Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience/The Explanation of Experience
THE EXPLANATION OF EXPERIENCE
I
In the work of describing experience, by far the greater part of the subject-matter belongs to the outer world. The complete program of the undertaking to describe all experience would be the classification of the sciences, which provide the tasks for many minds working together.
But the fellow man is more than a cooperator in description. He has the peculiar function of providing the basis for validity. We are accustomed to say that scientific conclusions must have universal validity, by which we mean acceptability to all observers who care to verify the conclusions, or to such a majority of them that the dissenters can be ignored.
But in explanations of experience, which are of an ultimate type, the fellow being appears to occupy a somewhat different position. In philosophy, the postulate is still made, no doubt, that agreement between different observers of the given situation is possible, philosophical discussion would have no meaning without it; but practically such agreement is not expected, certainly not from all observers of the situation, even though they be all pronounced entirely competent. Yet every philosophy undertakes to be valid, and expects to secure some measure of validity whether it meet with approval or not.
Science aims at universally verifiable descriptions of phenomena. The question whether the description is a valid one is equivalent to the question whether the description fulfills the scientific purpose, whether it is universally verifiable. Metaphysics, on the other hand, asks the question, What is reality? What is the ultimate ground of phenomena? What is the ultimate cause of experience? The question. Does reality consist of matter with a molecular structure? does not mean, Is the concept of the molecule so useful as to lead to universally verifiable descriptions of phenomena? The question as to the molecular constitution of reality is a question which seeks not acquaintance with phenomena, but a knowledge of something underlying phenomena, and expressing itself through phenomena. The question as to the validity of a metaphysical judgment is a question whether the judgment fulfills the metaphysical purpose or not, and this purpose is not universal verifiability, but a true report about the ultimate ground and cause of experience.
Of course the actual fate of philosophical systems depends upon the degree to which they can win the other type of validity, by commending themselves to students of philosophical problems. Every philosophy seeks this type of validity and is fortunate to the degree that it secures it, but the validity it aims at is of another type, although practically this validity may have to submit to the same test as the other one.
Philosophical explanations are sure to be determined by the aspect of experience that seems most significant, most interesting. Those who are chiefly interested in the natural and exact sciences, and charmed with the conceptual regularity and order which is characteristic of large regions in those sciences, have usually defined reality from the point of view of this prevailing interest. The goal of natural science as described by Helmholtz is an expression of this point of view.
But explanation from the side of the interest in natural science is giving way to description,[1] Statements like that of Helmholtz, quoted above, sound already a little antiquated. Explanations of experience are, therefore, coming more to be determined by the other chief factor in the natural view of the world, namely, the fellow being. Reality must be so understood as to be an adequate ground for the social aspect of experience. From the side of this interest, the dramatic aspects of human experience and human history are cared for. Moral and esthetic experience, the problem of evil, personality, are important headings. But the explanation which takes special account of these interests must not do too great violence to the other feature of the natural Weltbegriff, the outer world. The significance of my fellow depends largely upon the fact that we are supposed to have common interests and common objects, and the sphere for these must be preserved.
II
We can approach the explanation of experience by an indefinite number of ways. Every metaphysic is an attempt to explain experience. It seeks not to describe phenomena, but to get behind phenomena to some ultimate ground, and the experience to be explained presents as its most characteristic feature the cognition of apparently transcendent objects. This character, which comes out most frankly in the naive realism which I have called the natural view of the world, appears to determine metaphysics more than any other character of experience. Sir W. Hamilton testifies to this character in the following vigorous statement. "We are immediately conscious in perception of an ego and a non-ego, known together and known in contrast to each other. This is the fact of the duality of consciousness. It is clear and manifest. When I concentrate my attention in the simplest act of perception, I return from my observation with the most irresistible conviction of two facts, or rather two branches of the same fact; that I am and that something different from me exists."[2] "The ego and non-ego, mind and matter, are given together." This fact is 'clear and manifest.'
I am not now asking whether there is any truth in these statements. I simply call attention to the fact that when a philosopher harks back to the plain testimony of consciousness, this is what he harks back to. I think Hamilton was prevented by a philosophical theory from going quite far enough. Certainly the ego which normal consciousness testifies to in 'the simplest act of perception* is usually just the body, and if one is very much interested in something objective, the perception of the ego will not form part of the experience at all. Mill, although unable to be quite so frank as Hamilton, still retains the transcendent object as something whose existence is too evident to be questioned. "I believe that Calcutta exists," he says, "though I do not perceive it, and that it would still exist if every percipient inhabitant were suddenly to leave the place or be struck dead."[3] Calcutta would still be real under these circumstances, for it would remain 'a permanent possibility of sensation.' If the inhabitants return or come to life again, they will perceive Calcutta, and Calcutta was there all the time waiting to be perceived. So Mill reflects.
This 'possibility of sensation' is the classic entrance to the idealism which claims to explain experience in a really profound and consistent way. What, it is asked, is an object of experience while it is mere possibility of sensation? What kind of a positive fact is Calcutta while it is waiting to be perceived? It appears to be taken for granted that it is all the time a 'possibility' of experience, but that if it is really anything at all, it must be something more. The same sturdy instinctive realism which both Hamilton and Mill represent, appears in this request for a further account of the possibility of sensation.
Suppose one were to reply that not even the possibility of sensation exists in the sense in which Mill spoke of it. One could answer, experimentally at least, that so long as Calcutta is not perceived or thought about by human minds, Calcutta simply does not exist. One who made this answer would, no doubt, hasten to add that of course he did not really believe it, that he suggested this reply in order to observe what the logical results might be. And as for the few who might make this reply in all sincerity, some of these would save the transcendent character of Calcutta by declaring it to be an object in an eternal experience, and the others would, I am sure, feel that something was wrong, and that the transcendent character should be gotten back somehow. The 'dualistic discontent' makes itself felt when we undertake to define the world as a series of dissolving views. And yet why not? That is the way the world flows by before us. One view melts into another with enough consistency and a good deal of predictability.
But we will none of such sophistry. The changing view is all characterized as more than view. The realistic bias so characteristic of our human nature demands permanence and stability. Moreover, one might feel obliged to be consistent and thoroughgoing, and then our fellows would dissolve away together with the views to which they belong, and against this we set a subborn face. But the material outer world is probably able to take care of itself even without the help of the fellow being; our reality- functions see to it that the world remains, even in idealism, a transcendent object, so far as any one finite mind is concerned.
The transcendence-character must somehow be preserved, for it is preserving it to translate it into something permanent in an experience, which is outside the limits of what I recognize just now as mine. This motive is contributed by the outer world character of experience. Another important motive there is in the fellow being, not so much in the external aspect he presents by appearing in the outer world, as by his being a fellow. As such, he is the condition of all our ethical attitudes, and of everything that gives the deeper value and significance to life. His presence lays a significant demand upon the outer world. External objects must be the same objects for him and for me. That is made the test of their reality as external objects. But most important of all is it that the fellow being remain a transcendent object. Yet how, then, can there be one and the same outer world for us both? It would seem as though his outer world must exist in a different space from mine and in a different time. In fact, it seems as though in one universe there were room for only one self. This is really, it seems to me, the clinching argument for idealism, and it is one that the critics of that doctrine, and those who prove to us the actual transcendent existence of the world, hardly notice. These philosophers take all their illustrations from a one-object-one-subject relation, whereas the case of realism can not be proved without making clear the one-object-two-subjects relation.
The idealist is prepared to handle this difficulty, by declaring that the relation of one object to two subjects is a mythical relation. Of course there is in one universe room for only one self, and when your experience and mine and the object are all abs<jrbed into this absolute experience, we get the one-subject-one-object relation back again. Do we indeed know of any experience analogous to the absorption of the experience of me and my fellows into one, in such a way as to comprehend them both, yet leave to each its individuality? On a small and trivial scale, we do. If I seize some object, a book, with both hands, the book which I grasp with my right hand is the same book as the one I grasp with my left. There is for the experience of grasping simply the one experienced object, because the touch-sensations of both hands, and the visual elements in the total perception are all brought together in one experience. For the same reason, the space through which my right hand swings is a part of the same space as that through which my left hand swings. In cases of alternating personality, in what intelligible empirical sense is the world of one of these selves the same world as that of the other self? The illustration of grasping the book shows that any external object can be kept one by defining it as the object within one experience. This logical necessity contradicts, of course, the plain testimony of pure experience, and as pure experience is the sole ground of good theory, and as logical contradictions proceed from definitions, one is justified in suspecting that the idealistic implications are begged somewhere in a definition. But realism can certainly have no logical standing until this petitio is pointed out.
But whatever means we resort to to explain experience, we adopt some concept and attach to it the existential predicate and seek thus to deproblematize the situation. We are seeking an experience with the fidential-character, the character of 'Heimhaftiakeit,' as Avenarius called it, and, in fact, the presence of ultimate problems is often testified to in language that breathes an acute tone of 'Heimweh.' The search for truth is indeed the search for a satisfied will, but the truth which we find may remain the truth for ten minutes or for a lifetime.
But science, too, seeks to deproblematize a situation by means of a concept, only science does not attach the existential predicate. Just in this matter of the existential judgment, metaphysics goes beyond science. Science does not deny that there is an ultimate truth, but she does not claim to have found it. She is very likely to say that it can not be found. Science has a system of concepts of which the necessary consequences are images of the actual effects and expressions of the ultimate ground of things. Science says that phenomena are as if reality were thus and so, as if the world of matter had a molecular structure, as if space were filled with a vibrating ether, and, with the attention directed upon experience of another sort, she might say, as if each finite human life were a moment in an absolute life which comprised all of reality.
If such a concept as the Absolute were a useful concept in getting a synthetic sense of experience of a certain type, or in helping to describe it, or in making one a more sensitive and appreciative observer of this experience, then the concept of the Absolute would have precisely the same validity as the concept of the atom. Both could dwell side by side in science very well.
Yet anxious ones cry out, "But the Veritas! The reality back of phenomena! The something which completes my fragmentary experience and answers my questions! No mere acquaintance with phenomena, however wide, can be to me a substitute for this deeper insight."
What, precisely, are the motives because of which we search for something back of phenomena and demand a deeper insight? But before taking up this question let us recall what actual truth and error appear to be, that experience, namely, which is called the possession of truth, and that experience which is called the possession of error.
There is no test of truth other than the removal of the problematic character from the content about which a true judgment is desired,— and the possession of truth, as a case of experience, can be in no wise distinguished from the possession of a deproblematized content. If this content happen to break out into a problem again, then the temporary peace and satisfaction of the will must be pronounced an error. And then another truth may be found, or the same truth may turn out to be true after all. Is a given conclusion a valid one? The question is an inquiry whether the conclusion has got rid of the problem-character and continues deproblematized. 'Yes, the conclusion is valid,' means that the conclusion has not yet shown itself to be unsatisfactory. Or, 'No, that conclusion was an error,' means that the conclusion in question has lost the character of sameness which made it appear as a true account of certain facts, the same as the facts, in some respects, and has taken on a quality of otherness, so that one now has to observe, 'No, the facts are certainly not like that, it was an erroneous account of them. ' The possibility of error thus means the possibility of experience which shall include in it the contradiction of a previous cognitive experience. To say that error is or is not possible in any given case is to predict something about the future.
If one simply observes the situation one is obliged, I think, to report it somewhat as I have done. Of course it takes an effort to mean by truth, error, and validity merely these characters of experience. The primitive realism which is such a sturdy growth within us causes us to try to mean something very different by truth, error and validity. But when we get these facts into our experience, what we have is experience, with the fidential character.
When we read the pages of certain philosophers of the past we can not doubt that to thera some objects were assured experienced facts, which to-day have to be proved by elaborate dialectical methods. Thus Descartes appeals to his idea of God as to the idea of something that could not possibly be doubted in any moment of sanity. Spinoza gives the impression even more strongly of being a man in whose experience God is an established and simply unquestionable reality. He could probably no more have doubted the existence of God than the 'plain man' doubts the existence of the outer world.
It seems hardly possible that the concept of God should appear in modern philosophical literature with the complete fidential character which it appears to have had with Descartes and Spinoza. But that does not mean that we have learned to question the existence of a ground of things back of phenomena. Philosophy still regards the visible and tangible world as a secondary quality of endless variety. We speak of change and the necessity of some ground of change, of fragmentary experience and the necessity of its completion, of thought and its 'Other' which exists even now before it is found as deproblematized experience.
As a mere suggestion, a hint, I recall the way in which Avenarius accounts for Idealism as a prevailing point of view in philosophy. The suggestion is that the search for an ultimate ground of experi^ ence, especially a spiritual ground with dramatic consequences, is a stirring of the old animistic habit within us.
But as to the motives which cause metaphysics to pass beyond science and attach the existential predicate to the useful concept, these may be many and different. We still hear now and then that the existence of God is assured in the necessity of a first cause. In reputable philosophical literature we do not now often meet with the concept of an efficient cause of the world, but the idea of a final cause lurks in all teleological metaphysics. The historical influence of the Christian conception of God would provide one motive for still seeking a ground of phenomena.
The intellectual interest in the dialectical problems, the exercise of thinking and of imagination, which is always attractive, and the sense of being engaged in very important undertakings, is another motive or group of motives.
As a statement of a third motive, I will quote a sentence from Professor Ladd's work.[4] "The construction of a tenable and comforting philosophy is a work of good-will; it is a beneficent deed, a gift of blessing to humanity." And the dedication: "To those who have the faith of reason in its strivings to know the deeper truth of things."
Now I would not be understood as not sharing in the faith of reason or in the longing for the existential judgment. But at present it interests me to stand aside and view the varied spectacle of philosophical effort. Experience itself in its diversity, the description of experience, and the explanation of experience, help to make up that spectacle. Even he who enters eagerly into the work of description or explanation can but observe the situation before him and report what he can see. If he does more, he mutilates the facts which he has undertaken to describe in their integrity. And there is much to suggest that the philosopher is not the mere spectator nearly so often as he should be.
It is sometimes said that the function of idealism is to make men feel at home in the world. Some lines of Professor Seth are such an apt testimony on this point that I can not resist quoting them: "Metaphysically, idealism is opposed most ordinarily to materialism; in the widest sense it is the opposite of what may be called the mechanical and atheistic view of the universe, whatever special form that may take. Is self-conscious thought with its ideal ends,—the True, the Beautiful, the Good,—the self-realizing End that works in changes and makes it evolution? or are these but the casual outcome of a mechanical system?—a system in its ultimate essence indifferent to the results which in its gyrations it has unwittingly created, and will as unwittingly destroy? Is thought or matter the prius? Is the ultimate essence and cause of all things only 'dust that rises up and is lightly laid again,' or is it the Eternal Love of Dante's Vision,—'the love that moves the sun and the other stars'? That is the fundamental metaphysical antithesis. If we embrace the one alternative, however we may clothe it in detail, we recognize the universe as our home, and we may have a religion; if we embrace the other, then the spirit of man is indeed homeless in an alien world."[5]
We have here, I think, a sufficient explanation of the longing for the existential judgment. The existential judgment is needed to deproblematize the situation. Of course the emotional need is not always stated quite so frankly, but it frequently appears in a philosophy as its efficient cause. The philosophy of Spinoza is as clearly an adjustment to the emotional values of his world as were the deeds of Saint Francis. Even Kant, who nearly always displays the ideal philosophical temper, lets one see that his course is determined by his valuation of moral character. Fichte is evidently, in all his work, responding to a moral enthusiasm, defining reality so as to adapt it to emotional needs.
Not all metaphysicians, however, have been determined in their philosophy by religious cravings. Many an imagination loves to play with cosmic themes, and what it produces is a work of art.
Metaphysics is, like all knowledge laboriously attained, the response which has been made to demands for cognitive satisfaction. The demand is, of course, the expression of a temperament and may show a religious or an esthetic character. It may show, too, what we are obliged to call the purely intellectual character, where the cognitive satisfaction which is sought is a deli«;lit in knowing, in rt'lating ideas, in building up an ideal system of thought which charms by its order and completeness. A superb example of this type is Aristotle.
I ask above for the motives which makes metaphysics insist upon the existential judgment, and I have indicated certain emotional needs which demand this satisfaction. Actually, however, the existential judgment is so characteristic of metaphysics because until very recently it was equally characteristic of science, and the motives which are driving it out of science have not yet made themselves felt in philosophy. This critical attitude in science has not yet become very general, but we can not doubt that it will become rapidly authoritative. A point of view which leaves to science full scope to carry on its tasks, and defines those tasks in such a way as to eliminate metaphysics, or at least to reduce the metaphysical presuppositions to a minimum, is sure to be most welcome. And this point of view, when it comes to be regarded as the only point of view for science, when the definition of the goal of science as the knowledge of the unchanging original causes of phenomena comes to be looked back upon as something quite antiquated and outgrown, may have important consequences for metaphysics.
Metaphysics, as we saw, is the response to interests of rather different types. It undertakes to satisfy certain emotional needs of a religious or semireligious character, and it ministers to the purely intellectual and esthetic delight in noble ideal constructions. To the former of these two classes of interest, the existential judgment must always be indispensable. It is not evident why it should be indispensable to the latter. The latter type of mind is ever admitted to be the more scientific of the two. And supposing that the concepts of science, the atom, the molecule, the ether, etc., are recognized and claimed as nothing but conceptual instruments for extending our acquaintance with nature, and the idea of the atom or of the ether as an image of 'reality' is remembered as a notion surprisingly naive, is it not altogether likely that minds of the purely intellectual type, which devote themselves to problems about an ultimate reality, may feel disposed to regard their concepts as science regards hers?
For the example of science in such ways is authoritative. Metaphysics has become very eager to be 'scientific,' in all possible ways, and there is no reason to suppose that the methods of science will be less alluring than formerly.
Well,—if this happens (and the new epistemology of science makes it seem not unlikely)—if it comes to pass that the concepts of God, the Absolute, the Unknowable, the concept of reality itself as something distinguished from appearance, should be looked upon as working hypotheses, then a long step would have been taken toward the clarified experience which Avenarius sought to describe as the limit of the evolution of experience.
But then these concepts must do one of two things. They must either (1) lead to new observations by proving convenient instruments of description, for a working hypothesis must work, or (2) they must attempt to describe something which is confessedly removed from all possible observation. In the former case metaphysics becomes a natural science, in the latter case it is difficult to see that metaphysics remains anything at all. For that which is removed from all possible observation is no longer accepted without question as existing, and this concept of reality is itself a working hypothesis used, it may be said, to make phenomena intelligible, by which is meant, however, to make them dramatically interesting.
But, it may be said, there will still be those who refuse to surrender the existential judgment. They will keep metaphysics true to its ancient function, the search for reality behind appearance.
No doubt they will, but it is a question of how much honor will be paid to their literature. Of course speculations as to the future are generally idle, but we have here certain definite data. We have, I think, the beginning of a new epistemological situation of a perfectly statable kind, and we have a large amount of experience showing the recent growing dependence of philosophy upon the special sciences. This dependence is growing ever greater. See such definitions of philosophy as that given by Wundt, in which philosophy is expected to follow behind the special sciences, collecting, organizing and criticizing their results. And if the existential predicate as applied to the working concept comes to be regarded by scientists as an evidence of medieval simplicity, it will be but natural, the prestige of science being what it is, and growing ever greater, that this new epistemology should be adopted by the more critical students of philosophy. More and more the search for reality behind appearance would seem like a monkish dream.
This might be a great catastrophe for human knowledge and experience, but nature permits catastrophes.
And if it should come to pass? Well,— we should then have science and our natural view of the world.
To put it as briefly as possible, science is interested in contents, and aims at getting more content. The existential predicate adds nothing to the definable content, therefore science has no interest in the existential predicate. By what interest then is the existential predicate demanded? Not by an interest in contents that are in any way statable, therefore by an interest in contents that are unutterable. For it can not be denied that the predicate of existence does enrich the total content, but it does so in unutterable ways. And the interest in the unutterable is a purely emotional interest.
The relation between science and metaphysics as above described is strikingly like that situation in the Middle Ages which brought forth the doctrine of the twofold truth. This doctrine was first stated in the interest of religion, but its effect was to liberate scientific speculation, and to protect religion so well that theology occupied, more and more, a position of dignified but somewhat lonesome aloofness. If now we are told that a proposition can be true in science and false in metaphysics, and vice versa, one really can not be blamed for detecting in the 'fringe' a feeling of prophecy.