A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can
reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness
can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or
_d'emblée_, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active
thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions
are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist
substitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal
movement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, and
innumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with only
an abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up
movement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost.
So it is with every concrete thing, however complicated. Our
intellectual handling of it is a retrospective patchwork, a
post-mortem dissection, and can follow any order we find most
expedient. We can make the thing seem self-contradictory whenever
we wish to. But place yourself at the point of view of the thing's
interior _doing_, and all these back-looking and conflicting
conceptions lie harmoniously in your hand. Get at the expanding centre
of a human character, the _élan vital_ of a man, as Bergson calls it,
by living sympathy, and at a stroke you see how it makes those who see
it from without interpret it in such diverse ways. It is something
that breaks into both honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice,
stupidity and insight, at the touch of varying circumstances, and you
feel exactly why and how it does this, and never seek to identify
it stably with any of these single abstractions. Only your
intellectualist does that,--and you now also feel why _he_ must do it
to the end.
Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision
and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write
or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build
the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then
another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You
crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling
into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but
inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope
that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have
had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism
applied to their own works!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account