Philosophical Review

An Essay on Method by C. Hillis KaiserReview by: John RobinsonThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan., 1954), pp. 130-133Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2182132 .

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

principle is suspected as a prejudice or a weakness. In a symposium where such attitudes have no spokesmen, can anyone be sure that he has reckoned with all of the essential obstacles to a life lived on prin- ciple, especially to a life lived on a particular set of principles?

Another limitation of the symposium is the fact that "moral prin- ciples" of action are defined, but "action" is left vague and unspecified. Scattered through the book are some interesting action problems. Alexander Sachs, for instance, deals with the tragic situation of Benes and Jan Masaryk. But not one of the other contributors discusses the same problem. If the thirty-four writers had been asked to bring their wealth of experience and insight to bear on even one such case, more members of the symposium might have laid stress on the role of prin- ciples in a search for moral action instead of looking for principles to justify what has already been decided. Discussion for morale is some- what different from discussion for morality. The limits of communica- tion vary according to the purpose served. If the two purposes were more clearly distinguished in this symposium, the reader would have a better chance to assimilate the incomparable insights of the priests and the prophets, the scientists and the politicians.

WAYNE A. R. LEYS

Roosevelt College

AN ESSAY ON METHOD. By C. HILLIS KAISER. New Brunswick,

Rutgers University Press, I952. PP. vi, i63. $3.25.

This is the sort of book that appears too rarely in philosophy. It deals with fundamentals in a language that is clear and vigorous, it is marked by an exceptional and refreshing independence of mind, and it is brief. Like Descartes' Discourse, which in these respects it resembles, it is concerned with the failure of an educational system, a failure re- flected in the divisions in contemporary culture.

It is common knowledge [Professor Kaiser writes] that poetry is no longer written for the educated world; it is written for other poets. Serious science, of course, is written for no one but the specialist, or if it is a popular book, it is written with such condescension that the author would appear to be ad- dressing an audience of children. Philosophers, with one or two exceptions, are a completely ineffective force in American culture, principally because their jargon is intelligible only to other philosophers. ... The members of these vertical strata not merely have no knowledge of the ideas or methods common to another stratum; they cannot understand how anyone can be a member of another stratum.

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Yet it is precisely the business of the educator to provide the means by which the individual may realize in himself that ideal of harmonious and complete development which the Greeks called paideia. "The mere scientist, the mere philosopher, the mere artist is . . . not completely human, nor is he human who exercises two or three of these capacities and spurns or neglects the others. Virtue is a harmony of cultural ex- perience and activity, and disproportion or defect can produce merely discord and ugliness." The divisions in contemporary culture are the result of the educator's failure to implement this ideal. But if he is to implement it, the educator must have a clear notion of those funda- mental disciplines whose value for a complete education he must assess. He needs a map of these disciplines which will clearly define their relations to one another, and it is Professor Kaiser's aim in this little book to provide the outline of such a map.

To give an account of a discipline is to say how that discipline is carried on and to describe the methods characteristic of it; the science which aims at giving such an account is methodology. The method of methodology, in turn, must be the method of definition; but the defini- tions which it seeks cannot be wholly arbitrary. "They must be 'real' definitions in the sense that they conform, as best they can, to the actual facts of common usage"; yet at the same time they must be precise enough to enable us to deal with those boundary disputes in which the appeal to common usage is insufficient. It might be supposed that the discipline which we have been describing is philosophy itself, but this Professor Kaiser denies. For philosophy is itself one of the fundamental disciplines, and to use the method of philosophy in de- termining what that method is would be absurd. "Either we know at the beginning of such an inquiry what the methods of philosophy are or we do not. If we do not know, then it is highly improbable, if not impossible, that we shall use them in the inquiry. If we do know, then we are committed to finding out what we already know, and an im- partial observer might ask us how we know initially what philosophy is." But is the dilemma really as formidable as it appears? Surely we often do use a method successfully without being able to give an ac- count of it (indeed, with respect to "philosophical analysis" we seem to be in precisely this position), and on the other hand we often do seem to be engaged in philosophy in discovering what in some sense we already know. In fact the dilemma does not arise at all if we reject the assumption that philosophy is a discipline co-ordinate with art, science, and religion.

The method of definition which Professor Kaiser employs is remi-

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

niscent of Plato's method of division. The names of the fundamental

disciplines are names for activities, and for activities that are distinc-

tively human. But whereas religion and philosophy are serious activi-

ties, that is, activities undertaken for the sake of an end other than

the pleasure that accompanies doing them, art and science (once they

are properly distinguished from craft and technology) are clearly not

serious in this sense but a kind of play. We can further divide both

serious and playful activities into those which eventuate ideally in an

act of judgment expressed in a statement and those which do not.

Philosophy and science are activities of the first sort, for they aim at

producing rational conviction; but what religion produces in us is "a

certain disposition of will," and the reward of the artist lies in "the im-

mediate sensuous (or imaginative) apprehension" of the work of art.

It is a pity that space does not permit detailed consideration of the

chapters in which Professor Kaiser deals in turn with each of these

four disciplines. It must suffice to notice here his remarks on philosophy

in its relations to science, a subject upon which there is an inordinate

amount of contemporary confusion. We have seen that philosophy differs from science in being a serious

activity. It is, as Whitehead has observed, "an attempt to clarify those

fundamental beliefs which finally determine the emphasis of attention

that is the base of character." But it also differs from science in its

way of going about its task. The philosopher proceeds by dialectic or

argument. But he differs from the mathematician, who also uses argu-

ment, in that he is interested in knowing the truth of his premises; and

he differs from the natural scientist, who also is interested in the truth

of his premises, in his way of coming to know their truth, namely by

intuition. By intuition Professor Kaiser simply means thinking. Sup-

pose we take the philosophical assertion that being cannot arise from

nonbeing.

If anyone assents to this proposition, and I fail to see how anyone can refuse his assent once he has understood the meaning of the terms in the statement, he is asserting the truth of a proposition in which the terms, and the relation asserted to hold between them, cannot be clarified by experience. "To arise from" means in this case "to be produced or caused by," and Hume demon- strated quite conclusively that this relation could never be discovered in sen- sation or imagination.

If we can nevertheless make assertions about it of a nontautological

sort, this is only because "the objects of sensation and imagination ...

are not the only objects of consciousness. There are also objects of

thought, and the discrimination and comparison of these is the task of

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS

philosophy." The empiricist will of course object that on this showing philosophical assertions are unverifiable. If no appeal to sense experi- ence could either confirm or disconfirm them, he will argue, then the philosopher is clearly free to believe whatever he pleases. And his worst suspicions will seem to be confirmed when he is told by Professor Kaiser that philosophic truth is always intensely personal. These sus- picions are not unwarranted. To be sure, in so far as the empiricist assumes that where there is no external control over philosophical thinking there is no control over it whatever, he is simply begging the question. It is just that self-critical aspect of thought which we point to when we call it dialectic. But we need to know more about the kinds of control which are relevant to the verification of philosophical assertions. It seems clear that if philosophy is ever to emerge again as an autonomous discipline this question must be squarely met. Let us hope that Professor Kaiser may be prevailed upon to answer it in an- other book as good as this one.

JOHN ROBINSON

University of Maryland

THE FLIGHT FROM GOD. By MAX PICARD. With an Introduction by J. M. CAMERON and a Note on Max Picard by GABRIEL MARCEL.

Translated from the German by MARIANNE KUSCHNITSKY and J. M. CAMERON. Chicago, Henry Regnery Co., I95I. Pp. xxii, I85. $2.50.

HOMO VIATOR. Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. By GABRIEL

MARCEL. Translated by EMMA CRAUFURD. Chicago, Henry Regnery Co., I95I. Pp. 270. $3.50.

Existentialist philosophies manifest a variety which belies the popu- lar identification of existentialism with the atheistic position expounded by Sartre. These two existentialist books are written by deeply religious men who take the sickness of our time seriously, yet are not ultimately dismayed by it.

The Flight from God by Max Picard reminds one instantly of the I 39th Psalm. It is a moving, penetrating description of man's ceaseless and impossible attempt to flee God. Picard has the understanding of a philosopher and the heart of a poet. With power and insight he ana- lyzes the spiritual sickness of an age bent on escaping from God, a world that perishes even as it piously enjoins a return to moral and religious verities. J. M. Cameron writes in the introduction, "One of the great merits of Dr. Picard's The Flightfrom God is that he has shot,

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