Latest / Logic Library / 07 Part 1 - Pragmatism and Humanism - Pragmatism - William James
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- Lecture seven, Pragmatism and Humanism. What hardens the heart of every one I approach with a view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that the 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, vealing 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, their idea, the self, the over soul, draw 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 man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers, the truth. What a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind. I read in an old letter from a gifted friend who died too young. These words in everything, in science, art, morals, and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong. How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth at twenty one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later, that the question what is the truth is no real question, being irrelative to all conditions, and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural a mere useful summarizing phrase, like the Latin language or the law. 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 uneqivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflection 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 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. All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the one previous justice, grammar, or truth is simply fulgrating and not being made. But imagine a youth in the court room trying cases with this abstract notion of the law, where a censor of speech let loose among the theaters with his idea of the mother tongue, or a professor setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of the truth with a big t And what progress do they make? Truth, law and language fairly boil away from them at least the touch of novel fact. These things make themselves as we go. Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truths are but abstract names for its results, and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man made things. Mister Schiller applies the analogy to believes and proposes the same of humanism for the doctrine that, to an uncertainable extent, our truths are man made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions, Human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist. This element is so inextricable in the products that mister Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be anything else. The world, he says, is essentially ju lam danieu. It is what we make of it. It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was, or by what it is apart from us. It is what is made of it. Hence the world is plastic. Footnote personal Idealism, page sixty. He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought to start, as it were, wholly plastic, acting methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked. This is mister Schiller's butt and foremost statement of the humanist position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks. At this point, mister Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting factors in every actual experience of truthmaking of which the new made special truth must take account and with which it has perforce to agree. All our truths are beliefs about reality, and in any particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing found, not manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture. Reality is, in general what truths have to take account of. Footnote. Mister Taylor, in his Elements of Metaphysics, uses this excellent pragmatic definition, and the first part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations. 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. The second part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also obediently take account of, is the relations that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into two sub parts, one the relations that are mutable and accidental, as those of day and place, and two those that are fixed and essential because they are grounded on the inner natures of their terms, such as likeness and unlikeness. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception. Both are facts, but it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more important sub part of reality. For our theories of knowledge. Inner relations, namely, are eternal, are perceived whenever their sensible terms are compared, and of them our thought, mathematical and logical thoughts so called must eternally take account The third part of reality, additional to these perceptions, though largely based upon them is the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting factor. It often ends by giving way in speaking of these three portions of reality as at all times controlling our beliefs formation. I'm only reminding you of what we heard in our last hour. Now, however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations that they are is undoubtedly beyond our control, but which we attend to note and make empathetic in our conclusions depends on our own interests, And according as we lay the emphathis here and there quite different formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently. Waterloo with the same fixed details spells a victory for an Englishman, For a Frenchman it spells a defeat. So for an optimist philosopher, the universe spells victory for a pessimist defeat. What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it. That of it is its own, But the what depends on the witch, and the witch depends on us. Both the sensational and relational parts of reality are dumb. They say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is, who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T. H. Green and Edward Cared to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition. But pragmatis refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer, and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affair, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give. Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions. We trace the fields extent by our emphasis. We mark its foreground and its background by our order. We read it in this direction or in that. We receive, in short, the block of marble. But we carve the statue ourselves. This applies to the eternal parts of reality as well. We shuffle our perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely. We read them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or in that. Treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs about them form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in each all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is flagrantly man made. That's to say nothing of the new facts which men add to the matter of reality. By the acts of their own lives. They have already impressed their mental forms on that whole third of reality, which I have called previous truths. Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of sensation and relation to be truly taken account of. But the whole of our past dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous truths. It is therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the first two parts of reality that comes to us without the human touch, And that fraction has immediately to become humanized, in the sense of being squared, assimilated, or in some way adapted to the humanized mass already there. As a matter of fact, we can hardly take in an impression at all in the absence of a preconception of what impressions there may possibly be. When we talk of reality independent of human thinking, then it seems a thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just entering into experience and yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal presence in experience before any belief about the presence had arisen, before any human conception had been applied. It is what is absolutely dumb an evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it. What we grasp is always some substitute for it, which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already faked. This is what mister Shiller has in mind when he calls independent reality a mere unresisting yu lum dan you, which is only to be made over by us. That is mister Schiller's beliefs about the sensible core of reality. We encounter it, in mister Bradley's words, but don't possess it superficially. This sounds like canst view, but between kateogorists fulminated before nature began and ktogoris gradually forming themselves in nature's presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and empiricism. Jawn's to the genuine can gener Schiller will always be to kunt as a satyr to hyperion. Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core of reality. They may think to get at it in its independent nature by peeling off the successive man made rappings. They may make theories that tell us where it comes from and all about it, And if these theories work satisfactorily, they will be true. The transcendental idealists say that there is no core, the finally completed rapping being reality and truth in one. Scholasticism still teaches that the core is matter. Professor Bergson, higher means strong, and others believe in the core and bravely tried to define it. Misters Dewy and Schiller treat it as a limit, which is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory on the one hand, there will stand reality, on the other, an account of it which proves impossible to better or to alter. If the impossibility prove permanent. The truth of the account will be absolute. Other content of truth than this I can find nowhere. If the anti pragmatists have any other meaning, let them, for the Heaven's sake, reveal it. Let them grant us access to it, not being reality but only our belief about reality. It will contain human elements, but these will know the non human element in the only sense in which there can be knowledge of anything. Does the river make its banks or the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg? More essentially, just as impossible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience. Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position. Does it seem paradoxical? If so, I will try to make it plausible by a few illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject. In many familiar objects, everyone will recognize the human element. We conceive a given reality in this way or in that to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the number twenty seven as the cube of three, or as the product of three and nine, or as twenty six plus one, or one hundred minus seventy three, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as another. You can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground, or as white squares on a blackground, and neither conception is a false one. You can treat the adjoined nature figure of a star of David as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on it, angles as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, et cetera. All these treatments are true treatments, the sensible that upon the paper resists no one of them. You can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency. We carve out groups of stars in the heavens and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so, though if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them. We name the same constellations diversely as Charles Vane, the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable. In all these cases we humanly make in addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions agree with the reality. They fit it while they build it out. No one of them is false. Which may be treated as the more true depends altogether on the human use of it. If the twenty seven is a number of dollars which I find in a drawer which I had left twenty eight, it is twenty eight minus one. If it is the number of inches in a shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard twenty six inches wide, it is twenty six plus one. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there, Charles Wayne would be more true than Dipper. My friend Frederick Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious star group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil. What shall we call a thing? Anyhow, it seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes. For me, this whole audience is one thing which grows, now restless, now attentive. I have no use at present for its individual units, so I don't consider them so of an army of a nation. But in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you audience is an accidental way of taking you the permanently real thing. For you are your individual persons. To an anatomist, again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists. Not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists. We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then at our will we create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions. We create the predicates. Also, many of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such predicates, of course, are human additions. Caesar crossed the rubicon and was a menace to Rome's freedom. He is also an American schoolroom pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones. End of Lectures seven, Part one,