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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Harald Höffding
The importance of pluralism, i.e., of the tendency to accentuate the multiplicity and the difference of phenomena, depends on its power to raise problems. Both thought and sensations suppose difference, contrast, variation. Already Thomas Hobbes saw that, when he said that to have always one single sensation would be the same as to have no sensation at all. The psychology of our time has, generally speaking, confirmed this view. Fechner's law on the relation between physical impression and psychical sensation points in this direction. And our thought starts with greatest energy when two judgments contradict one another, i.e., when a problem arises. I believe there is a reason for accentuating this point in the actual state of philosophy. There seems to be too much metaphysics in the air, and it is important not to forget what we have learnt from positivism and criticism. The old English school had the mission to keep the attention of philosophers on experience, and it started the great movement against dogmatism in the last three centuries. It is no accident that the greatest setter of problems, David Hume, belonged to this school. In evolutionism this school has said its last word -- the widening of the concept of experience to connote not only the experience of the single individual, but the organized experience of the whole species. We may hope that a new, refreshing start will be made. Pluralism makes the world new for us and necessitates a revision of our categories, our principles and our methods. A dogmatic sleep is too tempting for the human mind. We are inclined to suppose that we can develop -- or perhaps already have developed -- thoughts in which all existence can be expressed. But, as a Danish thinker, Sören Kierkegaard, has said we live forward, but we understand backward. Understanding comes after experience. Only when life is closed can it be thoroughly understood. This is our tragico-comical situation. Even a divine thinker could only understand the world when the life of the world was finished. But pluralism as such brings no understanding, no intelligence. To understand is to connect one fact with other facts, to find a uniting principle. Multiplicity as such would only make description and classification possible, and even this only under the condition that the manifold phenomena were not only different, but also similar. The only meaning of "understanding" which a consistent pluralism can acknowledge is understanding as mere recognition, not as explanation. ...Now, it is a fact that we in many cases have found such connection of continuity in nature. It is the ideal of knowledge to find it in all domains of observation. Our mind can only understand by synthesis, and the principle of continuity is therefore the presupposition, the working hypothesis, of all science. But we must also acknowledge continuity as a characteristic of reality. We have no right to suppose that the fact that we can not understand phenomena, if we can find no connection or continuity, should be without ground in reality itself. If we will build our philosophy on experience, we ought to give full importance to connection, unity and continuity, as well as to difference and multiplicity. Experience shows us both, and pluralism can, therefore, not be the sole or the last word of the philosopher. And there is an inner connection between continuity and multiplicity. All qualities, powers and characters which we ascribe to the single elements or beings which pluralism acknowledges are only known through the connection of these elements or beings with a whole order of things. We can, for example, only ascribe energy to a being because we experience that it actually does a certain work, that alterations in it or out of it have their cause in it. If it were absolutely isolated, we could not ascribe any predicate to it, we could not know it at all. Perhaps it is impossible to develop a metaphysical theory which shall give both facts their full right. But this ought not to lead us to forget the urgency of the problem. I, for my part, call myself a monist, because connection and continuity seem to me to be more important facts than multiplicity; it is, as I have shown, only through their connection one with another and with us, that things can be understood.
Excerpted from A Philosophical Confession, in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods (February 16, 1905) |
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