the causal context of our various options is relevant to intelligent choice.

For instance, to make an intelligent choice between going to a movie and staying home to study, a student would need to know the probable effects in this situation, at this time of the academic year, with his or her work in this stage of preparation, and so on, of going to a movie. The student must not only have a method that enables him or her to predict the probable effects of the various alternatives; he or she must also have one that provides a way of choosing intelligently between two rival enjoyings. This can be done only on the basis of a preference for some other good to which one or the other of these enjoyings is a means.

T ~,

THE NATURE OF VALUE 61

All of this, of course, was said long ago by Aristotle, and all of it was well said and useful. But though Aristotle was interested in the problems of intelligent choice, he was also interested in the metaphysical implications of the practical situation just described. People have to choose among values and can do so only on the basis of other values to which they are means; this led Aristotle to conclude that values form precisely that kind of hierarchy, or pyramid, whose existence Dewey denied.

The argument against Dewey runs roughly as follows. A person cannot choose intelligently between two rival enjoyments unless there is a basis for saying that one is better than the other. But Dewey's view allows for no such basis. How, in his view, can a person distinguish between what seems to be good now (because it is an enjoying) and what is really good? How is one to distinguish between what is desired and what is desirable? Between what is enjoyed and what is enjoyable (that is, worthy to be enjoyed)? Must there not be some criterion other than more (subsequent, later) enjoyings? Not all traditional philosophers based this criterion for choice, as Aristotle did, on a hierarchy of goods leading up to a supreme goodin-itself: Kant, for instance, derived it from a categorical imperative. But they all believed that some nonempirical standard was required. Dewey's naturalism, his critics maintained, committed him to a "fatal" relativism.

Dewey, of course, rejected this conclusion. It is possible, he thought, to maintain "a distinction between likings and that which is worth liking, between the desired and the desirable, between the is and the ought,":' without reference to any transcendental, or absolute, standards. The basis for making this distinction, he held, is exactly the same sort of operation as that by which we interrogate and establish "belief-judgments" about external events. No one proposes to use transcendental criteria to test a scientific hypothesis: everyone agrees that such belief-judgments are validated by means of empirical criteria. This is equally true, Dewey held, for belief-judgments about desirings, enjoytngs, and (generally) values. Indeed, Dewey proposed to turn the tables on his critics by arguing that any appeal to standards that "descend from the blue," far from being the only basis for intelligent and reasonable choice, actually makes intelligent choice impossible.

Operational thinking needs to be applied to the judgment of values just as it has now finally been applied in conceptions of physical objects. Experimental empiricism in the field of ideas of good and bad is demanded to meet the conditions of the present situation.

The scientific revolution came about when material of direct and uncontrolled experience was taken as problematic; as supplying material to be transformed by reflective operations into known objects. The contrast between experienced and known objects was found to be a temporal one; namely, one between empirical subject-matters which were had or "given" prior to the acts of experimental variation and redisposition and those which succeeded these acts and issued from them. The notion of an act whether of sense or thought which supplied a valid

62 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

measure of thought in immediate knowledge was discredited. Consequences of operations became the important thing ....

Analogy suggests that we regard our direct and original experience of things liked and enjoyed as only possibilities of values to be achieved; that enjoyment becomes a value when we discover the relations upon which its presence depends. Such a causal and operational definition gives only a conception of a value, not a value itself. But the utilization of the conception in action results in an object having secure and significant value.

The formal statement may be given concrete content by pointing to the difference between the enjoyed and the enjoyable, the desired and the desirable, the satisfying and the satisfactory. To say that something is enjoyed is to make a statement about a fact, something already in existence; it is not to judge the value of that fact. There is no difference between such a proposition and one which says that something is sweet or sour, red or black. It is just correct or incorrect and that is the end of the matter. But to call an object a value is to assert that it satisfies or fulfills certain conditions. Function and status in meeting conditions is a different matter from bare existence. The fact that something is desired only raises the question of its desirability; it does not settle it. Only a child in the degree of his immaturity thinks to settle the question of desirability by reiterated proclamation: "I want it, I want it, I want it." ... Take for example the difference between the ideas of "satisfYing" and "satisfactory." To say that something satisfies is to report something as an isolated finality. To assert that it is satisfactory is to define it in its connections and interactions. The fact that it pleases or is immediately congenial poses a problem to judgment. How shall the satisfaction be rated? Is it a value or is it not? Is it something to be prized and cherished, to be enjoyed? Not stern moralists alone but everyday experience informs us that finding satisfaction in a thing may be a warning, a summons to be on the lookout for consequences. To declare something satisfactory is to assert that it meets specifiable conditions. It is, in effect, a judgment that the thing "will do." It involves a prediction; it contemplates a future in which the thing will continue to serve .... It denotes an attitude to be taken, that of striving to perpetuate and to make secure.s

Thus, according to Dewey, the situation with respect to values is exactly the same as the situation with respect to physical objects. In our perceptual field there are all sorts of sensory experiences. Do we accept all of them at their face value? We do not; or at least if we begin by doing so, we are soon forced to become a bit more careful. For example, in my perceptual field at this moment there is a rowboat, with an oa.r ~ent in the water. Is the oar really bent? I run my hand along it to find out. ThIS IS a commonsense procedure for distinguishing between the

THE NATURE OF VALUE 63

seemingly true and the really true, between initial impressions of physical objects and the objects themselves. Such procedures have been greatly refined by the methods of scientific investigation and by the introduction of instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, and thermometers; all these procedures and instruments are capable of continuous refinement and improvement. A "fact" is simply an initial experience that has survived the tests available at any given time. For instance, a witness's initial impression may be that the person he or she now sees in the police lineup is the same one he or she saw leaving the scene of a crime; but fingerprints or tests of blood type may correct this impression and "establish" that it is not the same person.

As Dewey argued, values are not intrinsically different from other facts: there are initial enjoyings, just as there are initial impressions of the characteristics of physical objects. Insofar as and as long as the initial enjoyings are enjoyed, they are good. But experience shows that some of these initial enjoyings, like some initial sense experiences, are deceptive. Thus a bit of skepticism and a disposition to test enjoyings before we commit ourselves to them soon emerges. Just as the initial sense experiences that survive the tests of subsequent experience become "facts," so initial enjoyments that survive the tests of experience become values.

Although Dewey admitted-indeed, he insisted-that no belief-judgment (whether about physical objects or about values) can ever be absolutely true, he maintained that many such judgments are "reasonable." For instance, it is reasonable to conclude that the person in the police lineup is not the one who was seen leaving the crime if chemical tests show that the blood types are different. This is the reasonable conclusion to draw, even though the possibility cannot be excluded that further experimentation by chemists may someday throw doubt on the validity of currently accepted blood tests. To ask for more than this, to expect that people can ever be absolutely certain about a matter of fact such as the identity of the person in the lineup, is unreasonable. It is as unreasonable (quite literally) as it is for a child to demand to be in the front seat and in the back seat of the family car at the same time. In Dewey's view the notion that a belief-judgment can be absolutely true is a fiction, a product of human insecurity. We live in a world that will always be insecure, because it is living and changing. But by intelligent action we can make it progressively less insecure; we can make it into a world that "will do."

Similarly, as regards the problem of what is "good," we can never be absolutely sure that something we now assess as "desirable" will continue to be desirable. It may change, or we may change. Nonetheless, knowledge that a particular object or experience is desirable-that is, that it has survived the best available tests"will do." This knowledge is a reasonably reliable rule for gUiding conduct, and it is far better and far more reliable than a rule derived in any other way-say, a rule that tells us to obey strange voices that speak to us from the air, even though these voices order us to sacrifice our child.

Is Dewey's answer to the charge of relativism adequate? To begin with, it should be noted that Dewey did not deny that his view was relativistic; he claimed

64 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE NATURE OF VALUE 65

that relativism need not be "fatal" and that a relativism that makes available continuously improving criteria for choice is not fatal. Indeed, to ask for more than this-to look for an absolutely valid criterion-would probably be fatal, in the sense that such a demand would lead to poorer rather than better decisions in concrete situations.

Dewey recognized, of course, that this reply would not be acceptable to those who, like Kierkegaard, long for certainty. But then, in Dewey's estimation, such people are seriously disturbed. He did not expect his theory to satisfy neurotics, and he would not have regarded their rejection of it as relevant. He asked only that his theory be tried, that it be tested. That is, he applied to his own theory his general thesis about the nature of truth. He had defined truth as "processes of change so directed that they achieve an intended consummation"; the test of any theory, accordingly, is whether application of it leads to more-enlightened and more-effective practice in the domain of experience covered by the theory. The theory of empirical naturalism in the domain of decision making has not yet been tried. Dewey held that in ethics we are at the level we were in physics before the appearance of Galileo and the other early modern scientists. It was dogmatic to reject out of hand, as many people did in the seventeenth century, the proposal to apply empirical methods to the study of physical nature. It is equally dogmatic to reject out of hand, and prior to testing, the proposal to apply empirical methods to the problems of choice.

What the method of intelligence, thoughtful valuation, will accomplish, if once it be tried, is for the result of trial to determine. Since it is relative to the intersection in existence of hazard and rule, of contingency and order, faith in a wholesale and final triumph is fantastic. But some procedure has to be tried; for life is itself a sequence of trials. Carelessness and routine, Olympian aloofness, secluded contemplation are themselves choices. To claim that intelligence is a better method than its alternatives, authority, imitation, caprice and ignorance, prejudice and passion, is hardly an excessive claim. These procedures have been tried and have worked their will. The result is not such as to make it clear that the method of intelligence, the use of science in criticizing and recreating the casual goods of nature into intentional and conclusive goods of art, the union of knowledge and values in production, is not worth trying.'

To many readers this passage will sound badly dated. In the first place, Dewey optimistically assumed that to a very great extent a consensus exists among people that "the positive concrete goods of science, art, and social companionship" are good, and further, that it is better for these goods to be widely, rather than narrowly, distributed. In this respect he shared the optimism of the Utilitarians and their eighteenth-century predecessors. Like them, he thought that the main problem of ethics was that of implementing agreed-on values, not that of

reaching an agreement about values. The methods of empirical science are more obviously applicable to the former problem than to the latter.

In the years since Dewey wrote, people have become increasingly doubtful about whether the consensus Dewey described exists. He claimed to be able to "differentiate genuine aims from merely fantastic ideals" on the basis of future empirical consequences. The trouble is that a person who believes all Jews ought to be exterminated is as unlikely to be won over by a consideration of the deleterious consequences of this belief as a person who believes the world is flat is unlikely to be shaken by the accumulation of empirical evidence to the contrary. Dewey recognized this, of course, but he evidently did not consider the possibility that large numbers of people, for one reason or another, are deeply committed to such "fantastic ideals." Dewey's theory of value is workable only on the assumption that fanaticism, neurosis, and the "death wish" are minority phenomena. If the more pessimistic estimate of human nature proves to be correct, Dewey's theory may turn out to be untrue by its own criterion of truth.

In the second place, to many people Dewey's faith in the efficacy of "pooled intelligence" is likely to seem a bit naive. Not everybody still shares Dewey's confidence that the problems created by technology can be solved by technology. And what about the alienation and dissociation of sensibility that so many people feel today? Here again Dewey's diagnosis may seem superficial. He thought there was nothing new in these anxieties. Indeed, since they stem from humankind's relative inability to control the environment, they are much more characteristic of primitive than of twentieth-century humanity. But, he said, wherever, whenever, and for whatever reason man has "distrusted himself," he has sought "to get beyond and above himself." This pathetic quest for certainty, this desire to escape from contingency, not only explains belief in gods, it also explains the philosopher's belief in a transcendent reality that is "universal, fixed and immutable," as well as the insistence on absolute truths, absolute values, absolutely reliable sense data, or an ideal language that is isomorphic with the world.

Moderate anxiety, Dewey would have said, is of course reasonable-after all, the world is an uncertain place-and it is also SOcially useful. In contrast to dogmatic assurance, it is a spur to improving our instruments of control. But extreme anxiety is unreasonable, since it ignores the empirical evidence that intelligent inquiry does indeed payoff.

But the acceptability of this account depends on men and women being content to live in the relativistic and uncertain world that Dewey's view allows them. It depends, that is, on anxiety not being existential, on its not being rooted in the divisiveness of consciousness or in our having been "thrown" into an indifferent and absurd universe. Dewey would have thought that belief in the absurdity of human existence is neurotic; existentialist critics can reply that Dewey was insensitive to our deepest needs and blind to our real nature. Who is correct? We can only say that, for the present at least, the culture as a whole seems to have moved away from Dewey's view of humankind.

66 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 67

Whitehead

whereas Hegel sometimes slipped into thinking of his in this way. Whitehead's thought about his own thinking was open-ended like Dewey's rather than dogmatic, as the traditional rationalism tended to be.

The basic orientation of Whitehead's 19 mind was quite different from that of Dewey's. He had, for instance, a nostalgia for the past and a sense of tradition that Dewey lacked. Reminiscing about Sandwich, a town in the south of England near which he grew up, Whitehead remarked that the sleepy sixteenth- and seven~eenth-century. town he had known as a boy was no more. "In the last half century It has been revived by a golf-course, one of the best in England. I feel a sense of profanation amidst the relics of the Romans, of the Saxons, of Augustine, the medieval monks, and the ships of the Tudors and the Stuarts."g It seems unlikely that Dewey would have cared much if Burlington, Vermont, had suffered this fate, or that he would have found golf "a cheap ending to the story."

Whitehead, however, did not live solely in the past; nor was he uninterested in contemporary social problems. On the contrary, he had a very lively interest in such problems and wrote with power and insight on such subjects as education. Neve~thel~ss, fo: Whitehead, philosophy was primarily a cognitive enterprise, an~ hIS pn~ary mterest was metaphysical. In a sense both he and Dewey wanted their the ones to perform a social function. They wanted to make human life richer and more Significant by helping us understand our experience. But whereas ~ewey thought of this task primarily in terms of solving a variety of fairly immediate, concrete problems, Whitehead thought of it in terms of a long-range and systen:atic i~terp:etation of the whole range of experience. Because he was a systernatizer, hIS pomt of view was less "modern" than Dewey's; on the other hand, he belongs to the great tradition that has always regarded the role of philosophy as more a matter of understanding the world than of changing it.

If Dewey represented the empirical spirit of the modern mind, modified, as has been seen, by his sense of humankind's functional and active relation to the data of experience, Whitehead can be fairly said to have represented the rationalist tradition. But his relation to this tradition must be stated with care. To begin. with, lik~ every other philosopher of the last century, he took process very senously. ThIS serves to distinguish him from the rationalists of the Enlightenment, but not from Hegel. The chief differences between Whitehead and Hegel are,. fi~st, t~~t White~ead was not a constructivist but conceived philosophy in the realistic .spmt that ammated Moore, Russell, and the other philosophers who were attemptmg to break out of the Kantian paradigm and reaffirm objectivity; second, that he drew his conceptual scheme from the physical sciences instead of from "pure" logic; and third, that there is no Whiteheadian "dialectic." In addition, Whitehead was quite clear that his conceptual scheme was not the final answer,

The Function of Philosophy

Philosophy, Whitehead held, is simply the search for the pattern in the universe. In one sense people always have the pattern in their grasp; in another sense it forever eludes them. Philosophy works with feeble instruments, but it perfects these instruments as it goes. It is an "attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language."h It is the enemy of half-truths, dogmatiC generalizations, watertight compartmentalizations, and doctrinaire solutions. It knows that "all general truths condition each other; and the limits of their application cannot be adequately defined apart from their correlation by yet wider genoralities."! To perform this never-ending work of criticism and revision, to move forward to ever less inadequate formulations of the underlying pattern, is the task of philosophy.

19 Alfred North W~itehead (1861-1947) was born in England and educated at Trinity College, Cambndge. After teaching mathematics there for some years, he moved to London, where he continued teaching and writing on scientific subjects. In 1924, at an age when most people .would be thinking of retiring, he became a professor at Harvard and subsequently pubhshed most of his work on purely philosophical subjects.

Philosophy is an attitude of mind towards doctrines ignorantly entertained. By the phrase "ignorantly entertained" I mean that the full meaning of the doctrine in respect to the infinitude of circumstances to which it is relevant, is not understood ....

The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace. If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated.

Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern)

It will be seen how close Whitehead's view of language is to Eliot's. He would have agreed with Eliot that language is "a raid on the inarticulate," which inevitably deteriorates into a "general mess of imprecision of feeling."20 Thus, though Whitehead shared Russell's realism, he was almost diametrically opposed to Russell's view of philosophy. It is not the business of philosophy, as Russell held, to ascertain, by means of an analysis of the logic oflanguage, the simple facts into

2°Seep.7.

68 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 69

which the world divides." Rather, it is the business of philosophy, and of the sciences and the arts-indeed, as we shall see, it is the whole business of life-to render some welter of feeling articulate. But as often as some welter of feeling is articulated, it collapses into the "inarticulate commonplace," and the process must begin anew. Hence, because he saw philosophy as "akin to poetry" and to mysticism, rather than to logic, Whitehead could afford to be speculative, as Russell could not.

The science of Pure Mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit. ... [Its] originality consists in the fact that in mathematical science connections between things are exhibited which, apart from the agency of human reason, are extremely unobvious ....

The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities .... All

you assert is, that reason insists on the admission that, if any entities whatever have any relations which satisfy such-and-such purely abstract conditions, then they must have other relations which satisfy other purely abstract conditions.

In the pure mathematics of geometrical relationships, we say that, if any group [of] entities enjoy any relationships among its members satisfying this set of abstract geometrical conditions, then such-and-such additional abstract conditions must also hold for such relationships. But when we come to physical space, we say that some definitely observed group of physical entities enjoys some definitely observed relationships among its members which do satisfy this above-mentioned set of abstract geometrical conditions. We thence conclude that the additional relationships which we concluded to hold in any such case, must therefore hold in this particular case ....

Pure mathematics ... is a resolute attempt to go the whole way in the direction of complete analysis, so as to separate the elements of mere matter of fact from the purely abstract conditions which they exemplify ....

The exercise of logical reason is always concerned with these absolutely general conditions. In its broadest sense, the discovery of mathematics is the discovery that the totality of these general abstract conditions, which are concurrently applicable to the relationships among the entities of anyone concrete occasion, are themselves inter-connected in the manner of a pattern with a key to it. ...

The key to the patterns means this fact:-that from a select set of those general conditions, exemplified in anyone and the same occasion, a pattern involving an infinite variety of other such conditions, also exemplified in the same occasion, can be developed by the pure exercise of abstract logic. Any such select set is called the set of postulates, or premises, from which the reasoning proceeds ....

The complete pattern of general conditions, thus exemplified, is determined by anyone of many select sets of these conditions. These key sets are sets of equivalent postulates. This reasonable harmony of being, which is required for the unity of a complex occasion, together with the completeness of the realisation (in that occasion) of all that is involved in its logical harmony, is the primary article of metaphysical doctrine. It means that for things to be together involves that they are reasonably together. This means that thought can penetrate into every occasion of fact, so that by comprehending its key conditions, the whole complex of its pattern of conditions lies open before it. It comes to this:-provided we know something which is perfectly general about the elements in any occasion, we can then know an indefinite number of other equally general concepts which must also be exemplified in that same occasion."

FAITH IN A PATTERN

Whitehead was convinced that, though we can never formulate it completely or finally, there is a pattern-that is the realistic strain in his thought. On the one hand, "the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness."k On the other hand, since "we are finite beings," the complete grasp of this pattern "in its totality is denied us." It follows that belief in an order of nature, belief that "at the basis of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery," is, in the final analysis, an "act of faith." But Whitehead's faith was not remotely like Kierkegaard's leap of faith. Whitehead's was a faith in the continuity of things-a faith that the patterns already discovered are the basis for patterns yet to be found. Kierkegaard's faith involved a quantum jump, a complete break with the evidence. Whitehead's was a faith in an objective truth, in a cosmological principle. Kierkegaard's faith claimed only subjective truth; although for Kierkegaard it "made all the difference," the difference it made was entirely in his own life. Finally, and most important, Whitehead's was a faith that the human mind and the universe are interfused in harmony; Kierkegaard's faith presupposed that an abyss separates them.

Guided by his faith in the ultimate rationality of the universe, Whitehead held that philosophy is "to seek the forms in the facts"m and to display these forms in their systematic interconnections. Since Whitehead believed that the pattern thus revealed has affinities with the pattern found in mathematics, it is important to understand what he conceived the nature of mathematics to be. The following passage should be contrasted with Dewey's account of mathematics, which has already been exammed.P

21Seepp.172-73. 22See pp. 49-50.

70 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

It is clear from this passage that Whitehead belonged to the Platonic tradition.

He would not have denied, of course, that mathematics can have a purely calculative role of the kind that nominalists assign to it; he would have agreed that from this point of view it is "a way of avoiding reasoning." But it is, he believed, also an insight into real connections. Whitehead held, as Descartes did, that it is necessary to distinguish between (1) the movement of thought or inference in our own minds, (2) the eternal objects thought about, whose real connections are revealed when we think truly, and (3) the possible exemplification of these connections in the physical world. One of the tasks of the "philosophy of organism" (as Whitehead c~led his view) is to put these three factors back into organic unity instead of leaving them separate as Descartes had been obliged to do. But the point to understand here is simply that in Whitehead's view mathematical reasoning is more than a mere computation of the agreements and disagreements of names; it traverses an objectively real pattern. This pattern is something we find (we "seek the forms in the facts"), not a subjective order that we impose on experience.

But what is the source of the concepts that constitute this pattern, or categorial scheme-that is, what are those highest and pervasive concepts that apply to all experience whatever and thus "never fail of exemplification"? It was once thought that such highest forms had a "peculiar certainty and initial clarity," that they could therefore easily be recognized as self-evident axioms, and that, once they had been ascertained, the task of philosophy was "to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought." Unfortunately, according to Whitehead, there are no intrinsically clear and certain starting points. Theorems derived in one system can become postulates in another, and "the verification of a rationalistic scheme is to be sought in its general success," that is, in the way in which a deductive structure is developed. Until such a structure emerges, "every premise ... is under suspicion.">

INCLUSIVENESS: THE CRITERION

Since there are no self-evident axioms, it is necessary (Whitehead held) to make a start with the concepts that seem to form a satisfactory pattern for some less inclusive region of experience (such as physics). The next step is to try to show that this set of concepts is also adequate for the interpretation of other regions of experience. Eventually the concepts may prove to be the categorial scheme that is being sought. All claimants to categorial status must be challenged to show their relevance to all the facts.

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of "interpretation" I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme ....

THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 71

"Coherence," as here employed, means that the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless ....

The term "logical" has its ordinary meaning, including "lOgical" consistency, or lack of contradiction .... It will be observed that lOgical notions must themselves find their places in the scheme of philosophic notions.

It will also be noticed that this ideal of speculative philosophy has its rational side and its empirical side. The rational side is expressed by the terms "coherent" and "logical." The empirical side is expressed by the terms "applicable" and "adequate.">

THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION

But though the verification of a proposed categorial scheme is straightforwardly empirical, the initial formulation of the scheme is not. It is more like poetic insight than like generalization from the enumeration of instances. This is the case because of the very great generality of the concepts contained in a categorial scheme. Normally, science and common sense alike proceed by the method of difference: the range of a generalization is specified by noting the cases for which it does not hold. But metaphysical principles, precisely because they are categorial, hold universally.

We habitually observe by the method of difference. Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not. The result is that an elephant, when present, is noticed ....

The metaphysical first principles can never fail of exemplification.

We can never catch the actual world taking a holiday from their sway. Thus, for the discovery of metaphysics, the method of pinning down thought to the strict systematization of detailed discrimination, already effected by antecedent observation, breaks down. This collapse of the method of rigid empiricism is not confined to metaphysics. It occurs whenever we seek the larger generalities. In natural science this rigid method is the Baconian method of induction, a method which, if consistently pursued, would have left science where it found it. What Bacon omitted was the play of a free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic. The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. The reason for the success of this method of imaginative rationalization is that, when the method of difference fails, factors which are constantly present may yet be observed under the influence of imaginative thought. Such thought supplies the differences

72 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

which the direct observation lacks. It can even play with inconsistency; and can thus throw light on the consistent, and persistent, elements in experience by comparison with what in imagination is inconsistent with them .... The success of the imaginative experiment is always to be tested by the applicability of its results beyond the restricted locus from which it originated .... The partially successful philosophic generalization will, if derived from physics, find applications in fields of experience beyond physics. It will enlighten observation in those remote fields, so that general principles can be discerned as in process of illustration, which in the absence of the imaginative generalization are obscured by their persistent exemplification ....

There may be rival schemes, inconsistent among themselves; each with its own merits and its own failures. It will then be the purpose of research to conciliate the differences. Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities.

If we consider any scheme of philosophic categories as one complex assertion, and apply to it the logician's alternative, true or false, the answer must be that the scheme is false ....

The scheme is true with unformulated qualifications, exceptions, limitations, and new interpretations in terms of more general notions .... [It] is a matrix from which true propositions applicable to particular circumstances can be derived. We can at present only trust our trained instincts as to the discrimination of the circumstances in respect to which the scheme is valid. . ..

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought, progressive and never final. But it is an adventure in which even partial success has importance.s

This notion of imaginative rationalization, with the related ideas of adventure, poetic vision, and instinct, is one of the major clues to understanding Whitehead's conception of philosophy and his constant emphasis on growth and openness.

THE UTILITY OF METAPHYSICS

The chief criticisms of such an attempt at speculative philosophy, Whitehead believed, will be (1) that it is impossible and (2) that even if it is possible it is useless. It is a sign of the marked empiricism and pragmatism of one aspect of contemporary culture that Whitehead felt he had to defend himself on the second, as well as on the first, of these scores. As regards the claim that speculative philosophy is impossible, Whitehead believed that "all constructive thought is dominated by some such scheme, unacknowledged but no less influential in guiding the imagination." Thus philosophy has an important role to perform in making "such schemes explicit and thereby capable of criticism and improvement.">

CRITICISM OF THE DOMINANT PHILOSOPHICAL SCHEME 73

Obviously, this is also a reply to the charge that speculative philosophy is useless. If it is true that constructive thought is always guided by some underlying metaphysical scheme, any improvement of the scheme by means of philosophical criticism should result in an improved empirical understanding of the world about us.

The main objection ... is that we ought to describe detailed matter of fact, and elicit the laws with a generality strictly limited to the systematization of these described details. General interpretation, it is held, has no bearing upon this procedure; and thus any system of general interpretation, be it true or false, remains intrinsically barren. Unfortunately for this objection, there are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element in a system. Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals in terms of which its definiteness is exhibited .... When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. Its search for a rationalistic scheme is the search for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate justification, of the interpretations which we perforce employ ....

The useful function of philosophy is to promote the most general systematization of civilized thought. There is a constant reaction between specialism and common sense. It is the part of the special sciences to modify common sense. Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations.'

Criticism of the Dominant Philosophical Scheme

According to Whitehead, then, all thought has as its underlying presupposition some categorial scheme. These categorial schemes are often largely unconscious and chaotic; yet each one shapes the actual concepts, hypotheses, and theories by means of which the scientists-as well as the ordinary people-of any age seek to understand themselves and the world they live in.

Stated in this general way, Whitehead's assertion is clearly an echo of Hegel's contention that what we experience is in part a product of the mind's activity, and that the mind's role in this production has a history. But in one respect Whitehead was perhaps closer to Nietzsche than to any of the other nineteenth-century philosophers who held this kind of view. He agreed with Nietzsche that the categorial scheme underlying modern thought was the product in large measure of seventeenth-century physics; he agreed, too, that although this scheme had

74 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

worked reasonably well for a long time in the field of physics, its application to other fields-psychology, ethics, and theory of knowledge, for instance-was never even remotely adequate. Further, Whitehead pointed out that relativity theory and quantum physics (which Nietzsche, of course, had not known) demonstrated that the dominant categorial scheme was no longer adequate even in its own sphere.

But although Nietzsche and Whitehead agreed that the dominant categorial scheme had collapsed, Nietzsche was content merely to suggest a new one in a cursory and sketchy fashion. Whitehead, for his part, regarded this collapse as an occasion for the exercise of those constructive functions that he assigned to speculative philosophy. These radically different attitudes toward the role of speculative philosophy reflect, once again, two persistently different personality types that have appeared again and again in Western culture. Nietzsche was too deeply concerned with his existential problem-with the need to affirm life despite its horrors-to be seriously interested in cosmology. Moreover, he believed that all categorial schemes-including, of course, any that he himself might put forward-were mechanisms designed to protect philosophers from insecurity, and he held that it was more noble and "masterly" to face insecurity boldly than to invent a categorial defense against it. In contrast, Whitehead's faith in a pattern led him to believe that categorial schemes are not merely products of insecurity; they are also expressions of the human passion to understand. In his view, since the schemes can come to correspond more and more adequately to the "facts" of the cosmological pattern, this passion is reasonable; it is capable of progressive, though never complete, satisfaction. But not only did Whitehead believe that the application of intelligence can result in improved categorial schemes; he also had surplus energy to expend on that improvement because he was not deeply immersed in an existential problem of his own.

Whitehead's philosophy of organism thus falls into two parts. First, he undertook to demonstrate the incompetence of the existing categorial scheme. Second, he sought to develop a new scheme that would avoid the difficulties of the existing one.

THE NOTION OF SIMPLE LOCATION

Whitehead believed that the root idea, and the source of much of the trouble, in the dominant categorial scheme was the notion of "simple location."

One ... assumption [underlying] the whole philosophy of nature during the modern period . . . is embodied in the conception which is supposed to express the most concrete aspect of nature. The Ionian philosophers asked, What is nature made of? The answer is couched in terms of stuff, or matter, or material-the particular name chosen is indifferent -which has the property of simple location in space and time, or, if you adopt the more modern ideas, in space-time. What I mean

CRITICISM OF THE DOMINANT PHILOSOPHICAL SCHEME 75

by matter, or material, is anything which has this property of simple location ....

The characteristic common both to space and time is that material can be said to be here in space and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time. Curiously enough this character of simple location holds whether we look on a region of space-time as determined absolutely or relatively ....

This fact that the material is indifferent to the division of time leads to the conclusion that the lapse of time is an accident, rather than of the essence, of the material. The material is fully itself in any sub-period however short. . . .

The answer, therefore, which the seventeenth century gave to the ancient question of the Ionian thinkers, "What is the world made of?" was that the world is a succession of instantaneous configurations of matter-or of material, if you wish to include stuff more subtle than ordinary matter, the ether for example.

We cannot wonder that science rested content with this assumption as to the fundamental elements of nature .... This is the famous mechanistic theory of nature, which has reigned supreme ever since the seventeenth century. It is the orthodox creed of physical science. Furthermore, the creed justified itself by the pragmatic test. It worked .... But the difficulties of this theory of materialistic mechanism very soon became apparent. The history of thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is governed by the fact that the world had got hold of a general idea which it could neither live with nor live without.'

THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION

In Whitehead's view, the first thing wrong with the dominant scheme is that developments in physics in the twentieth century (such as discoveries about the properties of electrons) made interpretation in terms of simple location hopelessly complex and even contradictory. People used to think that it would someday be possible to give a mechanical explanation of all natural phenomena-this was the "ideal" of science. But "what is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?" u

But apart from such difficulties posed by twentieth-century discoveries, the dominant scheme is ill equipped even for dealing with the kind of world it supposes itself to be facing. "It is obvious," for instance, "that the concept of simple location is going to make great difficulties for induction." For the assumption that there is no inherent connection between heres and theres or between nows and thens means that inference from what happened at one instantaneous configuration of matter to what may happen at another is quite impossible.

76 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

The governing principle underlying [the orthodox] scheme is that extension, namely extension in time or extension in space, expresses disconnection. This principle issues in the assumptions that causal action between entities separated in time or in space is impossible and that extension in space and unity of being are inconsistent. ... This governing principle has to be limited in respect to extension in time. The same material exists at different times. This concession introduces the many perplexities centering round the notion of change ....

The ultimate fact embracing all nature is (in this traditional point of view) a distribution of material throughout all space at a durationless instant of time, and another such ultimate fact will be another distribution of the same material throughout the same space at another durationless instant of time. The difficulties of this extreme statement are evident and were pointed out even in classical times when the concept first took shape ....

We must therefore in the ultimate fact, beyond which science ceases to analyse, include the notion of a state of change. But a state of change at a durationless instant is a very difficult conception. It is impossible to define velocity without some reference to the past and the future. Thus change is essentially the importation of the past and of the future into the immediate fact embodied in the durationless present instant.

This conclusion is destructive of the fundamental assumption that the ultimate facts for science are to be found at durationless instants of time ....

In biology the concept of an organism cannot be expressed in terms of a material distribution at an instant. The essence of an organism is that it is one thing which functions and is spread through space. Now functioning takes time. Thus a biological organism is a unity with the spatio-temporal extension which is of the essence of its being. This biological conception is obviously incompatible with the traditional ideas. This argument does not in any way depend on the assumption that biological phenomena belong to a different category to other physical phenomena. The essential point of the criticism on traditional concepts which has occupied us so far is that the concept of unities, functioning and with spatio-temporal extensions, cannot be extruded from physical concepts."

Of course, as Whitehead pointed out, such "theoretical difficulties ... have never worried practical scientists."w Scientists are content to operate pragmatically; they do not worry that their tacit assumption of arbitrariness and disconnectedness undermines the rationale of their procedure. For they have quietly gone on believing in the rationality of the universe even while saying that it is irrational. "It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts .... Since the time of Hume, the fashionable

CRITICISM OF THE DOMINANT PHILOSOPHICAL SCHEME 77

scientific philosophy has been such as to deny the rationality of science .... But scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the philosophic mountain.">

Nevertheless, however pragmatically minded practicing scientists may be, no one can enjoy operating from contradictory premises. If it is the notion of simple location that is responsible for "this strange contradiction in scientific thought," the sensible procedure is to abandon the concept in question.

THE "BIFURCATION OF NATURE"

Another difficulty with the concept of simple location is connected with the theory of perception. The minds that observe nature are supposed to be different sorts of things from the nature they observe. This notion of "bifurcation of nature," which is another by-product of the assumption of simple location, is hopelessly contradictory. According to this view, the ordinary objects of sense perception (for example, the castle seen at a distance, the planet in the sky) are unreal. They are actually only material particles that cause changes in the observer via his or her sense organs and cortex. But

the difficulty to be faced is just this. We may not lightly abandon the castle [and] the planet, ... and hope to retain the eye, its retina, and the brain. Such a philosophy is too simple-minded-or at least might be thought so, except for its wide diffusion.

Suppose we make a clean sweep. Science then becomes a formula for calculating mental "phenomena" or "impressions." But where is science? In books? But the castle and the planet took their libraries with them.

No, science is in the minds of men. But men sleep and forget, and at their best in anyone moment of insight entertain but scanty thoughts. Science therefore is nothing but a confident expectation that relevant thoughts will occasionally occur .... Yet this won't do; for this succession is only known by recollection, and recollection is subject to the same criticism as that applied ... to the castle [and] the planet. ... In their departure "you" also have accompanied them; and I am left solitary in the character of a void of experience without Significance}

CONFLICTS WITH ESTHETIC AND MORAL VIEWS OF THE WORLD

Even apart from such epistemological puzzles, the dominant view of the world is "quite unbelievable." According to Whitehead, ordinary, everyday experience-including even the ordinary, everyday experience of those physicists and philosophers who affirm the "truth" of the dominant categorial schemeis not experience of temporally and spatially discrete entities that are wholly without sensuous differentiations. Everyone's experience includes continuity, endurance, value, and sensuous detail. But according to the dominant scheme, nature

78 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

is "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material endlessly, meaninglessly." From this point of view it is we, not the rose, who should get the credit for its scent; we, not the nightingale, the credit for its song. "The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind."z

But Whitehead held the poets to be right in refusing to believe this scientific dogma about the unreality of secondary qualities. Moreover, by insisting on the endurance and interpenetration of things, poets "bear witness that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values; and that these values arise from the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts."a

In addition to conflicting with the esthetic view, the old scientific scheme is incompatible with the moral and religious view of the world. The problem of free will is an example. According to the scientific scheme,

each molecule blindly runs. The human body is a collection of molecules. Therefore, the human body blindly runs ....

There are then two possible theories as to the mind. You can either deny that it can supply for itself any experiences other than those provided for it by the body, or you can admit them.

If you refuse to admit the additional experiences, then all individual moral responsibility is swept away. If you do admit them, then a human being may be responsible for the state of his mind though he has no responsibility for the actions of his body ....

The question as to the metaphysical status of molecules does not come in. The statement that they are mere formulae has no bearing on the argument. For presumably the formulae mean something. If they mean nothing, the whole mechanical doctrine is likewise without meaning, and the question drops. But if the formulae mean anything, the argument applies to exactly what they do mean. The traditional way of evading the difficulty-other than the simple way of ignoring it-is to have recourse to some form of what is now termed "vitalism." This doctrine is really a compromise. It allows a free run to mechanism throughout the whole of inanimate nature, and holds that the mechanism is partially mitigated within living bodies. I feel that this theory is an unsatisfactory compromise. The gap between living and dead matter is too vague and problematical to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption, which involves an essential dualism somewhere."

Whitehead's position can be summarized by saying that the metaphysical scheme based on simple location, which modern science inherited from the seventeenth century and which it is still trying to apply, is far too narrow to serve as a satisfactory categorial scheme; it is even too narrow for science itself. What is required is "an alternative cosmological doctrine, which shall be wide enough to

WHITEHEAD'S NEW CATEGORIAL SCHEME 79

include what is fundamental both for science and for its critics."> Such a scheme will first replace the concept of simple location by concepts more adequate to the new developments in physics and then try to show that these new concepts are also more adequate for interpreting esthetic, moral, and religious experience.

Whitehead's New Categorial Scheme

The new categorial scheme that Whitehead constructed is not only the center of his own philosophy; it also represents the last of the great efforts of speculative philosophy. Unfortunately, it is as difficult and obscure as anything in modern philosophy.23 The concepts that form the core of Whitehead's view are those of event (or occasion), prehension, eternal object, and organism.

EVENTS

According to Whitehead, the notion of a thing as existing at a particular here and enduring through a succession of instantaneous nows must be replaced by the concept of event. Here again the pervasive influence of the idea of process can be seen. Like Dewey, Whitehead held that the concept of event involves the notions of beginning, ongoing, and consummation. But the measure of Whitehead's greater metaphysical interest is the more thorough analysis to which he subjected these ideas.

A Whiteheadian event is "the ultimate unit of natural occurrence." The simplest example is any act of perception. I say that from the top of this hill I see a castle across the valley, or that I see a planet in the sky. Thinking in terms of the old scheme of simple location, I regard myself as wholly "here" and the castle and the planet as wholly "there," with all the ensuing difficulties that have b.een pointed out. But let me abandon the notion of simple location. Then the thI~gs "grasped into a realized unity" here and now are not the castle and the planet SImply in themselves; they are the castle and the planet from the point in space and time of my here and now. And there are innumerable other points from which other aspects of castle and planet are grasped and with which they are united in similar ways. What, indeed, are the castle and the planet except the endless variety of standpoints (including, if they were conscious, their "own" standpoints) from which, and into which, they are perceived? And what is this "here and now" from which I am perceiving? The phrase used above was that "from the top of this hill"

23Whitehead's most systematic treatment of his proposed scheme is contained in Process and Reality, in which the "category of the ultimate" ("creativity," "many," ."on,~"), eight "categories of existence," twenty-seven "categories of explanation," and nme categoreal obligations" are defined and elaborated. For the most part, however, ~e p~esen.t ac- . count will follow the somewhat Simpler, but sufficiently abstruse, version gtven ill SCIence and the Modern World.

80 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

I saw the castle. But hill is "too wide for our peculiar locus standi." What I am conscious of is merely the relation of my "bodily events to the simultaneous events throughout the rest of the universe.I'< Hence an event is the interpenetrating of all the infinitely various aspects of the universe at some particular standpoint.

PREHENSIONS

Applied to events at the level of human perceivings, Whitehead's conception is most interesting and ingenious, but difficulties arise as soon as we try to pass from the level of human perception (which leaves us in "idealism") to the "realism" Whitehead wanted to maintain. According to him, these graspings into unity are not merely ways by which the human mind synthesizes its materials; they are objective occurrences going on allover the universe at all sorts of levels below the level of conscious comprehension. Thus, while I am perceiving the castle and the planet, they are prehending (feeling) me. But that does not mean a radical difference between their mode of experiencing me and my mode of experiencing them, for there is much about them that I am merely feeling rather than perceiving, and feeling at much the same level that they are feeling me.

Most unifyings, that is, are simply felt; they take place without consciousness of the fact of unification. This is why Whitehead talked about "prehendings" instead of "perceivings." He intended, on analogy with "apprehension," that the term "prehension" suggest the unifying function of perception and consciousness, but without definitely implying the perception and consciousness. In this way, he believed he had obtained a concept that would serve equally well for interpreting such diverse phenomena as an electron and my view of the castle. "Prehension" and "event" are categorial concepts precisely because (Whitehead believed) they hold good for-that is, are exemplified in-the whole of nature.

Unfortunately, one cannot escape the feeling that categorial interpretation is secured by a verbal trick. Is the electron a prehension into unity in the sense in which my view of the castle is? If so, how do we know that it is? The terminological relationship between "prehension" and "apprehension" suggests somewhat facilely an objective relationship about whose existence not everyone will be persuaded. But is it in fact possible to have any clear idea at all, verbal relationship apart, of a prehension that is not an apprehension? Thus the effect of categoriality is achieved, but the cost is ambiguity.

Applications of the Categorial Scheme

So much for two of the main elements in the scheme itself. The next step is to see how they are applied. This examination should make the concept more intelligible and perhaps clear up some of the ambiguity. To begin with, how does the concept of event fit in with developments in quantum physics?

APPLICATIONS OF THE CATEGORIAL SCHEME 81

One of the most hopeful lines of explanation [in quantum physics] is to assume that an electron does not continuously traverse its path in space. The alternative notion as to its mode of existence is that it appears at a series of discrete positions in space which it occupies for successive durations of time. It is as though an automobile, moving at the average rate of thirty miles an hour along a road, did not traverse the road continuously; but appeared successively at the successive milestones, remaining for two minutes at each milestone ....

But now a problem is handed over to the philosophers. This discontinuous existence in space, thus assigned to electrons, is very unlike the continuous existence of material entities which we habitually assume as obvious. The electron seems to be borrowing the character which some people have assigned to the Mahatmas of Tibet. ...

There is difficulty in explaining the paradox, if we consent to apply to the apparently steady undifferentiated endurance of matter the same principles as those now accepted for sound and light. A steadily sounding note is explained as the outcome of vibrations in the air: a steady colour is explained as the outcome of vibrations in ether. If we explain the steady endurance of matter on the same principle, we shall conceive each primordial element as a vibratory ebb and flow of an underlying energy, or activity .... Accordingly there will be a definite period associated with each element; and within that period the stream-system will sway from one stationary maximum to another stationary maximum .... This system, forming the primordial element, is nothing at any instant. It requires its whole period in which to manifest itself. ...

Accordingly, in asking where the primordial element is, we must settle on its average position at the centre of each period. If we divide time into smaller elements, the vibratory system as one electronic entity has no existence. The path in space of such a vibratory entitywhere the entity is constituted by the vibrations-must be represented by a series of detached positions in space, analogously to the automobile which is found at successive milestones and at nowhere between ....

[This] hypothesis of essentially vibratory existence is the most hopeful way of explaining the paradox of the discontinuous orbit.

In the second place, a new problem is now placed before philosophers and physicists, if we entertain the hypothesis that the ultimate elements of matter are in their essence vibratory. By this I mean that apart from being a periodic system, such an element would have no existence. With this hypothesis we have to ask, what are the ingredients which form the vibratory organism. We have already got rid of the matter with its appearance of undifferentiated endurance .... The field is now open for the introduction of some new doctrine of organism which may take the place of the materialism with which, since the seventeenth century, science has saddled philosophy=

82 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

What is here called an organism is simply an event-that is, a coming into being of a prehensive unity, whose present includes its past and looks ahead into its future. The organism's life has a structure, or pattern, that arises from the particular way it prehends into unity all the manifold aspects of nature that it includes. Its endurance through time is simply the successive prehension of past patterns along with present aspects.

For example, a molecule is a pattern exhibited in an event of one minute, and of any second of that minute. It is obvious that such an enduring pattern may be of more, or of less, importance. It may express some slight fact connecting the underlying activities thus individualised; or it may express some very close connection .... [In the latter case 1 there is then an enduring object with a certain unity for itself and for the rest of nature. Let us use the term physical endurance to express endurance of this type. Then physical endurance is the process of continuously inheriting a certain identity of character transmitted throughout a historical route of events. This character belongs to the whole route, and to every event of the route. This is the exact property of material. If it has existed for ten minutes, it has existed during every minute of the ten minutes, and during every second of every minute. Only if you take material to be fundamental, this property of endurance is an arbitrary fact at the base of the order of nature; but if you take organism to be fundamental, this property is the result of evolution ....

Endurance is the repetition of the pattern in successive events.

Thus endurance requires a succession of durations, each exhibiting the pattern.'

In contrast to the very simple, material points that the old scheme took as its ultimate reals, events are thus very complex affairs. What physics studies is only a part of the total complex. Of the manifold aspects of nature prehended into an event, physics is concerned only with "their effects on patterns and on locomotion [insofar as they] are expressible in spatio-temporal terms .... An electron for us is merely the pattern of its aspects in its environment, so far as those aspects are relevant to the electromagnetic field." In other words, Whitehead replaced the old notion that "happenings of nature are to be explained in terms of the locomotion of material" with the notion of two radically different kinds of locomotion-the "vibratory locomotion of a given pattern as a whole" and the "vibratory change of pattern."g

Thus physics is simply an abstraction from the full nature of an organism, that is, from all the other aspects that are relevant in other ways to other fields. Hence there is no fundamental difference between, for instance, physics and biology. "Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms."h Nor is there

WHITEHEAD'S ACCOUNT OF VALUE 83

any difference, ultimately, between the relatively simple organisms studied in physics and biology and those much larger and richer organisms called human beings. Beginning with the Simplest event, or prehension into unity, we can advance into more and more complex organic structures, as a given structure at one level is prehended into a higher structure at another level.

In this way, eventually, the level of ordinary everyday experience is reached, from which (as has just been seen) physics is an abstraction. One of the troubles with the dominant metaphysical scheme was precisely its failure to see that it was dealing with an abstraction. Since, according to that scheme, the abstract, simply located material particles were "real," it was necessary to relegate the concrete, sensuous world to "appearance." Whitehead called this the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, the mistake of treating an abstraction as if it were a concrete fact. One of the advantages claimed by Whitehead for his philosophy of organism was that it enables us to escape this particular fallacy. Once philosophers understand that they are dealing with prehendings into unity, they will no longer feel that scientific objects and everyday objects are in competition as rival claimants to an exclusive reality. On the contrary, they will see that a so-called scientific objectelectron, molecule, and so on-is Simply a selection from the full diversity of aspects that are being prehended into unity here and now. Hence the poeticesthetic view of the world, as well as the everyday view, is rehabilitated. Indeed, Whitehead believed that what the poets express in their imaginative language is precisely that interpenetration of aspects and prehension into unity that he himself was describing in abstract and philosophical prose.

Whitehead's Account of Value

One of the most fundamental aspects of everyday, as well as of poetic and religious, experience is the experience of value. Whitehead believed that one main advantage of his philosophy of organism was its ability to make a place for value in a world of fact. In order to deal with this question it is necessary to describe an aspect of prehension into unity that has so far been omitted from the discussion. What is it that is prehended? Up to now the answer has been simply "aspects of nature." It is time to examine this matter more precisely. Some organisms obviously prehend other organisms, but what about those Simpler organisms that are the prehensions prehended by more-complex organisms? Eventually, we have to face the question, "Of what are the Simplest events the prehension?" Whitehead's answer was "eternal objects"-but what is an eternal object?

ETERNAL OBJECTS

An eternal object is "any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world." i Some

84 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

entities-a fire engine, for example-are obviously cognized in spatiotemporal relations to other events: the garage in which it is housed, those who operate it, the citizens who pay for it, and so forth. The color "fire engine red" has a different status. It "ingresses" into many particular, actual occasions, including the fire engine. But its nature is what it is, indifferent to any of the occasions into which it ingresses. As has been seen, events change and endure; eternal objects are the eternal elements that become the ingredients of various transitory events.

Enduring things are thus the outcome of a temporal process; whereas eternal things are the elements required for the very being of the process ....

Every scheme for the analysis of nature has to face these two facts, change and endurance. There is yet a third fact to be placed by it, eternality, I will call it. The mountain endures. But when after ages it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has ....

In any occasion of cognition, that which is known is an actual occasion of experience, as diversified by reference to a realm of entities which transcend that immediate occasion in that they have analogous or different connections with other occasions of experience. For example a definite shade of red may, in the immediate occasion, be implicated with the shape of sphericity in some definite way. But that shade of red, and that spherical shape, exhibit themselves as transcending that occasion, in that either of them has other relationships to other occasions. Also, apart from the actual occurrence of the same things in other occasions, every actual occasion is set within a realm of alternative interconnected entities. This realm is disclosed by all the untrue propositions which can be predicated Significantly of that occasion .... It is the foundation of the metaphysical position which I am maintaining that the understanding of actuality requires a reference to ideality. The two realms are intrinsically inherent in the total metaphysical situation. The truth that some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may express the vital truth as to the aesthetic achievement. ... An event is decisive in proportion to the importance (for it) of its untrue propositions: their relevance to the event cannot be dissociated from what the event is in itself by way of achievement. These transcendent entities . . . are thus, in their nature, ... comprehensible without reference to some one particular occasion of experience .... But to transcend an actual occasion does not mean being disconnected from it. On the contrary, I hold that each eternal object has its own proper connection with each such occasion.' I

WHITEHEAD'S ACCOUNT OF VALUE 85

POSSIBILITY, LIMITATION, AND VALUE

The realm of eternal objects is the realm of possibility; the realm of events is the realm of actuality. Since there are always possibilities not realized in the complex of interlocking events, a principle of selection is necessary. Prehending unities, that is, are not merely passive contemplators of "aspects of nature"; they are at the same time includings and excludings of eternal objects. Every realized, actual occasion is a limitation. This is the basis for Whitehead's conception of value.

The element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual something. "Value" is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event. ... But there is no such thing as mere value. Value is the outcome of limitation. The definite finite entity is the selected mode which is the shaping of attainment; apart from such shaping into individual matter of fact there is no attainment. The mere fusion of all that there is would be the nonentity of indefiniteness .... That which endures is limited, obstructive, intolerant, infecting its environment with its own aspects. But it is not self-sufficient. The aspects of all things enter into its very nature. It is only itself as drawing together into its own limitation the larger whole in which it finds itself. Conversely it is only itself by lending its aspects to this same environment in which it finds itself. The problem of evolution is the development of enduring harmonies of enduring shapes of value, which merge into higher attainments of things beyond themselves. Aesthetic attainment is interwoven in the texture of realisation. The endurance of an entity represents the attainment of a limited aesthetic success, though if we look beyond it to its external effects, it may represent an aesthetic failure."

An organism, then, is a "unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the characters of eternal objects, emerging for its own sake." This, once again, is easier to understand if we think of it at the human level (for example, the esthetic process going on in the mind of the artist-what emerges is a work of art, a "fusion" of selected eternal objects) than if we try to think of it as a universal ontological principle. But the latter is the way we must think of it if we want to follow Whitehead. Thus an electron is just as much a unit of emergent value (and for the same reason) as is Michelangelo'S "David" or Socrates' decision to sit in prison instead of fleeing to Megara.

GOD: THE ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE OF CHOICE

The realm of possibility, of eternal objects, is not a hodgepodge of diverse entities. The eternal objects are arranged in orders and hierarchies. If some are selected, others must be excluded-as a child soon enough finds out when first

86 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

confronted with the hard fact of alternatives. And ultimately, of course, these are not merely matters of private choice. There is a metaphysical principle at work, and this is God.

We require God as the Principle of Concretion. This position can be substantiated only by the discussion of the general implication of the course of actual occasions-that is to say, of the process of realisation.

We conceive actuality as in essential relation to an unfathomable possibility. Eternal objects inform actual occasions with hierarchic patterns, included and excluded in every variety of discrimination. Another view of the same truth is that every actual occasion is a limitation imposed on possibility, and that by virtue of this limitation the particular value of that shaped togetherness of things emerges ....

Consider an occasion a:-we have to enumerate how other actual occasions are in a, in the sense that their relationships with a are constitutive of the essence of a. What a is in itself, is that it is a unit of realised experience; accordingly we ask how other occasions are in the experience which is a. . . .

There is also in a ... the "abrupt" realisation of finite eternal objects. ... This abrupt synthesis of eternal objects in each occasion ... is how the actual includes what (in one sense) is not-being as a positive factor in its own achievement. It is the source of error, of truth, of art, of ethics, and of religion. By it, fact is confronted with alternatives ....

Restriction is the price of value. There cannot be value without antecedent standards of value, to discriminate the acceptance or rejection of what is before the envisaging mode of activity. Thus there is an antecedent limitation among values, introducing contraries, grades, and oppositions ....

[Eventually there must bel a ground for limitation ... for which no reason can be given: for all reason flows from it. God is the ultimate limitation, and His existence is the ultimate irrationality. For no reason can be given for just that limitation which it stands in His nature to impose. God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality. . . .

We have come to the limit of rationality. . . . What further can be known about God must be sought in the region of particular experiences, and therefore rests on an empirical basis. In respect to the interpretation of these experiences, mankind have differed profoundly. He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it.'

WHITEHEAD'S ACCOUNT OF VALUE 87

COMMENT ON WHITEHEAD'S ACCOUNT OF VALUE

It will be noted that Whitehead's theory of value depends on the doctrine of eternal objects, and it should be clear that eternal objects are nothing but Platonic forms. But if this is true, why not call them "universals" and be done with it? Whitehead answered, "I prefer to use the term 'eternal objects,' in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term [universals] owing to its prolonged philosophical history."m It is certainly easy to sympathize with a philosopher's desire to escape the difficulties clustering around the problems of universals. But can one "disengage" merely by using a different term? It is difficult to see how Whitehead's "prehensions" and "events" resolve the old difficulties about participation, or indeed why Whitehead's theory of knowledge requires eternal objects at all. Though it is impossible to go into this matter here, it should be noted that any difficulties with Whitehead's eternal objects will "infect" his account of value.

Even apart from this consideration, his theory of value is in trouble. For one thing, it is not clear whether value is a structure or a feeling, that is, whether value resides in the limitation-the structure achieved-or in the idea that in this structure the aim of some feeling happens to be realized. In the latter case, that is, if a structure is valuable insofar as it facilitates the achievement of some feeling's aim, Whitehead's values are indistinguishable from Dewey's enjoyings, and it is not at all evident that Whitehead would have found congenial the relativistic and empirical naturalism that Dewey openly espoused.>' On the other hand, if feelings are valuable only insofar as they are realized in certain structures, objectivity is attained. But what does it mean to say that such-and-such a structure is valuable in itself, apart from any interest or need that is thereby satisfied? It would seem that if ontological Significance is attributed to values by defining them in terms of structure, they lose just those characteristics that, in most people's view, make them valuable. Whitehead's predominant metaphysical interest naturally inclined him to put the emphasis on structure rather than on feeling:

All value is the gift of finitude which is the necessary condition for activity. Also activity means the origination of patterns of assemblage ....

Thus the infusion of pattern into natural occurrences, and the stability of such patterns, and the modification of such patterns, is the necessary condition for the realization of the Good. n

And again:

Value is in its nature timeless and immortal. Its essence is not rooted in any passing circumstance. The immediacy of some mortal circumstance is only valuable because it shares in the immortality of some value."

24 See pp. 57-64.

88 THREE PHILOSOPHIES OF PROCESS: BERGSON, DEWEY, AND WHITEHEAD

Of course, no sooner had Whitehead erected this dualism of a "world of value" and a "world of fact" than he tried to break it down. Either "considered by itself is an abstraction"; they "require each other, and together constitute the concrete universe .... The value inherent in the Universe has an essential independence of any moment of time; and yet it loses its meaning apart from its necessary reference to the World of passing fact. Value refers to Fact, and Fact refers to Value."

Religion

Obviously Whitehead was confronted with Plato's old problem-the question of the relation between the forms and the particulars that supposedly "participate" in them. Reformulation of this puzzle in terms of the ingression of eternal objects into events hardly clears the matter up. Nevertheless, let us assume for the sake of argument that God somehow performs the metaphysical role that Whitehead assigned to him as the principle of concretion-that he effects the transition between the eternal and the actual. Then the metaphysical scheme satisfies the demands of logic, but does it satisfy the requirements of feeling? Is the principle of concretion "available for religious purposes"? This depends in part on what one means by religion. According to Whitehead,

religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. . . .

The fact of the religiOUS vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.r

Eloquent as this passage is, it misses both the personality and the providence, as well as the theological precision, that some people require in religion. On the whole, it would seem that Whitehead was correct in remarking that "it may be doubted whether any properly general metaphysics can ever, without the illicit introduction of other considerations, get much further than Aristotle," who certainly did not get "very far towards the production of a God available for religious purposes."q Although Whitehead put forward a more available God in Process and Reality, it was one that seems to have been reached by "the illicit introduction of other considerations." But Whitehead was not the first philosopher to find

RELIGION 89

it difficult to reconcile religious demands with the requirements of philosophical consistency. 25

Perhaps enough has been said to suggest that there are difficulties with Whitehead's categorial scheme. But Whitehead would not have expected it to be otherwise. The whole point of his position was that philosophical thinking, like all other thinking, is open-ended. "A clash of doctrines is not a disaster-it is an opportunity. . . . The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation ... will be found."T Although Whitehead would not, therefore, have regarded deficiency as per se an objection to his view, he surely hoped that his categorial scheme would be more "coherent" than it seems to be. His emphasis was always (and rightly) on inclusiveness. Yet inclusiveness is just where the scheme is weakest: he wanted his concept of God to be available for religious purposes as well as necessary for metaphysical purposes; he wanted his concept of event to be relevant to everyday experience as well as to quantum physics; and so on. That these concepts are not so inclusive as Whitehead believed them to be was hidden from him by the ambiguity of such terms as "prehension," which allowed him to think that he had hit on a generic relationship that transcended "apprehension" while including it.

But such criticisms as these are in some respects beside the point. Philosophers who admire Whitehead and who are impressed by the boldness of his categorial scheme will rightly regard his majestic vision of a Single explanatory system for the universe as being of central importance; criticism of this or that detail will seem to them trivial. On the other hand, philosophers who are indifferent or hostile to metaphysics will say that it is a waste of time to attack specific points in Whitehead's categorial scheme; the whole enterprise, they will hold, is mistaken from start to finish.

Here again, clearly, we have reached a fundamental parting of the ways in philosophy. An antimetaphysical spirit is probably dominant in contemporary philosophy, at least in the United States and Great Britain. The remark just made, and so often repeated in this History, that we have now reached a "parting of the ways," surely reflects this spirit: if there are fundamental partings of the ways, the pursuit of an all-inclusive, systematic metaphysical scheme is certainly illusory. But are there fundamental partings of the ways in philosophy? Though this seems to be a straightforward empirical question, it involves deep metaphysical issues. Thus, as Dewey discovered, even the most determined of antimetaphysicians is likely to find himself or herself doing metaphysics in the course of demonstrating that it is not "do-able." For this reason, although metaphysics has been "killed off" many times in the history of Western thought, it has always revived. Metaphysicians need not be distressed by these Swings. Indeed if, like Whitehead, they take process seriously, they will expect them and seek to explain them by means of a meta-metaphysical scheme.

25 See Vol. IV, pp. 62 and 93-95.

CHAPTER 3

Moore and the Revival

of Realism

The Analytic Tradition

Analytic philosophy was a central movement in the English-speaking world (and beyond) throughout the twentieth century. It is, however, an odd sort of move~ent, since many of the characteristic features of analytic philosophy as practiced III the first half of the century were explicitly attacked and rejected by philosophers engaged in analytic philosophy in the second half of the century. Because a fun~amental shift has taken place in the analytic movement, it is obviously misleading to speak about analytic philosophy in a general and unqualified manner. ~e shall therefore distinguish, in an admittedly rough-and-ready way, two phases III the development of analytic philosophy: the early or classic analytic philosophy

THE ANALYTIC TRADITION 91

of the first half of the century, and the late or new analytic philosophy of the second. This chapter and the four that follow are concerned with classic analytic philosophy; Chapters 11 through 13 consider the new form of analytic philosophy that arose in opposition to classic analytic philosophy.

Classic analytic philosophy is committed to a set of more or less implicit assumptions about the nature of the world and about the nature of philosophical inquiry, assumptions that can be traced far back into the past-to Hume, beyond Hume to Locke, and beyond Locke to Hobbes. One of the main features of twentieth-century philosophy has been the reemergence, or revival, of this tradition after a period of quiescence during most of the nineteenth century. We shall first examine the theories of a number of philosophers who, while differing in many respects, may all be said, without stretching the definition, to belong to the analytic tradition.'

A chief characteristic of the analytic tradition is its commitment to atomicity, that is, to the belief that the universe consists of a very large number of independent, encapsulated entities. Analytic philosophers have conceived of these entities in various ways-as material particles, as sense data, as impressions, as "facts." But common to all philosophers of this tradition is the conviction that the ultimate entities of which the universe is composed are only externally related-that they are, in Humes language, "loose and separate."

From this basic assumption follows the importance of analysis for these philosophers: the primary task of philosophy, they held, is the analysis of complex entities into the simple entities of which they are composed. Because the simple entities are simple they are directly understandable whenever they are encountered. A complex entity is explained only when its analysis into simples has been correctly carried out. They thus completely reversed the direction of explanation as it was understood by contextual philosophers such as Bradley, Dewey, and Heidegger.2 For such philosophers a simple is unintelligible; it becomes intelligible only when it is seen in the larger context in which it operates. The direction of explanation is from simple to complex, from the small entity to the larger entity that includes it. For the analytic philosophers, in contrast, the direction of explanation is from the large to the small.

Philosophers of the analytic tradition thus put a very high valuation on "clarity," the pursuit of which has been, as we have seen, one of the main preoccupations of twentieth-century thought. It seemed to philosophers of the analytic

I We use the term "tradition" instead of "school" because it suggests a looser relationship.

No two philosophers discussed in these five chapters are representative of the analytic tradition in exactly the same way. Rather, they only shared a family resemblance (see p. 401), and the resemblance became more attenuated as time passed. From this point of view, as from so many others, Philosophical Investigations was a turning point. PostWittgensteinian analysis has been very different from pre-Wittgensteinian analysis, Wi_!! iat@p B@' elopa n~8t~!! witRiR Wi:e l"lHP o<iaw sf this Wll_:-

2See pp. 54-57 and 325-31.

92 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

persuasion, as to poets like Wallace Stevens," that most of our experience is anything but clear; on the contrary, most of our experience is an encounter with large, vaguely bounded, and complex conglomerates. Further, our experience of these conglomerates is notoriously affected by our beliefs about them and our attitudes toward them: this is why no two observers are likely to agree about the foreign policy of Russia or even about the character of a mutual acquaintance. Clarity is achieved, in the first place, when such a conglomerate is analyzed into the set of unambiguous simples of which it is composed, each one of which (to expropriate a phrase of Bishop Butler's, which he used in a different connection) "is what it is, and not another thing." And in the second place, clarity is achieved when the mind is brought directly into the presence of each of these Simples-that is, when its experience is a direct confrontation, unmediated and uncontaminated by our hopes or our fears. These two requirements for clarity are closely connected: it is possible to have a direct, unmediated experience of the simples on which analysis terminates precisely because, since they are simples, there is nothing about them to arouse our hopes or fears. We are able to contemplate them in their essential nature for what they are in themselves, without reacting to them and so confusing them with our feelings about them.

The analytic philosophers' pursuit of clarity led them to a great concern about language, a concern that, as we have seen, is another characteristic preoccupation of the twentieth century." In the view of the analytic philosophers most of our language is seriously inadequate. This follows from everyday language suggesting that the universe consists of untidy conglomerates such as dogs and cats and apples and oranges, instead of such neat, encapsulated, atomistic entities as sweetness, redness, and sphericity. Accordingly, these philosophers were convinced that before philosophical inquiry can begin, everyday language must be refined and purified. For want of this preliminary work, they believed, many philosophers have ended in blind alleys and confusion; but if this work is carefully performed, most philosophical questions can be rather easily answered. This attitude was expressed by Thomas Hobbes:

Seeing that truth consists in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeks precise truth had need to remember what every name he uses stands for and to place it accordingly, or else he will find himself entangled in words as a bird in lime twigs, the more he struggles the more belimed .... By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge to examine the definitions of former authors, and either to correct them where they are negligently set down or to make them himself. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities."

3See p. 6. +See pp. 6-8.

THE ANALYTIC TRADITION 93

And by John Locke:

It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge. . . . Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have ... long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have [been] mistaken for deep learning .... They are but the covers of ignorance, [and] hindrance of true knowledge."

And by Bishop Berkeley:

We need only to draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand,"

It is this interest in language, this conviction that philosophical problems are best approached by a tough-minded, critical examination of linguistic usage, that chiefly distinguishes analytic philosophers from other post-Kantians. Once Kant had drawn the distinction between phenomena and noumena, the basic choice for philosophers was either to reaffirm that some sort of knowledge of noumena is possible or to confine their attention to phenomena." Most nineteenth-century philosophers unhesitatingly rejected the former alternative: unknowable thingsin-themselves seemed to them to be useless and redundant.

But a major division soon developed among the philosophers who rejected Kant's noumena and concentrated on his phenomena: some concerned themselves primarily with the observable phenomena and the various spatiotemporal relations in which they stood; and some focused on the part of Kant's doctrine that held phenomena and their spatiotemporal relations to be the products, at least in part, of the synthesizing activities of mind. The latter school, among them the Hegelians, Marxists, and Nietzscheans, were naturally led in the direction of social psychology, anthropology, and cultural history. From the point of view of the analytic philosophers this whole development was a disaster. In the first place, the inquiries generated in this way were not philosophy at all-that is, of course, not as the analytic philosophers conceived philosophy. In the second place, the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions underlying these inquiries seemed to the analytic philosophers to be self-stultifying, since they ended in skepticism and relativism. The analytic philosophers therefore put themselves squarely in the other post-Kantian camp: the one that concentrated on the phenomena themselves, just as we experience them. Indeed, for the analytic philosophers, since noumena are meaningless nonsense, it is a mistake to talk about phenomena at all, for this term inevitably suggests something less than wholly real. Once noumena are eliminated from the inventory of realities, what Kant called phenomena are

5See Vol. IV, p. 101.

94 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

not appearances of something more basic but the only reals that there are. Further, by an easy move, the analytic philosophers identified these reals with the unambiguous simples that are the termini of the process of analysis. Now the central problem of philosophy is the problem of finding a language that is itself simple enou?h and .clear ~nough. to reflect the simplicity and clarity of those unambiguous simples m which reality, on this view, consists.

Just at. this point, by a ~app~ coincidence: new developments occurred in lOgiC t~at ~r~VIded t~e analytic philosophers With a more powerful instrument of linguistic an.alysis and t~u~ gave early-twentieth-century versions of analytic philos?phy ~heir ch~r~ctenstIc form. As long as lOgiC had been dominated by the Ansto~ehan conviction that all propositions are reducible to the subject-predicate form, It was .easy to assume that words are the names of objects and that they mean the objects that they name. This assumption about naming (evident in the passage quoted above from Hobbes) and the assumption about atomicity reinforce each other. Since words are clearly atomistic units, it seemed evident that corresponding to the words there must be self-enclosed, encapsulated entities named by them. These assumptions occasioned a number of paradoxes that preoccupied analytic philosophers at the beginning of this century, and the emergence of relational logic seemed to them to make the resolution of these paradoxes possible." But this new start was made within the framework of the analytical-linguistic tradition; that is, it was taken for granted that complexes could be, and should be, analyzed into simples and that the proper method of attack was to u~cover t~e "true ~e~ing" ~f the language that we ordinarily use loosely and amb.I~ously. The chief mnovation of the new, twentieth-century version of the tradition was that the n.ew, relational lOgiC was to be the instrument of analysis.

. In what other ways IS the analytic tradition to be characterized? The analytic phIlo~ophers doubtl~ss had existential problems, as all individuals presumably do. But hke Dewey, Whitehead, and Bergson, and unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche they kept these problems under reasonably adequate control and out of their philosoP~ical writings. For them philosophy was primarily a cognitive enterprise, not, as With James, a therapeutic one.

Again, although they were interested in science, differences in temperament also marked the analytic philosophers from other thinkers who were sympathetic to the scientific viewpoint. For example, even though Whitehead started as a physicist and joined with Russell in pioneering important studies of logic, he and Russell subsequently moved in very different directions. Whitehead used the concepts of physics as a "categoreal scheme" for a new metaphysics of the traditional type; ~ussell. e~ploye~ the concepts of logic as the basis for clearing up puzzles about me~~mg o~casIOned by people's slipshod use of language.

~n addition, philosop~ers of the analytic tradition were almost untouched by the Idea of process; certamly they were not in the least moved by the vision of development and the emergence of new forms of life that we found in the writings of Hegel and Karl Marx and that we find again in Bergson and Whitehead. One

"See pp. 174-87.

MOORE AND ANALYSIS 95

reason for this is undoubtedly the analytic commitment to atomicity: the ultimate simples by definition do not undergo internal change; they are whatever they are. Therefore, though they endure through time, they do not, in the strict sense of the word, have a history. New forms of life occur, but their "emergence" is merely the arrangement of the changeless simples in different combinations.

Further, the philosophers of the analytic tradition have generally not been deeply interested in social reform. There are exceptions, of course-for instance, Russell.' But Russell the reformer and Russell the philosopher were much more sharply distinguished (and not merely so far as writing goes) than were, say, Dewey the reformer and Dewey the philosopher. Dewey was essentially a social philosopher-his "reconstruction of philosophy" was part and parcel of his whole program of social reform; Russell was a philosopher who happened also to be a passionate critic of the economic and social status quo and a courageous political activist. But the reforming zeal of most analytic philosophers has been largely focused on philosophy itself-not in the interest of improving our "traffic with nature" but simply in the interest of obtaining "clarity."

Finally, whereas the idealists and constructivists undermined the concept of truth-each, of course, in a different way-and replaced it with the concept of interpretation, the philosophers of the analytic tradition wholly rejected this procedure as "psychologizing." They wanted, not to abandon the notion of truth, but to refine it. In doing so they certainly exposed many old "truths"; their assault on traditional metaphysics was every bit as radical as was that of the pragmatists. But the spirit of their attack was quite different from that of the pragmatists because, like the traditional pre- Kantian metaphysicians, they were realists. They took it for granted that there is an objective world that is independent of us but nonetheless accessible to us. The task of philosophy, they held, is to replace false or mistaken assertions about the nature of reality by true ones, attained by means of rigorous analysis. Here again the ideal of clarity is central. According to the analytic tradition, things are what they are; we have only to get clear in our minds about their nature.

Moore and Analysis

Philosophers agree that Moore" was one of the leaders in the revival of the analytic tradition in our time. Indeed, though Moore himself protested that he never

"See pp. 210-13.

BG. E. Moore (1873-1958) was born and brought up in a suburb of London. He was educated at Dulwich College, a private school near his home, and at Cambridge, where he studied classics and philosophy and where he first met Russell, who was two years his senior. Moore spent almost the whole of his long life at Cambridge, first as a research Fellow at Trinity, then as a lecturer, and finally as a professor. After his retirement in 1939 he visited the United States several times and taught at a number of institutions in this country. His influence on Anglo-American philosophy was great.

96 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

maintained that "analysis is the only proper business of philosophy," d most of the philosophers influenced by his writings have been more impressed by his method than by the positive conclusions he reached by means of that method. We shall therefore begin our discussion of Moore with an account of his method. It is somewhat ironic, in view of Moore's insistence on clarity, that it is by no means clear exactly what "analysis" meant to Moore. Even Moore himself on occasion professed not to understand what his method was. "I used to hear them speak of The Method' sometimes, and understood that it was regarded as mine, but 1 never did know what it was."e

The "them" referred to in this rather giveaway remark included John Maynard Keynes," and Keynes has left us a vivid description of the method of analysis as Moore practiced it in 1903, when he was a young Fellow of Trinity and Keynes was a precocious undergraduate.

How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalysable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue. In that case who was right when there was a difference of opinion? There were two possible explanations. It might be that the two parties were not really talking about the same thing, that they were not bringing their intuitions to bear on precisely the same object. . . . Or it might be that some people had an acuter sense of judgment, just as some people can judge a vintage port and others cannot. ...

We regarded [such questions] as entirely rational and scientific in character. Like any other branch of science, it was nothing more than the application of logic and rational analysis to the material presented as sense-data. Our apprehension of good was exactly the same as our apprehension of green, and we purported to handle it with the same lOgical and analytical technique which was appropriate to the latter ....

It was all under the influence of Moore's method, according to which you could hope to make essentially vague notions clear by using precise language about them and asking exact questions. It was a method of discovery by the instrument of impeccable grammar and an unambiguous dictionary. "What exactly do you mean?" was the phrase most frequentlyon our lips. If it appeared under cross-examination that you did not mean exactly anything, you lay under a strong suspicion of meaning nothing whatever.'

Though Keynes, naturally, was not concerned with philosophical fine points, the main features of analysis, as Moore practiced it, are quite evident in his account. Analysis is a form of division, in which something complex is taken to

9J. M. Keynes (1883-1946) was born in Cambridge and educated there. His economic theories, and especially his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), have had great influence in Western Europe and the United States.

MOORE AND ANALYSIS 97

pieces in order to ascertain how its constituent parts have been put together. As a result of this taking to pieces, we are in a position to inspect the constituent parts in a way that was impossible as long as they were assembled in the compound from which analysis started. The whole method is in fact dominated by two metaphors-first, the metaphor of disassembling some complex physical object, such as a watch or a diesel engine; second, the metaphor of visual perception. As a result of analysis the object whose nature we want to understand is before the mind in the way in which a physical object is before our eyes, and the process of analysis is talked about as if it were analogous to bringing that object into sharper focus, getting closer to it, getting it into a good light, getting it separated from the background, and so on.

With this general description of analysis in mind, it will be useful to watch the method in action, as Moore tackles the question of the relation between being and existence-a question that has always baffled philosophers, but that Moore held to be a puzzle only because in the past philosophers had failed to do the essential preliminary work of "analysis and distinction." 10

BEING

The first and most fundamental property which I wish to call attention to . . . is just this one which does belong to what we believe in, whenever our belief is true, and which does not belong to what we believe in, whenever our belief is false. I propose to confine the name being to this property; and I think you can all see what the property in question is. If, for instance, you are believing now that I, while I look at this paper, am directly perceiving a whitish patch of colour, and, if your belief is true then there is such a thing as my being now directly perceiving a whitish patch of colour. And I think you can all understand in what sense there is such a thing .... This property, then, which does so plainly belong to this event (or whatever you like to call it) is the one I am going to call "being."g

EXISTENCE

Next, as regards existence: How is the property that is denoted by the verb "is" related to the property denoted by the noun "being"?

As regards this question, I used to hold very strongly, what many other people are also inclined to hold, that the words "being" and "existence" do stand for two entirely different properties; and that though everything which exists must also "be," yet many things which "are"

lOSee p. 99.

98 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

nevertheless do emphatically not exist. ... But nevertheless, I am inclined to think that I was wrong, and that there is no such distinction between "being" and "existence" as I thought there was. There is, of course, a distinction of usage, but I am inclined to think that this distinction is only of the same kind as that holding between "being" and "being a fact." 11 That is to say, when we say of a thing that it exists, we don't, I think, mean to attribute to it any property different from that of "being"; all that we mean to say of it is simply that it is or is a constituent of the Universe .... In merely saying that there is a class of things, to which we tend to confine the word "existence," we are, of course, saying that these things have some common property, which is not shared by other constituents of the Universe .... The important thing is to recognise as clearly as possible that there is such a property, and what it is ....

And I think the best way of doing this is to point out what are the classes of things in the Universe, of which we cannot quite naturally say that they "exist." And so far as I can see we can divide these into two classes. The first is simply the class of things which I have just called "facts." It is in the highest degree unnatural to say of these that they exist. No one, for instance, would think of saying that the fact that lions exist, itself exists; or that the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 exists. We do, therefore, I think, certainly tend to apply the word "existence" only to constituents of the Universe, other than facts.

But there is, it seems to me, also another class of things, which really are constituents of the Universe, in the case of which it is also unnatural, though not, perhaps, quite so unnatural, to say that they "exist." The class of things I mean is the class of things which Locke and Berkeley and Hume called "general ideas" or "abstract ideas," and which have been often called by that name by other English philosophers. This is, I think, their most familiar name.s

THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF ANALYSIS

Analysis, then, is the process of isolating for inspection-holding up before our eyes, as it were-one or another of the various entities that, collectively, make up the universe. That division of complex entities into simple ones and inspection of these simple items are the two essential steps in the method follows from Moore's assumption that the universe consists of a vast number of absolutely simple items and that analysis, if carried far enough, always terminates on one of these items. For any such simple item, precisely because it is simple, is absolutely unambiguous and so requires only inspection to be fully grasped and understood.

II [In ~~ot.her disc~~sion Moor~ had ar~ed that the difference in usage between "being"

and bemg a fact expresses not a difference of predicate, but a difference in the character of the subjects to which it is applied't-c-Atrrnoas.]

MOORE AND ANALYSIS 99

It follows again that philosophical difficulties and disagreements

are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer. I do not know how far this source of error would be done away, if philosophers would try to discover what question they were asking, before they set about to answer it; for the work of analysis and distinction is often very difficult: we may often fail to make the necessary discovery, even though we make a definite attempt to do so. But I am inclined to think that in many cases a resolute attempt would be sufficient to ensure success; so that, if only this attempt were made, many of the most glaring difficulties and disagreements in philosophy would disappear. At all events, philosophers seem, in general, not to make the attempt; and, whether in consequence of this omission or not, they are constantly endeavouring to prove that "Yes" or "No" will answer questions, to which neither answer is correct, owing to the fact that what they have before their minds is not one question, but several, to some of which the true answer is "No," to others "Yes."!

It is not the world or the sciences that suggest philosophical problems to us-at least not to minds like Mooresi-e-but only the writings of those philosophers who ignore analysis and who demand of the universe more "symmetry and system" than it possesses. And this demand is in the highest degree unreasonable: "To search for 'unity' and 'system: at the expense of truth, is not, I take it, the proper business of philosophy, however universally it may have been the practice of philosophers."k

But what seemed so unreasonable to Moore was eminently reasonable to philosophers who, like Bradley." start from the assumption that reality is a complex unity, not a collection of Simples. Whereas for Moore, and for the analytic tradition generally, analysis gets us back to those real simples, for Bradley and philosophers of his school, analysis only fragments a real unity: they share Wordsworth's belief that we murder to dissect. For Moore, to understand any item is to inspect that item in splendid isolation from every other item; for Bradley, to be forced to contemplate such an isolated item is to misunderstand it: every "bare conjunction" is a standing contradiction.P

A PUZZLE ABOUT CLARITY

Here, then, we have reached another major parting of the ways in philosophy.

But even from within the general framework of the analytic tradition there are some serious questions about analysis as Moore practiced it. In the first place, it does not follow, just because we feel clear about something, that the thing we feel

12See Vo!' IV, Ch. 9. 13See Vo!' IV, p. 343.

100 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

clear about is clear. Moore wanted to hold, in opposition to extreme constructivists such as Nietzsche, that clarity is a property of things, not a reflection of our attitudes toward them. But even granting Moore's basic assumption (which the constructivists would of course have rejected) that there are entities so simple that when we inspect them they are perfectly clear, it is still possible on any particular occasion that the clarity we experience is subjective, not objective. Moore himself, in a passage already quoted.l" admitted to having once believed himself to be clear about something (that there is a difference between the property denoted by "being" and the property denoted by "exist") about which he subsequently came to hold that he had been mistaken. And we shall encounter other instances of such confusions. Accordingly, no matter how sure we may feel that an analysis has yielded clarity, we may be mistaken.

A PUZZLE ABOUT PROPOSITIONS AND THEIR VERBAL EXPRESSION

In the second place, what exactly (to borrow one of Moore's favorite adverbs) is being analyzed when an analysis is taking place? Sometimes Moore wrote as if what is being analyzed is the "meaning" of such a word as "is" or "exists"; sometimes, as if what is being analyzed is the "property denoted" by the word; sometimes, indeed, as if what is being analyzed is the verbal expression.P These shifts gave rise to a request from friendly critics that Moore clarify the relations among meanings, properties, and verbal expressions, that is, that he undertake an analysis of what analysis is.' When he did so, he concluded that, though he had sometimes written in ways that could give rise to a false impression, he never intended to make analyses of verbal expressions.

There is, of course, a sense in which verbal expressions can be "analysed." ... Consider the verbal expression "r is a small y." I should say that you could quite properly be said to be analysing this expression if you said of it: "It contains the letter 'x', the word 'is', the word 'a', the word 'small', and the letter 'y'; and it begins with 'x', 'is' comes next in it, then 'a', then 'small', and then 'y'." It seems to me that nothing but making some such statement as this could properly be called "giving an analysis of a verbal expression.">

We may agree, first, that if this is what analyzing a verbal expression amounts to, Moore certainly never analyzed verbal expressions, and, second, that it would be a very trivial thing to do. But, as we shall see, there is a different way in which one might go about analyzing a verbal expression: one might undertake to show, not the constituent physical parts of the expression, but the various contexts in which the expression occurs and the way in which these contexts affect the use of the expression,

14See pp. 97-98. 15See p. 105.

MOORE AND ANALYSIS 101

As regards "meaning," Moore concluded that it is too subjective a term and for it he therefore substituted the term "proposition," defined as the thing that is apprehended when someone says to us (or we read) a sentence that we understand.t''>

Accordingly, if Moore's analysis of analysis is correct, whenever an analysis is undertaken it is a proposition that is being analyzed.F But what is the relation between the proposition that is being analyzed and the verbal expression that we necessarily use to express it? Moore assumed that the verbal expression of a proposition denotes the proposition it expresses. Thus, on his view, language is anything but "a raid on the inarticulate." 18 Rather, it is just a label that we attach to the proposition in order to identify it for people with whom we want to communicate. Some interesting consequences follow, among them that we can have independent knowledge of a proposition before finding the right label for it. Indeed, it would seem that we must have such prior independent knowledge of the proposition; otherwise how do we know which label is the right one?

Just as we apprehend propositions in exactly the same sense . whether we hear spoken sentences which express them, or see these sentences written or printed, so also, obviously, we very often apprehend propositions in exactly the same sense, when we neither hear nor see any words which express them. . . . No doubt when we do thus apprehend propositions, without either hearing or seeing any words which express them, we often have before our minds the images of words, which would express them. But it is, I think, obviously possible that we should apprehend propositions, in exactly the same sense, without even having before our minds any images of words which would express them. We may thus apprehend a proposition, which we desire to express, before we are able to think of any sentence which would express it. We apprehend the proposition, and desire to express it, but none of the words we can think of will express exactly the proposition we are apprehending and desiring to convey=

16This is all straightforward enough, but unfortunately Moore also used the term "proposition" in a different way. Since he held in that sense there simply are no propositions, readers are likely to become confused unless they keep these two senses of "proposition" distinct.

17What Moore actually says, in "A Reply to My Critics," in The Philosophy of C. E. Moore, edited by P. A. Schilpp (Tudor, New York, 1952), p. 661, is that what is being analyzed is always either "an idea or concept or proposition," but since, according to him, ideas and concepts are no more "mental facts" than are propositions, this does not affect the general thesis. They are indeed constituents of propositions and therefore as independent of minds as are propositions. Thus we could undertake an analysis of the concept expressed by "brother," and we could also undertake an analysis of the proposition expressed by "Sons of brothers are first cousins," in which the concept expressed by "brother" is a constituent.

18See p. 7.

102 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

Again, it follows that a given verbal expression may be the label for two or more quite different propositions-for instance, "That is a red" may express a proposition about sornebody's political affiliation and also a proposition about the locus of some color in the spectrum. This is obviously a source of possible confusion, which analysis is intended to clear up. From the detachability of verbal expressions it also follows that a number of quite different verbal expressions can be equally correct labels for the same proposition. The most obvious instances of this are verbal expressions in different languages. Thus "Red is a color" and "Rot ist eine Farbe" are labels for exactly the same proposition. Finally, we can know that two verbal expressions express the same proposition (for example, we can know that "Rot" means what is meant by "red") without knowing what color is named by both of these terms. To put this differently, we can employ correct usage without knowing how to analyze the proposition expressed in this usage. For instance, 1 can know that Tom, Dick, and Harry are brothers, and 1 can use the term "brother" correctly with reference to them (I can say, correctly, "Tom is a brother of Dick's") without in the least knowing that the concept "being a brother" is identical with the concept "being a male sibling," which is the correct analysis of "brother."> All these assumptions about the relation between verbal expression and proposition appear in the following passage.

The preceding discussion concerned the meaning of certain words. I said I proposed to raise the question: What is the meaning of the words "real," "exists," "is," "is a fact," "is true"? But I think this was perhaps an unfortunate way of describing the question which I really wished to discuss. Obviously there can be no need for me to explain to you the meaning of the word "real," in the sense in which it might be necessary for me to explain its meaning if I were trying to teach English to some foreigner who did not know a word of the language ....

Just as, if I were trying to tell you some facts about the anatomical structure of horses, I should suppose that the word "horse" had already called up to your mind the object I was talking about, and just as, unless it had, you would not understand a word that I was saying; so I am now supposing that the word "real" has already called up to your mind the object or objects I wish to talk about-namely the property or properties which you wish to assert that a thing possesses when you say that it is real-and unless the word has called up before your mind this property or properties, everything that I say will be quite unintelligible. The fact is then, that I am solely concerned with the object or property or idea, which is what is called up to your mind by the word "real," if you understand the English language: it is solely some questions about this object or property or notion or idea that I wish to investigate .... What is this notion or property, which we mean by the word real? But you see, the question, in this sense, is an entirely different question from that which would be expressed in the same words if a Polynesian,

MOORE AND ANALYSIS 103

who knew no English, asked: "What is the meaning of the word 'real'?" So far as ~ can see, the Polynesian's question would be simply equivalent to saYIng: Please, call up before my mind the notion which Englishmen express by the word "real." So soon as you had done this, you would have completely answered his question. Whereas this is by no means all that I want to do when I ask: What is the meaning of the word "real"? What I want to do is to raise certain questions about the nature of this notion, which is called up by the word "real," not merely to call it up ....

So far as we assert: the notion or notions in question are conveyed by the word "real," we are asserting something which presupposes a knowledge of English. But I want to insist that as regards part, and the most important part, of its meaning, my question is a question which can be raised without a knowledge of English. All that it requires is that we should have before our minds the notion or notions which are in fact expressed to Englishmen by the word "real": it does not require that we should know the fact that these notions are expressed to Englishmen by the word "real." A person may quite well investigate the differences between a horse and a donkey, without knowing at all that these objects are called "horse" and "donkey" in English. And similarly a person who had never heard the word "real" might have before his mind the rough notion or notions, which are conveyed by this word to us, and might ask:

Is it the same notion I have before my mind now, as I had just now, or is it a different one? ... If you ask yourself: Is the notion conveyed to my mind by the word "real" in that sentence, the same as that conveyed to it by the word "real" in this sentence? it is not always easy to be sure whether it is the same or not .... A philosopher may say: When I use the word "real," this is what I mean by it; and yet he may be wrong: what he says he means by it may not, in fact, be what he does mean by it. It may be the case that the thought which is before his mind, when he uses the word "real," and which he expresses by it, is in fact different from that which is conveyed by the words of his definition, only that he has made the mistake of thinking they are the same .... And just as a philosopher may think that the thought which he is expressing by two different words, or by the same word on two different occasions, is the same, when in fact it is different; so conversely he may think that there is a difference between what he is expressing by a word on one occasion and what he expresses by the same or a different word on another, when in fact there is no difference-when the two thoughts, which he thinks are different, are, in fact, the same .... This would be an instance of making a distinction without a difference-of making a merely verbal distinction, an offence of which some philosophers have often accused others and probably sometimes with justice, though I think philosophers are certainly more often guilty of the opposite offencethat of supposing that there is no difference, where there is one.s

104 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

An analogy may be helpful. Let us therefore return to the three brothers, Tom, Dick, and Harry. Because they are brothers they resemble one another, and Tom and Dick, who are twins, resemble each other more closely than either resembles Harry. It is possible that acquaintances who do not know them well (or even friends who look at them hastily or in a poor light) may mistake one for another. To mistake them is to misname them. An acquaintance may for instance call Dick "Tom" and Tom "Dick." Or again he may encounter Dick on two separate occasions and call him (correctly) "Dick" on the first and (incorrectly) "Tom" on the second: he may mistakenly believe he has encountered two brothers when he has in fact encountered only one. Conversely, he may encounter Dick on one occasion and Tom on another, and call them both "Dick": he may believe himself to have talked with one brother when he has in fact talked with two. Finally, corresponding to the English names of the brothers there are French, German, and Italian names, and a man might know that "Heinrich" is German for "Harry," and so know that the brother who is called "Harry" in English would be called "Heinrich" in German, without having the least idea which of the three brothers is Harry/Heinrich.

Moore's account oflanguage as denotative is plausible as long as we are thinking about people and their names. Each of the brothers is obviously himself and not another one of the brothers; their names are detachable labels that they could change. And obviously we could know a lot about Tom, Dick, and Harry (how tall they are, how much they weigh, whether they are good at sports, how much their salaries are) without knowing that they are called "Tom," "Dick," and "Harry." The same is true for horses and donkeys. There are obviously horse-thingsthings that we can see, smell, and touch quite independently of knowing that these horse-things are called "horses." And if there are horse-things in Polynesia, then we can point to those horse-things and ask what they are called in Polynesian. We shall then know the label in Polynesian for the things that we label in English by the word "horse."

The question is, how far can this account of language be generalized? Granted that in some situations language functions denotatively, does language always function in this way? For instance, is there a Polynesian equivalent-as Moore assumed there must be-for "real"? And how would we go about finding out? Or to take an easier case, suppose a man says to us, "Numbers are real," and we wonder what he means. It would seem that the only way we can find out what he means by "real" in this sentence is by taking note of the contexts in which he says this sentence, that is, by studying his usage. Moore has maintained that to ascertain meaning is to ascertain the proposition that is expressed by a sentence. If, however, usage determines meaning, there is no need to postulate the existence of propositions. It would seem that propositions are redundant; they are not needed to give an account of meaning. 19

19 It was Wittgenstein who first posed the kinds of question raised in this paragraph. See pp. 396-401.

REALISM 105

Now, if propositions are redundant, what happens to analysis as Moore practiced it? Evidently, if there are no propositions Moore cannot have been doing what he thought he was doing, that is, dividing a complex proposition into its constituent parts. It would seem that Moore's analysis turns out to be an examination of the ways in which certain English terms are actually used and a recommendation to confine our own usage to one of these ways rather than to any other. For instance, on this analysis of Moore's analysis, he was not displaying, as he believed himself to be doing, the property denoted by "is" and the property denoted by "exists" and showing us that they are exactly the same property. Instead, he was urging us to agree to use "is" and "exists" interchangeably.

But if this is what Moore was doing, why did he not see it himself? The answer appears to be as follows. If the objects we think about exist independently of our thoughts about them, it is plausible to regard thought (and perception) as contemplation, not activity, and language then functions merely ex post facto to label objects already fully apprehended. But, as we have seen, Moore's temperament was fundamentally realistic. As Keynes perceptively wrote, "Moore had a nightmare once in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables. But even when he was awake, he could not distinguish love and beauty and truth from the furniture. They took on the same definition of outline, the same stable, solid, objective qualities and common-sense reality."r For Moore, that is to say, "Our apprehension of good [is] exactly the same as our apprehension of green."s Thus Moore's view that language is denotative, on which his analysis of analysis depends, rests in turn on his realism. It is time, then, to examine his argument for realism and against idealism.

Realism

THE REFUTATION OF IDEALISM

In our discussion of the Kantian paradigm 20 we said that the attempt to break out of it took three main forms-one a revival of realism, another based on a revolution in logic, and a third based on phenomenological observation and bracketing. Moore played no substantial part in the second of these movements, but his article "The Refutation of Idealism," published in 1903, was one of the earliest, and also one of the most influential, contributions to the revival of realism.

If I can refute a Single proposition which is a necessary and essential step in all Idealistic arguments, then, no matter how good the rest of these arguments may be, I shall have proved that Idealists have no reason whatever for their conclusion ....

20 See pp. 8-14.

106 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

[There is] a matter upon which not Idealists only, but all philosophers and psychologists also, have been in error, and from their erroneous view of which they have inferred (validly or invalidly) their most striking and interesting conclusions. . . . It will indeed follow that all the most striking results of philosophy-Sensationalism, Agnosticism and Idealism alike-have, for all that has hitherto been urged in their favour, no more foundation than the supposition that a chimera lives in the moon. It will follow that, unless new reasons never urged hitherto can be found, all the most important philosophic doctrines have as little claim to assent as the most superstitious beliefs of the lowest savages.'

The step in the idealist argument that Moore selected for attack is the claim that to be is to be experienced, or, in Berkeley'S formulation, esse est percipi, and since from Berkeley>' to Bradley= this had been an essential part of the idealist case, it was shrewd of Moore to focus on it.

That wherever you can truly predicate esse you can truly predicate percipi, in some sense or other, is, I take it, a necessary step in all arguments, properly to be called Idealistic, and, what is more, in all arguments hitherto offered for the Idealistic conclusion. If esse is percipi, this is at once equivalent to saying that whatever is, is experienced; and this, again, is equivalent, in a sense, to saying that whatever is, is something mental. But this is not the sense in which the Idealist conclusion must maintain that Reality is mental. The Idealist conclusion is that esse is percipere; and hence whether esse be percipi or not, a further and different discussion is needed to show whether or not it is also percipere ....

But now: Is esse percipi? There are three very ambiguous terms in this proposition, and I must begin by distinguishing the different things that may be meant by some of them.

And first with regard to percipi. This term need not trouble us long at present. It was, perhaps, originally used to mean "sensation" only; but ... the distinction between sensation and thought need not detain us here. For, in whatever respects they differ, they have at least this in common, that they are both forms of consciousness or, to use a term that seems to be more in fashion just now, they are both ways of experiencing. Accordingly, whatever esse is percipi may mean, it does at least assert that whatever is, is experienced. . . . I shall undertake to show that what makes a thing real cannot possibly be its presence as an inseparable aspect of a sentient experience."

21 See Vol. III, p. 287. 22See Vol. IV, pp. 357 -58.

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So much for percipi. Next Moore considered the ambiguity of "is."

What can be meant by saying that Esse is percipi? There are just three meanings, one or other of which such a statement must have, if it is to be true; and of these there is only one which it can have, if it is to be important. (1) The statement may be meant to assert that the word "esse" is used to signity nothing either more or less than the word "percipi": ... that what is meant by esse is absolutely identical with what is meant by percipi. I think I need not prove that the principle esse is percipi is not thus intended merely to define a word .... But if it does not mean this, only two alternatives remain. The second is (2) that what is meant by esse, though not absolutely identical with what is meant by percipi, yet includes the latter as a part of its meaning. If this were the meaning of "esse is percipi," then to say that a thing was real would not be the same thing as to say that it was experienced .... From the fact that a thing was real we should be able to infer, by the law of contradiction, that it was experienced; since the latter would be part of what is meant by the former. But, on the other hand, from the fact a thing was experienced we should not be able to infer that it was real."

That is to say, although from xy we can infer y, from y we cannot infer x. But the idealist of course does not want to infer y from xy, that is, infer percipi from esse and percipi together-that would be the most trivial conclusion. He wants to infer percipi from esse alone, that is, y from x. "This is (3) the third possible meaning of the assertion esse is percipi: and [it is] the only important one. Esse is percipi asserts that wherever you have an x you also have percipi, that whatever has the property x also has the property that it is experienced.">

Moore has now formulated the doctrine that he believed idealists wanted to maintain-that "whatever is experienced, is necessarily so"-and that they formulated, in a very muddled way, by saying that "the object of experience is inconceivable apart from the subject." And this assertion, so far from being obviously true as the idealists suppose, is actually self-contradictory.

How can the idealists have made such a colossal mistake? The reason is that they have never looked at experience carefully enough to see that subject and object are two completely distinct things.

I am suggesting that the Idealist maintains that object and subject are necessarily connected, mainly because he fails to see that they are distinct, that they are two, at all. When he thinks of "yellow" and when he thinks of the "sensation of yellow," he fails to see that there is anything whatever in the latter which is not in the former. This being so, to deny that yellow can ever be apart from the sensation of yellow is merely to deny that yellow can ever be other than it is; since yellow and the sensation of yellow are absolutely identical. To assert that yellow is necessarily an object of experience is to assert that yellow is necessarily

108 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

yellow-a purely identical proposition, and therefore proved by the law of contradiction alone. Of course, the proposition also implies that experience is, after all, something distinct from yellow-else there would be no reason for insisting that yellow is a sensation: and that the argument thus both affirms and denies that yellow and sensation of yellow are distinct, is what sufficiently refutes it.x

In a word, esse and percipi are actually just as different from each other as are green and sweet, and there is therefore no more reason "to believe that what is is also experienced than to believe that whatever is green is also sweet.">

But now what is that property, missed altogether by the idealist, that, being actually present in the sensation of yellow and absent in yellow, makes subject and object into two quite distinct things? The answer is, consciousness.

We all know that the sensation of blue differs from that of green. But it is plain that if both are sensations they also have some point in common. What is it that they have in common? And how is this common element related to the points in which they differ?

I will call the common element "consciousness" without yet attempting to say what the thing I so call is. We have then in every sensation two distinct terms, (1) "consciousness," in respect of which all sensations are alike; and (2) something else, in respect of which one sensation differs from another. It will be convenient if I may be allowed to call this second term the "object" of a sensation: this also without yet attempting to say what I mean by the word ....

Accordingly to identify either "blue" or any other of what I have called "objects" of sensation, with the corresponding sensation is in every case, a self-contradictory error. It is to identify a part either with the whole of which it is a part or else with the other part of the same whole. If we are told that the assertion "Blue exists" is meaningless unless we mean by it that "The sensation of blue exists," we are told what is certainly false and self-contradictory .... We can and must conceive that blue might exist and yet the sensation of blue not exist. For my own part I not only conceive this, but conceive it to be true."

This, then, is Moore's refutation of idealism: idealism is refuted by showing that one of the principal links in the proof is self-contradictory, and the selfcontradictoriness of this link is shown, in its turn, by pointing out the two distinct things-(I) consciousness and (2) the object of consciousness-which the idealist has confusedly identified. We have quoted Moore's case against idealism in detail not only because it is historically important but also, and especially, because it is an excellent example of analysis as Moore practiced it. The critical move in the whole argument is the uncovering for inspection of an entity (consciousness) that Moore held to be clearly visible as soon as we look in the right

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place but that eludes those who do not take care to analyze the complex entity "experience" into its constituent parts. The idealists' mistake is thus, in Moore's view, a classical instance of one of the most common of philosophical mistakes, identifYing two things that are superficially similar but really very different.f" It corresponds, that is, to the mistake made by the man who, failing to see that he has encountered twins, calls both of them "Dick."24

A PUZZLE ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS

But is consciousness as clear and unambiguous an item in experience as Moore claimed it to be? James, who was certainly an acute observer, was unable to find any such element when he introspected, and he concluded that people who think that they are conscious of consciousness are mistaken. What they are really aware of, he thought, is their breathing." Thus, though James was as hostile to idealism as was Moore, he would have said that it was Moore, not the idealists, who were mistaken about the makeup of experience; there was, as it were, only one man, whom Moore called by two different names because he erroneously believed that this man had a brother.

Moore himself allowed that

the element which I have called "consciousness" . . . is extremely difficult to fix .... It seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparentwe look through it and see nothing but the blue .... The moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and if we know that there is something to look for.s

The operative phrase here is "if we know that there is something to look for."

Certainly, if we know that there is something to look for, we are much more likely to find it than if we do not know. On the other hand, however, if we very much want to find something, we may persuade ourselves we have found it when in fact it is not there to be found. This is one reason that the experience of clarity is not infallible evidence that what we feel clear about is in fact the case. Moore of course had a very strong motive for wanting to find consciousness: it enabled him both to refute idealism and also, as we shall shortly see, to prove realism.

23See p. 104. 24See p. 104.

25See Vol. IV, p. 306.

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THE EVIDENCE OF BRENTAN026

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that Moore had nothing to go on but his own introspection. On the contrary, the psychological studies of Franz Brentano, in contrast to those of James, lent support to the thesis that something real and important is named by the term "consciousness." Indeed, Brentano's studies suggested that James had failed to find consciousness because he had been looking for the wrong sort of thing, a thesis that resonated, of course, with Moore's belief that philosophers go wrong because they fail to isolate those simple items that are there to be inspected. What, then, is consciousness, according to Brentano? Not an idea, not a representation, not a state, but a direction. Consciousness is intentional in nature and simply "points toward an object." Since James was looking for a psychic state it is no wonder he could not find consciousness. Had he looked for a direction, instead of a psychic state, he would have found it.

Brentano's account of consciousness-and it must be emphasized that this was a psychological description, not a piece of philosophical theorizing=-seemed to hold out a way of reviving realism without slipping back into the paradox of Cartesianism. The problem for Cartesianism had always been to explain how, if we are directly conscious only of our own mental states, we can ever know that these states represent an objective world. But if Brentano was correct, to be conscious of something (say, my desk) is not to contemplate a private inner representation of the desk; it is simply for me to be directed toward the desk, to "intend" the desk.

More important in the present connection is that Brentano's account of consciousness as intentional suggested a way of avoiding the subjectivism in which the whole post-Kantian philosophy had become enmeshed. It now seemed possible to agree with Kant that human experience is limited to things-for-consciousness while denying to consciousness any role in constructing these things. If Brentano was correct, consciousness does not do anything; it merely discloses, or displays, things to us.

Although, as we shall see when we begin to trace the development of phenomenology-? Moore's was not the only possible conclusion to be derived from Brentano's account of consciousness, what Moore saw in it was a way of eliminating any kind of intermediary between our minds and their objects. What we are aware of when we are conscious of something is what Wallace Stevens also sought28-the very thing itself, unmediated and uncontaminated by any sort of

26Franz Brentano (1838-1917) was a Catholic priest for nearly ten years but resigned his priesthood because he refused to accept some of the fundamental dogmas of the Church. He taught at Wiirzburg and at Vienna, but his independence of mind cost him both posts, and he spent the last twenty years of his life in Italy and Switzerland. His lectures on "descriptive psychology" were given at Vienna in 1888-89.

27See pp. 272-76. 28 See pp. 6-7.

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mental activity whatsoever. Anybody, Moore thought, who attends carefully to very simple experiences-such as the experience first of a green sense datum and then of a blue one-will see that this is the case, and what is true of very simple experience is equally true of complex perceptions and cognitions, though in such cases careless observers may be misled.

THE PROOF OF REALISM

So far Moore has merely insisted that the sensation of blue and the sensation of green have something in common, which he called "consciousness," and something in respect to which they differ, which he called "object," 29 but of which he has not yet given an account. This was enough to refute idealism but not to establish realism.

The point I had established so far was that in every sensation or idea we must distinguish two elements, (1) the "object," or that in which one differs from another; and (2) "consciousness," or that which all have in common-that which makes them sensations or mental facts ....

The analysis hitherto accepted of the relation of what I have called "object" to "consciousness" in any sensation or idea ... is ... that what I call the object is merely the "content" of a sensation or idea. It is held that in each case we can distinguish two elements and two only, (1) the fact that there is feeling or experience, and (2) what is felt or experienced; the sensation or idea, it is said, forms a whole, in which we must distinguish two "inseparable aspects," "content" and "existence." I shall try to show that this analysis is false ....

We have it, then, as a universally received opinion that blue is related to the sensation or idea of blue, as its content, and that this view, if it is to be true, must mean that blue is part of what is said to exist when we say that the sensation exists. To say that the sensation exists is to say both that blue exists and that "consciousness," whether we call it the substance of which blue is the content or call it another part of the content, exists too. Any sensation or idea is a "thing," and what I have called its object is the quality of this thing. Such a "thing" is what we think of when we think of a mental image ....

What I wish to point out is that we have no reason for supposing that there are such things as mental images at all-for supposing that blue is part of the content of the sensation of blue ....

The true analysis of a sensation or idea is as follows. The element that is common to them all, and which I have called "consciousness," really is consciousness. A sensation is, in reality, a case of "knowing" or "being aware of" or "experiencing" something. When we know that the

29See p. 108.

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sensation of blue exists, the fact we know is that there exists an awareness of blue. And this awareness is not merely, as we have hitherto seen it must be, itself something distinct and unique, utterly different from blue: it also has a perfectly distinct and unique relation to blue, a relation which is not that of thing or substance to content, nor of one part of content to another part of content. This relation is just that which we mean in every case by "knowing." To have in your mind "knowledge" of blue, is not to have in your mind a "thing" or "image" of which blue is the content. To be aware of the sensation of blue is not to be aware of a mental image-of a "thing," of which "blue" and some other element are constituent parts in the same sense in which blue and glass are constituents of a blue bead. It is to be aware of an awareness of blue; awareness being used, in both cases, in exactly the same sense. This element, we have seen, is certainly neglected by the "content" theory: that theory entirely fails to express the fact that there is, in the sensation of blue, this unique relation between blue and the other constituent. ...

It being the case, then, that the sensation of blue includes in its analysis, beside blue, both a unique element "awareness" and a unique relation of this element to blue, ... [it follows] that what is called the content of a sensation is in very truth what I originally called it-the sensation's object.

But, if all this be true, what follows? ...

What my analysis of sensation has been designed to show is, that whenever I have a mere sensation or idea, the fact is that I am then aware of something which is equally and in the same sense not an inseparable aspect of my experience. The awareness which I have maintained to be included in sensation is the very same unique fact which constitutes every kind of knowledge: "blue" is as much an object, and as little a mere content, of my experience, when I experience it, as the most exalted and independent real thing of which I am ever aware. There is, therefore, no question of how we are to "get outside the circle of our own ideas and sensations." Merely to have a sensation is already to be outside that circle. It is to know something which is as truly and really not a part of my experience, as anything which I can ever know."

This, then, is Moore's proof of realism. On the one hand, consciousness is real and not a case of mistaken identity, as James had held; on the other hand, it is not an organizing activity, as the idealists had held. It is just the nature of consciousness to be of, so that we mean exactly what we say when we say that we are "conscious of" blue: when we are conscious of blue, it is blue we are conscious of-blue itself, and not another thing.

Further, what is true about blue is, of course, equally true of all other thingsthey are all equally independent of us and our thoughts about them. The universe contains in fact

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an immense variety of different kinds of entities. For instance: My mind, any particular thought, a perception of mine, the quality which distinguishes an act of volition from a mere act of perception, the Battle ofWaterioo, the process of baking, the year 1908, the moon, the number 2, the distance between London and Paris, the relation of similarity-all of these are contents of the Universe, all of them are contained in it."

These items divide into two main classes-items that are "mental" (or "psychical") and items that are not. Some of the items that are not mental are physical objects; some are not. But all of these itemS-including such mental items as my thoughts and sensations-have the characteristic of being, in their nature, independent of minds. My awareness of blue, for instance (just as much as the moon or the number 2), is just what it is, a fact uncontaminated and untouched by my awareness that I am aware of blue. What is more, the objective and public world which is thus revealed to view is just the world that common sense believes in. Finally, that all this is true Moore held to be completely obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to look carefully at his or her experience.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect of this analysis on those who had been disturbed by the subjectivism of idealism. Russell's response was typical:

C. E. Moore ... took the lead in rebellion, and I followed, with a sense of emancipation. Bradley had argued that everything common sense believes in is mere appearance; we reverted to the opposite extreme, and thought that everything is real that common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy or theology, supposes real. With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them [and that] mathematics would be quite true, and not merely a stage in dialectic."

THE STATUS OF SENSE DATA

It was not long, however, before Moore-and Russell too-began to see grave difficulties in the new view. As long as we concentrate on sense data, realism is persuasive, for it seems plausible to say that when I am sensing a blue sense datum, it is the blue sense datum itself, directly and in its entirety as it were, that I am aware of. But it is only under rather unusual circumstances that I actually ever experience a blue sense datum; what I usually experience are blue thingsblue beads, blue flowers, blue ribbons, and the like. I do not experience any such object all at once, and it may even be doubted whether I experience any of it directly.

When, for instance, I see a dime and a quarter lying on the ground in front of me, I am not directly aware of the whole of either coin- I do not see the other side of either, still less the inside of either. Further, if the coins are a little way off I am directly aware of two elliptical sense data (though the coins themselves are

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round), and, if the dime happens to be nearer than the quarter, the sense datum associated with the dime may be larger than the sense datum associated with the quarter. But how are these sense data related to the coins? What, exactly, does "associated" mean?

One way of dealing with this problem is to define a physical object (for instance, a coin) as the whole set of sense data that all possible observers would experience under all possible conditions of observation. Then the elliptical sense datum would be related to the coin by the well-known relation of class membership. This, as we shall see, is the type of solution for which Russell opted, but since Moore's main aim was to "vindicate" common sense, and since he believed that common sense holds material objects to be more than mere collections of sense data, he could not take this way out.

It is obvious that, on this view, though we shall still be allowed to say that the coins existed before I saw them, are circular, etc., all these expressions, if they are to be true, will have to be understood in a Pickwickian sense. When I know that the coins existed before I saw them, what I know will not be that anything whatever existed at that time, in the sense in which those elliptical patches of colour exist now. All that I know will be simply that, since the elliptical patches exist now, it is true, that, if certain unrealised conditions had been realised, I should have had certain sensations that I have not had; or, if certain conditions, which mayor may not be realised in the future, were to be so, I should have certain experiences .... In other words, to say of a physical object that it existed at a given time will always consist merely in saying of some sensible, not that it existed at the time in question, but something quite different and immensely complicated ....

The fact that these assertions that the coins exist, are round, etc., will, on this view, only be true in this outrageously Pickwickian sense, seems to me to constitute the great objection to it. But it seems to me to be an objection only, so far as I can see, because I have a "strong propensity to believe" that, when I know that the coins existed before I saw them, what I know is that something existed at that time, in the very same sense in which those elliptical patches now exist. And, of course, this belief may be a mere prejudice. It may be that when I believe that I now have, in my body, blood and nerves and brain, what I believe is only true if it does not assert, in the proper sense of the word "existence," the present existence of anything whatever, other than sensibles which I directly apprehend, but only makes assertions as to the kind of experiences a doctor would have, if he dissected me. But I cannot feel at all sure that my belief ... is a mere prejudice=

What, then, is the alternative for a realist? In the end Moore inclined to a position "roughly identical with Locke's view," that at least some of the sense data

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"resemble" the physical objects that are their "source." But, as Moore recognized, this seems indistinguishable from just that representative theory of perception that Moore's own original formulations were designed to avoid: "How can I ever come to know that these sensibles have a 'source' at all? And how do I know that these 'sources' are circular?"! Moore confessed that he did not know how to answer these questions. Of course, if, along with our experience of the sensibles, we had an "immediate awareness" that the sources of these sensibles exist and that they are circular, the problem would be solved. But do we have such an immediate awareness? Analysis, Moore had to admit, did not disclose any such immediate awareness to inspection. But of course the fact that analysis has not yet disclosed something does not prove that a more careful analysis would not lay it bare. Thus, the most Moore felt he could claim was that there is no conclusive evidence against the Lockean view.

It has to be allowed that this is a somewhat inconclusive conclusion but it is not the only problem about sense data that realism had to face: When a colorblind man looks at a traffic signal, where are the gray sense data that he sees? If they are objective, as Moore's theory must hold them to be, they must be somewhere in physical space. Are they in the same region of space as the red and green sense data that the person with normal vision sees? How can this be? And what about the silvery circular sense datum that we see when we look at the moon? Where is it? Out there, where the moon itself is-250,OOO miles away?

Still another set of problems emerged in connection with developments of modern physics. For physics the coin was neither the solid material object that common sense believes it to be nor yet the collection of sense data that, as we have just seen, one philosophical theory held it to be. On the contrary, for physics, it seemed, the coin was mostly empty space, occupied here and there by electrical charges. Thus arose what Sir Arthur Eddington called "the two-tables problem": What is the relation between the table of physics and the table of common sense? If the former is real, must not the latter be an illusion? Since these are all questions to which Russell addressed himself, we may postpone further consideration of them until Chapter 5.

THE FALSE, THE IMAGINARY, AND THE CONTRADICTORY

As we have just seen, perceptual illusions, foreshortenings, hallucinations, and the like create problems for any view, like Moore's, that holds us to be aware of something real, objective, and independent of ourselves, since there is a puzzle about where these illusory or mistaken sensory experiences are located. There is an analogous puzzle about imaginary, self-contradictory, and nonexistent objects. What am I thinking about when I think about such objects? On Brentano's account of consciousness as consciousness-of, it seems to follow there must be something that is the object of consciousness whenever we are conscious, even when we are conscious of (thinking about) centaurs, chimeras, round squares, and the present king of France.

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Given Moore's strong tendency to hypostatize everything from green to good, he naturally sympathized with this point of view '? As he wrote in a passage already quoted," he initially drew a sharp distinction between "being" and "existence," and his first account of the nature of truth conformed. Every assertion, he argued, refers to a proposition, and all propositions without exception, both true propositions and false ones, have the "ultimate and unanalysable property of 'being.''' True propositions, however, have in addition a second equally ultimate and unanalyzable property, which, he said, may be called "truth." Thus the propositions referred to in assertions about fictitious or contradictory objects have but one property ("being"), whereas the propositions referred to in factual assertions have two properties ("being" and "truth").

By 1910 Moore had decided that this theory was mistaken, though he still held that it is "a very simple and a very natural one; and I must confess I can't find any conclusive arguments against it."g The main objection is that propositions turn out to be redundant. Suppose that Moore were now hearing the noise of a brass band. It would follow that there is in the universe the fact that Moore is hearing the noise of a brass band. But now suppose that Moore (or somebody else) were to assert, "Moore is now hearing the noise of a brass band." On the theory we are considering, a proposition would be referred to in this assertion, the proposition, namely, that Moore is now hearing the noise of a brass band. Thus, on this theory, there are in the universe two "different facts having the same name-the proposition, on the one hand, and the fact on the other."h Therefore it seemed reasonable to Moore to drop propositions from the inventory of items in the universe. There are no more any true propositions than there are any false propositions. "There simply are no such things as propositions."32 Moore's objection to the theory gives us an interesting insight into his underlying assumptions about the nature of the world, assumptions that are reflected in his conception of analysis. He was not at all disturbed by the notion of "ultimate and unanalysable properties"-a notion that many philosophers would regard as prima facie suspect. What disturbed him was the thought of "two different facts that have the same name."

But now, if there are not propositions, then "belief does not consist, as the former theory held, in a relation between the believer, on the one hand, and another thing which may be called the proposition believed."i In what, then, does belief consist? And, more especially, what is it that makes some beliefs true if it is not having for their objects propositions possessing the unanalyzable property "truth"?

30See p. 105. 3ISee p. 97.

32 I~ the discussion being summarized here Moore is using the term "proposition" in a different sense from that in which he maintained that the object of analysis is a proposition. See pp. 101-02.

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Let me try to state the matter quite precisely, and to explain what I think is quite certain about truth .... To say that a belief is true is to say that the fact to which it refers is or has being; while to say that a belief is false is to say that the fact to which it refers is not-that there is no such fact. Or, to put it another way, we might say: Every belief has the property of referring to some particular fact, every different belief to a different fact; and the property which a belief has, when it is true-the property which we name when we call it true, is the property which can be expressed by saying that the fact to which it refers is .... Obviously this expression "referring to" stands for some relation which each true belief has to one fact and to one only; and which each false belief has to no fact at all; and the difficulty [is] to define this relation. Well, I admit I can't define it, in the sense of analysing it completely .... But obviously from the fact that we can't analyse it, it doesn't follow that we may not know perfectly well what the relation is; we may be perfectly well acquainted with it; it may be perfectly familiar to us; and we may know both that there is such a relation, and that this relation is essential to the definition of truth. And what I want to point out is that we do in this sense know this relation; that we are perfectly familiar with it; and that we can, therefore, perfectly well understand this definition of truth, though we may not be able to analyse it down to its Simplest terms)

So much for truth. But what about falsity? It may seem quite plausible to say that a true belief refers to "a fact that is or has being." But if every belief refers, to what does a false belief refer, since Moore has now abandoned the propositions to which, on the old view, a false belief refers? It certainly seems odd to say, as Moore does, that a false belief refers to a fact that is not, and it is typical of Moore's intellectual honesty that he pointed out this difficulty as clearly and incisively as the most severe critic of realism could possibly have done.

If you consider what happens when a man entertains a false belief, it ... seems ... as if the thing he was believing, the object of his belief, were just the fact which certainly is not-which certainly is not, because his belief is false. This, of course, creates a difficulty, because if the object certainly is not-if there is no such thing, it is impossible for him or for anything else to have any kind of relation to it. In order that a relation may hold between two things, both the two things must certainly be; and how then is it possible for anyone to believe in a thing which simply has no being? This is the difficulty, ... and I confess I do not see any clear solution ....

What I think is quite certain is that when we have before us a sentence-a form of words-which seems to express a relation between two objects, we must not always assume that the names, which seem to

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be names of objects between which a relation holds, are always really names of any object at all. ...

For instance, one of my friends might be believing of me now, that I am not in London. This is a belief which certainly might quite easily be now occurring. And yet there certainly is no such thing as my not being now in London. I am in London; and that settles the matter .... We must, therefore, I think, admit that we can, in a sense, think of things which absolutely have no being. We must talk as if we did. And when we so talk and say that we do, we certainly do mean something which is a fact, by so talking. When, for instance, my friend believes that I am not in London, whereas in fact I am, he is believing that I am not in London: there is no doubt of that. That is to say this whole expression "he believes that I am not in London" does express, or is the name for, a fact. But the solution of the difficulty seems to me to be this, namely that this whole expression does not merely express, as it seems to, a relation between my friend on the one hand and a fact of which the name is "that I am not in London" on the other. It does seem to do this; and that is where the difficulty comes in. It does seem as if the words "that I am not in London" must be a name for something to which my friend is related, something which certainly has being. But we must admit, I think, that these words may not really be a name for anything at all. Taken by themselves they are not a name for anything at all, although the whole expression "he believes that I am not in London" is a name for something. This fact that single words and phrases which we use will constantly seem to be names for something, when in fact they are not names for anything at all, is what seems to me to create the whole difficulty. Owing to it, we must, in talking of this subject, constantly seem to be contradicting ourselves. And I don't think it is possible wholly to avoid this appearance of contradiction .... I think it is quite plain that wherever we entertain a false belief-whenever we make a mistake-there really is, in a sense, no such thing as what we believe in; and though such language does seem to contradict itself, I don't think we can express the facts at all except by the use of language which does seem to contradict itself; and if you understand what the language means, the apparent contradiction doesn't matter,"

The notion that a whole expression (for example, "that there is no such thing as a chimera") can be the name of something, while a part of that same expression (that is, "chimera") is not the name of anything, is far from clear and requires further analysis, which, as Moore readily acknowledged, he did not "pretend to be able" to provide. Again, Moore's idea that, "if we know what we mean, the apparent contradiction doesn't matter" is troubling. It might be questioned whether we really do know what we mean until we manage to remove the contradiction and so show that it is only "apparent." And we cannot do that, surely, until we find

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language that does not contradict itself, as this language does. These are problems that have preoccupied many philosophers, among them, notably, Russell. And since Russell carried the analysis further than Moore, we may once again postpone further discussion.

Ethics

In 1903, the year in which "The Refutation of Idealism" appeared, Moore also published Principia Ethica, another landmark in the development of twentiethcentury philosophy. But in ethics as in epistemology, what has had a lasting influence is less his answers to ethical questions than the acuity with which he exposed confusions in the answers that philosophers-including Moore himselfhave given to ethical questions. Indeed, Principia Ethica begins from the thesis we have already encountered, that "everybody" really knows the answers to the important questions in ethics and that they have become confused only because philosophers have failed to formulate the questions carefully." What, then, are those central questions of moral ethics, which philosophers have so badly muddled?

I have tried in this book to distinguish clearly two kinds of question, which moral philosophers have always professed to answer, but which, as I have tried to shew, they have almost always confused both with one another and with other questions. These two questions may be expressed, the first in the form: What kind of things ought to exist for their own sakes? the second in the form: What kind of actions ought we to perform? I have tried to shew exactly what it is that we ask about a thing, when we ask whether it ought to exist for its own sake, is good in itself or has intrinsic value; and exactly what it is that we ask about an action, when we ask whether we ought to do it, whether it is a right action or a duty.'

WHAT IS RIGHT?

Let us take up these two central questions of moral philosophy in turn, and let us begin with the second. What it is right to do in any particular set of circumstances (alternatively, what we ought to do, or again, what it is our duty to do) is the act that will produce more good (or less evil) than any other act open to us in those circumstances. Though this may sound straightforward, it requires a good deal of analysis, as a result of which some seemingly paradoxical conclusions emerge, among them the conclusion that we can never know what we ought to do.

33See p. 99.

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To begin with, to be able to ascertain what our duty is, we need to know not only what is good but also what effects, both long-range and short-range, our actions will have.

Whenever we judge that a thing is "good as a means," we are making a judgment with regard to its causal relations: we judge both that it will have a particular kind of effect, and that that effect will be good in itself. But to find causal judgments that are universally true is notoriously a matter of extreme difficulty .... We cannot even discover hypothetical laws of the form "Exactly this action will always, under these conditions, produce exactly that effect." But for a correct ethical judgment with regard to the effects of certain actions we require more than this in two respects. (1) We require to know that a given action will produce a certain effect, under whatever circumstances it occurs. But this is certainly impossible. It is certain that in different circumstances the same action may produce effects which are utterly different in all respects upon which the value of the effects depends .... With regard then to ethical judgments which assert that a certain kind of action is good as a means to a certain kind of effect, none will be universally true; and many, though generally true at one period, will be generally false at others. But (2) we require to know not only that one good effect will be produced, but that, among all subsequent events affected by the action in question, the balance of good will be greater than if any other possible action had been performed. In other words, to judge that an action is generally a means to good is to judge not only that it generally does some good, but that it generally does the greatest good of which the circumstances admit. m

It follows that the so-called moral laws that Kant characterized as categorical imperatives are at best only rules of thumb, and that "duty," which he exalted as "sublime," is only equivalent to "useful." This is easily shown. Since our duty

can only be defined as that action which will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible alternative, [it follows that] when Ethics presumes to assert that certain ways of acting are "duties" it presumes to assert that to act in those ways will always produce the greatest possible sum of good. If we are told that to "do no murder" is a duty, we are told that the action, whatever it may be, which is called murder, will under no circumstances cause so much good to exist in the Universe as its avoidance.

But, if this be recognised, several most important consequences follow, with regard to the relation of Ethics to conduct.

(1) It is plain that no moral law is self-evident, as has commonly been held by the Intuitional school of moralists ....

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(2) In order to shew that any action is a duty, it is necessary to know both what are the other conditions, which will, conjointly with it, determine its effects; to know exactly what will be the effects of these conditions; and to know all the events which will be in any way affected by our action throughout an infinite future. We must have all this causal knowledge, and further we must know accurately the degree of value both of the action itself and of all these effects; and must be able to determine how, in conjunction with the other things in the Universe, they will affect its value as an organic whole. And not only this: we must also possess all this knowledge with regard to the effects of every possible alternative; and must then be able to see by comparison that the total value due to the existence of the action in question will be greater than that which would be produced by any of these alternatives. But it is obvious that our causal knowledge alone is far too incomplete for us ever to assure ourselves of this result. Accordingly it follows that we never have any reason to suppose that an action is our duty: we can never be sure that any action will produce the greatest value possible."

But though "no sufficient reason has ever yet been found for considering one action more right or more wrong than another," we can nevertheless find "actions which are generally better as means than any probable alternative," and this gives us the practical guidance we need.> The actions that are generally better are for the most part just those actions that are "most universally enforced by legal sanctions, such as respect of property." It is possible, regarding such actions, to show that "a general observance of them would be good as a means,"p and from this it follows that we should never violate these rules-whether from altruistic motives or because we choose to make an exception of ourselves.

Two possible difficulties with this conclusion may be pointed out. First, it is far from obvious that a violation of some "legally sanctioned rules" can never be productive of more good than conformity to those rules. It is surely arguable, for

. instance, that if the attempt to assassinate Hitler in the summer of 1944 had succeeded, a great deal of evil that befell many Europeans during the next year would never have occurred and that the net result of the assassination would therefore have been a decided gain. Second, it is not obviously wrong, as Moore supposed, to make an exception of oneself. Moore had originally believed that it is self-contradictory to hold both (1) that one ought to do act A, that maximizes one's own good and (2) that A lessens the total amount of good in the universe. But in the end Moore concluded that it is merely odd to hold these views; no contradiction is involved.

WHAT IS GOOD?

On Moore's view, "right" is a subordinate notion, in the sense that in order to ascertain what we ought to do we need information not only about what

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empirical effects our acts are likely to have but also about what is good. Let us turn therefore to the question "What is good?" Moore begins by pointing out that, as it stands, this question is ambiguous. "What is good?" may mean (1) "What particular things are good?" (2) "What sorts of things are good?" or (3) "What does the word 'good' mean?"-that is, how is the word "good" to be defined? To the first question there are literally "many millions of answers," and it is not the business of "scientific Ethics" to try to supply them. The second question, in contrast, is within the domain of ethics, and in the final chapter of Principia Ethica Moore listed some of the chief sorts of good thing. But it is the third question that is absolutely basic to moral philosophy. Unfortunately, "How is 'good' to be defined?" is itself ambiguous and in its turn requires analysis.

A definition does indeed often mean the expressing of one word's meaning in other words. But this is not the sort of definition I am asking for. Such a definition can never be of ultimate importance in any study except lexicography. If I wanted that kind of definition I should have to consider in the first place how people generally used the word "good"; but my business is not with its proper usage, as established by custom .... My business is solely with that object or idea, which I hold, rightly or wrongly, that the word is generally used to stand for. What I want to discover is the nature of that object or idea ....

But, if we understand the question in this sense, my answer to it may seem a very disappointing one. If I am asked "What is good?" my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked "How is good to be defined?" my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it. ...

When we say, as Webster says, "The definition of horse is 'A hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus," we may, in fact, mean three different things. (1) We may mean merely: "When I say 'horse,' you are to understand that I am talking about a hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus." This might be called the arbitrary verbal definition: and I do not mean that good is indefinable in that sense. (2) We may mean, as Webster ought to mean: "When most English people say 'horse,' they mean a hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus." This may be called the verbal definition proper, and I do not say that good is indefinable in this sense either; for it is certainly possible to discover how people use a word: otherwise, we could never have known that "good" may be translated by "gut" in German and by "bon" in French. But (3) we may, when we define horse, mean something much more important. We may mean that a certain object, which we all of us know, is composed in a certain manner: that it has four legs, a head, a heart, a liver, etc., etc., all of them arranged in definite relations to one another. It is in this sense that I deny good to be definable. I say that it is not composed of any parts, which we can substitute for it in our minds when we are

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thinking of it, . . . and that is what I mean, when I say that good is indefinable. q

GOOD IS A SIMPLE PROPERTY

Good, then, is a simple property that belongs to, or is attached to, many millions of things in the universe. The word "good" is, Moore thought, parallel to the word "yellow." "Yellow" is an adjective, the name of a simple (and thus indefinable) quality that innumerable objects-buttercups, primroses, crocuses, for instance-possess. If someone does not understand what property is named by the adjective "yellow," we can point to an object having this property and say, "That is yellow." It is unfortunately true that if that person is blind, there is no possibility of his or her understanding what "yellow" means. But if the person has normal vision and looks in the right direction when we say "That is yellow," he or she will understand the meaning of "yellow." We must only take care to "isolate" the instance of yellow to which we point; for example, we must see to it that when we say "That is yellow," the person looks at a primrose, not at the violet that is growing beside it.

All of this holds equally of "good." It too is an adjective; it too names a simple (and thus indefinable) quality that cannot be defined but that can be pointed to. If someone professes not to know what "good" means, we can call his or her attention to something that has the property of being good, such as some pleasurable experience or some beautiful object. That person will then apprehend the simple, self-identical property good that inheres in pleasurable experiences and in beautiful objects in exactly the way that yellow inheres in primroses and crocuses, but not in violets or camellias. The only difference between "good" and "yellow" is that "yellow" is the name of a natural property and "good" of a nonnatural property.

Moore regarded all this as self-evident-that is, evident as soon as we attend closely to good things and isolate the property in virtue of which they are, in fact, good. Beyond this direct appeal to intuition, Moore offers no argument for the simplicity (hence, indefinability) of the property of being good.

MOORE'S ANTI NATURALISM

Moore not only held that good is a simple property; more famously, he held that it is a nonnatural property. What, exactly, did Moore have in mind when he spoke of a nonnatural property? A nonnatural property is clearly a property that is not natural, but that hardly helps until we are told what this contrast amounts to. Moore had no difficulty in presenting what he took to be clear examples of both natural properties and nonnatural properties. Being yellow and being pleasurable are, for Moore, examples of natural properties. Being good and being beautiful are, for him, examples of nonnatural properties. When, however, he tried to go beyond presenting examples to offer an analysis of the difference

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between natural and nonnatural properties, he was never able to come up with anything that satisfied him.

At first Moore held that it is one that is not "the subject-matter of the natural sciences [or] psychology." Thus yellow is a natural, not a nonnatural, property because it is a matter for investigation in physics and in physiological psychology. But this will hardly do, for the yellow that we experience (the felt, or sensed, yellow) can no more be investigated than can the good that we experience. The circumstance under which we experience yellow (for instance, what happens in the nervous system and in the cortex) can certainly be studied, but this holds for good as much as for yellow. Hence good and yellow seem to be on the same footing; if the latter is a natural property, so is the former.'

Next, Moore suggested that natural properties are those that can "exist in time by themselves" and nonnatural properties are those that cannot so exist. But on further consideration he concluded that the distinction, as he tried to draw it, was "utterly silly and preposterous."s Finally, after attempting to distinguish natural properties as "intrinsic" and nonnatural properties are not intrinsic, he decided that the difference may be that natural properties "describe, at least to some extent," and that nonnatural properties "do not describe at all."! But this far from satisfied him, for he allowed that this account is "vague and not clear," and that "to make it clear it would be necessary to specify the sense of 'describe' in question; and I am no more able to do this now than I was then."

Ultimately, Moore left the contrast between natural and nonnatural properties at an intuitive level.

Even if Moore was not able to produce an analysis of natural and nonnatural properties that satisfied him, he was, he thought, able to provide a number of considerations that would show, for example, that the hedonist's identification of goodness with pleasure cannot be correct. More generally, he thought that he could show that any theory that identified goodness with some natural property must be mistaken. We will let his attack on hedonism serve as a model for his general attack on all the theories that he deemed naturalistic.

It is important to be clear about the target of Moore's attack. It is analutic hedonism-that is, the view that the words "good" and "pleasant" simply mean the same thing. Because it is a thesis about the meaning of ethical terms, it is sometimes called a metaethical theory. Analytic hedonism stands in contrast with what might be called normative hedonism-the view that pleasure, and pleasure alone, is intrinsically good. Whereas analytic hedonism is a metaethical thesis concerning the meaning of words, normative hedonism is a substantive thesis concerning what things are good. Moore, in fact, rejected both analytic hedonism and normative hedonism. He rejected normative hedonism because he thought that other things besides pleasure were good-knowledge, for example. But Moore is best remembered for his attacks on analytic hedonism, and, by extension, on analytic naturalism in general.

Moore employed two arguments in his attempt to refute analytic hedonism.

The first involves the so-called naturalistic fallacy; the second has come to be

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known as the open-question argument-although Moore himself never used this label. As we shall see, it is the open-question argument, and not the naturalistic fallacy, that carries the main burden of Moore's attempted refutation of naturalism.

Moore is famous for having formulated the naturalistic fallacy, but if we examine the text closely, it is not immediately clear what he had in mind when he said that a theory committed this fallacy. Sometimes when Moore spoke of the naturalistic fallacy, he seemed to have in mind the error (assuming it is one) of identifying goodness with some natural property. This is sometimes more loosely described as the fallacy (again assuming it is one) of reducing values to facts. This is the common way of understanding what Moore meant by the naturalistic fallacy. There are, however, passages that suggest a different interpretation: the naturalistic fallacy is a tempting form of invalid reasoning (hence, literally a fallacy) that has misled philosophers to define good in terms of some natural property, for example, pleasure.

In order to sort all this out, it will be helpful to examine exactly how the naturalistic fallacy first appears in the text. Just before introducing the naturalistic fallacy, Moore draws a distinction between two sorts of definitions:

But I am afraid I have still not removed the chief difficulty which may prevent acceptance of the proposition that good is indefinable. I do not mean to say that the good, that which is good, is thus indefinable; if I did think so, I should not be writing on Ethics, for my main object ~s to help towards discovering that definition. It is just because I think there will be less risk of error in our search for a definition of "the good," that I am now insisting that good is indefinable. I must try to explain the difference between these two. I suppose it may be granted that "good" is an adjective. Well "the good," "that which is good," must therefore be the substantive to which the adjective "good" will apply: it must be the whole of that to which the adjective will apply, and the adjective must always truly apply to it. But if it is that to which the adjective will apply, it must be something different from that adjective itself; and the whole of that something different, whatever it is, will be our definition of the good. Now it may be that this something will have other adjectives, beside "good," that will apply to it. It may be full of pleasure, for example; it may be intelligent: and if these two adjectives are really part of its definition, then it will certainly be true, that pleasure and intelligence are good. And many people appear to think that, if we say "pleasure and intelligence are good," or if we say "Only pleasure and intelligence are good," we are defining "good." Well, I cannot deny that propositions of this nature may sometimes be called definitions; I do not know well enough how the word is generally used to decide upon this point. I only wish it to be understood that that is not what I mean when I say there is no possible definition of good, and that I shall not mean this if I use the word again. I do most fully believe that

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some true proposition of the form "Intelligence is good and intelligence alone is good" can be found; if none could be found, our definition of the good would be impossible. As it is, I believe the good to be definable; and yet I still say that good itself is indefinahle.»

The difference between defining good and defining the good seems to come to this: A definition of good would have this form:

(1) The property of being good is a whole made up of parts A, B, C, etc. whereas a definition of the good would have quite a different form:

(2) Something is good if and only if it has features A, B, C, etc.

Moore holds that the simplicity of good precludes definitions of the first kind thoug~ ~e thinks, indeed hopes, that definitions of the second kind are possible: . It IS Important to see that this discussion of simplicity, and hence indefinabiltty, has absolutely no bearing on the question whether goodness is a natural or a nonnatu.ral property. For all that has been said so far, goodness may be a simple (hence, indefinable) natural property, for it is clear from the examples he uses that Moore thinks that such simple natural properties do exist. What is needed then is an argument with the consequence that good cannot be a natural property of any kind, including a simple natural property. Moore makes the transition from indefinability to antinaturalism following a curious route:

. Cons~der yell~w, for example. We may try to define it, by describing ItS physical equivalent, we may state what kind of light-vibrations must stimulate the normal eye, in order that we may perceive it. But a moment's reflection is sufficient to shew that those light-vibrations are not themselves what we mean by yellow. They are not what we perceive. Indeed we should never have been able to discover their existence, unless w_e had first been struck by the patent difference of quality between the different colours. The most we can be entitled to say of those vibrations is that they are what corresponds in space to the yellow which we actually perceive.

Yet a mistake of this simple kind has commonly been made about "goo~." It m~y. be true that all things which are good are also something else, Just as It IS true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not "other," but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the "naturalistic fallacy" and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose."

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Here the naturalistic fallacy is clearly identified as a faulty inference from the claim that certain properties belong to all things that are good to the conclusion that these properties are identical with the property of being good. Or to use Moore's somewhat strange terminology, it involves a faulty inference from a definition of the good (or that which is good) to a definition of goodness itself. Read this way, as a particular kind of faulty inference, it does not matter whether goodness is a nonnatural property or not-for the fallacy will be the same in either case. Moore sees this, and makes the point explicitly.

When I say "I am pleased," I do not mean that 'T' am the same thing as "having pleasure." And similarly no difficulty need be found in my saying that "pleasure is good" and yet not meaning that "pleasure" is the same thing as "good," that pleasure means good, and that good means pleasure. If I were to imagine that when I said "I am pleased," I meant that I was exactly the same thing as "pleased," I should not indeed call that a naturalistic fallacy, although it would be the same fallacy as I have called naturalistic with reference to Ethics.v

Or again:

As for the reasons why good is not to be considered a natural object, they may be reserved for discussion in another place .... Even if [good] were a natural object, that would not alter the nature of the fallacy nor diminish its importance one whit. All that I have said about it would remain quite equally true: only the name which I have called it would not be so appropriate as I think it is!

If we have correctly identified the naturalistic fallacy as a particular kind of faulty inference-one that is called the naturalistic fallacy when it is committed by a naturalist doing ethics-then it follows that it cannot be used to show that naturalism is false. The point is quite Simple: an argument can be fallacious but still have a true conclusion. (If this were not the case, it would be possible to refute a claim simply by presenting a fallacious argument in its behalf.) Pointing out a fallacy blocks a route to a conclusion; it does not show that this conclusion is false. Moore is completely clear about this, for notice that the last passage cited begins with the remark that "the reasons why good is not to be considered a natural object ... may be reserved for discussion in another place." Even with both the discussion of the indefinability of good and the presentation of the naturalistic fallacy behind us, naturalism in ethics, as Moore plainly sees, remains to be refuted.

Moore does, however, present another argument against analytic naturalism that, if correct, would refute analytic naturalism. It has come to be known as the open-question argument. It exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century reflection on the meaning of evaluative terms. An analytic naturalist holds that the term "good" is synonymous with some purely naturalistic or descriptive term-

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for example, "pleasurable." Against any such claim, Moore responds in the following way:

It is very natural to make the mistake of supposing that what is universally true is of such a nature that its negation would be selfcontradictory: the importance which has been assigned to analytic propositions in the history of philosophy shews how easy such a mistake is. And thus it is very easy to conclude that what seems to be a universal ethical principle is in fact an identical proposition; that, if, for example, whatever is called "good" seems to be pleasant, the proposition "Pleasure is the good" does not assert a connection between two different notions, but involves only one, that of pleasure, which is easily recognised as a distinct entity. But whoever will attentively consider with himself what is actually before his mind when he asks the question "Is pleasure (or whatever it may be) after all good?" can easily satisfy himself that he is not merely wondering whether pleasure is pleasant. And if he will try this experiment with each suggested definition in succession, he may become expert enough to recognise that in every case he has before his mind a unique object, with regard to the connection of which with any other object, a distinct question may be asked.x

The argument here is remarkably Simple. An analytic naturalist holds that the term "good" is synonymous with some purely naturalistic or descriptive term, for example, "pleasurable." If this theory is right, however, then the follOwing sentence,

(1) That which is pleasurable is good.

would be analytic-an empty redundancy-and say nothing more than the following sentences:

(2) That which is pleasurable is pleasurable. (3) That which is good is good.

Yet, according to Moore, it is simply obvious that the first sentence is not analytic (or an empty redundancy) in the way in which the last two sentences are. From this it follows that analytic hedonism is false. More generally, whatever descriptive property we assign to a thing, it remains an open question-that is, a question we can Significantly ask-whether that thing is good or not.

The open-question argument is one main support of Moore's case against naturalism. His commitment to a denotationalist account of meaning is another. Combined with his distinction between natural and nonnatural properties, we get an argument that, if sound, provides a decisive refutation of analytic naturalism in ethics:

In saying that something is good, we are ascribing a property to it. That property is either a natural or a nonnatural property.

That property cannot be a natural property.

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Therefore:

In saying that something is good, we are ascribing a nonnatural property to it.

At the time Moore wrote Principia Ethica-and for some time after-the first premise of this argument was accepted as a matter of course. The second premise is a truth of logic. The open-question argument seems to establish the truth of the third premise. Accepting these three premises makes Moore's conclusion that goodness is a nonnatural property completely unavoidable.

None of this, however, settles the matter in Moore's favor; instead, it leaves us with a series of choices. We can accept the premises and find ourselves committed to Moore's doctrine of nonnatural properties. Alternatively, we can reject the conclusion and then seek good reasons for rejecting at least one of the premises that leads to it. This provides a set of choices of its own. A staunch naturalist could reject the third premise, claiming not to be convinced by the open-question argument. More strongly, the naturalist could argue that the only thing that he or she finds in good things in virtue of which they are good is that they are pleasant (or desired or whatever); and the naturalist finds nothing corresponding to Moore's strange notion of a nonnatural property. It is also possible to reject the second premise on the grounds that the distinction between natural and nonnatural properties has never been drawn in a satisfactory way. Perhaps the most radical move is to reject the first premise by maintaining that evaluative terms do not refer to properties of any kind, either natural or nonnatural. This is the view of the errwtivists (and, more generally, of the noncognitivists) in ethics. We will return to this story when we examine emotivism in Chapter 7.

Moore's Philosophy of Common Sense

From what we have seen so far, it would seem peculiar to associate Moore's philosophy with common sense. His complex reflections on perception and existence-not to mention his commitment to nonnatural properties-seem wholly remote from the beliefs of daily life. Yet, from early in his career, Moore showed a deep respect for commonsense beliefs and, corresponding to this, a deep suspicion of philosophical theories that ran counter to them. Here, for instance, is Moore's reply to the phenomenalists' argument that material objects are nothing but "bundles" of perception.

You have all probably often travelled in a railway-train. And you would agree that a railway-train is one specimen of the sort of things which we call material objects. And you would agree that, when you travel in a railway-train, you may, if you happen to think of it, believe in the existence of the train you are travelling in ....

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But now, what does [phenomenalism] say? It says that ... the existence of the train simply consists in the existence of the sense-data which you and the other people travelling in it are at the moment directly apprehending; in this together with the fact that, if, in succession to those, you were to directly apprehend certain others, you would, or would probably, directly apprehend still others. But to suppose that your carriage, while you sit in it, really is running on wheels, or that it really is coupled to other carriages in the train or to the engine-this, it says, is a complete mistake .... All that you really believe in, and certainly all that you can possibly know, is not that there are any wheels existing at the moment, but merely that you would, in the future, if you were first to apprehend certain other sense-data, also directly apprehend those sense-data which we call the visible appearances of wheels, or those which you would feel, if you did that which we call touching them ....

But now, I ask, is this, in fact, what you believe, when you believe you are travelling in a train? Do you not, in fact, believe that there really are wheels on which your carriage is running at the moment? ... [Phenomenalism] does, I think, plainly give an utterly false account of what we do believe in ordinary life .... So long as it is merely presented in vague phrases such as: All that we know of material objects is the orderly succession of our own sensations, it does, in fact, sound very plausible. But, so soon as you realise what it means in particular instances like that of the train-how it means that you cannot possibly know that your carriage is, even probably, running on wheels, or coupled to other carriages-it seems to me to lose all its plausibility.'

This, then, is Moore's first, and chief, argument against philosophical theories that run counter to common sense. It consists simply in showing the enormous number of beliefs that must be false if these theories are true. Moore called this "translating into the concrete."

Of course, Time, with a big T, seems to be a highly abstract kind of entity, and to define exactly what can be meant by saying of an entity of that sort that it is unreal does seem to offer difficulties. But if you try to translate the proposition into the concrete, and to ask what it implies, there is, I think, very little doubt as to the sort of thing it implies .... If Time is unreal, then plainly nothing ever happens before or after anything else; nothing is ever simultaneous with anything else; it is never true that anything is past; never true that anything will happen in the future; never true that anything is happening now; and so on."

Of course, pointing out that a philosophical position has consequences that seem odd or paradoxical from a commonsense standpoint is not likely to lead a philosopher who holds such a position to give it up. On the contrary, it is often

MOORE'S PHILOSOPHY OF COMMON SENSE 131

just these odd and paradoxical features that make a philosophical position seem exciting or give it an appearance of depth. If a philosopher succeeds, for example, in proving that time is unreal or proving that we can have no knowledge of the external world, then we seem to accept these results no matter how odd or paradoxical they may seem. Against this, Moore made a move that became a central part of his philosophical position for the remainder of his career.

A second strategy notes that philosophers maintaining these paradoxical theses usually contradict themselves. Idealists, for instance, are capable of writing, "I shall next proceed to demonstrate the unreality of time," thus affirming temporal succession even as they deny it. A third line of argument points out that these theses are all conclusions-the conclusions of long, complicated, and often obscure chains of reasoning, no link in which is remotely so persuasive as the beliefs that it is proposed to replace.

WHAT IS COMMON SENSE?

What, for Moore, is common sense, and why does he give it priority in deciding philosophical issues? Moore's most sustained attempt to answer these questions occurs in his essay "A Defence of Common Sense." After some preliminary remarks, Moore produces a rather long list of what he calls "truisms," everyone of which he claims to know and know with certainty. He refers to this list as (1).

(1) I begin, then, with my list of truisms, everyone of which (in my own opinion) I know, with certainty, to be true. The propositions to be included in this list are the following:

There exists at present a living human body, which is my body. This body was born at a certain time in the past, and has existed continuously ever since, though not without undergoing changes; it was, for instance, much smaller when it was born, and for some time afterwards, than it is now. Ever since it was born, it has been either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth; and, at every moment since it was born, there have also existed many other things, having shape and size in three dimensions (in the same familiar sense in which it has), from which it has been at various distances (in the familiar sense in which it is now at a distance both from that mantelpiece and from that bookcase, and at a greater distance from the bookcase than it is from the mantelpiece); also there have (very often, at all events) existed some other things of this kind with which it was in contact (in the familiar sense in which it is now in contact with the pen I am holding in my right hand and with some of the clothes I am wearing). Among the things which have, in this sense, formed part of its environment (i.e. have been either in contact with it, or at some distance from it, however great) there have, at every moment since its birth, been large numbers of other living human bodies, each of which has, like it, (a) at some time been born, (b) continued to exist from some time after birth, (c) been,

132 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

at every moment of its life after birth, either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth; and many of these bodies have already died and ceased to exist. But the earth had existed also for many years before my body was born; and for many of these years, also, large numbers of human bodies had, at every moment, been alive upon it; and many of these bodies had died and ceased to exist before it was born. Finally (to come to a different class of propositions), I am a human being, and I have, at different times since my body was born, had many different experiences, of each of many different kinds: e.g. I have often perceived both my own body and other things which formed part of its environment, including other human bodies; I have not only perceived things of this kind, but have also observed facts about them, such as, for instance, the fact which I am now observing, that that mantelpiece is at present nearer to my body than that bookcase; I have been aware of other facts, which I was not at the time observing, such as, for instance, the fact, of which I am now aware, that my body existed yesterday and was then also for some time nearer to that mantelpiece than to that bookcase; I have had expectations with regard to the future, and many beliefs of other kinds, both true and false; I have thought of imaginary things and persons and incidents, in the reality of which I did not believe; I have had dreams; and I have had feelings of many different kinds. And, just as my body has been the body of a human being, namely myself, who has, during his lifetime, had many experiences of each of these (and other) different kinds; so, in the case of very many of the other human bodies which have lived upon the earth, each has been the body of a different human being, who has, during the lifetime of that body, had many different experiences of each of these (and other) different kinds."

Having completed this list of beliefs, which all, in one way or another, are keyed on Moore himself, he adds a further truism concerning other people that he also claims to know and know with certainty, namely, that many other people, though not all, know of themselves just the sorts of things that Moore knows about himself. He calls this further truism (2). In his words:

What (2) asserts is only (what seems an obvious enough truism) that each of us . . . has frequently known, with regard to himself or his body ... everything which, in writing down my list of propositions in (1), I was claiming to know about myself or my body=

Before we examine the way in which Moore attempts to use his list of truisms for philosophical purposes, we can first note some features they all share. First, unlike truths of logic or mathematical truths, not one of these truisms is necessarily true. Though Moore did live for many years near or close to the surface of the earth, it is not necessarily true that he did so. We can at least conceive of a

MOORE'S PHILOSOPHY OF COMMON SENSE 133

world where Moore had quite extraordinary powers of flight. For that matter, we can also conceive of a world where Moore never existed at all. Moore's truisms are, one and all, contingencies. Second, none of these seems self-evident in the sense that it can be seen to be true simply by reflecting on the content of the proposition itself. Third, none of these truisms has the form of a weak, highly protected proposition. One way to approach certainty is to restrict oneself to highly guarded propositions such as: "It seems to me now that I am aware of something that may be red." In contrast, Moore's truisms are robust, unqualified claims about the world he inhabits. Fourth, these truisms do not involve specialized knowledge; they are all items of comrrwnplace knowledge. Moore, for example, would probably claim to know with certainty that there are more than seven planets, but this is not the sort of thing that Moore puts on his list. The items on Moore's list are all things that any mentally competent adult will know. They are comrrwn features of the world, and are things, according to (2), that we know in common with others.

Of course, many philosophers might agree that at a practical, day-to-day level we can be said to know all these things to be true, but they might still insist that, strictly speaking, none of these so-called truisms is wholly true. This is the position of the British Idealists, who held that truth can be assigned only to the total (or absolute) system of beliefs. Individual beliefs, for them, could, at most, only be partially true. Moore will have none of this. "I am maintaining," he tells us, "that all the propositions in (1), and also many propositions corresponding to each of these, are wholly true."d Moore also rejects a subtle variation on this doctrine of partial truth, which he describes as follows:

Some philosophers seem to have thought it legitimate to use such expressions as, e.g. "The earth has existed for many years past," as if they expressed something which they really believed, when in fact they believe that every proposition, which such an expression would ordinarily be understood to express, is, at least partially, false; and all they really believe is that there is some other set of propositions, related in a certain way to those which such expressions do actually express, which, unlike these, really are true."

Over against this, Moore tells us:

I wish . . . to make it quite plain that I was not using the expressions I used in (1) in any such subtle sense. I meant by each of them precisely what every reader, in reading them, will have understood me to mean.'

Moore's thesis, then, is that the items in (1), understood in the ordinary or popular manner, are wholly true.

Moore realizes that his appeal to the ordinary or popular meaning of the items in (1) can itself be a target of criticism. Many philosophers have held that ordinary language, because of its inherent vagueness and ambiguity, often does not convey exact meanings. To this, Moore responds in the following way:

134 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

In what I have just said, I have assumed that there is some meaning which is the ordinary or popular meaning of such expressions as "The earth has existed for many years past." And this, I am afraid, is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing. They seem to think that the question "Do you believe that the earth has existed for many years past?" is not a plain question, such as should be met either by a plain "Yes" or "No," or by a plain "I can't make up my mind," but is the sort of question which can be properly met by: "It all depends on what you mean by 'the earth' and 'exists' and 'years': if you mean so and so, and so and so, and so and so, then I do; but if you mean w~~~w~~~w~~orw~~~w~~~ so and so, or so and so, and so and so, and so and so, then I don't, or at least I think it is extremely doubtful." It seems to me that such a view is as profoundly mistaken as any view can be. Such an expression as "The earth has existed for many years past" is the very type of an unambiguous expression, the meaning of which we all understand. Anyone who takes a contrary view must, I suppose, be confusing the question whether we understand its meaning (which we all certainly do) with the entirely different question whether we know what it means, in the sense that we are able to give a correct analysis of its meaning. The question what is the correct analysis of the proposition meant on any occasion (for, of course, as I insisted in defining [2], a different proposition is meant at every different time at which the expression is used) by "The earth has existed for many years past" is, it seems to me, a profoundly difficult question, and one to which, as I shall presently urge, no one knows the answer. But to hold that we do not know what, in certain respects, is the analysis of what we understand by such an expression, is an entirely different thing from holding that we do not understand the expression.s

This is an important passage-one that deserves very close reading. Moore begins by rejecting the idea that whether a statement is true or ~ot sim?ly depends on how one chooses to interpret the meaning of t~e words it c~ntallls. On this view, if words are interpreted one way, a statement might be true; mterpreted another way, perhaps, false. On this view, no statement will be determinately true or false. It is probably because of this relativistic consequence that he tells us that this view "is as profoundly mistaken as any view can be." For Moore, meanings are not something we decide on arbitrarily; they are things we learn when acquiring a language.

Having insisted on the nonarbitrariness of meaning, the passage then takes a remarkable turn. If we do, in fact, understand the meaning of the items in (1), should we not be able to say what those meanings are? Moore's answer is no. For him, it is possible to understand what a proposition means without being able to state what its meaning is-without, that is, being able to offer an adequate

MOORE'S PHILOSOPHY OF COMMON SENSE 135

analysis of the proposition. More strongly, Moore says that the question of the correct analysis of a proposition such as "The earth has existed for many years past" is not only profoundly difficult but one to which "no one knows the answer."

This doctrine that we can understand the meaning of a proposition without being able to offer an analysis of it certainly casts the project of analytic philosophy in a peculiar light. It seemed that analytic philosophy would be of service just because it would clarify the meanings of the propositions that we employ and, in doing so, contribute to the solution of philosophical problems. This, as we shall see in the next chapter, was Russell's attitude. For him, most of the propositions formulated in everyday language are inherently inexact. It is the task of analytic philosophy, he thought, to clarify them and, when necessary, replace them with something better. Moore, in contrast, holds that the sentence "The earth has existed for many years past" is the very type of an unambiguous expression, the meaning of which we all understand. Furthermore, we can understand it without being able to analyze it; indeed, we can understand it even if we are convinced that no adequate analysis exists or is ever likely to exist. Here Moore notes that his position is the reverse of that held by many other philosophers.

I am not at all sceptical as to the truth of such propositions as "The earth has existed for many years past" ... i.e. propositions which assert the existence of material things: on the contrary, I hold that we all know, with certainty, many such propositions to be true. But I am very sceptical as to what ... the correct analysis of such propositions is. And this is a matter as to which I think I differ from many philosophers. Many seem to hold that there is no doubt at all as to [the] analysis ... of the proposition "Material things have existed," ... [whereas] I hold that the analysis of the proposition in question is extremely doubtful; and some of them ... while holding that there is no doubt as to [the] analysis, seem to have doubted whether any such propositions are true. I, on the other hand, while holding that there is no doubt whatever that many such propositions are wholly true, hold also that no philosopher . . . has succeeded in suggesting an analysis of them . . . which comes anywhere near to being certainly true."

Moore, then, does not employ the methods of analysis in the process of establishing the truth of the items that he lists in (1). For him, our ability to understand these propositions and know them to be true is wholly independent of our ability to provide them with a proper analysis. This may seem an odd position for someone who is generally considered a founder of twentieth-century analytic

philosophy. .

Moore's position is peculiar in another way. When people claim to ~ow certain things, we often ask them how they know, and if they cannot provide a reasonable answer to this question, we are often inclined to say that they do not know what they claim to know. Moore seems unconcerned with challenges of this kind.

136 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

He, in fact, acknowledges that, with respect to some of the propositions on his list, he is not able to explain how he is able to know them to be true.

It is, indeed, obvious that, in the case of most of them, I do not know them directly: that is to say, I only know them because, in the past, I have known to be true other propositions which were evidence for them. If, for instance, I do know that the earth had existed for many years before I was born, I certainly only know this because I have known other things in the past which were evidence for it. And I certainly do not know exactly what the evidence was. Yet all this seems to me to be no good reason for doubting that I do know it. We are all, I think, in this strange position that we do know many things, with regard to which we know further that we must have had evidence for them, and yet we do not know how we know them, i.e. we do not know what the evidence was.'

In this passage Moore freely acknowledges that he cannot explain how he knows that the earth had existed for many years before his birth. But instead of taking this as grounds for saying that he does not know it, he takes his knowing it as grounds for saying that one can know something without knowing how one knows it.

With this battery of truisms in place, Moore has little difficulty in dismissing philosophical views opposed to his own. For Moore, anyone who adopts the truisms he has presented thereby adopts what he calls the Common Sense view of the world. "I am," Moore tells us, "one of those philosophers who have held that the 'Common Sense view of the world' is, in certain fundamental features, wholly true."j Furthermore, by the truism he labeled (2), Moore attributes this Common Sense view of the world to a great many other people as well-presumably to all competent adult human beings. In doing this, however, Moore seems to ignore the plain fact that many reputable philosophers (whose mental competence is not at issue) have explicitly rejected various aspects of the Common Sense view of the world. Moore claims, however, that those philosophers who reject aspects of the Common Sense view of the world also accept them:

According to me, all philosophers, without exception, have agreed with me in [accepting the Common Sense view of the world]: and that the real difference [between me and some other philosophers] is only a difference between those philosophers, who have also held views inconsistent with these features in "the Common Sense view of the world," and those who have not."

This is an ingenious maneuver, for it has the immediate result that any philosopher who holds beliefs incompatible with Moore's commonsense beliefs must thereby hold views incompatible with some of his or her own beliefs. Moore shows great ingenuity in ringing changes on this basic pattern of criticism.

MOORE'S INFLUENCE 137

For many, it is hard to read Moore's defense of common sense without the sense that none of his arguments is really persuasive. They seem somehow question-begging, but it is hard to make such a charge stick. Perhaps we can understand the source of this dissatisfaction by noting that at the heart of Moore's position we find a refusal to do things that philosophers have commonly thought essential to philosophy itself. In freeing himself from the necessity of giving an analysis of the propositions he claims to know, and, further, in freeing himself from the necessity of providing reasons for the things he claims to know, Moore has Significantly lightened his philosophical burden. Indeed, it comes very close to a refusal to accept a philosophical burden at all. Looked at this way, Moore has not begged any philosophical questions; he has simply rejected the claim that he is under any obligation to answer them.

Moore's Influence

Moore is generally regarded as one of the most influential philosophers in the first half of this century. How can this be if his conclusions were so often, as we have had to point out, inconclusive? The answer is that what philosophers noted was not so much that his conclusions were inconclusive but that he knew that they were and freely admitted it. What impressed philosophers was his intellectual honesty, his integrity, and his persistence.

They were also impressed by his concentration on method. Method always becomes important at the end of a period in which the results have been less than what was expected, as at the end of the Middle Ages, when it became clear that scholasticism had failed. Similarly, the nineteenth century had been a period of great hopes unfulfilled-a period of vast philosophical syntheses that, because they were constructed too rapidly and without sufficient preparation, collapsed of their own weight even before they had been completed. Philosophers were therefore ready for thinkers like Moore who maintained that we should not move too fast, that we should divide large, messy problems into smaller, more precise ones, and that we should not try to make an advance until we are sure of the basis from which it is to be launched. They were impressed by the way Moore sought to narrow down issues by specifying all alternatives and then eliminating them in turn. They saw that Moore was a master of the closely reasoned argument, and they took him for a model.

But philosophers were by no means impressed only by Moore's methodology.

He was, as we have already seen, one of the leaders in the attempt to revive realism, but even philosophers who had no interest in realism were struck by the prominence of sense data in his theory and by his attention to common sense. Though Moore was interested in sense data chiefly because, as he thought, they lead us to physical objects, he did hold that the existence of objectively real and

138 MOORE AND THE REVIVAL OF REALISM

independent sense data is particularly easy to veri£Y.34 It was natural, then, that philosophers who were aware of the difficulty of getting from sense data to physical objects, who were in pursuit of absolutely certain knowledge, and who did not share Moore's confidence in common sense would fasten onto what Moore had to say about sense data as the starting point for a view that turned out to be radically different from his. This development led, through Russell, to LOgical Positivism. On the other hand, those who were less insistent on certainty (or even doubtful about the possibility of achieving it), but who were impressed by what Moore said about common sense, moved in a different direction. When they, in harmony with the general shift of the culture toward an interest in language, began to translate substantive philosophical questions into linguistic questions, Moore's commonsense philosophy was then developed into a philosophy of ordinary language. Since LOgical Positivism and ordinary-language philosophy were important influences on Anglo-American philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, it is fair to call Moore one of the fathers of twentieth-century philosophy. It is true that Moore repudiated both of these developments, but has it not often been the fate of fathers to disown, and to be disowned by, their children?

34See pp. 113-15.

CHAPTER 4

Frege and the

Revolution

•

In

Logic

The revival of realism, whose beginnings we have just studied in the philosophy of C. E. Moore, was the first of three main routes out of the Kantian paradigm.' The second route was opened up by a revolution in logic that occurred at about the same time. The details of this revolution are part of the development of logic and as such lie outside the purview of this history. Here we have to examine only the impact of this revolution on those central metaphysical and epistemological problems that have been our theme from the beginning.

-See p.Td,

140 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

Aristotelian Logic and Its Critics

For two thousand years after Aristotle first put together his views on logi~ in the Analytics and other works, it was felt that he had said virtually everyt~ll~g that needed saying about this discipline. Early in the nineteenth .century, it is true, there had been a revolt against Aristotle, and, as a result of the influence of Hegel, a "new" logic had emerged, which was dialectical and dynamic and regarded ~ontradiction as merely a stage in thought that could be transcended and harmonized in a higher synthesis+ But the revolt that we have now t.o cons~der was far more radical and attacked both the Aristotelian and the Hegelian logiCS, the former on the ground that it was too narrow, the latter on the ground that it .was ~ot lOgic. at all but psychology. Let us examine these criticisms in turn, startmg With. a bnef account of the features of Aristotelian logic against which the revolution was directed.

Aristotle was chiefly interested in the ways in which different types of judgment can be combined so as to yield valid conclusions. For this purpose he classified judgments in various ways: they are either affirmative (All men are mortal) or negative (No men are mortal); either universal (All men are mortal), particular (Some men are mortal), or individual (Socrates is mortal). He assumed that all judgments without exception are predicative. That is, he assumed that when we judge we are always either (1) attributing a predicate.(some ~roperty or quality) to a subject or (2) denying that the subtect has this. predicate: Thus "Socrates is mortal" and "Socrates is not a Spartan are, for Anstotle, typical, or representative, judgments. And judgments that do not at first si~ht seem to have a subject-predicate form (Whales suckle their young; The cow Jumped over the moon) can easily be rephrased to bring out the idea that in them we are none~eless predicating a quality or property of a subject (Whales are young-suckling creatures; The cow is a jumping-over-the-moon animal).

Further, Aristotle thought that the standard unit of reasoning (to which he gave the name "syllogism") consists in three judgments: two premise~ and a conclusion. So the question is, which combinations of premises, affirmative and negative, universal, particular, and individual, yield valid conclusions, and which yield invalid ones? Consider, for instance, the following arguments:

(1) All men are mortal All Greeks are men

All Greeks are mortal

(2) All men are mortal

All Greeks are Europeans

All Greeks are mortal

2See Vol. IV, pp. 124-34.

ARISTOTELIAN LOGIC AND ITS CRITICS 141

(3)

No mortals are angels All men are mortal

No men are angels

(4) No men are angels

No centaurs are men

No centaurs are angels

Which of these syllogisms are valid? Which are invalid, and why? Aristotle was not concerned with the particular conclusions of particular arguments, but with those arrangements of subjects and predicates in the premises-which he called "figures" -that yield valid conclusions. For instance, in the two premises there must be a "middle" term, and the position of this middle is one feature of an argument that determines whether the conclusion is valid. In the first syllogism the middle is "men," and in all syllogisms of this figure-where the premises are two universal affirmative judgments-the middle must be the subject of the first premise and the predicate of the second premise. Thus (1) is valid and (2) is invalid-actually, in (2) there is no middle at all. Or consider a different figure, as in (3), where one of the premises is a universal negative and the other is a universal affirmative judgment. Here again there must be a middle, and the middle must again appear as the subject of the first premise and the predicate of the second. Since "mortal" occupies these positions in (3), this is a valid syllogism, In contrast, (4) is invalid because no conclusion may be drawn from two negative premises.>

Logicians after Aristotle's day refined his account, but no one-not even the Hegelian lOgiCians-questioned Aristotle's fundamental thesis that all judgments are predicative in form. As long as mathematics and logic were viewed as completely different disciplines there was no reason to challenge this assumption, and since logic was held to be the science of the laws of thought, while mathematics was the science of number and quality, it seemed evident that they were indeed wholly autonomous sciences.

The first step in what proved to be the merging of mathematics and logic was taken quite unintentionally. Mathematicians had long been dissatisfied with the postulate of parallels, which seemed to them less certain than the Euclidean axioms-which is why they called it a "postulate" rather than an "axiom." They sought to prove the postulate by means of a standard strategy of proof: one assumes that the proposition one wants to prove is false and then shows that on the assumption of its falsity a contradiction emerges. But to everybody'S surprise, when this reductio strategy was applied to the postulate of parallels, no contradiction was generated. Instead, what was generated, as geometers gradually came to see, was an internally consistent set of theorems different from the Euclidean theorems-a non-Euclidean geometry, in fact. And from each different set of

3For a more detailed account of Aristotle's lOgic, see Vol. I, pp. 244-54.

142 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

axioms a different geometry could be generated. From this it followed that geometry is not, as had always been supposed, the science of space-at least not if space is conceived in the Newtonian fashion as an independently existing threedimensional box in which events occur. But if geometry is not the science of space, what is it? It began to look surprisingly like logic, but the logic it looked like was not the old syllogistic, predicative logic of Aristotle.

While geometry was thus being shaken to its foundations, conceptions of arithmetic were undergoing an equally radical transformation, though as a result of a very different line of investigation, whose aim was to "formalize" arithmetic. It is unnecessary for us to go into these developments in detail," but the result was to demonstrate that the line between logic and mathematics is essentially arbitrary. However-and this is the relevant pOint-the logic to which arithmetic was being reduced, like that which geometry was beginning to resemble, was very far from the traditional Aristotelian lOgic. Indeed, as soon as mathematicians began to think seriously about logic, the limitations of Aristotle's account of reasoning became evident.

When we assert, for instance, that Plato is taller than Socrates, we have certainly said something about Plato, and we can, in fact, express this in the traditional Aristotelian way by saying that Plato has the specific property of being taller than Socrates. If we call this property of being taller than Socrates H, then the assertion that Plato is taller than Socrates can be expressed in the simple subjectpredicate statement:

Plato is H.

Similarly, the assertion that Aristotle is taller than Plato can be put into subjectpredicate form by symbolizing the property of being taller than Plato by G:

Aristotle is G.

In a certain sense, there is nothing wrong with these symbolizations. Being taller than Socrates may have been a property that Plato possessed and being taller than Plato may have been a property that Aristotle possessed, and if we want to assign symbols to these properties, nothing stops us from doing so. The difficulty with this way of symbolizing these assertions is not that it is illegitimate but that it fails to bring out important logical relationships between them. To see this, we need only compare the following clearly valid argument (1) with its translation into a subject-predicate form (2):

(1) Aristotle is taller than Plato.

Plato is taller than Socrates.

(2) Aristotle is G.

Plato is H.

Therefore:

Aristotle is taller than Socrates

Therefore:

Aristotle is H.

"However, see p. 146 ff.

ARISTOTELIAN LOGIC AND ITS CRITICS 143

The argument on the right does not give us a clue why the argument on the left is valid. The situation is altered in a fundamental way if we introduce relational terms. The statement "x R y" says that x stands in the relation R to y. For example, we can take "x T y" as a way of saying that x is taller than y. Using this notation, we now get a new symbolization for the above argument:

Aristotle is taller than Plato. Aristotle T Plato.

Plato is taller than Socrates. Plato T Socrates.

Therefore:

Aristotle is taller than Socrates.

Therefore:

Aristotle T Socrates.

In this case, the symbolization on the right does bring out the logical structure in virtue of which the argument on the left is valid. We see that the validity of this argument depends on the logtcal properties of the relational term "taller than."

If the validity of some arguments depends on relational rather than predicative structures, it follows that some reasoning is not syllogistic, for a syllogism presupposes, as we have seen, that the two premises consist of subjects, pr~dicates, and middles arranged in certain regular patterns. The argument we have Just considered does not have this form. Nor do these two arguments: (1) If New York is east of Chicago, and Chicago is east of Los Angeles, then New York is east of Los Angeles. (2) If Aristotle was before Hegel, and Hegel was before Russell, then Aristotle was before Russell. What we are dealing with in all of these arguments are relations characterized by transitivity, and the conclusion follows in each argument because the relation asserted between the terms is transitive. Let us use the symbol ">" to refer to any transitive relation; we can now write "If x> y, and y > z, then x > z," and this will represent the lOgical form of a class of arguments that is not reducible to a syllogistic figure.

So far as such considerations as these dethroned syllogism, they constituted a formidable attack on Aristotelian lOgic. But in one important respect they were a reaffirmation of Aristotle, as against Hegel and his followers. Aristotle, like these late-nineteenth-century logiCians, and unlike the Hegelians, had concentrated on logtcal form. What had interested him was precisely what interested them-the formal properties of arguments in virtue of which they are valid and therefore fit guides for reasoning. The application of mathematical models to lOgic enabled logicians to bring out the formal properties of arguments much more powerfully than Aristotle had been able to do, but the mathematical lOgicians were at one with him in holding that the business of logic is not to tell us how people actually happen to think but to tell us how we must think if we are to think c~r~ectly. Logic, that is, is a normative, not a descriptive, science. Alternatively, lOgIC IS not to be confused with psychology. It does not describe how people actually happen to think but provides instead the criteria for distinguishing between correct and incorrect thinking.

This brings us to the attack on post-Hegelian, idealist logic. In the first place, Hegel was by no means so revolutionary as he thought he was. As Russell

144 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

remarked, "There is some sense in which the traditional logic, with all its faults, is uncritically and unconsciously assumed throughout his reasoning." That is, like Aristotle, Hegel assumed "the universality of the subject-predicate form."a But, in the second place, the Hegelians fell into a mistake from which Aristotle himself was exempt. Hegelian logic did not merely give a deficient account of lOgical form; it virtually ignored logical form. That it should do so was of course almost inevitable, for if mind constructs its world, as the idealists held, then the focus of attention is on the mind's constructive activity, and logic becomes simply a description of this activity. We have seen this tendency in Bradley, despite his efforts to resist it; 5 in Dewey it became open and explicit." For Dewey, indeed, thought is simply the process of problem solving, and there are as many different techniques of problem solving as there are types of problems to be solved. It is the business of logic, he held, to describe these techniques, not to evaluate them, for they are to be evaluated not on the basis of abstract logtcal form but simply on the basis of whether or not the outcomes are successful. Which techniques solve the problems to which they have been applied, and which do not? This indeed was the whole thrust of Dewey's "instrumentalism." From the viewpoint of the mathematical logicians this idealist logic was not merely mistaken in the way Aristotelian lOgic was mistaken. It was wrongheaded, and what is more, wrongheaded in a deep and fundamental way.

Thus, the motive of the logicians was very similar to the motive that animated those philosophers who were reviving realism: opposition to contructivism. Like the realists, the mathematical logicians believed that for knowledge to be possible there must be an objective universe, independent of us and of our constructions. But though the revolution in lOgic was inspired by the same pursuit of objectivity, the mathematical logicians provided philosophers influenced by the revolution in lOgic with a new route out of the Kantian paradigm. Moore's refutation of idealism consisted in an attack on idealist epistemology, specifically in an analysis of experience that purported to show that mind does nothing; it merely contemplates an object held before it in consciousness. Moore simply offered a new answer to the old epistemological question, "How do we know?"-the question with which philosophy, since the time of Descartes, had been obsessed.

In contrast, the new attack on idealism bypassed epistemology altogether and thus broke new ground. The philosophers influenced by the mathematicallogicians fully shared the realists' thesis-Wallace Steven's thesis t=-that when we know something it is the very thing itself that is present in the mind, not some idea or mental representation of it. So, in effect, they said, since it is the very thing itself that is present in our minds when we know, let us undertake an analysis of the language in which our knowledge claims are expressed-the language, that is, of assertion. If by means of such an analysis we can ascertain the logical form of

5See Vol. IV, p. 340. 6See p. 53.

7See pp. 6-7.

ARISTOTELIAN LOGIC AND ITS CRITICS 145

true assertions, we shall eo ipso be acquiring information about the logical structure of the universe. For it is the structure of the universe that is revealed in these assertions as the "meaning" expressed in them.

These philosophers pointed out that what metaphysicians have believed about lOgical form has always determined their view of the universe. The only differences between themselves and earlier metaphysicians, they held, were, first, that they were aware of the relationship between lOgical form and metaphysical theory whereas earlier metaphysicians had been unaware of it, and second, that they had an instrument, which earlier philosophers had lacked, for analyzing logical form correctly and hence for ascertaining the true nature of the universe.

Let us spell this out in a bit more detail: as we have seen, all philosophers up to the "revolution" had assumed that all judgments are predicative-that they predicate properties of subjects. Since we can, at least on occasion and in principle, make true judgments about the world, it follows that the world about which we judge truly must consist of substances that own properties. The only question is how many such substances there are-many or one? If many, then each substance is an isolated individual, for the only relationship that this logic recognizes is the relationship of predication. If one, then this one substance is an all-encompassing subject of which the seemingly separate things are really only predicates. Thus, as long as the subject-predicate lOgic was unquestioned there were but two options: Leibniz's monads or Spinozas god, though the philosophers in question had no idea that their logic was thus limiting their options."

The revolution in logic, then, proposed to free philosophy from these limitations by exploding the myth that all judgments are predicative in form. Of course, when these philosophers talked about an analysis of the lOgic of assertions, they were not thinking of studying the ordinary language in which people actually make assertions, for this language is often muddled and incoherent, and it is always multifunctional. Their approach was normative, not descriptive. Their aim was to uncover the form that language must have if it is to be capable of conveying truths about the world. Hence what we learn about the universe through this analysis is its general nature, not its specific features.

Naturally not all of these long-range implications of the revolution in lOgic were seen at the outset, but the initial moves were nevertheless made very early-and also very clearly-by Frege.? Frege was first and foremost a mathematician and mathematical logician, but his work in these highly specialized fields had important applications to questions of general philosophical interest-applications on which this account will concentrate.

8See Vol. III, pp. 224-29 and 196-202.

9Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) taught mathematics at the University ofJena from 1879 until his retirement in 1918. His two chief works were The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (Vol. I, 1893; Vol. II, 1903). He received almost no recognition during his lifetime, and it was chiefly owing to Russell's efforts that his work became known.

146 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

Frege on the Nature of Number

Although Frege's views about the nature of language and the nature of meaning are of central importance for us, we shall begin where Frege began, with a study of the nature of number. Freges reason for starting here was his desire to establish arithmetic on a secure basis.

The charm of work on arithmetic and analysis is, it seems to me, easily accounted for. We might say, indeed, almost in the well-known words: the reason's proper study is itself. In arithmetic we are not concerned with objects through the medium of the senses, but with objects given directly to our reason and, as its nearest kin, utterly transparent to it."

Like Plato, that is, Frege held that the objects of mathematical thought are nonsensible entities that are completely independent of our thoughts about them:

"The mathematician cannot create things at will, any more than the geographer can; he too can only discover what is there and give it a name.'> In other words, from the outset Frege adopted an anticonstructivist stance. His stance is equally in the spirit of what we have called the analytic tradition, as the following passage shows.

When we ask someone what the number one is, or what the symbol 1 means, we get as a rule the answer 'Why, a thing." And if we go on to point out that the proposition

"the number one is a thing"

is not a definition, because . . . it only assigns the number one to the class of things, without stating which thing it is, then we shall very likely be invited to select something for ourselves-anything we please-to call one. Yet if everyone had the right to understand by this name whatever he pleased, then the same proposition about one would mean different things for different people-such propositions would have no common content. ...

Is it not a scandal that our science should be so unclear about the first and foremost among its objects, and one which is apparently so simple? ... If a concept fundamental to a mighty science gives rise to difficulties, then it is surely an imperative task to investigate it more closely until those difficulties are overcome; especially as we shall hardly succeed in finally clearing up negative numbers, or fractional or complex numbers, so long as our insight into the foundation of the whole structure of arithmetic is still defective ....

In order, then, to dispel this illusion that the positive whole numbers really present no difficulties at all, . . . I have adopted the plan of

FREGE ON THE NATURE OF NUMBER 147

criticizing some of the views put forward by mathematicians and philosophers on the questions involved .... My object in this is to awaken a desire for a stricter enquiry. At the same time this preliminary examination of the views others have put forward should clear the ground for my own account, by convincing my readers in advance that these other paths do not lead to the goal, and that my opinion is not just one among many all equally tenable; and in this way I hope to settle the question finally, at least in essentials.

I realize that, as a result, I have been led to pursue arguments more philosophical than many mathematicians may approve; but any thorough investigation of the concept of number is bound always to turn out rather philosophical. It is a task which is common to mathematics and philosophy. d

It is easy to see why Frege would appeal so strongly to philosophers in the analytic tradition. There is the same demand for clarity, the same emphasis on rigor, the same insistence on clearing the ground and on securing an absolutely firm base before seeking to make any advance, however small. Moreover, there is the same assumption of objectivity. Indeed, Freges whole criticism of then current views of the nature of number turned on their failure to satisfy the Platonic requirements of objectivity and certainty. He ruled out formalist theories on the ground that they failed to meet the first requirement; empirical theories, on the ground that they failed to meet the second; psychologiZing theories, on the ground that they met neither. Let us first examine Frege's criticism of psychologizing.

CRITICISM OF PSYCHOLOGIZING THEORIES

The predominance in philosophy of psychological methods of argument ... [has] penetrated even into the field oflogic. With this tendency mathematics is completely out of sympathy .... When ... our ideas of numbers [are called] motor phenomena and [are made] dependent on muscular sensations, no mathematician can recognize his numbers in such stuff. ... No, sensations are absolutely no concern of arithmetic. No more are mental pictures, formed from the amalgamated traces of earlier sense-impressions. All these phases of consciousness are characteristically fluctuating and indefinite, in strong contrast to the definiteness and fixity of the concepts and objects of mathematics. It may, of course, serve some purpose to investigate the ideas and changes of ideas which occur during the course of mathematical thinking; but psychology should not imagine that it can contribute anything whatever to the foundation of arithmetic .... Never let us take a description of the origin of an idea for a definition, or an

148 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

account of the mental and physical conditions on which we become conscious of a proposition for a proof of it. A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse these two things. We must remind ourselves, it seems, that a proposition no more ceases to be true when I cease to think of it than the sun ceases to exist when I shut my eyes. Otherwise, in proving Pythagoras' theorem we should be reduced to allowing for the phosphorous content of the human brain; and astronomers would hesitate to draw any conclusions about the distant past, for fear of being charged with anachronism-with reckoning twice two as four regardless of the fact that our idea of number is a product of evolution and has a history behind it. ... The historical approach, with its aim of detecting how things begin and of arriving from these origins at a knowledge of their nature, is certainly perfectly legitimate; but it has also its limitations. If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know anything about the world and everything would be plunged in confuslon.s

Thus psychologizing theories totally misunderstand the nature of mathematics-as Frege understood the nature of mathematics. At best, such theories merely tell us why, in terms of personal biography or the circumstances of the culture, a particular mathematician (say, Pythagoras) undertook to prove a particular theorem at a particular time. Mathematics is concerned with whether the proof of the theorem is valid. "A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse these two things." There could hardly be a more succinct statement of the difference between a psychological or SOCiological inquiry into the causes of beliefs and a logical inquiry into the validity of inference.

CRITICISM OF FORMALIST THEORIES

Formalism escapes psychologizing only at the cost of trivializing mathematics.

Parrots learn to articulate words, but they do not think, for they do not realize that the noises they articulate are Signs. Nor are we thinking, unless the words we utter and the marks we make on paper are signs. Accordingly, mathematics cannot be, as the formalists hold, merely the manipulation of marks in accordance with certain arbitrarily chosen rules. In that case mathematics would not involve thought. Mathematical thinking is thinking only because the marks the mathematician manipulates are signs of real entities and because his or her manipulation of these marks reflects the real nature of these real entities.

It is possible, of course, to operate with figures mechanically, just as it is possible to speak like a parrot: but that hardly deserves the name of thought. It only becomes possible at all after the mathematical notation has, as a result of genuine thought, been so developed that it does the thinking for us, so to speak.'

FREGE ON THE NATURE OF NUMBER 149

CRITICISM OF EMPIRICAL THEORIES

The empiricists for their part avoid the mistake of the formalists-they recognize that mathematics is not merely the manipulation of marks on paper. But though they understand that mathematics is about real entities of which these marks are the signs, unfortunately they suppose these real entities to be sensible properties of sensible things. Their view may seem faintly plausible if we confine ourselves to the positive integers; then someone with no real feeling for mathematics might conclude that, just as "red" is the name of a property of some sensible things and "blue" is the name of another, so "two" is the name of a property of some agglomerations and "three" is the name of a property of other agglomerations. But their view is wholly implausible as an account of the irrationals. Those who think that three is a property of aggregates having thre~arts may be challenged to present us with instances of aggregates having V-I parts. However, in fact, this "gingerbread and pebble arithmetic," as Frege contemptuously described it, is inadequate even for the positive integers, in part because the number of an agglomeration depends on how we choose to think about it. What, for instance, is the number of that agglomeration known as Homer's Iliad? It is one poem, twenty-four books, a very large number of verses, and a still larger number of words.

Mill is, of course, quite right that two apples are physically different from three apples, and two horses from one horse; that they are a different visible and tangible phenomenon. But are we to infer from this that their twoness or threeness is something physical? One pair of boots may be the same visible and tangible phenomenon as two boots. Here we have a difference in number to which no physical difference corresponds; for two and one pair are by no means the same thing, as Mill seems oddly to believe.s

Underlying Frege's criticism of empiricism is a typically platonic attitude: sensible objects are too transitory, too fluctuating, to have the permanence and objectivity required for those entities of which the marks the mathematician makes on paper are the signs. Those sensible things are but the shadows and reflections of these real objects, and to take the former for the latter is a most grievous error. In Mill's gingerbread and pebble arithmetic "we see everything as through a fog, blurred and undifferentiated. It is as though everyone who wished to know about America were to try to put himself back in the position of Columbus at the time when he caught the first dubious glimpse of his supposed India.'?'

NUMBERS ARE NONSENSIBLE OBJECTS

The chief reason for the persistence of these three mistaken theories, despite their obvious inadequacies, is simply that

there is at present a very widespread tendency not to recognize as an object anything that cannot be perceived by means of the senses; this

150 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

leads here to numerals' being taken to be numbers, the proper objects of our discussion; and then, I admit, 7 and 2 + 5 would indeed be different, But such a conception is untenable, for we cannot speak of any arithmetical properties of numbers whatsoever without going back to what the signs stand for, For example, the property belonging to 1, of being the result of multiplying itself by itself, would be a mere myth; for no microscopical or chemical investigation, however far it was carried, could ever detect this property in the possession of the innocent character that we call a figure one .... The characters we call numerals have ... physical and chemical properties depending on the writing material. One could imagine the introduction some day of quite new numerals, just as, e.g., the Arabic numerals superseded the Roman. Nobody is seriously going to suppose that in this way we should get quite new numbers, quite new arithmetical objects, with properties still to be investigated. Thus we must distinguish between numerals and what they stand for; and if so, we shall have to recognize that the expressions "2," "1 + 1," "3 - 1," "6 -7- 3" stand for the same thing, for it is quite inconceivable where the difference between them could lie .... The different expressions correspond to different conceptions and aspects, but nevertheless always to the same thing. i

If people can only overcome their prejudice against nonsensible objects, they will see at once the "number is neither a collection of things nor a property of such, [nor] a subjective product of mental processes," but a nonsensible object. "A statement of number asserts somethi~ objective of a concept."!

As an example, consider 100010001 • Is this

an empty symbol? Not at all. It has a perfectly definite sense, even although, psychologically speaking and having regard to the shortness of human life, it is impossible for us ever to become conscious of that many objects; in spite of that, 1000l()()()1000 is still an object, whose properties we can come to know, even though it is not intuitable. To convince ourselves of this, we have only to show, introducing the symbol an for the nth power of a, that for positive integral a and n this expression always refers to one and only one positive whole number."

For our purposes it is unnecessary to follow Frege's discussion of number any further.t? except to emphasize once more the extent to which, in his view, the distinction between knowledge and belief on the one hand and the objectivity of number, on the other, are bound up together. Since it is possible to prove, for all values of a and n, that an is a positive whole number, we know-not merely believe-that 100010001000 is an object, for we could not know this unless there is a real entity, independent of ourselves, of which 100010001000 is the sign.

lOSee, however, pp. 176-77, note 7.

ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND FORMALIZED LANGUAGE 151

Ordinary Language and Formalized Language

To say that "100010001000" and "2" and "\1=1" are signs of real, objective entities is to say that mathematics is a language, and this powerfully suggests that the superiority of mathematics as a way of knowing, which Frege so strongly felt, is reflected in the language that mathematics uses. Thus we find him drawing a distinction between ordinary language and the special, formalized language in which, as a result of logical analysis, the general principle of mathematics can be set out.

A distinction of subject and predicate finds no place in my way of representing a judgment. In order to [ustify this, let me observe that there are two ways in which the content of two judgments may differ: it may, or it may not, be the case that all inferences that can be drawn from the first judgment when combined with certain other ones can always also be drawn from the second when combined with the same other judgments. The two propositions "the Greeks defeated the Persians at Plataea" and "the Persians were defeated by the Greeks at Plataea" differ in the former way; even if a slight difference of sense is discernible, the agreement in sense is preponderant. Now I call the part of the content that is the same in both the conceptual content. Only this has significance for our symbolic language; we need therefore make no distinction between propositions that have the same conceptual content. ... In [ordinary] language the place occupied by the subject in the word-order has the Significance of a speCially important place; it is where we put what we want the hearer to attend to specially. This may, e.g., have the purpose of indicating a relation between this judgment and others, and thus making it easier for the hearer to grasp the whole sequence of thought. All such aspects oflanguage are merely results of the reciprocal action of speaker and hearer; e.g. the speaker takes account of what the hearer expects, and tries to set him upon the right track before actually uttering the judgment. In my formalized language there is nothing that corresponds; only that part of judgments which affects the possible inferences is taken into consideration. Whatever is needed for a valid inference is fully expressed; what is not needed is for the most part not indicated either; no scope is left for conjecture. In this I follow absolutely the example of the formalized language of mathematics; here too, subject and predicate can be distinguished only by doing violence to the thought. We may imagine a language in which the proposition "Archimedes perished at the capture of Syracuse" would be expressed in the following way: "The violent death of Archimedes at the capture of Syracuse is a fact." You may if you like distinguish subject and predicate even here; but the subject contains the whole content, and the only purpose of the predicate is to present this in the form of a

152 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

judgment. Such a language would have only a single predicate for all judgments, viz. "is a fact." We see that there is no question here of subject and predicate in the ordinary sense.'

This passage is interesting for a number of reasons. In the first place, within the notion of "sense'v=-or, as we might say, "meaning"-Frege draws a distinction between what is "conceptual content" and what is not conceptual content. Though, as far as conceptual content goes, there is no difference between the active and passive voices of the verb, yet there is a difference. It reflects or expresses what the speaker regards as the important feature of the battle of Plataea. He will use the active voice if what impresses him is that the Greeks won the battle and the passive voice if what impresses him is that it was lost by the Persians. But this sort of difference is unimportant for Frege; he introduces it only in order to exclude it from further discussion. What interests him is what (in this early version of his theory) he calls conceptual content. This is defined as the part of the sense of a sentence on which valid inference depends, and in Frege's formalized language two sentences are to count as the same, however much they may differ in other respects, if all the inferences that can be drawn from one of the sentences can also be drawn from the other sentence. In the second place, the passage is worth noting because, though Frege recognized that ordinary language does much more than express valid inferences, in his formalized language, expression is confined to what is needed for inference.

Notice that Frege does not consider it a defect that assertions in ordinary language do more than express what he calls conceptual, or logical, content. In fact, he would certainly acknowledge it as one of the strengths of ordinary language that it contains devices that assist "reciprocal action of speaker and hearer." Frege considered aspects that are not part of a sentence's conceptual content so that he could set them aside as irrelevant to his logical concerns. All the same, he often showed considerable originality and sophistication in analyzing these nonconceptual aspects of sentences, and many of his ideas about them, which he sometimes seemed to produce just in passing, were incorporated into works by philosophers not committed to Frege's logical program-indeed, sometimes by those opposed to it.'!

But even if ordinary language is, in its way, serviceable for ordinary activities, it does not, according to Frege, provide a symbolism adequate for logical purposes. Specifically, instead of making logical form clear, its grammar often hides it. In contrast, Frege's Begriffschrift-literally, his concept writing-is a symbolism concerned solely with conceptual content and intended to present that content in a clear and rigorously defined format.

11 Many of Freges ideas about the nonconceptual aspects of sentences reappear, in various ways, in the works of the so-called ordinary-language philosophers-a group largely, although not completely, opposed to the use of the methods of formal lOgic

in philosophy. See Chapter 12.

ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND FORMALIZED LANGUAGE 153

FUNCTIONS AND ARGUMENTS

Frege's discussion of the difference between a mathematical function and its argument will serve as an example of how it is possible to use the analysis of mathematical form as the basis for making a point about the logic of assertions generally. Frege began by pointing out that the distinction between a function and an argument is one about which mathematicians themselves are far from clear. Thus everybody agrees that the expression 2.x3 + x (that is, two times x to the third power, plus x) is a function of x, and some mathematicians, arguing on analogy, would allow that 2.23 + 2 is a function of 2. This, according to Frege, is a muddle that lOgical analysis can clear up and, in clearing it up, can lead us to a correc~ understanding of what a function is and how it differs from an argument. Consider, then, the expressions

2.13 + 1 2.23 + 2 2.43 + 4

These expressions stand for numbers, namely, 3, 18, and 132. If they were also functions there would be no difference between numbers and functions, and "nothing new would have been gained for arithmetic" by speaking of functions. It follows, therefore, that there must be a difference between a function and a number. What is it?

Admittedly, people who use the word "function" ordinarily have in mind expressions in which a number is just indicated indefinitely by the letter x, e.g.

"2.x3 + x":

but that makes no difference; for this expression likewise just indicates a number indefinitely, and it makes no essential difference whether I write it down or just write down "r."

All the same, it is precisely by the notation that uses "r' to indicate [a number 1 indefinitely that we are led to the right conception. People call x the argument, and recognize the same function again in

"2.13 + 1," "2.43 + 4," "2.53 + 5,"

only with different arguments, viz. 1,4, and 5. From this we may discern that it is the common element of these expressions that contains the essential peculiarity of a function; i.e. what is present in

"2.x3 + x"

154 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

over and above the letter "r." We could write this somewhat as follows:

"2.( )3 + ( )."

I am concerned to show that the argument does not belong with the function, but goes together with the function to make up a complete whole; for the function by itself must be called incomplete, in need of supplementation, or "unsaturated." And in this respect functions differ fundamentally from numbers ....

The two parts into which the mathematical expression is thus split up, the sign of the argument and the expression of the function, are dissimilar; for the argument is a number, a whole complete in itself, as the function is not. m

Accordingly, if we continue to say, as we did at the start, that the expression "2.x3 + r" is a function of x, it is essential to remember that "r must not be considered as belonging to the function; this letter only serves to indicate the kind of supplementation that is needed; it enables one to recognize the places where the sign for the argument must go in."n

In bringing out the difference between complete ("saturated") and incomplete ("unsaturated") expressions, Frege's point was not merely that these expressions are different but that these different expressions represent (are the signs of) fundamentally different sorts of entities. Thus the expressions "2.13 + I" and "3," which look very dissimilar, are both signs of the same sort of entity, namely number, and indeed of the very same entity, 3, whereas the expressions "2.13 + I" and "2.( ) + ( )," which look very similar, are signs of very different sorts of entity, the former being a sign of a number and the latter the sign of a function. The mistake committed by those who identify functions and numbers is thus first to confuse a sign with the thing that it signifies and then to conclude that when signs differ, different things are Signified and that when signs are similar, similar things are Signified. "It is as though one wanted to regard the sweet -smelling violet as differing from Viola odorata because the names sound different. Difference of sign cannot by itself be a sufficient ground for difference of the thing signified."o

TRUTH-VALUES

Frege next introduced the notion of truth-values. He began by defining "the value of a function for an argument" as "the result of completing the function with the argument. Thus, 3 is the value of the function 2.x3 + x for the argument 1, since we have: 2.13 + 1 = 3."p This leads to the question, "What are the values of a function-say, x2 = I-for different arguments?"

Now if we replace x successively by -1,0, 1, and 2, we get:

(-1)2 = 1,

02 = 1, 12 = 1, 22 = l.

ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND FORMALIZED LANGUAGE 155

Of these equations the first and third are true, the others false, I now say: "the value of our function is a truth-value" and distinguish between the truth-values of what is true and what is false. I call the first, for short, the True; and the second, the False. Consequently, e.g., "22 = 4" stands for the True as, say, "22" stands for 4. And "22 = 1" stands for the False. Accordingly

"22 = 4," "2> 1," "24 = 42,"

stand for the same thing, viz. the True, so that in (22 = 4) = (2 > 1)

we have a correct equation.

The objection here suggests itself that "22 = 4" and "2 > I" nevertheless make quite different assertions, express quite different thoughts; but likewise "24 = 42" and "4.4 = 42" express different thoughts; and yet we can replace "24" by "4.4," since both signs have the same reference. Consequently, "24 = 42" and "4.4 = 42" likewise have the same reference. We see from this that from identity of reference there does not follow identity of the thought [expressed]. If we say "the Evening Star is a planet with a shorter period of revolution than the Earth," the thought we express is other than in the sentence "the Morning Star is a planet with a shorter period of revolution than the Earth"; for somebody who does not know that the Morning Star is the Evening Star might regard one as true and the other as false. And yet both sentences must have the same reference; for it is just a matter of interchanging the words "Evening Star" and "Morning Star," which have the same reference, i.e. are proper names of the same heavenly body. We must distinguish between sense and reference. "24" and "42" certainly have the same reference, i.e. they are proper names of the same number; but

tl "24 42" d "4 4 42"

they have not the same sense; consequen y, = an . =

have the same reference, but not the same sense (which means, in this case: they do not contain the same thought) ....

We saw that the value of our function x2 = 1 is always one of the two truth-values. Now if for a definite argument, e.g. -1, the value of the function is the True, we can express this as follows: "the number - 1 has the property that its square is 1"; or, more briefly, "-1 is a square root of 1"; or "-1 falls under the concept: square root of l." If the value of the function x2 = 1 for an argument, e.g. for 2, is False, we can express this as follows: "2 is not a square root of I" or "2 does not fall under the concept: square root of I." We thus see how closely that which is called a concept in logic is connected with what we call a function. q

CONCEPTS AND OBJECTS

Passing over, for the moment, the distinction just drawn between sense and reference, we can note the conclusion reached: a function is like a concept in that

156 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

it has an empty place that must be filled to make it complete; an argument is like an object in that it "falls under" a concept and thereby makes it complete. We have reached the point where it is possible to extend the notions of function and argument to nonmathematicallanguage.

We shall not stop at equations and inequalities. The linguistic form of equations is a statement. A statement contains (or at least purports to contain) a thought as its sense; and this thought is in general true or false; i.e. it has in general a truth-value, which must be regarded as the reference of the sentence, just as (say) the number 4 is the reference of the expression "2 + 2," or London of the expression "the capital of England."

Statements in general, just like equations or inequalities or expressions in Analysis, can be imagined to be split up into two parts; one complete in itself, and the other in need of supplementation, or "unsaturated." Thus, e.g., we split up the sentence

"Caesar conquered Gaul"

into "Caesar" and "conquered Gaul." The second part is "unsat- . urated"-it contains an empty place; only when this place is filled up with a proper name, or with an expression that replaces a proper name, does a complete sense appear. Here too I give the name "function" to what this "unsaturated" part stands for. In this case the argument is Caesar.

We see that here we have undertaken to extend [the application of the term 1 in the other direction, viz. as regards what can occur as an argument. Not merely numbers, but objects in general, are now admissible; and here persons must assuredly be counted as objects. The two truth-values have already been introduced as possible values of a function; we must go further and admit objects without restriction as values of functions. To get an example of this, let us start, e.g., with the expression

"the capital of the German Empire."

This obviously takes the place of a proper name, and stands for an object. If we now split it up into the parts

"the capital of" and "the German Empire"

... I call

"the capital of r"

the expression of a function. If we take the German Empire as the argument, we get Berlin as the value of the function.

SENSE AND REFERENCE 157

When we have thus admitted objects without restriction as arguments and values of functions, the question arises what it is that we are here calling an object. I regard a regular definition as impossible, since we have here something too simple to admit oflogical analysis. It is only possible to indicate what is meant. Here I can only say briefly: An object is anything that is not a function, so that an expression for it does not contain any empty place.

A statement contains no empty place, and therefore we must regard what it stands for as an object. But what a statement stands for is a truth-value. Thus the two truth-values are objects!

In these paragraphs Frege was discussing, in his own terms, what in the history of philosophy is known as the problem of universals. 12 But notice how his linguistic approach differed from the usual epistemological approach, and how the problem is thereby transformed. From Frege's point of view there is no question about the "status" of universals or about their relation to particulars. Universals (or "concepts" in his terminology) are those entities of which unsaturated expressions are the signs. Thus, for Frege the much-debated question whether universals exist was easily answered. That there are, and must be, such entities follows directly from the idea that unsaturated expressions occur as components in Significant assertions, sentences that are either true or false. These sentences would not be Significant if the expressions that occur in them were not signs, that is, if these expressions did not refer to reals. What the metaphysical nature of these entities may be (which is the traditional puzzle) is simply bypassed.

The same is true for particulars. A particular (or "object") is an entity that saturates a concept by falling under it, that is, by serving as the argument that completes some function and gives it a truth-value. Since anything that completes a function is an object, the variety of objects is immense: men, cities, planets, points in space, proofs of theorems-all these and more are objects. Hence it is idle to inquire about the metaphysical status of particulars. But the existence of particulars is not problematic, as some philosophers have supposed. That there are particulars (objects) follows directly from the occurrence of proper names in Significant assertions.

Sense and Reference

As we have seen, Frege introduced a distinction between sense and reference in his treatment of functions and concepts, but in that discussion he did not fully explain what he meant by it. In his effort to do so, Frege produced one of the undisputed classics of early analytic philosophy, an essay he published in 1892 with the

12For a discussion of the problem of universals in its historical context, see Vol. II, pp. 185-90. For contemporary critiques, see this volume, p. 49.

158 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

German title Ober Sinn und Bedeutung. The title, in fact, produces a problem of translation that is not easily solved in a satisfactory way. Because the German words Sinn and Bedeutung both literally mean "meaning," we can wind up with the translation "On meaning and meaning," thus burying whatever distinction Frege was trying to draw. Sinn has been uniformly translated as "Sense." Bedeutung has been variously translated as "meaning," "reference," and, using a fancy Latin word, "nominatum." We have chosen to translate Bedeutung as "reference," for, even if it is not what the word literally means, it seems to bring out the contrast with "sense" that Frege had in mind.P

"On Sense and Reference" begins in the following way:

EQUALITyl4 gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer. Is it a relation? A relation between objects, or between names or signs of objects? In my Begriffsschrift I assumed the latter. The reasons which seem to favour this are the following: a=a and a=b are obviously statements of differing cognitive value; a=a holds a priori and, according to Kant, is to be labelled analytic, while statements of the form a=b often contain very valuable extensions of our knowledge and cannot always be established a priori. The discovery that the rising sun is not new every morning, but always the same, was one of the most fertile astronomical discoveries. Even to-day the identification of a small planet or a comet is not always a matter of course. Now if we were to regard equality as a relation between that which the names "a" and "b" designate, it would seem that a=b could not differ from a=a (i.e, provided a=b is true). A relation would thereby be expressed of a thing to itself, and indeed one in which each thing stands to itself but to no other thing. What is intended to be said by a=b seems to be that the signs or names "a" and "b" designate the same thing, so that those signs themselves would be under discussion; a relation between them would be asserted. But this relation would hold between the names or signs only in so far as they named or designated something. It would be mediated by the connexion of each of the two signs with the same designated thing. But this is arbitrary. Nobody can be forbidden to use any arbitrarily producible event or object as a sign for something. In that case the sentence a=b would no longer refer to the subject matter, but only to its mode of designation; we would expr~ss no proper knowledge by its means. But in many cases this is just what we want to do. If the sign "a" is distinguished from the sign "b"

13For this reason we have cited the first edition rather than the second edition of Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black (Philosophical Library, New York, 1952). In the first edition, Bedeutung is translated as "reference"; in the second edition, it is translated as "meaning."

14 I use this word in the sense of identity and understand "a = b" to have the sense of "a is the same as b" or "a and b coincide."

SENSE AND REFERENCE 159

only as object (here, by means of its shape), not as sign (i.e, not by the manner in which it designates something), the cognitive value of a=a becomes essentially equal to that of a=b, provided a=b is true. A difference can arise only if the difference between the signs corresponds to a difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated. Let a, b, c be the lines connecting the vertices of a triangle with the midpoints of the opposite sides. The point of intersection of a and b is then the same as the point of intersection of b and c. So we have different designations for the same point, and these names ("point of intersection of a and b," "point of intersection of band c") likewise indicate the mode of presentation; and hence the statement contains actual knowledge.

It is natural, now, to think of there being connected with a sign (name, combination of words, letter), besides that to which the sign refers, which may be called the reference of the sign, also what I should like to call the sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained. In our example, accordingly, the reference of the expressions "the point of intersection of a and b" and "the point of intersection of band c" would be the same, but not their senses. The reference of "evening star" would be the same as that of "morning star," but not the sense.'

The contrast between sense and reference is most easily shown by using a descriptive phrase such as "the tallest building in the world." The sense of this expression is what we might call its cognitive content or even it meaning. Sense is what a competent speaker of some language understands by a word or longer expression in that language. Notice that a competent speaker of English can understand the expression "the tallest building in the world" even if she does not know which building it is. That is, it is possible to know the sense of this expression without knowing its reference. Furthermore, the reference of this expression changes over time as progressively taller buildings are constructed.

The distinction between sense and reference seems unproblematic when applied to descriptive phrases such as "the tallest building in the world." One of Frege's innovations was to extend its use in ways that seem, at first glance, quite unnatural. He not only applied it to descriptive phrases of the kind just examined, but he also applied it to proper names. It does, in fact, seem odd to ask what a name means. For example, to the question "What do the words 'John F. Kennedy' mean?" the natural response is that they do not mean anything, they name someone, in particular, John F. Kennedy. In Fregean terminology, while proper names have a reference," they seem not to have a sense. Yet Frege thought that proper names must have a sense as well as a reference, for it was the only way he could find to solve a problem he encountered concerning identity statements.

15Proper names of fictitious persons raise problems that we cannot discuss here.

160 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

The problem with identity statements, which is still with us today, is this: Suppose we identify the meaning of a proper name with the object it stands for-that is, with its reference. In that case, two proper names referring to the same thing would have the same meaning. For example, all the following names refer to the very same thing:

The Morning Star The Evening Star Venus

Since all these names name the same thing, all the following identity statements are true:

The Morning Star is Venus. The Evening Star is Venus.

The Morning Star is the Evening Star. Venus is Venus.

The fourth item seems peculiarly uninformative, but-and here is Freges problem-if the meaning of a proper name is simply its reference, then all of these sentences would mean the same thing, and thus be equally uninformative. This, however, seems plainly wrong, for the claim that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are the same thing seems altogether different from the claim that the Morning Star and the Morning Star are the same thing. This, then, is Frege's puzzle: how can an identity statement of the form "a = b" if true, be any more informative than the trivialities "a = a" and" b = b"?

One answer to this puzzle is to treat identity statements as statements about names. This is not wholly implausible and, as the passage just cited indicates, Frege was tempted by this way out of his problem. After all, an identity statement will be true just in case the names on each side of the identity sign refer to the same thing. This suggests an analysis of the following kind:

"a = b" means "The names 'a' and 'N refer to the same thing."

Although something might be said for an analysis developed along these lines, Frege rejects it, for, as it seems to him, it would make all identity statements rely on arbitrary linguistic conventions. To vary one of Freges own examples, we can imagine an astronomer in the nineteenth century discovering a comet and naming it after herself: Comet Wilkinson. A hundred years later another astronomer discovers a comet and names it in his honor: Comet Nakamura. The question then arises whether the comets Wilkinson and Nakamura are the same comet. There is, in fact, a conventional element here: Wilkinson named the comet after herself; Nakamura named it after himself. But, as Frege saw, the question also involves an issue in astronomy. We want to know whether the comet that was named Wilkinson and the comet that was named Nakamura are, in fact, the very same comet.

SENSE AND REFERENCE 161

This is not a question of linguistic convention. It was considerations of this kind that led Frege to abandon the sort of linguistic analysis sketched above, and put in its place the doctrine that a proper name has a sense as well as a reference.

What, then, does Frege mean by the sense of an expression? He describes a sense as a "mode of presentation of the thing designated," but does not fully explain what he means by this. He does, however, provide an elegant example of what he has in mind, referring to the following diagram:

It is a theorem of geometry that, for a triangle constructed in this way, where each line bisects the opposing side of the triangle, the three lines must-as the diagram indicates-intersect at the same point. (The proof of this is not altogether trivial.) If we use Xxy as a way of representing the intersection of lines x and y, then the following identities hold:

Xab = Xbe Xab = Xac Xbe = Xae

Unlike Xab '= Xab, these are all Significant truths of geometry, because the intersecting point is presented to us in different ways on each side of the identity sign.

We can now examine the various ways in which a name, its sense, and its ref erenee (if any) can be related to one another. In the Simplest and standard case, a name has a sense that relates it to a Single reference:

Name ~ Sense ~ Reference

. For example, for the name "Moses," its sense is something like the person who led the Jews out of Egypt, etc.; its reference is the man Moses himself. We also have cases of the following kind:

Name ~ Sense ~ No Reference

This is an instance of reference failure. The name "Loch Ness Monster" may fit this pattern, for it has a sense, but, perhaps, the Loch Ness Monster does not exist. Frege saw that reference failures of this kind are not uncommon in ordinary language, but he thought they should be avoided in a proper logical notation.

162 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

The following pattern often arises in everyday language:

<Sense (1) -7 Reference (1) (If any) Name

Sense (2) -7 Reference (2) (If any)

This is a case of ambiguity. There are, for example, a great many different senses associated with the name "John Smith," and in virtue of these different senses, the name has different referents. "Prester John" presents an interesting example of a name with more than one sense and perhaps no reference at all. Various incompatible stories are told about this legendary medieval figure, but, still, he may never have existed.

Turning again to identity statements, such a statement will be true just in case the names on each side of the identity sign have the same reference. That is, "a = b" will be true just in case the following situation obtains:

"a"

Referent

"b"

This suggests-and we have seen that Frege was at first tempted by this ideathat identity statements Simply say that two different names have the same reference. This, however, does not explain the difference between trivial and nontrivial identity statements. By introducing the distinction between sense and reference, Frege thought that he could show how the claim that a is identical with b can be Significant in a way that the claim that a is identical with a is not:

"a"-7 Sense.tc) ~

Referent "b"-7 Sense (b) ~

This contrasts with the trivial claim that a is identical with a, which can be represented as follows:

"a"

~ Sense (a) -7 Referent "a"16~

This, then, is Frege's solution to the problem posed by Significant identity claims:

They are true just in case the terms flanking the identity sign have the same reference; they are Significant just in case they have different senses.

16 If "a" is, in fact, an ambiguous sign, namely a sign having two different senses, then an identity statement of the form "a = a" could be Significant, but here we can ignore this possibility.

SENSE AND REFERENCE 163

So far we have been told that the sense of a proper name is the mode of presentation of the thing designated, and we have been given some examples of what this means. Beyond this, Frege says little in the way of offering a positive account of what he means by a sense. He does, however, warn against a possible misunderstanding of his position. Although he acknowledges that different people may associate somewhat different senses with a proper name (the name "Aristotle," for example), he rejects the idea that senses are subjective. Frege is a Platonist with respect to senses. For him, senses are objective entities that exist independently of the mind that, on occasion, apprehends them. Senses, then, are not to be identified with the subjective ideas that occur in this or that mind on various occasions:

The reference of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by its means; the idea, which we have in that case, is wholly subjective; in between lies the sense, which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet not the object itself. The following analogy will perhaps clarify these relationships. Somebody observes the Moon through a telescope. I compare the Moon itself to the reference; it is the object of the observation, mediated by the real image projected by the object glass in the interior of the telescope, and by the retinal image of the observer. The former I compare to the sense, the latter is like the idea or experience. The optical image in the telescope is indeed one-sided and dependent upon the standpoint of observation; but it is still objective, inasmuch as it can be used by several observers. At any rate it could be arranged for several to use it simultaneously. But each one would have his own retinal image. On account of the diverse shapes of the observers' eyes, even a geometrical congruence could hardly be achieved, and an actual coincidence would be out of the question. This analogy might be developed still further, by assuming A's retinal image made visible to B; or A might also see his own retinal image in a mirror. In this way we might perhaps show how an idea can itself be taken as an object, but as such is not for the observer what it directly is for the person having the idea. But to pursue this would take us too far afield.'

Frege first applied his distinction between sense and reference to proper names in order to explain how identity statements could be cognitively Significant. He then went on to apply this distinction to sentences as a whole with, as we shall see, some quite remarkable results. He identified the sense of a sentence with the thought it expressed. Like other senses, thoughts are objective and should not be confused with psychological states. Frege held that two people can quite literally entertain the same thought. There can also be thoughts that no one has ever entertained and that never will be entertained. That there is a zebra wearing pajamas standing on top of a bus in Times Square is almost certainly a thought that was never entertained before this paragraph was written. There must also be endlessly many such thoughts that will never be entertained by anyone, though of

164 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

course it is not possible to produce an example of such a thought without thereby entertaining it.

If the thought is the sense of a sentence, we might ask whether a sentence has a reference as well, and, if so, what it is. On the face of it, it does not seem obvious that a sentence as a whole should refer to some particular object. Parts of sentences may refer to particular things, and in that sense we might say that sentences refer to particular things. Our question here, however, is whether sentences as a whole can have a reference distinct from the reference of the terms they contain, and it is far from obvious that they can. Frege, as we shall see, will argue that sentences as a whole can have referents, namely one of two abstract entities he calls the True and the False. Every true sentence names the True, and every false sentence names the False.

Before considering Frege's claim that sentences name the True and the False, we must first consider his reasons for saying that they are names at all. They certainly do not look like names. Names are the sort of thing people get when baptized, they are spelled using capital letters, and so on. Sentences are not like that. Part of the problem here is that Frege uses the notion of a name in a very wide sense to cover any expression intended to pick out a unique reference. Thus, for him, "the last man off the ship" counts as a name. We can remove some of the oddness from this discussion by introducing a less misleading label for expressions that function to pick out particular objects. We will call them uniquely referring expressions (UREs).17 Proper names are UREs, but so too are descriptive phrases such as "the last man off the ship" and also demonstrative phrases such as "that man" or "this book."

Reformulated, our first question is this: Why does Frege hold that sentences as a whole are UREs? The argument here is rather complex, so we will take it slowly. As we have already seen, UREs with different senses can have the same reference. (That was the key element in Frege's treatment of significant identity statements.) For example, the following UREs have different senses but the same reference:

"George Washington"

"the first president of the United States"

"the American commander at the Battle of Valley Forge"

We will call terms like this that have the same reference coreferential terms. Next, we can construct UREs that themselves contain UREs as parts. For example:

"the spouse of George Washington"

The reference of this URE is Martha Washington. Thus, "the spouse of George Washington" and "Martha Washington" are coreferential terms.

17This terminology is derived from P. F. Strawson. His views on reference are examined in detail in Chapter 12.

SENSE AND REFERENCE 165

With this background we can introduce one of Frege's fundamental principles

(though not using his terminology):

If a URE contains a URE as a part, then substituting a coreferential URE for the contained URE will not change the reference of the total URE.

A bit more simply:

When co referential terms are substituted one for another, the reference of the total expression remains unchanged. 18

For example, "the spouse of George Washington" is a complex URE containing the URE "George Washington" as a part. This principle tells us that the reference of the larger URE will not change when a coreferential term is substituted for the contained URE. Our example bears this out:

"the spouse of George Washington"

"the spouse of the first president of the United States"

"the spouse of the American commander at the Battle of Valley Forge"

Although the sense changes under substitution, the reference of these expressions remains the same, namely, Martha Washington.

We are now in a position to follow Frege's two-stage argument intended to show that the reference of an entire assertive sentence is a truth-value. The first stage of the argument is intended to show that such sentences do, indeed, have a reference:

So far we have considered the sense and reference only of such expressions, words, or signs as we have called proper names. We now inquire concerning the sense and reference for an entire declarative sentence. Such a sentence contains a thought.t'' Is this thought, now, to be regarded as its sense or its reference? Let us assume for the time being that the sentence has reference. If we now replace one word of the sentence by another having the same reference, but a different sense, this can have no bearing upon the reference of the sentence. Yet we can see that in such a case the thought changes; since, e.g., the thought in the sentence "The morning star is a body illuminated by the Sun" differs from that in the sentence "The evening star is a body illuminated by the Sun." Anybody who did not know that the evening star is the

18In the second part of "On Sense and Reference," Frege examines and attempts to deal with a whole series of apparent counterexamples to this prmciple. His discussion shows a sophisticated understanding of the workings of ordinary language and has had an enormous influence on the work of later analytic philosophers. Unfortunately, these matters cannot be pursued here.

19By a thought I understand not the subjective performance of thinking but its objective content, which is capable of being the common property of several thinkers.

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morning star might hold the one thought to be true, the other false. The thought, accordingly, cannot be the reference of the sentence, but must rather be considered as the sense. What is the position now with regard to the reference? Have we a right even to inquire about it? Is it possible that a sentence as a whole has only a sense, but not reference? At any rate, one might expect that such sentences occur, just as there are parts of sentences having sense but no reference. And sentences which contain proper names without reference will be of this kind. The sentence "Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep" obviously has a sense. But since it is doubtful whether the name "Odysseus," occurring therein, has reference, it is also doubtful whether the whole sentence has one. Yet it is certain, nevertheless, that anyone who seriously took the sentence to be true or false would ascribe to the name "Odysseus" a reference, not merely a sense; for it is of the reference of the name that the predicate is affirmed or denied. Whoever does not admit the name has reference can neither apply nor withhold the predicate. But in that case it would be superfluous to advance to the reference of the name; one could be satisfied with the sense, if one wanted to go no further than the thought. If it were a question only of the sense of the sentence, the thought, it would be unnecessary to bother with the reference of a part of the sentence; only the sense, not the reference, of the part is relevant to the sense of the whole sentence. The thought remains the same whether "Odysseus" has reference or not. The fact that we concern ourselves at all about the reference of a part of the sentence indicates that we generally recognize and expect a reference for the sentence itself. The thought loses value for us as soon as we recognize that the reference of one of its parts is missing. We are therefore justified in not being satisfied with the sense of a sentence, and in inquiring also as to its reference. U

Having shown to his satisfaction that entire sentences must have a reference as well as a sense, Frege next argues that this reference can only be a truth-value:

But now why do we want every proper name to have not only a sense, but also a reference? Why is the thought not enough for us? Because, and to the extent that, we are concerned with its truth-value. This is not always the case. In hearing an epic poem, for instance, apart from the euphony of the language we are interested only in the sense of the sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused. The question of truth would cause us to abandon aesthetic delight for an attitude of scientific investigation. Hence it is a matter of no concern to us whether the name "Odysseus," for instance, has reference, so long as we accept the poem as a work of art. It is the striving for truth that drives us always to advance from the sense to the reference.

SUMMARY 167

We have seen that the reference of a sentence may always be sought, whenever the reference of its components is involved; and that this is the case when and only when we are inquiring after the truth-value.

We are therefore driven into accepting the truth-value of a sentence as constituting its reference .... If ... the truth-value of a sentence is its meaning [reference]' then on the one hand all true sentences have the same meaning [reference] and so, on the other hand, do all false sentences."

Putting all these pieces together, we arrive at the following argument:

1. We are interested in the reference of a contained expression if and only if we are interested in the reference of the whole expression in which it occurs.

2. We are interested in the reference of a term within a sentence if and only if we are concerned with the truth-value of the sentence.

3. Whatever the reference of a sentence might be, it must remain unchanged under substitution of coreferential terms for the referential terms it contains.

4. Truth-values, and seemingly nothing else, possess this last feature.

5. ''We are therefore driven into accepting the truth-value of a sentence as constituting what it means [what it refers to]."

This argument seems to give surprisingly strong support to a thesis that, on its face, seems quite implausible. Each of these premises is, however, open to criticism by those who are opposed to Platonism-or are at least opposed to Frege's rather exotic form of Platonism. Even so, Frege's discussion of sense and reference was a remarkable achievement. If nothing else, it set up a challenge that has dominated much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy: to accomplish what Frege accomplished without introducing a superabundance of exotic Platonic entities. That challenge has not proved easy to meet. In fact-more than a hundred years after Frege wrote "On Sense and Reference"-no philosopher has been able to meet this challenge in a way that has gained general acceptance.

Summary

Frege was one of the founders of philosophy of language, which has become a major preoccupation of philosophers in the twentieth century. Frege not only made important contributions to methods of linguistic analysis; more important-at least from our point of view-is the basic conception of the relation between language and the world that is implicit in his approach. Like the epistemological and metaphysical realists, Frege assumed that our minds are in contact with an objective world; like them he assumed this because he wanted to draw a firm

168 FREGE AND THE REVOLUTION IN LOGIC

distinction between knowledge and belief. But his approach differed from, say, Moore's in two respects. In the first place, he held that the logic of the signs in which we express our knowledge reflects the structure of the objects we know. That this should be the case follows from the realistic thesis that when we know, we are in direct contact with the object known. In the second place, where Moore began with our commonsense belief, Frege began with mathematics. He started from the platonic assumption that in mathematics, if anywhere, we attain knowledge in contrast to mere belief. Hence, if we want to discover what characteristics the world must have for our thinking about it to be knowledge, not mere belief, we should examine the nature of our thinking in mathematics and generalize about all thought from this "best" type of thinking. But, once again, we think in signs, or at least we express our thoughts in signs. Hence, the lOgiC of mathematical signs became the primary clue that led to what may be called a linguistic, as distinct from an epistemological, route out of the Kantian paradigm.

CHAPTER 5

Russell

Russell and Moore

When philosophers mention Moore, they are likely to add "and Russell"; when they mention Bussell,' they are likely to add "and Moore." The reasons for this strong association are obvious: Moore and Russell were almost exact contemporaries at Cambridge; they were friends; together they went through a period in which they "more or less" believed in Hegel and from which they emerged

1 Bertrand A. W Russell (1872-1970) was brought up in the home of his grandfather, who was a son of the duke of Bedford and who had been prime minister under Queen Victoria. Russell was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he subsequently taught for some years. In 1931 he succeeded to the peerage, on the death of his elder brother, as third earl of Russell. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

170 RUSSELL

together, cured and, as it were, "whole." They not only agreed on rejecting idealism, they also agreed on the reasons for doing so: first, because of its constructivism-because it holds that minds construct their experience rather than contemplate it; second, because of its monism-because, as Russell said, it makes the world into "a pot of treacle." Though Moore-at least according to Russellwas most concerned with the rejection of constructivism, "while I was most interested in the rejection of monism,"a they were both leaders in the revival of realism and the analytic tradition. That is, they both held that the universe is a collection of wholly independent, discrete entities and that "analysis" is the method by which we can come to know the nature of these atomic entities.

Despite all these similarities they differed so much temperamentally that they ended up in very different philosophical positions. Moore's objection to idealism was that it conflicts with our ordinary beliefs about the world." This was Russell's objection too, but be put greater emphasis on idealism undermining the objectivity of mathematics.

Various things caused me to abandon both Kant and Hegel. . . . 1 thought that all that [Hegel] said about mathematics is muddle-headed nonsense. I came to disbelieve Bradley's arguments against relations, and to distrust the logical basis of monism. 1 disliked the subjectivity of the "Transcendental Aesthetic." ... Moore took the lead in rebellion, and 1 followed, with a sense of emancipation .... With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic ideas .... Mathematics could be quite true, and not merely a stage in dialectic."

Thus the driving force behind Russell's interest in mathematics was his pursuit of certainty, an interest as powerful as that which had animated Descartes. "I came to philosophy through mathematics or rather through the wish to find some reason to believe in the truth of mathematics."c And, looking back on his life in his old age, he described as "a great event" his discovery of geometry in 1883, when he was eleven:

When I had got over my disappointment in finding that [Euclid] began with axioms, which had to be accepted without proof, I found great delight in him .... This interest was complex: partly mere pleasure in discovering that I possessed a certain kind of skill, partly delight in the power of deductive reasoning, partly the restfulness of mathematical certainty; but more than any of these (while I was still a boy) the belief that nature operates according to mathematical laws, and that human actions ... could be calculated if we had sufficient skill."

2See pp. 129-37.

RUSSELL AND MOORE 171

Russell's passion for certainty explains why he could never be satisfied, as Moore was, merely by justifying common sense against the arguments of the Hegelians. It explains, too, why, unlike Moore, he was a metaphysician, Russell adopted Moore's definition of the business of philosophy-"to give a general description of the whole universe," an inventory of the kinds of entities that make up the universe. But whereas Moore held that common sense provides the answers, Russell began with what the sciences tell us, and what they tell us, he thought, was problematic. Hence, though he certainly agreed with Moore that many so-called philosophical problems are generated by the mistakes and the carelessnesses of philosophers, he did not think that all are. On the contrary, there are real puzzles about what is real, which it is urgent to try to resolve. The "constant preoccupation" of his life, he said, had been "to discover how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness."e "I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith."! And since Russell was never able to satisfy this deep metaphysical interest, since he was "unwillingly forced to the conclusion that most of what passes for knowledge is open to reasonable doubt,"g he experienced a kind of existential loneliness that was wholly foreign to the nature of one who, like Moore, was as persuaded of the existence of good as of green.3

Finally, Moore and Russell differed because Russell was an activist, as Moore was not.

Ever since boyhood [I have had] two different objects which for a long time remained separate and have only in recent years united into a Single whole. I wanted, on the one hand, to find out whether anything could be known; and, on the other hand, to do whatever might be possible toward creating a happier world.b

By the time he was fourteen he had abandoned in succession belief in free will, immortality, and God, and found himself "much happier" as a result. When he undertook to persuade people that they too would be happier if they abandoned these beliefs he naturally incurred the enmity of authorities.' During the First World War he was imprisoned for pacifism and for encouraging conscientious objectors. In 1940 he was forbidden to teach at City College in New York on the grounds that his views on morals and politics might corrupt innocent young minds. In the 1950s and 1960s, as he became increasingly concerned about the threat of thermonuclear war, he participated in various disarmament and passive disobedience demonstrations in England, for which at the age of ninety he was once again, but only briefly, imprisoned.

3See p. 105.

41n a 1959 BBC interview Russell said, "I had a letter from an Anglican bishop not long ago in which he said that all my opinions on everything were inspired by sexual lust, and that the opinions 1 expressed were among the causes of the Second World War."

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Though Russell hated tradition and though his views on almost every subject were anathema to the social class into which he was born, in a curious way he remained loyal to his heritage. "My family during four centuries was important in the public life of England, and I was brought up to feel a responsibility which demanded that I express my opinions on political questions."! But Russell was too much attracted by the "lure of philosophy," too committed to the quest for certainty, too skeptical of its outcome, ever to become a politician in the traditional sense.

When I come to what I myself can do or ought to do about the world situation, I find myself in two minds. A perpetual argument goes on within me between two different points of view which I will call that of the Devil's Advocate and that of the Earnest Publicist. ... The voice of the Devils Advocate is, at least in part, the voice of reason. "Can't you see," says this cynical character, "that what happens in the world does not depend upon you? Whether the populations of the world are to live or die rests with the decisions of Khrushchev, Mao Tse-tung and Mr. John Foster Dulles, not with ordinary mortals like ourselves. If they say 'die,' we shall die. If they say 'live,' we shall live. They do not read your books, and would think them very silly if they did. You forget that you are not living in 1688, when your family and a few others gave the king notice and hired another. It is only a failure to move with the times that makes you bother your head with public affairs." Perhaps the Devil's Advocate is right-but perhaps he is wrong. Perhaps dictators are not so all-powerful as they seem; perhaps public opinion can still sway them, at any rate in some degree; and perhaps books can help to create public opinion. And so I persist, regardless of his taunts. There are limits to his severities. 'Well, at any rate," he says, "writing books is an innocent occupation and it keeps you out of mischief." And so I go on writing books, though whether any good will come of doing so, I do not know)

Thus, irony and commitment, skepticism and a desire for certainty, scientific objectivity and deep passion were all intertwined in his nature. As we shall see, these complexities added their own shadings and tonality to his philosophical program and to its outcome.

Russell's Program

The project of making an inventory of the kinds of entities that collectively make up this world proved far more difficult than at the outset Russell thought it would be, and he changed his mind many times about what types of entity really belong in the inventory and what types, as a result of linguistic confusions, only seem to

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belong there and can therefore be eliminated from it. At the outset he thought the inventory consists in minds, material objects, universals, particulars, and the laws of logic. Subsequently, as we shall see, he dropped material objects from the inventory, and still later, minds. Particulars were replaced by qualities, and, as regards universals, he concluded that only one is indispensable, the universal called "similarity. "

,. All these shifts and changes in position make it difficult to give an account of

Russells views in short compass. For the most part, therefore, we shall concen'trate on a small number of persistent theses that together constitute the core of his program, rather than on the successive solutions that he from time to time put forward.

The first aspect of the program that Russell never abandoned was the distinction he and Moore had drawn between those entities about whose existence we are absolutely certain because we are directly aware of them and those entities of whose existence we are less certain because we are led to believe in their existence as a result of an inference. The former are "hard data"; the latter are "soft data." Though Russell changed his mind a number of times about what the things are of which we are directly aware, he never doubted that there is a distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.

A second element in the core of Russell's program was pluralism, and a third was the importance of analysis. These, of course, are central features of the analytic way of thought.

Although I have changed my opinion on various matters, ... I still hold to the doctrine of external relations and to pluralism, which is bound up with it. I still hold that an isolated truth may be quite true. I still hold that analysis is not falsification. I still hold that any proposition other than a tautology, if it is true, is true in virtue of a relation to fact, and that facts in general are independent of experience. I see nothing impossible in a universe devoid of experience .... On all these matters my views have not changed since I abandoned the teachings of Kant and Hegel.k

Analysis was important to Russell because it enabled him to reduce the number of kinds of independent entities and so keep the inventory small. His drive for certainty and his demand for simplicity made him want to show that a large number of different kinds of inferred entities ("soft data") could all be accounted for in terms of a few kinds of hard data. In other words, Russell was a strong advocate of the maxim called Occam's razor: "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity." 5

When, however, after 1910, I had done all that I intended to do as regards pure mathematics, I began to think about the physical world and,

5See Vol. II, p. 322.

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largely under Whitehead's influence, I was led to new applications of Occam's razor, to which I had become devoted by its usefulness in the philosophy of arithmetic .... As in all uses of Occam's razor, one was not obliged to deny the existence of the entities with which one dispensed, but one was enabled to abstain from ascertaining it. This had the advantage of diminishing the assumptions required for the interpretation of whatever branch of knowledge was in question.'

We may, then, call Occam's razor a fourth persistent element in Russell's program. A fifth was the conviction that ordinary language is so incoherent that it h~s badly misled philosophers: it disguises lOgical form. Here, of course, Russell di~fered from Moore, who held that most philosophical problems could be solved If only philosophers would return to ordinary language and to the ordinary beliefs expressed in that language. A sixth and final element in Russell's program-and another respect in which he differed from Moore-was his strategy of concentrating on logical form. A correct analysis, one that reveals logical form, will lead us directly to the solution of metaphysical problems and so bypass the great traditional question, "How do we know?" The contrast between Russell's logtcal orientation and Moore's epistemological orientation shows up very clearly in "My Present View of the World," written in 1959; but it had existed, really, from the start.

I reverse the process which has been common in philosophy since Kant. It has been common among philosophers to begin with how we know and proceed afterwards to what we know. I think this a mistake, because ... it tends to give to knowing a cosmic importance which it by no means deserves, and thus prepares the philosophical student for the belief that mind has some kind of supremacy over the non-mental universe, or even that the non-mental universe is nothing but a nightmare dreamt by mind in its unphilosophical moments. This point of view is completely remote from my imaginative picture of the cosmos. . . . There is no evidence of anything mental except in a tiny fragment of space-time, and the great processes of nebular and stellar evolution proceed according to laws in which mind plays no part.v'

Though Russell and Moore agreed on the importance of analysis, their views of what analysis is differed considerably, inasmuch as Russell came to philosophical analysis from mathematical lOgic and Moore did not.

Logical Analysis

In a lecture called "Logic as the Essence of Philosophy," given in Boston in 1914, Russell laid it down categorically that "every philosophical problem, when it is

LOGICAL ANALYSIS 175

subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which [I am) using the word, logical." But, he immediately added, "as the word 'logic' is never used in the same sense by two different philosophers, some explanation of what I mean by the word is indispensable."n

Logic, we may say, consists of two parts. The first part investigates what propositions are and what forms they may have; this part enumerates the different kinds of atomic propositions, of molecular propositions, of general propositions, and so on. The second part consists of certain supremely general propositions, which assert the truth of all propositions of certain forms .... The first part, which merely enumerates forms, is the more difficult, and philosophically the more important; and it is the recent progress in this first part, more than anything else, that has rendered a truly scientific discussion of many philosophical problems possible."

The traditional Aristotelian logic, Russell concluded, "put thought in fetters, while the new logic gives it wings."P An example of the "fetters" that Russell had in mind is the old logic's assumption that all judgments are predicative in form. This, as we have seen, committed philosophers in advance to a substantive metaphysics and limited them to two options, monism or pluralism-either ever~hing is an attribute of one substance or else there are many substances, each so mdependent of the others that interaction among them is impossible." As for the way the new lOgiC gives thought "wings," we shall give some examples of age-old philosophical problems that are solved by the new method of analysis.

THE THEORY OF TYPES

In our discussion of Frege we have already seen the interest of mathematicians in providing an anchor for mathematics in logic, instead of leaving it floating on a sea of vague and unanalyzed assumptions. Russell, who began life as a mathematician and who fully shared this Cartesian interest in certainty and clarity, was one of the first, and for some time one of the few, of Frege's contemporaries to recognize his genius and originality. The first step in giving mathematics a s~cure foundation was (to quote Russell's later description of the work of analysis) to show that "all traditional pure mathematics, including analytical geometry, may be regarded as consisting wholly of propositions about the natural numbers."q The second step was to show that "the entire theory of the natural num?ers c~~ld be derived from three primitive ideas and five primitive propositions m addition to those of pure logic. These three ideas and five propositions thus became, as it

"See p. 145. Russell had discovered the wayan assumption about logical form limits metaphysical options in the course of writing A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, which was published in 1900.

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were, hostages for the whole of traditional pure mathematics. If they could be defined and proved in terms of others, so could all pure mathematics." Here the operative words are "derived" and "defined." The next step was to show that the three primitive ideas (0, number, successor) are definable in terms of class, belonging to a class, and Similarity-all of which are purely lOgical notions.' Here is Russell's definition of number.

Many philosophers, when attempting to define number, are really setting to work to define plurality, which is quite a different thing. Number is what is characteristic of numbers, as man is what is characteristic of men. A plurality is not an instance of number, but of some particular number. A trio of men, for example, is an instance of the number 3, and the number 3 is an instance of number; but the trio is not an instance of number. . ..

Number is a way of bringing together certain collections, namely, those that have a given number of terms. We can suppose all couples to be in one bundle, all trios in another, and so on. In this way we obtain various bundles of collections, each bundle consisting of all the collections that have a certain number of terms. Each bundle is a class whose members are collections, i.e. classes; thus each is a class of classes ....

Two classes are said to be "similar" when there is a one-one relation which correlates the terms of the one class each with one term of the other class ....

We may thus use the notion of "similarity" to decide when two collections are to belong to the same bundle .... We want to make one bundle containing the class that has no members: this will be for the number O. Then we want a bundle of all the classes that have one member: this will be for the number 1, ... and so on. Given any collection, we can define the bundle it is to belong to as being the class of all those. collections that are "similar" to it. ...

We naturally think that the class of couples (for example) is something different from the number 2. But there is no doubt about the class of couples: it is indubitable and not difficult to define, whereas the number 2, in any other sense, is a metaphysical entity ... which must always remain elusive. Accordingly we set up the followtng definition:-

The number of a class is the class of all those classes that are similar to it ....

At the expense of a little oddity, this definition secures definiteness and indubitableness; and it is not difficult to prove that numbers so defined have all the properties that we expect numbers to have,">

7This account may be compared with Frege's (see pp. 149-50). Where Russell made the notion of "similarity" fundamental, Frege introduced the notion of "capable of being recognized again." Number, he said, is "an object that can be recognized again, though not

LOGICAL ANALYSIS 177

Russell was soon to realize that the "oddity" was much more serious than he had supposed. To define number as the class of all classes is to say that number is a class. Some classes are members of themselves (for instance, the class of all classes, being a class, is a member of itself), and some are not members of themselves (for instance, the class of all men, not being a man, is not a member of itself). But what about the class, W, of all classes that are not member of themselves? Is Wa member of itself? Unfortunately, however we answer, we contradict ourselves. Suppose we start by assuming that W is a member of itself. Then, being a member of itself, it cannot be a member of the class of classes that are not members of themselves. Therefore, contrary to assumption, W is not a member of itself. Very well, then, let us try the alternative- W is not a member of itself. But then, obviously, it is a member of the class of classes that are not members of themselves. Therefore, contrary to assumption, W is a member of itself. In a word, W is both a member of itself and not a member of itself, which is a contradiction.

Paradoxes of this kind have long been objects of curiosity and puzzlement.

Consider the following assertion: "This sentence is false." Since every assertion is either true or false, this assertion is either true or false. Suppose it to be false. Then, since what it asserts is that it is false, it is false that it is false-that is, it is true. Now suppose that it is true. Then, since, once again, what it asserts is that it is false, it is true that it is false-that is, it is false. In both cases, we have contradicted ourselves. Or consider the claim made by Epimenides the Cretan that all Cretans are liars. Suppose Epimenides is not making merely the dispositional assertion that Cretans tend to lie, but the strong claim that no Cretan ever tells the truth. Then we have to ask whether Epimenides is telling the truth or lying. If he is telling the truth when he says that Cretans always lie, then it is not the case that Cretans always lie, for Epimenides is a Cretan and he is telling the truth now. He had falsified his own statement that Cretans always lie. On the other hand, if he is lying when he says that Cretans always lie, then Cretans are not always liars. Once again he has falsified his statement.

Solution of the paradox about the class of classes that are not members of themselves was urgent if Russell's attempt to provide a lOgical foundation for mathematics was not to collapse." His solution was to introduce the notion of a hierarchy of types. There is, he said, a basic type of proposition that simply asserts

II

I

as a physical or even a merely spatial object, nor yet as one of which we can form a picture by means of our imagination .... The problem, therefore, was now this: to fix the sense of a numerical identity, that is, to express that sense without making use of number words," and so gave only a circular definition. This was accomplished by showing that "it is possible to correlate one to one the objects falling under a concept F with those falling under a concept G," and to define this possibility as numerical identity. Thus Russell and Frege made exactly parallel moves in defining number.

"The same was true for Frege, of course. Russell notified Frege of the paradox as soon as he discovered it, and Frege, who had just finished his Basic Laws of Arithmetic, could only remark, in an appendix, that nothing was more unfortunate for a writer "than to have one of the foundations of his edifice shaken after the work is finished."

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something, for instance, "S." Then there is a second level that asserts something of S, for instance, "S is true." Then there is a third level that asserts "(S is true) is true," and a fourth level that asserts "([S is true] is true) is true," and so on. Paradoxes arise only when these levels are not distinguished, and they are resolved as soon as we see that a generalization (S is true) about an assertion (S) is not at the level of those assertions it is about but is always at a higher level. Hence the proposition that makes an assertion about a class of assertions is not included in that class of assertions. For instance, there is a class of assertions made by Cretans. Let us assume that these assertions are all at, say, level n, and let us suppose that all them are lies. Then there is an assertion made by Epimenides about this class of assertions to the effect that they are lies. That assertion is at level n + 1, and so is not one of the assertions that are being characterized by him as being lies. A contradiction seemed to arise only because this assertion was supposed to be at the same level as that of the assertions it was about.

The following theory of symbolic logic recommended itself to me in the first instance by its ability to solve certain contradictions .... But the theory in question seems not wholly dependent on this indirect recommendation; it has also, if I am not mistaken, a certain consonance with common sense which makes it inherently credible. This, however, is not a merit upon which much stress should be laid; for common sense is far more fallible than it likes to believe. I shall therefore begin by stating some of the contradictions to be solved, and shall then show how the theory of lOgical types effects their solution.

(1) The oldest contradiction of the kind in question is the Epimenides. Epimenides the Cretan said that all Cretans were liars, and all other statements made by Cretans were certainly lies. Was this a lie? The simplest form of this contradiction is afforded by the man who says "I am lying"; if he is lying, he is speaking the truth, and vice versa.

(2) Let w be the class of all those classes which are not members of themselves. Then, whatever class x may be, "r is a w" is equivalent to "x is not an r." Hence, giving to x the value w, "w is a w" is equivalent to "w is not a u:" ...

In the above contradictions (which are merely selections from an indefinite number) there is a common characteristic, which we may describe as self-reference or reflexiveness. The remark of Epimenides must include itself in its own scope. If all classes, provided they are not members of themselves, are members of w, this must also apply to W; and similarly for the analogous relational contradiction .... Let us go through the contradictions one by one and see how this occurs.

(1) When a man says "I am lying," we may interpret his statement as:

"There is a proposition which I am affirming and which is false." All statements that "there is" so-and-so may be regarded as denying that the opposite is always true; thus "I am lying" becomes: "It is not true of

LOGICAL ANALYSIS 179

all propositions that either I am not affirming them or they are true"; in other words, "It is not true for all propositions p that if I affirm p, p is true." The paradox results from regarding this statement as affirming a proposition, which must therefore come within the scope of the statement. This, however, makes it evident that the notion of "all propositions" is illegitimate; for otherwise, there must be propositions (such as the above) which are about all propositions, and yet can not, without contradiction, be included among the propositions they are about. Whatever we suppose to be the totality of propositions, statements about this totality generate new propositions which, on pain of contradiction, must lie outside the totality. It is useless to enlarge the totality, for that equally enlarges the scope of statements about the totality. Hence there must be no totality of propositions, and "all propositions" must be a meaningless phrase ....

Thus all our contradictions have in common the assumption of a totality such that, if it were legitimate, it would at once be enlarged by new members defined in terms of itself.

This leads us to the rule: "Whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of the collection"; or, conversely: "If, provided a certain collection had a total, it would have members only definable in terms of that total, then the said collection has no total."9

We can now sum up our whole discussion. After stating some of the paradoxes oflogic, we found that all of them arise from the fact that an expression referring to all of some collection may itself appear to denote one of the collection; as, for example, "all propositions are either true or false" appears to be itself a proposition. We decided that, where this appears to occur, we are dealing with a false totality, and that in fact nothing whatever can significantly be said about all of the supposed collection. In order to give effect to this decision, we explained a doctrine of types of variables, proceeding upon the principle that any expression which refers to all of some type must, if it denotes anything, denote something of a higher type than that to all of which it refers.'

Although, as Russell remarked, "this theory of types raises a number of difficult philosophical questions concerning its interpretation,"u we will not go into these complications. Instead, we will conclude this discussion-from which we have omitted all of the symbolic logic and much else besides-a-by noting two points that bear on Russell's general philosophical position. First, just as with Moore's quite different method of analysis, the results of Russellian analysis are supposed to be completely evident once they are pointed out to us. For instance, that a class composed of individuals belongs to a different logical type from a class

9When I say that a collection has no total, I mean that statements about all its members are nonsense.