Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 02 Part 2 - What Pragmatism Means - Pragmatism - William James
Transcript
- I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact and its success. As I said a moment ago, in doing this is a matter for the individual's appreciation. When old truth grows, then by new truth's addition, it is for subjective reasons we are in the process and obey the reasons that new idea is truest, which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, get itself classed as true by the way it works grafting itself, then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium. Now Julie and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic. They also were called truth for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role. Whatever is nowhere to be found. 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. The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent, truth that we find merely truth, no longer malleable to human need, truth incorrigible. In a word, such truth exists indeed superabundantly, or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers, But then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and its prescription, and may grow stiff with years of veteran service, and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are, has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider principles principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation. Mister Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of humanism. But for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these lectures. Such then would be the scope of pragmatism, first a method, and second a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two things must be our future topics. What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you, by reason of us brevity. I shall make amends for that. Hereafter, in a lecture on common sense, I shall try to show what I mean by truths growing petrified by antiquity. In another lecture, I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become true in proportion as they successfully exert their go between function. In a third, I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from objective factors in truth's development. You may not follow me wholly in these lectures. And if you do, you may not wholly agree with me, but you will, I know, regard me at least as serious and treat my effort with respectful consideration. You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that mister Schiller's and Jewish theory have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridiculle all rationalism has risen against them in influential quarters. Mister Schiller, in particular has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves as banking. I should not mention this but for the fact that it throws so much side light upon that rationalistic temper to which I have posed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. These pragmatists talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they work, et cetera, suggest to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse, lame, second rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are merely subjective. As against this objective truth must be something non utilitarian haughty, refined, remote, august exalted. It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we ought to think unconditionally. The conditioned ways in which we do think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology, down with psychology, up with logic. In all this question, see the exquisite contrast of the types of mind. The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes truth for him become a class name for all sorts of definite working values in experience. For the rationalist, it remains a pure abstraction to the bare name of which we must differ. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must differ, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth, whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it, and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness. Other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. I hope that, as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister sciences interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of correspondence. What that may mean, we must ask later between our minds and reality into that of our rich and active commerce, that any one may follow in detail and understand between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of our experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses. But enough of this at present, the justification of what I say must be postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking with the more religious demands of human beings. Men who are strongly of the fact loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad enough with its notion of God as an exalted monarch made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous attributes, but so long as it held strongly by their argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the scientific theism has lost that foothold, and some kind of an imminent or pantheistic deity working in things rather than above them, is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Asperance to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders, but as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connection whatever with concreteness, affirming the Absolute mind, which is its substitute for God to be the rational presuposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be. It remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Essep's fable, all footprints lead into his den but nulla vestigia retrusum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detailed importance for your life from your idea of His nature. He gives you, indeed, the assurance that all is well with him and for his eternal way of thinking. But thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices. Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception. Or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. Its substitutes a pallid outline for the real world's richness. It is dapper. It is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be enapt for humble service in this real world of sweat and dirt. It seems to me that when a view of things is noble, that or to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The Prince of Darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told is, but whatever the God of Earth and Heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials even more than his dignity is needed in the emperian Now, pragmatism devoted those should be to facts, has no such materalistic 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 a 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 the other truths that also have to be acknowledged. What I have said just now about the absolute of transcendental idealism is a case in point. First I called it majestic, and said it yielded religious comfort to a class of minds. And then I accused it of remoteness and sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not sterile. It has that amount of value. It performs a concrete function as a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the absolute true in so far forth then, and I unhesitatingly now do so. But what does true in so far forth mean in this case to answer, we need only apply the pragmatic method. What do you believe in the absolute? Mean by saying that their belief affords them comfort. They mean that, since in the absolute finite evil is overruled already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean, we have a right, ever and anon, to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business. The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally in which they don't care. Mood is also right for men and moral holidays in order that, if I mistaken, is part at least of what the absolute is known as. That is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes for us. That is part of his cash value. When he is pragmatically interpreted farther than that the ordinary lay reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute idealism, does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can use the absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at hearing you speak incredulously of the absolute, therefore, and disregards your criticisms, because they deal with aspects of the conception that he fails to follow. If the absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can possibly deny the truth of it? To deny it would be to insist that men should never relax, and that holidays are never in order. I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives, that it is good forasmuch as it profits. You will gladly admit if what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word truth you will say to call ideas also true? For this reason? To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage on my account. You touch here upon the very central point of mister Schiller's and Jewish and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot discuss with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinctly good and coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good too for definite, assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this that if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantages, and false ideas their only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious and its pursuit of duty could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a word like that, our duty would be to shun truth rather, But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach, in our tissues, so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, And if there be any idea which, if I believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless indeed belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits. What would be better for us to believe? This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying what we ought to believe, And in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we, ever, not to believe? What is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us and what is true for us permanently apart? Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her, probably also agree so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about the world's affairs and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete. That complicates the situation. I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit. Now, in real life, what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with what, indeed, except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs, when these prove incompatible with the first ones. In other words, words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all, this desperate instinct of self preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it, and let me speak now confidentially as it were, and merely in my own private person, it clashes with other truths of mine, whose benefits I hate to give up. On its account, it happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy. I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, et cetera, et cetera. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistent and says I personally just give up the absolute, I just take my moral holidays or else. As a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle. If I could restrict my notion of the absolute to its bare holiday giving value, it wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we cannot easily thus restrict our hypothesis. They carry supernumerary features, and these it is that clash. So my disbelief in the absolute means then disbelief in those are the supernumerary features. For I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays. You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconcile it, and said, borrowing the word from Puppini, that he unstiffens our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons, or what I shall count as proof she is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both of a positivistic empiricism, which is anti theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception. In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the emperium. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything to follow, either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact, if that should seem a likely place to find him. Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, What fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experiences, demands nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God in particular should prove to do it, how should pragmatism possibly deny God's existence. She should see no meaning in treating as not true a notion that was pragmatically so successful. What other kind of truth could there be for her than all this agreement with concrete reality. In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of Mother Nature and of Lecture two.