Latest / Logic Library / 07 Part 2 - Pragmatism and Humanism - Pragmatism - William James

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07 Part 2 - Pragmatism and Humanism - Pragmatism - William James · Logic Library

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You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle. You can't weed out
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the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in
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the theories we build them into the inner order. And arrangement is wholly dictated
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by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic themselves
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are fermenting with human re arrangements. Physics, astronomy, and biology follow massive
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cues of preference. We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the
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beliefs our ancestors, and we have made already these determined what we notice.
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What we notice determines what we do. What we do again, determines what
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we experience. So from one thing to another, although the stubborn fact remains
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that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first
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to last to be largely a matter of our own creation. We build the
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flux out inevitably. The great question is, does it with our additions rise
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or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy? Suppose a universe
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composed of seven stars and nothing else but three human witnesses and their critic.
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One witness names the stars great Bear, one calls them Charles Wayne, one
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calls them the Dipper, which human addition has made the best universe of the
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given stellar material. If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no
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hesitation in turning down the American witness. Lotzy has in several places made a
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deep suggestion we naively assume. He says a relation between reality and our minds,
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which may be just the opposite of the true one. Reality we naturally
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think stands ready made and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple
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duty of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions,
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Lotzi asks, be themselves important additions to reality, and may not previous reality
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itself. Be there far less for the purpose of reappairing unaltered in our knowledge
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than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance
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the universe's total value. The ehohung des Forgefunden than the science is a phrase
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used by Professor Eucken somewhere which reminds one of this suggestion by the Great Lotzy.
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It is identically our pragmatistic conception in our cognitive as well as in our
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active life. We are creative. We add both to the subject and to
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the predicate part of reality. The world stands really immaleable, waiting to receive
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its final touches at our hands. Like the Kingdom of heaven, it suffers
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human violence. Willingly man engenders truths upon it. No one can deny that
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such a role would add both to our dignity and to our responsibility as thinkers.
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To some of us, it proves a most inspiring notion. Signer Pappini,
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the leader of Italian pragmatism, grows fairly detherambic over the view that it
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opens of man's divinely creative functions. The import of the difference between pragmatism and
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rationalism is now in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that
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for rationalism, reality is ready made and complete from all eternity, while for
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pragmatism it is still in the making and waits part of its complexion from the
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future. On the one side, the universe is absolutely secure, on the
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other, it is still pursuing its adventures. We have got into rather deep
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water with this humanistic view, and it is no wonder that misunderstanding gathers round
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it. It is accused of being a doctrine of caprice. Mister Bradley,
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for example, says that a humanist, if he understood his own doctrine,
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would have to hold any end, however perverted, to be rational if I
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insist on it personally, and any idea, however mad, to be the
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truth if only some one is resolved that he will have it. So.
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The humanist view of reality as something resisting yet malleable, which controls our thinking,
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as an energy that must be taken account of incessantly, though not necessarily
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merely copied, is evidently a difficult one to introduce to novices. The situation
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reminds me of one that I have personally gone through. I once wrote an
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essay on our right to believe, which I unluckily called the Will to Believe.
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All the critics, neglecting the essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically
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it was impossible. Morally it was iniquitous. The will to deceive the will
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to make believe were Whitley proposed as substitutes for it. The alternative between pragmatism
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and rationalism, in the shape in which we now have it before us,
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is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge. It concerns the structure
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of the universe itself. On the pragmatist side, we have only one edition
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of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in
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the places where thinking beings are at work. On the rationalist side, we
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have a universe in many editions, one real one, the infinite folio or
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additioned looks eternally complete, and then the various finite editions full of false readings,
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distorted and mutilated, each in its own way. So the rival metaphysical
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hypothesis of pluralism and monism here come back upon us. I will develop their
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differences during the remainder of our hour. And first let me say that it
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is impossible not to see a temperamental difference at work in the choice of science.
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The rationalist mind, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion.
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The phrase must be is ever on its lips. The belly band of
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its universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist, on the other hand,
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is a happy, go lucky, anarchistic sort of creature. If it had
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to live in a tub like diogenis he wouldn't mind at all if the hoops
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were loose and the staves let in the sun. Now, the idea of
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this loose universe affects your typical rationalists in much the same way as freedom of
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the press might affect a veteran official in the Russian Bureau of Censorship, or
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as simplified spelling might affect an elderly school mistress. It affects him, as
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the swarm of Protestant sects affects a papist onlooker, it appears as the backboneless
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and devoid of principle, as opportunism in politics appears to an old fact French
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legitimist, or to a fanatical believer in the divine right of the people.
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For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite experiences. They
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lean on each other, but the whole of them. If such a hole
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there be leans on nothing. All homes are infinite experience. Finite experience as
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such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it.
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It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies. To rationalists,
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this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space, with neither
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elephant nor tortures to plant the soul of its foot upon. It is a
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set of stars hurled into heaven, without even a center of gravity to pull
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against. In other spheres of life, it is true that we have used
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to living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority of the state and
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that of an absolute moral law have resolved themselves into expediences, and Holy Church
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has resolved itself into meeting houses. Not so, as yet within the philosophic
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classrooms. A universe with such as us contributing to create its truth, a
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world delivered to our opportunisms and our private judgments. Home rule for Ireland would
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be a millennium in comparison. Were no more fit for such a part than
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the Filipinos are fit for self government, such a world would not be respectable
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philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar
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in the eyes of most professors of philosophy, What then, would tighten this
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loose universe, According to the professors, something to support the finite, many
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to tie it to, to unify and anchor it. Something unexposed to accident,
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something eternal and unalterable. The mutable inexperience must be founded on immutability.
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Behind our de facto world, our world in act, there must be a
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dejured duplicate, fixed and previous, with all that can happen here already there
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in pulse, every drop of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided,
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stamped and branded without chance of variation. The negatives that haunt our ideals
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here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely real. This alone makes the
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universe solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the stormy surface,
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but with this our anchor holds for it grapples rocky bottom. This is
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Wordsworth's central plays, subsisting at the heart of endless agitation. This is Vivi
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Cananda's mystical one of which I read to you. This is reality with the
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big r reality that makes the timeless claim, reality to which defeat can't happen.
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This is what the men of principles, and in general, all the
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men whom I called tender minded in my first lecture, think themselves obliged to
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postulate. And this exactly, this is what tough minded of that lecture find
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themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction worship. The tough minded are
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the men whose alpha and omiga are facts behind the bare phenomenal facts. As
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my tough minded old friend Chauncey Wright, the great Harvard empiricist on my youth,
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used to say, there is nothing. When a rationalist insists that behind
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the fact, there is the ground of the facts, the possibility of the
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facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him of taking the mere name and nature of
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a fact and clapping it behind the fact as a duplicate entity to make it
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possible. That such sham grounds are often invoked. Is notorious. At a
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surgical operation, I heard a bystander ask a doctor why the patient breathed so
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deeply, because ether is a respiratory stimulant. The doctor answered, Ah,
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said the questioner, as if relieved by the explanation. But this is like
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saying that cyanide of potassium kills because it is a poison, or that it
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is so cold tonight because it is winter, or that we have five fingers
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because we are pentadactyls. These are but names for the facts, taken from
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the facts and then treated as previous and explanatory. The tender minded notion of
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an absolute reality is, according to the radically tough minded, framed on just
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this pattern. It is but our summarizing name for the whole, spread out
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and strong, long mass of phenomena, treated as if it were a different
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entity, both one and previous. You see how differently people take things.
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The world we live in exists, diffused and distributed in the form of an
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indefinitely numerous lots of eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees,
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And the tough minded are perfectly willing to keep them at that valuation. They
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can stand that kind of world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.
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Not so the tender minded party. They must back the world we find
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ourselves born into by another and a better world in which the eaches form and
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the all a one that logically presupposes, co implicates and secures each each without
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exception. Must we, as pragmatists be radically tough minded, or can we
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treat the absolute edition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis. It is certainly
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legitimate, for it is thinkable, whether we take it in its abstract or
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in its concrete shape. By taking it abstractly I mean placing it behind our
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finite life, as we place the word winter behind tonight's cold weather. Winter
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is only the name for a certain number of days, which we find generally
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characterized by cold weather, But it guarantees nothing thing in that line. For
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our thermometer tomorrow may soar into the seventies. Nevertheless, the word is a
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useful one to plunge forward with into the stream of our experience. It cuts
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off certain probabilities and sets up others. You can put away your straw hats,
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you can unpack your architects. It is a summary of things to look
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for. It names a part of nature's habits and gets you ready for their
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continuation. It is a definite instrument, abstracted from experience, a conceptual reality
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that you must take account of and which reflects you totally back into sensible realities.
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The pragmatist is the last person to deny the reality of such abstractions.
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They are so much past experience funded. But taking the absolute edition of the
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world concretely means a different hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and oppose it to
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the world's finite conditions. They give it a particular nature. It is perfect
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finished, everything known there is known along with everything else here where ignorance reigns
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far Otherwise, if there is want, there there also is the satisfaction.
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Provided here all is process, the world is timeless. Possibilities obtain in our
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world. In the absolute world, where all that is not is from eternity
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impossible, and all that is is necessary, the category of possibility has no
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application in this world. Crimes and horrors are regrettable. In that totalized world,
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regret obtains not, for the existence of ill in the temporal order is
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the very condition of the perfection of the eternal order. Once More, either
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hypothesis is legiti admit in pragmatist eyes, for either has its uses abstractly or
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taking like the word winter, as a memorandum of past experience that orientces towards
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the future. The notion of the absolute world is indispensable concretely taken. It
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is also indispensable at least to certain minds, for it determines them religiously,
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being often a thing to change their lives by, and by changing their lives,
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to change whatever in the outer order depends on them. We cannot therefore
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methodically join the tough minds in the rejections of the whole notion of a world
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beyond our finite experience. One misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic
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tough mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion as so much jabber
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and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual honarchy as such and prefers a sort of
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wolf world, absolutely unpenned and wild and without a master or a collar to
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any philosophic classroom product whatsoever. I have said so much in these lectures against
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the overtender forms of rationalism that I am prepared for some misunderstanding here, But
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I confess that the amount of it that I have found in this very audience
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surprises me, for I have simultaneously defended rationalistic hypothesis so far as these redirect
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you fruitfully into experience. For instance, I received this morning this question on
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a postcard. Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic? One of
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my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter
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that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and
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condemning us to the most territories of naturalism. Let me read you some extracts
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from it. It seems to me, my friend writes that the pragmatic objection
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to pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of narrow minds.
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Your call to the rejection of the namby pamby and the wishy washy is
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of course inspiring. But although it is salutary and stimulating to be told that
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one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings of his words and thoughts,
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I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and profit of dwelling also on
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remoter bearings and issues. And it is the tendency of pragmatism to refuse this
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privilege. In short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather
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the dangers, of the pragmatic tendency are analogous to those which beset the unwary
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followers of the natural sciences. Chemistry and physics are eminently pragmatic, and many
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of their devotees, smugly content with the data that their weights and measures furnish,
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feel an infinite pity and disdain for all students of philosophy and metaphysics whomsoever,
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and of course everything can be expressed after a fashion and theoretically in terms
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of chemistry and physics. That is, everything except the vital principle of the
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whole. And that they say there is no pragmatic use in trying to express
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it has no bearings for them. I, for my part, refuse to
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be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and the
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pragmatists to a logical unity in which they take no interest. How is such
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a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible after my first and second lectures,
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I have all along been offering it expressly as a mediature between tough mindedness
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and tender mindedness. If the notion of a world anti rem whether taking abstractly
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like the word winter or concretely as the hypothesis of an absolute, can be
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shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning.
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If the meaning works, it will have some truths that ought to be held
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to through all possible reformulations for pragmatism. The absolutistic hypothesis that perfection is eternal,
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aboriginal, and most real has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works
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religiously to examine how will be the subject of my next and final lecture?
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End of Lecture seven.