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    Pragmatism and Other Writings
    Pragmatism and Other Writings
    Pragmatism and Other Writings
    Ebook542 pages8 hours

    Pragmatism and Other Writings

    By William James and Giles Gunn

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    The writings of William James represent one of America's most original contributions to the history of ideas. Ranging from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging formulation of American pragmatism. 'Pragmatism' grew out of a set of lectures and the full text is included here along with 'The Meaning of Truth', 'Psychology', 'The Will to Believe', and 'Talks to Teachers on Psychology'.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 1, 2000
    ISBN9781101221617
    Pragmatism and Other Writings
    Author

    William James

    William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher, physician, and psychologist. The brother of novelist Henry James, William James is remembered for his contributions to the fields of pragmatism and functional psychology. 

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    • 5/5
      James elucidates his conception of meaning as possibility-of-use-value in clear, amicable language that uninitiated readers can appreciate.
    • 4/5
      Dry!! Dry dry dry.....oooohhhhhh so very dryyyyyyy......
      Don't throw this one into the ocean or it'll soak everything up & we'll all be in real trouble.

      Don't get me wrong, it's really not a bad book at all; but -good god!- this thing is dry.

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    Pragmatism and Other Writings - William James

    INTRODUCTION

    William James is a thinker whose charm as well as importance derives at least in part from his ability to appeal to different readers in different eras and for different reasons. This remarkable availability for repossession by such varied readers in so many eras would be less likely, perhaps, if James were not so protean a philosopher. Indeed, to call him a philosopher in the traditional sense is to risk doing him an injustice.

    James’s first book — which some still consider his greatest — was entitled The Principles of Psychology and was published in two volumes in 1890. This pioneering study, which was immediately received with wide acclaim and adopted as a text in many British and American universities, was then followed seven years later by a collection of essays in what appeared to be moral and religious thought entitled The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. The essays comprised in this volume, a volume James almost immediately wished he had called instead The Right to Believe, turned out in some respects to prepare him for the prestigious Gifford Lectures that he was invited to give in May and June of 1901 and 1902 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and which were published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religions Experience. However, it was not until five years later, in 1907, that James published the lectures in practical philosophy, as he termed it, that would ever after provide his thinking with its signature description.

    First delivered as a set in Boston to a large and receptive audience at the Lowell Institute in November and December 1906, and then later to a much larger and still more enthusiastic audience at Columbia University in January and February 1907, the essays gathered under the title Pragmatism, and dedicated to one of the great exponents of liberty, John Stuart Mill, were almost immediately to define James’s reputation in the public mind, even as they produced widespread consternation in more specialized philosophical circles. Preceded by several additional texts in practical, indeed popular, philosophy such as his one-volume condensation of The Principles entitled Psychology: Briefer Course, published in 1892, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, based on a lecture series he frequently gave at Harvard, published in 1899, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking was quickly followed by a succession of other volumes. These include The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism, in which he attempted to clarify some of the misinterpretations that the earlier text immediately produced (and still does), and the posthumously published and unfinished Essays in Radical Empiricism, in which he sought to flesh out the lineaments of his metaphysics. Taken together with such additional works as A Pluralistic Universe, which appeared in 1909, and Some Problems in Philosophy, published in 1911, the year after James died, these many volumes, along with more than a hundred essays he wrote on similar or related subjects, as well as a plethora of articles on issues of more topical concern, describe a thinker who was a master not only of philosophy, as it classically defined itself in his age around questions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the theory of truth, but also of critical thinking generally, as it was seeking to reconstitute itself as a form of public discourse capable of reflecting on such philosophically nontraditional subjects as psychology, religion, educational theory, social thought, politics, cultural experience, and contemporary morals and manners.

    Yet what sets all of James’s writing apart, rendering it simultaneously so attractive and so accessible, are his immense and varied gifts not only as a thinker but also as a writer. James was brilliantly adept at producing an American middle style that makes up in suppleness, wit, grace, and fluidity for what it sometimes lacks, at least for certain kinds of readers, in coherence, rigor, and internal consistency. James writes always out of the decencies and commonplaces and reasonableness of ordinary experience, which he welcomes into his thinking not only as an old and trusted if also frequently amusing friend but also as an ever-renewing and renewable source for reflection. Thought should never rise so far above the plane of common life, James seems to say, that it forgets where it came from and to what it must finally be accountable.

    There is, moreover, a cordiality as well as a warmth to his prose because of the way it functions to draw readers in rather than hold them off. James clearly wanted to communicate and convince, but he also hoped to bring his readers into the processes and play of his own reflections. The mind is not a passive receptor of information that it then simply translates into another medium, James believed; it is a creative, inventive, imaginative instrument that responds to previous descriptions of reality not as existing simply for themselves but as stimulants to further thought. "We add, James wrote in one of his most famous formulations, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly (Pragmatism and Humanism," p. 112).

    This is what James wanted his readers to experience in his own prose: not just the creativity of his own reflections but the stimulation of their own minds in response and the accompanying sense that such stimulations actually enhance the universe’s total value (Pragmatism and Humanism, p. 112). In this he was assisted by a feeling for vernacular language and the rhythms of everyday speech that was as game-flavored, to quote another of his famous figures of speech, as a hawk’s wing (Preface to The Will to Believe, p. 194). James’s colleague at Harvard and sometime fellow pragmatist, the philosopher George Santayana, got it just about right when he described James the writer as an impulsive poet: a master in the art of recording or divining the lyric quality of experience as it actually came to him or to me.

    Beyond that, however, there was the sheer vitality, brilliance, edginess, unconventionality, and disarming candor of the man. To his students, James was ready for almost anything and hated any system that closed off further possibilities for thought. We must never set up boundaries that exclude romantic surprises, Santayana again remarked. "He retained the primitive feeling that death might open new worlds to us …; also the primitive feeling that invisible spirits might be floating about among us, and might suddenly do something to hurt or to help us." How was one to resist such a man who so perfectly fit the description he provided in A Pluralistic Universe of the German philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner?

    The power of the man is due altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he gives of a man who doesn’t live at secondhand, but who sees, who in fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.³

    Little wonder, then, that just as James’s own contemporaries turned again and again to him for illumination of their own quandaries, so subsequent generations of readers have inevitably brought to him their own very different questions and concerns. James’s earliest readers sought him out either as one of the first — and still one of the greatest — psychologists of the inner life, or as a moral thinker who could adumbrate the experiential grounds of reasonable belief, or as an anatomist of religious experience. Later admirers during the middle part of the twentieth century valued him instead for developing a simpler calculus for weighing the merits of ideas, or as the proponent of a worldview that was radical in the seriousness with which it took the relational character of existence, or as an advocate of the social theory known as democratic pluralism. Now, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, we find still other things to value in James, whether it be his conviction that most of our certainties (even about matters of fact) are susceptible to correction in the light of future experience, or his emphasis on contingency, chance, and novelty, or his sensitivity to what he calls, in the title of one of his most famous essays, a certain blindness in human beings. But this only confirms what James would have anticipated himself. If philosophy is, as James’s fellow pragmadst John Dewey later contended, merely the history of its own time in thought, then it should surprise no one to discover that different historical eras put very different queries to themselves, or at least find themselves confronted by very different challenges and conundrums.

    James was living at a moment when the spirit of the modern was beginning to break free of the ethos of the Victorian. The latter era had been marked by a strong belief in the permanence and validity of certain moral values associated with words like truth, duty, selflessness, and decency. It also assumed that such values are inscribed nowhere more deeply than in the texts and practices associated with high culture, and that as long as such values are permitted to influence the course of the present, then human history will continue to display a record of steady progress.⁴. The new era described as modern, on the other hand, and particularly modernism of the sort that James helped stimulate in America, assumed that values are, like life itself, more unstable, provisional, and circumstantial, that the monuments of high culture have lost touch with their roots in the soil of vernacular experience, and that history refuses to present us with a spectacle of uninterrupted advancement and enlightenment. T. S. Eliot captured this benighted side of James’s modernism perfectly when he remarked that it is in the struggle for cultural and spiritual values that we fight to keep something alive, rather than in the belief that anything is certain to prevail. Or, as James put it for himself at the end of his essay Is Life Worth Living? what matters is not having won but having tried

    But there was a good deal more than this — and a good deal that was more radical — to James’s American modernism, much of which is proleptically present in the great early essay James wrote on the nature of human consciousness entitled The Stream of Thought. I refer not simply to his view that life confronts us with a series of obstacles to be overcome, of problems to be addressed, but to his belief that consciousness comes before sensation, that thinking can be likened to the behavior of a stream, that thought can therefore be differentiated into moments that are substantive and moments that are transitive, that the relations between such moments are as much a part of experience as the moments they connect, that we can have feelings about those moments as well as about the things conjoined by them, that thought is therefore a kind of algebra that does not need to translate all its operations into images in order to perform its work, and that, as a result, consciousness should be reconceived as a process and not a substance. I also mean that The Stream of Thought gives early expression to James’s belief that modern philosophy needs to redirect its efforts toward the reinstatement of the elements of the vague and the indeterminate in our mental life; that it foreshadows his later opinion that philosophical history is to a large extent a conflict of different dispositions rather than merely of different opinions; and, finally, that it reveals his lifelong penchant for meliorism, for exploring the middle ground between extremes. In all these ways — and one could name others — James was already in possession of some of the most radical elements of his own modernism, to say nothing of many of his most recurrent themes, by the time he had published his first major book, which was not a work of philosophy but a work of psychology!

    James has now of course been rediscovered in a historical and cultural moment that is somewhat different from the one he first helped to energize. This is the moment we have come to call post-modern, if only because it seems to exist both in continuity with and in disjunction from the cultural moment just preceding it. By cultural moment I simply mean a time whose general intellectual framework and emotional tone possess a distinctive and discriminable feel for those who live in it. While such structures may be difficult to define, precisely because they are composed of nothing more palpable than patterns of impulse, restraint, aspiration, foreboding, confidence, or distress, they nonetheless lend an unmistakable ethos and coloration, whether consciously or subconsciously, to one’s experience of the social world. Viewed in these terms, the contrast between James’s so-called modernist moment and our so-called postmodernist one might be reconceived as the difference between an era in which belief in life’s fundamental unity and coherence has been seriously eroded, or at least fundamentally questioned, without loss of a nostalgic desire for its recovery, and an era that, in one of its bleaker versions, acknowledges that life seems to lack any sense of underlying unity or purpose at all beyond, perhaps, the pursuit of pleasure and the creation of a therapeutic culture to sustain it, but that, in one of its more robust expressions, insists that bricolage, parody, irony, playfulness, anarchy, and jouissance may provide new avenues to the sublime.

    The American poet Wallace Stevens can help us sharpen one side of this distinction, just as the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard can assist us in honing the other. Stevens associates modernism with an age of disbelief in which people who have experienced the disappearance of many if not all of the gods are forced to look elsewhere for the consolations once provided by religious faith. Such consolations, which included above all the mediation of a reality not their own, a something ‘wholly other,’ as Stevens refers to it in Opus Posthumous, by which the inexpressive loneliness of thinking [and feeling] is broken and enriched,⁵ must now be sought in secular forms such as literature, painting, dance, and philosophy itself. Here spiritual survival depends on what, in Of Modern Poetry, Stevens describes as the finding of a satisfaction, and may/Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman/Combing.⁶

    Lyotard, on the other hand, finds such spiritual substitutes ineffective at best, self-deceiving at worst. The great metanarratives of the past, which once taught us, if not exactly what the world is really like, then at least in what direction to think about the world and how to care for it, have collapsed, or at any rate have been outgrown, and there is little to console the self but the endless recirculation, often narcissistic, of outmoded images of such things. This means that all storytelling, all narrativizing, is plural, provisional, sentimental, and genealogical: an attempt out of the various, fragmentary plots at hand to rewrite the story of the past in light of the outcome we would like it to have. In such a cultural climate, James’s pragmatism presents itself less as a simple philosophical and moral alternative to postmodernism than as an intellectual correction and deepening of some of postmodernism’s own preoccupations with the fluidity, open-endedness, belatedness, randomness, and undecidability of experience itself.

    Such terms, which have come to be regarded almost as hallmarks of the postmodern, should serve to remind us that pragmatism has never been an exclusively American phenomenon or movement. Long before James had settled on the vocation of philosopher, much less developed any sense of the pragmatist project, he had undergone, while reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier’s writings on the will, a kind of conversion that would stay with him through much of his life, and once James’s range of intellectual interests acquired sharper philosophical focus, he was to find himself in extended conversation with two other pragmatist philosophers from abroad, F.C.S. Schiller in England and Giovanni Papini in Italy. But almost as soon as James’s ideas began to circulate beyond the shores of the Atlantic, following the publication of The Principles of Psychology and particularly The Will to Believe, people were detecting European precedents for his thinking in the work of everyone from Fichte, Nietzsche, and Schelling in Germany to Bergson in France (who denied a connection), and were moreover claiming that it communicates in interesting and important ways with the writings of Simmel, Husseri, Vaihinger, and even members of the Vienna Circle such as Mach and Wittgenstein.

    At the time of his death in 1917, for example, the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim was preparing to deliver a major series of lectures on pragmatism, while soon thereafter pragmatism began to attract a good deal of attention, most of it negative, in Germany. But if German philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer (Georg Simmel, father of German sociology, being a notable exception) assumed before mid-century that pragmatism represented technological reason at its worst, Jürgen Habermas, Germany’s greatest philosopher after midcentury, found in pragmatism the key to his reconstruction of reason as a mode of communicative action. However, Habermas is only one of a number of European and world philosophers who have more recently discovered themselves in dialogue with ideas that were first developed by James. Others would include, in France, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva; in Germany, Hans-Otto Appel and Hans Joas; in Greece, Cornelius Castiodoris; in Brazil, Roberto Unger; and in Belgium, now Paris, Luce Irigaray.

    James first employed the term pragmatism in a lecture entitled Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, delivered before the Philosophical Union at the University of California at Berkeley in August 1898. He was borrowing the term from his friend and sometime colleague Charles Sanders Peirce, who had first developed it in an essay that appeared in Popular Science Monthly in 1878 entitled How to Make Our Ideas Clear. Peirce had in turn reported discovering the term in Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals, where, interestingly enough, it is contrasted with the term practical — Kant associates the practical with a priori moral laws, the pragmatic with rules of art and technique derived from experience — but for both Peirce and James pragmatism was essentially a new name for some older ways of thinking that could be found in everyone from Socrates and Aristotle to Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Mill. John Dewey associated pragmatism’s roots in the past with Francis Bacon and his new theory of knowledge.

    But H. S. Thayer has warned that the genealogical impulse can also be carried too far. When the pragmatic becomes merely another name for the practicable, its orgins can be pushed back to the beginnings of primitive magic and early religion, from which it can then be said to have moved into ancient Greek literature, eventually became associated with certain Hellenistic schools of salvation, was subsequently discovered by early Christianity, later was picked up and re-expressed during the Middle Ages by the Franciscans, eventually found its way into definitions of the new knowledge propounded by modern science, and was ultimately picked up by American colonists who threaded it through Puritanism, the American Enlightenment, the opening of the West, and a host of other American moments since. If the contexts differ, the effect is the same. Linking knowledge with results, throught with power, ideas with action may produce little that is new but also yields little that is distinctive: The dictum holds for any interpretation of practical uses, sacred or profane, whether it be taken as recommending the subservience of all things to a moral aim or to material gain.⁷

    Peirce’s interests centered more narrowly than Dewey’s, or, for that matter, James’s, on the problem of meaning: the pragmatic method, which he was at one point tempted to call practicalism, and at another pragmaticism, the latter being an ugly enough term to keep it from being stolen by James and his followers, addressed this problem by proposing that all distinctions of thought can ultimately be reduced to differences in practice. Assuming further that our conceptions of things are no more than our idea of their sensible effects, Peirce devised the following pragmatic rule: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is our whole conception of the object.⁹ ⁹What Peirce wanted was a procedure for determining the rational meaning of a word or concept, which for him lay exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of experience. Hence the rational meaning of every proposition, said Peirce, lies in the future, its meaning being that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those special circumstances, nor when one entertains this or that special design, but in that form which is most directly applicable to self-control under every situation, and to every purpose.

    This was Peirce speaking like a scientist intent on establishing a rule for intellectual clarity that was sufficiently rigorous to stand up to laboratory conditions of exactitude, consistency, and logical coherence. Ideally, Peirce felt that scientific investigation should operate like a force of destiny, carrying the most radically antagonistic minds toward the same inevitable conclusion. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. Truth is no more than the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, Peirce maintained, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.¹⁰ That, and that alone, is what we should mean by reality.

    By contrast, James was convinced from very early on that reality definitely exceeds the conclusions on which reasonable people can logically agree. Reality constantly overflows our intellectual formulas and findings and may be, as James observed only much later in A Pluralistic Universe, if not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution.¹¹ James therefore wanted a less scientifically scrupulous or psychologically sanitized method for clarifying the meaning of principles, ideas, and language. Even scientists possessed needs, desires, biases, and preferences, after all, and however laudable and necessary it was to submit them to scrutiny and possible modification and improvement through scientific investigation, one could not do away with them entirely. One’s subject position, as we would now call it, is not irrelevant to one’s investigative presuppositions and techniques. More to the point, most of James’s potential readers were not scientists, and the issues and concerns with which they were confronted did not, for the most part, lend themselves to scientific analysis. What they wanted were answers to larger, more unwieldy and amorphous questions, such as why to go on living, what constitutes the moral life, how to reconcile the many with the one, why truth matters, and what makes one view of the world better or truer than another. Consequently, philosophy needed to stop concentrating all of its attention on its own problems and begin asking itself, as James put it in Pragmatism, 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 (What Pragmatism Means, p. 27).

    Thus when James decided, in his Berkeley lecture to the Philosophical Union, to borrow the pragmatic method from Peirce (he had actually heard Peirce invoke it in the early 1870s and had himself employed less developed versions of it in his earlier writing), he sought to give it much more general application. While remaining in complete agreement with Peirce that beliefs are guides for action and that truth must be measured by the consequences to which it leads, James nonetheless felt that the pragmatic principle should be opened up. If the ultimate test of any truth is the conduct it produces, James reasoned in Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, then one must grant that it produces or inspires this conduct only because it initially foretells some particular turn to cur experience which shall call for just that conduct from us. James was thus prepared to revise Peirce’s principle to say that the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active.¹²

    The upshot of this expansion of Peirce’s original definition is, first, that it permitted James to apply the method to a vastly larger terrain of experience than Peirce had considered. He was not interested in a method that works only under the controlled conditions afforded by laboratory apparatus or the classroom. He wanted a method that could be employed across the board, in all concrete cases. Second, it enabled James to turn pragmatic reasoning into an exercise that was less severely rational or deductive and more loosely interpretive and conjectural, one involving a good deal of mental guesswork as well as more stringent intellectual calibrations. To attain intellectual clarity, then, as James paraphrased Peirce both in his University of California address and, as here, in his chapter from Pragmatism entitled What Pragmatism Means, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve — what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive sign ficance at all (What Pragmatism Means, p. 25). In Some Problems of Philosophy, James simplified the method still further:

    The pragmatic rule is that the meaning of a concept may always be found, if not in some sensible particular which it directly designates, then in some particular difference in the course of human experience which its being true will make. Test every concept by the question What sensible difference to anybody will its truth make? and you are in the best possible position for understanding what it means and for discussing its importance.¹³

    James’s definition of the pragmatic method, however phrased, clearly opened up Peirce’s formulation to more comprehensive use while at the same time rendering it, much to Peirce’s displeasure, a good deal less precise. The new imprecision of James’s description of the method derived partly from some of the phrases it left open for further elucidation — conceivable effects, practical kind, may involve, sensations … to expect, reactions … may prepare, or, in the phrasing from Some Problems of Philosophy, sensible difference and course of human experience — but it also stemmed from the way James put imagination back into the operations of rationality. To determine some particular difference in the course of human experience which [a concept’s] being true will make, as in the latter definition, or, to calculate, as in the former,what sensations we are to expect from [the object], and what reactions we must prepare, was to put much greater reliance on the inferential and the projective capacities of the mind than Peirce had done. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, James proclaimed,limbers them up and sets each one at work (What Pragmatism Means, p. 28), and the work our theories do is suppositional, hypothetical, and presumptive as well as analytic. Assessing notions in terms of their practical consequences often entailed reflection on matters that had not taken place yet, that could only be surmised rather than substantiated, imagined rather than corroborated. Where theories and beliefs had been for Peirce merely precepts, templates for action, for James they became instruments for imaginative speculation as well as catalysts for change.

    Pragmatism could thus be said to coincide with, and reinforce, many philosophical orientations. It agrees with nominalism, for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions (What Pragmatism Means, p. 28). It could also be seen as continuous with the practice of everyone from Socrates to Hume. But all of these forerunners had practiced it piecemeal. James was recommending that pragmatism be applied more universally and in a form that was intellectually more supple, accessible, and predictive. Even if it seemed to lack any presuppositions of its own and stood for no particular results, the pragmatic method could nonetheless serve as the solvent of all other philosophical theories, as the medium in which they conducted their investigations. Giovanni Papini, the Italian pragmatist, had caught exactly this dimension of the pragmatic method when, in a particularly apt metaphor, he likened its operations among all theories to the way a corridor functions in a hotel. While innumerable philosophical chambers open off of and onto this corridor, each housing a particular way of thinking, and all of them having rights to it, the corridor itself is philosophically neutral. It merely serves as the conduit that all schools of thought must use if they are to exit their rooms, much less circulate among one another.

    If this was to say that the pragmatic method lacks an intellectual agenda, it did not mean that it is bereft of any philosophical presuppositions or, more to the point, that its adoption was without consequences. James, in fact, was convinced that its broad-scale employment would spell the end of many of the practices to which philosophers had become habituated over the centuries. More specifically, it meant looking away from first things, principles, categories/ supposed necessities, and towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts (italics James’s) (What Pragmatism Means, p. 29). More generally, it meant the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, ardficiality, and the pretence of finality in truth (What Pragmatism Means, p. 27). If pragmatism was a method only, then it was a method with, as we now say, an attitude. James considered the implementation of the pragmatic method nothing short of revolutionary and even imagined for a time that he might be launching a new Protestant reformation.

    It should come as little surprise that, with ambitions such as these, James shared with the British writer G. K. Chesterton the belief that the most important and practical thing one can know about individuals is their philosophy or worldview. By philosophy or worldview he did not refer to anything derived chiefly from books but rather to one’s more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means (The Present Dilemma in Philosophy, p. 7). Something acquired from the whole course of one’s experience, one’s philosophy is in this sense simply our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos (The Present Dilemma in Philosophy p. 7). James was prepared to concede that most of us have no very clear idea of such matters; indeed, he was persuaded that on large issues the great majority of us rarely know our own minds at all. But he was also of the opinion that no individuals, professional philosophers included, are indifferent to their "Binnenleben, as he called it in Is Life Worth Living? that mute region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears (Is Life Worth Living? p. 240). The history of philosophy, he therefore boldly proclaimed, is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments (The Present Dilemma in Philosophy," p. 8).

    That philosophical divisions can to a large degree be reduced to no more than a difference in temperament is a claim that philosophers were no more prepared to hear then than they are now. Violating all their preconceptions of and pretensions about their work as reasonable, objective, and disinterested, it provoked, not surprisingly, a torrent of criticism. But if philosophers remained for the most part adamant in defending themselves against such a charge, James was no less adamant in pressing it. Temperament might well be the last thing that philosophers wanted to admit into their practices, much less admit about them, but it was the first thing they trusted, James was certain, when it came to reaching their conclusions. Temperament loads the evidence … just as this fact or that principle would. (The Present Dilemma in Philosophy, p. 9). The philosopher wants a universe that matches his or her temperament and rejects those that don’t. [The philosopher] feels men of opposite temper, James argues, 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 (The Present Dilemma in Philosophy, p. 9). In A Pluralistic Universe, James goes even further:

    If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one’s total character and experience, and on the whole preferred — there is no other truthful word — as one’s best working attitude.¹⁴

    The conflict of temperament that marked his own period, James believed, set rationalists, as he called them, against empiricists. Rationalists were committed to abstract or timeless principles and tended to be intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, monistic, and dogmatic. Empiricists, on the other hand, were committed to facts and thus tended to be materialistic, sensationalistic, positivist, pessimistic, fatalistic, pluralistic, and skeptical. While neither type was pure — traces of these differences can be found in some mixture in most of us — the clash between them could be discerned throughout literature, government, art, religion, social thought, and contemporary manners, as well as philosophy, and seemed to be reducible to a basic distinction between two types of personality. On the one side are the tender-minded, who cling to the belief that facts should be related to values and values should be seen as predominant; on the other are the tough-minded, who want facts to be dissociated from values and left to themselves. Just as the tough-minded find such things as idealism and intellectualism laid too heavily over the path of life, so the tender-minded complain that the path of life is choked with the weeds of positivism, relativism, utilitarianism, and naturalistic determinism. The tender-minded find the tough-minded callous and unfeeling, the tough-minded charge the tender-minded with sentimentality and fuzzy thinking. This clash has produced what James describes as the dilemma in philosophy, a dilemma that has left thoughtful people who seek a philosophy for the whole person suspended between two seemingly irreconcilable and equally unattractive alternatives: either an empirical philosophy that leaves too little room for values and principles, or a rationalistic or intellectualistic philosophy that has lost touch with the concrete facts of human experience.

    James offered pragmatism as a solution to this dilemma. Pragmatism could reconcile the ideal with the material, the rational with the concrete, because in addition to being a theory of meaning, pragmatism was also a theory of truth. As a theory of truth, James argued, pragmatism holds that ideas are not only abstractions from experience and generalizations about it but also aspects or components of it. Ideas, that is, do not simply comment on experience but actually constitute important elements of it. For example, ideas are the forms that life takes for us when we are living under the sway of ideologies or experience a feeling of solidarity with others who belong to those imagined communities called nationalities, religions, ethnicities, and so forth. More than that, ideas are what, for us, experience consists of when, even temporarily, our sensibilities undergo the reshapings of art and serious thought. Were this better understood, James assumed (and Dewey never tired of remarking), the importance of education, and the directions it should take, would be much more apparent to most people than they currently are.

    But if ideas are in fact aspects of experience and not simply interpretations of it, then ideas become true, James reasoned, or at any rate become true instrumentally, just insofar as they help place us in more constructive, more effectual, more valuable relations with other parts of our experience — just to the extent that they exhibit what James termed, borrowing an unfortunate metaphor from business, cash-value. James’s use of such commercial metaphors was not intended to imply, as he has been crudely misinterpreted to mean, that the truth of ideas or concepts is determined solely by, or reducible to, what they are good for in the intellectual or cultural or any other marketplace. He was merely restating and reaffirming what he thought Dewey and other members of the Chicago School had established, and what other disciplines as various as geology, biology, and philology now routinely accepted: that truth is not an inherent property of ideas as such but rather a property of their working connection with other things that already belong to the assemblage of the true.

    James was here drawing from a familiar theory of how individuals typically acquire new opinions and establish their veracity. Truth normally lives on what James elsewhere refers to as 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 (Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth, p. 91). When some new experience emerges that unsettles the stock of already accepted opinions and thereby creates discomfort, the mind seeks to escape from this discomfort by attempting initially to modify the mass of already accepted opinion as much as possible. If this doesn’t relieve the sense of inward unease, then one must await the discovery of some new idea that can be grafted onto the stock of older opinions with a minimum of difficulty, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently (What Pragmatism Means, p. 31). New truth functions as a kind of go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity (What Pragmatism Means, p. 31).

    One of James’s chief interests in this subject is the part played by older truths in the acquisition of new truths. Even as knowledge grows, it only grows in spots and leaves most of what is already known completely intact. The greatest enemy of a new truth is thus likely to be the rest of our other truths. And even when a new truth can get itself grafted onto the stock of the old, it almost always comes cooked rather than raw: New truths … are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another (Pragmatism and Common Sense, pp. 75–76). In this connection, James’s most startling assertion is that the body of truth that strikes most of us as no more than ordinary common sense may actually represent the distilled wisdom of some ancient genius whose discoveries have survived the long night of history to form a kind of stage of equilibrium in the human mind’s development (Pragmatism and Common Sense, p. 76), a level that later stages of knowledge supplement without ever completely replacing. Thus, even if common sense does not represent the most complex or advanced stage of human understanding — James reserves this for science and critical philosophy — it shows us how knowledge increases and why truth is always relational. Truth is relational because it is never encountered alone or in isolation; it always emerges in association with its antecedents and allies, its previous models and affiliated figurations.

    James deduced from this that truth is not so much found as made, and made in part out of former truths constantly remade because they prove useful both as material for such remaking and as beliefs that do something for us.

    We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation (Pragmatism and Humanism, p. 112).

    Truth therefore ceases to be a category distinct unto itself and becomes for James a species of the good. "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons (italics James’s) (What Pragmatism Means, p. 38). In purely functional terms, truth is, whatever else it is, what we say about it; the reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ‘to be true’ means only to perform this marriage-function (What Pragmatism Means," p. 33). We accept things as true, then, not because of what, in and of themselves, they say about the real but rather because of what saying this about the real does to and for our relations with it.

    Such views were, of course, bound to arouse a windstorm of criticism, since they put James on a collision course with all those philosophers and laypeople who maintained instead that truth represents a correspondence with reality. In this more conventional notion of truth — which, as it happens, is the same notion that common sense holds, even if common sense portrays truth as something else — truth is a reflection of what is already there in existence prior to our perception of it. And what is already there in experience prior to our perception of it is simply the realm of the real that our ideas are supposed to copy. Empiricists in James’s time, no less than in our own, supposed that the realm of the real is composed essentially of material facts. The rationalists and idealists who opposed them in James’s time insisted instead that the real also includes our perception of purely mental notions like goodness and beauty and the relations between them. In James’s estimation, however, both overlooked the fact that the real is also composed, as James had shown in his discussions of common sense, of the whole funded tradition of experience already accepted as true.

    If this latter claim, even if not original with him, was one of the distinctive contributions of James’s theory of truth, it immediately created problems for any who wanted to champion the view that truth is simply a matter of correspondence. The problem was how to square the idea of truth as correspondence or agreement with this threefold conception of the real as relating to facts, to ideas, and to history. James’s answer was simple. Inasmuch as the idea of copying never worked in the first place for many of the things we already take for reality — James’s examples include such things as power, spontaneity, and time past — he concluded that truth as agreement between an idea of something and the thing itself could only in the widest sense mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed (italics James’s) (Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth, p. 93).

    James’s phrasing here is very important. Without disputing the fact that some ideas do indeed copy the reality they name, and thus coincide with reality more or less perfectly, he wishes to indicate that agreement in this literal sense is far from essential to what is most salient in our working notion of truth. For many purposes of truth — and particularly those we can never corroborate, so to speak, face-to-face — it is sufficient for ideas to lead us in the direction of reality and to aid us in our dealings with it. James speaks of this process of worthwhile leading as one by which an idea’s truth is verified. Truth is not, in other words, an ingredient in ideas from the outset but is acquired by them. Truth is what happens to an idea when it is put into the relations that confirm it. More than a description of the agreement that obtains between an idea and its referent, then, truth is an action, an event, a process, by which an idea’s agreement or correspondence, in only this widest sense James is talking about, is verified, validated. An idea’s verity, however, is not to be confused with the process of its, as James called it, "veri-fication (Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth," p. 88). Truths are verified only retrospectively, and are always subject to further revision by later experience.

    James was willing to admit that others might find this way of talking about agreement confusing, if not disturbing, but it was

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