Source of book: I own this.
While I probably do not agree with any other person on this planet or in history about absolutely anything - let alone agree with any one philosopher - I must say that it is William James who comes closest to my own views.
I have written previously about A Pluralistic Universe, and also about Paul Fisher’s excellent biography of the various members of the incredibly talented James family, House of Wits. Both of those posts give some background on William James and his contributions both to philosophy and psychology.
Perhaps a big reason that I find James’ ideas so refreshing is that they are a direct antidote to the Fundamentalist horseshit that I grew up with. Rather than ideas being used as weapons against other humans, to either bludgeon them into submission or destroy them, James sees ideas as simply our ways of understanding reality. Truth is not some decree imposed on the universe, but is the reality of the universe itself, to be discovered by curious minds.
For this reason, ideas are judged by whether they “work.” That is, do they accurately reflect our experiences in a way that helps us live in the world we are in, or not.
This pragmatic approach to philosophy is neither the strict “ideas-based” rationalism nor the full empiricism that sees the pluralism of the universe as unconnected to ideas.
I am unqualified to explain all of James’ ideas in this post, but I do want to hit some highlights from the text.
Like A Pluralistic Universe, Pragmatism is a series of eight lectures given by James. They build on one another, but are also self-contained arguments regarding one facet of his philosophy.
This lecture-style format was quite popular in 19th Century America - you can find the same thing in Emerson’s writing, for example - and for the intelligentsia, attending these lectures was entertainment on the level of a good play or concert.
It does sometimes feel a bit foreign to our modern way of reading non-fiction. Likewise, because the book is part of a broader discussion involving philosophers around the world, it occasionally feels dated in its focus. One is occasionally tempted to say “what about [insert 20th Century philosopher here]?” before remembering that this book predated those arguments. And also, not all of the 19th Century ideas turned out to have staying power - some of the names mentioned in the book are at best footnotes now.
This is why, as always, I recommend getting a copy of Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy by Samuel Enoch Stumpf - it gives a chronological look at philosophy as a conversation. I still reference it whenever I read.
I’ll just jump in with some quotes, and at least give some choice morsels of James’ thinking. First is this one on temperament, which makes a lot of sense to me.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusion. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-headed view of the universe, just as this fact or principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world’s character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and ‘not in it,’ in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability.
To further explain this, James then creates a chart of what he sees as the opposite temperaments, and their respective traits as philosophers.
Under “Tender-minded,” he lists Rationalistic, Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, and Dogmatical.
Under “Tough-minded,” he lists Empiricist, Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, and Skeptical.
Each corresponds to each other, so, to pick one, the one relies on intellectual exercise while the other relies on the senses.
I read the list and realized that I by temperament tended to pull traits from both sides - and this is exactly what James does. He sees these two temperaments as representing the extremes, which is where philosophers tended to end up, following their temperaments to the furthest poles of ideas in reaction to the other. For pragmatists like James and myself, we tend to use both sides, seeing the opposing ideas as methods of finding what works in a given case.
The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? - fated or free? - material or spiritual? - here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatsoever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.
And later:
It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t also make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.
This is one reason I really dislike most theological disputes. Many of them have no practical value whatsoever. And most of the ones that do have practical value end up being people making theological arguments for why it is good to hurt other people in the name of profit or self-righteousness.
It is ultimately my pragmatism that led me away from Evangelical doctrine - it isn’t really “good for” anything. It just convinces people to embrace Trump’s evil. Does the doctrine of the Trinity make a damn bit of difference in how people live their lives? Absolutely not. But the unspoken believe if white supremacy and male supremacy certainly does. And that’s what we need to be talking about.
James’ pragmatism is the perfect response to this: rather than dither about abstract doctrines, we need to be doing what Christ commanded us to do: look at the fruit.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
There is no point in asking if the doctrine is true, when it is blindingly obvious that its fruit is utter shit.
James also accurately describes how humans evolve in thinking over time. We almost never make a complete and sudden switch. Rather, changes accumulate as the result of new experiences. Those who refuse to incorporate these into their thinking fail to adapt, and instead build layer upon layer of cognitive dissonance.
The process is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of believe we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up wich he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitiously and expediently.
This has been my experience - I have undergone what many call a “deconstruction,” and that isn’t a bad term. But more than anything, it has been a gradual remodeling of my thought - I continue to have a fundamentally theological way of thinking and writing about many things, and I find, ironically, that my commitment to Christ-following has if anything grown stronger at the same time that my belief in Evangelical theology has crumbled.
In a later chapter, James again returns to this process.
New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men’s opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged.
Here, James again expresses so well my relation to theology.
Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
In the chapter on metaphysical problems, James engages in an extended discussion about the existence of God. In it, he imagines that the world has ended - the heat death of the universe or whatever you believe may happen in the future. At that point, everything that has happened has happened. A theist and an atheist may disagree about the ultimate meaning and causes of it all, but the fact remains that at that point, the belief is completely irrelevant, as it cannot change one thing about the past. The past is exactly the same whether there was or was not a God.
Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible? Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in? And how, experience being what it is once for all, would God’s presence in it make it any more living or richer?
Good question - there is really no change in what has been based solely on the hypothesis - and that goes either way.
Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on either hypothesis, ‘the same, for our praise or blame,’ as Browning says. It stands therefore indefeasibly: a gift which can’t be taken back. Calling matter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that have made it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them. They are the God or the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world. The God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do - appearing in the character of atoms, so to speak - and earning such gratitude as is due to atoms, and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would indignity come to it if her were absent, and did the atoms remain the only actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.
Thus, arguments about the existence of God do not have any true meaning in and of themselves. The better question is always “what do your beliefs in God do to change your life and behavior.” Or its flip side, “what does your belief in materialism do to change your life and behavior.” It is always and forever about the fruit.
James is hardly anti-religion, by the way. In an era roiled by the discoveries of Darwin, he defended religious experience as genuine, and something to be explored as part of the legitimate human experience.
This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And like those poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism - not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter’s inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for any one who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophical debate.
Ironically, more of my atheist friends seem to deep down believe in an eternal moral order than my Evangelical former friends and acquaintances. In fact, I think most Evangelicals are characterized by a deep-down belief that there will never be consequences for their actions, that they can continue to hate and abuse their neighbors and God will never judge them for it. It is really very, very weird.
James is correct, though, that most humans do feel a deep need for that eternal moral order - and for me, that is one reason that I still find elements of Christianity to hold great meaning for me.
In a later chapter, James examines so-called “common sense,” which he argues is all too often just another word for unexamined and untested beliefs. Rather than relying on “common sense” and certainty, James argues we should see all of our understanding of truth to be what it is: provisional. Subject to modification upon receiving better information or finding better theories to explain what we experience.
Ought not the existence of the various types of thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a claim of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the pragmatistic view that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma? …May there not after all be a possible ambiguity in truth?
This, I think, is the great error of Fundamentalism, which believes that we already know everything - all the answers were given to dead white males of the past, and all there is to do is to “defend against error.” My own view - and that of James - is that we need to be open to changing our minds. And in fact, humans have always done so, despite the clearly false claims of Fundamentalists of all kinds.
I want to quote James’ line from the chapter on Pragmatism’s conception of truth. It is pretty amusing, in addition to being pretty accurate.
I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
I could write a whole post on how this works within Evangelicalism. But a mention of the ludicrous claim that conservative religious people were responsible for feminist gains rather than the truth that they fought against women’s rights and continue to do so is one example.
Also excellent in this chapter is the concise summary of Pragmatism.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being make in any one’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?”
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.
In our place and time, denialism has become the bedrock of an entire political party and religion. The existence of both are only sustained by a vast superstructure of lies and falsehoods, and maintained by the cognitive dissonance of much of the population. This will not end well.
The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty.
To name just one example from recent headlines are the children who have died of measles, a preventable disease, due to the wrong ideas about reality being accepted by their parents. (Who, by the way, have been appallingly cavalier in talking about their children’s deaths - the child in each case seems to have been viewed as expendable, rather than a beloved human.)
Later in the chapter, James again notes that ideas change only in response to new information.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other’s truth. But beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure.
This is where MAGA will eventually collapse - it is built entirely on fiat truth - truth unbacked by any experiential evidence. Nobody was running a child prostitution ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor in a building that literally does not have a basement. Thus for every single undergirding belief of MAGA, from white male superiority to tariffs being paid by foreign countries rather than consumers.
The chapter on pragmatism and humanism is also very good. As a Christian Humanist myself, I think that James explains how humanistic beliefs are in fact pragmatic. We wish to make life better for all humans, and whether something “works” toward that goal is the all-important question. We cannot accept bare dogma.
What hardens the heart of every one I approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great single-word answers to the world’s riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw from the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to men consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!
That is simply outstanding. I love that. It really does explain why I no longer engage with MAGA voters on politics, doctrinaire Evangelicals about religion, or my parents about anything. They already know they know the One True Truth About Everything™, and the rest of us are just evil rebels for disagreeing with them. But the fact is, there is no One Truth. There is only provisional truth, that we see “through a glass, darkly.”
Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and schoolmasters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the interactions of men’s experiences in detail; and in no other way do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up. Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Previous idiom; new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste; - and presto, a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh facts: - and our mind finds a new truth.
Exactly. James grew up in a family that learned broadly, and his description of the common law here is spot on. As is his description of language. And, for that matter, truth. He continues:
All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the one previous justice, grammar, or truth is simply fulgurating and not being made.
This is the Big Lie of the right wing. That “we have always been at war with EastAsia” - that we have always believed the same thing, that truth is exactly what they say it is now and forever. And that experiences, perspectives, and new ideas do not matter. Defending the dogmas and the injustices those dogmas in turn defend is all that matters to them. Again, why I have refused to further engage. Their minds are not open. And their hearts are not open. That makes me deeply sad. It will only be once reality breaks through the cognitive dissonance that change will come. And for many, insulated from the consequences of their beliefs by their wealth and privilege, it may never come.
I’ll end with a final thought:
Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no control. They are neither true nor false; they simply are. It is only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not.
I found this book very thought-provoking, and found once again that William James is able to cut through so much of the bullshit to what actually matters. As far as philosophers go, he isn’t the most difficult read, although that may be damning with faint praise. It is a bit of work to read his stuff, but he is nowhere near as dense as so many of his fellow philosophers. I own both Library of America volumes of his works, and look forward to continuing my exploration of his ideas.
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