Comparative Philosophy

Paul Masson-Oursel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317830832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is Volume IV of seven in the Philosophy of Religion and General Philosophy series. First published in 1926 this is a study of a method designed to attain a positive by way of the comparative or compared philosophy.

PART I

CHAPTER I

OF POSITIVITY IN PHILOSOPHY

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century there has been no lack of effort to construct philosophy, in the fashion of the various sciences, on a positive foundation. The founder of positivism desired to settle the character and limits of the Positive Philosophy as co-extensive with the expanse of the domain grasped by the positive mind. Thus conceived, philosophy, once more in harmony with a tradition that deploys from Greek antiquity to Cartesianism, again becomes synonymous with science. But this acceptation of the term philosophy has not secured unanimous assent. We persist in considering certain disciplines, such as logic, ethics, æsthetics, and jurisprudence, to be constituent parts of philosophy, although their partly normative character precludes all possibility of their institution as sciences in the proper sense of the word. Moreover, we continue to regard metaphysics as eminently philosophical: and metaphysics is as unscientific as any perquisition can well be, since it deals with the absolute, instead of being concerned with relations. It should be our business to draw nigh to philosophy, by positive means of approach, throughout the whole extension thereof, including those parts and aspects that do not yet, and perhaps never will, comply with the exactions of science.

All attempts to assimilate philosophy with science, or to treat of philosophy in accordance with the principles of any one science—be it physics, biology, or sociology, are compromised by the same ignoratio elenchi.

On the other hand, the risk of committing this sophism is averted if the term philosophy is frankly employed, in all its methodological ambiguity, as connoting such sciences as psychology, such demi-sciences or arts as logic and ethics, such ideal improvisations as metaphysics, but in all its objective exactitude, as implying the whole of the disciplines relative to the spiritual life.

Now, there is one indirect route by which the manifestations as well as the aspirations of the spirit may be attained in a manner that is at least positive, though, in default of determinable laws, not really scientific. This route is that of historical investigation. Thanks to the effort of criticism in restoration of the past, history, at once the theatre and the residuum of human activities, constitutes a datum that theoretically is as susceptible of disinterested and impartial examination as is physical experience. Since historical facts are never subject to repetition, it perhaps follows that they are not admissive of laws, but it by no means follows that they are without a certain necessity, by whose virtue such and such antecedents explain such and such consequents. This objectivity, this necessity, point out a positivity, that is to say a stable and solid base, one and the same for all minds bent on the experiment that we call examination of the past. If the phenomena of spirituality indeed lend themselves to investigation through the medium of this experiment, our knowledge of them, at any rate in principle, will have little right to be envious of the certitude of natural knowledge.

The basic principle of any positive philosophy must be then that of resolute intention to take the facts of philosophy from history and from history alone. When the philosopher—instead of creating or imagining his object of study—instead of attempting rectification without preliminary exploration and circumscription—shall limit his ambitions to the systematic examination of the feelings and thoughts of humanity graven in history, then will spiritual analysis achieve such decisive progress as did material science when first the investigator constrained himself to learn all from physical experience.

We are well aware that this modesty of aim, this discipline in research, are but little natural to us. Thought has a thousand ways of self-illusion concerning such knowledge of the real as it may acquire; that which it deems to have attained is often enough but delved from its own inner depths and, when reality gives the lie to the knowledge put forward as acquired, the mind is more disposed to find fault with what is than to hold itself responsible for its mistake. All the more then are to be feared these aggravated risks of error due to the overweening confidence we repose in our thought, when the object to be studied is none other than our mind. Then, less than ever is the latter doubtful of competence: then does immediate introspection, apparently reconciling both the subject and its object, seem to render realizable the Socratic injunction: Know Thyself. Indeed, we deem it suffices us to be dowered with consciousness that we may comprehend the how and the why of our deeds as of our judgments, of our ideals as of our life. But the bankruptcy of this postulate springs from the continuing obscurity of the so-called moral sciences, despite the so many efforts that the anonymous traditions of sects and schools and the original, personal improvisations of the great metaphysical geniuses have devoted to the resolution of that Sphinx’s riddle that Man is to himself.

It seems then that the time is now come to make trial of a converse method—one that finds in introspection not solutions, but problems only. The fertile analogy of the natural sciences gives ground for hope that fewer ill-set problems, and fewer question-begging solutions, will be met with when problems and solutions alike are only entered upon in respect of an objective datum that it is nobody’s business to make other than it is, and which it will be the task of the investigator to know, and not to create or transmogrify. To this end it suffices to be persuaded that mind may know itself objectively, provided that it is apprehended not in itself but in its manifestations. Though not exclusively of the mind’s fashioning—since man is not isolated from the universe—human reality yet bears in every feature traces of the mind. It would be rash to conclude that, in things human, thought is reduced to an epiphenomenon, in that it neither accomplishes all, nor even anything. Economic data bear witness to our needs; those of religion to our aspirations: artistic, juridical, ethical, or logical data to our diverse kinds of ideal; and the data of political history to our sufferings and our Sisyphean labours in attempting perpetual readjustment to the ever-changing conditions that so little depend upon ourselves. These are so many data—that is to say, forms of existence independent of our arbitrament. They are written in historical reality: it is open to us to misunderstand but not to change, much less efface them.

Away with the illusion that has too long encouraged the belief that mind, in its essence, can only be approached by direct coincidence with its autonomous and living action! Positive philosophy is no more reducible to intellectual or sensible intuition, or to reasoning based on the one or the other—that is to say, to thought in action—than is æsthetics—the analysis of art—to be confounded with artistic creation. The positive attitude excludes identification even with life itself, for observation and frank spontaneity are never coincident. Let us not thence conclude too hastily that there is an inevitable divergence between being and knowing: there is difference only between being which is accomplishing itself and being that is accomplished. It is the latter alone which permits positive investigation: while there is nothing positively knowable except completed being, there is no possible approximation to being in the making other than by induction that is the outcome of analysis of the static conditions of existence. Though science should never adequately express life, it must not be said that science does not afford the surest means of acquiring information concerning this creation that we call life. The converse claim to grasp the essence of the real as a function of life itself, is the very antipodes of the positive spirit, and otherwise called the mystic attitude. From this pretension we abstain, on principle.

Now, we should mistake did we suppose the inner workings of thought to be only revealed by speculation. Thus attained they are grasped only under their contingent and arbitrary aspects; that which they present to an individual consciousness. Let us not shrink from repeating that they may be found expressed in those realities, sui generis yet completely objective—the works of the spirit. A landscape—above all, if painted—corresponds to a state of soul: a plastic attitude, a mimicry, is, literally, an emotion: institutions are normative purposes, either behind or in advance of the average state of consciousness: a lyric poem or a drama may bear witness to inward crisis; a novel, even a romance, epitomizes many a biography. But, of all the productions of mind, those which most reveal the speculative exigences of thought are just those wherein this thought has explicitly formulated these demands: to wit, metaphysics. Even though these abstract constructs in no wise enlighten us concerning the things that they are supposed to probe to the bottom, they do frankly tell us in what manner their authors have understood intelligibility. Of little or no value in respect of knowledge of the real, they do at least bring into the full light of day the assemblage of postulates that at a given period, or in a certain intellectual environment, would have been spontaneously set up as necessary and universal conditions of being. Proof this that therein are to be found at least some authentic demands of the spiritual life! An objective notion of mental laws is only to be gained by analysis of the productions wherewith thought has been satisfied, doubtless because thought has made them in its own image.

What is important here is to regard philosophies as materials no less real than other data, no matter what. They are extant in beliefs, in oral traditions, in written treatises, and in the interpretations which are grafted on to these original bases; they corroborate them, whether designed to complete or to undermine them. Doubtless then, an appreciation is incorporated with a fact; but where are we to find a spiritual fact with which no evaluations are mingled? These appreciations are themselves facts. The products of thought must be thought if they are to be known, but if they are apprehended objectively they will not be less known than thought. Plato does not exist simply as an individual who died in 347 B.C.; nor merely in the literal import of his works. The understanding of his labour by Aristotle, by Plotinus, and by Leibnitz are facts no less real than the initial system. The triumph of criticism—mainspring and supreme safeguard of history—consists in piercing the clouds that inevitably veil all testimony, so that the documentary—that is to say, the objective—value concealed thereby may transpire. Far from banishing, thought delights in and establishes objectivity, provided that we know—and this we can learn—how to eliminate the accidental particularities of the concrete individuality. The elaboration of a positive philosophy requires, then, that thought should study itself in its productions whose objectivity yields in nothing to that of natural phenomena. But the products of thought are ordered in time no less than in space. Hence the data of philosophical experience must be sought in geography and history, but above all in history; not in an analysis of concepts in some abstract and timeless world. Such an experiment possesses its own fit and proper rules.

CHAPTER II

OF THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

The immanence in history of the philosophical datum by no means implies that, in philosophy, the positive method reduces to the historical. Were it otherwise, philosophy would consist only in its own history; and, since the theory of the influence exerted upon humanity by the material conditions of existence is called historical materialism, philosophy would be conceived as a sort of historical spiritualism—the theory of the part played by thought in human evolution. It is, however, as much the duty of philosophy to prosecute investigations into that total, that unique storehouse of facts which we call history, as it is for her to be mistress of the situation—that is to say, to preserve liberty to seek documentation where she will, to appraise by appropriate standards, to vary the field of exploration, and independently to analyse the ground surveyed in accordance with the hypothesis selected. We only plan to extend our knowledge in order that the more we know, the better we may understand; we only peer more distantly in order that we may see more plainly and more clear. Both ends are secured when we discern fundamental likeness beneath apparent dissimilitude. All judgment is comparison: every comparison an interpretation of diversity by way of identity. Positive philosophy as conceived by a Comte or a Durkheim, and especially as we try to define it, differs from history in so far as, in the quest of the same throughout the other, she finds a succedaneum for the Utopian search for laws in a series of facts which (for so it seems) do never recur. Let us observe that this discipline, far from leading back to history, will be in principle inverse and complementary thereto. For the historian is only concerned with resemblances that he may the better establish, by their light, the secret and subtle distinctions that finally differentiate the concrete data into irreconcilable disparities: whilst the positive philosopher insists that all variety should reveal before his eyes, if not a systematization of hard and fast laws, at any rate the constancy of certain conditions and some generality of certain facts.

In support of the assertion that positive philosophy must be comparative philosophy, we would in the first place make deliberate appeal to some assumptions based upon analogy. One after another, the different “moral sciences” are becoming positive in being comparative. Philology only emerged from blind gropings and achieved a definite method when the discovery was made that the majority of European languages bear witness to a mutual relationship: the linguistic unity of the Indo-European family, once recognized, enables this group of idioms to be contrasted with other groups, no less individual, but built up around other and independent types. These families, foreign to each other, undergo modification as a result of multiple cross influences, and yet in relative isolation: from a confrontation of their parallel development arise observations to be reckoned among the most precise and securely founded known to science. Only to the extent that therein is outlined a comparative theory does jurisprudence stabilize on a basis that is largely humanist, instead of soaring into the abstract ideal or reducing to traditionalistic conservatism. Anthropology and ethnography amass evidence only that some day they may justify a comparative interpretation of human evolution. The term ‘comparative psychology’ is hazarded to indicate a science of the mental functions that will, in this respect, throw light on man from a study of the beast, and on the beast by a study of man. Thus too, more than one of the natural sciences has progressed only by becoming comparative. Such are anatomy and physiology, which first made giant strides when enabled to place in parallel orders an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION (by F. G. CROOKSHANK, M.D., F.R.C.P.)
• PRELIMINARY
• PART I
• PART II
• INDEX