The Idealistic Reaction Against Science/Introduction

by Antonio Aliotta

INTRODUCTION

1. The Reaction from Intellectualism in Contemporary Philosophy. — One of the essential characteristics of contemporary thought is undoubtedly the reaction from intellectualism in all its forms. The mind of man, which could not rest content with a simple transference of results attained by the methods of the natural sciences to the realm of philosophy, and was reluctant to stay its steps on the threshold of the dim temple of the Unknowable, sought within itself other and deeper activities which should throw open the portals of mystery. Art, moral life, and religious belief were called upon to fill the void left by scientific knowledge; and the reaction went so far as to extend to the human intellect as a whole a distrust which should have been confined to scientific naturalism and its claim to be able to comprehend the infinite riches of mind and nature within a few mechanical formulas. The ruined shrines of the Goddess of Reason, who for so long had tyrannised over the mind, were invaded by the rebel forces of feeling, will, imagination, and every obscure and primitive instinct: thus it came about that Schopenhauer achieved a posthumous triumph over his hated rival Hegel, whose hearers he had in his lifetime vainly endeavoured to entice away, even though he fixed his own lectures for the same hour. Once the blind power of impulse was exalted and the sure guidance of the intellect abandoned, the door was opened to every kind of arbitrary speculation; hence the confusion, Byzantinism, and dabbling in philosophy which during the last twenty years have obscured thought and masqueraded under the fine-sounding name of idealism. unhappy Idealism, how many intellectual follies have been committed in thy name! Theosophy, the speculations of the Kabala, occultism, magic, spiritualism, all the mystic ravings of the Neo-Platonists and Neo-Pythagoreans, the most antiquated of theories, debris of every kind, heaped haphazard on the foundation of the speculations of the ages — all these have returned to favour in defiance of the dictates of logic and common sense. Balance and the sense of direction have to a certain extent been lost, the fight of intelligence quenched, and man gropes in the gloom of wild inspirations, direct intuitions, and mysterious miracles in the search for some new truth which shall satisfy the inmost needs of the human mind.

2. Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism in the History of Philosophy. — The reaction from pure intellectualism, which reached its zenith towards the end of the last century, is nothing new in the history of philosophy, but a phenomenon which recurs whenever thought indulges in exaggerated rationalism. In Greece the splendid affirmation of the concept against the subjectivism of the Sophists and the intellectualism which had carried all before it from Socrates to Aristotle was followed by the sceptical dissolution which ended in the ravings of the mystics of Alexandria; while the glow of Christian sentiment came to fill the void left by a cold intellectualism in minds confused by the contradictory formulas of the various systems and the quibbles of destructive dialectic. All through the Middle Ages we see this antithesis of mystic faith and love, which breaks out from time to time with fresh force in protest against the excesses of rationalism: the paradoxical “Credo quia absurdum” of Tertullian stands in opposition to the bold assertions of the gnostics; the “Amo ut intelligam” of S. Bernard and the Victorines marks the reaction of feeling from the intemperate dialectic of Abelard’s “Intelligo ut credam”; S. Thomas vainly strives to reconcile these conflicting principles in a higher synthesis, defining clearly the limits of faith and reason. The antithesis of feeling lives on, although in a more moderate form, in the “lumen superius,” the “excessus mentalis et mysticus” of S. Bonaventura who counsels his followers to appeal for penetration into the highest truth: to “gratiam, non doctrinam”; “desiderium, non intellectum”; “caliginem, non claritatem”; indeed, another antithesis is added in the voluntarism of Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus, which places “Voluntas imperans intellectui est causa superior respectu actus eius” in opposition to the “Simpliciter tamen intellectus est nobilior quam voluntas” of S. Thomas. The exaggerated subtleties of the scholastics and the interminable controversies between the followers of S. Thomas and those of Scotus lead by way of Ockham’s scepticism to a re-awakening of the spirit of mysticism in Eckhart and Gerson. The epic struggle still continues in modern philosophy; the first triumphs of mathematical natural science encouraged the boldness of Cartesianrationalism, against which the tormenting doubt of the mystic Pascal struggles in vain. Intellectualism, not content with its theoretical domain, would fain in the teaching of Spinoza invade that of moral life as well, vainly deceiving itself into the belief that it can interpret the action of the passions more geometrico, and reaches its extreme in the claim of Wollaston to be able to express the supreme laws of duty as logical relations, a claim calling forth the just reaction of the sentimentalists from Shaftesbury to Smith. The mind of man is once more irresistibly drawn in the opposite direction by the piercing analyses of Berkeley and Hume and the critical genius of Kant, which is at one and the same time the apotheosis of the physico-mathematical method in the order of phenomena and the irrevocable condemnation thereof as an organ of speculation. We see the antithesis once more in the traditional form of feeling regarded as the direct revelation of God in the mystical writings of Jacobi, and in the form of the primacy of practical reason in the work of Kant and Fichte, while in the revolt of the romanticists, the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, and Schelling, it takes on the new aspect of poetic intuition which ranks the concreteness of aesthetic vision higher than abstract mathematicism, the individual than the universal, the changeful life of history than the inflexible formulas of mechanical science. In Hegel reason strives to break away from the motionless formulas of the old logic and to comprehend within the triad of a higher dialectic that concrete development which eluded the schemes of mathematical intellectualism, but for all its gigantic efforts it fails to dominate the manifold complexity of experience, or to absorb into the idea the productive wealth of intuition and the vivid glow of feeling; and, while speculative Pan-logism is celebrating the funeral rites of the dead and gone divinities of the romanticists — art and religion, superseded now by thought — we behold the gods arising once more from the tombs to which Hegel and his teaching had consigned them — rising full of the ardour of youth in the mysticism of the later philosophy of Schelling, in the feeling and religious faith with which Schleiermacher and Hamilton sought to supplement our poor intellectual science of the finite and conditioned, in the belligerent will of Schopenhauer who strives to express his deep sense of rhythm in music, beyond the realm of precise concepts. The over-depreciation of scientific intellectualism and of mechanical and abstract mathematicism, which is characteristic of all idealistic speculation, and its claim to take the place of science and to substitute for it a fantastic system of natural philosophy are followed by a fresh glorification of the physical mathematical method, which in its turn, in the exaggerated reaction which set in, laid claim to the place of philosophy, thus invading the realm of the mind. Thus, passing over the criticism of Kant, we return to the naturalism of the eighteenth century with its crass ignorance of the epistemological problem. Scientific intellectualism, however, after vainly striving to express the highest manifestations of life and consciousness by the aid of its formulas, is forced to stop short at the limits already defined by the genius of Kant. The “Ignorabimus” of Du Bois-Reymond, the Unknowable of the philosopher of First Principles, are the most explicit confession of the inability of that method to solve the problems of most vital interest to the mind of man.

3. Causes of the Reaction from Intellectualism. — Could thought rest easy in this complacent agnosticism? Could it silence the ever-questioning voice within? There were two ways of escaping this intolerable situation: either to turn to the other functions of the mind for the solution of the problem which had baffled the intellect, or to eliminate the problem altogether, by proving it to be due to faulty perspective and to a false conception of science and of the value of scientific theories. Both ways have been tried; on the one hand, by a return to the moralism of Fichte and the aestheticism of the romanticists, into which the rebellious genius of Nietzsche had breathed new life, the will, as the creative source of all values and of unfettered aesthetic intuition, is exalted above the intelligence; while, on the other, the bases of the mechanical conception and of its chief instruments — geometrical intuition and mathematical calculation — are subjected to a searching examination. This analysis, to which men of science themselves were impelled by the discovery of the new principles of energy, and by meta-geometrical conceptions, resulted in stress being laid upon the active work of the mind in the construction of scientific laws and theories, and has therefore contributed to the triumph of that fine of philosophic thought which holds that the fullest revelation of reality is to be found in the aesthetic point of view, and in the practical functions of consciousness. In this way speculative criticism, determined by imperious demands of the mind which positivism failed to satisfy, came into contact with the new criticism which the new theories called into being in the realm of science itself, thus shaking dogmatic belief in the old geometry and in traditional mechanical science. This valid co-operation of physicists and mathematicians distinguishes the struggle against intellectualism of the closing years of the nineteenth century from the analogous movement of the beginning of the present century; it is also more intense and more extensive, especially as regards its critical aspect. The scientific method which Kant and the idealists had declared to be inadequate in the domain of the absolute had successfully resisted all attacks, entrenching itself within the citadel of the phenomenon which Kant himself had fortified so strongly with his vigorous criticism, but towards the end of the century the reaction spread to this sphere also, and science was not only divested of its speculative office, but its theoretical value was denied as well.

The prevalence of Darwinism and of the theory of evolution in general contributed not a little to this radical change in the concept of science. From this standpoint consciousness too appeared to be a complex of functions, whose meaning could not differ from that of the other organic functions: it was but an additional weapon in the struggle for existence, a means of adaptation. The theoretical function could not be regarded as an exception to this utilitarian value — a value, that is to say, of an essentially practical order — of psychic fife as a whole, and the forms of thought, like the other types of the biological world, could not therefore be considered as being immutable and eternal, but rather as being subject to a continuous process of formation by means of successive adaptations to new conditions of life.^[1] Science is no longer the standard by which every form of knowledge is gauged, as was the case in the days of the old positivism; it is no longer the eternal mould into which human consciousness must be forced if it would attain to certainty; it too is an organism capable of that development, renewal, and change of structure which enable it better to fulfil its biological function. That very theory of evolution which had at first sight appeared to prove the mechanical method afresh, and to give it a new weapon wherewith to subdue the rebel world of life, helped rather to depreciate its value and to shake its foundations. Regarded in the light of evolution, was the world what the mechanical theory had held it to be, an eternal persistence of unchangeable substances, an eternal repetition of necessary movements subject to unchangeable laws; or was it rather a perennial becoming, an incessant renewal of forms which cannot be foreseen, and which cannot therefore be subject to the rigid necessity of determinism? Is not variability, that is to say, the possibility of the new, presupposed in all evolution? Can the new be confined within the limits of any mathematical formula? How can mechanics, the science of eternal types, mirror the transient life of the real? It is not to the motionless ideas of reason that we must turn if we would sound the depths of being and grasp it in the productive moment of its generation, but rather to the free creations of imagination and energy. Not sub specie aeternitatis, but sub specie generationis is the motto of modern logic.^[2]

The researches of psycho-physiology and more especially the analyses of perception, which proved the subjective character of those sensory elements which the mechanical theory had raised to the rank of ultimate reality, contributed largely to the change in the conception of science and of knowledge in general. Are not resistance, space, and time presentations no less dependent on the special physiological structure than sounds, colours, tastes, and smells? What right have we to regard the one class as objective and primary, the other as subjective and secondary? Helmholtz considers that the only distinction which can fairly be drawn between these elements is of a practical kind, in as much as some of them are of more assistance to us than others as guides to reality, awakening in us, as they do, expectations which are habitually verified.

In the first glow of enthusiasm to which these researches gave birth, the possibility of discovering the psychological origin of these presentations and of resolving them into their elements seemed to be a clear proof of the empirical nature of geometrical truths and therefore, also, of mechanics; thus from this point of view also doubt was cast upon the apodeictic value of science more geometrico demonstrata.

The reaction from intellectualism, which is, in my opinion, the predominant characteristic of contemporary philosophy, will act as our guide in the study of the prevailing tone of present-day thought touching the theory of knowledge. By the general term “intellectualism,” taken in the widest sense of the word, we shall understand those epistemological systems which assign an autonomous value to the cognitive function,^[3] and we shall therefore regard as forms of reaction all those currents of thought which make the value of science and of knowledge in general depend upon the ends of other functions of the mind and rank will and imagination above intellect.

Notes

1. Sergi, L’Origine dei fenomeni psichici e la loro significazione biologica (Milan, 1885), p. 72.
2. Dewey, “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?” Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honour of W. James (London, 1908).
3. Intellectualism in the strict sense of the word is the reduction of all the functions of the mind to intellectual processes. The pragmatists and intuitionists, however, in their polemic against the intellectualists, apply the term also to those who, though not going so far, yet look upon the intelligence as a theoretic function of intrinsic value, and do not consider it as identical with or subordinate to practical activity. It would be waste of time to enter upon a discussion of the justifiability of using the word in this sense; the essential thing is that we should clearly understand what concepts we attach to the word.