How
We Know What We Know:
Babbitt, Positivism and Beyond
Claes G. Ryn*
[From HUMANITAS, Volume VIII, No. 1, 1995 ©
National
Humanities Institute, Washington, DC USA]
American academia is generally not friendly to systematic and "technical"
philosophy. Although American intellectual culture has produced thinkers
of international stature, it typically tries to get by with theoretical
generalities. A lack of philosophical discipline, depth and continuity
accounts for the ease with which inferior doctrines get their time in the
sun.
The theory of knowledge has long seemed to American intellectuals an
especially unappealing and arduous subject, but in recent years the winds
of fashion have created a surge of interest in "epistemology." That surge
has produced criticisms of teleology, structure, doctrine, system, etc.,
which are seen as representing "violence," tyrannical power, exhaustion,
false security, or other denials of life. Sometimes these critiques have
been salutary counters to rationalism, the disingenuous certainty of dogmatism
and other evasions of real existence. More often they have been ideologically
inflamed and themselves blatant examples of the mentioned dangers. Frequently
extreme and indiscriminate in their opposition to intellectual structure,
they have brought to new heights the old resistance to philosophical discipline
of any kind. Because so much of the recent epistemological writing has
been abstruse, esoteric, lingoistic and distant from concrete life, it
has at the same time fed the traditional American disdain for "philosophical
abstractions."
Whatever the weaknesses of the approaches now in fashion, epistemology
must not be shunned. Careful, in-depth attention to questions of knowledge
is one of the preconditions for a reinvigoration of the humanities and
social sciences. In the study of man as a social and cultural being, how
is knowledge obtained? What is pertinent evidence? For about a century
the dominant answers to those questions have been provided by positivism
of one kind or another. When the dust settles after the current epistemological
controversies, positivism is not likely to have been driven from power.
Disillusionment with the element of faddishness and frivolity in so much
current academic discourse may give a stale doctrine a new lease on life.
A Thinker for Our Time
Young scholars sensing the need for fundamentally rethinking the epistemology
of the humanities and social sciences do well to examine for themselves
certain thinkers from this century whose reputations were shaped largely
by their opponents or whose ideas may have been taken in unintended directions
by others. One such thinker is Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), the professor
of French and comparative literature at Harvard whose work formed an indictment
of America’s intellectual and cultural elite. Although his writing is chiefly
addressed to aesthetical and moral questions, it is highly significant
for the theory of knowledge. In fact, his work is directly relevant to
much present epistemological discussion.1
Babbitt was an intellectual maverick whose challenge to the dominant
trends of his time made him the focus of intense and persistent hostility.
Although his reputation suffered at the hands of leading academic and literary
figures, he never lacked admirers of intellectual substance. Three generations
after his death new editions of his books and an expanding secondary literature
testify to the resilience and originality of his work. Scholars in America
and abroad are taking a fresh look at his thought. Babbitt is found to
have identified and addressed cultural and social problems long before
their seriousness was widely recognized and to have formulated ideas which,
in often extreme and superficial versions, were to become fashionable more
than half a century later. Some of his characteristic ideas are even finding
their way into more general circulation. Scholars who in the past saw no
reason to cite him or feared to do so now mention or discuss his work.
One reason for the current resurgence of interest in Babbitt is undoubtedly
a desire for alternatives to the present flow of extremism and shallowness
in academia and the arts. At a time of moral, intellectual and aesthetical
fragmentation and idiosyncrasy, bordering sometimes on madness, Babbitt
has appeal as one who criticizes similar phenomena and explores sources
of restraint, sanity, and common meaning. He does so while stressing the
centrality of the imagination and while recognizing, in a way that an older
Western tradition did not, the importance of individual creativity and
freedom in moral action and art. For him the self-control that marks all
genuinely centering experience does not extinguish but selectively affirms
and enhances the personal uniqueness of the agent. Another attraction of
Babbitt today is that his thought is informed by and tethered to great
literary and historical learning. He has no propensity for esoteric theoretical
abstractions, seeking instead to understand actual life and letters. Another
of his strengths is that he opposes Enlightenment rationalism and scientism
while at the same time embracing other aspects of modernity, notably the
spirit of critical inquiry.
Because of Babbitt’s originality and independence of existing schools,
his contemporaries had difficulty placing him. Aestheticians advocating
l’art
pour l’art and political "progressives" assumed that he was some kind
of reactionary, while some traditionalists found him disturbingly modern.
Both groups read him carelessly. Distortions of Babbitt’s thought gained
wide currency, and there is a continuing need to guard against misunderstanding.
Today his growing prestige adds the complication that scholars trying to
validate their own position in academic disputes will claim him for their
side on the basis of a limited grasp of his ideas.
Babbitt a Positivist?
Babbitt was well-versed in the history of philosophy and had much to
say on central philosophical questions. Yet he was formally a professor
of literature, and his style of writing was not that of the "technical"
philosopher. Some of his comments on epistemological issues, though fully
intelligible in the context of his work as a whole, are unclear and easily
misunderstood. Several seemingly favorable statements about positivism
are a case in point. Those comments have been seen by some traditionalists
as revealing dangerously modern leanings, by others as a sign of enlightened
views. In the latter group today is Professor A. Owen Aldridge, a leading
representative of comparative literature and eighteenth-century studies.
Aldridge would like to claim Babbitt for positivism.
Positivism seems to Professor Aldridge to offer the most promise for
a return to scholarly integrity in literary studies and criticism, fields
that have been badly damaged in recent years by an assortment of extreme
and politicized approaches. Aldridge discusses this subject in a consideration
of Kenneth Craven’s book Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness.
Aldridge points to similarities between phenomena satirized by Swift and
the "theory explosion that has overturned literary criticism in the last
two decades." He speculates that Swift would have regarded Jacques Derrida
as the most prominent representative of "modern critical madness." Aldridge
reflects that, while literary scholarship and criticism in general have
suffered badly under structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism,
multiculturalism, etc., his own field of eighteenth-century studies has
been "relatively free of theoretical extremes." The mainstream of that
field "is by and large grounded in positivism and formalism." He then suggests
that what is sound in American literary scholarship can be extended and
that the greatest need at present is for "a new positivism."2
Here Professor Aldridge singles out one person for emulation—Irving
Babbitt. He sees Babbitt as being all the more relevant and appealing in
the present academic situation for representing a "salutary multiculturalism,"
one different from what is prescribed by the enforcers of political correctness.
As one who has long called attention to Babbitt’s virtues, I agree that
this seminal American thinker-scholar and sage can help revitalize literary
and other studies. I agree that Babbitt’s type of multiculturalism is a
sound and sorely needed alternative to what is so called today. When it
comes to Professor Aldridge’s characterization of Babbitt as a "positivist,"
I must enter a substantial demurrer.
It can be said in Professor Aldridge’s defense that in claiming Babbitt
for positivism he is not entirely without textual support. Even allowing
for wishful thinking on Aldridge’s part, the fact that a scholar of his
prominence can misread Babbitt in this regard points to a lack of precision
in some of Babbitt’s formulations and to the need for examining them within
his epistemology as a whole.
In what follows I shall try to elucidate Babbitt’s comments on positivism
and demonstrate why it is misleading to describe him as a positivist, especially
without explanation. Beyond advancing our understanding of Babbitt, analyzing
his conception of knowledge lends itself to a consideration of issues of
general epistemological interest. What are the methodological needs of
the humanities and social sciences? What is the nature and range of the
evidence proper to those disciplines? Clarifying Babbitt’s relation to
positivism will serve the purpose of advancing an alternative to that doctrine.
The Facts of Human Experience
It should be granted first of all that Babbitt’s language in a few passages
did seem to suggest that he considered himself a positivist, if only a
positivist of sorts. But that rather ambiguous self-designation must not
be taken out of context: his emphatic rejection of naturalism—of views
of life that deny the existence of a universal, "transcendent" ethical
dimension. He distinguished two main forms of naturalism, which were often
joined in the same individual or movement, one "utilitarian and scientific"
and one "emotional." He regarded Francis Bacon as emblematic of the first
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as emblematic of the latter.
Babbitt wanted to refute modern methodologies that reduce man to a part
of the phenomenal nature posited by natural science or that otherwise neglect
or distort what is distinctively human about man—methodologies that, most
importantly, maltreat the moral and religious dimensions of existence.
He believed that, in the effort to overcome the reductionistic intellectual
tendencies in the modern world, something might be gained by giving a new
meaning to an existing term.
Babbitt took up the subject of positivism in a discussion of the meaning
of "modernity" in Rousseau and Romanticism. He pointed out that
"the word modern is often and no doubt inevitably used to describe the
more recent or the most recent thing." But this was not its sole use and
not the one that he preferred. He associated himself rather with figures
like Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, and Arnold, who meant by the modern spirit
"the positive and critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take things
on authority." Babbitt welcomed the willingness to deal critically with
traditional subjects in the humanities, and he also had praise for the
modern approach to natural science. One source of possible confusion regarding
his meaning is the following sentence, which discusses the two types of
research together:
I hold that one should not only welcome the efforts of the man of
science at his best to put the natural law on a positive and critical basis,
but that one should strive to emulate him in one’s dealings with the human
law; and so become a complete positivist.3
By the "natural law" Babbitt meant the order of nature that is explored
by the physical sciences. By the "human law" he meant the source of moral
order within specifically human life, as studied by philosophers, literary
scholars and others.
Lifted out of context, the quoted sentence might give the impression
that Babbitt wanted to extend the methodology of natural science to the
humanities. But that would be precisely the kind of "naturalistic excess"
that he was combatting, a proclivity that to him was not modern in the
good sense but modernistic. The context of the sentence as well as his
work as a whole makes clear that he was here approving not scientism but
the modern "positive and critical spirit . . . that refuses to take things
on authority." In Babbitt’s view, the better natural scientists represent
that spirit in one way; soundly modern humanistic scholars do so in another.
The sentences that follow immediately upon his comment about becoming "a
complete positivist" condemn reductionistic approaches to the study of
human nature. As applied to what is distinctively human, the critical spirit
demands attention to a kind of evidence that is beyond the grasp of natural
science.
It might be noted in passing that Babbitt had a broader and more historical
understanding of modernity than so-called "postmodernists" today who define
it eclectically and rather arbitrarily. Modernity is more diverse and complex
than they assume, partly in that many of its strains simultaneously develop
and react against older Western currents.
Babbitt insisted that the most important material for study in the humane
disciplines is not the external data sought by the physical sciences, but
the "inner life" of humanity, including its moral and religious life. There
are facts of human self-experience that are more directly relevant to understanding
characteristically human existence than facts ascertained by empirical-positivist
methods.
As a part of his program to deepen humane studies in the modern world,
Babbitt was concerned to put the study of moral and religious questions
on a positive and critical basis. Without rejecting the need for authority
or the special claims of Christianity, he thought it misguided, especially
in existing intellectual circumstances, merely to invoke traditional authority
and assert the truths of the inner life in a doctrinal-dogmatic fashion.
He noted that many modernists had broken with tradition, partly because
tradition is "not sufficiently immediate, partly because it is not sufficiently experimental."4
But certain general truths of morality and religion can be verified ecumenically,
independently of particular traditions. They have their own experiential
ground, Babbitt insisted, and that ground can be critically examined. Modernists
who refuse to do so are "incomplete positivists" with truncated notions
of immediacy and experiment. The right way to answer their neglect of important
evidence, Babbitt suggested, "is not to appeal to some dogma or outer authority
but rather to turn against them their own principles."5
Those who are concerned to protect moral and religious wisdom need not
resist the demand that claims be validated through experience and experiment—provided
those terms are not understood reductionistically. Babbitt vigorously objected
to "scientific naturalists" who restrict such terms "to observation of
the phenomenal order and of man only in so far as he comes under this order."6
The inner life of humanity is concrete and immediate and offers evidence
of the nature of human existence that must be taken seriously by honest
representatives of the critical attitude. According to Babbitt, the central
fact of man’s moral-spiritual life—the special power of self-restraint
that he termed the "inner check" or the "higher will"—is also a matter
of direct experience. Because it is a form of willing, there is an important
sense in which it becomes known only in action. The person who experiments
morally by "exercising" this will eventually discovers more fully its own
self-justifying quality and direction. This power is not confined to or
exhausted by its particular manifestations. Rather, it is transcendent,
pulling man toward moral universality. Yet, as a specific, discernible
influence on the conduct of individuals, it is at the same time immanent;
it is known in experience, and its effects on individual and society form
a rich historical record. Why then not meet the modernists on their own
ground, Babbitt asked, and "oppose to them something that is both immediate
and experimental—namely the presence in man of a higher will or power of control?"7
The facts of the inner life are more clearly a matter of immediate experience
than are the "external" facts of the natural sciences. The latter phenomena
are not known from within human experience itself; they are reifications
according to prescribed methodologies. Many advocates of positivist, "scientific"
methods are actually dogmatists uninterested in the full range of evidence.
Babbitt pointed here to "the behaviourists and other naturalistic psychologists
who are to be regarded at present as among the chief enemies of human nature."8
But more moderate empiricists in the humanities and social sciences were
also reluctant to consider man’s inner life in its own terms. To the extent
that they studied man "from within," they were prone to forcing evidence
thus obtained into pre-conceived, reifying categories that distorted or
reduced actual experience. This tendency was debilitating, not least in
scholars of literature and art, since their task was to absorb and assess
works that seek to render life with experiential fullness.
It should be evident that what Babbitt meant when calling for a more
complete positivism was not that positivist principles, as understood in
his own day or our own, should be more widely or thoroughly applied. What
he affirmed and welcomed was the modern critical spirit. That commitment
to evidence and verification must not, he argued, be arbitrarily restricted
to what could be handled by positivist methods as heretofore conceived.
Humanistic investigations should not only encompass but be centered in
the facts of immediate self-experience.
The context of Babbitt’s apparent endorsement of positivism was thus
a sharp critique of existing positivism. He tried to put that orientation
on the defensive by arguing that it did not fully employ its own principles.
His referring to the desirable widening and deepening of humanistic research
as a kind of positivism turns out, on closer inspection, to be mostly a
rhetorical posture. Babbitt’s claim to be meeting "the modernists" on their
own ground would be accurate only to the extent that they would be willing
to reconstitute their understanding of what is admissible, reliable evidence.
He recognized in his own way the important difference between his own method
and that of existing positivism, but, because of a flaw in his own epistemological
self-understanding, he also tended to blur that difference. Given the established
and continuing meaning of the term positivism, his call for "a more complete
positivism" was bound to mislead readers, especially superficial ones,
regarding his own critical program. Babbitt was a positivist, if at all,
only in a new and special sense of the word.
Positivism in Theory and Practice
Professor Aldridge is sympathetic to conventional positivism in literary
scholarship. He associates Babbitt with that type of orientation, asserting
that Babbitt subscribed to "the essence of positivism." That essence, Aldridge
intimates, contrasts sharply with today’s obsession with theory. It "consists
in creating a factual base without which there could be no theory at all."9
Significantly, Aldridge does not indicate that the term "factual base"
might have more than one meaning. His readers can only assume that he has
in mind the standard positivist conception of fact and that "the essence
of positivism" is to be understood accordingly.
Positivism rests on generally naturalistic assumptions and is willing
to attach scholarly-scientific weight, officially at least, only to empirically
ascertainable phenomena. For it, knowledge expands cumulatively and quantitatively
rather than qualitatively. Researchers are seen as adding to the "body
of knowledge." They do so by gathering more and more individual "data,"
which are analyzed and catalogued. It is the task of scholars to give an
accurate, "objective" account of the evidence. Good theory either assists
in the collection of material or spells out the patterns in what has been
collected.
The "new positivism" for which Professor Aldridge calls in literary
scholarship appears to be of this type. He defines it as "a method of objective
description"—language that calls to mind the standard positivist approach.10
Now it is of course possible, as the above discussion of Babbitt illustrates,
to use the language of positivism in a manner quite different from common
usage. By taking up an epistemological discussion and introducing important
philosophical distinctions, one could define Aldridge’s term "objective
description" in such a way as to make it fit Babbitt’s method. But Aldridge
does not signal that the methodology of which he approves is different
from positivism in the ordinary sense: collecting and "describing" facts
that can be warrantably ascertained by approved empirical methods.
It is vaguely assumed by most positivists that the natural sciences
set the most rigorous standards for inquiry. "Objective description" has
to do with seeing, hearing, counting, recording, measuring, testing, etc.
In practice, positivist scholars in the humanities and social sciences
never come very close to following the methods of natural science, although
so-called behaviorists believe themselves to be approximating the real
thing. Consciously or unconsciously, positivist students of man as a social
and creative being adopt more humanistic and philosophical outlooks, although
ones marked by naturalistic and empiricist prejudices. What qualifies as
fact is never made entirely clear. Most of what positivists in the humanities
and social disciplines allow into consideration, including material from
historical researches, has not really been screened and ascertained according
to strict scientific investigative principles. But the material is viewed
and treated in a quasi-quantitative, quasi-empirical manner. Hence the
"value"-dimension of life is said to lie outside the purview of the researcher,
except in so far as the "preferences" of individuals can be empirically
studied as among the phenomena constituting behavior.
Positivist scholars in the humanities and social sciences are guided,
in practice, by a sense of the larger whole of human life that is not derived
mainly from positivist methods and investigations. Specifically, these
scholars bring to their work a feel for the dynamic of human existence,
for the interconnections of particulars, and for what is important and
relevant. In addition to their own personal experience of what it is like
to be a human being, what helps them interpret and give the right proportions
to evidence is a philosophical-humanistic understanding of man and society
of one kind or another. A long tradition of non-positivist scholarship
and reflection seeps into the minds of the researchers. In trying to explain
the French Revolution, for example, positivist scholars too regard the
ideas of Rousseau and the Jacobins as being more important than, say, the
dietary habits of the French people. They do so even as their official
epistemology undermines the type of philosophical understanding of man
that gave rise to their own implicit view of what influences human conduct.
In proportion as it is true to its own official methods, positivism
treats what is distinctively human in a reductionistic manner, fostering
a naturalistic, "value-free" perspective. Precisely because Babbitt championed
close attention to the central facts of human self-experience now and throughout
history, he resisted the spread of this narrowing approach. He was sharply
critical of what German scholars called the strengwissenschaftliche
Methode, the kind of positivism that was being emulated in leading
American universities before the turn of the century when Babbitt received
his education and started his academic career. The advocates of that method
insisted on the rigorous and thorough collection, analysis and cataloguing
of empirical data. Babbitt was disdainful of the pedantry and over-specialization
that this allegedly scientific method spawned in the humanities and of
its inability to handle the central questions of human existence. He remembered
with distaste a year-long course on Shakespeare that he had taken as an
undergraduate at Harvard. In keeping with the fashionable positivist method,
the professor, George Lyman Kittredge, presented large amounts of detailed
philological and biographical material but offered no insight into Shakespeare
as a commentator on the human condition.
Babbitt formed the opinion that this dehumanizing and pedantic data-gathering
method was quintessentially German. Even today it is common for American
academics with sympathies for a more humanistic approach to believe the
same. But this prejudice betrays limited familiarity with German thought
and its history. What is not understood is that, although German scholars
in various disciplines did make pioneering and widely admired efforts of
the mentioned kind, that type of research represented a marked change in
German thought relative to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
the most creative and famous period in the history of German philosophy.
The strengwissenschaftliche Methode signified the retreat of that
earlier humanistic-philosophical-historical orientation and the triumph
of very different influences—of mainly French and English origin: the positivism
of such figures as Auguste Comte, James and John Stuart Mill, and Herbert
Spencer. This change in German thought was partly a reaction against the
excesses and weaknesses of Hegelianism. The historical consciousness emerging
from the older German humanistic-philosophical understanding of man had
not been fully absorbed. It was now pushed aside or transformed into a
positivist concern about the past as a huge new field for the collection
of data. Babbitt always assumed the indispensability of history in humane
studies. When he objected to the positivist narrowing of the meaning of
history, he could have appealed to earlier and more home-grown German philosophy.
In spite of terminological appearances, then, Babbitt opposed positivism—as
understood then and now. He did affirm the modern "positive and critical
spirit," but, as should be clear from the above analysis, his view of what
is sound about that spirit is markedly different from that of the intellectuals
who,
until fairly recently, have set the tone in academia in this century.
Babbitt and German Philosophy
Babbitt’s own epistemology combined elements from ancient, Oriental,
medieval, and modern sources. One substantial influence on him was Aristotle’s
"empiricism," although as revised in the light of much later thought. Another
major influence on Babbitt, if partly unconscious and acknowledged mostly
by implication, was German non-positivist philosophy. When Babbitt referred
directly to German thought his tone was often critical, even hostile. Kant,
for example, came across in his writing as an abstract rationalist with
a weak sense of the importance of the concrete and imaginative in the search
for reality. Still, Babbitt’s own epistemological assumptions, which were
never brought to full and systematic self-awareness, reveal that he was
substantially affected by German philosophy, including Kant.
To point out this philosophical affiliation may not enhance Babbitt’s
standing in the eyes of his countrymen. Their unease about "German philosophy"
is considerable and of long standing. Babbitt himself exhibited it. In
general, Anglo-Saxony has not been predisposed to the kind of intellectual
discipline and depth that is required to move beyond elementary and general
philosophical discourse. Often Anglo-Saxony has excused itself from these
rigors by disparaging and ridiculing German philosophy, calling it pretentious,
obscurantist, turgid, arrogant, God-denying, or the like, and has recommended
its own more "down-to-earth," pragmatic ways.11
Although this criticism has not been without truth in all cases, too often
it has been a cover for lack of philosophical understanding and subtlety.12
Babbitt was a student of German thought, especially the philosophy of
aesthetics, and often commented on it.13
He was influenced by it not only through Germans he admired—he revered
the older Goethe—but through Germans of whom he had major criticisms. Babbitt
also had considerable, if highly qualified, admiration for two English-speaking
writers who had drunk deeply from German sources, Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Babbitt was sharply and properly critical of the
strains of romantic sentimentalism in both men and drew only selectively
from them, but he often referred to them. He aligned himself with such
elements of their thought as Emerson’s critique of scientism and Coleridge’s
notion of the creative imagination. Through them and others Babbitt absorbed
much of the German idea of the universal, transcendental Self and of the
German historical sense. He did so while emphatically rejecting the romantic
primitivism and pantheism with which these philosophies were often mixed
up.
Babbitt did not directly acknowledge these German influences on his
thought. Always concerned to criticize what seemed to him questionable
and pernicious about romanticism, he did not explicitly distinguish between
higher and lower forms of that large and diverse movement. He would have
had every reason to make and to dwell on such distinctions, because, in
spite of appearances, he was himself a kind of romantic—his emphasis on
the creative nature of the imagination and on the imagination as a possible
source of reality being obvious examples. Contrary to the impression created
by Babbitt, romanticism did not only inspire the kind of imaginative extravagance
and irresponsibility that he found objectionable and dangerous. Two individuals
whom Babbitt admired can be cited as outstanding examples of a different,
higher form of romanticism: the mature Goethe in Germany and Edmund Burke
in England. Both exhibited romantic thought and imagination but chiefly
not of the type that Babbitt criticized. If he did not recognize the full
extent to which German ideas influenced his own thinking, it also should
be said that he put his own mark on what he absorbed and that in so doing
the German ingredients were blended with elements of different origin.
Babbitt was not drawing on Aristotelianism but rather echoing German
idealism when he took up the theme of universality and particularity. He
often argued in one way or another that there is that which makes a person
"incomprehensibly different" from other human beings, but that there is
also "that element in his own nature that makes him incomprehensibly like
other men." "Even the man who is most filled with his own uniqueness, or
‘genius,’ a Rousseau, for example, assumes this universal self in every
word he utters." Babbitt quoted approvingly from Emerson’s essay on "The
Over-Soul" to convey the same idea: "Jove nods to Jove behind us as we speak."14
The German notion of the transcendental Self, an obvious strong influence
on Emerson, had added an important dimension to what Babbitt had drawn
from other, partly ancient sources. He found much to admire in Coleridge’s
explication of the modern idea of the creative imagination in Biographia
Literaria. That idea, as is abundantly clear from the text itself,
owes greatly to German thought, and Coleridge makes a philosophically ambitious
effort to explain its meaning and derivation, including the philosophy
of Immanuel Kant, to English readers. Setting forth his own position, Coleridge
writes of "the conditional finite I"—which, as he points out, Kantians
call the "empirical self"—and "the absolute I AM." He notes "the dependence
or inherence of the former in the latter."15
Although Babbitt sometimes used the ancient Greek language of the One and
the Many when speaking of the same subject, he was aware that for him the
One is not a disembodied Platonic transcendent, just as the Many is not
a Platonic flux. What is "stable and permanent" in life was for Babbitt
"a oneness that is always changing. The oneness and the change are inseparable."16
Had Babbitt been more fully conscious of his indebtedness to German philosophy,
he might have referred to the inherence of life’s enduring element in historical
particulars as the subject of "the concrete universal."17
The purpose of establishing these philosophical connections is not to
prove that Babbitt was a German idealist, but to show how his philosophical
leanings separated him from positivism. For him, the proper sphere of evidence
about human life and letters is the simultaneously individual and trans-individual,
trans-cultural, trans-historical consciousness in which permanence and
change, unity and diversity are inextricably joined. The facts most relevant
to the student of human action, thought and imagination are not the kind
of atomic objects postulated by positivism. The relevant facts are the
living phenomena of human self-experience. These facts, though always present
to and marked by individual consciousness, are inextricably part of the
universal whole and are meaningless outside of that whole. So-called empirical
data are fragments from the whole that have been turned into "distincts"
by abstraction, i.e., reification. As was suggested above, evidence of
that reified kind makes sense to researchers in the humanities only because
the researchers continue to live within the whole and because, in the act
of interpretation, they partially reintegrate the "empirical" evidence
into the whole.
If it can be said that Babbitt advocated "a method of objective description,"
to use Professor Aldridge’s phrase, "objective" must not be understood
in the ordinary positivist manner. Babbitt did want to give an accurate
account of life and literature, but here the most important facts are not
solids of some kind; they are not facts in the empirical-positivistic sense
of discrete, inert "things." The subject matter of Babbitt’s investigations,
as of any similar scholarly endeavors, is the immediate, irreducible sense
of human existence as actually lived or imagined. The facts being scrutinized
are potentialities of life belonging to a structured if forever changing
human consciousness. Before they become objects of interpretation and philosophizing,
the central facts of life and literature are experiential facts. They must
be studied from within the whole of which they are a part, whatever the
limits of intuition and personal experience of the particular student.
Needless to say, works of art are intuitions of life that can only be understood
and assessed in relation to the whole that they attempt to express.
Scholarly Illumination of the Whole
Humanistic scholarship frequently studies the life and work of particular
persons. Often it studies particular movements or epochs. Yet, through
the particular, it is trying to better understand all of humanity. It was
for Babbitt self-evident that the history of mankind, displaying both the
depravity and glory of human life, provides indispensable illumination
of the present. The study of the past is a powerful antidote to idiosyncrasy
and superficiality regarding human nature. With deep approval, Babbitt
quoted Goethe’s statement that one should juxtapose to the aberrations
of the hour the masses of world history.
Scholars in the humanities and social sciences must of course marshal
the kind of evidence that is most pertinent to their particular disciplines.
Depending on their orientations, the evidence may be predominantly literary
and artistic, historical and philosophical, or historiographic and documentary.
In each instance, what gives meaning and the right proportions to the particular
material is how it fits within the whole. The most systematic and concentrated
study of human experience is philosophy. Good philosophy explores the enduring
forms of human life—will, imagination and reason—consulting the forever
expanding historical record of what human beings have wrought. The complexity
and range of human life calls for a wide variety of research. Specialization
is a necessary aspect of all serious scholarship. And yet specialization
that loses itself in its specialty by deliberately or inadvertently disconnecting
its "facts" from the enduring human consciousness loses its human significance.
This is the case, for example, when history, potentially one of the most
humane of academic disciplines, becomes instead, in that apt if brusque
phrase, just "one damn thing after another."
In practice, positivism has often done better than its epistemological
theory by following humanistic intuitions of the whole. Still, its understanding
of knowledge as based on quasi-solid, discrete pieces of evidence bears
much of the blame for the current fragmentation in academia. Positivism
has greatly damaged the sense of universality without which the academic
enterprise and civilization in general will begin to fall apart. The belief
of many positivists that their methods, by themselves, could supply the
needed academic unity has proved ill-founded. To the extent that an older
Western sense of the whole has ceased to inform positivist researches,
partly because of positivist attacks upon that sense, fragmentation has
worsened, and the inability of those methods to carry the burden placed
upon them has become more glaring. Some positivist researchers may still
exhibit greater discipline than do exponents of the approaches that now
have the cry in academia, but discipline for what enduring central purpose?
If positivism is offered today as the best that the humanities and social
sciences can offer, the value of those disciplines to people concerned
about life’s central questions is placed in doubt.
By contrast, research that is guided by and conducive to reflection
upon the whole can justify itself to humanity. It is the connection between
more or less specialized investigations and the continuing effort better
to understand life in general that gives the investigations meaning and
humane relevance. Experts in particular fields need the seminal centering
insights of the intellectual giants, those rare thinkers and scholars who
are capable of the highest form of specialization: that of specializing
in being a generalist. Those individuals too achieve insight with reference
to some particular material, whether of action, thought or art: they understand
the universal and the particular through each other. Their distinction
is that they center thought while heightening the awareness of the complexity,
richness, and diversity of human life. Babbitt was such a thinker.
The Aesthetical and Moral Conditions of Knowledge
This article has examined Babbitt’s conception of knowledge in relation
to positivism. I have concentrated on different meanings of the "positive
and critical spirit" and have tried, by means of a comparison with positivism,
to explain a view of knowledge that Babbitt implied but was not able fully
to articulate. To contain the discussion I have not delved into the aesthetical
and moral issues to which Babbitt devoted most of his attention, although
they have a strong bearing on epistemology. To balance my deliberately
selective approach to his work and to expand and deepen the notion of knowledge
here presented, a few clarifications and additions are needed. It is particularly
desirable to summarize an idea of which the main contending epistemological
camps have at best only the most fumbling grasp: that humane knowledge
is to a large extent dependent for its depth and breadth upon will and
imagination of a certain quality.
The critical intellect is in an important sense the chief organon of
humanistic inquiry. The scholarly mind, especially when it becomes more
systematically philosophical, proceeds by means of analyses, definitions,
distinctions, concepts, etc. The critical intellect aspires to clarity
of thought. What has been argued here is that sound humanistic scholarship
is the intellectual articulation of experience and that the experiential
material must be understood in a non-positivist, non-empirical manner.
The scholarly-philosophical intellect appropriate to humane studies works
primarily, not on abstract, reified entities, but on the living, concrete
phenomena of human consciousness.
There is no hidden inference in this view of the critical intellect
that conceptual excogitation is mankind’s sole or even primary source of
understanding. Babbitt would certainly have resisted such an inference.
One of his chief and recurring criticisms of the Western tradition was
that it has too often, as in the case of Plato, placed too much emphasis
on the importance of intellect in pointing man toward reality.
There is also a non-intellectual form of understanding. Human beings
did not have to wait for philosophers to know something substantial about
their own existence. They always had an immediate intuition of the nature
of the whole, an awareness to which story-tellers, poets and other artists
contributed. That kind of intuition, or imagination (a synonymous term),
is presupposed in all operations of the critical intellect. Without a pre-conceptual,
alogical sense of what human life is actually like, philosophical reflection
on man would lack concrete material and direction. One of Babbitt’s most
persuasive themes is that the artistic imagination at its best is a central
source of knowledge, although of non-conceptual, non-historical knowledge.
Babbitt contrasted what he called the "ethical" imagination—which is
not only aesthetically compelling but realistic and penetrating—with the
"idyllic" imagination—whose visions are perhaps appealing but illusory
and distortive. He pursued this distinction not just because it is important
to aesthetics and literary scholarship but because it is central to understanding
human life in general, including the evolution of civilization. Briefly
put, how mankind sees its own situation and how it decides to live has
everything to do with how it imagines the world. Sometimes artists pull
civilization into dangerous illusion. Scholars and thinkers are by no means
immune to such imagination. It can make them see life in a warped fashion,
which means that distorted intuitive material is presented to the intellect.
In one sense, then, the primary need—the sine qua non—of good critical
scholarship is a soundly working imagination.
This is not the place to take up the epistemological importance of Babbitt’s
understanding of the imagination, including its morally opposed potentialities.
But it is important to recognize that the scholarly-philosophical mind,
as such, owes much of its sense of the whole to poets and other artists.
Humanity in general and scholars in particular are deeply affected, directly
or indirectly, by the imaginative masterminds. The latter articulate, express
in aesthetically intensified form, what others intuit in merely groping
fashion. The imaginative masterminds thus put their mark on society’s general
outlook on life. At bottom, what holds the contemplated world together
and forms the basis for critical reflection upon human existence is the
imagination. But only a certain quality of imagination imparts a sense
of reality. It can become such, Babbitt argued, only if rooted in and informed
by exercise of the special quality of will that he called the "higher will"
or "inner check." A truly penetrating and proportionate imagination is
centered by experience of that will and of the forces with which it must
contend in self and the world. Without that kind of imagination, scholars
and thinkers have an insufficient sense of the concrete texture of reality.
If it is true, as it certainly is, that, in their professional capacities,
scholars and thinkers base their conclusions not on artistic visions but
on historical facts, it is also true that their imaginations help direct
their attention and profoundly affect their interpretations of those facts.
And individuals tend to develop such imaginations as are pleasing to their
wills. However much it may offend the dominant epistemological prejudices
of this century to say it, moral character is a necessary precondition
for a realistic view of life.18
Babbitt added significantly to mankind’s self-understanding by identifying
and exploring contrasting forms of the imagination and relating those forms
to the qualities of will that inspire and are inspired by them. He examined
in depth a central part of the human condition and understood perhaps better
than any other thinker the moral-imaginative dynamic that characterizes
modern Western man. He achieved his knowledge and wisdom, not through the
positivist method, but through an extraordinarily perceptive grasp of the
living human whole. Irving Babbitt was not a positivist but a learned scholar
who specialized in being a generalist.
1 For a consideration of how Babbitt can both enhance
and subvert postmodernist discussion, see Michael Weinstein, “Irving Babbitt
and Postmodernity,” Humanitas, Vol. VI, No. 1 (1992/93). [Back]
2 A. Owen Aldridge, “Jonathan Swift’s Message
for Moderns,” Modern Age, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1995), 170-71.[Back]
3 Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), lxxi. [Back]
4 Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition,”
in Norman Foerster, ed. Humanism and America (Port Washington, N.Y.:
Kennikat Press, 1967; reprint of 1930 original), 44. [Back]
5 Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, lxxi.[Back]
6 Babbitt, “Humanism,” 45. [Back]
7 Ibid., 44. [Back]
8 Ibid., 39. [Back]
9 Aldridge, “Swift’s Message,” 171. [Back]
10 Ibid. [Back]
11 One of the few major American contributions to philosophy,
the pragmatism of John Dewey, is far from lacking intellectual discipline
and depth. It also owes greatly to German thought. [Back]
12 In some American intellectual circles a stated belief
in God or “transcendence” appears to be a sufficient sign of philosophical
depth. [Back]
13 See, for example, the chapter on “Schiller as Aesthetic
Theorist” in Irving Babbitt, On Being Creative (New York: Biblo
and Tannen, 1968; reprint of the 1932 original). [Back]
14 Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism,
50, 47. [Back]
15 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
(London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1975), 152n. [Back]
16 Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, lxxiii
(emphasis in original). [Back]
17 On Babbitt’s relation to German thought, see Claes
G. Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason (Chicago and Washington, D.C.:
Regnery Books, 1986). [Back]
18 For an in-depth discussion of the epistemological
importance of the imagination and of the relation of the imagination to
reason and different types of will, see Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason.
The book draws selectively from Babbitt and Benedetto Croce, as well as
other thinkers, to reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and
social sciences. [Back]
*Claes G. Ryn is Professor of Politics at the Catholic
University of America, Chairman of the National Humanities Institute, and
Editor of Humanitas. [Back]
Copyright © 2010 NATIONAL HUMANITIES
INSTITUTE
Updated 29 July 2010