Is Philosophy Any Good ?
ONE of the greatest and most pregnant philosophers of the Pragmatic movement is Professor John Dewey. His Experience and Nature, like other writings of the same school, is an adVenture to read. Philosophy, after so much wandering in the air, again seems to have a basis in life and a justification for its own existence. Professor Dewey refers to " those astounding differences of philosophic belief that startle the beginner and that become the plaything of the expert." ' It is thehope of the Pragmatist to abolish those logomachies which have brought philosophy into disrepute; to show in what ways philosophers have deviated from the love of wisdom ; and-to proVide the criterion by which the serviceablenesS of abstract thinking can always be checked.
In Professor Dewey's view the first and most intimate reality, we might almost say the absolute reality, is exper- ience ; and the task of philosophy is to equip us to handle experience, to adapt ourselves to its demands, and even, in its own measure, to influence and change experience. We shoiild always remember, however, in our philosophic approach that it is experience which sets the problems for philosophic thought and the answers which philosophy gives must always be referred back to -experience. If they are true, they _make
a difference, If they make n difference, they are meaningless. . . . _ In any case experience itself must alway; remain richer and fuller and more actual than contemplation. If these statements are sound, we shall be surprised to see that instead of contributing to our methods of meeting ex• perience philosophers have often used their thinking to dii. credit experience itself and to suggest that something or other is far more real, more admirable, and more permanent.
For this extraordinary misuse of philosophy Professor Dewey provides an explanation.. We have said that experience sets problems. One of the most obvious points about experience is that, although in some ways it appears calculable, trust- worthy, settled and sure, in other ways, equally inportant, it appears precarious and full of chance.
" We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of sufficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertainpossibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate." _ Philosophy undertakes to bring more of the unexpectedness Of experience into order ; but, in the past, philosophers have generally shirked the hard work of their task. Instead of finding a unity and an order, they have contented themselves with asserting it. They have treated the world as if it were
already changeless, absolute, orderly, always one and always the same. Nothing could be more absurd than this pretence of a solution. .It denies the problems which were the very reason for the existence of philosophy. It is no wonder that the schools of thought which such philosophers founded seem as contradictory, as irreconcilable, and as unintelligible as the experience with which their thinking began. • If philosophy is to serve its purpose, it must accept at the same time a modester and a more genuinely influential role. The recognition that it is working on-the problems of experience must be clear and continuous ; its. answers must be pee. petually referred to experience to see if in fact they have made us any wiser ; its dogmas must really prove themselves to be affording us better instruments for living. Plainly, too, philosophic statements will be always open to revision. Philosophy again -will represent the body-of wisdom gained from thinking about experience and applicable to the manage- ment and control of new experience.
This body of wisdom cannot be one man's work. In common with other pragmatic philosophers, Professor Dewey, in his
" Natural Empiricisni," is intimately aware of the degree in which knowledge is a social product.
" The adoption of empirical method thus procures for philosophic reflection something of that co-operative tendency toward consensus which marks enquiry in the natural sciences."
Wherever the wisdom of one individual can genuinely be referred to common experience it will prove capable of con- firmation. In this way philosophy may really begin to ac- complish its task of making experience more manageable.
In his criticism of a number of contemporary British philo- sophers, Mr. Adrian Coates contrives, without much difficulty, to show where they have contradicted themselves. It is only in his last chapter, where he states his agreement with Pro- fessor Moore, that he ceases to be merely sceptical. He takes up the Position of " common sense." •
. " Some philosophers seem to think that such a question as, ' Do you believe that the earth has existed for many years past ? ' is not a plain question but the sort of question which can be taken in different ways and may therefore be true in one sense and habit) in another. But this view seems to be profoundly mistaken, this being the very type of unambiguous question, the meaning of which we alt Understand."
It becomes clear, in Mr. Coates's statement, that much of philosciphy hits applied itself in foolish and illegitimate ways. It seems, however, that Mr. Coates and Professor; Moore have -made their position harder to defend than it need be. They assert, for example, that such propositions as that they have bodies, that these bodies.. exist in time and space, and that other bodies exist like their own, they know with certainty to be -true." . It would be less open to argument if they had said that they found themselves irretrievably committed to acting as if they were true. Although they assert, for example,
that they know space exists, it can easily be shown that the perception of space is built up as a fruitful instrument for
securing our ends. It is part of the wisdom of experience_; and of course it would -be fruitless to deny the reality of space unless we had found a More profitable way of getting about the world:
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