RELATIVISM
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RELATIVISM
subject to indefinite modification before they can
become embodied in the one coherent system of
ideal truth (Joachim and Hegelians generally), or
else (b) because truth is conceived as a peculiar prop-
erty of ideas whereby they enable us to deal with our
environment more or less successfully (Pragmatists) .
A tliird affirms moral worth to be essentially relative
and to emerge only when motives are in conflict
(Martineau). (See Ethics, Pragmatism, Truth.)
The term Relativism, however, is more commonly
applied to theories which treat of the nature of knowl-
edge and reality, and it is in this sense that we shall
discuss it here.
The Relativity of Knowledge. — Whatever may be the real and primary significance of Protagoras's famous dictum, "Man is the measure of all things" {&vdpoiiro$ fi^rpov wdvTwv Kai TWV ivTuv /cal tCjv fxri bvTuv^
Plato, "Thest.", 152 A; in "Mind", XIX, 473, Mr. Gillespie maintains that the dictum has an ethical significance), it has ordinarily been understood in an epistemological sense, as a statement of the relativity of all human knowledge, of the impossibility of pene- trating beyond the appearances of things. And this interpretation is in conformity with the general tendency of the age in which Protagoras lived. Heraclitus's doctrine of a perpetual and universal flux, Parmenides's view that plurality and change are but the semblance of reality, futile attempts to ex- plain the nature of sense-perception and to account for illusion and false judgment, together with a dawning consciousness (evident in Democritus) of a subjective factor in the perceptual process — all this tended to make philosophers distrust the deliverances of their senses and rely solely upon reason or in- telligence. Reflection, however, soon made it clear that rational theories were no more consistent than the data of perceptional experience, and the inevi- table result of this was that the Relativism of Pro- tagoras and his followers eventually passed into the Scepticism of the Middle Academy (see Scepticism).
Modern Relativism, on the other hand, though it too tends to pass into Scepticism, was in its origin a reaction against Scepticism. To dispel the doubt which Hume had cast on the validity of universal judgments of a synthetic character, Kant proposed that we should regard them as arising not from any apprehension of the nature of real things, but from the constitution of our own minds. He maintained that the mental factor in experience, hitherto neglected, is really of paramount importance: to it are due space, time, the categories, and every form of synthesis. It is the formal element arising from the structure of the mind itself that constitutes knowl- edge and makes it what it is. Hume erred in sup- posing that knowledge is an attempt to copy reality. It is nothing of the kind. The world as we know it, the world of experience, is essentially relative to the human mind, whence it derives all that it has of unity, order, and form. The obvious objection to a Relativism of this kind is the outstanding thing-in- itself, which is not, and can never become, an object of knowledge. We are thus shut up with a world of appearances, the nature of which is constituted by our minds. What reality is in itself we can never know. Yet this is, as Kant admitted, precisely what we wish to know. The fascination of Kant's philos- ophy lay in the fact that it gave full value to the activity, as opposed to the passivity or receptivity of mind; but the unknowable Ding-an-sich was an abomination, fatal alike to its consistency and to its power to solve the problem of human cognition. It must be got rid of at all costs; and the simplest plan was to abolish it altogether, thus leaving us with a reality know.able because knowledge and reality are one, and in the making of it mind, human or absolute, plays an overwhchiiiuglv important part.
The Relativity of Reality, which thus took the
place of the relativity of knowledge, has been vari-
ously conceived. Sometimes, as with Fichte and Hegel,
Nature is opposed to Mind or Spirit as a twofold
aspect of one and the same ground — of Intelligence,
of Will, or even of unconscious Mind. Sometimes, as
with Green and Bradley, Reality is conceived as one
organic whole that somehow manifests itself in finite
centres of experience, which strive to reproduce in
themselves Reality as it is, but fail so utterly that
what they assert, even when contradictory, must be
held somehow to be true — true like other truths in that
they attempt to express Reality, but are subject to
indefinite reinterpretation before they can become
identical with the real to which they refer. Still
more modern Absolutists (e. g., Mackenzie and Tay-
lor), appreciating to some extent the inadequacy
of this view, have restored some sort of independence
to the physical order, which, says Taylor (Elem. of
Metaph., 198), " does not depend for its existence upon
the fact of my actually perceiving it," but "does de-
pend upon my perception for all the qualities and re-
lations which I find in it". In other words, the
"what" of the real world is relative to our perceiving
organs (ibid.); or, as a recent writer (Murray in
"Mind", new series, XIX, 232) puts it. Reality, an-
terior to being known, is mere iiXri (raw material),
while what we call the "thing" or the object of knowl-
edge is this liXi as transformed by an appropriate
mental process, and thus endowed with the attri-
butes of spatiality and the like. Knowing is, there-
fore, "superinducing form upon the matter of knowl-
edge" (J. Grote, "Explor. Phil.", I, 13). Riehl,
though usually classed as a Realist;, holds a similar
view. He distinguishes the being of an object (das
Sein der Ohjekte) from its being as an object (06-
jeklsein). The former is the real being of the ob-
ject and is independent of consciousness; the latter
is its being or nature as conceived by us, and is some-
thing wholly relative to our faculties (cf. Rickert,
"Der Gegeiistand der Erkennlnis" , 2nd ed., pp. 17 sq.,
where the inconsistency of this view is clearly in-
dicated).
The relativity of Reality as thus conceived really involves a return to the position of Kant, except that for the thing-in-itself with its unknowable charac- ter and properties is substituted a kind of materia prima, without qualities, attributes, or determina- tions, and therefore as unknowable as the thing-in- itself, but unknowable now because there is nothing to be known. On this point modern Idealism is at one with Pragmatism or Humanism, which also in- sist that reality must be regarded epistemologically as CXt;, wholly propertiless and wholly indeterminate. The difference between the two views lies in this, that for the Idealist, form is imposed upon matter by the very act by which we know it, while for the Pragmatist, it is imposed only after a long process of postulation and experiment.
Criticism. — M. Fonsegrive in his "Essais sur la connaissance " has discussed the question of Relativ- ism at considerable length, and is of opinion that we must in some sense grant that knowledge is relative to our faculties. But, while in principle he grants this universally, as a matter of fact in his own theory it is only our knowledge of corporeal objects that is regarded as strictly relative. We can know other minds as they really are, because we ourselves are thinking beings, and the external manifestation of our mentality ami theirs is similar in character. But "we do not know the essence of things, but the essence of our rehitions with things; of the laws of nature in themselves we know much less than we do of our dealings with nature" (pp. 85, 86). "Whatever we know, is known in terms of the self" (p. 125; cf. pp. 184 sq.). The principal argument upon which this Relativism rests, is fundamentally the S£ime as that used by Berkeley in his fanious "Dia-
