American Wisdom: The Philosophers' Blindman's Bluff

We continue our series on Lin Yutang's masterpiece on American culture, "The Wisdom of America," with Yutang's critical review of the fruits of modern philosophy:

"Suppose I arrange the works of the essential philosophers leaving out the secondary and transitional systems in a bookcase of four shelves; on the top shelf (out of reach, since I can't read the language) I will place the Indians; on the next the Greek naturalists; and to remedy the unfortunate paucity of their remains, I will add here those free inquirers of the renaissance, leading to Spinoza, who after two thousand years picked up the thread of scientific speculation, and besides, all modern science: so that this shelf will run over into a whole library of what is not ordinarily called philosophy. On the third shelf I will put Platonism, including Aristotle, the Fathers, the Scholastics, and all honestly Christian theology; and on the last, modern or subjective philosophy in its entirety. I will leave lying on the table, as of doubtful destination, the works of my contemporaries. There is much life in some of them. I like their watercolor sketches of self-consciousness, their rebellious egotisms, their fervid reforms of phraseology, their peep-holes through which some very small part of things may be seen very clearly: they have lively wits, but they seem to me like children playing blindman's buff; they are keenly excited at not knowing where they are. They are really here, in the common natural world, where there is nothing in particular to threaten or allure them; and they have only to remove their philosophical bandages in order to perceive it."

That was George Santayana soliloquizing in Europe on the progress of philosophy, after he had retired from Harvard. We are grateful for such confidences on the part of a professor of philosophy and only wish more of them had the same charm of candor and the same wit to know what they are about. "Seem like children playing blindman's buff . . . keenly excited at not knowing where they are" - what an apt characterization of the joys of philosophizing in the last three hundred years of modern subjective philosophy! "Fichte and Nietzsche, in their fervid arrogance, could hardly outdo the mental impoverishment of Berkeley and Hume in their levity: it really had been a sight for the gods to see one of these undergraduates driving matter out of the universe, while the other drove out the spirit." That Santayana's summing up of the burden of modern philosophy is both fair and accurate, in regard to its general preoccupation with laboratory examination of self -consciousness with a self-conscious mind, all students of philosophy today must admit.

Almost exclusively, the problem attacked by modern philosophy is the problem of knowledge, of how we can know reality. The net outcome of three centuries of such inquiry is that we know nothing and can know nothing of reality, of the thing-in-itself. Through the long gray corridors of modern learning, one hears the frightened cries of these philosophers "Where am I?" "Do I exist?" "Am I real?" "How do I know that I exist?" cries that reverberate with increasing exasperation and are echoed by the gray-plastered hallways until it seems the only thing which remains real is the fear of the unknowable.

Two men in the present generation seemed dissatisfied with this state of affairs; while admitting the excitement of the game of blindman's buff, they also had the wit to tire of it and call it slightly unfair, unfair to themselves, unfair to the world of reality, and unfair to the business of living. One, William James, completely an American, with Irish wit under his red head, and the other, George Santayana, as good as American but with a European and generally Catholic background, were seen constantly cheating their playmates by stealthily lifting their philosophical bandages to have a peep at the sun and the trees and the birds outside. This habit of lifting their bandages was generally deplored; unless all played at the game of pretending not to know where they were, the illusion would be destroyed. William James was always regarded with some suspicion; he was described as "making raids into philosophy," by which it was meant that philosophy was not his mansion. I would admit that; to me, William James was a man who happened to drift into teaching philosophy as a means of making a living, of which means in his later years he rather tired, and who, locked up in a room with his hundreds of books on continental philosophy and psychology, was all the time pacing the floor and peeping through a keyhole at the outside world of sunlight, who heard the still inner voice, "The world is real for me, real enough for my purposes." The two men were not too close together; it was not James's fault, and yet when Santayana wrote in 1918, we "are really here, in the common natural world, where there is nothing in particular to threaten or allure us," the ghost of James must have been gratified.

The situation, I think, may be summed up in a paragraph. Since Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, began to question his own existence and fell back on his consciousness to prove that he existed, this branch of human knowledge has been occupying itself, very principally, with the problem, whether reality is real and whether we can know it at all. There grew then a paradox: how can matter, which is not mind, produce consciousness, and how can mind, which is not matter, reach out to establish connections with the external world? Having artificially separated mind and matter, which were nothing but the philosophers own concepts, they were confronted with an unbridgeable chasm, across which no flight of speculative fancies enabled them to fly, until quite lately, thanks to the progress of modern physics, Whitehead pointed out the falseness of their basic assumptions that mind and matter were independent substances and declared somewhat triumphantly that consciousness is but a function of an event and therefore necessarily an integral part of reality. This is just another of those "fervid reforms of phraseology" that, played strictly according to the rules of the game, seem to save the situation and rescue the world of reality for us. To be sure, it is playing with words again, but as it is played according to Hoyle, the evidence is admitted, and the layman watchers of the game like myself heave a sigh of relief. It had been a game of concepts and words and definitions all along. More recently, Northrop of Yale marked an important advance in thought by readmitting the value and validity of immediate, intuitive perceptions, which are the only approach God has given us for knowing the outside world, and which the willful men in their intellectual arrogance have chosen to ignore.

To be sure, these impressive structures of thought, from Kant and Hegel down, were a mirage; yet they held men s speculative thought for ages. Many inquiring minds studying the nature and validity of thought and reality and spirit have derived great pleasure in their contemplation, for they fairly scintillate with the multicolored cobwebs these magicians wove around them. The students of thought were for the most part so desirous of emulating their fellows and anxious not to be thought stupid that each was ready, individually, to try to see what he could see and discover what he could discover in the filaments of light and color in their intricate schemes. They never stopped to ask, If the sum total of philosophy was the impossibility of knowledge, was not something fundamentally wrong? If the material world was perceptually, morally, socially, and aesthetically real, but logically unreal, was not something wrong with the tool of thought itself? Clearly something was not right in our definition of truth itself. The nature of truth as philosophers argue about it is one thing. The nature of truth as a hillbilly says to himself, "The skies are dark on the north west; I must finish planting the potato patch tonight, before supper," is clearly another. How to bridge that gap is no mean task for a philosopher who wants to satisfy both his sense of fact and his intellectual pride.

Since we have decided not to occupy ourselves with formal philosophy, we may enlist the help of William James and George Santayana to polish off the systems in a few paragraphs and then escape with them to the fullness of living. Both James and Santayana betrayed professional secrets of the philosophers. What James said amounted to a confession of total ignorance of the philosophers, that they were all subjective guessers without their pretended objectivity, according to James, and without love of truth, according to Santayana. William James was an American phenomenon, crude, free, forever curious and undisciplinable. When he applied his American sense of fact and robust sense of life to the academic disciplines of European structures, some thing was bound to happen,

"But practically one's conviction that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been claimed! The world is rational through and through, its existence is an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God, a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known, the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative exists, obligation is only the resultant of ideas; a permanent spiritual principle is in everyone, there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes, there is an absolute first cause; an eternal necessity, a freedom; a purpose, no purpose; a primal One, a primal Many; a universal continuity, an essential discontinuity in things; an infinity, no infinity. There is this, there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in his grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or not."

The final stab at philosophic systems is given by George Santayana, who wields his weapon of irony with as much finesse as the matadors of his race wield theirs, plunges it straight into the heart of the matter, which in this case is the heart of a European bull, and draws blood from it.

"To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every philosopher says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As a philosopher has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are rather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians. . . . But professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or semblance of evidence they an gather for the defence, and how much prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution; for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system, covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be poetical; but how should any one who really coveted truth suppose that it was true?"

Elsewhere, in the essay on "Masks," Santayana continues his pinpricking of professional philosophers. "No one," he says, "would be angry with a man for unintentionally making a mistake about a matter of fact; but if he perversely insists on spoiling your story in the telling of it, you want to kick him; and this is the reason why every philosopher and theologian is justly vexed with every other." I am informed that at the UNESCO Conference at Mexico City, some one made an attempt to call a conference of theologians and philosophers in the foolish hope that they might come to agree upon some common denominator of beliefs, unaware that it would be easier for the president of Palmolive to concede the virtue of Ivory soap than for an Episcopalian bishop to concede merits in Baptist theology.

In viewing man s attempts at philosophy, there is really only one important distinction, pertinent thinking and impertinent thinking. That thinking which concerns itself with life is pertinent, that which forgets or abandons it is impertinent. Man s instinct, even in the field of thought, is a quest for life, even though philosophers frequently forget this. Is not barrenness in itself a sufficient condemnation of a philosophy? In the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastics enjoyed the "benefit of clergy." Isn't there in modern society also a demoralizing, corrupting benefit of the university professor which exempts him from the trial of everyday living for pompous untruths? Would that the benefit of the savants were abolished and that a general conviction be established that writers on philosophy should not be exempt fromtrial at the secular court of common human life! Certainly, modern philosophy has the gift of missing the obvious. At the same time, its lack of adaptability is immense; it shows an inability to shift its pastures and move away from barren grounds to more fertile valleys, at which primitive cattle and sheep seem superior.