The Metaphysics of Pragmatism

By Sidney Hook

Considered by some the most controversial American philosopher of contemporary times, SIDNEY HOOK (1902-1989) was infamous for the wild swing in his political thought over the course of his career, starting out as a young Marxist before the Great Depression and ending up a vehement anti-Communist in his later years. The Metaphysics of Pragmatism-Hook's first work, originally published in 1927-is something of a malicious joke on the philosopher's part, one he readily acknowledges in his introduction, a bringing together of one discipline, that of metaphysics, with the one generally regarded as its polar opposite, that of pragmatism, for the purposes of rescuing the second. Though not a political work at all—except, possibly, one of academic politics—this is nevertheless a fascinating introduction to this notorious figure. In its expression of the author's "passionate moral interest in the creative power... of human thinking," it may, perhaps, begin to lend some understanding to the shifts in his own thinking that characterized his work.—Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: Jun 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745713

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THE METAPHYSICS OF PRAGMATISM

BY

SIDNEY HOOK

"...and in his hand

He took the golden compasses, prepared

In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe

This Universe, and all created things.

One foot he centred, and the other turned

Round through the vast profundity obscure,

And said, ‘Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds:

This be thy just circumference, О World!"

William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy (1794)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 6

AN INTRODUCTORY WORD—BY JOHN DEWEY 7

INTRODUCTION 10

CHAPTER ONE: THE METAPHYSICS OF THE INSTRUMENT 16

I 16

II 17

III 20

IV 26

CHAPTER TWO—THINKING AS INSTRUMENTAL 29

I 29

II 35

III 38

CHAPTER THREE—THE METAPHYSICS OF LEADING PRINCIPLES 43

I 43

II 45

III 47

III 52

IV—Leading Principles, Novelty and the "Paradox of Inference 57

V 60

VI—Leading Principles and the Theory of Probability 63

VII—The Metaphysics of Knowledge 67

CHAPTER FOUR—CATEGORIAL ANALYSIS 69

I 70

II 73

III 76

IV 81

CHAPTER FIVE—OF HUMAN FREEDOM 85

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 91

DEDICATION

TO

ERNEST NAGEL

IN AFFECTION AND ESTEEM

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I have special acknowledgments to make to three men who have made the following pages possible; to Professor Morris R. Cohen of the College of the City of New York under whose educational inspiration and guidance I came to critical self-consciousness; to Professor John Dewey of Columbia University to whom I am indebted for essential points of doctrine and for generous personal encouragement; and to Dean Woodbridge of Columbia University from whom I learned that the substance of philosophy consists not in labored and involved argument but in insight and vision.

Thanks are due to the Editors of The Journal of Philosophy and The Monist for permission to reprint material previously published.

AN INTRODUCTORY WORD—BY JOHN DEWEY

VARIANT developments in thought, scientific or intellectual, in their early stages suffer in statement and apprehension in two ways. These ways although logically opposed to each other are psychologically complementary. On the one hand, there is an exaggeration of the factor of novelty which creates an illusion of total breach of continuity. On the other hand, there is an injection into the new ideas of older conceptions which are irrelevant and the elimination of which is demanded by the new ideas. Because of the suppression of the continuities, and indeed the fulfillments, which are required to make the new fully comprehensible, and because of the insertion of the old notions which the new point of view makes untenable, it is not surprising that the introduction of any significant variation in thought is marked by a period of confused controversy in which both goal and road are obscured to participants on either side.

Yet it is antecedently certain that continuities there must be; the new idea must be generated out of the old; it has its basis in them; and in the end its justification is found in the completion and organization which it contributes to them;—its removal of their surds and inconsistencies. If the present is big with the future, it is certain that the past was big with the present. Any novelty, whether a practical invention or a departure in theory, which finally wins a place for itself gains not only a psychological familiarity due to wont and use, but a logical naturalness, an inevitableness, because it is seen to carry on and fulfill what went before. Looking back from the vantage point of later time, this factor of development is so marked as easily to give rise to a false impression of a one-way evolution or unfolding from within. Thus it is that many theories which began as perfect absurdities or wilful eccentricities close their careers as obvious common-places that only restate what everyone had always believed. Indeed, in their later stage, the virtual attitude of the former critic is often: If that was what you meant all the time, why didn’t you say so? The question is well meant. But its implication overlooks two facts. To develop an adequate statement and understanding of a new view is all one with ability to see its connections, continuities and completions of what went before. Only miraculous creatures, goddesses springing full grown from the head of Zeus, are exempt from a period of uncertain and precarious growth. The other fact overlooked is that the establishment of these continuities demand a recasting, a reseeing, of old beliefs, and the latter resist modification even more than refractory physical substances. In short, the perception of continuity and fulfillment occurs only as old ideas undergo a subtle and pervasive modification. By the time a new conception has become a version of what everyone always believed, what everyone always believed has undergone purgation and transformation.

On the other hand, phases of the former beliefs which have to be discarded if the new one is valid are unconsciously but surely read into the new. Failure to see the continuities which do exist is compensated for by the assumption of identities which must be read out. The basic method and common form of all dialectical refutation of new conceptions consists in first assimilating them in some respect to views already current and then showing the logical contradiction between this assimilation and other phases of the new idea. The critic thus convincingly demonstrates that the new view would be absurd if it were held in terms of his own position. Just as it takes time to discover the respects in which a new idea completes and organizes old beliefs, so it takes time to detect and eliminate old elements which are so taken for granted that they are unconsciously projected, to its undoing, into the new. Gradually, often imperceptibly, an equilibrium is attained as eccentricities are smoothed into connections and engrained habituations are remade.

These remarks have been suggested to me by reading Dr. Hook’s work. The volume is noteworthy because, more than anything on its subject with which I am acquainted, it expresses an equilibrium which is consciously and deliberately sustained between that newer movement which goes by the name of pragmatism and instrumentalism and essential portions of classic thought. Dr. Hook sees at once, altogether and gladly, connections and revisions which in the ordinary course of discussion are seen only reluctantly and piecemeal. He has worked clear of the partial concessions and misunderstandings which accompany early stages of discussion, and placed himself securely on the further side, on a definite realization of both the reconstructions demanded and the continuities and completions effected, keeping both in view with an equal mind.

To develop this remark in detail would be only to attempt in a hasty and sketchy way what the book itself accomplishes with leisurely amplitude. But one point may be indicated by way of illustration. As is obvious from the mere names, instrumentalism made much of instrumentalities, and pragmatism much of action, practise. The projection of older ideas is seen in the fact that the ideas of tools and action were given a personal and subjective meaning. Instrumentalism was taken to signify that thought and knowledge exist only as means of accomplishing some private advantage, some external utility. The earlier stages of criticism show that instrumentalism was even defined as the doctrine that all knowing is subordinate to satisfying organic, animal needs. The idea of action was given a similarly isolated and private interpretation. What the criticisms really proved was the nature of the conceptions which were previously current as to instruments and action. When these conceptions were read into the new view, there was no difficulty in attributing to the latter a denial of all objective and disinterested thought. It took time to make it clear that what was genuinely new in pragmatism was precisely a denial of these conceptions, and the substitution for them of an objective conception of tools, purpose and action.

But Dr. Hook at the outset cut the discussion clear of all such encumbrances and irrelevant confusion. He makes it clear that instruments denote objects having a definite existential status and office, and that action does not cease to be continuous with the energies of nature when it is expressed in the behavior and habits of a living organism. There is then no difficulty in making it clear that thought, which in science deals with the objects which have the status of instruments, is itself a further tool of a distinctive type, and yet like other instruments, one set to operate in a common world of existences. There is an important sense in which all conclusive thinking is circular and is justified by its circularity. It brings us back at its close to the material which formed its starting point, enabling us to see it as a contributing and an enveloped member of an inclusive whole. This completer vision forms, I take it, the reality of what is termed synthesis. This consists in the perception of material previously isolated and fragmentary as a constituent of a related unity. The grasp which Mr. Hook has upon both the newer movement and the essential factors of classic thought enables him to achieve such a synoptic vision to a remarkable extent. His discussion is thus lifted far above the level of controversy which has attended so much of the consideration of pragmatism. It is possible for a reader by means of rigid definition of the terms metaphysics and pragmatism, laid down inflexibly in advance, to hide his mind from the enlightenment which this book can convey. But the reader who permits his idea of the meaning of these words to grow with and from the actual subject-matter of the following pages will find in them, I am confident, a penetrating and illuminating union of the basic ideas in the newer movement with those of the classic philosophic tradition, a union in which equal justice is dealt to the truths which are carried over and completed in the new development and to the transformations in them which the new ideas exact.

JOHN DEWEY.

INTRODUCTION

THE title of this study has been selected with malice prepense. It conjoins two terms whose connotations are generally regarded as opposite in order to make more emphatic the belief that method is dogged by a pack of metaphysical consequences; that a pure method which does not involve reference to a theory of existence is as devoid of meaning as a proposition which does not imply other propositions. Pragmatism has become a debased word in the linguistic exchange of contemporary philosophy.{1} Its one indisputable signification is that of a militant method of approaching and settling philosophic problems—some say by ignoring them, others say by calling familiar assumptions into question. But unless pragmatism is to experience the same fate which has befallen the positivism of Comte and the phenomenalism of Mach—philosophies proudly and avowedly anti-metaphysical—it must analyze the implications of what it means to have a method and examine the generic traits of existence which make that method a fruitful one in revealing them. Identified as it commonly is with what is merely instrumental, it must start with a consideration of the instrument and follow its lead into the subject matter which is, so to speak, instrumentalized. This emphasis on the instrument is not an evasion of a metaphysics but a challenge to one. Hence if in the course of the inquiry a metaphysics is invalidated it will be of a certain type—one denied or precluded by the metaphysical consequences of the characteristic pragmatic doctrine. Just as in the field of logical judgment a negative pronouncement can only be made on the basis of a positive commitment so in the larger field of methodological analysis. Ignorance of everything can certainly be no ground for denying anything.

Although pragmatism has come of age in a complex industrial era it may be regarded as the culminating expression of one of the great philosophic motifs in the history of thought. Together with almost every phase of evolutionary naturalism and positivism it revolves around a conception of man designated by Max Scheler (following Bergson) as homo faber which sums up man’s activities as (1) a sign-making animal (ein Zeichentier), (2) an instrument-using animal (ein Werkzeugstier) and (3) a brainy animal (ein Gehirnwesen).{2} Although the accuracy of these distinctions may be questioned the clear indication of the primacy of the practical may be accepted as the defining emphasis of the pragmatic point of departure. Hence, the stress on ways and means, methods and instrumentalities. Contrary to prevalent notions however, accentuation is not placed on intermediating affairs in the interest of a particular outcome but rather for the sake of a general consequence or rule. He who is