German philosophy and politics Part 1

German philosophy and politics.

by John Dewey.

PREFACE

The will of John Calvin McNair established a Foundation at the University of North Carolina upon which public lectures are to be given from time to time to the members of the University. This book contains three lectures which were given in February of this year upon this Foundation. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many courtesies enjoyed during my brief stay at Chapel Hill, the seat of the University.

J. D.

Columbia University, New York City, April, 1915.

I

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: THE TWO WORLDS

The nature of the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs is a troubled question. Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim in an alien world. A discovery that the belief in the influence of thought upon action is an illusion would leave men profoundly saddened with themselves and with the world. Were it not that the doctrine forbids any discovery influencing affairs--since the discovery would be an idea--we should say that the discovery of the wholly _ex post facto_ and idle character of ideas would profoundly influence subsequent affairs. The strange thing is that when men had least control over nature and their own affairs, they were most sure of the efficacy of thought. The doctrine that nature does nothing in vain, that it is directed by purpose, was not engrafted by scholasticism upon science; it formulates an instinctive tendency. And if the doctrine be fallacious, its pathos has a n.o.ble quality. It testifies to the longing of human thought for a world of its own texture. Yet just in the degree in which men, by means of inventions and political arrangements, have found ways of making their thoughts effective, they have come to question whether any thinking is efficacious. Our notions in physical science tend to reduce mind to a bare spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas has led many to regard intelligence as a deposit from history, not as a force in its making. We look backward rather than forward; and when we look forward we seem to see but a further unrolling of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, appears to reveal vast unexplored vistas of genuinely novel possibilities, turns out, upon careful study, to regard _intellect_ (everything which in the past has gone by the name of observation and reflection) as but an evolutionary deposit whose importance is confined to the conservation of a life already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or something akin to instinct, for the future:--as if there were hope and consolation in bidding us trust to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently direct or control.

I do not see that the school of history which finds Bergson mystic and romantic, which prides itself upon its hard-headed and scientific character, comes out at a different place. I refer to the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history in its extreme form--which, so its adherents tell us, is its only logical form. It is easy to follow them when they tell us that past historians have ignored the great part played by economic forces, and that descriptions and explanations have been correspondingly superficial. When one reflects that the great problems of the present day are those attending economic reorganization, one might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted confession that historians are really engaged in construing the past in terms of the problems and interests of an impending future, instead of reporting a past in order to discover some mathematical curve which future events are bound to describe. But no; our strictly scientific economic interpreters will have it that economic forces present an inevitable evolution, of which state and church, art and literature, science and philosophy are by-products. It is useless to suggest that while modern industry has given an immense stimulus to scientific inquiry, yet nevertheless the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century comes after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth. The dogma forbids any connection.

But when we note that Marx gave it away that his materialistic interpretation of history was but the Hegelian idealistic dialectic turned upside down, we may grow wary. Is it, after all, history we are dealing with or another philosophy of history? And when we discover that the great importance of the doctrine is urged upon us, when we find that we are told that the general recognition of its truth helps us out of our present troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we positively take heart. These writers do not seem to mean just what they say. Like the rest of us, they are human, and infected with a belief that ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy in the conduct of human affairs influencing the history which is yet to be.

I have, however, no intention of entering upon this controversy, much less of trying to settle it. These remarks are but preliminary to a consideration of some of the practical affiliations of portions of the modern history of philosophical thought with practical social affairs.

And if I set forth my own position in the controversy in question, the statement is frankly a personal one, intended to make known the prepossessions with which I approach the discussion of the political bearings of one phase of modern philosophy. I do not believe, then, that _pure_ ideas, or pure thought, ever exercised any influence upon human action. I believe that very much of what has been presented as philosophic reflection is in effect simply an idealization, for the sake of emotional satisfaction, of the brutely given state of affairs, and is not a genuine discovery of the practical influence of ideas. In other words, I believe it to be esthetic in type even when sadly lacking in esthetic form. And I believe it is easy to exaggerate the practical influence of even the more vital and genuine ideas of which I am about to speak.

But I also believe that there are no such things as _pure_ ideas or _pure_ reason. Every living thought represents a gesture made toward the world, an att.i.tude taken to some practical situation in which we are implicated. Most of these gestures are ephemeral; they reveal the state of him who makes them rather than effect a significant alteration of conditions. But at some times they are congenial to a situation in which men in ma.s.ses are acting and suffering. They supply a model for the att.i.tudes of others; they condense into a dramatic type of action.

They then form what we call the "great" systems of thought. Not all ideas perish with the momentary response. They are voiced and others hear; they are written and others read. Education, formal and informal, embodies them not so much in other men's minds as in their permanent dispositions of action. They are in the blood, and afford sustenance to conduct; they are in the muscles and men strike or retire. Even emotional and esthetic systems may breed a disposition toward the world and take overt effect. The reactions thus engendered are, indeed, superficial as compared with those in which more primitive instincts are embodied. The business of eating and drinking, buying and selling, marrying and being given in marriage, making war and peace, gets somehow carried on along with any and every system of ideas which the world has known. But how, and when and where and for what men do even these things is tremendously affected by the abstract ideas which get into circulation.

I take it that I may seem to be engaged in an emphatic urging of the obvious. However it may be with a few specialized schools of men, almost everybody takes it as a matter of course that ideas influence action and help determine the subsequent course of events. Yet there is a purpose in this insistence. Most persons draw the line at a certain kind of general ideas. They are especially p.r.o.ne to regard the ideas which const.i.tute philosophic theories as practically innocuous--as more or less amiable speculations significant at the most for moments of leisure, in moments of relief from preoccupation with affairs. Above all, men take the particular general ideas which happen to affect their own conduct of life as normal and inevitable. Pray what other ideas would any sensible man have? They forget the extent to which these ideas originated as parts of a remote and technical theoretical system, which by mult.i.tudes of non-reflective channels has infiltrated into their habits of imagination and behavior. An expert intellectual anatomist, my friends, might dissect you and find Platonic and Aristotelian tissues, organs from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Locke and Descartes, in the make-up of the ideas by which you are habitually swayed, and find, indeed, that they and other thinkers of whose names you have never heard const.i.tute a larger part of your mental structure than does the Calvin or Kant, Darwin or Spencer, Hegel or Emerson, Bergson or Browning to whom you yield conscious allegiance.

Philosophers themselves are naturally chiefly responsible for the ordinary estimate of their own influence, or lack of influence. They have been taken mostly at their own word as to what they were doing, and what for the most part they have pretended to do is radically different from what they have actually done. They are quite negligible as seers and reporters of ultimate reality, or the essential natures of things.

And it is in this aspect that they have mostly fancied seeing themselves. Their actual office has been quite other. They have told about nature and life and society in terms of collective human desire and aspiration as these were determined by contemporary difficulties and struggles.

I have spoken thus far as if the influence of general ideas upon action were likely to be beneficial. It goes against the grain to attribute evil to the workings of intelligence. But we might as well face the dilemma. What is called pure thought, thought freed from the empirical contingencies of life, would, even if it existed, be irrelevant to the guidance of action. For the latter always operates amid the circ.u.mstance of contingencies. And thinking which is colored by time and place must always be of a mixed quality. In part, it will detect and hold fast to more permanent tendencies and arrangements; in part, it will take the limitations of its own period as necessary and universal--even as intrinsically desirable.

The traits which give thinking effectiveness for the good give it also potency for harm. A physical catastrophe, an earthquake or conflagration, acts only where it happens. While its effects endure, it pa.s.ses away. But it is of the nature of ideas to be abstract: that is to say, severed from the circ.u.mstances of their origin, and through embodiment in language capable of operating in remote climes and alien situations. Time heals physical ravages, but it may only accentuate the evils of an intellectual catastrophe--for by no lesser name can we call a systematic intellectual error. To one who is professionally preoccupied with philosophy there is much in its history which is profoundly depressing. He sees ideas which were not only natural but useful in their native time and place, figuring in foreign contexts so as to formulate defects as virtues and to give rational sanction to brute facts, and to oppose alleged eternal truths to progress. He sees movements which might have pa.s.sed away with change of circ.u.mstance as casually as they arose, acquire persistence and dignity because thought has taken cognizance of them and given them intellectual names. The witness of history is that to think in general and abstract terms is dangerous; it elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they were born and charges them with we know not what menace for the future. And in the past the danger has been the greater because philosophers have so largely purported to be concerned not with contemporary problems of living, but with essential Truth and Reality viewed under the form of eternity.

In bringing these general considerations to a close, I face an embarra.s.sment. I must choose some particular period of intellectual history for more concrete ill.u.s.tration of the mutual relationship of philosophy and practical social affairs--which latter, for the sake of brevity, I term Politics. One is tempted to choose Plato. For in spite of the mystic and transcendental coloring of his thought, it was he who defined philosophy as the science of the State, or the most complete and organized whole known to man; it is no accident that his chief work is termed the "Republic." In modern times, we are struck by the fact that English philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill has been cultivated by men of affairs rather than by professors, and with a direct outlook upon social interests. In France, the great period of philosophy, the period of _les philosophes_, was the time in which were forged the ideas which connect in particular with the French Revolution and in general with the conceptions which spread so rapidly through the civilized world, of the indefinite perfectibility of humanity, the rights of man, and the promotion of a society as wide as humanity, based upon allegiance to reason.

Somewhat arbitrarily I have, however, selected some aspects of cla.s.sic German thought for my ill.u.s.trative material. Partly, I suppose, because one is piqued by the apparent challenge which its highly technical, professorial and predominantly _a priori_ character offers to the proposition that there is close connection between abstract thought and the tendencies of collective life. More to the point, probably, is the fact that the heroic age of German thought lies almost within the last century, while the creative period of continental thought lies largely in the eighteenth century, and that of British thought still earlier. It was Taine, the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas of the present day were produced in Germany between 1780 and 1830. Above all, the Germans, as we say, have philosophy in their blood. Such phrases generally mean something not about hereditary qualities, but about the social conditions under which ideas propagate and circulate.

Now Germany is the modern state which provides the greatest facilities for general ideas to take effect through social inculcation. Its system of education is adapted to that end. Higher schools and universities in Germany are really, not just nominally, under the control of the state and part of the state life. In spite of freedom of academic instruction when once a teacher is installed in office, the political authorities have always taken a hand, at critical junctures, in determining the selection of teachers in subjects that had a direct bearing upon political policies. Moreover, one of the chief functions of the universities is the preparation of future state officials. Legislative activity is distinctly subordinate to that of administration conducted by a trained civil service, or, if you please, bureaucracy. Membership in this bureaucracy is dependent upon university training. Philosophy, both directly and indirectly, plays an unusually large role in the training. The faculty of law does not chiefly aim at the preparation of practicing lawyers. Philosophies of jurisprudence are essential parts of the law teaching; and every one of the cla.s.sic philosophers took a hand in writing a philosophy of Law and of the State. Moreover, in the theological faculties, which are also organic parts of state-controlled inst.i.tutions, the theology and higher criticism of Protestant Germany have been developed, and developed also in close connection with philosophical systems--like those of Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel. In short, the educational and administrative agencies of Germany provide ready-made channels through which philosophic ideas may flow on their way to practical affairs.

Political public opinion hardly exists in Germany in the sense in which it obtains in France, Great Britain or this country. So far as it exists, the universities may be said to be its chief organs. They, rather than the newspapers, crystallize it and give it articulate expression. Instead of expressing surprise at the characteristic utterances of university men with reference to the great war, we should then rather turn to the past history in which the ideas now uttered were generated.

In an account of German intellectual history sufficiently extensive we should have to go back at least to Luther. Fortunately, for our purposes, what he actually did and taught is not so important as the more recent tradition concerning his peculiarly Germanic status and office. All peoples are proud of all their great men. Germany is proud of Luther as its greatest national hero. But while most nations are proud of their great men, Germany is proud of itself rather for producing Luther. It finds him as a Germanic product quite natural--nay, inevitable. A belief in the universal character of his genius thus naturally is converted into a belief of the essentially universal quality of the people who produced him.

Heine was not disposed by birth or temperament to overestimate the significance of Luther. But here is what he said:

"Luther is not only the greatest but the most _German_ man in our history... . He possessed qualities that we seldom see a.s.sociated--nay, that we usually find in the most hostile antagonism. He was at once a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action... . He was both a cold scholastic word-sifter and an inspired G.o.d-drunk prophet... . He was full of the awful reverence of G.o.d, full of self-sacrificing devotion to the Holy Spirit, he could lose himself entirely in pure spirituality. Yet he was fully acquainted with the glories of this earth; he knew how estimable they are; it was his lips that uttered the famous maxim--

"'Who loves not woman, wine and song, Remains a fool his whole life long.'

He was a complete man, I might say an absolute man, in whom there was no discord between matter and spirit. To call him a spiritualist would be as erroneous as to call him a sensualist... . Eternal praise to the man whom we have to thank for the deliverance of our most precious possessions."

And again speaking of Luther's work:

"Thus was established in Germany spiritual freedom, or as it is called, freedom of thought. Thought became a right and the decisions of reason legitimate."

The specific correctness of the above is of slight importance as compared with the universality of the tradition which made these ideas peculiarly Germanic, and Luther, therefore, a genuine national hero and type.

It is, however, with Kant that I commence. In Protestant Germany his name is almost always a.s.sociated with that of Luther. That he brought to consciousness the true meaning of the Lutheran reformation is a commonplace of the German historian. One can hardly convey a sense of the unique position he occupies in the German thought of the last two generations. It is not that every philosopher is a Kantian, or that the professed Kantians stick literally to his text. Far from it. But Kant must always be reckoned with. No position unlike his should be taken up till Kant has been reverently disposed of, and the new position evaluated in his terms. To scoff at him is fair sacrilege. In a genuine sense, he marks the end of the older age. He _is_ the transition to distinctively modern thought.

One shrinks at the attempt to compress even his leading ideas into an hour. Fortunately for me, few who read my attempt will have sufficient acquaintance with the tomes of Kantian interpretation and exposition to appreciate the full enormity of my offense. For I cannot avoid the effort to seize from out his highly technical writings a single idea and to label that his germinal idea. For only in this way can we get a clew to those general ideas with which Germany characteristically prefers to connect the aspirations and convictions that animate its deeds.

Adventuring without further preface into this field, I find that Kant's decisive contribution is the idea of a dual legislation of reason by which are marked off two distinct realms--that of science and that of morals. Each of these two realms has its own final and authoritative const.i.tution: On one hand, there is the world of sense, the world of phenomena in s.p.a.ce and time in which science is at home; on the other hand, is the supersensible, the noumenal world, the world of moral duty and moral freedom.

Every cultivated man is familiar with the conflict of science and religion, brute fact and ideal purpose, what is and what ought to be, necessity and freedom. In the domain of science causal dependence is sovereign; while freedom is lord of moral action. It is the proud boast of those who are Kantian in spirit that Kant discovered laws deep in the very nature of things and of human experience whose recognition puts an end forever to all possibility of conflict.

In principle, the discovery is as simple as its application is far-reaching. Both science and moral obligation exist. a.n.a.lysis shows that each is based upon laws supplied by one and the same reason (of which, as he is fond of saying, reason is the legislator); but laws of such a nature that their respective jurisdictions can never compete. The material for the legislation of reason in the natural world is sense. In this sensible world of s.p.a.ce and time, causal necessity reigns: such is the decree of reason itself. Every attempt to find freedom, to locate ideals, to draw support for man's moral aspirations in nature, is predoomed to failure. The effort of reason to do these things is contrary to the very nature of reason itself: it is self-contradictory, suicidal.

When one considers the extent in which religion has been bound up with belief in miracles, or departures from the order of nature; when one notes how support for morals has been sought in natural law; how morals have been tied up with man's natural tendencies to seek happiness and with consequences in the way of reward of virtue and punishment of vice; how history has been explained as a play of moral forces--in short, the extent to which both the grounds and the sanctions for morality have been sought within the time and s.p.a.ce world, one realizes the scope of the revolution wrought by Kant, provided his philosophy be true. Add to this the fact that men in the past have not taken seriously the idea that every existence in s.p.a.ce, every event in time, is connected by bonds of causal necessity with other existences and events, and consequently have had no motive for the systematic pursuit of science.

How is the late appearance of science in human history to be accounted for? How are we to understand the comparatively slight influence which science still has upon the conduct of life? Men, when they have not consciously looked upon nature as a scene of caprice, have failed to bring home to themselves that nature is a scene of the legislative activity of reason in the material of sense. This fact the Kantian philosophy brings home to man once for all; it brings it home not as a pious wish, nor as a precarious hope confirmed empirically here and there by victories won by a Galileo or a Newton, but as an indubitable fact necessary to the existence of any cognitive experience at all. The reign of law in nature is the work of the same reason which proceeds empirically and haltingly to the discovery of law here and there. Thus the acceptance of the Kantian philosophy not only frees man at a single stroke from superst.i.tion, sentimentalism and moral and theological romanticism, but gives at the same stroke authorization and stimulation to the detailed efforts of man to wrest from nature her secrets of causal law. What spa.r.s.e groups of men of natural science had been doing for the three preceding centuries, Kant proclaimed to be the manifestation of the essential const.i.tution of man as a knowing being.

For those who accept the Kantian philosophy, it is accordingly the _magna charta_ of scientific work: the adequate formulation of the const.i.tution which directs and justifies their scientific inquiries. It is a truism to say that among the Germans as nowhere else has developed a positive reverence for science. In what other land does one find in the organic law mention of Science, and read in its const.i.tution an express provision that "Science and its teaching are free"?

But this expresses only half of Kant's work. Reason is itself supersensible. Giving law to the material of sense and so const.i.tuting nature, it is in itself above sense and nature, as a sovereign is above his subjects. The supersensible world is thus a more congenial field for its legislative activity than the physical world of s.p.a.ce and time. But is any such field open to human experience? Has not Kant himself closed and locked the gates in his a.s.sertion that the entire operation of man's knowing powers is confined to the realm of sense in which causal necessity dominates? Yes, as far as knowledge is concerned. No, as far as moral obligation is concerned. The fact of duty, the existence of a categorical command to act thus and so, no matter what the pressure of physical surroundings or the incitation of animal inclinations, is as much a fact as the existence of knowledge of the physical world. Such a command cannot proceed from nature. What is cannot introduce man to what ought to be, and thus impose its own opposite upon him. Nature only enmeshes men in its relentless machine-like movement. The very existence of a command in man to act for the sake of what ought to be--no matter what actually is--is thus of itself final proof of the operation of supersensible reason within human experience: not, indeed, within theoretical or cognitive experience, but within moral experience.

The moral law, the law of obligation, thus proceeds from a source in man above reason. It is token of his membership as a moral being in a kingdom of absolute ends above nature. But it is also directed to something in man which is equally above nature: it appeals to and demands freedom. Reason is incapable of anything so irrational, so self-contradictory, as imposing a law of action to which no faculty of action corresponds. The freedom of the moral will is the answer to the unqualified demand of duty. It is not open to man to accept or reject this truth as he may see fit. It is a principle of reason which is involved in every exercise of reason. In denying it in name, man none the less acknowledges it in fact. Only men already sophisticated by vice who are seeking an excuse for their viciousness ever try to deny, even in words, the response which freedom makes to the voice of duty. Since, however, freedom is an absolute stranger to the natural and sensible world, man's possession of moral freedom is the final sign and seal of his membership in a supersensible world. The existence of an ideal or spiritual realm with its own laws is thus certified to by the fact of man's own citizenship within it. But, once more, this citizenship and this certification are solely moral. Scientific or intellectual warrant for it is impossible or self-contradictory, for science works by the law of causal necessity with respect to what is, ignorant of any law of freedom referring to what should be.

With the doors to the supersensible world now open, it is but a short step to religion. Of the negative traits of true religion we may be sure in advance. It will not be based upon intellectual grounds. Proofs of the existence of G.o.d, of the creation of nature, of the existence of an immaterial soul from the standpoint of knowledge are all of them impossible. They transgress the limits of knowledge, since that is confined to the sensible world of time and s.p.a.ce. Neither will true religion be based upon historic facts such as those of Jewish history or the life of Jesus or the authority of a historic inst.i.tution like a church. For all historic facts as such fall within the realm of time which is sensibly conditioned. From the points of view of natural theology and historic religions Kant was greeted by his contemporaries as the "all-shattering." Quite otherwise is it, however, as to moral proofs of religious ideas and ideals. In Kant's own words: "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge of G.o.d, freedom and immortality in order to find a place for faith"--faith being a moral act.

Then he proceeds to reinterpret in terms of the sensuous natural principle and the ideal rational principle the main doctrines of Lutheran Protestantism. The doctrines of incarnation, original sin, atonement, justification by faith and sanctification, while baseless literally and historically, are symbols of the dual nature of man, as phenomenal and noumenal. And while Kant scourges ecclesiastical religions so far as they have relied upon ceremonies and external authority, upon external rewards and punishments, yet he ascribes transitional value to them in that they have symbolized ultimate moral truths. Although dogmas are but the external vesture of inner truths, yet it may be good for us "to continue to pay reverence to the outward vesture since that has served to bring to general acceptance a doctrine which really rests upon an authority within the soul of man, and which, therefore, needs no miracle to commend it."

It is a precarious undertaking to single out some one thing in German philosophy as of typical importance in understanding German national life. Yet I am committed to the venture. My conviction is that we have its root idea in the doctrine of Kant concerning the two realms, one outer, physical and necessary, the other inner, ideal and free. To this we must add that, in spite of their separateness and independence, the primacy always lies with the inner. As compared with this, the philosophy of a Nietzsche, to which so many resort at the present time for explanation of what seems to them otherwise inexplicable, is but a superficial and transitory wave of opinion. Surely the chief mark of distinctively German civilization is its combination of self-conscious idealism with unsurpa.s.sed technical efficiency and organization in the varied fields of action. If this is not a realization in fact of what is found in Kant, I am totally at loss for a name by which to characterize it. I do not mean that conscious adherence to the philosophy of Kant has been the cause of the marvelous advances made in Germany in the natural sciences and in the systematic application of the fruits of intelligence to industry, trade, commerce, military affairs, education, civic administration and industrial organization. Such a claim would be absurd. But I do mean, primarily, that Kant detected and formulated the direction in which the German genius was moving, so that his philosophy is of immense prophetic significance; and, secondarily, that his formulation has furnished a banner and a conscious creed which in solid and definite fashion has intensified and deepened the work actually undertaken.

In bringing to an imaginative synthesis what might have remained an immense diversity of enterprises, Kantianism has helped formulate a sense of a national mission and destiny. Over and above this, his formulation and its influence aids us to understand why the German consciousness has never been swamped by its technical efficiency and devotion, but has remained self-consciously, not to say self-righteously, idealistic. Such a work as Germany has undertaken might well seem calculated to generate attachment to a positivistic or even materialistic philosophy and to a utilitarian ethics. But no; the teaching of Kant had put mechanism forever in its subordinate place at the very time it inculcated devotion to mechanism in its place. Above and beyond as an end, for the sake of which all technical achievements, all promotion of health, wealth and happiness, exist, lies the realm of inner freedom, of the ideal and the supersensible. The more the Germans accomplish in the way of material conquest, the more they are conscious of fulfilling an ideal mission; every external conquest affords the greater warrant for dwelling in an inner region where mechanism does not intrude. Thus it turns out that while the Germans have been, to employ a catchword of recent thought, the most technically pragmatic of all peoples in their actual conduct of affairs, there is no people so hostile to the spirit of a pragmatic philosophy.

The combination of devotion to mechanism and organization in outward affairs and of loyalty to freedom and consciousness in the inner realm has its obvious attractions. Realized in the common temper of a people it might well seem invincible. Ended is the paralysis of action arising from the split between science and useful achievements on one side and spiritual and ideal aspirations on the other. Each feeds and reinforces the other. Freedom of soul and subordination of action dwell in harmony.

Obedience, definite subjection and control, detailed organization is the lesson enforced by the rule of causal necessity in the outer world of s.p.a.ce and time in which action takes place. Unlimited freedom, the heightening of consciousness for its own sake, sheer reveling in n.o.ble ideals, the law of the inner world. What more can mortal man ask?