COGNITIO: Revista de Filosofia
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Indexação: The Philosopher`s Index; Citas Latinoamericanas en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
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Tradução de artigo publicado no número 2 – novembro de 2001
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM: BERGSON AS A READER OF
WILLIAM JAMES
Prof. Dr. Franklin Leopoldo e
Silva
Departamento de Filosofia –
USP
Original in Portuguese.
[tr. to English by Rodrigo
Brandão]
The followers of the structuralist
method in the History of Philosophy are
accustomed to say that philosophers are not good historians, for they cannot read and
understand other authors without projecting onto them their own ideas. Thus, accepting or
denying other philosophies, what the philosopher actually does is a kind of experience of
his own thought through other’s. Something further than an objective analysis of the
doctrine that he is concerned to. As if the other author’s ideas were just a pretext or a
reference to the articulation of their own conceptions. This consideration could initially
work as a standard of moderation of the enthusiastic admiration that Bergson had for
William James. In fact, if the Bergson´s role in his age was that of reinstate the possibility
of metaphysics in the French philosophy, denied by the positivism and by the neo-Kantian
epistemologists, how he could accept the declared admiration of James for the positivism
and for the utilitarianism? How to admit the compatibility between a philosophy that
2
conceives the time as Absolute and the intuition as a contact with an unspeakable totality
and an epistemology that links the truth to the evolution of the human practice in its
relation to the things? Yet the claims that Bergson made about the philosophical rightness
of the pragmatism are not just eloquent. But the accounts of his approximations are more
meaningful when- explaining the ideas of the American philosopher - he displays his own
ideas. Only a deep comparative study could rigorously trace the similarities and the
differences. Here we will be satisfied with a brief view of the Bergsonian account of the
philosophy of William James. To do this we attempt to focus on specific points where the
rapport comes up, chiefly grounded on the interpretative reading of James’s works that
Bergson did.
Lets initially approach the general question of the relation between thought and
reality.
“ We would misunderstand the pragmatism of James if we do not begin by
changing the idea that we have about reality generally. We talk about ‘world’ or about
‘cosmos’; and these words, according to their origins, mean something simple or
something composed. We say ‘universe’ and the word makes one think of a possible
unification of things. We may be spiritualists, materialists, pantheists as we can be
indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with the common sense: we always represent to
ourselves several simple principles by which we could explain the conjoint of material and
moral things. (...) Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. (...) It is far
from this dry universe that the philosophers compound with well-cut and well-arranged
elements, in which each part is not just linked to each other, as experience says, but also as
our reason would like it to be, co-ordinate to the Whole.”1
1
BERGSON, H. Sur le Pragmatisme de William James. In La Pensée et le Mouvant, PUF, Paris, 1969, pg.239-241
3
We can notice in this text that, according to Bergson, the philosophy of William
James is characterised by a refusal of a system of reality. The simplicity, the simple
orderliness, the perfect and accomplished co-ordination, the unity that arises from its
totality. The elements that make up the traditional notion of the cosmos are more
exigencies of our intellect than attributes of reality. Beyond the links that the experience
provides, we project into reality what our reason would like it to be, and this is a rewarding
rationality because it fulfils with actual contents the intellectual categories that gives
functionality to both the philosophical thought and the common sense. Our representation
frames the reality, forms a picture in which the simplicity and the necessity stands out in a
way that it encourages the unitary and fundamentally homogeneous images that the
tradition built in its attempts to understand the world. We could remember now the
Leibnizian idea of simplicity of means and complexity of ends, a sort of law obeyed by the
divine rationality in the building of an absolute co-ordinate universe. Opposed to this is,
according to Bergson, the James’s conception of reality as “redundant and superabundant”,
of which our intellectual representation would be a shrunk
version, to not say an
impoverished one. What explains the difference between James and the tradition is the
value which each one grants to two aspects that are in Bergson´s description: the parts
linked to each other and the elements co-ordinate to the Whole. The one is present in our
immediate contact with the things; the other is derived from an exigency or from a desire
of our reason. The universe seems to James to be an indefinible plurality of parts linked to
each other and this constitutes our experience. This experience conveys us nothing about a
unity that could rule this plurality or about a totality to which every elements would be coordinated to form a coherent system, either finite or infinite. Hence in this redundant
superabundance that the praxis displays we do not have means of asserting the necessity of
4
each elements or the strict determination of each relation. When we do it, we do suppose a
totality and a unity that would rule the experience and would structure it a priori.
The rationalist tradition thinks that the reality structured by a priori principles is
superior and richer than an indefinable plurality. James, on the other hand, thinks that this
theoretical attitude actually
impoverishes the experience, for it takes away from
experience the novelty, the unpredictability, the creation of forms, finally the openness of
its character. The idea of system confines the reality in the intellectual pictures that we use
to understand it. The very root of the James’s pragmatism is a resolutely anti-dogmatic
attitude that is expressed in all the accompaniment of the lines of experience, without
categorical suppositions that could bind the flux of reality. This attitude is to James the
radical empiricism.
“Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist
attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less
objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and
once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away
from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from
fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards
concretenesss and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means
the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the
open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of
finality in truth.”2
The pragmatism is not a novelty. It relies on the empiricist attitude, which,
however, had realised it imperfectly. To dissolve the inherent contradictions of the
traditional empiricism, it is, therefore, to radicalise the empiricist attitude. Turning away
5
from abstraction in philosophy, the tendency of immediately linking the use of words to
the knowledge of things. The totalling pretence and others “inveterate habits” that result in
dogmatism and artificiality. It would be enough to remember that the book “The
Immediate data of Consciousness” aims at a knowledge devoid of the metaphysical and
methodological supposition that were traditionally constituted, and which stand between
the philosopher and the reality. This impede him of immediately reaching the date, here,
the conscience in its spontaneous, continuous and heterogeneous flux of essentially
temporal existence. The one that psychology, following the traditional paradigms of
knowledge, put into a formal picture of discontinual elements of spatial character and as
though they were ready to be apprehended by an analytical and conceptual procedure.
The Bergson´s opposition to the traditional pattern of knowledge is the criticism of
the conceptual abstraction, which moves round the object in a multiple external points of
view, without ever reaching its hardcore. Something that would just be possible through an
experience that abandons the assumptions of conceptual analyses, in its definition
something not fit to apprehend the moving continuity that constitutes the fabric of reality.
“for [the concept] substitutes the actual and internal organisation of something for an
external and schematic reconstitution.” 3
The Bergsonian criticism includes, however, the comprehension of the cause by
which such procedures of knowledge were exclusively emphasised in the history of
thought. It is the theme concerned to the genesis of intelligence in the context of the theory
of evolution. Along the development of beings, a primitively impulse divided in two
directions, formed two distinct instruments for survival of species: the instinct of the
animal and the intelligence in man. Thus it is, because of its own origins, pragmatic, in the
2
3
JAMES,W. Pragmatism. In Contemporary Philosophy. Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1994
BERGSON, H. Introductuion à la metaphysique. In La Pensée et le Mouvant,pg.191
6
sense that it is the satisfaction of the necessities of life. The structure of reality is,
therefore, patterned after utilitarian criterions, forasmuch the assuring of the means of
survival is its first function. Thenceforth the parallelism with the instinct, that does not
have, however, the flexibility that characterises the intelligence, which does not pattern
after any skill fixed by nature, but by a wide range of possibilities, all of them, however,
with a character originally instrumental. Whilst the instinct is itself an instrument for
survival, the serious intelligence, Bergson says, is an instrument to make instruments, and
is this characteristic of making instruments that is responsible for the variety and
mutability of which man uses to dominate the nature to his own benefit.
Here two things are meant: firstly the categories of intelligence are linked to a
pragmatical feature. Secondly, the interpretation of reality that such categories provides us,
being also consequently linked to the praxis, results in a cut of reality that guides itself by
criterions of domination and utilisation of things. The intellectual knowledge, therefore, is
derived from this cut done by these categories, is a representation that the conscience does
when it pragmatically aims at the world. So knowledge, therefore, is strictly linked to
action: is for the asking of the practices of survival, which involves both the primitive
relation to the world, concerned to an instrumentally still rough, and the scientifical
theories more sophisticated and apparently far from the realm of practice. Bergson thinks
that this is a difference of degree, due to the possibility of intelligence of progressively
develop to relations with the real that are gradually more complex. Thus there is a practical
limitation of the intellectual categories. It is to this limitation that Bergson attributes the
preponderance of certain notions, such as simplicity, stability, unity, necessity, and others,
since that in all of them one can notice the work of the intelligence to make the reality
understandable, chiefly making it accessible. It is significant that Bergson refers to this
7
character of intelligence to explain, in its regards of James, the intellectual relation
between thought and reality.
“Our intelligence loves the simplicity. It saves effort, and wants that the nature is
organised after a fashion that would demand from us the least work account. It uses just the
strictly necessary in the elements or the principles to recompose with them the indefinable
series of objects and events.”4
In other words, the systematic character of reality, including the entire exigency to
its intellectual comprehension, comes from intelligence or from techno-practical rationality
that is projected into the world by it. To know and to act are inseparably joined, the
knowledge is, as it were, subordinated to the prerogatives of action. In this sense the truth
is what is fitted to the enacting of some necessary actions for survival, in the wide sense
that we already have mentioned. It means that, in a large extent, our experience of reality,
instead of providing aid to the conceptual image of the world, is subordinated to the
structure of intelligence, with its analytical-conceptual character. Our experience of reality
is conditioned by mechanisms of articulation that shape the real to the discursiveness of
the intelligence. From it derives a sort of harmony that we accustomed to realise, at least
since Aristotle, between reality and an intelligible structure that seems to be very fit to, so
“immanent” to the things . The representation of reality relies on this adequacy, with its
variants common to the several theoretical systems of knowledge, including from the
Aristotelian objectivism to the Kant´s transcendental subjectivity. Is in this pragmatical
tendency of the intelligence that relies, in a deeper way than the relativists had understood,
the relativity of the human knowledge. Hence the pragmatist sense of relativity of the
human knowledge, such as it was held by James, is not too far from this Bersgsonian
conception.
8
“But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground that
most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover,
have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations
are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to
the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one them may
from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to
new ones. They are only a man made language, a conceptual shorthand, as some one calls
them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate
much choice of expression and many dialects.”5
As science is a well-made language, we should consider it as a symbolic transcript
of reality. The relativity is as present in the lexicon of the elements as in the grammar that
articulates these elements. We cannot estimate the actual correspondence between the
symbol and what is symbolised; for we somehow impose to reality the way we prefer to
transcript it. This background of arbitrariness is balanced by the utility of the theories
regarding the possibility of articulating the facts and enabling the new ones to be grouped.
Owing a structure within which the experience is connected, that is, within which the facts
are linked to each other, we have, therefore, an adequate code to refer to reality. Thus we
can say that we have a group of “ideas” about reality. Yet all of them come from
experience and are conjugated in experience, “linking things satisfactorily, working
securely, simplifying, saving”; and this is what make them true. A true idea, James
emphasises this, is always instrumentally true.
It is most glaring that this thesis raised a great deal of opposition, for it seemed to
lead the relativism to its ultimate consequences. Bradley, for instance, claimed that,
4
5
BERGSON, H. Sur le Pragmatisme de William James. Ob. Cit., pg.240.
JAMES, W. Op. Cit., pg.235
9
according to this thought, for any idea be a true idea would be enough to anyone consider it
as such. Bergson, however, appraises the thesis of relativity because of its human
construction of truth. Providing that it is well considered, it is more coherent than the
theory of correspondence between representation and reality, mainly if we understand this
correspondence as a copy. Is it possible to admit that our cognitive instrumental is a copy
of reality? If we use this conception to the particular facts, we will have to solve the
problem of the copying of the moving, for there is not any particular reality that is not
subordinated to a continual alteration. If we take the general propositions as copies, we will
have to point out what they copy and, since it could not be any particular fact, we would
have to conclude that the general rules are not copies. Actually, the concordance is a
rational aspiration – almost a regulatory idea in the Kantian sense. But to Bergson (who
thinks to be in agreement with James on this) it is not even a possibility. It is a rationalised
desire, due to an aspiration of reason of a safe degree of knowledge that could just be
realised through a sort of coincidence between the subject and the reality, conceived
within the logical stability of an “object”. The philosophy furthered this aspiration.
“There were to the ancient philosophers a world above time and space, where were,
since eternity, all possible truths: the human statements would be truer the more faithfully
they copied these eternal truths. The moderns made the truth go down towards earth, but
they still see in it something that would pre-exist our statements. The truth would be placed
in the things and in the facts: our science would search for this and would take it out of its
hidden place, bringing it into light.”6
However, the truth is not waiting for us, “ as America was waiting for Christopher
Columbus”; our statements about reality that create the truths about reality. It grants to
knowledge more dignity, for the truth is no longer a discovery, it becomes an invention. An
10
invention does not mean arbitrariness. As we have already said, the utility impedes the
arbitrariness, for it gives to the pursuit of truth a goal; the addition in our dominion of
things. The idea that the truth is originated in the act of knowledge has to be understood
regarding the radical empiricism. Following the meanders of experience, in its indefinable
plurality that characterises it, we prolong the dominion of the facts and its connections.
Then the knowledge is defined as a process in which the most important realm is the
future, since it is concerned to the movement of invention. The truth does not precede the
human act of knowing it: is the knowledge itself that engenders the truth, the reason why
we cannot expect any eternal truth or any system of intelligibility pre-existent to our
contact with the world. Since the truth is practical, we invent it in so far we learn how to
improve the use of reality. And since truth always coincides with the act of apprehending
it, the construction of truth is also the construction of the means with which we
apprehended it. Bergson thinks that the pragmatism of William James continues the critical
philosophy of Kant and surpasses it. It is not just a general structure of our mind, in which
the theoretical truth relies, but this structure is produced over the process of invention of
truth. The man is not just responsible for the use of his rational structure, of his mind, but
he also creates it within the freedom of knowledge.
Perhaps the freedom can help us comprehending another characteristic of the
pragmatism according to James: the possibility of choosing after a fashion the question
whose solution will be sought. Thus there is not any previous truth waiting for someone to
discover it, nor there are problems waiting for resolutions. And the link between truth and
utility also explains the inexistency of an obligatory pile of questions of which the
philosopher would have to compulsorily talk about: as all truth is a human invention, the
only solution that must be sought are the ones to questions that reflect on praxis;
6
BERGSON,H. Sur le Pragmatisme de William James. Op. Cit., pg.245.
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considered as the relations of man with himself and things. Then/By this one could observe
another feature of the easiness that James escapes from tradition, chiefly regarding the
recurrent metaphysical questions of the history of philosophy.
“ Is the world one or many? -fated or free?- material or spiritual?- here are notions
either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and dispute about such notions are
unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing
its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one
if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be
traced, than the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”7
The pragmatism grants itself of formulating the questions that it proposes to solve.
This is an aspect through which the criticism of the traditional philosophical method is
manifested. A great deal of philosophical questions are driven from the reification of the
terms, as Berkeley already remarked, or from the logically and semantically insufficient
analysis of the words that philosophers use. But as far as James is concerned seems to exist
an important doctrinal motive linked to the hardcore thesis of pragmatism. He says it to be
the Peirce´s principle: “to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what
conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance.”8 Every object,
every relation, every state of reality has a practical effect. To clearly define something
means to distinguish effects, to trace the differences between them. When it is not possible
to trace such differences- regarding its practical effect or its meaning- the two elements are
identical. Actually, it does not matter to know whether any of them are absolutely identical
or inwardly identical; since they are what they practically produce, if the effect is no good
the objects neither. In this fashion the metaphysical questions can be left out of account,
7
8
JAMES,W. Pragmatism pg.232
JAMES, W. Op. Cit., pg.233
12
for instance; if we are not able to estimate the practical effects, the difference between the
unity and the multiplicity of the world is because it would not be any change in practical
effects whether the world is one or many- and the question may be considered trifling.
To Bergson, a large number of philosophical problems that the tradition proposed
and are still unsolved are grounded on the fact that the logic of intelligence was to
problems that cannot be solved in this realm. Antinomies, paralogisms and other impasses
are formed due to the impossibility of the intellectual knowledge of evaluating the
questions that are not concerned to the practical part of the intelligibility. This does not
mean that they are devoid of meaning own their own; but it is the conceptual formulation
of the problem and the expectancy of an analytical answer that are neither here nor there.
The relations between the human mind and the metaphysical questions, including in it the
mind itself, are to an intuitive approximation. An alternative that would hardly be accepted
by James, at least in the Bergsonian ways.
This does not impede the existence of similar points in their criticism of the
traditional metaphysics. Bergson finds in the intellectual procedures what he calls the false
problems.
“ How is it possible to something exist – matter, mind, God? It is necessary a cause,
and then a cause of the cause and so on.(...) Why an ordinate reality, in which our thought
reencounters itself as in a mirror? Why the world is not incoherent? I say that these
problems are related much more to what is not than to what is. We would never be
astonished with the existence of something - matter, mind, God – if we do not implicitly
admit that nothing could exist. ”9
The intelligibility works with two false presuppositions: the nothingness precedes
the being and the disorder precedes the ordinance. Therefore, the absence and the
13
emptiness are settled; and what “fills” them, reality and ordination appear as an addition.
Therefrom the obsession of always go back cause by cause, because reality must be
explained, it does not justifies itself- so to speak, it is not the emptiness that strike us or
frighten us, as Pascal thought, but instead the fullness. Nietzsche already denounced this
metaphysical ascent that turns the Nothingness into an ideal. As though the goal of
metaphysics was the expression of the Nothingness. It is an extreme effect of the
abstraction and it is a paroxysm of the effort of generalisation. For to talk about the
Nothingness is to practice an abstraction of separating the things from themselves; and the
extreme of generalisation is the possibility of talking about every thing without a single
reference to any of them specifically. We are led to this sort of contradiction when the
language loses the actual and experiential references which grant the words a meaning.
Berkeley already denounced this inward trick of the language: if we do not maintain the
semantical boundary of the terms, and we use them in an indefinable way, the reference of
the word, eventually is only it own, and we do not mind any longer the distinction between
words and things. It is the ill possibility that is present in the mechanism of generalisation.
This is what makes James claims that the metaphysical quest often are just verbal exercises
and an argumentative wrangling devoid of any objective reference. Perhaps a remaining of
the magical power primitively attributed to the words.
“ Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how
men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic
words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds
him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be(...) So the
universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the fey
must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That
9
BERGSON,H. Introduction (De la position des Problèmes). La Pensée et le Mouvant,pg68
14
word names the universe’s principle, and to posses it is after a fashion to posses the
universe itself.” 10
Is to refuse this incantation that the pragmatism is concerned to the practical value
of words, what James calls the “cash-value”: a coin whose gold reserve is the experience.
Within this wide but well-configured semantical universe, the word is born, extends its
meaning, gets into relation with others, enlighten the things and itself in as well as the
things enlighten it. The word is not a place to rest, is an instrument of work. Because of
this no word can provide us a definite answer to any problem. The language is an activity,
and it will always be dynamic and this is why it will never be means to achieve
contemplation. Is this active meaning of the language and method that makes Bergson
counterpoint the criticism made by those who think the pragmatism is an indolent attitude,
a sort of laissez-faire that, in fact, is a detachment from the effort to know or a kind of
impoverished renewed scepticism. On the other hand, Bergson thinks that the pragmatism
is mainly a theory of the truth, which replaces the knowledge in the human universe,
whose boundaries are not logically delimited. But it proposes the achievement of aims
always renewed by the scientifical progress and by the historical development, which
converges to the ethical improvement of humanity. According to this the pragmatism is a
humanistic philosophy, for it considers that the pluralism of experience and the human
value of the beliefs make our undeniable finitude an open condition that provides men the
means of creating their own becoming.
10
JAMES,W. Pragmatism, op. Cit., pg.234