Frederick Woodbridge: Experience and Idea

FREDERICK WOODBRIDGE: EXPERIENCE AND IDEA WHEN HE SPOKE to the Columbia department of philosophy on the occasion of John Dewey's death, John Randall remarked that Dewey learned from Frederick Woodbridge what metaphysics is.1 A good number of people, including Randall himself, learned that lesson from Woodbridge. His role-as teacher, chairman of department, and dean of the Columbia faculties of arts and sciences-in the development and flowering of Columbia Naturalism is pivotal. If his greater influence seems to have been as teacher and friend of other Naturalists, we cannot afford to overlook the few volumes of his writings which exhibit the power of mind that made him so extraordinary a teacher and so stimulating a friend, and that embody his own peculiar and attractive philosophy. It is to Woodbridge's" intellectualism" that I wish to call attention here, and attempt to do so by some comments on the most provoking of his works, The Realm of Mind.2 Woodbridge taught that being is " logical." What did he mean? And what did he mean by " idea " ? The answers to these questions help one situate Woodbridge in relation to other Naturalists of his generation such as Santayana and Dewey and to estimate his considerable influence on second generation Naturalists such as John H. Randall, Jr. and Sterling P. Lamprecht, and mark The Realm of Mind as a significant contribution to the metaphysical endeavors of Naturalists. 1 John H. Randall, Jr. "John Dewey, 1859-1952," Journal of Philosophy, 50 (1953), p. 9. Randall suggests that Dewey's Experience and Nature most clearly reveals Woodbridge's influence. Cf. "The Department of Philosophy," A History of the Faculty of Philosophy af Columbia University (New York: 1957), pp. 127218 . 2 F. J. E. Woodbridge, The Realm of Minrl (New York: 19~6}. FREDERICK WOODBRIDQE: EXPERIENCE AND IDEA 718 I. A NAIVE REALISM There is no attempt in Realm to offer a psychology of knowing. Questions of epistemology, insofar as they are treated at all, are subordinate to and placed in the context of metaphysics . Woodbridge takes as his starting point the fact that man thinks. He sidesteps, as an initial consideration bound to lead to absurd conclusions, a theory of knowing based on an acceptance of sensing as mediator in cognition between mind and existence.8 He suggests that if one begins with sensation as the sole avenue of contact with the realm of being, one is compelled by the logic of the starting point to end with mind as an entity internal to body, an entity which depends on sensation for its activity in existence and which is inevitably restricted to consideration of sense data and not of existence itself. A different starting point, he suggests, yields an entirely different and more reasonable outcome. Thinking as a fact leads one directly to what is thought about. To ask about thinking is necessarily to ask about what is thought. For Woodbridge, " objective mind," or what we might call the thinkability of being, is a necessary correlate to thinking as an activity in being.4 The problem how man thinks and the epistemological problem of the meaning of ideas and their relation tol existence is to be settled within a context already set by the apparently common-sensical affirmation that what man thinks about is no more obscure a topic or distant a subject matter than the fact that he thinks. In fact, to begin a consideration of mind and being with the already established conclusion that the two are either at a distance from one another in existence or are to be considered as separate prob8 Ibid., p. 18 f. I think that Woodbridge may well have had Santayana in mind here. Santayana had already made known his basically Kantian position on the cognitional problem. He remained obtuse on this point, and is as consistent in his obscurantism on the mediatory function of sensing as Woodbridge is clear on the same question. See Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: 1900), pp. 1-2!1. 'Ibid., pp. 2, 18, 81-82. 714 WILLIAM M. SHEA lems for examination is to belie the obvious fact that thinking is thinking-about. Once thinking...