Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller
Encyclopedia
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (August 16, 1864 - August 9, 1937) was a German
-British
philosopher. Born in Altona
, Holstein
(at that time member of the German Confederation
, but under Danish
administration), Schiller studied at the University of Oxford
, and later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University
. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California
. In his lifetime he was well-known as a philosopher; after his death his work was largely forgotten.
Schiller's philosophy was very similar to and often aligned with the pragmatism
of William James
, although Schiller referred to it as "humanism
". He argued vigorously against both logical positivism
and associated philosophers (for example, Bertrand Russell
) as well as absolute idealism
(such as F.H. Bradley).
Schiller was an early supporter of evolution
and a founding member of the English Eugenics Society.
Schiller was a founding member of the English Eugenics Society and published three books on the subject; Tantalus or the Future of Man (1924), Eugenics and Politics (1926), and Social Decay and Eugenic Reform (1932).
, the metaphysical speculations of his Riddles of the Sphinx were likely to hurt his professional prospects (p. xi, Riddles). However, Schiller's fear of reprisal from his anti-metaphysical colleagues should not suggest that Schiller was a friend of metaphysics
. Like his fellow pragmatists across the ocean, Schiller was attempting to stake out an intermediate position between both the spartan landscape of naturalism and the speculative excesses of the metaphysics of his time. In Riddles Schiller both,
The result, Schiller contends, is that naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world (freewill, consciousness
, God
, purpose, universals), while abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (the imperfect, change, physicality). In each case we are unable to guide our moral
and epistemological "lower" lives to the achievement of life's "higher" ends, ultimately leading to skepticism
on both fronts. For knowledge
and morality to be possible, both the world's lower and higher elements must be real; e.g. we need universals (a higher) to make knowledge of particulars (a lower) possible. This would lead Schiller to argue for what he at the time called a "concrete metaphysics", but would later call "humanism".
Shortly after publishing Riddles of the Sphinx, Schiller became acquainted with the work of pragmatist philosopher William James and this changed the course of his career. For a time, Schiller's work became focused on extending and developing James' pragmatism (under Schiller's preferred title, "humanism"). Schiller even revised his earlier work Riddles of the Sphinx to make the nascent pragmatism implicit in that work more explicit. In one of Schiller's most prominent works during this phase of his career, “Axioms as Postulates” (1903), Schiller extended James' will to believe doctrine to show how it could be used to justify not only an acceptance of God, but also our acceptance of causality, of the uniformity of nature, of our concept of identity, of contradiction, of the law of excluded middle, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more.
Towards the end of his career, Schiller's pragmatism began to take on a character more unique from the pragmatism of William James. Schiller's focus became his opposition to formal logic. To understand Shiller's opposition to formal logic, consider the following inference:
From the formal characteristics of this inference alone (All As are Bs; c is not a B; Therefore, c is not an A), formal logic would judge this to be a valid inference. Schiller, however, refused to evaluate the validity of this inference merely on its formal characteristics. Schiller argued that unless we look to the contextual fact regarding what specific problem first prompted this inference to actually occur, we can not determine whether the inference was successful (i.e. pragmatically successful). In the case of this inference, since “Cerebos is 'salt' for culinary, but not for chemical purposes”, without knowing whether the purpose for this piece of reasoning was culinary or chemical we cannot determine whether this is valid or not. In another example, Schiller discusses the truth of formal mathematics "1+1=2" and points out that this equation
does not hold if one is discussing drops of water. Shiller's attack on formal logic and formal mathematics never gained much attention from philosophers, however it does share some weak similarities to the contextualist
view in contemporary epistemology
as well as the views of ordinary language philosophers
.
, Zeno, and Hegel
, portraying Hegel as the worst offender: "Hegelianism never anywhere gets within sight of a fact, or within touch of reality. And the reason is simple: you cannot, without paying the penalty, substitute abstractions for realities; the thought-symbol cannot do duty for the thing symbolized".
Schiller argued that the flaw in Hegel's system, as with all systems of abstract metaphysics, is that the world it constructs always prove to be unhelpful in guiding our imperfect, changing, particular, and physical lives to the achievement of the "higher" universal Ideals and Ends. For example, Schiller argues that the reality of time and change
is intrinsically opposed to the very modus operandi
of all systems of abstract metaphysics. He says that the possibility to change is a precondition of any moral action (or action generally), and so any system of abstract metaphysics is bound to lead us into a moral skepticism
.
The problem lies in the aim of abstract metaphysics for "interpreting the world in terms of conceptions, which should be true not here and now, but “eternally
” and independently of Time and Change." The result is that metaphysics must use conceptions that have the "time-aspect of Reality" abstracted away. Of course, “[o]nce abstracted from,
While abstract metaphysics provides us with a world of beauty
and purpose and various other “highers”, it condemns other key aspects of the world we live in as imaginary. The world of abstract metaphysics has no place for imperfect moral agents who (1) strive to learn about the world and then (2) act upon the world to change it for the better. Consequently, abstract metaphysics condemns us as illusionary, and declares our place in the world as unimportant and purposeless. Where abstractions take priority, our concrete lives collapse into skepticism and pessimism
.
In making the case that the naturalist method also results in an epistemological and moral skepticism, Schiller looks to show this method’s inadequacy at moving from the cold, lifeless lower world of atoms to the higher world of ethics, meanings, and minds. As with abstract metaphysics, Schiller attacks naturalism on many fronts: (1) the naturalist method is unable to reduce universals to particulars, (2) the naturalist method is unable to reduce freewill to determinist movements, (3) the naturalist method is unable to reduce emergent properties
like consciousness to brain activity, (4) the naturalist method is unable to reduce God into a pantheism
, and so on. Just as the abstract method cannot find a place for the lower elements of our world inside the higher, the naturalist method cannot find a place for the higher elements of our world inside the lower. In a reversal of abstract metaphysics, naturalism denies the reality of the higher elements to save the lower. Schiller uses the term “pseudo-metaphysical” here instead of naturalism—as he sometimes does—because he is accusing these naturalist philosophers of trying to solve metaphysical problems while sticking to the non-metaphysical “lower” aspects of the world (i.e. without engaging in real metaphysics):
To show that the world’s higher elements do not reduce to the lower is not yet to show that naturalism must condemn the world’s higher elements as illusionary. A second component to Schiller’s attack is showing that naturalism cannot escape its inability to reduce the higher to the lower by asserting that these higher elements evolve from the lower. However, Schiller does not see naturalism as anymore capable of explaining the evolution of the higher from the lower than it is capable of reducing the higher to the lower. While evolution does begin with something lower that in turn evolves into something higher, the problem for naturalism is that whatever the starting point for evolution is, it must first be something with the potential to evolve into a higher. For example, the world cannot come into existence from nothing because the potential or “germ” of the world is not “in” nothing (nothing has no potential, it has nothing; after all, it is nothing). Likewise, biological evolution cannot begin from inanimate matter, because the potential for life is not “in” inanimate matter. The following passage shows Schiller applying the same sort of reasoning to the evolution of consciousness:
Unable to either reduce or explain the evolution of the higher elements of our world, naturalism is left to explain away the higher elements as mere illusions. In doing this, naturalism condemns us to a skepticism in the both epistemology and ethics. It is worth noting, that while Schiller's work has been largely neglected since his death, Schiller's arguments against a naturalistic account of evolution have been recently cited by advocates of intelligent design
to establish the existence of a longer history for the view due to legal concerns in the United States
(See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
).
Schiller was demanding a course correction in field of metaphysics, putting it at the service of science. For example, to explain the creation of the world out of nothing, or to explain the emergence or evolution of the “higher” parts of the world, Schiller introduces a divine being who might generate the end (i.e. Final Cause
) which gives nothing
ness, lifelessness, and unconscious matter the purpose (and thus potential) of evolving into higher forms:
This re-introduction of teleology
(which Schiller sometimes calls a re-anthropomorphizing of the world) is what Schiller says the naturalist has become afraid to do. Schiller’s method of concrete metaphysics (i.e. his humanism) allows for an appeal to metaphysics when science demands it. However:
Schiller finally reveals what this “End” is which “all things tend”:
Now, while by today’s philosophic standards Schiller’s speculations would be considered wildly metaphysical and disconnected from the sciences, compared with the metaphysicians of his day (Hegel, McTaggart, etc.), Schiller saw himself as radically scientific. Schiller gave his philosophy a number of labels during his career. Early on he used the names "Concrete Metaphysics" and "Anthropomorphism", while later in life tending towards "Pragmatism" and particularly "Humanism".
In order to justify his attempt to occupy the middle ground between naturalism and abstract metaphysics, Schiller makes a move that anticipates James' The Will to Believe
:
Schiller contends that in light of the other methods’ failure to provide humans with a role and place in the universe, we ought avoid the adoption of these methods. By the end of Riddles, Schiller offers his method of humanism as the only possible method that results in a world where we can navigate our lower existence to the achievement of our higher purpose. He asserts that it is the method we ought to adopt regardless of the evidence against it (“even though it were but a bare possibility”).
While Schiller’s will to believe is a central theme of Riddle of the Sphinx (appearing mainly in the introduction and conclusion of his text), in 1891 the doctrine held a limited role in Schiller's philosophy. In Riddles, Schiller only employs his version of the will to believe doctrine when he is faced with overcoming skeptic and pessimistic methods of philosophy. In 1897, William James published his essay “The Will to Believe” and this influenced Schiller to drastically expanded his application of the doctrine. For a 1903 volume titled Personal Idealism, Schiller contributed a widely-read essay titled “Axioms as Postulates” in which he sets out to justify the “axiom
s of logic” as postulates adopted on the basis of the will to believe doctrine. In this essay Schiller extends the will to believe doctrine to be the basis of our acceptance of causality
, of the uniformity of nature
, of our concept of identity
, of contradiction
, of the law of excluded middle
, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more. He notes that we postulate that nature is uniform because we need nature to be uniform:
Schiller stresses that doctrines like the uniformity of nature must first be postulated on the basis of need (not evidence) and only then “justified by the evidence of their practical working.” He attacks both empiricists like John Stuart Mill
, who try to conclude that nature is uniform from previous experience, as well as Kantians
who conclude that nature is uniform from the preconditions on our understanding. Schiller argues that preconditions are not conclusions, but demands made on our experience that may or may not work. On this success hinges our continued acceptance of the postulate and its eventual promotion to axiom status.
In “Axioms and Postulates” Schiller vindicates the postulation by its success in practice, marking an important shift from Riddles of a Sphinx. In Riddles, Schiller is concerned with the vague aim of connecting the “higher” to the “lower” so he can avoid skepticism, but by 1903 he has clarified the connection he sees between these two elements. The “higher” abstract elements are connected to the lower because they are our inventions for dealing with the lower; their truth depends on their success as tools. Schiller dates the entry of this element into his thinking in his 1892 essay “Reality and ‘Idealism’” (a mere year after his 1891 Riddles).
The shift in Schiller's thinking continues in his next published work, The Metaphysics of the Time-Process (1895):
The abstractions of metaphysics, then, exist as explanations of the concrete facts of life, and not the latter as illustrations of the former […] Science [along with humanism] does not refuse to interpret the symbols with which it operates; on the contrary, it is only their applicability to the concrete facts originally abstracted from that is held to justify their use and to establish their ‘truth.’
Schiller's accusations against the metaphysician in Riddles now appear in a more pragmatic light. His objection is similar to one we might make against a worker who constructs a flat-head screwdriver
to help him build a home, and who then accuses a screw of unreality when he comes upon a Phillips-screw that his flat-head screwdriver won’t fit. In his works after Riddles, Schiller’s attack takes the form of reminding the abstract metaphysician that abstractions are meant as tools for dealing with the “lower” world of particulars and physicality, and that after constructing abstractions we cannot simply drop the un-abstracted world out of our account. The un-abstracted world is the entire reason for making abstractions in the first place. We did not abstract to reach the unchanging and eternal truths; we abstract to construct an imperfect and rough tool for dealing with life in our particular and concrete world. It is the working of the higher in “making predictions about the future behavior of things for the purpose of shaping the future behavior of things for the purpose of shaping our own conduct accordingly” that justifies the higher.
A few lines down from this passage Schiller adds the following footnote in a 1903 reprint of the essay: “All this seems a very fairly definite anticipation of modern pragmatism.” Indeed, it resembles the pragmatist theory of truth. However, Schiller’s pragmatism was still very different from both that of William James and that of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Both Schiller’s theory of truth and meaning (i.e. Schiller’s pragmatism) derive their justification from an examination of thought from what he calls his humanist viewpoint (his new name for concrete metaphysics). He informs us that to answer “what precisely is meant by having a meaning” will require us to “raise the prior question of why we think at all.”. A question Schiller of course looks to evolution to provide.
Schiller provides a detailed defense of his pragmatist theories of truth and meaning in a chapter titled “The Biologic of Judgment” in Logic for Use (1929). The account Schiller lays out in many ways resembles some of what Peirce asserts in his "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) essay:
This passage of Schiller was worth quoting at length because of the insight this chapter offers into Schiller’s philosophy. In the passage, Schiller makes the claim that thought only occurs when our unthinking habits prove themselves inadequate for handling a particular situation. Schiller’s stressing of the genesis of limited occurrences of thought sets Schiller up for his account of meaning and truth.
Schiller asserts that when a person utters a statement in a situation they are doing so for a specific purpose: to solve the problem that habit could not handle alone. The meaning of such a statement is whatever contribution it makes to accomplishing the purpose of this particular occurrence of thought. The truth of the statement will be if it helps accomplishes that purpose. No utterance or thought can be given a meaning or a truth valuation outside the context of one of these particular occurrences of thought. This account of Schiller’s is a much more extreme view than even James took.
At first glance, Schiller appears very similar to James. However, Schiller’s more stringent requirement that meaningful statements have consequences “to some one for some purpose” makes Schiller’s position more extreme than James’. For Schiller, it is not a sufficient condition for meaningfulness that a statement entail experiential consequences (as it is for both Peirce and James). Schiller requires that the consequences of a statement make the statement relevant to some particular person’s goals at a specific moment in time if it is to be meaningful. Therefore, it is not simply enough that the statement “diamonds are hard” and the statement “diamonds are soft” entail different experiential consequences, it is also required that the experiential difference makes a difference to someone’s purposes. Only then, and only to that person, do the two statements state something different. If the experiential difference between hard and soft diamonds did not connect up with my purpose for entering into thought, the two statements would possess the same meaning. For example, if I were to randomly blurt out “diamonds are hard” and then “diamonds are soft” to everyone in a coffee shop one day, my words would mean nothing. Words can only mean something if they are stated with a specific purpose.
Consequently, Schiller rejects the idea that statements can have meaning or truth when they are looked upon in the abstract, away from a particular context. “Diamonds are hard” only possesses meaning when stated (or believed) at some specific situation, by some specific person, uttered (or believed) for some specific aim. It is the consequences the statement holds for that person’s purposes which constitute its meaning, and its usefulness in accomplishing that person’s purposes that constitutes the statement’s truth or falsity. After all, when we look at the sentence “diamonds are hard” in a particular situation we may find it actually has nothing to say about diamonds. A speaker may very well be using the sentence as a joke, as a codephrase, or even simply as an example of a sentence with 15 letters. Which the sentence really means cannot be determined without the specific purpose a person might be using the statement for in a specific context.
In an article titled “Pragmatism and Pseudo-pragmatism” Schiller defends his pragmatism against a particular counterexample
in a way that sheds considerable light on his pragmatism:
We might recognize this claim as the sort of absurdity many philosophers try to read into the pragmatism of William James. James, however, would not agree that the meaning of “the 100th decimal of Pi
is 9” and “the 100th decimal of Pi is 6” mean the same thing until someone has a reason to care about any possible difference. Schiller, in constast, does mean to say this.
James and Schiller both treat truth as something that happens to a statement, and so James would agree that it only becomes true that the 100th decimal of Pi is 9 when someone in fact believes that statement and it leads them to their goals, but nowhere does James imply that meaning is something that happens to a statement. That is a unique element of Schiller’s pragmatism.
With Peirce’s attempts to restrict the use of pragmatism set aside, Schiller unpacks the term “consequences” to provide what he considers as a more substantial restatement of Peirce’s pragmatism:
Schiller believes his pragmatism to be more developed because of its attention to the fact that the “consequences” which make up the meaning and truth of a statement, must always be consequences for someone’s particular purposes at some particular time. Continuing his condemnation of the abstract, Schiller contends that the meaning of a concept is not the consequences of some abstract proposition, but what consequences an actual thinker hopes its use will bring about in an actual situation. The meaning of a thought is what consequences one means to bring about when they employ the thought. To Schiller, this is what a more sophisticated pragmatist understands by the term meaning.
If we are to understand the pragmatic theory of meaning in Schiller’s way, he is right to claim that James’ theory of truth is a mere corollary of the pragmatist theory of meaning:
Given Schiller's view that the meaning of a thought amounts to the consequences one means to bring about by the thought, Schiller further concluded that the truth of a thought depends on whether it actually brings about the consequences one intended. For example, if while following a cooking recipe that called for salt I were to think to myself, "Cerebos is salt", my thought will be true if it consequently leads me to add Cerebos and produce a dish with the intended taste. However, if while working in a chemistry lab to produce a certain mixture I were to think to myself, "Cerebos is salt", my thought would both have a different meaning than before (since my intent now differs) and be false (since Cerebos is only equivalent to salt for culinary purposes). According to Schiller, the question of what a thought like "Cerebos is salt" means or whether it is true can only be answered if the specific circumstances with which the thought arose are taken into consideration. While there is some similarity here between Schiller's view of meaning and the later ordinary language philosophers
, Schiller's account ties meaning and truth more closely to individuals and their intent with a specific use rather than whole linguistic communities.
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
-British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
philosopher. Born in Altona
Altona
Altona may refer to:* Altona, Hamburg, Germany** Altona-Nord, Hamburg, Germany*Altona, Illinois, United States*Altona, Indiana, United States*Altona, Manitoba, Canada*Altona , New York, located in Clinton County or...
, Holstein
Holstein
Holstein is the region between the rivers Elbe and Eider. It is part of Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany....
(at that time member of the German Confederation
German Confederation
The German Confederation was the loose association of Central European states created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to coordinate the economies of separate German-speaking countries. It acted as a buffer between the powerful states of Austria and Prussia...
, but under Danish
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
administration), Schiller studied at the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
, and later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
. In his lifetime he was well-known as a philosopher; after his death his work was largely forgotten.
Schiller's philosophy was very similar to and often aligned with the pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
of William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
, although Schiller referred to it as "humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
". He argued vigorously against both logical positivism
Logical positivism
Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
and associated philosophers (for example, Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
) as well as absolute idealism
Absolute idealism
Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy attributed to G. W. F. Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole. Hegel asserted that in order for the thinking subject to be able to know its object at all, there must be in some...
(such as F.H. Bradley).
Schiller was an early supporter of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
and a founding member of the English Eugenics Society.
Life
Born in 1864, one of three brothers and the son of Ferdinand Schiller (a Calcutta merchant), Schiller's family home was in Switzerland. Schiller was educated at Rugby and Balliol, and graduated in the first class of Literae Humaniores, winning later the Taylorian scholarship for German in 1887. Schiller's first book, Riddles of the Sphinx (1891), was an immediate success despite his use of a pseudonym because of his fears concerning how the book would be received. Between the years 1893 and 1897 he was an instructor in philosophy at Cornell University. In 1897 he returned to Oxford and became fellow and tutor of Corpus for more than thirty years. Schiller was president of the Aristotelian Society in 1921, and was for many years treasurer of the Mind Association. In 1926 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy. In 1929 he was appointed visiting professor in the University of Southern California, and spent half of each year in the United States and half in England. Schiller died in Los Angeles either on August 7 or 9th of 1937 after a long and lingering illness.Schiller was a founding member of the English Eugenics Society and published three books on the subject; Tantalus or the Future of Man (1924), Eugenics and Politics (1926), and Social Decay and Eugenic Reform (1932).
Philosophy
In 1891, F.C.S. Schiller made his first contribution to philosophy anonymously. Schiller feared that in his time of high naturalismNaturalism (philosophy)
Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
, the metaphysical speculations of his Riddles of the Sphinx were likely to hurt his professional prospects (p. xi, Riddles). However, Schiller's fear of reprisal from his anti-metaphysical colleagues should not suggest that Schiller was a friend of metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
. Like his fellow pragmatists across the ocean, Schiller was attempting to stake out an intermediate position between both the spartan landscape of naturalism and the speculative excesses of the metaphysics of his time. In Riddles Schiller both,
-
- (1) accuses naturalism (which he also sometimes calls "pseudometaphysics" or "positivismPositivismPositivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....
") of ignoring the fact that metaphysics is required to justify our natural description of the world, and - (2) accuses "abstract metaphysics" of losing sight of the world we actually live in and constructing grand, disconnected imaginary worlds.
- (1) accuses naturalism (which he also sometimes calls "pseudometaphysics" or "positivism
The result, Schiller contends, is that naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world (freewill, consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
, God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, purpose, universals), while abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (the imperfect, change, physicality). In each case we are unable to guide our moral
Moral
A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim...
and epistemological "lower" lives to the achievement of life's "higher" ends, ultimately leading to skepticism
Skepticism
Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...
on both fronts. For knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
and morality to be possible, both the world's lower and higher elements must be real; e.g. we need universals (a higher) to make knowledge of particulars (a lower) possible. This would lead Schiller to argue for what he at the time called a "concrete metaphysics", but would later call "humanism".
Shortly after publishing Riddles of the Sphinx, Schiller became acquainted with the work of pragmatist philosopher William James and this changed the course of his career. For a time, Schiller's work became focused on extending and developing James' pragmatism (under Schiller's preferred title, "humanism"). Schiller even revised his earlier work Riddles of the Sphinx to make the nascent pragmatism implicit in that work more explicit. In one of Schiller's most prominent works during this phase of his career, “Axioms as Postulates” (1903), Schiller extended James' will to believe doctrine to show how it could be used to justify not only an acceptance of God, but also our acceptance of causality, of the uniformity of nature, of our concept of identity, of contradiction, of the law of excluded middle, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more.
Towards the end of his career, Schiller's pragmatism began to take on a character more unique from the pragmatism of William James. Schiller's focus became his opposition to formal logic. To understand Shiller's opposition to formal logic, consider the following inference:
-
- (1) All saltSaltIn chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral...
is soluble in water; - (2) CerebosCerebosCerebos is an English brand of salt and, more recently, other flavourings and nutritional supplements. Its promise was "See How It Runs", describing how fine the salt was...
is not soluble in water; - (3) Therefore, Cerebos is not a salt.
- (1) All salt
From the formal characteristics of this inference alone (All As are Bs; c is not a B; Therefore, c is not an A), formal logic would judge this to be a valid inference. Schiller, however, refused to evaluate the validity of this inference merely on its formal characteristics. Schiller argued that unless we look to the contextual fact regarding what specific problem first prompted this inference to actually occur, we can not determine whether the inference was successful (i.e. pragmatically successful). In the case of this inference, since “Cerebos is 'salt' for culinary, but not for chemical purposes”, without knowing whether the purpose for this piece of reasoning was culinary or chemical we cannot determine whether this is valid or not. In another example, Schiller discusses the truth of formal mathematics "1+1=2" and points out that this equation
Equation
An equation is a mathematical statement that asserts the equality of two expressions. In modern notation, this is written by placing the expressions on either side of an equals sign , for examplex + 3 = 5\,asserts that x+3 is equal to 5...
does not hold if one is discussing drops of water. Shiller's attack on formal logic and formal mathematics never gained much attention from philosophers, however it does share some weak similarities to the contextualist
Contextualism
Contextualism describes a collection of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context...
view in contemporary epistemology
Contemporary philosophy
Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the end of the 19th century with the professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy....
as well as the views of ordinary language philosophers
Ordinary language philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use....
.
Opposition to naturalism and metaphysics
In Riddles, Schiller gives historical examples of the dangers of abstract metaphysics in the philosophies of PlatoPlato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, Zeno, and Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
, portraying Hegel as the worst offender: "Hegelianism never anywhere gets within sight of a fact, or within touch of reality. And the reason is simple: you cannot, without paying the penalty, substitute abstractions for realities; the thought-symbol cannot do duty for the thing symbolized".
Schiller argued that the flaw in Hegel's system, as with all systems of abstract metaphysics, is that the world it constructs always prove to be unhelpful in guiding our imperfect, changing, particular, and physical lives to the achievement of the "higher" universal Ideals and Ends. For example, Schiller argues that the reality of time and change
Identity and change
The relationship between identity and change in the philosophical field of metaphysics seems, at first glance, deceptively simple, and belies the complexity of the issues involved. This article explores "the problem of change and identity".- Change :...
is intrinsically opposed to the very modus operandi
Modus operandi
Modus operandi is a Latin phrase, approximately translated as "mode of operation". The term is used to describe someone's habits or manner of working, their method of operating or functioning...
of all systems of abstract metaphysics. He says that the possibility to change is a precondition of any moral action (or action generally), and so any system of abstract metaphysics is bound to lead us into a moral skepticism
Moral skepticism
"Moral skepticism" denotes a class of metaethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal, claim that moral knowledge is impossible...
.
The problem lies in the aim of abstract metaphysics for "interpreting the world in terms of conceptions, which should be true not here and now, but “eternally
Eternity
While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existence for a limitless amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside time. By contrast, infinite temporal existence is then called sempiternity. Something eternal exists outside time; by contrast,...
” and independently of Time and Change." The result is that metaphysics must use conceptions that have the "time-aspect of Reality" abstracted away. Of course, “[o]nce abstracted from,
the reference to Time could not, of course, be recovered, any more than the individuality of Reality can be deduced, when once ignored. The assumption is made that, in order to express the ‘truth’ about Reality, its ‘thisnessHaecceityHaecceity is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing...
,’ individuality, change and its immersion in a certain temporal and spatial environment may be neglected, and the timeless validity of a conception is thus substituted for the living, changing and perishing existence we contemplate. […] What I wish here to point out is merely that it is unreasonable to expect from such premises to arrive at a deductiveDeductive reasoningDeductive reasoning, also called deductive logic, is reasoning which constructs or evaluates deductive arguments. Deductive arguments are attempts to show that a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises or hypothesis...
justification of the very characteristics of Reality that have been excluded.
The true reason, then, why Hegelism can give no reason for the Time-process, i.e. for the fact that the world is ‘in time,’ and changes continuously, is that it was constructed to give an account of the world irrespective of time and change. If you insist on having a system of eternal and immutable ‘truthTruthTruth has a variety of meanings, such as the state of being in accord with fact or reality. It can also mean having fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal. In a common usage, it also means constancy or sincerity in action or character...
,’ you can get it only by abstracting from those characteristics of reality, which we try to express by the terms individuality, time, and change. But you must pay the price for a formula that will enable you to make assertions that hold good far beyond the limits of your experience. And it is part of the price that you will in the end be unable to give a rational explanation of those very characteristics, which you dismissed at the outset as irrelevant to a rational explanation.
While abstract metaphysics provides us with a world of beauty
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...
and purpose and various other “highers”, it condemns other key aspects of the world we live in as imaginary. The world of abstract metaphysics has no place for imperfect moral agents who (1) strive to learn about the world and then (2) act upon the world to change it for the better. Consequently, abstract metaphysics condemns us as illusionary, and declares our place in the world as unimportant and purposeless. Where abstractions take priority, our concrete lives collapse into skepticism and pessimism
Pessimism
Pessimism, from the Latin word pessimus , is a state of mind in which one perceives life negatively. Value judgments may vary dramatically between individuals, even when judgments of fact are undisputed. The most common example of this phenomenon is the "Is the glass half empty or half full?"...
.
In making the case that the naturalist method also results in an epistemological and moral skepticism, Schiller looks to show this method’s inadequacy at moving from the cold, lifeless lower world of atoms to the higher world of ethics, meanings, and minds. As with abstract metaphysics, Schiller attacks naturalism on many fronts: (1) the naturalist method is unable to reduce universals to particulars, (2) the naturalist method is unable to reduce freewill to determinist movements, (3) the naturalist method is unable to reduce emergent properties
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....
like consciousness to brain activity, (4) the naturalist method is unable to reduce God into a pantheism
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
, and so on. Just as the abstract method cannot find a place for the lower elements of our world inside the higher, the naturalist method cannot find a place for the higher elements of our world inside the lower. In a reversal of abstract metaphysics, naturalism denies the reality of the higher elements to save the lower. Schiller uses the term “pseudo-metaphysical” here instead of naturalism—as he sometimes does—because he is accusing these naturalist philosophers of trying to solve metaphysical problems while sticking to the non-metaphysical “lower” aspects of the world (i.e. without engaging in real metaphysics):
The pseudo-metaphysical method puts forward the method of science as the method of philosophy. But it is doomed to perpetual failure. […] [T]he data supplied by the physical sciences are intractable, because they are data of a lower sort than the facts they are to explain.
The objects of the physical sciences form the lower orders in the hierarchyHierarchyA hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
of existence, more extensive but less significant. Thus the atoms of the physicist may indeed be found in the organization of conscious beings, but they are subordinate: a living organism exhibits actions which cannot be formulated by the laws of physics alone; man is material, but he is also a great deal more.
To show that the world’s higher elements do not reduce to the lower is not yet to show that naturalism must condemn the world’s higher elements as illusionary. A second component to Schiller’s attack is showing that naturalism cannot escape its inability to reduce the higher to the lower by asserting that these higher elements evolve from the lower. However, Schiller does not see naturalism as anymore capable of explaining the evolution of the higher from the lower than it is capable of reducing the higher to the lower. While evolution does begin with something lower that in turn evolves into something higher, the problem for naturalism is that whatever the starting point for evolution is, it must first be something with the potential to evolve into a higher. For example, the world cannot come into existence from nothing because the potential or “germ” of the world is not “in” nothing (nothing has no potential, it has nothing; after all, it is nothing). Likewise, biological evolution cannot begin from inanimate matter, because the potential for life is not “in” inanimate matter. The following passage shows Schiller applying the same sort of reasoning to the evolution of consciousness:
Taken as the type of the pseudo-metaphysical method, which explains the higher by the lower […] it does not explain the genesis of consciousness out of unconscious matter, because we cannot, or do not, attribute potential consciousness to matter. [….] the theory of Evolution derives the [end result] from its germ, i.e., from that which was, what it became, potentially.
Unable to either reduce or explain the evolution of the higher elements of our world, naturalism is left to explain away the higher elements as mere illusions. In doing this, naturalism condemns us to a skepticism in the both epistemology and ethics. It is worth noting, that while Schiller's work has been largely neglected since his death, Schiller's arguments against a naturalistic account of evolution have been recently cited by advocates of intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
to establish the existence of a longer history for the view due to legal concerns in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
(See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. was the first direct challenge brought in the United States federal courts testing a public school district policy that required the teaching of intelligent design...
).
Humanist alternative to metaphysics and naturalism
Schiller argued that both abstract metaphysics and naturalism portray man as holding an intolerable position in the world. He proposed a method that not only recognizes the lower world we interact with, but takes into account the higher world of purposes, ideals and abstractions. Schiller:
We require, then, a method which combines the excellencies of both the pseudo-metaphysical and the abstract metaphysical, if philosophy is to be possible at all.
Schiller was demanding a course correction in field of metaphysics, putting it at the service of science. For example, to explain the creation of the world out of nothing, or to explain the emergence or evolution of the “higher” parts of the world, Schiller introduces a divine being who might generate the end (i.e. Final Cause
Four causes
Four Causes refers to a principle in Aristotelian science that is used to understand change. Aristotle described four different types of causes, or ways in which an object could be explained: "we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause", He argued...
) which gives nothing
Nothing
Nothing is no thing, denoting the absence of something. Nothing is a pronoun associated with nothingness, is also an adjective, and an object as a concept in the Frege-Church ontology....
ness, lifelessness, and unconscious matter the purpose (and thus potential) of evolving into higher forms:
And thus, so far from dispensing with the need for a Divine First Cause, the theory of evolutionEvolutionEvolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, if only we have the faith in science to carry it to its conclusion, and the courage to interpret it, proves irrefragably that no evolution was possible without a pre-existent Deity, and a Deity, moreover, transcendent, non-material and non-phenomenal. […] [T]he world process is the working out of an anterior purpose or idea in the divine consciousness.
This re-introduction of teleology
Teleology
A teleology is any philosophical account which holds that final causes exist in nature, meaning that design and purpose analogous to that found in human actions are inherent also in the rest of nature. The word comes from the Greek τέλος, telos; root: τελε-, "end, purpose...
(which Schiller sometimes calls a re-anthropomorphizing of the world) is what Schiller says the naturalist has become afraid to do. Schiller’s method of concrete metaphysics (i.e. his humanism) allows for an appeal to metaphysics when science demands it. However:
[T]he new teleology would not be capricious or random in its application, but firmly rooted in the conclusions of the sciences [….] The process which the theory of Evolution divined the history of the world to be, must have content and meaning determined from the basis of the scientific data; it is only by a careful study of the history of a thing that we can determine the direction of its development, [and only then] that we can be said to have made the first approximation to the knowledge of the End of the world process.
[This] is teleology of a totally different kind to that which is so vehemently, and on the whole so justly dreaded by the modern exponents of natural science. It does not attempt to explain things anthropocentrically, or regard all creation as existing for the use and benefit of man; it is as far as the scientist from supposing that cork-trees grow in order to supply us with champagne corks. The end to which it supposes all things to subserve is […] the universal End of the world-process, to which all things tend[.]
Schiller finally reveals what this “End” is which “all things tend”:
If our speculations have not entirely missed their mark, the world-process will come to an end when all the spirits whom it is designed to harmonize [by its Divine Creator] have been united in a perfect society.
Now, while by today’s philosophic standards Schiller’s speculations would be considered wildly metaphysical and disconnected from the sciences, compared with the metaphysicians of his day (Hegel, McTaggart, etc.), Schiller saw himself as radically scientific. Schiller gave his philosophy a number of labels during his career. Early on he used the names "Concrete Metaphysics" and "Anthropomorphism", while later in life tending towards "Pragmatism" and particularly "Humanism".
The Will to Believe
Schiller also developed a method of philosophy intended to mix elements of both naturalism and abstract metaphysics in a way that allows us to avoid the twin scepticisms each method collapses into when followed on its own. However, Schiller does not assume that this is enough to justify his humanism over the other two methods. He accepts the possibility that both scepticism and pessimism are true.In order to justify his attempt to occupy the middle ground between naturalism and abstract metaphysics, Schiller makes a move that anticipates James' The Will to Believe
Will to believe doctrine
"The Will to Believe" is a lecture by William James, first published in 1896, which defends, in certain cases, the adoption of a belief without prior evidence of its truth...
:
And in action especially we are often forced to act upon slight possibilities. Hence, if it can be shown that our solution is a possible answer, and the only possible alternative to pessimism, to a complete despair of life, it would deserve acceptance, even though it were but a bare possibility.
Schiller contends that in light of the other methods’ failure to provide humans with a role and place in the universe, we ought avoid the adoption of these methods. By the end of Riddles, Schiller offers his method of humanism as the only possible method that results in a world where we can navigate our lower existence to the achievement of our higher purpose. He asserts that it is the method we ought to adopt regardless of the evidence against it (“even though it were but a bare possibility”).
While Schiller’s will to believe is a central theme of Riddle of the Sphinx (appearing mainly in the introduction and conclusion of his text), in 1891 the doctrine held a limited role in Schiller's philosophy. In Riddles, Schiller only employs his version of the will to believe doctrine when he is faced with overcoming skeptic and pessimistic methods of philosophy. In 1897, William James published his essay “The Will to Believe” and this influenced Schiller to drastically expanded his application of the doctrine. For a 1903 volume titled Personal Idealism, Schiller contributed a widely-read essay titled “Axioms as Postulates” in which he sets out to justify the “axiom
Axiom
In traditional logic, an axiom or postulate is a proposition that is not proven or demonstrated but considered either to be self-evident or to define and delimit the realm of analysis. In other words, an axiom is a logical statement that is assumed to be true...
s of logic” as postulates adopted on the basis of the will to believe doctrine. In this essay Schiller extends the will to believe doctrine to be the basis of our acceptance of causality
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
, of the uniformity of nature
Principle of uniformity
The principle of uniformity may refer to* The assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe: Uniformitarianism....
, of our concept of identity
Identity (philosophy)
In philosophy, identity, from , is the relation each thing bears just to itself. According to Leibniz's law two things sharing every attribute are not only similar, but are the same thing. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and...
, of contradiction
Contradiction
In classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other...
, of the law of excluded middle
Law of excluded middle
In logic, the law of excluded middle is the third of the so-called three classic laws of thought. It states that for any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is....
, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more. He notes that we postulate that nature is uniform because we need nature to be uniform:
[O]ut of the hurly-burly of events in time and space [we] extract[ ] changeless formulas whose chaste abstraction soars above all reference to any ‘where’ or ‘when,’ and thereby renders them blank cheques to be filled up at our pleasure with any figures of the sort. The only question is—Will Nature honour the cheque? Audentes Natura juvat—let us take our life in our hands and try! If we fail, our blood will be on our own hands (or, more probably, in some one else’s stomach), but though we fail, we are in no worse case than those who dared not postulate […] Our assumption, therefore, is at least a methodological necessity; it may turn out to be (or be near) a fundamental fact in nature [an axiom].
Schiller stresses that doctrines like the uniformity of nature must first be postulated on the basis of need (not evidence) and only then “justified by the evidence of their practical working.” He attacks both empiricists like John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
, who try to conclude that nature is uniform from previous experience, as well as Kantians
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
who conclude that nature is uniform from the preconditions on our understanding. Schiller argues that preconditions are not conclusions, but demands made on our experience that may or may not work. On this success hinges our continued acceptance of the postulate and its eventual promotion to axiom status.
In “Axioms and Postulates” Schiller vindicates the postulation by its success in practice, marking an important shift from Riddles of a Sphinx. In Riddles, Schiller is concerned with the vague aim of connecting the “higher” to the “lower” so he can avoid skepticism, but by 1903 he has clarified the connection he sees between these two elements. The “higher” abstract elements are connected to the lower because they are our inventions for dealing with the lower; their truth depends on their success as tools. Schiller dates the entry of this element into his thinking in his 1892 essay “Reality and ‘Idealism’” (a mere year after his 1891 Riddles).
The plain man’s ‘things,’ the physicist’s ‘atoms,’ and Mr. Ritchie’s ‘Absolute,’ are all of them more or less preserving and well-considered schemes to interpret the primary reality of phenomena, and in this sense Mr. Ritchie is entitled to call the ‘sunrise’ a theory. But the chaos of presentations, out of which we have (by criteria ultimately practical) isolated the phenomena we subsequently call sunrise, is not a theory, but the fact which has called all theories into being.
In addition to generating hypothetical objects to explain phenomena, the interpretation of reality by our thought also bestows a derivative reality on the abstractions with which thought works. If they are the instruments wherewith thought accomplishes such effects upon reality, they must surely be themselves real.
The shift in Schiller's thinking continues in his next published work, The Metaphysics of the Time-Process (1895):
The abstractions of metaphysics, then, exist as explanations of the concrete facts of life, and not the latter as illustrations of the former […] Science [along with humanism] does not refuse to interpret the symbols with which it operates; on the contrary, it is only their applicability to the concrete facts originally abstracted from that is held to justify their use and to establish their ‘truth.’
Schiller's accusations against the metaphysician in Riddles now appear in a more pragmatic light. His objection is similar to one we might make against a worker who constructs a flat-head screwdriver
Screwdriver
A screwdriver is a tool for driving screws and often rotating other machine elements with the mating drive system. The screwdriver is made up of a head or tip, which engages with a screw, a mechanism to apply torque by rotating the tip, and some way to position and support the screwdriver...
to help him build a home, and who then accuses a screw of unreality when he comes upon a Phillips-screw that his flat-head screwdriver won’t fit. In his works after Riddles, Schiller’s attack takes the form of reminding the abstract metaphysician that abstractions are meant as tools for dealing with the “lower” world of particulars and physicality, and that after constructing abstractions we cannot simply drop the un-abstracted world out of our account. The un-abstracted world is the entire reason for making abstractions in the first place. We did not abstract to reach the unchanging and eternal truths; we abstract to construct an imperfect and rough tool for dealing with life in our particular and concrete world. It is the working of the higher in “making predictions about the future behavior of things for the purpose of shaping the future behavior of things for the purpose of shaping our own conduct accordingly” that justifies the higher.
To assert this methodological character of eternal truths is not, of course, to deny their validity [….] To say that we assume the truth of abstraction because we wish to attain certain ends, is to subordinate theoretic ‘truth’ to a teleological implication; to say that, the assumption once made, its truth is ‘proved’ by its practical working [….] For the question of the ‘practical’ working of a truth will always ultimately be found to resolve itself into the question whether we can live by it.
A few lines down from this passage Schiller adds the following footnote in a 1903 reprint of the essay: “All this seems a very fairly definite anticipation of modern pragmatism.” Indeed, it resembles the pragmatist theory of truth. However, Schiller’s pragmatism was still very different from both that of William James and that of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Opposition to logic
As early as 1891 Schiller had independently reached a doctrine very similar to William James’ Will to Believe. As early as 1892 Schiller had independently developed his own pragmatist theory of truth. However, Schiller's concern with meaning was one he entirely imports from the pragmatisms of James and Peirce. Later in life Schiller musters all of these elements of his pragmatism to make a concerted attack on formal logic. Concerned with bringing down the timeless, perfect worlds of abstract metaphysics early in life, the central target of Schiller’s developed pragmatism is the abstract rules of formal logic. Statements, Schiller contends, cannot possess meaning or truth abstracted away from their actual use. Therefore examining their formal features instead of their function in an actual situation is to make the same mistake the abstract metaphysician makes. Symbols are meaningless scratches on paper unless they are given a life in a situation, and meant by someone to accomplish some task. They are tools for dealing with concrete situations, and not the proper subjects of study themselves.Both Schiller’s theory of truth and meaning (i.e. Schiller’s pragmatism) derive their justification from an examination of thought from what he calls his humanist viewpoint (his new name for concrete metaphysics). He informs us that to answer “what precisely is meant by having a meaning” will require us to “raise the prior question of why we think at all.”. A question Schiller of course looks to evolution to provide.
Schiller provides a detailed defense of his pragmatist theories of truth and meaning in a chapter titled “The Biologic of Judgment” in Logic for Use (1929). The account Schiller lays out in many ways resembles some of what Peirce asserts in his "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) essay:
Our account of the function of Judgment in our mental life will, however, have to start a long way back. For there is much thinking before there is any judging, and much living before there is any thinking. Even in highly developed minds judging is a relatively rare incident in thinking, and thinking in living, an exception rather than the rule, and a relatively recent acquisition.
[…]
For the most part the living organism adapts itself to it conditions of life by earlier, easier, and quicker expedients. Its actions or reactions are mostly ‘reflex actions’ determined by inherited habits which largely function automatically […] It follows from this elaborate and admirable organization of adaptive responses to stimulation that organic life might proceed without thinking altogether. […] This is, in fact, the way in which most living being carry on their life, and the plane on which man also lives most of the time.
Thought, therefore, is an abnormality which springs from a disturbance. Its genesis is connected with a peculiar deficiency in the life of habit. […] Whenever […] it becomes biologically important to notice differences in roughly similar situations, and to adjust action more closely to the peculiarities of a particular case, the guidance of life by habit, instinct, and impulse breaks down. A new expedient has somehow to be devised for effecting such exact and delicate adjustments. This is the raison d’etre of what is variously denominated ‘thought,’ ‘reason,’ ‘reflection,’ ‘reasoning,’ and ‘judgment[.]’
[…]
Thinking, however, is not so much a substitute for the earlier processes as a subsidiary addition to them. It only pays in certain cases, and intelligence may be shown also by discerning what they are and when it is wiser to act without thinking. […] Philosophers, however, have very mistaken ideas about rational action. They tend to think that men ought to think all the time, and about all things. But if they did this they would get nothing done, and shorten their lives without enhancing their merriment. Also they utterly misconceive the nature of rational action. They represent it as consisting in the perpetual use of universal rules, whereas it consists rather in perceiving when a general rule must be set aside in order that conduct may be adapted to a particular case.
This passage of Schiller was worth quoting at length because of the insight this chapter offers into Schiller’s philosophy. In the passage, Schiller makes the claim that thought only occurs when our unthinking habits prove themselves inadequate for handling a particular situation. Schiller’s stressing of the genesis of limited occurrences of thought sets Schiller up for his account of meaning and truth.
Schiller asserts that when a person utters a statement in a situation they are doing so for a specific purpose: to solve the problem that habit could not handle alone. The meaning of such a statement is whatever contribution it makes to accomplishing the purpose of this particular occurrence of thought. The truth of the statement will be if it helps accomplishes that purpose. No utterance or thought can be given a meaning or a truth valuation outside the context of one of these particular occurrences of thought. This account of Schiller’s is a much more extreme view than even James took.
At first glance, Schiller appears very similar to James. However, Schiller’s more stringent requirement that meaningful statements have consequences “to some one for some purpose” makes Schiller’s position more extreme than James’. For Schiller, it is not a sufficient condition for meaningfulness that a statement entail experiential consequences (as it is for both Peirce and James). Schiller requires that the consequences of a statement make the statement relevant to some particular person’s goals at a specific moment in time if it is to be meaningful. Therefore, it is not simply enough that the statement “diamonds are hard” and the statement “diamonds are soft” entail different experiential consequences, it is also required that the experiential difference makes a difference to someone’s purposes. Only then, and only to that person, do the two statements state something different. If the experiential difference between hard and soft diamonds did not connect up with my purpose for entering into thought, the two statements would possess the same meaning. For example, if I were to randomly blurt out “diamonds are hard” and then “diamonds are soft” to everyone in a coffee shop one day, my words would mean nothing. Words can only mean something if they are stated with a specific purpose.
Consequently, Schiller rejects the idea that statements can have meaning or truth when they are looked upon in the abstract, away from a particular context. “Diamonds are hard” only possesses meaning when stated (or believed) at some specific situation, by some specific person, uttered (or believed) for some specific aim. It is the consequences the statement holds for that person’s purposes which constitute its meaning, and its usefulness in accomplishing that person’s purposes that constitutes the statement’s truth or falsity. After all, when we look at the sentence “diamonds are hard” in a particular situation we may find it actually has nothing to say about diamonds. A speaker may very well be using the sentence as a joke, as a codephrase, or even simply as an example of a sentence with 15 letters. Which the sentence really means cannot be determined without the specific purpose a person might be using the statement for in a specific context.
In an article titled “Pragmatism and Pseudo-pragmatism” Schiller defends his pragmatism against a particular counterexample
Counterexample
In logic, and especially in its applications to mathematics and philosophy, a counterexample is an exception to a proposed general rule. For example, consider the proposition "all students are lazy"....
in a way that sheds considerable light on his pragmatism:
The impossibility of answering truly the question whether the 100th (or 10,000th) decimal in the evaluation of Pi is or is not a 9, splendidly illustrates how impossible it is to predicate truth in abstraction from actual knowing and actual purpose. For the question cannot be answered until the decimal is calculated. Until then no one knows what it is, or rather will turn out to be. And no one will calculate it, until it serves some purpose to do so, and some one therefore interests himself in the calculation. And so until then the truth remains uncertain: there is no 'true' answer, because there is no actual context in which the question has really been raised. We have merely a number of conflicting possibilities, not even claims to truth, and there is no decision. Yet a decision is possible if an experiment is performed. But his experiment presupposes a desire to know. It will only be made if the point becomes one which it is practically important to decide. Normally no doubt it does not become such, because for the actual purposes of the sciences it makes no difference whether we suppose the figure to be 9 or something else. I.e. the truth to, say, the 99th decimal, is ' true enough ' for our purposes, and the 100th is a matter of indifference. But let that indifference cease, and the question become important, and the ' truth ' will at once become ' useful '. Prof. Taylor's illustration therefore conclusively proves that in an actual context and as an actual question there is no true answer to be got until the truth has become useful. This point is illustrated also by the context Prof. Taylor has himself suggested. For he has made the question about the 100th decimal important by making the refutation of the whole pragmatist theory of knowledge depend on it. And what nobler use could the 100th decimal have in his eyes? If in consequence of this interest he will set himself to work it out, he will discover this once useless, but now most useful, truth, and—triumphantly refute his own contention!
We might recognize this claim as the sort of absurdity many philosophers try to read into the pragmatism of William James. James, however, would not agree that the meaning of “the 100th decimal of Pi
Pi
' is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. is approximately equal to 3.14. Many formulae in mathematics, science, and engineering involve , which makes it one of the most important mathematical constants...
is 9” and “the 100th decimal of Pi is 6” mean the same thing until someone has a reason to care about any possible difference. Schiller, in constast, does mean to say this.
James and Schiller both treat truth as something that happens to a statement, and so James would agree that it only becomes true that the 100th decimal of Pi is 9 when someone in fact believes that statement and it leads them to their goals, but nowhere does James imply that meaning is something that happens to a statement. That is a unique element of Schiller’s pragmatism.
Humanist theory of meaning and truth
While Schiller felt greatly indebted to the pragmatism of William James, Schiller was outright hostile to the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce. Both Schiller and James struggled with what Peirce intended with his pragmatism, and both were often baffled by Peirce’s insistent rebuffing of what they both saw as the natural elaboration of the pragmatist cornerstone he himself first laid down. On the basis of his misunderstandings, Schiller complains that for Peirce to merely say “‘truths should have practical consequences’” is to be “very vague, and hints at no reason for the curious connexion it asserts.” Schiller goes on to denigrate Peirce’s principle as nothing more than a simple truism “which hardly deserves a permanent place and name in philosophic usage”. After all, Schiller points out, “[i]t is hard […] to see why even the extremest intellectualism should deny that the difference between the truth and the falsehood of an assertion must show itself in some visible way.”With Peirce’s attempts to restrict the use of pragmatism set aside, Schiller unpacks the term “consequences” to provide what he considers as a more substantial restatement of Peirce’s pragmatism:
For to say that a [statement] has consequences and that what has none is meaningless, must surely mean that it has a bearing upon some human interest; they must be consequences to some one for some purpose.
Schiller believes his pragmatism to be more developed because of its attention to the fact that the “consequences” which make up the meaning and truth of a statement, must always be consequences for someone’s particular purposes at some particular time. Continuing his condemnation of the abstract, Schiller contends that the meaning of a concept is not the consequences of some abstract proposition, but what consequences an actual thinker hopes its use will bring about in an actual situation. The meaning of a thought is what consequences one means to bring about when they employ the thought. To Schiller, this is what a more sophisticated pragmatist understands by the term meaning.
If we are to understand the pragmatic theory of meaning in Schiller’s way, he is right to claim that James’ theory of truth is a mere corollary of the pragmatist theory of meaning:
But now, we may ask, how are these 'consequences' to test the 'truth' claimed by the assertion? Only by satisfying or thwarting that purpose, by forwarding or baffling that interest. If they do the one, the assertion is 'good' and pro tanto 'true' ; if they do the other, 'bad' and 'false'. Its 'consequences,' therefore, when investigated, always turn out to involve the 'practical' predicates 'good ' or 'bad,' and to contain a reference to ' practice' in the sense in which we have used that term. So soon as therefore we go beyond an abstract statement of the narrower pragmatism, and ask what in the concrete, and in actual knowing, 'having consequences ' may mean, we develop inevitably the fullblown pragmatism in the wider sense.
Given Schiller's view that the meaning of a thought amounts to the consequences one means to bring about by the thought, Schiller further concluded that the truth of a thought depends on whether it actually brings about the consequences one intended. For example, if while following a cooking recipe that called for salt I were to think to myself, "Cerebos is salt", my thought will be true if it consequently leads me to add Cerebos and produce a dish with the intended taste. However, if while working in a chemistry lab to produce a certain mixture I were to think to myself, "Cerebos is salt", my thought would both have a different meaning than before (since my intent now differs) and be false (since Cerebos is only equivalent to salt for culinary purposes). According to Schiller, the question of what a thought like "Cerebos is salt" means or whether it is true can only be answered if the specific circumstances with which the thought arose are taken into consideration. While there is some similarity here between Schiller's view of meaning and the later ordinary language philosophers
Ordinary language philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use....
, Schiller's account ties meaning and truth more closely to individuals and their intent with a specific use rather than whole linguistic communities.
Recommended reading
- "The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics" reprinted in F.C.S. Schiller's Humanism (1902)
- "Useless 'Knowledge'" reprinted in F.C.S. Schiller's Humanism (1902)
- "Axioms as Postulates" published in the collection Personal Idealism (1902)
- "The Pragmatic Humanism of F.C.S. Schiller" in Cornelis De Waal's On Pragmatism (2005)
- Pragmatic Humanism of F.C.S. Schiller by Rueben Abel
- Humanistic Pragmatism: The Philosophy of F.C.S. Schiller edited by Rueben Abel
Selected works
- Riddles of the Sphinx (1891)
- "Axioms as Postulates" (1902, published in the collection Personal Idealism)
- Humanism (1903)
- Studies in Humanism (1907)
- Plato or Protagoras? (1908)
- Riddles of the Sphinx (1910, revised edition)
- Humanism (1912, second edition)
- Formal Logic(1912)
- Problems of Belief (1924, second edition)
- Logic for Use (1929)
- Our Human Truths (1939, published posthumously)