Relativism

“ On the other hand, the recognition that all knowledge is perspectival, worldview-ish, rooted in a particular historical and cultural setting, rather than universal or absolute has raised fears of an ‘anything goes’ relativism. ”

“ So the doubter has a real world, but his own real world. Moreover, in the great freedom of its reality we see how all things taken individually or distributively, must be, as the word is used, only "relative"; and in the perfect inclusiveness, how nothing, however "relative," can ever be unreal. Relativism and scepticism have been perenially associated, but relativism is not a nihilistic, but a deeply realistic philosophy; it is just the sceptic's natural realism. ”

“ They accuse relativists—and we pragmatists are typical relativists—of being debarred by their self-adopted principles, not only from the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, of believing that these principles of their own are truth impersonal and absolute, but even of framing the abstract notion of such a truth, in the pragmatic sense, of an ideal opinion in which all men might agree, and which no man should ever wish to change. ”

“ You have a mind, says the sophist, a mind to begin with, and this mind of yours makes the distinction between right and wrong. But it does not follow that a distinction which your mind makes is an embodiment of absolute, necessary, and immutable truth. The distinction between right and wrong is doubtless a distinction for you. But it does not follow that right and wrong are absolutely and in themselves distinct. In short, you cannot conclude an objective and divine, and absolutely true distinction from the existence of a mere subjective and human distinction. ”

“ If the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the 'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal,' the whole of reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked (for example) by the dialectical method, doesn't it seem odd that in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in 'science,' namely, the dialectical method should never once have been tried? ”

“ Let us now consider the explanation of error offered by the idealist philosophy. In this view only the whole truth is wholly true; the Absolute, as a perfect, concrete, individual system, is the ideal, and all that falls short of it can only possess a degree of truth—a degree which is greater or less according as it approximates to the ideal. The degrees of truth are not quantitative, not a mixture of truth and error, but a nearer or more distant approach to the ideal. ”

“ And, in that case, you have not discovered the reality of the physical world through the fact that it resists your will, but have presumed, in advance of all feeling of resistance, that there is a real world, beyond yourself, whose facts, whatever they are, are linked by a law of causation to your own experience. For surely you do not mean that the principle of causation itself, by resisting your will, forces you to believe in its reality as the cause of such resistance. ”

“ No matter what show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its cause, its designer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and absolute Reality, — the only being in existence having such compass, such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. ”

“ That rationality might [Pg 273] then mediate between all the members of our conception of the world, but not between the conception itself and reality. Reality would have to be given, not by Reason, but by Fact. Fact holds out blankly, brutally and blindly, against that universal deliquescence of everything into logical relations which the Absolutist Logic demands, and it is the only thing that does hold out. Hence the ire of the Absolutist Logic—hence its non-recognition, its ‘cutting’ of Fact. ”

“ Where should we find more counterbalancing, more starting and stopping, warming and cooling, combining and separating 113than in an organism? And if these processes can be stated only in propositions that are "manifestly contradictory," are we to understand that truth has errors for its constituent elements? Such paradoxes have always delighted the soul of absolute idealism. But, as we have seen, only the veil of an infinitesimal finitude intervenes between the logic of the objective universal of absolute idealism and the objective logic of analytic realism. ”

“ Must we not, in fact, say alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art, “Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk, no one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates of the others”? ”

“ And their warnings are particularly directed to the problems of the Absolute and the Relative, which perplex all students of philosophy, and which cause so many to think and act contrary to what is generally known as "common sense." And we caution all students to be sure to grasp the Divine Paradox of the Absolute and Relative, lest they become entangled in the mire of the Half-Truth. ”

“ The very conflict of the relative ipso facto puts it in perfect unity with the absolute. And so, seeing this, we see not only a world of relativity and consequent conflict, but also a world whose universal relativity makes for a genuine absoluteness, and whose conflict can never be in vain, but instead is always realizing and effective. Thus, all things relative, that is to say all things at once real and unreal, good and bad, true and false, are in the constant service of the absolute ”

“ If you adopt, as absolute, a criterion of right which is so only relatively, your results will not be absolutely right. Those who trust to their senses become, as it were, slaves to objective existences. Those alone who are guided by their intuitions find the true standard. ”

“ But we also predicate equality in the judgment of reality; what can the empirical sense of such a proposition be when the sense of equality is alleged to be non-empirical? We present reality to ourselves in a space and time order. What sense has this idea? We ourselves and our body belong to the idea which we have of reality. We represent things as acting upon our sense-organs and connect these with our psychical processes. The actual coincidence of these results with what we actually experience, warrants our ideas of what we call objective reality. ”

“ Yet the absolute's constitution, if imagined at all, has to be imagined after the analogy of some bit of finite experience. Take any real bit, suppress its environment and then magnify it to monstrosity, and you get identically the type of structure of the absolute. It is obvious that all your difficulties here remain and go with you. If the relative experience was inwardly absurd, the absolute experience is infinitely more so. Intellectualism, in short, strains off the gnat, but swallows the whole camel. ”

“ Over against this false we must place the true conception of the relativity of knowledge. We must hold, as the spontaneous sense of mankind and the best sustained psychology and philosophy of the centuries affirm, that our cognitive powers are genuine faculties for discerning the truth of things, that, while not infallible nor unlimited, they give us substantially correct knowledge, as far as it goes, of the realities of the natural and moral world in which we are placed. ”

“ By what title is it that every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed of some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of our impressions of sense,—what we call the facts of nature,—or it has left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands ”

“ The notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being depends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has objects, not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its definition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be self-sufficing. ”

“ The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions,—have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. ”

“ Into this categorical assertion of a concrete experience embodying a plan, our whole series of hypothetically valid assertions of the realm of Critical Rationalism have now resolved themselves. A will concretely embodied in a life, — and these meanings identical with the very purposes that our poor fleeting finite ideas are even now so fragmentarily seeking, amidst all their flickerings and their conflicts, to express, — this, I say, is the reality. ”

“ In the exact sciences, or, again, in case of those practically important realms of Being which we view as subject to our choice, — whenever we win control over a system of ideas, and assert a truth, or decide upon a course of action, and whenever we do this upon the basis of general principles, — our insight is always destructive of merely abstract possibilities, and, where our knowledge takes the form of universal judgments, they are always primarily such destructive judgments, so far as they relate to external objects. ”

“ Yet the reality which the soul was reconciled to—the objective which the subjectivity recognised—was actually only empirical existence, common world and actuality.... And though the reconciliation was in its heart and ground sure and fast, it still needed an objective form for this ground: the very necessity of nature made the blind certitude of immersion in the reality of empirical existence seek to provide itself with a justification and a good conscience. ”

“ Truth may be conveniently defined as universal consistency; or that which perfectly conforms to facts, and agrees with the widest experience, when tested by means of all our intellectual powers, the reasoning faculty in particular. The usual modern criterion of it, is consistency with the fundamental axioms of logic, and with all the great principles of nature as established by means of scientific research, such as the universality of causation, the continuity of phenomena, the indestructibility of matter and energy, the convertibility and equivalency of forces, &c. ”

“ And since perception always presents a number of universals, what determines which one shall perform the reproduction? Finally, since there are infinite differences of the universal that might be reproduced, what determines just which differences shall be reproduced? In this wise the controversy has gone on ever since the challenge of the old rationalistic logic by the nominalists launched the issue of empiricism and rationalism. All the charges which each makes against the other are easily retorted upon itself. Each side is resistless in attack, but helpless in defense. ”

“ Therefore your business is to invent a truth which shall harmoniously satisfy the needs of your nature and aid your efficiency in practical life. That we are justified in being dishonest towards truth has even been argued from the doctrine of relativity by some who failed to realise that that doctrine is here hardly relative. Certainly the philosophers of recent times, from Nietzsche to Croce, have loved to analyse the idea of “truth” and to show that it by no means signifies what we used to suppose it signified. ”

“ In that case, logic would be an imperative, not directed at the knowledge of truth, but at the adjusting and fixing of a world which must seem true to us. In short, the question is a debatable one: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality, or are they measures and means by which alone we can, create realities, or the concept " reality "? ”

“ But we have found that this objective, or the whole external universe, cannot become a thought at all, unless we blend and identify with it the subjective, or the whole mind of man. And we have also found that this subjective, or the whole mind of man, cannot become a thought at all, unless we blend and identify with it the objective, or the whole external universe. So that, instead of the question as it originally stood, What is the nature of the connection which subsists between the mind of man and the external world? in other words, between the subjective and the objective of perception? ”

“ By a consciously self-realising principle is meant a principle that is determined to action by the conception of its own perfection, or by the idea of giving reality to possibilities which are involved in it and of which it is conscious as so involved; or, more precisely, a principle which at each stage of its existence is conscious of a more perfect form of existence as possible for itself, and is moved to action by that consciousness. ”

“ Philosophy, indeed, at a later day, may bring her balance of probability, put the evidence of opposed facts in different scales, and deduce fair-seeming conclusions from an assumed principle that man is a rational creature. But is that assumption just? or, rather, does not History show, and experience prove, that he is swayed from the course which reason indicates, by passion, by indolence, and even by caprice? When the foundation is false, the superstructure must fall. ”