The following essay, taken from Ryn’s
Will, Imagination and Reason: Irving Babbitt and the Problem of Reality, offers a brief introduction to Babbitt’s life and work:
It is a controversial assumption of this book that the work of Irving
Babbitt (1865-1933), the Harvard literary scholar and cultural thinker,
will always stand as a monument to American intellectual culture at its
finest. Though frequently misunderstood and even maligned, Babbitt is likely
to live on after most of his critics have faded from memory.
One reason Babbitt has not yet acquired the general reputation he deserves
is that his central doctrines went contrary to the intellectual currents
of his time. He subjected to sharp and sustained criticism dispositions
on which many of his most influential contemporaries were basing their
claims to moral and aesthetical sensibility. Indiscriminate benevolence
toward mankind, translated into various “progressive” egalitarian schemes
in education and politics, he viewed as a caricature of ethics and love
as understood in traditional Christianity and other high religions. He
insisted that a genuinely moral concern for others presupposes difficult
self-discipline on the part of the bearer and a keen awareness of both
the lower and the higher potentialities in self and others. In aesthetics,
Babbitt similarly went against the tide by arguing that various doctrines
of l’art pour l’art are blind to the ultimate purpose of art. Truly
great works of the imagination are such not by virtue of their intuitive
coherence alone but by virtue of the moral quality of experience they convey.
These and other highly inopportune themes, which were not always formulated
with diplomatic tact but sometimes with sharpness, irony and ridicule,
were not designed to spare him intense, emotional opposition.
Babbitt’s ideas were the subject of much controversy in the 1920s and
’30s. They often served as the focal point for criticism of the so-called
New Humanism, inspired in large part by his work. This controversy involved
at one time or another practically every leading figure in American literature
and scholarship. Unfortunately, discussion of Babbitt was charac-terized
more by vague generalities or vituperation than by careful and dispassionate
examination of his ideas. The influence of Babbitt’s numerous opponents--including
such men as Edmund Wilson, Joel Spingarn, R. P. Blackmur, Oscar Cargill,
H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway--was sufficient to deny
his arguments a real hearing. Because of the animosity that he and his
disciples encountered, it sometimes seemed dangerous even to mention his
name. Babbitt himself cautioned his students accordingly.
This is not to suggest that Irving Babbitt has lacked prominent admirers
in the United States and abroad. Besides Paul Elmer More (1864-1937), who
became his close friend and intellectual ally, he deeply iniluenced individuals
as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, Gordon Keith Chalmers, Louis
Mercier, Austin Warren and, in a younger generation, Russell Kirk, Nathan
Pusey and Peter Viereck. He had many admirers in Europe, perhaps especially
in France, and also as far outside the West as China. In 1960 Harvard University
inaugurated the Irving Babbitt Chair of Comparative Literature.
Irving Babbitt was born in 1865 in Dayton, Ohio. On his father’s side
he was descended from an Englishman who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts,
in 1643. Irving’s father was a physician of diverse and sometimes crankish
interests. Babbitt was to see in the sentimental and pseudo-scientific
predilections of his father examples of what ailed the modern age. Irving’s
mother, Augusta, died when he was eleven years old. During his childhood
and early youth he lived, much of the time with relatives, in many different
places, including New York City; East Orange, New Jersey; and farms in
Ohio and Wyoming. Babbitt entered Harvard College in 1885. He was already
well-grounded in the classics and was, as he says, generally “overprepared"
for his studies. Dissatisfied with the pedantry and narrowness of much
of the instruction at Harvard, he would not attend class regularly. He
spent his junior year in Europe and graduated with Final Honors in Classics
in 1889. Babbitt wanted to delve deeper into oriental subjects. After teaching
for two years at the College of Montana, he spent a year in Paris working
under Professor Sylvain Levi. He continued his oriental studies with Professor
Charles Lanman at Harvard. Babbitt received the A.M. degree in 1893. Out
of contempt for what he saw as the German-inspired requirements for the
doctoral degree he refused to acquire that academic credential.
Babbitt taught French, Spanish and Italian at Williams College before
being appointed to the faculty of Harvard University in 1894. There he
was to remain until his death in 1933. Although deeply knowledgeable in
and attracted to the Greek and Roman classics, he was allowed to teach
only in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature and in the Department
of Comparative Literature. His teaching soon earned him considerable opposition
from his colleagues. His open criticism of the educational ideas of President
Charles W. Eliot did not strengthen Babbitt’s position, but his growing
reputation as a scholar and teacher and his large number of good students
finally led to his promotion to full professor in 1912. Babbitt was a Visiting
Professor at the Sorbonne in 1923. He became a corresponding member of
the Institute of France, and in the United States he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Babbitt’s first book, Literature and the American College (1908),
defines and defends the classical discipline of humanitas as an answer
to the erosion of ethical and cultural standards brought on by scientific
naturalism and sentimental humanitarianism. In The New Laokoon (1910)
he examines at greater length the weaknesses and dangers of modern conceptions
of art. The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) develops Babbitt’s
critical standards and applies them in assessments of leading French literary
critics and aestheticians mainly in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the
most important of Babbitt’s works is Rousseau and Romanticism (1919).
Here he describes and criticizes in depth various aspects of romanticism
wfth special reference to one of its seminal and most brilliant minds. Democracy
and Leadership (1924) relates Babbitt’s ethical and cultural philosophy
to issues of politics. On Being Creative (1932) and The Spanish
Character, published posthumously in 1940, contain essays in literary
and cultural criticism. Babbitt’s original translation of The Dhammapada,
the Buddhist holy text, was published together with a long interpretive
essay in 1936.
These brief biographical and bibliographical remarks cannot convey the
scope of Babbitt’s mind. His thinking defies academic boundaries. He is
far more than a literary and cultural critic, as those terms are ordinarily
meant. His particular subjects become the occasion for developing a comprehensive
view of life. His thought is marked by cosmopolitan breadth and vast literary,
historical and philosophical learning.
A legendary Harvard teacher of wit and humor as well as strong conviction
and assertiveness, Babbitt made a deep impression on many of his students.
Austin Warren refers to Babbitt in the classroom as “an experience not before
encountered nor ever to be forgotten.”1 Friends and students of Babbitt’s contributed to the valuable collection of memoirs edited by F. Manchester and 0. Shepard, Irving Babbitt, Man and Teacher (1941). Babbitt’s ideas and their historical influence are examined in
David Hoeveler’s The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America 1900-1940 (1977), which is broadly informative and sometimes quite perceptive but
not consistently reliable in details and matters of interpretation.
Babbitt has continued to have a not insubstantial influence, although
it is one often formally unacknowledged in footnotes and other references.
Examining Babbitt’s influence on various well-known writers, some of whom
have also been his critics, sometimes becomes a psychologically interesting
study of the covert assimilation of ideas. Walter Lippmann was a young
socialist when he took a course with Babbitt at Harvard. There was an understandable
element of irritation and hurt pride in Lippmann’s early reaction to his
teacher, yet Babbitt made a lasting impression. Lippmann’s famous book
The Public Philosophy (1955) is unmistakably imbued with Babbitt’s ideas;
still, it does not once mention his name. Other erstwhile critics, such
as Arthur Lovejoy and Jacques Barzun, seem to have been similarly affected
by Babbitt. Whether submerged or cited openly, Babbitt somehow remains
present in the American intellectual consciousness. Perhaps the most telling
sign of his presence is the hostility that has greeted attempts to take
a new look at his ideas long after his death. That his critics generally
have been unwilling to contend with his real arguments, as distinguished
from long-circulating caricatures, may indicate that, intuitively, the
critics do recognize the importance of his ideas and their potential for
unsettling accustomed ways of thinking.
An important reason why Babbitt has not yet received the widespread
attention he deserves is that, with very few exceptions, his interpreters
have not attempted a philosophical explication and assessment of his work.
Babbitt was well versed in many aspects of philosophy and brought to most
of his subjects the kind of comprehensiveness that is characteristic of
good philosophy. Yet he was not a professional, “technical” philosopher.
Profound though many of his insights are, he did not always develop them
systematically and with conceptual precision. The intellectual power and
coherence of his work are sometimes obscured by fragmentary argumentation
or by ambiguous, cryptic or overly compressed statements of ideas. The
real import of Babbitt’s central insights can be demonstrated by careful
philosophical analysis of his work as a whole. There is a strong need to
lift his thought out of the sphere of rather general discussion in which
friendly and unfriendly commentators alike have placed it. The renewed
and growing interest in Babbitt in recent years underscores the scholarly
necessity of relating his ideas to the enduring concerns of philosophy
proper.
The plan of this book does not quite conform to any established genre
of scholarship. Literary scholars who are most likely to be familiar with
Babbitt may be disappointed to find in this study, which aims first of
all at conceptual clarification, little of the stylistic flavor and concrete
illustrations expected of a more literary or historical work. Some professional
philosophers, on the other hand, will perhaps feel uneasiness about the
many references to writers and subjects that have been primarily the concern
of literary scholarship.
This book seeks to demonstrate the significance of Babbitt’s work for
understanding and dealing with the problem of reality. Babbitt has much
to contribute to broadening and deepening the epistemology of the humanities,
including philosophy itself and the social disciplines. His most original
insight relating to the theory of knowledge may be his view of the relationship
between imagination (intuition) and moral character. The book is structured
to explain in depth the epistemological importance of Babbitt’s doctrine
of the ethical and unethical imagination. His ideas in this area address
a neglected aspect of modern aesthetics, but they also have profound implications
for our understanding of the process of knowledge, including the work of
reason.
Babbitt’s contribution to the theory of knowledge can be brought fully
into view by examining it within a philosophical frame of reference in
some respects broader than his own. Much can be gained by drawing selectively
from the work of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Croce’s
name is everywhere known, but his importance has been insufficiently understood,
especially outside of his home country. He is famous for his early aesthetical
ideas, particularly as expressed in Aesthetic (1902). Far less known
but of similar philosophical weight are his ideas on logic and ethics,
developed most importantly in Logic (1908) and Philosophy of
the Practical (1908).
Many of Croce’s ideas correspond or run parallel to Babbitt’s. Although
this book will argue that Croce’s work has serious weaknesses and that
he is not Babbitt’s equal where it counts most, he expresses himself with
a philosophical precision rarely matched by Babbitt. Croce’s philosophy,
because it develops systematically and at length some ideas which are left
vague in Babbitt’s writings, is helpful in bringing Babbitt’s ideas to
greater conceptual clarity. An examination of Croce also suggests the need
to revise and supplement Babbitt in some areas, particularly in his view
of reason.
A comparative critical analysis of these representatives of two continents
is well-suited to rethinking the fundamental problems of epistemology.
The emphases and ideas of Babbitt and Croce are sufficiently different
to require discrimination and choice but also are sufficiently related
to make possible some fruitful syntheses. The book will seek to forge their
respective strengths into a systematic whole, thus developing a new approach
to the problem of knowledge.
Readers sympathetic to Babbitt may be suspicious of an attempt to synthesize
his work and Croce’s. Did not Babbitt express strong reservations about
the Italian philosopher? How could Babbitt’s ethical dualism, his belief
in the reality of evil as well as good, be reconciled with Croce’s idealistic
monism, closely related to Hegel’s? How could Babbitt’s insistence on the
ethical dimension of art be reconciled with Croce’s emphatic insistence,
at least before 1917, that art is indifferent to morality? But it is possible
to draw on Croce’s ideas in logic and ethics without accepting his monism;
and one can learn a great deal from his aesthetics without accepting his
early insensitivity to art’s ethical quality. After 1917 his aesthetical
ideas became virtually indistinguishable from Babbitt’s. Philosophical
discussions are never served by rigid prejudgments of what is to be found
in various thinkers. Ideas contain potentialities for development in sometimes
unexpected directions.
This book offers some extensive criticisms of Babbitt, many of them
along lines suggested by Croce’s philosophy. Part One is devoted mainly
to identifying weaknesses in Babbitt’s position and to supplementing his
ideas. Attention is drawn in particular to deficiencies in Babbitt’s understanding
of the nature of reason. This criticism and revision is needed in part
to explicate the main strengths of Babbitt’s general position, which is
done in Part Two. Because of the order of presentation, the impression
may initially prevail that Croce is the superior thinker. Rather, the net
effect of comparing and synthesizing the two men’s ideas is to demonstrate
the essential soundness of Babbitt’s thought where it matters most. Not
only are the weaknesses in his treatment of epistemological issues balanced
by significant insights in that same field; it can also be argued that,
in the search for reality, technical philosophical brilliance is less important
in the end than having ethical wisdom. Babbitt reveals a deep and subtle
awareness of the fundamental problem of ethics and its relationship to
the problem of knowledge. That Babbitt pays inadequate attention to some
questions of epistemology and is disinclined to take up sustained technical
philosophical analyses can be attributed in large measure to his belief
that grasping reality is ultimately dependent on man’s willing what he
ought to will. For all of Croce’s intellectual brilliance, he betrays a
lack of ethical sensitivity. Even though a critic of much of Hegel’s work,
Croce is a captive still of the German philosopher’s monistic-pantheistic
tendency to explain away the reality of evil. According to Babbitt, Croce
“combines numerous peripheral merits with a central wrongness and at
times with something that seems uncomfortably like a central void.”2 Read
as an assessment of Croce’s work as a whole, this is an unfair and exaggerated
statement; most of Croce’s philosophical insights are anything but peripheral.
The statement is typical of Babbitt’s habit of judging thinkers primarily
by their ability to discern adequately the ethical dimension of problems,
a habit which sometimes makes him discount—or seem to discount—merits in
other areas. Yet his comment on Croce is not without truth. In respect
to what is most important to the central soundness of a philosophy of life,
the synthesis of Babbitt and Croce must be achieved largely on the terms
of the former. Croce is regarded here as providing a very enlightening
supplement and corrective to Babbitt, rather than vice versa.
Through the explication and critical assessment of Babbitt, with special
reference to Croce, this book develops a theory of reality and knowledge.
The central thesis presented is that knowledge of reality rests upon a
certain orientation of the will and upon the corresponding quality of imagination
(intuition) that the will begets. Reason is dependent for the truth and
comprehensiveness of its concepts on the depth and scope of the material
that it receives from the imagination. Babbitt’s important contribution
is the doctrine that only the highest form of the imagination—which he
regards as sustained and anchored in ultimate reality by ethical will—pulls
man towards a comprehensive and proportionate view of life. Conversely,
immoral desire distorts our imaginative vision and, hence, our sense of
reality. Synthesizing Babbitt’s ethico-aesthetical ideas and elements of
Croce’s logic, the book argues that an important source of faulty philosophical
reasoning is misleading intuition which misdirects the attention of reason.
Because man’s grasp of life is seen as enhanced or distorted according
to the underlying orientation of the will, considerable attention is given
to Babbitt’s ethical doctrine and Croce’s philosophy of the practical.
If the book puts much emphasis on the intuitive and practical aspects of
knowing as something poorly understood in contemporary philosophy, it also
argues for renewed confidence in reason. An integral part of the epistemological
thesis is a revised understanding of the nature of reason. The philosophy
of human life, it is suggested, employs reason of a different kind than
pragmatic or positivistic rationality. Genuinely philosophical reason has
the capacity for discerning and formulating the universal dimensions of
life. Still, reason is not ahistorical. This book rejects prevalent formal
and abstract notions of logic in favor of dialectical logic. Philosophical
reason joins the universal and the historical. The coexistence in philosophical
reason of the universal and the concrete particular points to the aforementioned
bond between reason and intuition.
The human consciousness forms an organic whole. A philosophical account
of a particular element of experience must set it in the larger context
of life and hence relate it, implicitly or explicitly, to other elements.
An adequate understanding of either will, imagination or reason requires
that they be viewed together—that is, systematically. The universals of
philosophy are distinct categories within a larger whole. The essence of
the theory of knowledge here developed lies in the theory’s definitions
of will, imagination and reason, and of their relations to each other.
The complexity of the subject matter presents unusually difficult problems
of organization. The intricacy of the relationship between the relevant
problems of ethics, aesthetics and logic requires much movement back and
forth between these areas. Because philosophy is systematic, all the chapters
in a philosophical treatise in a way presuppose each other. Insight is
not gained by a process of mere addition. Concepts formulated in certain
pages are ideas in the making, anticipations of the clearer view which
can be provided only by the work in its entirety. Particular formulations
are seen in hindsight to have been manifestations of the overall thesis
and to be in this sense indistinguishable from ideas presented later or
earlier. Attempts fully to explain the placing of a chapter or section
here or there are attempts to write the entire work before it is written.
The reader of this book, if sometimes wondering about the order of exposition,
may rest assured that the material has been carefully arranged to make
as clear as possible the distinctions and relations which constitute the
book’s philosophical substance.
Part One of the book develops the notion of philosophical reason. It
does so by distinguishing this reason from will and imagination, as well
as from pragmatic rationality. These discussions set the stage for Part
Two, which concentrates on explaining the epistemological significance
of Babbitt’s understanding of the relationship between will and imagination.
Babbitt’s grounding of the search for reality in a transcendent moral
order has some parallels or counterparts among thinkers of recent decades,
as exemplified by American social and political thought. With varying emphases
and degrees of success, this line of inquiry has been pursued by thinkers
as diverse as John Hallowell, Russell Kirk, Reinhold Niebuhr, Leo Strauss,
Peter Viereck, Eliseo Vivas and Eric Voegelin. The efforts of these writers
appear to have had little influence on the development of philosophy in
the broader and stricter sense. With rare exceptions, they have not formed
part of a sustained attempt to develop a comprehensive and precisely formulated
philosophy.
Because of what usually passes as reason in most contemporary philosophy,
technical philosophical inquiries are often viewed with suspicion as likely
to play into the hands of moral nihilism or relativism. It is not uncommon,
as in the case of Viereck, Kirk and even Voegelin, to appeal to experience
or intuition rather than to conceptual reason as support for the existence
of a universal moral order, a position that is not false but insufficient.
If experience gives evidence of a transcendent moral order, it needs to
be explained how we gain knowledge of that order. How is the moral order
related to conceptual thought? And what is the relationship of both of
these to intuition? The need to explore these issues in depth runs counter
to a rather common prejudice, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries,
against “systematic” thought. Speculation of that type is believed to
be indicative of a closed, dogmatic system. But no claim to final knowledge
need be implied in the view that philosophy proper studies its subjects
within the context of the larger whole to which they belong. On the contrary,
the complexity and limited transparency of that whole induces intellectual
humility.
Strauss and most of his followers are among those who affirm a distinction
between good and evil in the name of reason and philosophy. But what they
call philosophy is usually rather narrow in scope and quite general in
formulation. Hence, one may question whether they have really come to philosophical
grips with the deepest challenges of modernity. Are the epistemologies
of Plato or Aristotle still essentially adequate? Or have the more than
two thousand years of philosophical speculation since their time yielded
substantial new insight adding to or making necessary the rearticulation
and revision of their central ideas? The laudable wish to uphold the existence
of universal values is hardly best served by attempting a return to premodern
ways of thought. Being philosophically modern does not have to mean espousal
of what undermines universality. The most truly modern thinker may be one
who is profoundly respectful of ancient insights while understanding that
philosophical knowledge is a grasp of the universal forever in need of
clarification and restatement.
In order to gain a strong foothold in philosophy, contemporary intellectual
efforts to restore a sense of man’s transcendent moral purpose need to
give more attention to fundamental philosophical problems and particularly
to questions of epistemology. A willingness to consider that the last two
centuries have brought forward some very fruitful new ideas, as well as
much decadence, may produce results surprisingly compatible with central
classical and medieval beliefs. Since all genuine philosophy is systematic,
attempts to develop a theory of knowledge are likely to give greater depth
and precision also to our understanding of the transcendent moral order.
1. Austin Warren, “A Memoir,” in Frederick Manchester
and Odell Shepard (eds.), Irving Babbitt, Man and Teacher (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1969; first published in 1941), 209. [Back]
2. Irving Babbitt, Spanish Character and Other Essays
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 66. [Back]
