The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays Lovejoy, Arthur O
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The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays Lovejoy, Arthur O. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.68490. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/68490 [ Access provided at 29 Sep 2021 16:59 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Arthur O. Lovejoy The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3248-9 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3248-X (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3246-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3246-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3247-2 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3247-1 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. The Thirteen Pragmatisms The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY The Johns Hopkins Press: Baltimore © 1963 by The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 18, Md. Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, Lmdon Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-11890 This book has been brought to publication with the assistance of a grant from The Ford Foundation. PREFACE ?.'&5. �1� Since the publication in 1936 of The Great Chain of Being, Professor Lovejoy has been thought of as primarily a historian of ideas. His contributions to epistemol ogy have been obscured by his activity in opening up a new territory of research into which his juniors have rushed with all the enthusiasm of pioneers. The founding of a jour nal devoted to that study, Lovejoy's acceptance of the editor ship of that journal, his unfailing kindness in reading and criticizing papers sent him by aspiring historians made it impossible for him to continue that long series of philo sophical papers which had culminated in The Revolt Against Dualism and had given him a distinguished reputation in technical philosophy. As a matter of fact he had always com bined the two interests. As early as 1904 he had published his monograph on The Dialectic of Bruno and Spinoza, which was an analysis of a metaphysical technique, and at the same time he had published Some Eighteenth Century Evolutionists, which was a contribution to the history of a science. This was not after all surprising in a man who had called himself a temporalistic realist, for such a man would be likely to see in every idea traces of the historical moment in which it was expressed. As he says in his article on "Wil liam James as Philosopher," reprinted in the present volume, V vi PREFACE "All philosophies . are the result of the interaction of a temperament (itself partly molded by a historical situation) with impersonal logical considerations arising out of the nature of the problems with which man's reason is con fronted." To discover in a philosophy this interaction has always been his purpose, and in these essays on the various pragmatisms one sees the discovery in process. Every logical system has to he based on premises, and what will seem self-evident to one man will seem dubious or problematical to another. Moreover the personal vision of no man is all-inclusive and the wider his angle of vision, the less likely is he to see the details of his intellectual landscape. It has always been part of Lovejoy's critical technique to ask himself just what an author is saying and then to put it down in straightforward literal sentences. He thus untangles the premises from their implications, sorts out ambiguities, and above all indicates clearly where a switch from one meaning to another has occurred. This technique he has used upon himself as well as on others. In his statement of his own position, "A Temporalistic Realism," which ap peared in Contemporary American Philosophy (1930), he laid down his own premises as if he were writing a legal brief, just as he did in The Revolt Against Dualism. The essays in this volume are then critical and are, with one exception, directed against pragmatism. "The Thirteen Pragmatisms" is an exercise in logical analysis and is, so to speak, a challenge to a group of philosophers who have taken on a collective name to show how their apparent di versities are to he reconciled. The distinctions which he made in that article and which led to logical confusions are ex- Preface vii pounded in such papers as "Pragmatism and Realism," "Pragmatism vs. the Pragmatist," and "Pragmatism as ln teractionism." There can be few living philosophers who would call themselves orthodox followers of this train of thought, and hence these papers can be studied without that sense of personal injury which deadens the critical faculty and obscures one's insight. Here it is the logical technique which counts; the author's keenness in spotting double meanings and his ability to rephrase them in univalent form. In spite of his admiration for William James himself as a teacher and writer, Lovejoy turned a cold shoulder to the seductions of a brilliant literary style and asked James just what he was driving at. Yet this was done with rare courtesy and with appreciation of a great thinker's generosity and imaginative power. In admitting the contributions of temperament to phi losophy, Lovejoy also ran the risk of what he has called mind-reading. Though he has always insisted upon the part which temperament must play in thinking, he has also in sisted that no critic can assume the position of a psycho analyst. One simply does not know why James, for instance, was so open-minded, so in love with the unfinished, the mul tiple, and the changing. We know that such attitudes were characteristic of him, but the philosophical critic who is interested in reasoning alone must accept them as funda mental and leave it at that. They orient a man's thoughts, ex plain his acceptance of certain ideas and his reluctance to accept their contraries, but they are prelogical and hence prephilosophical in the sense that they need not be clear to the man who is possessed of them. They are part of what viii PREFACE might be called his protophilosophy, though the neologism is not Lovejoy's. By bringing them into the light of day, Lovejoy translates them into sentences which can be sub mitted to validation or simply to the test of clarity. To cite but one example out of scores, when someone argues that a given practice is bad because it is unnatural or another good because it is natural, one confers a benefaction upon him by asking him which of the sixty-odd meanings of "natural" he is thinking of. This is to be sure an unpopular way of writing. We philosophers do not seem to be any fonder of exposure than other people are. Though most of us take pride in our ra tionalism, we hesitate to accept its consequences. One of them is obviously the impossibility of believing in both the affirmative and negative of a proposition. Either all knowl edge can be formulated in a consistent set of sentences or it can not. If it can, then the act of knowing is robbed of its temporal, historical, personal character. But if it can not, then the world is in a state of change and what is true today may be false tomorrow. But this would seem to involve one in accepting the reality of time and of logical gaps. In "The Anomaly of Knowledge" (p. 236 below), Lovejoy argues that knowledge itself contains one of these gaps, in that knowing as a psychological fact is here and now whereas its object may be in the future, the remote past, or almost any where. The problem of the epistemologist is to explain, if possible, how this can happen or, if he cannot explain it, to accept it as one of his fundamental data, just as a botanist would have to accept the fact that some plants have flowers and some do not. The desire to find out just what facts are Preface ix imposed upon a philosopher has always been illustrated m Lovejoy's critical method, whether he was writing about emergent evolution, psychophysical dualism, or the reality of time. If one wishes to attack him, this is the place to do so. But one must be prepared to prove that the supposed data are really fictions or illusions. In his case this would involve one in proving, for instance, that the idea which I am now en tertaining of the character of Julius Caesar is identical with that character itself in date and location; that my idea, if true, is existentially one with that of a friend which is also true; that the image of which I am aware of a picture hang ing in the next room is also in the next room at this moment; and that two physical objects can be in the same place at the same time.