America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense

7. Conclusion

209 7 Conclusion How compatible were Scottish Common Sense and James’s philosophy? How compatible were the Scottish realist and the Jamesian moral understandings ? What is their relevance for us? What can we conclude from this study as a whole about the personal and social meanings of common sense in general, and the role of common sense in the unfolding of American order in particular ? And how might American common sense and that of other peoples be preserved and vivified? A New Direction for Philosophy The two kinds of realism considered here—Scottish Common Sense and James’s pragmatic radical empiricism—have their differences, clearly. Scottish realism lays heavy stress on the constitution of the mind and the discovery of first principles and natural laws. James’s theory, conversely, stresses perceptual experience and the dynamic quality of knowing. Scottish realism assumes the existence of an entity called soul, while James doubts it. But these differences mask a fundamental compatibility. First, both theories are empiricist in spirit and method. The Scottish realists’ stress on first principles might give a superficial impression that they are rationalists like Descartes or Kant, differing from them only in detail, but the Scots in contrast to those thinkers continually remind us that the grasp of first principles is a kind of experience, which they call “sense” or “intuition.” Like James they are concerned to keep philosophy concrete. Also like James they adopt an inductive method of philosophical investigation. Second, both the Scots and James are centrally concerned with combating the evils of skepticism, on one side, and idealistic certitude on the other. Both employ the same means of attack, trying to out-empiricize, if you will, their opponents. In so doing, they both hew to the common sense middle 210 America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense way. Third, both stand for the objectivity of knowledge and reject pure subjectivism as being inconsistent with the facts of experience, whether of intuition or simply our sense of externality. Both, in short, are thoroughly realist in orientation . The claim has been made here that the intuitionism represented by the Scottish realists and the dynamic realism of James need each other and cannot be complete apart, cannot indeed survive apart in terms of maintaining the respect of the philosophic world. The reason is that a fixation on first principles leads to philosophical desiccation and forgetfulness about the experiences that make the principles intelligible, while an obsession with movement disconnects us from the fixed points in the stream of experience that give it stable meaning. (A stream, after all, though its content continually changes, cuts through the same country and rolls over the same unmoving contours.) Reconciliation is not impossible. The Scottish Common Sensers did recognize the experiences required for a knowledge of first truths, and James acknowledged our perceptions of intrinsic value, the fact of unchanging truths on the conceptual level (relations that must hold between certain ideas), and at least the possibility if not the likelihood of permanent realities (as, for example , of an “eternal moral order”). Moreover, Scottish realists such as Witherspoon who understood true faith as a vital connection to God had a sense of the deeper truths that intuition in the narrow sense could not touch, though they did not sufficiently explore the philosophical implications. James, though he did not make much of it, recognized the “regularities” in perceptual experience and the necessity of these for reasoning about the world. The inadequacies of each camp are not a matter of substantive falsehood— they are both right—but of attention and analytical development. Each fails to keep certain critical points in mind and in focus and, in consequence, fails to differentiate their significance adequately. To the extent the two sides do so, they fall short of common sense. Each fails also to see the connections between the things variously emphasized—in particular, the connection between first principles and the larger dynamic and continuous world of experience. James does not give sufficient thought to the element of judgment involved in all rational determinations or the necessity of certain conclusions about the concrete world. The Scottish realists did not adequately consider the questing dimension of philosophy (or, conversely, the philosophical dimension of faith), or the element of active and creative appropriation in our grasp of reality , or the concrete realities underlying true propositions—not the existential conditions of knowing, which they recognized, but the empirical ground of the propositions themselves. Conclusion 211 With a few adjustments, however...