European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, III-1

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

III-1 | 2011 Contemporary Reassessment of William James a Century Later

Edmundo Baselmão (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/860 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.860 ISSN: 2036-4091

Publisher Associazione Pragma

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Symposia. “Contemporary Reassessment of William James a Century Later”

Introduction Edmundo Balsemão Pires

Communication and Consciousness in the Pragmatist Critique of Representation W. James and C. S. Peirce Edmundo Balsemão Pires

James’s Epistemology and the Will to Believe Christopher Hookway

Peirce’s Post-Jamesian Pragmatism Nathan Houser

Individuality The Emersonian Background of the Bergson-James Controversy Anna M. Nieddu

The Reception of William James in Continental Europe Jaime Nubiola

From Consistency to Coherence Whitehead’s Transformation of James’s Epistemic Conservatism Dennis Soelch

James and Whitehead Assemblage and Systematization of a Deeply Empiricist Mosaic Philosophy Paul Stenner

The Stream of Consciousness and the Epochal Theory of Time Maria Teresa Teixeira

Essays

The Sign of the Four Italian Pragmatists Retold Giovanni Maddalena and Giovanni Tuzet

Naturalism and Metaphors Towards a Rortian Pragmatist Aesthetics Kalle Puolakka

Book Review

Vincenzo COSTA, Fenomenologia dell’intersoggettività Roma, Carocci, 2010 Giovanni Maddalena

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Richard BERNSTEIN, Filosofía y democracia: John Dewey Ramón del Castillo (ed.) & Alicia García Ruiz (trans.), Barcelona, Herder, 2010 Núria Sara Miras Boronat

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Symposia. “Contemporary Reassessment of William James a Century Later”

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Introduction

Edmundo Balsemão Pires

1 William James (1842-1910) influenced the American intellectual history of the second half of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX in various fields, due to his activity as a writer, a teacher and experimentalist.

2 William James was a participant in the germinal, legendary meetings of the “Metaphysical Club,” in 1872, together with C. S. Peirce, Chauncey Wright, O. W. Holmes Jr., and others, in conversations that would lead to the first formulas, close to the future “pragmatism,” regarding the sense of evolution and chance, the truth, the value of the experience and the rejection of metaphysics. What one may call “characteristically American” in the Pragmatist way of thinking was perhaps launched in this period of the intellectual history of the United States.

3 After that initial period W. James was the supporter of the philosophical doctrines identified with the American pragmatism regarding especially the concepts of consciousness, experience, belief and truth. He was the responsible, at Harvard University, for the Psychology Courses oriented towards the experimental perspective, and left us an important treatise on the Principles of Psychology. We recognize him as the profound connoisseur of the contemporary European thought in German and French, and his Letters reveal an intense dialogue and debate on themes of psychology, metaphysics or religion with European colleagues, who admired him.

4 His work counts many volumes devoted to the examination of the essential problems of the theory of knowledge, the justification of faith, the psychological nature of thought, consciousness and emotions. Today, we rediscover some of his thesis on the relations between the brain, emotions and consciousness in scientific fields of research such as the neuroscience. This reveals his importance not only in the philosophical discussions.

5 In the year 2010, 100 years after the death of the philosopher, scholars and researchers from diverse fields of knowledge gathered in the most important European and American universities together in order to examine and evaluate the intellectual heritage of the Harvard Professor.

6 For this occasion it is also expectable a great variety of monographic publications in America and Europe. The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy wants

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to be an important contributor for this movement and wishes to celebrate William James’s European heritage with the present volume of selected papers by scholars from the United States, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Germany.

AUTHOR

EDMUNDO BALSEMÃO PIRES Universidade de Coimbra edbalsemao[at]gmail.com

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Communication and Consciousness in the Pragmatist Critique of Representation W. James and C. S. Peirce

Edmundo Balsemão Pires

I. Overview

1 In many writings, W. James criticized the concept of a double of the object in the mind as a wrong perspective about the mental activity involved in the construction of the experience, a mistaken conception on the balance of the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the knowing process and, generally speaking, a misconception of the importance of the imaginative projections along the temporal emergence of the “actual” perception. His criticism applies also to the conventional Realist doctrines or to the modern theories of the perception as a mirror of the external being. But he didn’t pay special attention to the linguistic extension of this “double” in the theory of sign and proposition of the modern philosophers that were continuing Aristotle.

2 Along Peirce’s discussion of the Metaphysical and Logical significance of the Doctrine of Categories emerged the idea of a cyclical, sequential and self-catalysed sign-activity or semeiosis coupled with a much more complex triad of object, mental concept and sign than supposed in the classical and modern idea of representation. But, Peirce didn’t extend his concept of a self-catalysed semeiosis to communication as a system autonomous from the individual consciousness and to biosemeiosis.

3 Additionally, If Peirce and James agree in the refusal of the conventional theory of representation as mirror, their rejection came from different horizons and their critiques don’t mean the same. We will see if their views are convergent.

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II. Consciousness

II.1. The Formation of Meaning in Consciousness

4 The post-kantian Philosophy illustrates a continuous discussion about the meaning of the representation and the thing-in-itself in relation to the concept of the consciousness as absolute activity (Fichte) or the consciousness as a source of a subjective self-validating “certainty” (Hegel).

5 The writing of Kant’s former student in Königsberg J. S. Beck, Erläuternder Auszug aus den critischen Schriften des Herrn Prof. Kant (Riga, 1793), includes a critique of the postulation of the thing-in-itself beyond the representation. According to J. S. Beck representations are the primitive source of knowledge in the consciousness and possibly its unique searchable source. The admission of the thing-in-itself transcending the representations would entail an avoidable concession to the dogmatic method in Philosophy, contradicting the spirit of the Kantian Philosophy.

6 Later, C. Renouvier began in his Essais de Critique Générale (first edition 1854) a philosophical programme ambitioning the rebuilding on new foundations of the critical Philosophy. He kept the essential traits of his earlier efforts in Le Personnalisme, suivi d’une Étude sur la Perception externe et sur la force (1903) where one finds chapters especially concerned with James’s Philosophy of Perception and Will.1

7 Trying to preserve those Kantian conceptions akin to the positivistic imperative of the knowledge within the limits of “facts,” one of the original contributions of the Essais is the refutation of Kant’s dualism of the thing-in-itself and the phenomena. According to C. Renouvier Kant’s dualistic thought remains uncritical and metaphysical and compels the philosopher to forge idola such as the noumenom. The objections regarding Kant’s doctrine led to a sharp scrutiny of the concept of representation and to a refusal of the mirror version of the representation and Knowledge. The first division of his first Essai deals with the concept of representation (De la Repésentation en général). To be represented means simply “to appear.” Appearance is the proper definition of a “representation.” Thus, this word doesn’t mean re-presentation of a previous thing, but donation of content in the consciousness. The relation between the representations and the external things is not clarified. Instead, the author states that in Knowledge the “things” must be referred only through the “representations.” This requires a precision: if we can’t apprehend anything outside the content of our consciousness all we need is this content. There is nothing more to know.

8 Identified with the conscious contents the “things” and the “representations” are the same. C. Renouvier calls these primitive contents “faits” or “phénomènes.”2 The metaphysical problem of the relation between an “external world” and the conscious content of the representations ceases. “What is” is a representation as an irreducible phenomenon or “fact.” From these premises comes the need for a new concept of experience. According to the “new criticism” experience refers to the multiple connexions of the phenomena in a personal consciousness. The form of the representations and the personal consciousness made a self-sufficient pair that makes senseless the problem of the access to a transcendent thing-in-itself: “la représentation n’implique rien qu’elle-même.”3 It is the representation that divides itself in two faces: a representative and a represented. The idea of a self-division of the representation led to the refusal of the comparison of the consciousness with a mirror of the external

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thing.4 Finally, comes the statement of the identity between the thing and the appearance (phénomène).

9 In 1886, in the Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, according to a positivistic mood, E. Mach refused the thing-in-itself, independent from the impressions and sense-data of the experience (Merkmalen), as a sort of “rest” that would subsist as the transcendent warranty of the continuous multiplicity of the subjective impressions. Against the transcendence of a noumenon he declared: “Es ist denn richtig, dass die Welt nur aus unsern Empfindungen besteht.”5 In the formation of the impressions one needs to describe the association between the states of consciousness and the space-time situation of the organic body. But from this relation it is not valid to conclude that there is an external independent support of the plurality of the impressions.

10 On the other hand, at the middle and final stages of the post-kantian period, A. Schopenhauer and F. Nietzsche prepared the conditions for a subjective genealogy of the thing-in-itself through its reduction to the human Will.

11 It is not incidental the inclusion of a Lecture on “Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism” (Lecture VI) in James’s Hibbert Lectures – A Pluralistic Universe.6 In the writings of the French philosopher James could find a metaphysical proof of the distinction of the psychic systems towards the physical and the biological, in the difference between the conscious, the organic and the inert realms. However, this distinction leads to the need for elucidation of the nature of the causation between the three levels. H. Bergson was very sceptical regarding the idea of a direct cerebral causation of the consciousness.7 His observations on the difference between the brain of the animals and the human brain made obvious that the human brain is structured in such a complex way that it liberates the superior form of consciousness one finds in humans. The complexity of the organization of matter in the living organisms establishes not only complex forms of life and consciousness, but the autonomy of consciousness properly speaking. L’Évolution Créatrice develops the connexion of the brain to the consciousness as an association between different orders of complexity that are mutually adapted in the universal process of Life. The mutual adaptation is possible because the Human brain doesn’t dictate nothing qualitatively determined, but a certain number of possible combinations which the consciousness actualizes in a qualitative domain characterised by a permanent modal change of the actual in the potential and vice-versa. In the inner durée consciousness keeps the essential fluidity typical of all the organic structures in opposition to the inorganic matter and only along the stream of the psychic time the consciousness is close to itself. The knowing process emerges along the stream of time and consciousness Bergson called durée. This version of the cognitive process is very different from the intellectualist doctrine of representation that Bergson criticizes.

12 W. James refused the traditional theory of representation and along the section I of the Essays in Radical Empiricism he tried to develop his own version of the inner intentionality of consciousness. According to his version, the continuity of the experience is something that is achieved inside a series of connected moments of an unbroken stream of thought from a beginning point until a result. In such stream what is called the object or meaning is the result of this continuous, conjunctive, sequence of thinking. What compels to a relative pause of the thinking process, as its teleological orientation, is the cognitive interest of the cognisor and the action he associates to the particular sequences of the stream. Thus, what one calls the object is given in the

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immanent process of the continuous thinking as its (relative) teleological conclusion or terminus. The subject can give an account of such internal oriented procession until the meaning or object. But it is not possible to establish a correspondence part-to-part or point-to-point between the object of consciousness and the exterior thing. This means that the whitness of the inner connectivity of the thinking process doesn’t give a precise picture of the whitness of the transcendent relations in what occurs in the physical world. The true experience is self-sufficient regarding its inner teleological tendency towards the meaning or object: “experience and reality come to the same thing.”8 James criticized both the “representationalists” and F. H. Bradley because especially this one “derealized” the experience.9 His critic of the “absolutists” focused F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality as the direct target, and indirectly Hegel. I will not scrutinize here the accuracy of the indirect critiques against Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Logic.

13 Let me go to the critique of “representationalism.”

14 If the body, as “my body,” is the “objective nucleus of every man’s experience”10 and if it remains in continuity with the psychic experience, in such a way that one may include the organic body in the erection of the self, the same doesn’t happen with the physical reality in the primary sense of the concept. This means that around the same physical, exterior, reality a great variety of psychic processes may start, because the association to it is discontinuous and not exclusive of a singular thinker.

15 Experience is not based on representations if with the word “representation” one means a double of the original physical thing in the mind. The same applies to fictive substitutes of the physical thing. However, in the stream of thoughts it is possible to identify psychic processes where short thoughts, or concepts and ideas, operate by substitution of other more complex thoughts. But the value of this substitution is to be evaluated always regarding its function in the particular stream as a temporal continuous and not as tool to get out from the stream.

16 The transitions and conditional ends are the unique elements to be taken as real parts of a course of experience and substitutions are aspects in the transitions. Nothing in this field is able to operate definitely as a substitute for a physical thing or for an alien course of experience, because one can’t abstract from the singular combination of possibilities that made the actual stream of thought possible which is individual, hic et nunc, and not repeatable. The equivalent of a “whole system of experiences” would be a “quasi-chaos” made by an indefinite combination of possibilities of stream paths and not an order.11

17 In the Principles of Psychology W. James continues the refutation of the metaphysical dualism of the thing-in-itself and its image in the mind supporting the thesis that every object of the type of a thought-correlate is identical to what is presented along the personal consciousness stream. The fiction of a point-to-point correspondence of a thought-correlate and an exterior substance is a prejudice rooted in grammatical fetishism.12

18 From the point of view of the jamesian Psychology grounded on the idea of homogeneity, continuity and indivisibility of the stream of thought it is expectable a critique of the psychological atomism of modern Philosophy (Hobbes, Locke and Hume). But in the constitution of its concept of the psychic representation, the atomistic reconstruction of thought and knowledge started from the postulate of the

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external thing with qualities figured in the mind through a physical-psychical causation.13

19 The psychological atomism brings together the parts of the mental object in order to show that those aspects were in the external physical object as the cause of the mental image. According to the description, a representation means a mental effect of an external cause through sensations and associations of sensations.

20 W. James remarks that this model takes the thought about the thing as equivalent to the objective discourse about the thing. The belief in the physical-psychical causation led to the suggestion of a previous unity in the external thing instead of the assumption of the homogeneity of the stream of thought. The causal model ignores that the time of the consciousness is not point-to-point identical with an objective chronology with its own parts or identical with the time of the discourse.14

21 Another consequence of the prestige of the atomistic Psychology was the description of the psychological objects as representations perfectly defined and separated from other representations equally distinct. However, a serious examination of the psychic enchainment shows that the distinct impressions are always referred to a halo or penumbra enveloping the psychic life.15

22 There is a corporeal, neural ground for this permanent shifting movement from the penumbra to the vivid impression along the stream. The neural transmission takes its own duration and its psychic effects are not comparable to discrete pulses. W. James distinguished the “brain dying vibrations” from the “brain vivid vibrations.” Pauses in the neural vibration convert in memory marks and fictive substitutes. The cover of the pauses with the help of ficta is also a condition for the internal continuity of the consciousness. One may describe stream segments ordered around identity and relative durableness and other segments responsible for freshness.16 The resting-phases are like the “substantive parts” of the stream; the flux-phases “transitive parts.” Thus, vagueness is a constitutive trait of the mental phenomena.

23 The difference between the “substantive” and the “transitive” is due to the selective orientation of the consciousness towards its elements. It is apparently inconsequential to say that consciousness is selective, but if one observes better W. James was right when he extended such appreciation to the operations of the sensorial organs. One of the mental mechanisms that reveals this selective course is the attention. But selection through attention is associated with a variety of selective channels for the organization of the impressions, entailing complex negations, distinctions, abstentions, etc.17

24 Retrieving the problem of the coordination of the stream of consciousness and the world of the external things, W. James quoted Helmholtz18 to prove that what one calls “things” are results of impressions fixed through selections which set up clusters of qualities. These are arranged in such a way that our practical interests and habits dictate the relevancies regarding what occurs in the horizon of the mental meaning. Naming and the formation of judgments are the linguistic processes that follow.

25 The objective reference of a thought (or also, according to W. James, its “meaning”) is not directly established by an isolated figurative act starting with the physical thing and ending in the mind but it is a temporal teleological oriented process towards an end or final meaning, where it is admissible differences between virtual stages in the formation of the meaning and actual, perceptual stages that fulfil the requirements for the conclusion of the stream of thought regarding the thing or event. This distinction

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shall be emphasized because a great part of our knowledge remains in the virtual stages. From the impossible fulfilment of all the conceptions of our virtual knowing follows that the “pragmatic method,” which is a guessing about the practical consequences of our conceptions, is the best way to certify the correctness of our ideas. But in James’s version, at the end, this method leads to a relative privilege of the perceptual elements of the experience regarding the other virtual psychic components. This is mainly due to a shift from the difference between vivid/non-vivid, virtual/ actual and fictional/perceptual stages of the stream.

26 What are the criteria for the reaching of meaning? Is it the satisfaction with our picture of the real as a sort of positive emotional response to it? It coincides with the content of a “final” percept, as proposed by James? Or it stands for a felicitous momentarily “it fits” in a running process of adjustments of inner experience and bodily orientation?

27 If we choose the Jamesian answer to the alternatives and the idea of a tendency of the virtual knowing to the actuality of a percept there is no radical difference between the “pragmatic maxim” and verificationism that leads to a quasi representationalism. If we emphasize the value of the temporal drift, or the “in between,” every moment of the experience is “virtual” and experience is a never ending path towards fulfilment. The exclamation “it fits” stands for a chance that happens when a selection is made from a variety of candidates such as a percept, fictional contents or emotions for the completion of a coherent picture of the stream of thought. It seems that James was not sufficiently radical to realize that in consciousness there is nothing definitely “actual” or “objective.”

28 Our position regarding James’s idea of virtual and actual (or perceptual) elements of the stream is twofold. Against James we say that meaning is not coincident with a final perceptual fulfilment of a flow. We are asserting that in consciousness alone there is no valid way to distinguish between actuality and virtuality. This distinction entails communicative events and not only consciousness contents. With James we agree that in consciousness meaning emerges from a temporal adjustment, and we add: it is a temporal adjustment of different elements of the experience in order to get the best layout for a puzzle, which belongs not to consciousness but to language in the form of propositions.

29 James declares that the stream of consciousness is a continuous flow of elements connected together along a nonstop chain. But in order to give an account of the objective reference of the thought he acknowledges a relative break in the chain to allow the formation of the consciousness of identity. However, it seems that he didn’t realize that with the passage from the continuous flow to the consciousness of identity one is facing the emergence of a denotative symbolic action, which begins with imagination and at the end will mobilize names, the relation of names and verbs, or going to the point: language. From the perspective of consciousness as a nonstop metamorphosis of virtual and actual elements every meaning-fixation coincides with an interruption or with an internal reflexive loop.

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Figure 1

30 In the figure above one can visualize the formation of reflexive loops in the immanent time entailing the internal reference to identity through imaginary formations and imaginary time meta-flows (in the discrete lines).

31 In his Essays in Radical Empiricism James passes from the psychic notion of meaning in the immanence of the teleological stream of thought to the problem of the objective reference of thought and to the question of the truth. But in such passages James didn’t acknowledge the use of signs.

II.2. The Formation of Meaning in Consciousness

32 All the mental phenomena suppose the identity of appearance and reality. This is a thesis common to the idealists and to James’s own conception. According to James the application of the idealist relation of the whole and the parts to the finite consciousness and to what he calls the super-consciousness has a major negative consequence or is paradoxical. In chapter III of Appearance and Reality F. H. Bradley started his explanation of the meaning of relations from the notion of the “given facts” as compounds or units made by qualities and relations. “Reality” is a composition of these two aspects. He claims that the way in which both dimensions harmonize is not immediately apparent and manifest. The conclusion of the argument points to a unifying principle that ties together relations and qualities: relation presupposes quality, and quality relation.19 It is impossible to dissolve qualities in relations or vice versa. The qualities must be and also must be related. This means that qualities are partially made by the relations.20 The connection between a quality and its relations constitutes a part of what a quality is, even if we know that the quality is never completely identical with its relational dimension. The part of the quality which depends on the relation is connected to it by an internal relation. The admission of internal relations is a consequence of the argument that states that a relation can’t be a “mere adjective” to the qualities.21 Such outcome also entails the need for an adequate interpretation of the inherence of relations. Here, the objection can be turned to the empirical inaccessibility to such internal relations.

33 But James’s critique of the super-consciousness in A Pluralistic Universe is directed towards both F. H. Bradley’s ideas and J. Royce’s full version of his “fourth conception of Being” in the Gifford Lectures The World and the Individual (1899-1900). The “fourth conception” states three basic thesis: i) that whatever is has its being only as a fact observed, and exists as the fulfilment of a conscious meaning;22 ii) the idea that the finite knowers are in reciprocal relations (in society) which leads to the conclusion that such

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reciprocal relation exists and, consequently is a fact and as a fact must be observed (again) by another consciousness, different of the first knowers; iii) to avoid a regressum ad infinitum J. Royce tries to prove that it must be a final knower, which is God identical with the Aristotelian “absolute self-knowledge,” and concludes that “[…] one final knower knows all knowing processes in one inclusive act.”23

34 In A Pluralistic Universe James’s argumentation against intellectualism and idealism states that in the idealistic version of the process of knowledge the finite consciousness relates to a “super-consciousness” in the same way as a part to its whole. At the same time the difference of the finite and the super-consciousness is a difference for a consciousness and in this case for the super-consciousness, which means that the finite consciousness must be apparent and not real. Because this involves the rejection of the initial identity of appearance and reality the idealist supposition of a super- consciousness relating to the finite knowers as the whole to its parts must be false or the idealist thesis inconsistent and self-contradictory.

35 James’s critique of the idealistic “whole and parts” relation is the ground for his strategic isolation of the consciousness as a special field, and a new disciplinary subject matter.

36 The “field of consciousness” can only be fully acknowledged under some general epistemological and ontological premises. I will detach four main ideas. i) The field of consciousness is self-sufficient regarding what appears for a consciousness; ii) the admission of this self-sufficiency and the rejection of a super-consciousness as another level of integrative knowledge of the finite subject entails the absolute individuation of the consciousness; iii) the ideas of pluralism and multiverse reflect the subtraction of the finite consciousness from its alleged source in the “absolute”; and iv) the space-time identity of the object is not a guaranty of the uniformity of the images of the world.

37 But these obvious consequences from the critical starting point against the monistic idealism produce the difficult alternative between a radical finite distribution of the “consciousness field” and the admission of a unifying principle.24 Some pages ahead James resumes and summarizes this dilemma in the alternative between the logic of identity or the irrationality.25

38 His choice will be on the side of the “irrational” character of psychical reality and life. But in order to make clear his choice he should explain what is “irrational.”

39 The access to the inner, qualitative reality is only possible by a sort of participation, “direct acquaintance” or immediate experience of the proper or of an alien psychic life and not by rational, conceptual reconstruction.

40 Connected with his idea of the inner intentionality or immanent orientation of the stream of thought James has developed a conception of the physical environment of the consciousness and the relation to other minds. The thing-as-such was re-(ob)-jected to the environment in order to preserve the integrity of the unbroken connectivity of thoughts. The selfhood or personality of the stream of thought gives an additional complexity to our reading of James’s pluralism: the other minds are also part of the environment of the psychic system. This is due to the fact that the reference to the consciousness is always reference to an intimate, individuated flow and the psychic systems are always split in individuated flows. Other flows of consciousness belong to a non-original, non-intimate given. If the access to other minds is mediated by the

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animated body of the others it emerges always as a symbolic, indirect reference through the analogical imagination, as also Husserl pointed out.26

41 The correspondence of the “mine” and of “yours” perceptual conceptions of the “things” or events is always tuned by mutual confirmation and the common reference to objects is frequently associated to the spatial location of the thing or event towards the organic bodies. The subject matter James didn’t scrutinize was the relation of the common reference of the multiple individuated conceptions of the real to language and to communication.27 This lack leads, in the following remarks, to the recognition of the need for integration of the analogical imaginary projections of the “mine” and “yours” in language and communication.

42 Firstly, the habit to combine the immediate flow of consciousness and the stream of time in a unique course simply derives from the impossibility to have an intuition of time with no contents of consciousness, with no qualities of the experience.

43 Secondly, the continuity of the stream is made of sometimes imperceptible conscious and unconscious reflexive loops connecting memories, actual states and projections. In the conscious life, even the distinction between past and present entails reflexion. The virtual / actuality distinction in the conscious life refers to a difference in complex virtual, imaginary re-entries.

44 Thirdly, the reflexive loops entering in the penumbral regions of the consciousness are similar to knotting points that work through dissimilar time strata in order to ensure the integrity of conscious life but not the continuity of time. The understanding of the way the loops work will lead us to a multilevel notion of time and consciousness, this one made of multiple streams and meta-streams (imaginary streams, virtual fluxes and fluxes representing fluxes) as an integration of the linear temporal succession (figured in the “arrow of time”) and imaginary recursions of impressions and qualities of the experience.

45 Lastly, in the reflexive, symbolical, internal relations of streams and meta-streams one can’t recognize parts standing to other parts as a representation towards an original or a teleological orientation of the virtual parts of the stream to perceptual fulfilments. This means that one can avoid the representational view of the understanding of the linkages within the conscious life without forcefully have to support the monolinear flow of time and consciousness. But the end of a flow has only compulsory value for the consciousness if one associates this stop with communicative events. Nothing in the immanent flow alone can stop its infinite virtual loop.

III. Communication

III.1. Peirce’s Transformation of the Concept of Representation Through the Sign-Relations

46 These critical remarks28 will lead me now to C. S. Peirce’s notion of thought as symbolic activity in order to evaluate if the semiotic examination of the process of thought is a better candidate to the critique of the traditional concept of representation.29 Regarding my last critical remarks on the monolinear flow of time and consciousness, if Peirce’s analogy of thought as a sign is true, then the “stream of thought” must be a reflexive internal loop only momentarily adhering to the so-called flow of time.

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47 Observations on “representation” are documented in the seminal text On a New List of Categories (1868), based on a quasi-kantian double deduction of the categories from the judgements and the judgments from the acts of reduction to the unity of the multiplicity of the conscious content. Here, Peirce started with the psychological mechanism of attention, as “denotative power of the mind,” to illustrate the operations of the mental life analogous of the diairesis and synderesis in propositions. This denotative power of the mind is turned to the flow of ideas and impressions and here it isolates something immediately present to the consciousness, that Peirce calls substance.30

48 In the investigation of the sources of the categories, the text distinguishes three internal references in the formation of judgments or in the application of predicates to the substances by the mediation of the copula or being: the reference to a ground, to a correlate and the reference to an interpretant. The analysis of the three internal references joins psychological, logical and semiotic aspects. The concept of representation is reserved to the general conceptions of the mind which can originate judgements, in a sense similar to Kant. Conceptions can be incomplete or complete. They are incomplete if they don’t include the three references, but only one or two. They are complete whenever for the formation of the conception the reference to the interpretant is included. Likeness, Indices (or Signs) and Symbols are representations resulting from the reference to a ground (quality), to a correlate (by contrast and comparison) and to an interpretant (or mediating representation), correspondingly.

49 By recognizing the validity of the medieval definition of Logic as the study of “second intentions” and identifying second intentions with the concepts of the understanding and the primary intentions with the objects, Peirce further characterized second intentions as “the objects of the understanding considered as representations.” But he adds that such objects must be complete representations and not only icons or indices of their objects. In order to be complete representations they must include the interpretants. As complete representations all “second intentions” are symbols. From this conclusion comes the definition of Logic as the study of symbols and the triadic division of symbols in terms, propositions and arguments. The importance of the interpretant in the symbolic representation is evident. Thus, the conventional notion of representation was almost limited to icons and indices.

50 If Peirce’s enlarged notion of representation is true one must apply the consequences of such enlargement to the total depth of the doctrines of categories which implies the psychological the logical, the semiotic and the ontological levels.

51 The 1868 text is not unequivocal concerning the definition of interpretant. Sometimes, it takes as a valid definition the equivalence between interpretant and translator. According to the best proposal of definition, an interpretant is a mediating representation which represents the relate to be a representation of the same correlate which this mediating representation itself represents (1.553). The exemplification that follows this definition in the text shows that Peirce intended with this “mediating representation” a thought operation that connects the object of a conception, the expression of the conception and the effect it produces in the mind(s). The equivalence between interpretant and translator as “mediating representation” is comprehensible if one remembers that the translator-interpretant is the responsible for the establishment of the identity of two different linguistic expressions of the same object

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in the mind. Thus, it is the translator the responsible for the causation of the identity or resemblance by mediating the linguistic difference.

52 The further evolution of the concept reveals even more the decisive aspect of such causality. The definition of representation follows: A representation is that character of a thing by virtue of which, for the production of a certain mental effect, it may stand in place of another thing. The thing having this character I term a representamen, the mental effect, or thought, its interpretant, the thing for which it stands, its object (1.564).31

53 In On a New List of Categories was suggested the conceptual frame and terminology of the later work on semiotics in the Correspondence with Lady Welby, but here the division of the categorial space in Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness is achieved and mature.

54 In a way somewhat familiar to the late Wittgenstein and insisting in the triadic source of a complete deduction of categories, including the semiotic level of the analysis of signs, in his Questions concerning certain Faculties claimed for Man (1868) Peirce examined the question of the existence of thought without signs. His analysis led to the conclusion that “The only thought, then, which can possibly be cognized is thought in signs. But thought which cannot be cognized does not exist” (5. 251).32

55 This means that the process of cognition entails a self-reflexive movement and doesn’t coincide with the immediate, irreflexive, monolinear, temporal flow of consciousness or with the immediacy of the content of the inner experience.

56 On the other hand, the reductionist habit to reduce signs to the thought and the thought to the object (of perceptual content or intuition) is a consequence of the fear of a regressio ad infinitum in the process of the internal associations of the signs, as Peirce showed in his critique of Cartesian intuitionism.

57 But, Peirce kept the concept of representation.

58 Indeed, another justification for the non-reductionist thesis he also adduces lies on the fact that there is not a proper idea of thought without a notion of what it represents. He uses the concept of representation positively, as meaning the essential characteristic of the cognizing process. Because thought which cannot be cognized does not exist one needs to acknowledge the cognition as a process of meaning-donation of the thought. Thought is a process of self-enchainment where it is impossible to discover ultimate sources outside the flow. Such meaning-donation means representation through symbolic nexus in a cyclical chain. Sometimes, the symbolic nexus is also called “representation.” However, with this word is meant the internal reference linking representamen, object and interpretant and not a reproduction of a given fact, “thing” or intuition.

59 This is clarified in the answer to Question 7 of Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man where Peirce declares ungrounded the belief in ultimate foundations of the enchainment of the thought and meaning-donation.33 His answer to this question means that the use of the grammar of causation in the relation of thought to its underpinnings is limited. We should use a model of a circular causation instead of the fiction of ultimate foundations. In his arguments, the critique of the causation of the flow of thought joins the idea that all the process of thinking supposes relations and is donated within relations: “[…] we know of no power by which an intuition could be known. For, as the cognition is beginning, and therefore in a state of change, at only the first instant would it be intuition. And, therefore, the apprehension of it must take

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place in no time and be an event occupying no time. Besides, all the cognitive faculties we know are relative, and consequently their products are relations. But the cognition of a relation is determined by previous cognitions. No cognition not determined by a previous cognition, then, can be known” (5. 262).

60 The reference to the relation of cognition to previous cognitions in a chain is not far from Bergson durée or James “stream.” The distinct character of Peirce’s enchainment lies on its symbolic-semiotic structure. The character of symbolic linkage of the thought-stream was developed along the pragmatic critique of the Cartesian intuitionism in The fixation of Belief (1877) and How to make our ideas clear (1878), as an aspect in the construction of the doctrine of the three categories. Additionally, the maturity of Peirce’s critique of the prestige of the “clara et distinta perceptio” in 1877 and 1878 agrees with the formation of his theories on the scientific enquiry, the psychology of belief, the doctrine of the logical inference grounded on signs-relations and also the conviction of the identity of thought and sign-activity. These achievements constitute a system.

61 His notion of the role of the representations in mental life is never isolated from his understanding of the role of representations in the scientific endeavour or in the scientific ways to develop inferences which are communicative processes not reducible to mental states.

62 From the development of the theory of categories resulted the conclusion that the conception of what is entails a progressive determination of thought in an endless course, situated between the two extremities of the indeterminate firstness and the rules or laws for the recognition of the thought process itself, according to the thirdness. The secondness is defined by the actuality of action and reaction and it is identical with the sufficient maturity of thought to construct a fact. For that reason, Peirce wrote in A Guess at Riddle: It seems, then, that the true categories of consciousness are: first, feeling, the consciousness which can be included with an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another something; third, synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought (1.377).34

III.2. What is an Inference?

63 In 1869, in Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities continuing ideas from two other texts published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy – Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man and Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (both from 1868) – Peirce suggested the figure of the absolute sceptic, unable to justify any sentence or belief, in order to establish his refutation of scepticism, the impossibility of an absolute beginning and his thesis that every judgement results from (previous) inference (stock of knowledge). Every inference accepts to be recreated in the syllogism: every S is M; M is P; then S is P. Such form is the habitual ground for ratiocination in everyday life producing a continuous chain of conceptions. This means that what is valid as real must have the characteristic of something engendered in a cognitive running process. From these assertions follow three main consequences: i) [...] real things are of a cognitive and therefore significative nature [...]; ii) to predicate something of another thing is

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equivalent to say that the first is a sign of the other; iii) cognition is a process of semiotic nature.

64 In the Logic of 1873 one may follow the essay to define inference in the scientific enquiry from its grounding elements: ideas born from observations, formation of ideas through other ideas, development of ideas through inferential previous streams more complex. Peirce never isolates an inference from communicative connections.35 Psychic inferences of thought are thus mixed with communicative based inferences. On the other hand, the hypothetical nature of science explains that the inferences are never dead conclusions but prospective and conditional ways of disposing the known subjects.36 Disciplined inferences are methods. The convenience of the treatment of inferences as methods in the scientific enquiry is related to the creative orientation of the inferential stream towards the hypothetical (heuristic) activity of Science.

65 The requirement of self-sufficiency of the Cartesian intuitions limits the “clear and distinct perception” and the justified knowledge to a few moments in the psychic life and contradicts the continuity of the knowledge claimed for the scientific enquiry and common-sense through the illuminating power of guiding hypothesis or guessing.37 According to the article Logic (1873) and against Cartesianism, the normal movement of the scientific enquiry consists in a development from some temporary proto-beliefs which are general ideas able to start the inferential processes. Examples of proto- beliefs are the sensation and the observation. In the process of the scientific enquiry only observations are “real” inferential moments. Sensation is a starting point and a testimony of novelty in the thinking run but by itself it is not an inference. What Peirce calls the “final belief” is the consequence of this inferential process of fixation of the general opinion combining sensations and observations. In the case of the scientific enquiry the general opinion is not a solipsistic state of mind, but a consequence of a cooperative work in the formation of meaning and the cause of the general belief in a “community of research.” This means that the philosopher gave to communication and not to consciousness, alone, the final responsibility for the formation of the belief and the construction of the Reality.38

66 From Peirce’s writings we have no further explanation for the convergence of the psychic inferences and the communicative processing of meaning and information. We have to presuppose this convergence as already established. Thus, the heterogeneous character or relative autonomy of the conscious running of the inferences, with its ground in emotion and volition, and the communicative running of arguments and information-transmission was not emphasized. However, we know that the faith in the immediate connection of the stream of consciousness and communication would be pure ingenuity. Peirce didn’t give an adequate description of the enchainment of consciousness in communication and vice-versa. This remains a problem.

67 Certainly, the philosopher inverted the classical scheme of the representation and instead of conceiving the sign as a double of the thought-thing relation he took the sign as an activity characteristic of the thinking process itself, according to the famous definition of semiosis in Survey of Pragmatism: “By semiosis I mean […] an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this three-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs” (5.484).

68 However, Peirce didn’t realize that consciousness and communication are two relative independent sources of meaning generation.39 Both participate in meaning, but through

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different forms. The abstraction of the problem of the relative opacity of the psychic forms towards the communicative forms (and vice-versa) is reflected in the difficulty to realize how the final interpretants or the community’s beliefs influence the actual running of a psychological experience in the individuals. This “influence” remains hypothetical or “regulative” in the Kantian sense.40

69 Former developments on the doctrine of categories from the years 1867, 1890, 1894, 1896-189741 and the formulas of the sketches for the Lowell Lectures (1903),42 Lectures II and III, concerning the critique of the “nominalism” of modern Philosophy; the need for a recognition of “three types of Being” and three categories and here the regulative power of the “universals” (or generality) as “laws” concerning our representation of the future phenomena; the preparatory studies for the “existential graphs” entailing a concept of individuation, relation, possibility and necessity and the studies on abduction constitute the germinal material for Peirce’s understanding of semiosis as a universal component of Being in general and for his own semiotic transformation of Pragmat(ic)ism.

70 In the formulation of the theory of the “three universes” contained in the Correspondence with Lady Welby (December, 14, 1908), and before another essay of a trichotomy of the sign-types, Peirce outlined a sketch of the embryonic three triads articulating the reality-thought-sign combinations.

Figure 2

71 The resulting diagram represents the structure of the sign along the Representamen (R), Object (O) and Interpretant (I) links, with divisions occurring from its relative positions in the categories of the firstness, secondness and thirdness: Oi, Od, Ii, Id and If. The object (O) of the sign is divided in the types of the immediate (firstness) and dynamic (secondness); the Interpretant in immediate (firstness), dynamic (secondness) and final (thirdness). The Representament is not subject to divisions, because it coincides with the potentiality, typical of the firstness.

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72 If Peirce’s analogy of Man with a Sign stands for a radical, unrestricted, pan-semiotic model for the understanding of biological, psychic and communicative processes, it would contend with James’s pluralism and the principle of the selfhood, intimacy and individuality of the psychic stream of consciousness and, additionally, it would violate the borders between biological, psychic and social systems. If this last conclusion was not the intended result of Peirce’s analogy, even if some Peirce’s texts point to a pan- semiotic model of this kind, one must harmonize the semiotic model with an internal pluralism of levels which will lead to the recognition of systemic autonomies. Such proposal demands a combination of semiotic and systemic models. According to this systemic and plural semiotic approach James’s descriptions of the stream of consciousness would correspond to the psychic system with its own closure and borders formations and his claim to pluralism regains sense.

III.3. The Double Environment Hypothesis and the Meaning of Modelling Systems

73 If Peirce’s semiosis supposes a complete communicative dimension and not only a linguistic comprehension of the use of symbols, this means that it is only by communication and not by language alone that one is able to follow the formation of some important systemic borders. A triple distinction of consciousness, language and communication is needed. For example, the distinction between the physical, exterior thing and the psychological object is only completed with the supposition of a public space-time system of coordinates which is only available through communicative sources. But communication is autonomous from the psychological formation of meaning in a great variety of modes.

74 Modern Society is an evolutionary demonstration of such progressive autonomy of the communicative emergence of meaning towards the “Psyché.”

75 Inspired in the advances of Biosemiotics and in the writings of Y. Lotman and the Tartu School, the deepening of the concept of modelling systems led T. A. Sebeok to an enlarged notion of the modelling capabilities in systems subject to evolution, such as living systems, psychic systems and what he calls “cultural systems.”43

76 Modelling systems44 are enclosed spaces of semiotic and cognitive nature providing mappings of the world, adaptation responses to the environments, as “ecological niches,” schemes for the processing of signalling information and the selection of patterns of behaviour appropriate to the circumstances of action or movement. The ability to develop models evolves from the basic organisms45 as pre-verbal and pre- linguistic mapping and adaptation to the complex images of the world of Science, Philosophy and Literature passing through the linguistic modelling systems. All these stages are partially related to representation, but with “representation” one doesn’t mean passive reproduction of something given but mapping, selection, adaptation and coordination schemes. Further, a model is a congruent, self-referential set of schemes to anticipate and control the relation of cognitive orientations and action in complex organisms. Consequently, modelling is not an exclusive characteristic of the cognising psychic systems but occurs in biological, psychic and communication-based systems.46 According to T. Sebeok’s correction to Y. Lotman’s concept of “secondary modelling systems,” biological systems are the true primary modelling systems instead of linguistic systems which are secondary systems and “culture” and “cultural texts” are

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tertiary modelling systems.47 The criteria for primary, secondary or tertiary modelling systems depends on the degrees of increasing presupposition of the relevant environments. The tertiary modelling systems suppose the modelling results of the secondary systems.

77 Regarding the tertiary systems, I would prefer the concept of systems based on communication instead of “cultural systems,” in virtue of our thesis about the distinction between the communicative forms of meaning and the psychic forms of meaning.

78 I would like to emphasise now that psychic systems and systems based on communication are parts of this integrative view of the “modelling systems.” Both constitute models of the physical and biological environments and are models for each other, reciprocally. Each of them is the environment of the other. Language is an evolutionary tool for the accommodation of consciousness to the requirements of the participation in communication.48 But language doesn’t destruct the systemic autonomy of both systems, rather it presupposes such independence.

79 The hypothesis of a double or reciprocal environment supposes that meaning is the common element of both systems. What defines meaning is a minimal distinction that recurs in psychic life and in communication: the difference between actuality and potentiality.

80 W. James was aware of this basic oppositional repetitive relation at the foundations of the psychic processes of association, attention or, more generally speaking, of selection. The distinction also occurs in time, or we can interpret time as a universal generalization of the distinction of actuality and potentiality. However, the form of time is more universal than the forms of meaning in psychic or communicative systems.

81 Through the organic body the psychic system ensures a continuous contact with the physical and organic environment. Communication and communicative systems suppose the bodily coordination of the psychic systems towards their environments but the outcomes of communication are only significant for psychic systems or consciousness, because only psychic systems are able to decode communicative outcomes in their own elements, or thoughts. On the other hand, communication supposes the formation of the physical environment as an objective sphere regarding the “field of consciousness” which partially results from the closure of consciousness itself. The double environment is structured on the basis of a plurality of modelling schemes: biological, psychic and communicative. This multilevel architecture is worth of an autonomous analysis and remains a productive land for a multilinear Semiotic, refusing the abstraction of a naïve homogeneous model.49

82 Instead of conceiving representation as a doubling of the external being and a figurative passage between a physical state and a psychic replica the semiotic ideas of modelling and modelling systems consider the cognitive act of referring as a creation of the activity of modelling environments. What counts as the cognitive reference of a system shall be traced through the dividing border of the system, as its outer space. Such activity of drawing borders is one of semiotic nature because it is structured by the R-O-I relations. It is also systemic because gives to the object of the cognitive act of referring the status of an element in the environment of the system. Finally, it is

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evolutionary because supposes that the limits dividing system and environment are relative, contingent and evolve.

83 The adaptation of Peirce’s gerative semiotic R-O-I model and his idea of semiosis as an endless process to the style of the systemic description made clear that the physical reality of the objects exterior to the mind is not the unique available environment, but one may conceive environments constituted by psychic or organic events and many others. Biological events or psychic streams may be parts of the environment of a system. This depends on which system is taken as reference. If one assumes that communication makes a self-reproducing cycle of connected elements distinct from consciousness and from the biological units, because in communication there is a connection of elements autonomous from the elements connected in the psychic stream of consciousness or in the self-reproduction of the living, then one faces the relation of communication to consciousness or to the organic events as a typical relation of a system towards its environment.

84 James’s and Peirce’s approaches to pragmatism are so different in many aspects because they started from different systemic perspectives concerning the modelling activity and both believed in the universality of their own limited theoretical reconstructions of the partial modelling systems. The importance Peirce gave to the community in the endless formation of the “final beliefs,” which are quasi identical with the final interpretants, clearly resulted from a communicative bias in the understanding of the modelling activity. On the other hand, James’s quasi phenomenological description of the “field of consciousness” is a remarkable picture of the closure of the psychic systems coupled with the organic bodies, modelling the physical, external object or physical environment.

85 My proposal has an ontological depth. “What is” consists of the contingent outcome of overlapping environments: it is not a definite state in the world, a mental image or a communicative result of an endless communication process, but the overlapping of multiple modelling sources starting with the living mapping of the ecological niche until the conditional couplings of psychic and communicative modelling. This perspective gives an additional support to James’s pluralism and multiverse.

86 The programme of a multilinear Semiotics implies a non-reductionist concept of reference, beginning with the constitutive couple of self-reference and hetero-reference that emerges when a system closes its own borders regarding its environments. The question of the generation of systemic borders is similar to the problem of the determination of “what is” real in a particular course of learning and adaptation and is therefore a question born in the cradle of Pragmatism and Peirce’s Semiotics. But according to our multilinear programme evolution doesn’t mean an overall uniform result, but entails differences in evolutionary stages and time discrepancies between the systems and the environments.

87 In order to know what is “real” one needs to know what reference-frames were settled to establish the difference between the reference framework, or “model”, and what is going to be revealed through it. The R→O→I basic semiotic elements could be taken here as the elements of a gerative sequence of the emergence of the referential capability of systemic borders (self- and hetero-references).

88 On the division border between system (S) and environment (E) are closely associated three aspects of the semiosis: i) the distinction itself (S/E), like a separation between two “domains” – system and “world”; ii) the indication/signalling through which,

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thanks to a given operation, one of these domains may stand “in place of another”, thus generating the familiarity I have been commenting between representation and meaning and, finally, iii) an enchainment of operations and codifications to rule the repetition of the former distinction (S/E). These three aspects reiterate in the gerative systemic terminology the semiotic distinction between R→O→I. If the system refers to more than one environment, the three aspects must be applied to each of them.

89 The border between the system and the environment (S/E), the structuring difference between both domains, is situated at the level of the differential couples of the continuous/discontinuous and fusion/separation and can cause the enchainment of semiotic codes and operations sustaining or reinforcing meaning through repetition. In systems, the self-enchainment of operations (or elements) can be identified along the evolution as the possibility of repetition of the structural arrangement of a particular organism or machine. In order to reproduce the separation of the system regarding its environment (S/E) is required the repetition of the original distinction which is reinforced through the evolutionary perception of identity of the same. Thus, sameness is obtained through repetition of a distinction (S/E) that recurs inside itself in virtue of an observation. This means the evolutionary attainment of self-reference.

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NOTES

1. W. James relationship with C. Renouvier is attested in many texts, including A Pluralistic Universe and the Letters. See for example W. James 2008: Appendix B, p. 233, n.24; W. James 1920: vol. I, p. 163-4; 206-7 (here James refers a course he gave on the subject of C. Renouvier’s Essais), W. James 1920: vol. II, p. 44 ff.

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2. “Les choses en tant que représentations, conformément à ce que je viens d’exposer, je les nomme des faits ou des phénomènes. Ainsi j’arrive à définir la chose par la représentation après avoir défini la représentation par la chose; et ce cercle est inévitable; et les deux mots représentation et chose, d’abord distingués, viennent se confondre en un troisième: phenomena” (Renouvier 1854: 7). 3. Renouvier (1854: 24). 4. “La connaissance ne reçoit point de représenté sans représentatif, point de représentatif sans représenté, et c’est dans une représentation qu’elle reçoit l’un et l’autre ; ailleurs jamais” (Renouvier 1854: 24-5). 5. Mach (1886: 8). 6. James (2008: 135-66). 7. Bergson (1907: 72). 8. James (2009: 20). 9. James (2009: 21). 10. James (2009: 22). 11. James (2009: 21). 12. See the remarks about “the proper use of the term Object in Psychology” in James (1950: I, 275). 13. James (1950: I, 276-7). 14. See the illustration of the time of the “stream of thought” in James (1950: I, 279). 15. James (1950: I, 254-5). 16. James (1950: I, 242-3). 17. “The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and there, now and then, in our minds is the result of our laying the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time. But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite some and keep others apart. We actually ignore most of the things before us […] To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses themselves but organs of selection?” (James 1950: I, 284). 18. James (1950: I, 285). 19. F. H. Bradley (1893: 25). 20. F. H. Bradley (1893: 31). 21. F. H. Bradley (1893: 32). 22. J. Royce (1900: Lecture VIII). 23. Id., Ibid. 24. James (2008: 126). 25. James (2008: 128-9). 26. For a synthetic view combining aspects of the doctrine of the intersubjective constitution of the “social order” of the Husserlian Phenomenology and William James’s concept of consciousness see: Schutz 1962. Compare also with Gurwitsch 1964. 27. This was the point of departure of A. Schutz’s research, partially connected to James’s Psychology. Due to his debt to E. Husserl’s Phenomenology and M. Weber’s Sociology, Schutz’s analyses of communication in society are subordinated to the methodological arch relating the subject, the action and the shared symbols. Compare Schutz & Luckmann (1973: 148 ff.). Here, the connection with G. H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society is evident. 28. With the concept of communication used along this text it is not meant an intersubjective intercourse of words between human beings. The concept is used with a larger meaning. By communication I mean a production of meaning effects that transcend the consciousness of the individuals and may have its source, dissemination and impact outside psychic systems or psychic environments. Additionally, the idea of a self-catalyzed system of communication comes from the work of N. Luhmann. See Luhmann 2001.

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29. Some aspects of the research about the impact of Peirce’s concept of sign and semeiosis in the World-image of the traditional Metaphysics were developed by K.-O. Apel (1973: 157-77) and L. Honnefelder 1990. Summarizing many readings of Peirce, see Ketner (1995: 315 ff.). 30. The Kantian influence was decisive in the years of the formation of the first sketches of the categories. In the text On a New List of Categories, a category was the conceptual result of the reduction of the multiplicity of the sensorial experience, also reflected in the different types of judgements. At the surface, Peirce’s idea of a new deduction of categories continues what Kant called metaphysical deduction of the categories. However, Peirce was aware of the need for a special analysis of the signs implied in the judgements. Later, in the Lectures on Pragmatism, Lecture II, Peirce used the concept of “Phenomenology” to denote the discipline responsible for the examination of “the faculty of seeing.” See 5.43. Under mixed presuppositions and new interpretations of a “science of ideas” or conceptions the philosopher recurred also to the words “Ideoscopy,” in the Letters to Lady Welby (8.328), and “Phaneroscopy” (1.317-21; “The Basis of Pragmaticism in Phaneroscopy” in C. S. Peirce, N. Houser 1998: 360 ff.). See also W. L. Rosensohn 1993. 31. References to C. S. Peirce’s Collected Papers will be along the text. The numbers refer volume and paragraph in the Harvard edition. 32. The answer to Question 5 “Whether we can think without signs” is given in 5.251 as following: If we seek the light of external facts, the only cases of thought which we can find are of thought in signs. Plainly, no other thought can be evidenced by external facts. But we have seen that only by external facts can thought be known at all. The only thought, then, which can possible be cognized is thought in signs. But thought which cannot be cognized does not exist. All thought, therefore, must necessarily be in signs (5. 251). 33. “Question 7 ‘Whether there is any cognition not determined by a previous cognition’ […] For something entirely out of consciousness which may supposed to determine it, can, as such, only be known and only adduced in the determinate cognition in question. So, that to suppose that a cognition is determined solely by something absolutely external, is to suppose its determinations incapable of explanation. Now, this is a hypothesis which is warranted under no circumstances, inasmuch as the only possible justification for a hypothesis is that it explains the facts, and to say that they are explained and at the same time to suppose them inexplicable is self-contradictory” (5. 260). 34. Earlier, in Consequences of four Incapacities he declared about the way in which the ideas return to a “first” beginning, less vivid than the actuality: “[…] These in their term have been derived from others still less general, less distinct, and less vivid; and so on back to the ideal first, which is quite singular, and quite of consciousness. This ideal first is the particular thing-in-itself. It does not exist as such” (5. 311). 35. “Some thoughts are produced by previous thoughts according to regular laws of association, so that if the previous thoughts be known, and the rule of association be given, the thought which is so produced may be predicted. This is the elaborative operation of thought, or thinking par excellence. But when an idea comes up in the mind which has no such relation to former ideas, but is something new to us, we say that it is caused by something out of mind, and we call the process by which such thoughts spring up, sensation. And those parts of investigation which consist chiefly in supplying such materials for thought to work over, combine and analyze, are termed observations” (7. 328) “[…] But observations alone cannot constitute investigation […] Accordingly, besides observation it must be that there is also an elaborative process of thought by which the ideas given by observation produce others in the mind” (7.331). 36. A consequence of the postulation of the “final belief” in the actual efforts to build knowledge is the ideal character of a community of research which operates in a way similar to a hypothesis in the heuristic drive of science: “Hypothesis is where we find some very curious circumstance,

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which would be explained by the supposition that it was a case of a certain general rule, and therefore adopt that supposition” (2.524). 37. The constitution of the continuity of knowledge through hypothetic guessing is especially emphasized in the fragment manuscript entitled Guessing. Here Peirce shows the power of the “generals” or universals in the formation of the “art of inquiry” (7.47), but also the value of vagueness. 38. In Consequences of Four Incapacities Peirce wrote: “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge” (5.316-5.317). 39. The homogeneous medium attributed to the sign-thought couple is emphasized through the endless connectivity of its elements: “From the proposition that every thought is a sign, it follows that every thought must address itself to some other, must determine some other, since that is the essence of a sign” (5. 253). 40. The diagrams linking the three categories of firtsness, secondness and thirdness and the three components of semiosis, with its further divisions, makes clear that Peirce intends with his semiotic concept of thought a new idea of representation without rejecting the homogeneous medium of the ancient, medieval and modern Theory of Being as the ground for the modi essendi, cognoscendi and communicandi. Peirce used the kantian concept of “regulative principles” to describe the power of the representation of the future in the orientation in the present as a “logical principle” in the Notebook of the Lowell Lectures. See manuscript numbered MS 462, p. 25 Archive images, captured at Harvard 1994, by M. Keeler under NSF grant. Stored on DAT and transferred to the University of Washington in 1997. Archived on 1/98 at CARTAH, by M.Keeler on 6 CDs; CDs 1-5 ISO9660, CD 6 HFS. Towards the same direction goes his conception of abduction in 2.270. 41. See E. Balsemão Pires (1993: 117-8). 42. Compare with the Manuscripts numbered MSS 460, MSS 462 and MSS 464. Archive images, captured at Harvard 1994, by M. Keeler under NSF grant. Stored on DAT and transferred to the University of Washington in 1997. Archived on 1/98 at CARTAH, by M.Keeler on 6 CDs; CDs 1-5 ISO9660, CD 6 HFS. 43. Compare: Sebeok 2001; Sebeok 1994; Johansen & Larsen 2002; Petrelli & Ponzio 2008. 44. See: Lotman 2001; Lotman & Ouspenski 1976; Bains 2001; Deeley 2004; Nöth 2006. 45. Here the reference to the work of biologist J. von Uexküll and his concept of the biological Umwelt of the organisms is important. Compare: J. von Uexküll 1956; T. von Uexküll 1999; Barbieri 2008. 46. See Battail 2009. 47. Sebeok (1994: 139-49). 48. According to Luhmann (2001: 120-1). 49. The image of an “Architectonics of Semiosis” in an essay of E. Taborsky 1998 is seductive, because in the book the author tries to develop the idea of “semiotic complexity, ongoing diversification” (Taborsky 1998: 16) or “stages of increasing complexity of cognition” (Taborsky 1998: 114). But, a real diversification of semiosis demands the previous clarification of systemic individuation and constitution of meaning frontiers between systems and environments.

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ABSTRACTS

The pragmatist turn in Philosophy in the late XIX century and XX century was a serious attempt to refuse the privilege of the representational elements of the consciousness in the production of knowledge. Such privilege has its roots in Ancient Philosophy, in some consequences of the Platonic heritage, but was toughened by Modern philosophers of empiricist or aprioristic lineages within the modern concepts of Experience and Truth. With these last concepts of Experience and Truth I’m referring to the objectivising tendency that leads to identify experience with the final object resulting from the judicative fixation of relations. Due to the fixation of some basic relations the object of experience was identified and conceived with such and such characteristics as something independent of the mental or judicative activity. Such method of fixation and objectivising of relations is also present in the common-sense ideas of Reality, Experience and Truth. In the field of the theory of signs the reputation of the modern concept of representation was so vast that despite the progress in the discovery of the differential character of the linguistic units, Saussure’s well-known notion of sign and the division between “signifiant” and “signifié” still kept the reference to the double across the body/mind polarity and to the “mental image” of the sign, Vorstellung, concept or “signifié,” as the core of meaning. If Peirce and James agree in the refusal of the classical theory of representation, their rejection came from different horizons and their critiques don’t mean the same. I’ll try to show that James’s and Peirce’s attempts are not disjunctive, although they are not members of a simple addition. In the writings of the Tartu School and in T. Sebeok’s reassessment to Peircean semeiosis one finds interesting tools to reconsider the relation to the World of the “field of consciousness” and semeiosic cycles, beyond representationalism, such as the concepts of environment and primary, secondary and tertiary modelling systems. Starting with these insights I’ll propose at the end of the essay the notion of a double environment between psychic systems and systems based on communication.

AUTHOR

EDMUNDO BALSEMÃO PIRES Universidade de Coimbra edbalsemao[at]gmail.com

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James’s Epistemology and the Will to Believe

Christopher Hookway

1 When we look for distinctively pragmatist contributions to epistemology, we are likely to turn to Peirce’s criticisms of Cartesianism and his insights into induction, adbuction and the method of science. We may also examine Dewey’s criticisms of the “Quest for Certainty” and his work in what he called “logic” and the theory of inquiry. We are less likely to turn to the writings of William James whose interests and insights may be supposed to lie elsewhere. The aim of this paper is to identify some Jamesian contributions to our understanding of epistemic norms. I shall argue that a number of views which have become prominent in contemporary epistemology, and some of which are often described as pragmatist approaches to epistemology can be traced to the writings of James. And I shall consider how far the doctrine of the “Will to Believe” is an application of these epistemological views. I shall argue that James was an earlier defender of epistemic contextualism and epistemic conservatism, and I shall also suggest that some of his insights are in harmony with contemporary virtue epistemology.

I. Epistemic Contextualism

2 First we shall examine some evidence that James was sympathetic to epistemic contextualism. Contextualists hold that whether a belief counts as knowledge, or whether it is justified, can depend upon the context of the believer or the context of the person who is evaluating the belief (see DeRose 1992). In some circumstances, higher standards are required for a belief to count as justified than in others. For example, suppose that I am in the supermarket and the question arises whether we need to buy lasagne. Trusting my memory that I saw lasagne in the pantry yesterday morning, I dismiss the question, confident that I know that we possess lasagne. But suppose that I have already planned an important dinner for tomorrow, and the availability of lasagne is an indispensable ingredient of it. Since my memory may be fallible and the consequences of my being wrong could be serious, I wouldn’t claim

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knowledge that we possess lasagne. This has often been thought to offer a strategy for defusing skepticism. The context in which we can take seriously the possibility that we are dreaming or deceived by an evil demon may not be relevant to everyday beliefs that we are using to guide our actions. Contextualists often invoke the phenomenon of “pragmatic encroachment”: the standards of justification that we employ in a particular context depend upon how the belief in question is to be used and upon how damaging it would be if the belief turned out to be false. Thus more (or better) evidence is required for belief in results of medical research than for casual reflection.

3 What is the evidence that William James would have favoured epistemic contextualism? The place to begin is “The will to believe,” James’s response to Clifford’s account of the “Ethics of belief.” James is responding to one of the fundamental principles of W.K.Clifford’s “Ethics of belief.” According to Clifford: It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. (Clifford 1897: 186)

4 For Clifford, this rule is an ethical principle: “Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer.” Such belief is “sinful” (ibid.). As is well known, Clifford used this principle to mandate agnosticism about religious matters.

5 James’s paper argues that, in appropriate circumstances, it can be rational or appropriate to form or retain beliefs when you possess relatively little, or even no, relevant evidence. His argument rests upon identifying the particular circumstances in which belief can be formed on “passional grounds.” In identifying these circumstances, he is specifying the sort of context in which belief may be legitimate when we have no or little relevant evidence.

6 James specifies the contextual requirements for such belief to be legitimate. One requirement is that the correctness of the belief in question cannot be settled intellectually. Others concern the practical urgency of settling whether to endorse the proposition in question, and the lack of alternative courses of action which do not depend upon this belief. This urgency can depend upon the risks involved in suspending judgment in the proposition in question or in arriving at a belief which is in fact fals (James 1897: 2-4).

7 A contextualist response to Clifford’s position can take two different forms. One is to observe that the term “sufficient evidence” is vague or context relative. We may suppose that in different contexts, different amounts of evidence will count as sufficient. Someone may argue that the amount of evidence that would be sufficient for a casual belief where the risk of error has little weight would be insufficient when engaging in, for example, medical research. In that case, we could continue to endorse the principle as it was formulated by Clifford, but deny that it has the consequences which Clifford expects it to have. Alternatively, James could hold that Clifford’s principle is applicable in some circumstances but not in others. As we shall see, James’s response is of the second of these kinds. He does not address how we should understand when evidence is sufficient.

8 In section VII of “The Will to Belief,” James writes: There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion, – ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose different the theory of knowledge seems hitherto have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error. (1897: 17)

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9 These “two separable laws” “Believe truth!” and “Shun error” can be in tension, and “by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life” (1897: 18). James’s view is that in some contexts, we should give prominence to one of these laws, and in other contexts, we should rely upon the other. We want to obtain truth and we want to avoid falsehood, and we weigh these desiderata differently in different contexts. In effect, we have to choose between competing (prima facie) duties, and context determines which of those duties we should give priority to in a particular case. Clifford’s view appears to be that one of these duties (the avoidance of error) should be given absolute priority.

10 In science, he tells us, “and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all.” In science, we value the avoidance of error more than obtaining truth: we can wait to reach the truth. But “Moral questions present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof” (James 1897: 22). And the “Law courts have to decide on the basis of the best evidence attainable for the moment, for the judge’s duty is to make laws as well as to ascertain it” (James 1897: 20). James presents the issue by saying that there are two laws, and we can only follow one of them on any specific occasion, so we need an account of which we should follow. A more plausible kind of pragmatism would hold that we have, not two laws but rather two values which carry different weights in different circumstances, making use of Bayesian ideas and decision theory (Hookway 2005, Levi 1998). Although James´s way of describing the issue may have to be rejected, it is evidently a precursor of these more sophisticated views.

II. Contextualism and the Will to Believe

11 According to James, it is legitimate to believe propositions which cannot be settled by intellectual means when the choice meets some specific contextual circumstances. We can illustrate this by reference to one of James’s examples. Suppose that I am about to be interviewed for a job, and my current evidence does not give me conclusive reasons for thinking that I will. I am currently undecided about whether my application for the job will be successful. It is important to me that I get the job, and I believe that it is possible, to some degree at least, that I will. Let us suppose that I also believe, quite reasonably, that if I am confident that I will succeed, I am likely to perform much more impressively in the interview than I would if I was uncertain about the outcome. If I can bring myself to believe that I will succeed, then I am not irrational to do so. I should not follow Clifford’s apparent advice that I am irresponsible if I do not carefully evaluate my evidence and, recognizing that it does not settle the matter, abandon my belief and take an agonistic stance on the matter. As is well known, James discerns a similar structure in our reflections about whether we should retain, or perhaps adopt, religious belief. If I recognize that I face a “genuine option” which is “forced” and “momentous,” and it cannot be resolved by intellectual means, I am not irrational to hold on to a belief for which I do not possess conclusive evidence (James 1897: 2-4).

12 Interestingly, the philosopher of science, Bas van Fraassen describes James’s strategy in “Belief and the will” (1985) as the application to the case of religious belief of a strategy of belief formation which is widespread in science. He interprets Clifford’s notion of “sufficient evidence” as conclusive evidence, and argues that when we accept beliefs on inductive grounds, we have to rely upon non-evidential considerations. Perhaps it is

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rational to trust our current opinions even if, in a fallibilist spirit, we think there is a good chance that they will be refuted by further evidence. This is because doing so will be the best means of advancing our long term scientific goals of improving our scientific understanding of our surroundings. If we believe propositions on less than conclusive evidence, we initiate processes that will lead to a more thorough testing of the hypothesis, and perhaps to a better articulation of it. So van Fraassen’s view is that, both in the case of religious belief and scientific belief, it is a good strategy to believe propositions for which we have less than “sufficient” evidence, because we have non- evidential considerations for doing so.

III. James and Peirce on Science and Belief: A Comparison

13 In 1998, Peirce gave a series of lectures to the “Cambridge Conferences.” They were subsequently published in Reasoning and the Logic of Things (Peirce 1992). Some scholars interpret the first of these lectures, “Philosophy and the conduct of life” as a rejection of James’s doc trine of the Will to Belief. Their differences may be less than is often supposed. We can see this by considering their views about the role of belief in science.

14 James holds that ‘whenever the option of losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away and at any rate save ourselves from any risk of believing falsehood.” We can do this by suspending judgment, by neither believing nor disbelieving the proposition in question. According to James, this is almost always the case in science. The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived. Science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may say that she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. (James 1897: 21)

15 So James is ready to follow Clifford’s rule in serious scientific research. Indeed, if truth is presented “in affirmative form,” “she would decline to touch it” (ibid.). Agreeing with Clifford, James endorses the observation that “such truth as that […] would be stolen in defiance of [science’s] duty to mankind” (ibid.).

16 In Peirce´s Cambridge lectures (Peirce 1992: 111-2) he agreed with James. He insists that what is properly and usually called belief […] has no place in science at all […] because “nothing is vital for science; nothing can be” (CP1.635). “The true scientific investigator completely loses sight of the utility of what he is about” (CP1.619). Peirce seems to hold that, in pure science, the avoidance of error should be given priority. This provides an interesting contrast between Peirce and van Fraassen. Peirce holds that current philosophical results are not a matter of belief but are, rather, the objects of more tentative forms of acceptance. But Van Fraassen seems to think that current scientific results are believed, but that the belief in is not supported by “sufficient” evidence, and the belief has a non-evidential basis. The differences noted here may be less significant than they appear: Peirce, as well as denying that we believe current scientific results, talks about “scientific belief,” a state which is more provisional or tentative than full belief. Even if fallibilist scientists allow that the sort of acceptance scientific belief involves is more tentative than ordinary common-sense beliefs, if may be appropriate

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to treat this as a variety of (scientific) belief. However it is also important to recognize that the religious belief which James obtains on the basis of his “passional considerations” could not be a kind of tentative acceptance of the sort that Peirce and Popper would say was appropriate for scientific opinions.

17 Peirce’s agreement with James goes further. When we are concerned with “vitally important issues,” matters of urgency and importance for our lives, we should not trust to fallible scientific results. In vital matters, “the principle on which we are willing to act is a belief” (1992: 112). “Theoretical knowledge, of science,” he says, “has nothing directly to say concerning practical matters” (1992: 112). Whether we should believe depends upon context: we should be tentative about believing current scientific results; and whether we should believe is a function of how ready will be to risk possessing a false belief on the matter. Van Fraassen may suggest that James’s doctrine of the will to believe should lead us to take such risks when acquiring scientific beliefs, while Peirce would not. But James’s views here seem to be closer to Peirce’s than to van Fraassen’s. Both pragmatists have contextualist views about when we should be ready to believe a proposition.

IV. Epistemic Conservatism

18 We now turn to the second epistemological position that is reflected in James’s writings, epistemic conservatism. We can provide a positive justification for some of our beliefs. We can point to evidence that supports them or a proof that demonstrates their truth. However, for many of our beliefs, we can provide no positive justification at all. We may forget how we acquired them. They are things that we have learned but haven´t forgotten. If we have no positive justification for accepting some proposition, are we justified in believing it? The argument of Descartes’s first Meditation holds that if we lack positive justification for a belief, then this itself constitutes a reason for doubting it. Epistemic conservatives reject this Cartesian assumption. Beliefs are justified unless we have positive reason for doubting them:

19 If someone already believes some proposition, then they are prima facie rational in continuing to believe it.

20 You only need to be able to provide reasons for continuing to hold a settled belief if you are presented with a “defeater” for it, something that suggests that the proposition is false or something that suggests you were not entitled to hold it.

21 Beliefs are justified unless there is a positive reason for doubting them: the concept of a reason for doubt is more fundamental than the concept of a reason for belief. This opens up a range of interesting issues about just what constitutes a reason for doubting a stably held belief. Why are we justified in ignoring the sorts of hypothetical reasons for doubt which are proposed by proponents of skepticism?

22 This form of conservatism is often defended by philosophers sympathetic to the common-sense tradition. It is also found in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and it is sometimes assumed by epistemologists defending externalist views of justification and knowledge. It is also found in the writings of pragmatist philosophers such as Isaac Levi (1998) and Peirce (see Hookway 2008). Peirce calls upon philosophers “not to pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts” (1868, EP1: 29). Later, in 1906, he wrote that “what one does not doubt cannot be rendered more satisfactory than it

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already is” (CP6.498). And Levi defended “the principle of doxastic inertia” which holds that “there is no need to justify current beliefs, only changes in belief” (Levi 1998: 78).

23 James’s commitment to the principle of doxastic inertia is evident from his 1908 lectures on Pragmatism, especially in lecture II in which he explains “What pragmatism means” and introduces his pragmatist account of truth. Acknowledging the influence of Schiller and Dewey, he considers how we arrive at new opinions, concluding that process by which this occurs is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion and then that […] until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum disturbance of the latter. (James 1907: 34)

24 James’s conservatism is manifest when he writes that we “preserve the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible” (James 1907: 35).

25 The insistence on this conservatism, this preservation of the “older stock of belief,” is very important for James. He suggests that taking this seriously was indispensable if we are to recognize what is wrong with many of the criticisms made of pragmatism. Indeed, he says that loyalty to the older truths “is the first principle in revising and forming our beliefs rationally” (ibid.: 35). Pragmatism’s critics are disturbed by the suggestion that there is no independent or object constraint upon what we believe: perhaps, they suggest, we can reasonably accept anything which it suits our needs to believe. Rationalists and some other realists and empiricists offer different candidate explanations of why and how our opinions are constrained by reason, or by the facts, or by experience. Loyalty to the older facts provides another kind of constraint. They reflect what we know (fallibly) about reality and our determination to be loyal to these older facts and thus indicate thus we want to revise our beliefs in a way that preserves what we take ourselves to know. We trust our beliefs until given reason to doubt them, not whenever we think it would suit us to change them.

26 How does James’s epistemic conservatism relate to the argument of “The will to believe”? It is useful to distinguish two versions of the sort of view that James defends, two contexts from which his argument may be employed.

27 First, consider the position of someone who currently holds religious belief. They don’t reflect much upon the belief’s evidential credentials, but they find holding such a belief ful- filling. Clifford would probably regard this person as epistemically irresponsible: we have an obligation to ensure that such a belief is, indeed, supported by “sufficient evidence.” James’s epistemic conservatism would give reason for rejecting this requirement. In most cases, beliefs are innocent unless we think there is a positive reason for doubting them. Perhaps the argument of “The will to believe” would provide additional support for resisting the demand that we investigate the epistemic credentials of the belief. It may be suggested that the suspicion that the belief has been

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sustained by non-evidential considerations does not provide positive reason for doubting it.

28 Second, consider the position of someone who is initially an agnostic about the existence of God. Clifford’s view is such a person should proceed by collecting evidence, and their agnosticism should not be replaced by stable belief until they have “sufficient evidence” either for or against the truth of the religious proposition. This is the version that can seem problematic: James spears to recommend that this person should manipulate his beliefs by seeking out experiences which would contribute to the onset of religious belief.

29 James’s observation that a better title for his paper would have been “The right to believe” may support the first of these two positions, and it is significant that Peirce’s view of the rationality of religious belief fist this view as well. Suspicious of any attempt to ground religious belief in arguments or theories, he held that “pretty nearly everybody more or less believes that God is real, including many of the scientific men who are accustomed to think the belief is entirely unfounded” (CP 6.496). Indeed, religious belief is manifested in attitudes and practices, and it would be “folly” to think that “metaphysical theory in regard to the mode of being of the perfect” could damage religious belief (W3: 322, and see Hookway 2000: chapter 11).

V. Virtue Epistemology and Our Epistemic Temperaments

30 So far, we have said little about the epistemic relevance of “passional considerations.” Over the last twenty years, a number of philosophers have defended versions of virtue epistemology, approaches to the study of epistemic evaluation which are analogous to virtue theories in ethics (DePaul & Zabzebski 2003; Hookway 2003). Such views have taken a number of different forms. Some involve recognizing that epistemic evaluation rests upon possession of capacities or skills which can be describes as “excellences.” Others place emphasis upon the possession of favourable character traits, traits which enable us to form beliefs responsibly or to inquire well. Some virtue epistemologists argue that success in scientific investigations – or in other kinds of investigations – depends upon the possession of appropriate traits. For example, we must possess curiosity, open-mindedness, and diligence in testing theories, and so on. One way in which our epistemic evaluations are manifested, according to this kind of view, is through affective or emotional responses. Real or “felt” doubt about our beliefs can take the form of a sort of epistemic anxiety or “fear.” Someone who possesses the epistemic virtue will respond with doubt or anxiety about the belief in question. Just as fear alerts us to salient threats to our lives or activities, so doubt, epistemic anxiety, alerts us to salient problems, or salient weaknesses in our epistemic position. Epistemic virtues are varies, but we would expect that success in our reasoning and inquiry depends upon possessing traits such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and other traits. And if we take seriously James’s first lecture on Pragmatism in 1906, we learn of the importance of temperament to our practices, recognizing that commitments to tough minded empiricism or to tender minded rationalism reflect different temperaments or character traits. When we are guided by these temperamental traits, we are guided by “passional considerations” and according to James, his kind of pragmatist has the ability to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of both sorts of temperamental trait.

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Conclusion

31 James’s account of the legitimacy of belief is contextualist, conservative, and in the spirit of virtue epistemology. All of these features contribute to his defence of the “will to believe” doctrine. Whether they are the whole of his argument may be less clear. But his insistence that, for example, belief in molecules is grounded in the prestige of those who tell us about them and van Fraassen’s claim that the grounds on which we believe current fallible scientific results are similar to those employed in James’s argument for the will to believe offers some support for the idea that James’s reasons for believing in God draw on similar sorts of considerations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CLIFFORD W. K., (1879), “The Ethics of Belief,” in Lectures and Essays vol. 2, London, McMillan.

DEPAUL M. & L. ZAGZEBSKI (eds.), (2003), Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

DEROSE K., (1992), “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, 913-29.

VAN FRAASSEN B., (1984), “Belief and the Will,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 81, 235-56.

HOOKWAY Ch., (2000), Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

HOOKWAY Ch., (2003), “How to Be a Virtue Epistemologist,” in DePaul & Zagzebski (eds.), 183-202.

HOOKWAY Ch., (2005), “Ramsey and Pragmatism: The Influence of Peirce,” in Maria Frapolli (ed.), The Philosophy of Ramsey, London, Rodopi, 182-93.

HOOKWAY Ch., (2008), “Peirce and Skepticism,” in J. Greco (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, New York, Oxford University Press, 310-29.

JAMES W., (1907) Pragmatism: A New Name For an Old Way of Thinking, Cambridge, Harvard University Press (1972).

JAMES W., (1897), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, reprinted version, New York, Dover Publications.

LEVI I., (1998), “Pragmatism and Change of View,” in C. J. Misak (ed.), Pragmatism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplementary volume 24, 177-201.

PEIRCE C. S., (1982), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, M. Fisch, E. Moore, C. Kloesel, N. Houser et al. (eds.), Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press. (Refered to as W with volume number.)

PEIRCE C. S., (1931-60), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eight volumes, C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. Burks (eds.), Cambridge, Harvard University Press. (References take the form “CPn.m” giving volume and numbered section.)

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PEIRCE C. S., (1992), Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

PEIRCE C. S., (1998), The Essential Peirce, two volumes, The Peirce Edition Project, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. (References take the form “EPn:m” giving volume and page.)

ABSTRACTS

William James’s paper “The Will to Believe” defends some distinctive and controversial views about the normative standards that should be adopted when we are reflecting upon what we should believe. He holds that, in certain special kinds of cases, it is rational to believe propositions even if we have little or no evidence to support our beliefs. And, in such cases, he holds that our beliefs can be determined by what he calls “passional considerations” which include “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set” (1897: 9). On most occasions “we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.” When James allows passional considerations a major role in determining the rationality of belief and argues that it is rational to form beliefs in advance of the evidence, he can easily be understood as holding that belief can be responsible when it is not warranted by epistemological norms. Belief can be rational and responsible when the reasons which support it are entirely prudential or practical. The question I am concerned with here is: how far can James’s argument in “The Will to Believe” be understood as an application of some views which are genuinely epistemological? One question we can ask about these views is: how far are they an application of a distinctively pragmatist approach to epistemological concerns about when belief is justified? One possibility is that James is making some original contributions to epistemology which may have echoes in contemporary epistemology. I shall argue that this interpretation of James’s argument is more plausible than it at first appears.

AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER HOOKWAY The University of Sheffield c.j.hookway[at]sheffield.ac.uk

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Peirce’s Post-Jamesian Pragmatism

Nathan Houser

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This paper was originally presented to the International Conference on William James and Pragmatism, 12-13 November 2010, University of Coimbra, Portugal.

1 Anyone who has looked into the origins of pragmatism knows the story of William James’s famous August 26, 1898 lecture to the Berkeley Philosophical Union in which he publically introduced pragmatism by name for the first time and acknowledged Charles Peirce as its father. James’s talk set the philosophical world abuzz and prodded Peirce to take up his pen to write about pragmatism again after many years of silence.1 How Peirce’s pragmatism unfolded after James’s talk is my main subject but I will first briefly characterize Peirce’s friendship with James and will remark on the present-day resurgence of pragmatism.

2 Peirce and James met in 1861 when they were fellow students at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. James was 19 years old. Peirce, who had already taken a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, was 22. They soon became good friends. During the early years of their friendship, Peirce was the dominant figure; not only was he older, but he already had a reputation for genius and he seemed well on his way to a stellar career as a physical scientist, while also being well regarded in Cambridge for his knowledge of logic and the history and philosophy of science. James, on the other hand, had abandoned his aspiration to become an artist when he entered the Lawrence Scientific School with a view to becoming a doctor of medicine, and for much of the decade that followed he remained unsettled over his career choice and frequently suffered from severe depression. There is some anecdotal evidence that it was Peirce who persuaded James to give up medicine and to take up psychology.2 It is true, at least, that James publicly acknowledged Peirce’s early influence on his career and was even once reported to have said to his students that he owed “everything” to Peirce (Rukeyser 1942: 378).

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3 During their middle years, after James began teaching at Harvard in 1872 and until the mid-1880’s when Peirce’s career began to unravel, it seemed that both men were destined for notable success. After the meetings of the famous Cambridge Metaphysical Club, which met sometimes in Peirce’s study and sometimes in James’s, their lives diverged. Peirce went to Washington D.C. as the assistant in charge of gravity determinations for the United States Coast Survey3 and he frequently traveled to sites in North America and Europe to conduct scientific experiments. From 1879 to 1884 he lived in Baltimore where he taught logic part-time at the new Johns Hopkins University while also continuing to work for the Coast Survey. Peirce had already achieved international renown for his work in geodesy and in logic. James, too, traveled to Europe during those years but he made his home in Cambridge and continued at Harvard, where in 1874 he established the first psychology laboratory in the United States. In 1880, James was appointed to Harvard’s philosophy department and after that taught both philosophy and psychology. On his travels he met leading European psychologists and philosophers, including Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach, and Wilhelm Wundt. James was a charismatic man who, unlike Peirce, made friends easily; his renown and influence quickly spread.

4 After Peirce lost his appointment at Johns Hopkins in 1884, and later his assistantship in the Coast Survey, James became the dominant figure in their friendship, writing letters of recommendation for academic appointments for Peirce, procuring lectures for him, and finally even establishing a small but crucial privately funded pension for him. Two of the most important series of lectures of Peirce’s career, his Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898 and his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism of 1903, were arranged for by James. Not only did these lectures provide rare public venues for Peirce’s mature philosophy, they also provided critically needed income. Peirce’s brother, James Mills, wrote to James that the 1903 Harvard Lectures helped save Peirce from ruin (EP2: xxiv).4 On the day following the conclusion of the Harvard Lectures, Peirce added “Santiago” as his second middle name, apparently to honor James for his faithful support.

5 As a matter of human interest, these connections between Peirce and James are engaging, and it is intriguing that there are still many mysteries and hidden chapters in the story of their friendship. I think one of the most obscure facets of the Peirce-James story is how and to what extent they influenced each other intellectually. What did they learn from each other and how did they help shape each other’s key ideas? How much did they collaborate? There are no widely accepted answers to these questions and it is doubtful if there ever will be any definitive answers because surviving documentary evidence is scant and can be interpreted, and has been interpreted, in conflicting ways. Notwithstanding their long friendship, there has been a tendency among historians of ideas to downplay their influence on each other. Students of Peirce and James usually seem more inclined to flesh out their disagreements than their agreements, perhaps especially when it comes to their pragmatisms. The story of Peirce renaming his pragmatism with the less agreeable name, pragmaticism, is well known, and it is usually said that Peirce took this step to distance himself from James (and from others who were in the James camp). While there is certainly some truth to this, I believe there was an interesting interplay of ideas at work in the development of Peirce’s and James’s late pragmatisms just as there had been in the early Metaphysical Club days. In particular, I believe that Peirce’s late pragmatism, while distinct from

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James’s in important ways, bears evidence of James’s influence – at least it becomes more Jamesian in certain respects. The reference in my title to Peirce’s post-Jamesian pragmatism is to what is usually called Peirce’s late pragmatism – the pragmatism that emerged after James’s landmark 1898 Berkeley lecture.

6 I should point out that I am not only concerned with history but also with issues about pragmatism that bear on philosophy today. It is widely acknowledged, even by those who do not welcome it, that pragmatism is on the rise. I do welcome it, but I know that from its earliest days pragmatism has had its detractors, and that is as true today as it was a hundred years ago. But whether we like it or not, pragmatism can no longer be dismissed as of only historical interest. This is evident from the large number of recent articles and books about pragmatism as well as from the fact that a number of journals and centers have sprung up in recent years to advance pragmatism studies. Of special note is the increasing number of international conferences on pragmatism which attests not only to the present-day interest in pragmatism but also to the fact that no matter how American it might have been in its origins, pragmatism belongs to the world.

7 Among those who have written about the resurgence of pragmatism, some go so far as to say that it could become the dominant philosophical approach of 21st century.5 One such scholar is Richard Bernstein, whose work stands out because of his confidence in the continuing, even in part still untapped, relevance of the classical pragmatists, especially Peirce, James, and Dewey. Bernstein is adamant that Peirce is the father of pragmatism but he dismisses the usual claim that pragmatism was born in 1877-78 in the pages of the Popular Science Monthly where Peirce introduced his famous pragmatic maxim, or in the earlier private meetings of the Metaphysical Club. Bernstein argues that pragmatism was really born in 1868 in the pages of Peirce’s Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers, in which Peirce argued that all thought is in signs and where he made a strong case against intuitive cognition.6 James, still in Medical School at Harvard in 1868, found Peirce’s papers to be “exceedingly bold” and “subtle” but also, at that time, “incomprehensible,” and he claimed that Peirce’s attempt at elucidating them for him privately hadn’t helped much; nevertheless, he said he found them “strangely” interesting (Richardson 2006: 95). But if Peirce got the pragmatism ball rolling, as it were, it was soon picked up by others. Bernstein readily acknowledges the massive contributions of James and Dewey and he argues that there has been a more- or-less continuous development of pragmatism since its beginning with the upshot that pragmatic themes have come to dominate contemporary philosophy. Bernstein thinks that Putnam, Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas have been the key players in shaping pragmatism in recent years (Bernstein 2010: xi). (As an aside, I think we all know that John Dewey was the key player in extending pragmatism’s first wave beyond the lifetimes of Peirce and James but that is a story for another time.)

8 Unlike Bernstein, some promoters of pragmatism downplay, or even deny, the continuing relevance of the classical pragmatists.7 I believe that is partly the result of differences of opinion about what pragmatism is. We know, for example, that in some circles pragmatism is regarded as a methodology and in other circles as an epistemology. Some focus on the social and political ramifications of pragmatist thought. Many, including Bernstein, identify pragmatism with a distinctive assemblage of attitudes and ideas – a characteristic ethos. That is why Bernstein can hold that the birth of pragmatism properly began in 1868 with Peirce’s “radical critique” of

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Cartesianism and not with the 1878 publication of his pragmatic maxim (Bernstein 2010: ix, 35). It is well known that as early as 1908, only ten years after James’s Berkeley lecture, Arthur Lovejoy identified thirteen different varieties of pragmatism, and nearly everyone supposes that now, more than a hundred years later, a great many more could be added. Certainly what pragmatism is, is a serious question, but it cannot be treated thoroughly here and, besides, as I have pointed out elsewhere,8 one does not have to know exactly what pragmatism is in order to be a pragmatist philosopher just as one does not have to know clearly what analytic philosophy is or what continental philosophy is to be an analytic or a continental philosopher. Nevertheless, it will help if we stake out a position, even if only provisionally, and toward that end it will be useful to take a hint from Tom Burke, who has been trying to sort out contemporary conceptions of pragmatism and to establish some norms for the legitimate use of the name.9

9 Contrary to Bernstein’s claim that the importance of Peirce’s maxim has been exaggerated (Bernstein 2010: 35), Burke argues that along with a characteristic normative conception of belief, it “is the key to understanding what pragmatism is” (Burke 2010: 2), but that there are two interestingly different ways to utilize the maxim: a semantic approach which gives an operationalist account of meaning and “emphasizes interactions with objects falling under a given concept” and an inferentialist approach which “emphasizes repercussions of beliefs upon other beliefs and, respectively, upon one’s subsequent conduct – requiring a functional, inferential- role account of word meaning”(Burke, forthcoming). According to Burke, Peirce held the semantic approach and James the inferentialist approach. Burke points out that in recent times (at least since Rorty brought pragmatism back into vogue) the inferentialist approach, deriving from James, has become dominant to the point of having nearly eclipsed the operationalist orientation of Peirce. Robert Brandom, once Rorty’s student, is probably now the leading proponent of inferentialism and his work has become the main entry point for philosophers from the analytic tradition who want to find out about pragmatism (although I must enter the caveat that Brandom’s inferentialism is not a simple matter and is not equivalent to any of its antecedents). Burke notes that little attention has been given to developing an authentic Peirce- inspired pragmatist semantics focusing on actions and sensible effects to replace the standard empiricist semantics that focuses on “things and sets.” He believes that the almost unanimous embrace of inferentialism has seriously weakened pragmatism which should be a two-pronged approach incorporating both operationalist and inferentialist stances.10

10 I think Burke somewhat exaggerates the extent to which Peirce and James held exclusive views.11 It may be acceptable to regard James’s approach to pragmatism as principally inferentialist, since his concessions to Peirce’s more operationalist renderings of his maxim seem somewhat pro forma. As Burke says, for James, Peirce’s maxim “is more than just a methodological maxim” and among the consequences James seems most eager to consider are a conception’s effects on our overall store of beliefs (Burke 2010).12 This does seem to put James in the inferentialist camp. But to limit Peirce to the semantic, or operationalist, approach seems mistaken – even though it is by no means a mistake to count him in the operationalist camp. It is well-known that Peirce’s maxim was first published in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” the second of his famous 1877-78 set of pragmatism papers.13 In its original form it went as follows: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive

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the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (EP1: 132). Among the illustrations Peirce gave for using his maxim were his clarifications of “hard” as the character of something that can withstand being scratched by most substances without scoring, and of “weight” or “heavy” as characteristic of something that, “in the absence of opposing force, will fall” (EP1: 133). What we mean by these conceptions consists exclusively in what we would expect to experience in certain kinds of interactions with the objects conceived of. Years later, when Peirce returned to his maxim, he said that “if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it” (EP2: 332), and, in illustration, he said that by “lithium” we mean a mineral with specific observable characteristics which, if subjected to procedures described in textbooks of chemistry, will yield distinctive observable results. Peirce went into considerable detail in “prescribing what [one must] do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the word” lithium (EP2: 286) and indeed, as Burke points out, this is clearly an operationalist account of meaning. Harvard physicist, Percy W. Bridgman, is credited with developing the idea of operational meaning, which he defined as follows: “we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations […] the true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it” (Bridgman 1927: 5-7). It is easy to see why Burke describes Peirce’s approach as operationalist; others have noticed this as well. Dewey’s friend and collaborator, Arthur Bentley, more than once pointed out to Bridgman that he was following a path laid down by Peirce.14

11 But does this mean that Peirce could not also have been in some significant respect an inferentialist? Brandom, in his engaging “Tales of the Mighty Dead,” seems to deny it (Brandom 2002: 32), but one can’t help doubting that Brandom has read Peirce with care. Even a careful reading of Peirce’s maxim reveals an emphasis on the conceptual groundedness of pragmatic meaning: our conception of an object involves our conception of effects which might conceivably have practical bearings. Meaning concerns the relation of objects to experiential consequences, to be sure, but it does so only in the context of a network of conceptions or beliefs. If we dig deeper and look backward to Peirce’s 1868 Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers, and regard them as the original manifesto for pragmatism, as Bernstein recommends, and as I quite agree we should, then it is apparent that Peirce held an inferentialist theory of cognition.15 In his recent book, The Pragmatic Turn, Bernstein points out that in these early 1868 papers Peirce attacked Descartes’ claim that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge, direct and indirect or, in other words, immediate and inferential (Bernstein 2010: 39). Peirce questioned whether there really is immediate cognition, which he called intuition, and concluded that there is no good reason to assume that there is. Peirce’s famous declaration that all thought is in signs, something I will say more about in a moment, amounted to a denial that we have intuitive knowledge and a claim that all knowledge requires inferential processing. Now it might be objected that this is not enough to count Peirce an inferentialist according to the current understanding of inferentialism and I concede that there is merit in this objection. But Bernstein strongly disagrees with Brandom’s assessment of the American Pragmatic Tradition as belonging outside the inferentialist camp and he notes, specifically, that Brandom “fails to recognize that Peirce’s pragmatism is a normative pragmatism that is based upon an inferential

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semantics” (Bernstein 2010: 103).16 To what extent Peirce explicitly thought of his 1877-78 pragmatism in the context of his 1868 inferentialist framework is difficult to say but the fact that he was so careful to emphasize that his maxim was concerned with conceptions and conceivability leads one to believe that he could hardly have missed the link between his pragmatism and his 1868 sign theory of cognition. Peirce’s semiotic theory of mind was always the background theory for his pragmatism, but it would be many more years before he would make this link explicit.

12 In light of these considerations, I believe that Burke’s claim that Peirce was primarily a semantic operationalist and James an inferentialist is misleading because at least Peirce employed both approaches, but that does not weaken Burke’s central point that an adequate conception of pragmatism should accord with both operationalist and inferentialist readings of the pragmatic maxim. Furthermore, even though Burke’s two- pronged approach does not cleanly demarcate the pragmatisms of Peirce and James, he may still be correct in thinking that the most complete and satisfactory account of original pragmatism is a synthesis of Peirce’s and James’s views.17 But more interesting, I think, is that Burke’s conception of a two-pronged pragmatism points to the very factor which, over time, led Peirce to explicitly reformulate his pragmatism in semiotic terms. That is what I will turn to now and then I’ll briefly consider the role William James may have played in moving Peirce to a richer conception of pragmatism.

13 The factor I have in mind is the dual reference implicit in every sign and, therefore, in every concept of intellectual purport. Every sign fundamentally consists of a temporally based triadic relation in which it, the sign, mediates between its object and its interpretant and therefore may be said to refer to both. The key to intelligence and the acquisition of knowledge is semiosis, or sign action, whereby interpretants are determined indirectly by their referent objects through the mediation of the operative sign.18 Peirce’s denial of intuition was partly based on his argument that interpretants cannot arise directly from their objects, dyadically, without mediation. All of these ideas Peirce had developed by 1868. But not-withstanding the inferentialism implied by Peirce’s denial of intuitive knowledge, made stronger by his anticipation of inferential role semantics (Bernstein 2010: 103-4), his early classification of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols focused on the relation of signs to their objects without explicit reference to interpretants. His more-or-less exclusive attention to the sign-object relation does suggest that Peirce’s focus of concern, even in 1868, was mainly semantic, which is consistent with Burke’s interpretation of Peirce’s early pragmatism.

14 Beginning in the mid-1880’s, Peirce turned his attention to his scientific metaphysics, especially his theory of categories, and his realism became progressively more robust. Previously he had ascribed reality only to relations and generals (belonging to his category of thirdness) but he came to ascribe reality also to actions and reactions of existents (belonging to his category of secondness) and, finally, to the realm of feeling and possibles (belonging to his category of firstness). These changes expanded Peirce’s ontology and enriched his theory of signs by increasing the range of possible semiosis. Peirce eventually came to see that feelings and actions, as well as conceptions, could be proper correlates of sign relations, either as objects or as interpretants.

15 Peirce also expanded his semiotic theory in other ways. The early simple account of the fundamental sign relation as a triadic relation between an object, sign, and interpretant grew into a more complex account involving two kinds of objects, one immediate (the object as the sign represents it) and one dynamic (the external object that determines

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the sign), and three kinds of interpretants, one immediate (the interpretant as represented by the sign), one dynamic (the actual effect produced by the sign), and a final interpretant (the habit that exhausts the function of the sign). Until 1903 the only division of signs Peirce employed was the famous icon, index, symbol division19 which marks how signs are related to the objects they represent, either by virtue of similarity, existential connection, or convention. But from 1903 on he considered the sign relation from many new angles and worked out new divisions. First he added a division to account for the different ways signs can be interpreted from the standpoint of his categories – either as signs of possibility, fact, or reason. This is the rhemes, dicisigns, arguments division.20 Then he added a division to account for what signs are in themselves, or materially – either qualities, existents, or laws.21 This is the qualisigns, sinsigns, legisigns division. From these three divisions, Peirce worked out ten classes of signs. Eventually he added seven more divisions yielding, altogether, sixty-six classes of signs (but he still thought there was room for improvement).

16 The final division of signs in Peirce’s extended system distinguished signs according to the nature of the assurance they afforded their interpreters. Abducent signs afford assurance by instinct or, we might say, by an evolved attunement to nature. Inducents afford assurance by experience. Deducents afford assurance by form. All three types of assurance correspond to types of inference (abduction, induction, or deduction) confirming that in Peirce’s opinion all semiosis, and therefore all cognition, is inferential.22

17 There is much more in Peirce’s semiotic that has relevance for the evolution of his pragmatism but I’ll only mention one further matter: its partition into three branches. The dual reference of signs to objects and interpretants is the key to how Peirce divides up his study of signs. The first branch, speculative grammar, deals mainly with syntax and is concerned with signs per se, focusing on the necessary and sufficient conditions for signhood or on what is requisite for representation of any kind. The second branch, speculative critic, deals with the relations of signs to the objects they represent. Its focus is on semantic questions such as reference, truth conditions, and validity. The third branch is speculative rhetoric, which deals with the relations of signs to their users (or to their interpretants). In his one article on rhetoric, Peirce wrote that “the most essential business” of speculative rhetoric “is to ascertain by logical analysis, greatly facilitated by the development of the other branches of [semiotic], what are the indispensable conditions of a sign’s acting to determine another sign nearly equivalent to itself” (EP2: 328). The focus of this branch is on the pragmatic and rhetorical aspects of semiosis.23

18 The point of my digression on Peirce’s semiotic was to elaborate on Tom Burke’s recommendation that pragmatism should be explicated in both an operationalist framework and an inferentialist framework and how this two-pronged approach points to the factor that led Peirce to reformulate his pragmatism in semiotic terms. That factor was the dual reference of every conception and the need for multiple frameworks for fully explicating meaning. Burke fused Peirce’s operationalist reading of his pragmatic maxim with James’s inferentialist reading to gain a sufficiently complex framework for pragmatism. What I am suggesting is that the dual framework Burke advocates can be found in Peirce alone if we take his full semiotic as a general background theory for his pragmatism. Peirce does this explicitly in 1907 in his famous Manuscript 318 (EP2: 398-433) in which he unites his pragmatism with his semiotic in

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an attempt to explain his pragmatism and to produce a proof of its adequacy for explicating meaning.24

19 Burke recommends that attention should be given to “developing a Peirce-inspired pragmatist semantics focusing on actions and sensible effects to replace the standard empiricist semantics that focuses on ‘things and sets’.” I have no quarrel with that. However, it seems to me that one could with equal earnestness argue that Peirce’s mature semiotic forms the framework for a pragmatist inferentialist semantics that also needs attention – above all, it should be formalized.25 Even more interesting is the possibility of a hybrid semantics (a pluralist semantics or, simply, a robust semantics) that explicates the meaning of expressions (or signs of any kind) on a basis that takes account of both their inferential relations and use and their representative relations to objects or referents of various kinds. This may be what Burke is aiming toward with his “two-pronged approach” and it may also be what Peirce was trying to achieve with his mature realist semiotic.26

20 So far, I have given a very abbreviated and spotty account of Peirce’s pragmatism emphasizing the semiotic underpinnings of its mature form. It is well known that it was not until after James’s Berkeley lecture in August 1898 that Peirce returned to pragmatism after a hiatus of twenty years. It is true that in the early 1880’s he had used his original pragmatism articles as texts for some of his Johns Hopkins courses and had continued to be guided by his maxim, but he did not take up pragmatism again as an explicit topic of study until after James caught the interest of the philosophic world in what it took to be a fresh idea, and publicly gave Peirce the credit. Some commentators think that, in crediting Peirce, who in 1898 was seriously down on his luck, James was doing him a favor, hoping to help raise his stock.27 This is supported by the fact that only a few months after James gave his lecture, he wrote to Peirce asking if he had received copies of the lecture “wherein I flourished the flag of your principle of Pragmatism?” Whatever James’s purpose, the groundswell of interest in pragmatism that followed did create opportunities for Peirce, and pragmatism became the focus for much of his writing during the final years of his life. Murray Murphey has pointed out that simply by naming Peirce as the inventor of pragmatism, James compelled him “to decide where he stood not only on pragmatism itself but on a wide range of associated questions. The results,” Murphey wrote, “were a sweeping revision of [his] architectonic, the introduction of phenomenology and normative science, an extension of [his] theology, and a complete revision of [his] theory of cognition” (Murphey 1961: 358-9). All of these results would inform Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Late in 1902 Peirce wrote to James about how his view of pragmatism was changing and how the “true nature of pragmatism” cannot be understood without framing it within the context of his categories and the corresponding normative sciences. He said that only four years earlier, when he gave his 1898 Cambridge Conferences Lectures, he “had not really got to the bottom of it or seen the unity of the whole thing.”28 Eventually, as I have emphasized, it was in the context of his most advanced theory of signs that Peirce tried to bring his late pragmatism into unity with the rest of his system of ideas. The result was a pragmatism quite distinct from James’s and certainly more sophisticated technically. Nevertheless, I believe that Peirce’s engagement with James’s ideas was a major factor in the growth of his pragmatism. This is what I will turn to now.

21 I am aware that to select one source of influence from a complex network of factors can be misleading but James is a special case. He and Peirce had a long history of critiquing

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each other’s ideas, sometimes quite sharply but always respectfully.29 A lot of James’s influence took the form of confronting Peirce with ideas that were in some ways compelling but, at the same time, disturbing. Many of the issues that Peirce and James debated concerned perception: whether there are first sensations, whether we have direct perception of spatial extension, whether perception involves unconscious inference, and so on. Peirce and James had long-running disagreements about these and other issues. It is well-known that James’s conception of pragmatism also disturbed Peirce although perhaps less than is usually supposed. It is true that there were elements of James’s pragmatism that Peirce wanted to distance himself from – he wrote to James in March 1904 that he and Schiller carried pragmatism too far, but he admitted that “The humanistic element of pragmatism is very true and important and impressive.” Peirce’s principal objection was that he doubted that James’s pragmatism could be proved. In 1905, when Peirce announced that he had taken the name “pragmaticism” for his original form of pragmatism he explained that “[t]he original view appears […] to be a more compact and unitary conception than the others. But its capital merit […] is that it more readily connects itself with a critical proof of its truth” (EP2: 335). Peirce spent a lot of time between 1902 and 1908 constructing proofs of pragmaticism. But that Peirce never dissociated himself from pragmatism in the broader sense is clear from a letter he wrote to Mario Calderoni soon after the name change: “I proposed that the word ‘pragmatism’ should hereafter be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation with Schiller, James, Dewey, Royce, and the rest of us, while the particular doctrine which I invented the word to denote […] should be called ‘pragmaticism.’ The extra syllable will indicate the narrower meaning” (8.205-206).30 By 1907 Peirce frequently reverted to using the name “pragmatism” – possibly because he had begun to think of pragmatism in broader terms.

22 To convey some sense of the interplay of ideas between Peirce and James that helped shape Peirce’s late pragmatism, I’ll run briefly through some examples in chronological order. In 1887, while Peirce was working on his “A Guess at the Riddle,” his first self- proclaimed architectonic treatment of philosophy (W6: 166-210), James’s “The Perception of Space” appeared in four parts in successive issues of Mind (James 1887). In his article, James objected strongly to the idea of Helmholtz (and Wundt) that “space consciousness” is the result of unconscious inference and he made a case for direct perception of space based on “first optical sensations” (James 1887: 545-6). A year earlier, in his “The Perception of Time,” he incorporated E. R. Clay’s idea of “the specious present” and argued that our “cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle- back, with a certain breadth” and said that in this respect our perception of time is analogous with our perception of space: “the original experience of both space and time is always of something already given as a unit […]” (James 1886). But Peirce was a great admirer of Helmholtz and agreed with his so-called “empiristic” view that perception involves unconscious inference. Peirce and his student, Joseph Jastrow, had not long before published the results of an important study they had conducted which supported the conclusion that perceptual judgments can be influenced by sensations too faint to be consciously detectable (Peirce & Jastrow 1885). He wrote to James in October 1887 and raised a muted criticism in support of the Helmholtz account of perception: “I fancy that all which is present to consciousness is sensation & nothing assignable is a first sensation.”31 Nevertheless, he assured James that he had learned much from his work. From that time on, questions about consciousness and perception would be prominent in of Peirce’s thought and in the development of his pragmatism.

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It is difficult to say how much James’s papers on time and space immediately influenced Peirce but when James’s Principles of Psychology appeared three years later there is no doubt about its impact on him.

23 James’s twelve-hundred page Principles was a landmark work, destined to become the most influential text in the history of American psychology. James worked on his book for over a decade and it was published in September 1890 to wide acclaim – although there were a few cautious dissenters. Wilhelm Wundt is known to have proclaimed that “It is literature […] it is beautiful, but it is not psychology” (Blumenthal 1970: 238). Peirce was one of only five colleagues James acknowledged in his preface for their intellectual companionship. When Principles appeared, Peirce had begun work on his first series of articles for The Monist, the five papers that would set out his systematic evolutionary philosophy anticipated in his “Guess at the Riddle,” and he had been working through a number of issues that James addressed in articles that became chapters of Principles – for example, that consciousness is not a property of a mere mechanism but is a state of nerve matter, that “ultimate facts” are illogical, and that feelings spread.32 Peirce was under enormous pressure to complete a report on gravity for the U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey and his definitions for the Century Dictionary, but he hurriedly composed a review of James’s Principles for The Nation. It was a pretty harsh review, critical of James’s method and of his reasoning, which Peirce characterized as circular and virtually self-refuting (W8: 239). Peirce focused especially on James’s claim that the reasoning in perception is “above-board” and there is no need for intermediary unconscious ideas (James 1890, II: 111). According to Peirce, James failed to understand that what was meant by “unconscious inference” was only that “the reasoner is not conscious of making an inference.” More generally, Peirce claimed that James’s methodology was “materialistic to the core” in supposing that once psychology “has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought and feeling with definite conditions of the brain,” it can go no farther. Peirce thought this put James in league with the mechanistic philosophers he opposed (W8: xlix). But Peirce was not wholly negative; he made a point of saying that the “directness and sharpness” of his objections should be “understood as a tribute of respect” and he wrote that James’s Principles was “the most important contribution […] made to the subject for many years.”

24 Peirce’s Nation review, critical though it was, was the beginning of an engagement with James’s Principles that continued for at least another seven years. In March 1892 Peirce wrote a brief notice of James’s abridged edition, taking him to task for his easy acceptance of “unexamined assumptions.” But two months later in his “The Law of Mind,” the third paper of Peirce’s first Monist Series, one can see that he had been earnestly confronting ideas from James’s Principles. Although Peirce expressed his doubt that “we have a feeling of bigness” he admitted that James might be right in holding that we do (W8: 148). A few weeks later in “Man’s Glassy Essence,” in his discussion of habit formation, Peirce brought up James’s idea that habits are related to the plasticity of the materials in which they inhere. Peirce did not fully endorse James’s account, but his lengthy discussion of elasticity and habit indicates that James’s ideas were having an impact on the course of his thought (W8: 178). Habit formation would become a critical issue for Peirce’s metaphysics and for his late pragmatism. In January 1894 Peirce wrote to tell James how much he liked his distinction between the “substantive and transitive parts of the train of thought” and that there was nothing in his psychology which served his own purposes better. Typically, Peirce criticized James

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for his terminology and suggested that he choose more appropriate “psychological terms” leaving “grammar-words for logic.”33 But by this time, Peirce had already made use of James’s distinction in the second article of his 1892 Critic of Arguments series in a discussion about how to represent logical thought diagrammatically (3.424), and he would use it again in his 1893 “Reply to the Necessitarians” (6.595), and in his 1901 article on “Relatives” for Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, where he noted that “almost every great step in mathematical reasoning derives its importance from the fact that it involves an abstraction [whereby] the transitory elements of thought […] are made substantive elements” (3.642).

25 Peirce continued to study James’s Principles. There is a notebook from about 1897 in which Peirce recorded forty-six questions and comments relating to volume one.34 It appears that Peirce was using what he found engaging in James’s ideas about consciousness, abstraction, and habit to work out a more satisfactory taxonomy of consciousness and to hone his categories and his theory of inference. Mathias Girel, who has made a close and excellent study of Peirce’s grapplings with James’s ideas, points to Peirce’s “Questions” as typical of his treatment of James’s Principles: Peirce would acknowledge interesting insights on James’s part but would then try to provide the “conceptual tools” necessary for fully grasping “the phenomenon” under consideration (Girel 2003: 179). It is hard not to think of Wittgenstein when reflecting on Peirce’s long engagement with James’s Principles. Wittgenstein, too, was strangely attracted to James’s work – it has become part of our philosophical lore that for some time James’s Principles was the only book to be found on Wittgenstein’s bookshelves in Cambridge.35 Richard Gale muses that “One gets the feeling that Wittgenstein wrote his Philosophical Investigations with an open copy of The Principles of Psychology before him […]” (Gale 1999: 165). But, like Peirce, Wittgenstein generally used ideas from The Principles to illustrate interesting problems which he believed James had treated inadequately and even once remarked: “How needed is the work of philosophy is shown by James’s psychology” (Hilmy 1987: 196-7). Peirce, too, seemed to think that what James’s psychology needed most was sound philosophy. One wonders if, when in late 1893 Peirce announced his plan for a twelve-volume opus on The Principles of Philosophy, his idea was to produce a philosophy for James’s psychology.

26 James’s next major work, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, appeared early in 1897. James dedicated this book “To my old friend, Charles Sanders Peirce, to whose philosophic comradeship in old times and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay.” Peirce was moved and wrote James a reflective letter expressing his appreciation (“it was a truly sweet thing, my dear William”) and then pointed out some ways his thinking had been affected by his experience of “the world of misery” which had been disclosed to him in recent years. Although rating “higher than ever the individual deed as the only real meaning there is [in] the Concept,” he now saw “more sharply […] that it is not the mere arbitrary force in the deed but the life it gives to the idea that is valuable.”36 Peirce praised James’s opening essay, “The Will to Believe,” for its style and lucidity, but expressed reservations about the main idea: “our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced” (James 1897: 1-2). A key point made by James was that “our non- intellectual nature” influences our convictions. “Our passional nature,” he wrote, “not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.” Hilary

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Putnam has called this essay James’s “opening gun in the war for [his] own ‘Pragmatism’” (Putnam 1992: 56).

27 Peirce’s response came the following year in his Cambridge Conferences Lectures, entitled “Reasoning and the Logic of Things,” and arranged for by James to help Peirce through his difficult times. Peirce’s initial plan was to treat the logic of events, but James strongly discouraged him from anything too formal: “Now be a good boy and think a more popular plan out,” he wrote to Peirce. “You are teeming with ideas – and the lectures need not […] form a continuous whole. Separate topics of a vitally important character would do perfectly well” (Peirce 1992.2: 25). Peirce replied that he would accept all of James’s conditions, but he could not help retorting that the “neglect of logic in Cambridge is plainly absolute.” Of course Peirce could not restrain himself from putting some logic into his lectures, and, as is well known, he used the occasion to present a new theory of the continuum. But, overall, these lectures were quite accessible and were in large part directed at James and his ideas. Peirce began with a warning that given the “uncertain condition of philosophy […] any practical applications of it to Religion and Conduct [are] exceedingly dangerous” (Peirce 1992.2: 108). He went on to make his much debated distinction between matters of vital importance and matters concerning the general advancement of knowledge, a distinction which has been interpreted as creating a great Peircean divide between applied and pure science,37 and he advanced the idea that the will to learn is a prerequisite for actually learning – a counterpoint to James’s will to believe. But, disagreements aside, it is notable that Peirce was working in intellectual territory also occupied by James and was responding to many of his ideas. It is especially noteworthy that from at least this time on, the role of instinct, or sentiment, as a co-participant with reason in the acquisition of knowledge became a key concern for Peirce, and it would not be long until he came to regard ethics and esthetics as normative prerequisites for logic.

28 Peirce’s Cambridge Conferences lectures were a great success. James wrote to Paul Carus that though they were “abstruse in parts,” they were “popular and inspiring, and the whole thing leaving you with a sense that you had just been in the place where ideas are manufactured,” and he told Juliette Peirce that “everyone [spoke] of [your husband’s lectures] with the greatest admiration”; James mentioned in particular that Josiah Royce was “extraordinarily full of appreciation” (Peirce 1992.2: 36). From that time on, Royce’s writings “began to drift toward Peirce’s ideas” and only five months later James gave his famous lecture at Berkeley where he introduced pragmatism by name. Ketner and Putnam speculate that “these events in the careers of James and Royce, and in the career of pragmatism itself […] were influenced by Peirce’s performance” in Cambridge (Peirce 1992.2: 36).

29 I have already described some of the aftermath of James’s Berkeley lecture. Though it should now be clear that there were a number of factors already at work drawing Peirce back to pragmatism, there is no doubt that James’s lecture made Peirce’s return imperative. By November 1900, Peirce had begun reformulating his understanding of pragmatism for an entry in Baldwin’s Dictionary.38 In his entry, published the following year, Peirce noted that in his Will to Believe and his Berkeley lecture, James pushed pragmatism “to such extremes as must then to give us pause. [He] appears to assume that the end of man is action” but, on the contrary, Peirce wrote, “action wants an end, and that […] end must be something of a general description.” Consequently, Peirce

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said, “the spirit of the [pragmatic] maxim […] would direct us towards something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought.” Thus “the meaning of [a] concept does not lie in any individual reactions at all, but in the manner in which those reactions contribute to the development of concrete reasonableness.”

30 Peirce’s correspondence with James during this period indicates the direction his pragmatism was taking. On 12 June 1902 he asked James to help him with a point of psychology: “what passes in consciousness, especially what emotional and irrational states of feeling, in the course of forming a new belief?” Peirce then took up pragmatism directly: “Pragmatism is correct doctrine only insofar as it is recognized that irrational action is the mere husk of ideas. The brute element exists and must not be explained away as Hegel seeks to do. But the end of thought is action only insofar as the end of action is another thought. Far better [to] abandon the word [thought] and talk of representation & then define what kind of representation it is that constitutes consciousness.” I mentioned earlier Peirce’s November 1902 letter in which he told James that the “true nature of pragmatism” cannot be understood without framing it within the context of his categories and the corresponding normative sciences.39 A few days after that, he wrote again to let James know that his proposal for a grant from the Carnegie Institution had been turned down and that he was once again in dire straits. He then told James that, given time, “I think I could satisfy you that your view of pragmatism requires some modification, that it is the logical basis and proof of it […] and its relation to the categories that have first to be made clear before it can be accurately applied except in very simple ways.”40

31 Once again, James came to Peirce’s rescue in his hour of need. He arranged for Peirce to come to Cambridge to give another course of lectures and, for his topic, Peirce chose pragmatism. Peirce was immensely grateful and wrote to James: “You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism.”41 In his seven Harvard lectures, beginning on 26 March 1903 and concluding on 17 May, Peirce wanted to put his mark on pragmatism by building a proof that would draw together most of the strands of his rather rapidly evolving philosophy.42 The utility of the pragmatic maxim does not constitute a proof, he said; for that pragmatism must pass through the fire of drastic analysis. Peirce built his case for pragmatism on a new theory of perception, grounded in his theory of categories and on results from phenomenology, esthetics, and ethics. He argued that there is a realm of reality associated with each category and that the reality of thirdness is necessary to explain a mode of influence on external facts that cannot be explained by mechanical action alone. He argued that pragmatism is a logical, or semiotic, thesis concerning the meaning of a particular kind of symbol, the proposition, and explained that propositions are signs that must refer to their objects in two ways: indexically, by means of subjects, and iconically, by means of predicates.43 The crucial element of Peirce’s argument, from the standpoint of his realism, involved the connection between propositional thought and perception. To preserve his realism, Peirce distinguished percepts, which are not propositional, from perceptual judgments, which are, and which are, furthermore, the “first premisses” of all our reasonings. The process by which perceptual judgments arise from percepts became a key factor in Peirce’s case. But if perceptual judgments are the starting points for all intellectual development, then we must be able to perceive generality. Peirce next argued that abduction shades

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into perception, so that pragmatism may be regarded as the logic of abduction, and, finally, he isolated three key points:

32 (1) that nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses, (2) that perceptual judgments contain general elements, and (3) that abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any sharp line of demarcation between them. Pragmatism, Peirce argued, follows from these propositions.44

33 Peirce had succeeded in marshalling much of his growing system of philosophy in support of his increasingly rich conception of pragmatism and even had made headway toward merging his pragmatism with his developing semiotic, but his lectures were complicated and difficult to grasp. James described them as “flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness!” He urged Peirce to carry the same line of thought forward to his third course of Lowell Lectures scheduled for the end of 1903 but to confine himself to fewer points and to make one of them abduction (Fisch 1986: 365). In his Lowell Lectures Peirce again attempted to prove his pragmatism but he spent a lot of time developing his system of signs and his Existential Graphs. Max Fisch reported that when Peirce looked back at his Lowell Lectures two years after giving them, what stood out for him was bringing the normative sciences to bear on pragmatism. Peirce wrote that: “[I]t seems to me strange that we had to wait until 1903 for any pragmatist to assert that logic ought to be based upon ethics. Perhaps some one of us had said it before; but I only know that it was then said in [my] course of lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston, and was maintained on the ground that reasoning is thought subjected to self-control, and that the whole operation of logical self-control takes precisely the same quite complicated course which everybody ought to acknowledge is that of effective ethical self-control.”45

34 Now, in the interests of bringing this paper to a conclusion, I’ll move quickly through just a few more examples of Peirce’s evolving pragmatism and conclude with some further thoughts about James’s influence. I have already mentioned Peirce’s 1905 paper, “What Pragmatism Is,” in which he announced the new name, pragmaticism, for his narrower variant of pragmatism. That paper was the first article of a series on pragmatism that he had agreed to write for The Monist. Peirce decided he would use the opportunity to finally get his proof of pragmatism (now pragmaticism) into print. In this first article Peirce made the interesting point that “while the pragmaticist regards Thirdness as an essential ingredient of reality, it can only govern through action, and action cannot arise except in feeling. It is the dependence of Thirdness on action (Secondness) and feeling (Firstness) that distinguishes pragmaticism from the absolute idealism of Hegel.” In the second article of the series, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” Peirce restated his maxim in semiotic terms but devoted most of the paper to a consideration of critical common-sensism and scholastic realism. He extended his realism to include “real vagues” and “real possibilities,” writing that “it is the reality of some possibilities that pragmaticism is most concerned to insist upon.” Fisch described the pragmaticism presented in this article as pragmatism “purged of the nominalistic dross of its original exposition.” In a third article that was never published, Peirce developed his phaneroscopy and his doctrine of the valency of concepts as a basis for his proof, but along the way he decided that his Existential Graphs would provide a better basis so for his third article he substituted an explication of his Graphs. That article, “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” didn’t appear until October 1906 and it was the final

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instalment – the series was never completed and Peirce’s proof based on his Existential Graphs was never published.46

35 Peirce’s final extended exposition of pragmatism is the famous Manuscript 318, begun as a “letter to the editor” for the Nation but expanded into a lengthy article that also was never published during Peirce’s lifetime. There are many fragments and variants of this 1907 paper in which Peirce finally managed to fully explicate his pragmatism in a semiotic framework and to complete a proof based on that explication. His proof began with the premiss that every concept and every thought beyond immediate perception is a sign, and concluded with the proposition that a final logical interpretant must be of the nature of a habit. “But how,” Peirce asked, can a habit be described other “than by a description of the kind of action to which it gives rise, with the specification of the conditions and of the motive?” Peirce claimed that this is the very kernel of pragmatism which he expressed succinctly by saying that the “whole meaning of an intellectual predicate is that certain kinds of events would happen, once in so often, in the course of experience, under certain kinds of existential circumstances” (EP2: 402).47

36 The following year, 1908, Peirce wrote up his “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” for The Hibbert Journal.48 For his argument, Peirce elaborated on why our “instinct” for guessing – Galileo’s il lume naturale – is so successful. At the end of his paper, Peirce made a connection with pragmatism (or pragmaticism, for he had gone back to using that name). Peirce concluded that “man, like any other animal, is gifted with power of understanding sufficient for the conduct of life. This brings him,” Peirce says, “for testing the hypothesis [that God is real], to taking a stand upon Pragmaticism, which implies faith in common-sense and in instinct, though only as they issue from the cupel-furnace of measured criticism” (EP2: 445-6). Peirce’s late use of pragmaticism in support of a religious hypothesis is strangely reminiscent of James’s original use of pragmatism in his Berkeley lecture.

37 In reflecting on the intellectual companionship of Peirce and James and on the influence James had on the course of Peirce’s thought, it is important to bear in mind their differences. Hilary Putnam has pointed to “the enormous difference in their underlying metaphysical assumptions,” and more-or-less sums up these differences by pointing out that Peirce could not tolerate James’s nominalism and that James’s had no room in his philosophy for Peirce’s Thirdness (Putnam, 1997: 179). These are indeed fundamental disagreements. In his excellent article in The Cambridge Companion to William James, Christopher Hookway gives a detailed account of how Peirce’s and James’s pragmatisms differ and why their differences, which run throughout their philosophies as a whole, stem from differing purposes (Hookway 1997: 145-65). Although he doesn’t say it straightforwardly, it seems that Hookway believes that the very different characters of Peirce and James are reflected in their pragmatisms, and I think this too. Perhaps this is most evident in James’s anti-intellectualism and Peirce’s insistence that just about everything be viewed through the lens of logic. Their different characters might also be seen in James’s frequent nagging of Peirce to write for the common man and Peirce’s frustration over James’s indifference to formalisms and analysis. James tended to see things in broad outlines, almost as though he were trusting more to his feelings than his intellect. When he wrote to Peirce to say how much he had enjoyed his Monist article, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” he said that he believed “in that sort of thing” himself but that even if he didn’t “it would be a blessed piece of radicalism” (W8: lxxxi). James liked Peirce’s article for its general

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thrust regardless of its specifics. Peirce tended to read James with an analytical magnifier in hand, looking for faults.

38 But we must also remember that Peirce never completely renounced the broader Jamesian view of pragmatism and always believed there was some common ground that he shared with the Jamesian pragmatists. Peirce set out on a narrow path when he chose to limit his pragmatism, or pragmaticism, to that exclusive set of principles and ideas that could undergird and facilitate a proof of his maxim in an acceptable form. Clearly this was sound practice and it led Peirce to a refined architectonic philosophy that may one day be distinguished as one of the great intellectual achievements of humanity. As Peirce repeatedly remarked, his pragmaticism realigned pragmatism with its beginnings in the old Metaphysical Club. Louis Menand has pointed out that what the original pragmatists had in common was “an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas […] are tools […] that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves” (Menand 2001: xi). This takes cognition to be a serious business, more or less a matter of survival. But, as Peirce taught in his Cambridge Conferences Lectures, we are not always in the survival mode, dealing with matters of vital importance. It is true that Peirce’s early pragmatism, based on his doubt/belief theory of inquiry (Peirce 1877-78), accords with Menand’s characterization, while in its later form, Peirce’s pragmatism shifted more toward a focus on logical thought than on the conduct of life; but even from the beginning Peirce’s focus was on conceptual clarity and fidelity and his method tended toward formal analysis. Yet is it possible that, in the end, Peirce could not so staunchly resist the siren song of James’s less rigid pragmatism?

39 As his life drew toward its close, Peirce remarked that his pragmatism was useful for making reasoning more secure but that it “does not bestow a single smile upon beauty, upon moral virtue, or upon abstract truth; – the three things that alone raise Humanity above Animality” (EP2: 465). This was not a repudiation of his logical pragmatism, nor an embrace of James’s more humanistic pragmatism, but it is clearly an indication of the increased strength of Peirce’s aesthetic and humanistic interests. In his recent book on pragmatism, Bernstein refers to two of James’s essays which best express the deep ethical and humanistic underpinnings of his thought: “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes Life Worth Living?” (Bernstein 2010: 61). Both of those essays appeared in James’s 1899 book, Talks to Teachers. Late in 1910, after James’s death, Juliette Peirce wrote to Alice James that her husband “has not been the same since the loss of his earliest and best friend” and asked her if she would please send Charles a copy of James’s Talks to Teachers, which he had never read but now wanted to. 49 Of course this does not prove that Peirce was gravitating to a more multifaceted pragmatism, but it is testament to the attraction Peirce continued to feel for James and his work and it is suggestive of a turn in Peirce’s thought toward more humanistic concerns. The friendship of Peirce and James, and their engagement with each other’s thought, is one of the great stories of classical American philosophy.

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MARGOLIS J., (2002), Reinventing Pragmatism; American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ithica, Cornell University Press.

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PEIRCE C. S., (1892.2), “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” The Monist 2, 321-37; reprinted in 6.35-65, W8: 111-25, and EP1: 298-311.

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PEIRCE C. S., (1901), “Relatives,” Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, II, New York, MacMillan; reprinted in part in 3.636-643.

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PEIRCE C. S., (1906), “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” The Monist, 16 (4), 492-546; reprinted in 4.530-572.

PEIRCE C. S., (1907), Letter to the editor of The Nation, Manuscript 318 (R318); in EP2: 298-433 (entitled “Pragmatism”).

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PEIRCE C. S., (1908), “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” The Hibbert Journal, 7, 90-112; reprinted in 6.452-491 and EP2: 434-450.

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PEIRCE C. S., (1982–), The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Peirce Edition Project (eds.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

PEIRCE C. S., (1992.1), Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867-93), N. Houser & C. Kloesel (eds.); vol. 2 (1893-1913), Peirce Edition Project (eds.), Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.

PEIRCE C. S., (1992.2), Reasoning and the Logic of Things, Ketner K. (ed.), Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Introduction by Hilary Putnam and Kenneth Ketner.

PEIRCE C. S., (1997), Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking (The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism), Turrisi P. (ed.), Albany, SUNY Press. (The Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism are also published in EP2: 133-241.)

PEIRCE C. S., & J. JASTROW, (1885), “On Small Differences of Sensation,” Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 3, 75-83; reprinted in W5: 122-35.

PIETARINEN A., (2008), “Comments on Hookway: The Pragmatic Maxim and the Proof of Pragmatism,” Cognitio: revista de filosofia, 9 (1), 85-92.

PIETARINEN A., & L. SNELLMAN, (2006), “On Peirce’s Late Proof of Pragmaticism,” Acta Philosophical Fennica 78, 255-74.

PUTNAM H., (1992), “Comments on the Lectures,” Reasoning and the Logic of Things, (Peirce 1992.2).

PUTNAM H., (1997), “James’s Theory of Truth,” in Putnam R. (ed.) (1997).

PUTNAM R. (ed.), (1997), The Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RICHARDSON R., (2006), William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co.

RUKEYSER M., (1942), Willard Gibbs, Garden City, Doubleday, Doran & Co.

SHORT T. L., (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

SMYTH R., (1997), Reading Peirce Reading, Lanham, Md., Rowman and Littlefield.

NOTES

1. James’s lecture, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” was printed in the University of California Chronicle, September 1898, 287-310, and was widely circulated as a separate pamphlet. It was re-printed, with some omissions, in James 1904. For a discussion of the response engendered by James’s paper see Fisch 1977. 2. Juliette Peirce to Gifford Pinchot, 4 September 1934, quoted in Ketner (1998: 275-6).

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3. In 1878 the United States Coast Survey was renamed the United States Coast & Geodetic Survey. 4. References to Peirce’s writings will be made following standard practice. References to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (8 vols., Harvard University Press, 1931-58) are given in decimal notation: for example, (1.444) refers to vol. 1, paragraph 444. References to the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (Indiana University Press, 1982-) give volume and page numbers: for example, W8: 205 refers to vol. 8, p. 205. References to The Essential Peirce (2 vols., Indiana University Press, 1992, 1998) give volume and page numbers: for example, EP2: 200 refers to vol. 2, p. 200. References to Peirce’s manuscripts are given according to the Robin Catalogue of the Peirce Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, University of Massachusetts Press, 1967). 5. See, for example, Margolis 2002, and 2010. Margolis, whose recent writings have focused on the key role he thinks a third wave of pragmatism will play in reunifying philosophy across national boundaries, admires both James and Peirce for their original, even radical, ideas, though he singles out John Dewey as having made the greatest contribution to classical pragmatism. Margolis seems inclined to view what he calls the second wave of pragmatism, initiated and energized by the writings and debates of Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, as a decided advance over classical pragmatism which it appropriately eclipsed (Margolis 2002: 12). Accordingly, he applauds the resolution of neopragmatist Robert Brandom, Rorty’s student, to look for inspiration in Kant and Hegel instead of in the classical pragmatists. In fact it seems that, increasingly, Hegel has become the focal point of Margolis’s philosophical outlook and it is not entirely clear why he thinks that the coming philosophy should be thought of as the third wave of pragmatism instead of as a fusion of pragmatism with analytical and continental schools of thought. 6. See Bernstein 2010, especially chap. 1, for an excellent account of Peirce’s anti-Cartesian program that laid the groundwork for his pragmatism. 7. Joseph Margolis exhibits this tendency and it is surely true of Robert Brandom. 8. See, for example, Houser 2003. 9. See Burke 2010 and, especially, his forthcoming book, On What Pragmatism Was. 10. One must not suppose that this two-pronged approach is merely a joining of forces of empiricism with rationalism – James, of course, would be chagrined to think he might be thought to be a rationalist. The extent to which Burke’s arguments will prove convincing remains to be seen since his ideas have only been sketched in papers and talks and his book on the subject has not yet appeared. 11. Hookway, however, argues that the pragmatisms of Peirce and James are quite distinct because they held very different views about the purpose of pragmatism (Hookway 1997: 145-65). 12. Burke develops this fully in his forthcoming On What Pragmatism Was. 13. It was preceded by “The Fixation of Belief,” which Peirce intended to be the first part of a two-part article. Both of these pragmatism papers were part of a larger work, “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” (Peirce 1877-78). 14. For example: Bentley to Bridgman, 3 February 1950, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 15. Bernstein remarked on the importance of these early papers in his 1988 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association where he claimed that there is no important argument in the present-day anti-foundationalist arsenal that Peirce had not anticipated (Bernstein 1989). 16. See also Bernstein (2010: 226-7, n.12). In a recent article on Brandom and Peirce, Cathy Legg carefully examined Peirce’s 1868 anti-intuitionism and compared it with Brandom’s inferentialism. Legg concluded that in some respects Peirce had succeeded in formulating a clearer and more thoroughgoing inferentialism than Brandom’s (Legg 2008: 105). We must be careful, though, not to attribute too radical an inferentialism to Peirce and to remember his antipathy to rationalism (for example, see 1.631). Legg notes that an important precursor to the

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debate over inferentialism was played out in the 19th century in the great intuition debate between John Stuart Mill and Sir William Hamilton, and their followers. The Mill-Hamilton debate concerned whether, or to what extent, we have intuitive, or unmediated, knowledge; Hamilton was for and Mill was against intuitions. (See Legg (2008: 111-3). Note that she references Smyth 1997 as her source for the Mill-Hamilton debate.) Peirce’s 1868 arguments against intuitive cognition grew out of the Mill-Hamilton debate. 17. Morton White made the suggestion that Peirce’s operational treatment of meaning, expressed is statements of the form “if operation O […] then experience E will result,” can be used by James as well “if acceptance of belief of a statement is admissible as an operation, and satisfaction is admissible as an experience” (Flower & Murphey 1977: 676). 18. Peirce’s preferred spelling of “semiosis” and “semiotic” was “semeiosis” and “semeiotic.” For this paper I’ll follow the common practice of spelling these words without the extra e. 19. Sometimes he used different names. 20. For this division, too, he sometimes used different names. See “Sundry Logical Conceptions” (EP2: Sel.20). 21. See “Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations” (EP2: Sel. 21). 22. By 1906, he had come to hold the view that without a shared understanding of the right sort a sign could not “fulfill its function” and there could be no communication between utterer and interpreter (EP2: 478). 23. Peirce’s use of the word “speculative” was intended to associate his three branches of semiotic with the medieval trivium – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – but he used different names and never quite settled on a preferred set. 24. See also Peirce’s 1905 paper, “Issues of Pragmaticism” (EP2: sel. 25), where he began developing a semiotic account of his pragmatism. 25. Perhaps we could say that in some respects Peirce already achieved a quasi-formalization of his semiotic. Peirce’s Existential Graphs might be made to contribute to this formalization, or perhaps they can provide an alternative framework for an inferentialist semantics. 26. For systematic accounts of Peirce’s mature semiotics see Liszka 1996, and Short 2007. 27. See, for example, Murphey (1961: 358) and the introduction to Menand 1997. 28. Peirce to James, 25 Nov. 1902, James Papers, Houghton Library. 29. This was not always understood by others. See my remarks in Houser 2010.2 concerning Peirce’s review of James’s Principles. 30. My emphasis. See, also, Houser 2010.3. 31. Peirce to James, 27 Oct. 1887, James Papers, Houghton Library. 32. To compare Peirce’s work with James’s, see, for example, Principles of Psychology, 1, 588ff. Note that much of “The Stream of Thought” had been published in Mind in 1884 under the title “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (James 1884). 33. Peirce to James, 1 January 1894, James Papers, Houghton Library. Peirce tried more than once to convince James to replace “substantive” and “transitive” with “sessile” and “volatile” or, better yet, with “pteroentic” and “apteroenic” with a nod to the “winged” and “unwinged” words of Homer. 34. This notebook, or some of the questions in it, could have been written earlier, perhaps as early as 1894. See Girel (2003: 178-89), for an excellent account and discussion of Peirce’s questions and answers and their relation to Peirce’s ongoing philosophical work. Many of Peirce’s questions and comments referred to Chapter VIII, “The relations of Minds to Other Things” and Chapter IX, “The Stream of Thought.” 35. See Goodman 2007, especially p. 61. 36. Peirce to James, 13 March 1897, James Papers, Houghton Library. 37. For some discussion of Peirce’s treatment of this distinction see Houser (2010.4: 2-5). 38. Peirce to James, 10 November 1900, James Papers, Houghton Library.

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39. Peirce to James, 25 Nov. 1902, James Papers, Houghton Library. 40. Peirce to James, 1 Dec. 1902, James Papers, Houghton Library. Peirce remarked to James that pragmatism “can receive no sound support from psychology.” 41. Peirce to James, 10 March 1903, James Papers, Houghton Library. 42. See Hookway 2005 and 2008 and Turrisi’s introduction to Peirce 1997 for discussions of Peirce’s attempt to prove pragmatism in his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism. Hookway, especially, in these papers and in ongoing work is building a case for a 1903 proof, and for subsequent proofs, that is generally consistent with but significantly different than the proofs I sketched in Houser 1998. 43. Propositions as described here are a class of signs that Peirce would later call dicent symbols. T. L. Short argues that in another, and for him, preferred, sense, propositions are hypostatic abstractions “from a set of (in some respect equivalent) replications (actual or possible) of diverse dicent symbols” and not really signs at all (Short 2007: 245). See Peirce’s third 1903 Harvard Lecture (EP2: 160-78), for a discussion of the meaning of “proposition” in the context of his argument for pragmatism. 44. This sketch of Peirce’s 1903 proof is taken from Houser (1998: xxv-xxvi). See p. xxxiv-xxxv for a different rendering of Peirce’s 1903 proof. For some elaboration of Peirce’s view of the role of propositional judgment in perception see Houser 2005, and 2007. 45. Fisch (1986: 365-6); the quotation is from 5.533. 46. For recent work on Peirce’s attempt to use EG as a basis for a proof of pragmatism, see Pietarinen & Snellman 2006, and Pietarinen 2008. 47. See Houser (1998: xxxv-xxxvi), for some discussion of this proof. 48. In this paper (Peirce 1908), Peirce distinguished between an argument, “any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief,” and an argumentation, “an argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses” (EP2: 435). 49. Juliette Peirce to Alice James, 1 November 1910, Max H. Fisch Papers. The date written on the letter does not include the year but Fisch has guessed that it was written in 1910, about two months after James’s death.

ABSTRACTS

It is commonly supposed that the pragmatisms of Peirce and James are fundamentally opposed; this view is supported by the fact that in 1905 Peirce deliberately chose a new name for his original doctrine. Yet Peirce and James were not only life-long friends but to a surprising extent were life-long collaborators. It is true that their approaches to philosophy were very different, reflecting their distinct personalities, with James exhibiting a pluralistic and humanistic style as opposed to Peirce the analyst and formalist. James was a popular philosopher and Peirce a philosopher for philosophers. But they followed each other’s work, corresponded about philosophical problems, and deeply influenced each other. Peirce never completely renounced James’s broader pragmatism and tried hard to find common ground, even to some extent reshaping his own views to accommodate James’s.

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AUTHOR

NATHAN HOUSER Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

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Individuality The Emersonian Background of the Bergson-James Controversy

Anna M. Nieddu

1 The peculiarity of the relation between William James and Henri Bergson is connected to the deep differences of their philosophical outcomes. Really, it looks unusual that the two philosophers – both started from an idea of temporality of conscience so similar to be practically interchangeable – reach a conclusion at last, in many respects, diametrically opposite.1

2 Also the history of the relationship James-Bergson, as it can be reconstructed through letters and testimonies of various kinds, appears confused and uneven.

3 In a letter to Th. Ribot dated July 10th 1905, Bergson refers to an article appeared in the Revue Philosophique; in this article, Gaston Rageot affirmed that in his composition of the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, the French philosopher would have been influenced by the psychologies of James Ward and William James: France would have borrowed a psychology from United States to give back a philosophy.2

4 Bergson defends the full originality of his position affirming not to have had knowledge of J. Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism to the time when he was engaged to compose the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and only to have read the item written by Ward on the British Encyclopedia. With the same resolution, Bergson affirms not to have known of the same epoch in the article published in 1884 on Mind by W. James.3 But, really, this article also, broadly used by W. James for the drawing up of the IX chapter of The Principles of Psychology,4 bears witness to the fact that W. James had elaborated the basis of his psychological theory well before (i.e. five years before) Bergson had published his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. On the contrary, Bergson writes to Ribot that James truly was “un philosophe dont je ne dirai jamais assez combien je l’aime et je l’admire,” but unequivocal chronological reasons would forbid us to think about the possibility that the idea of stream of consciousness could have represented somehow a model for the durée réelle.

5 According to Bergson, undeniably some analogies among the two ideas concerning the dynamics of consciousness exist and they are evident; nevertheless – writes the French philosopher – we can see that they: “n’ont pas la même signification et ne peuvent se

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rattacher à la même origine.”5 The stream of consciousness has a psychological origin; the durée réelle, instead, draws its origin in the criticism of homogeneous time, as expressed in mathematics.6 It exists among the two philosophies – Bergson will still say – a sort of “prestablished harmony,” but not an identity,7 and the different origins of the notions of stream of consciousness and durée réelle give reason for their different functions too. As we have seen, for the French philosopher the true reason that really fits to expound certain analogies is to be sought in the general climate of an epoch, tense to the realization of a model of philosophical thought more concretely “tied to life.”8 A few days later his answer to Ribot, Bergson wrote a letter to James in which he supports that the fact that pragmatism and spiritualism appear so close in their criticism to the concept of spatial time denotes that the two philosophies are: “l’une et l’autre dans le voisinage de la vérité.”9 According to the French philosopher, Jamesian pluralism and Bergsonian spiritualism represent two answers different but complementary to the same demand; that is to say, the two answers both represent the need to transfer the metaphysics on a plan of vital concreteness after having shown the modalities by which the inner experiencing of human beings happens.

6 So, it could appear out of place to attest to an immediate deviation from James’ thought in Bergson’s philosophy – or also a simple determinable ancestry – to make affirmations in the opposite sense. Nevertheless, the representation of the life of human consciousness in the form of a “stream” and the qualification of inner time as “durée” appear tightly interconnected and, finally, both are finalized to the determination of a new and concrete metaphysics, in comparison to every kind of ontological hypostatization.10

7 In the relationship between Bergson and James an articulated and rich literature exists, contemporary to the two philosophers and following11 that has the worth to point out the ‘unusual coincidence’ to which we reported up until this point. It will not be assumed, in this occasion, the assignment to add new remarks inside this explored debate; the differences between the origins and the subsequent theoretical developments of the two philosophies, in fact, are evident.

8 The present work moves from the belief that the analysis of the relationship among the two philosophers must also follow other runs. The deep-rooted similarity of the ideas of stream of consciousness and durée réelle – similarity for the contents and not for what may concern their origin and function, as Bergson had sustained – represents, in fact, only a macroscopic aspect of the problem. The idea of a qualitative notion of temporality, indeed, opens the doors to a concept of human beings in which the value awarded to the notions of novelty and individuality plays a decisive role, opening the way to a new form of universalism of values and normative ideals: a concrete and personalistic universalism.

9 Stream of consciousness, as well as durée réelle, points out the essential feature of human “nature” and gives rise to notable developments in the field of ethics, both in respect to inherent problems concerning the formation of the self and in the relationship among its dynamics, both in respect to the theorization of the role of novelty exerted by “great men” or “great moral personalities” in Bergson’s terms.12 The strong assonance between the French philosopher and William James is to be put in a place of prominence also in this case and can be interesting to investigate its origin.

10 In this paper, I assume that the topic of individuality, and the very similar way in which the two philosophers theorized its temporalistic and pluralistic constitution, is the field

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in which it is possible to locate their common referring to Ralph W. Emerson.13 Both of them have been deeply influenced by Emerson’s thought, even though in different measure and sometimes with different, if not diverging, philosophical results. Nevertheless, just the peculiarity of this common inspiration can contribute to a better understanding of their controversial relation and of the consequences of this relation on the development of James’ ethics.14

11 Also on the basis of the evidences that it is possible to draw from Bergson’ statements, his contact with Emerson took roots far away, perhaps at the same time in which William James, on his side, became familiar with the Trascendentalism through his father’s teach ing. In this way, Bergson’s admiration of William James appears subsequent and, in a cer tain measure, consequential to that of Emerson: When I allude to American idealism – Bergson maintains in a discourse held to the Société France-Amerique of New York – I do not mean merely philosophical idealism, although that philosophical idealism is what drew me towards America many years ago, when I was almost a boy; I loved Emerson, and later I became a devoted friend and admirer of one of your greatest minds, one of the greatest philosophers of his time and probably of all times, William James.15

12 In 1936, in a letter addressed to J. Chevalier, Bergson still writes that it is well-suited to James Emerson’s definition of personality: “une réserve de force qui agit par sa seule présence.”16 Few years before, indeed – giving in Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion his own definition of “great moral personality”17 – Bergson had shown he re- membered the lesson of an attention given to the individual and the new coming not so much from the European romantic tradition, but rather from the American philosophy of the preceding century.18 Also Bergson’s positions seem to completely agree with the spirit dominating the young American philosophy. A spirit for which the term strength must be understood in a personalistic way, that is, like character, according to Emerson: a fruitful human energy that qualifies the single contexts in which it is inserted, identifying them.19

13 This appears to be also the case of some expressions that James had devoted to the figure of Emerson: Emerson’s belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being, is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners, and sustainers of our youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small, by being great and spreading when he is great. […] The vanity of all superserviceableness and pretence was never more happily set forth than by Emerson in the many passages in which he develops this aspect of his philosophy. Character infallibly proclaims itself.20

14 The deep trust in the ethical value of the inventive actions and capabilities of individuals assumes such a particular meaning in the context of an epoch that – in Europe as well as in America – had assisted and it still assisted in the birth of aberrant productions from a distorted environmentalism, like that proposed by the various currents of Social Darwinism. Bergson and James make a common way in their attempt to free the human action from every form of determinism, emancipating the individuals. On the philosophical plane, this ethical aim finds correspondence in the acknowledgement and the statement of the value of individuality.

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15 In Bergson, from the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience to Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, the grounding principle of individuality and the great theme of freedom develop together and at the same time. Individuality and free will, understood like original expressivity of subjectivity, mark the peculiar character of human beings: L’associationiste – Bergson writes in his essay of 1889 – réduit le moi à un agrégat de faits de conscience, sensations, sentiments et idées. Mais s’il ne voit dans ces divers états rien de plus que ce que leur nom exprime, s’il n’en retient que l’aspect impersonnel, il pourra les juxtaposer indéfiniment sans obtenir autre chose qu’un moi fantôme, l’ombre du moi se projetant dans l’espace. Que si, au contraire, il prend ces états psychologiques avec la coloration particulière qu’ils revêtent chez une personne déterminée et qui leur vient à chacun du reflet de tous les autres, alors point n’est besoin d’associer plusieurs faits de conscience pour reconstituer la personne: elle est tout entière dans un seul d’entre eux, pourvu qu’on sache le choisir. Et la manifestation extérieure de cet état interne sera précisément ce qu’on appelle un acte libre, puisque le moi seul en aura été l’auteur, puisqu’elle exprimera le moi tout entier.21

16 In Bergson’s thought, the authentic freedom is expression of the whole personality and, therefore, more difficult to achieve. Owing to a misunderstood and superficial education, in fact, a parasitical I overlaps the authentic one, the I that Bergson calls moi fondamental. Weak suggestions coming from the I cannot make their way and remain in a latent state without becoming a motive of conduct.

17 In that state, free will cannot be attested: Beaucoup vivent ainsi et meurent sans avoir connu la vraie liberté. Mais la suggestion deviendrait persuasion si le moi tout entier se l’assimilait […] toute l’histoire de la personne: et l’éducation la plus autoritaire ne retrancherait rien de notre liberté si elle nous communiquait seulement des idées et des sentiments capables d’imprégner l’âme entière.22

18 At last, the free action coincides with the re-conquest of self by the subject; a re- conquest that is realized when the subject can reconnect itself to the pure durée. In this respect, no one better than the artist is able to achieve a direct contact with the deep passions that animate the human spirit: Bref, nous sommes libres quand nos actes émanent de notre personnalité entière, quand ils l’expriment, quand ils ont avec elle cette indéfinissable ressemblance qu’on trouve parfois entre l’œuvre et l’artiste.23

19 The references to the creativeness of the artist enrich of new articulations the relationship between individuality and freedom. Sources of freedom, in the well-known Bergson’s expressions that we have recalled, might well represent the thread of all the philosophical search of the French thinker. In the Essai of 1889, the free act is a spontaneous one since the temporality of experience is durée; the free act, in fact, is one and indivisible like the temporal continuum which belongs to the life of the conscience. Intellect is incapable to formulate a notion of time that does not denaturalize the sense and the reality of it, making it a pure mental construction.

20 Intellect is not able, as well, to define freedom since the free act, as spontaneity, is really indecipherable. The authentic freedom can be only immediately picked up: Nous pouvons maintenant formuler notre conception de la liberté. On appelle liberté le rapport du moi concret à l’acte qu’il accomplit. Ce rapport est indéfinissable, précisément parce que nous sommes libres. […] comme on a commencé par figer en quelque sorte l’activité du moi, on voit la spontanéité se résoudre en inertie et la liberté en nécessité.24

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21 The inside development of his views on freedom will conduct the philosopher to a different attitude towards the social implications of human action; the theses of the Essai hide, in fact, a difficulty hard to exceed. The definition of free will as spontaneity and the refined indeterminateness of the affirmations of the philosopher had aroused an immediate critical reaction in whoever – like Levy-Bruhl and G. Belot – saw a real attack to the intellectual capabilities of man in Bergson’s idea.25

22 In Matière et mémoire, Bergson already warned the non negligible sense of such criticisms and tried to isolate his own position from the “indeterminist field,” influenced by the psychology of Janet, putting it on the place of a new horizon.26 Inside this new perspective, it would be possible a reconciliation among the purely sensitive and animal element of spontaneity and the reflexive one; the element that better characterizes the human approach to the reality: Chez l’homme, être pensant, l’acte libre peut s’appeler une synthèse de sentiments et d’idées, et l’évolution qui y conduit une évolution raisonnable. La durée où nous nous regardons agir, et où il est utile que nous nous regardions, est une durée dont les éléments se dissocient et se juxtaposent; mais la durée où nous agissons est une durée où nos états se fondent les uns dans les autres, et c’est là que nous devons faire effort pour nous replacer par la pensée dans le cas exceptionnel et unique où nous spéculons sur la nature intime de l’action, c’est-à-dire dans la théorie de la liberté.27

23 In this passage, Bergson alludes, even if still vaguely, to the possibility of a third way, among instinct and intelligence; a way that will find expression in L’évolution créatrice.28 In the 1907 work, in fact, Bergson gives evidence of the incapability of the intellect to furnish impulses to the will: the behavior of the human being can be solicited only by suggestions of emotional nature. Therefore, liberty appears as an expression of sensitiveness and not of intelligence and for this motive will be difficult to achieve it until human conduct is tied to the habits of the group: Au contraire, une conduite vraiment nôtre est celle d’une volonté qui ne cherche pas à contrefaire l’intelligence et qui, restant elle-même c’est-à-dire évoluant, aboutit par voie de maturation graduelle à des actes que l’intelligence pourra résoudre indéfiniment en éléments intelligible sans y arriver jamais complètement: l’acte libre est incommensurable avec l’idée, et sa “rationalité” doit se définir par cette incommensurabilité même, qui permet d’y trouver autant d’intelligibilité qu’on voudra. Tel est le caractère de notre évolution intérieure. Et tel est aussi, sans doute, celui de l’évolution de la vie.29

24 Despite Bergson’s new theory of free will proceeded toward a definite way, difficulties, criticisms and lacks of understanding of various kinds denote how much the psychology of the Essai was considered insufficient and inadequate on the scientific and experimental plan. On more than one occasion during animated discussions in the Société Française de Philosophie, G. Belot showed the great weaknesses of the Essai sur les données de la conscience to those who appeared to him. Bergson’s appeal for the foundation of a method finalized to the establishment of a new metaphysics, according to the author of the Études de morale positive, hides a substantial indeterminateness of contents, as well as almost the total absence of experimental results. According to the French moralist, Bergson introduced the analysis of the soul-body relationship in the Essai and developed it in following works, but without a real conclusion.30 Going to the problems more directly connected to human conduct, Belot holds that difficulties considerably increase; a theory that constitutes the individual soul in an entity

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separated by the body, in fact, leads to an analogous separation of the individuals between them: Même indécision enfin au point de vue moral. Tendre à isoler l’esprit du corps, c’est toujours tendre aussi à isoler les esprits les uns des autres; l’histoire de la pensée morale confirmerait, ce me semble, cet apparent paradoxe, et en tout cas les doctrines de M. Bergson comportement très manifestement l’aveu de la solidarité de ceux idées. 31

25 To these observations Bergson, simply and quietly, responded: Que vous dirais-je de plus? Et comment, sur cette philosophie encore vague de la vie, pourrais-je édifier la morale précise et définitive que vous paraissez me demander?32

26 In 1932, when Bergson finally sent the book concerning his interpretation of the facts of morals to press, some leading aspects of his thought had also suffered modifications of a certain degree, owing to the influence of a changed cultural climate in social- anthropological studies.33 In Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, after Bergson took the conscience of the social dimension of individual action, a new concept of community and a different way of handing towards this by the individual came out. The progressive sunset of Positivism made different hypotheses which were related to the social fact practicable and allowed them to refer to the problems regarding the life of collectivity without having to make concessions to mechanistic positions. The pragmatism of James contributes also to the attainment of these finalities and to the foundation of a new cultural climate as well as to a belated return to the psychological functionalism on which this had been founded.

27 In introducing his Hibbert Lecture on Bergson and the criticism of the intellectualism, James in 1909 so expressed himself: Neither one of Taine’s famous principles of explanation of great men, the race, the environment, or the moment, no, nor all three together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates from nothing previous, other things date from it, rather.34

28 It is unusual to see how James attributes the same acknowledgement that he steadily addressed to Emerson to Bergson; that is, the worth to have theorized the value of individuality and novelty, concerned as that inside capability of every individual to produce creative actions; the same kind of creative actions that can be identified in the actions of the so-called “great men.” According to James, we owe to Bergson the appraisal of the notion of individuality as expression of novelty and authentic freedom; that appraisal that the French philosopher – even though in a vague way – assigns to his own Emersonian source. Bergson – James still affirms – “cancels the intellectualistic veto” and, making so, produces a self-sufficient philosophical conscience. What intellectualism do, in fact: “is to harness up reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it better.”35

29 Intellectual processes pursue finalities of practical order; they are not able to justify the triumphalism that science displays in its steady conviction to be able to gather the objectivity of the natural phenomena at all times. James – that does not completely share the Bergonian ‘anti-deterministic’ thesis applied to science – limits himself to embank the ‘philosophical’ pretensions of a certain way to plan the problems: I am quite willing to part company with Professor Bergson, and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect, provided you on your part then agree to discriminate “theoretic” or scientific knowledge from the deeper

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“speculative” knowledge aspired to by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge, which is knowledge about things, as distinguished from living or sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of reality.36

30 According to James, from a speculative point of view it is valid to assume Bergson’s presupposition for which intellect can not gather the reality in its fullness and concreteness. The discussion related to the theoretical or practical function of the concepts could really be brought to an endless controversy, since – James observes – the way in which the problem is posed is not correct. As a matter of fact, it does not admit the possibility of a cohabitation among scientific and philosophical knowledge and between empiricism and philosophy of intuition. We must not confuse different fields of pertinence and different abilities of penetration: “Direct acquaintance and conceptual knowledge are thus complementary of each other; each remedies the other’s defects.”37

31 However, the deep substratum of the phenomena can be gathered through sudden contacts of sympathetic nature, through the intuition: The sole thing that is certain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely right in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feelings. All the what’s as well as the that’s of reality, relational as well as terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception.38

32 The point of substantial accord between James and Bergson seems to reside in a conception of the reality in form of a process, such not to allow the intellect to unfold its own logical nature. With propositions and accents that immediately call to the memory Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire, the American philosopher confirms the concept of a becoming reality, that: “falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life.”39 So, the assignments of science and philosophy are separate, above all when this last desires to strengthen the aspirations of an empiricism that is really such, integral and lived: Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results. 40

33 Therefore, James’ aspiration of the last years, tightened to the formulation of a reliable notion of truth – that is, a notion capable to guard against the risks implied by an excessive relativism – is set inside an ampler problematic horizon, facing the identification of a specific field of pertinence for the philosophical problems. It seems plausible to recognize in this kind of aspiration the real convergence of concerns among the two philosophers and the fundamental reason for the approach of James to Bergson, an approach sometimes unwitting, or forgetful, of the common referring to a same source.

34 The quest of an ideal of truth so constituted inevitably implied the recognition of the grounding value of individuality and, in a specific way, it sent again to the ethical implications of that same principle. Both the thinkers agree on the presupposition that is creativity the peculiarity of the individual action. This creativity produces ‘truth’ and realizes itself in the immediate contact of the subject with the deepest reality. On the concept of truth it nests one of ambiguities of the thought of the American pragmatist: in the essays that compose his 1909 work, generally, finds expression James’ demand about the foundation of a valid principle of truth; a principle that, at the same time,

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could be able to respect the pluralist ground of his new metaphysics. This demand – acknowledged, as it is known, also through Renouvier41 – in the pluralistic universalism of James was connected to that tenacious, consequential, substratum deriving from the education received by his father in a climate strongly engraved by Emersonian Transcendentalism. Until then, anybody better than Emerson had shown the way to the possibility of a fruitful cohabitation of monistic and pluralistic instances: nature and individuals, universalism and free expression of an indefinite and indefinable number of faiths and values.

35 But to gather the roots of that sort of leading ambiguity, it is opportune to remember some pages of The moral philosopher and the moral life. In this meaningful essay, appeared in 1891, we assist to the attempt of the philosopher to introduce his own views on the assignments and on the methodologies of the moral science in a ‘scientific’ form. What James wants to examine more precisely is the peculiarity of the relationship of the philosopher with ethical acting. But just on the term action stands a certain ambiguity of the writing.

36 The fundamental aim of the essay immediately comes declared by James: The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.42

37 In the analysis of ethical action, physical science and moral science have the common objective to achieve results of generalizable value through the application of a method founded upon the experience. Under this aspect, the methodological plants of physical science and moral science sink the roots into the same substratum, anti-substantialist and anti-absolutist: On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics is possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term. Everywhere the ethical philosopher must wait on facts.43

38 The moral philosopher works like an arbiter inside the variegated plurality of human faiths and beliefs to propose the more representative ideal in form of a model. Doing this work, the moral philosopher adopts a type of investigation that does not differ, in the method, from that of the natural scientist, but differs from it deeply for which concerns the subject.44

39 Feelings and beliefs represent psychological acts, expressions of the intimate nature of the human mind that only the intuitive processes gather in their deeper variety. Exalting a thread of ethical search that unites him to Bergson, James expresses with vigor his own recognition towards intuitionism: Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school.45

40 Ethical actions are not material objects, neither mere representations of the physical datum: they are countersigned for being original creations of the subject. With expressions that seem to anticipate the future developments of Bergson’s ethics, and bringing besides the implications of an analysis introduced in1880, in Great Men and Their Environment,46 he stress the importance of the proposals that arise from great men and from their originality:

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Every now and then, however, some one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary thought or action may bear prosperous fruit. He may replace old “laws of nature” by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than would have followed had the rules been kept.47

41 In the originality, not artfully hunted, and sometimes ‘inevitable,’ resides the possibility to get radical changes of the object of our faith and consequent innovations of the behavior. Although James was both convinced that only in the inner life of the individual the decisive word lodges,48 he also so that faith makes possible the progress of the humanity toward the best outcomes thanks to the fact that believing in God allows to formulate an unified systematic ethic and that every religious cause frees the individual courage.49 Whereas logic is incapable to formulate explanations of the action, the mysticism intervenes.

42 In that same years, in The Sentiment of Rationality, James wrote: The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. To religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish; nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep. […] Even the least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that “swiftly arose and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth.”50

43 The “mystical method,” inspired by the heart, encircles the mystery without being able to penetrate it, James will still write; the not systematic nature of such method represents in fact its substantial weakness: if men should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy.51

44 In this way: […] wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of the race. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.52

45 The changed accents in comparison to the 1880 essay are clear: the appeal to a mystical method that, according to James, would allow us to reach an authentic and complete empiricism, brings us well over specifically anti-Spencerian assumptions expressed in Great men and Their Environment. In this last writing, in fact, the appearance of great men was explained as a spontaneous variation, to the way of the Darwinian theory of evolution; therefore, the assignment of the philosopher was to examine the mutual relationship between the environment and the personalities so constituted. The following developments of Pragmatism, in particular way in Dewey and Mead, can be set in continuity with the evolutionistic theses of the above-mentioned essay and they will often overlook the developments of thought of the last James, of a philosopher that is, more and more ‘infatuated of metaphysics.’

46 Really, the position of James is complex, divided and almost working on antithetical or at least hardly compatible plane. Nevertheless, what seems to have surely fascinated James since the years of The Will to Believe – but in a more evident way when he composed the Essays on Radical Empiricism – was the possibility to mediate truth and pluralism through the appeal to a sort of principle of individuality, grounded in the

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creativeness and the originality of every human being. To the concept of truth as ‘verification,’ he replaces in The Will to Believe one new, that does not draw its value only from its practical effectiveness, but keeps the free will in the effectiveness of intimate and deep fields of experience, inaccessible to the scientific knowledge, that can be cultured only through a taking of conscience of fideistic nature. New men and women, books, accidents, events, inventions, enterprises, burst unceasingly upon the world. It is vain to resolve these into ancient elements, or to say that they belong to ancient kind, so long as no one of them in its full individuality ever was here before or will ever come again. Men of science and philosophy, the moment they forget their theoretic abstractions, live in their biographies as much as any one else, and believe as naively that that fact even now is making, and that they themselves, by doing “original work,” help to determine what the future shall become.53

47 Individuality, both as principle of cosmological order, both in its ethical meaning, constitutes a line of union among two philosophies, pragmatism and spiritualism, so different for methods and finality.

48 The philosophies of Bergson and James, departed from that sort of unusual coincidence we referred to, developed two philosophical theories in which, also assuming a different conception of the evolutionary movement, the psychic component and the physic one are harmoniously penetrated. Both the philosophers, after having crossed two distinct and separate walk, reach the formulation of an ethics that is inspired to be one with a common individualistic matrix. For the two thinkers, the ethical principles stop being empty rules and become direct expression of the real life of single personalities.

49 The lesson of deep trust in the value of the individual personality acknowledged by Bergson and James has a common ‘idealistic’ and ‘romantic’ derivation from Emersonian Transcendentalism. As a matter of fact, if Emerson’s thought played an important and well recognized role in the development of American pragmatism, his role over other philosophical European contexts was even more direct and incisive. Is this also the case of Bergson’s first approach to American philosophy. Also on this circumstance the adventures of Emerson’s seminal ideas carried out a journey to/from Europe whose ‘rebound effect’ on the American context is useful to evaluate.

NOTES

1. Clearly, I refer to William James’ concept of “stream of consciousness” (The Principles of Psychology, New York, 1890), and Henri Bergson’s concept of “durée réelle” (Essai sur les données immédiate de la conscience, in Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire, Textes annotés par André Robinet, Introduction par Henri Gouhier, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1970, 1-160). 2. Bergson’s letter to Th. Ribot is now in: H. Bergson, Mélanges, Textes publiés et annotés par André Robinet, Avant-propos par Henri Gouhier, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1972, 656-8. 3. H. Bergson, Mélanges: 657.

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4. James, The Principles of Psychology (New York 1890), I: 224 ff. 5. Bergson, Mélanges: 657. 6. Bergson, Mélanges: 658. 7. Letter to H. M. Kallen, dated October 28th 1915. This letter follows Kallen’s publication of the book: William James and Henri Bergson. A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life, Chicago 1914. Bergson’s letter is now in: Mélanges: 1191-4. 8. Bergson, Mélanges: 658. 9. Letter to W. James, dated July 20th 1905. Mélanges: 659-61. 10. The presuppositions of that turn “toward the concrete,” of which in 1932 Jean Wahl will make interpreter, really work in Bergson, since the beginning. J. Wahl, Vers le concret, Paris, Vrin, 1932. 11. Apart from the quoted book of H. M. Kallen, on the relation between stream of consciousness and durée réelle set his attention M. Capek in two interesting articles that opened the way to the following debate. M. Capek, Stream of consciousness and durée réelle, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 20 (3), 1950, 331-53; M. Capek, La signification actuelle de la philosophie de James, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 67 (3), 1962, 291-321. 12. H. Bergson, Œuvres: 1003-23. 13. I refer to the varieties of Emersonian suggestions that, also in Europe, spread out thanks to an exceptionally fast circulation of all the most important works by Emerson, and of Representative Men in particular. This almost immediate circulation is largely owed to the attendant success of Th. Carlyle’s works of 1841, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, and to the novelty represented by the disagreement expressed nine years later by Emerson in his Representative Men. In this book, the greatness of man is depicted like a potentiality extended to all human beings and every ‘immediate’ theodicy, that foresee some person mysteriously elected by God, is denied. Emerson’s thought on this topic restores the possibility of an ethical approach to the problem of the ‘greatness of men’; an approach that can be found in Bergson as well as in James. In this paper, cross-references to Emerson’s works come from: R. W. Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, ed. by E. W. Emerson, 12 vols. Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, 1903-04. 14. Relatively to this point, it appears today still fundamental the reading of Jean Wahl of the sources and the characters of pluralism in James’ thought (J. Wahl, Les philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique, Paris, 1920; J. Wahl, The Pluralists Philosophies of England and America, Oxford, 1925). Also with reference to Wahl’s suggestions, K. Ferguson has recently taken back the theme of the pluralism of James as the key of reading of a political vision of James that is often denied or underestimated. K. Ferguson, Politics in the Pluriverse, Lanham 2007, 51-72. 15. Bergson, Mélanges: 1244. 16. Bergson, Mélanges: 1543. 17. Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion has been published for the first time in 1932. H. Bergson, Œuvres: 980-1250. 18. In particular, from Emerson’s work of 1850, Representative Men. 19. The theme of “character” countersigns the reception of Emerson by Nietzsche too. The problem of the relationship Nietzsche-Emerson has almost crossed one century of the historiographical-philosophical search, considerably modifying some relevant interpretative parameters. An exhaustive outcome of this search is given by the book of an Italian scholar; B. Zavatta, La sfida del carattere. Nietzsche lettore di Emerson, Roma, 2004. 20. James, Essays in Religion and Morality:109. 21. Bergson, Œuvres: 109. 22. Bergson, Œuvres: 110. 23. Bergson, Œuvres: 113. 24. Bergson, Œuvres: 144.

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25. Lévy-Bruhl and G. Belot devoted to the essay of Bergson two articles, published in the Revue Philosophique, respectively in May 1890 (XXX: 361-392) and in October of the same year (XXX: 361-392). In both the articles, the theory of the liberty proposed by the French philosopher was harshly criticized. 26. Bergson, Œuvres: 161-382. 27. Bergson, Œuvres: 322. 28. Bergson, Œuvres: 578-652. 29. Bergson, Œuvres: 535. 30. Discussion of May 2nd 1901 to the Société Française de Philosophie concerning “Le parallélisme psycho-physique et la métaphysique positive”; statements of H. Bergson and G. Belot. H. Bergson, Mélanges: 463-91. 31. Bergson, Mélanges: 470. 32. Bergson, Mélanges: 487. 33. In virtue, above all, of the transformations proposed in sociological field by E. Durkheim; a scholar to which Bergson was very tied up. On the value recognized by the French philosopher to the nouvelle sociologie is to be seen some Bergsonian texts (1915-33); H. Bergson, Mélanges: 1165-170. 34. James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Writings 1902-10, New York, 1987, 731. 35. James, Writings 1902-10: 741. 36. James, Writings 1902-10: 742. 37. James, Writings 1902-10: 745. 38. James, Writings 1902-10: 744, footnote. 39. James, Writings 1902-10: 751. In this essay James clearly appears influenced from Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire. 40. James, Writings 1902-10: 751. 41. It is known that James dedicated to Renouvier Some Problems of Philosophy; a work in which there was room for explicit references to the debt of the pragmatist towards the French thinker: “[…] he was one of the greatest philosophic characters, and but for the decisive impression made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism. I might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which I had grown up,” W. James, Some Problems of Philosophy, New York, 1968, 165 footnote. 42. James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. An address to the Yale Philosophical Club, International Journal of Ethics, April 1891. 43. James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. 44. James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. 45. James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. 46. James, “Great Men and Their Environment,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York-London, 1897. 47. James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. 48. James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. 49. James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. 50. James, The Sentiment of Rationality in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York-London, 1897. 51. James, The Sentiment of Rationality. 52. James, The Sentiment of Rationality. 53. James, Some Problems of Philosophy: 151-2.

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ABSTRACTS

Emerson’s thought played an important and well recognized role in the development of American pragmatism, but the role exerted by the Transcendentalist in some other philosophical European contexts was even more direct and incisive. On some circumstances, the “adventure” of Emerson’s seminal ideas carried out a journey to/from Europe whose “rebound effect” on the American context is useful to evaluate. The widely attested influence of Emerson on Nietzsche sets an expressive example of this outward/inwards journey; other plain indications suggest now to reconsider the Emerson-Bergson relation and the peculiar outcomes that this relation produced in James’ pragmatism. In this paper, the controversy between William James and Henri Bergson is considered as from the topic of individuality and the very similar way in which the two philosophers theorized its temporalistic and pluralistic constitution. Both of them have been deeply influenced by Emerson, even though in different measure and sometimes with different – if not diverging – philosophical results. Nevertheless, just their common reference to Emerson can contribute to a better understanding of their controversial relation and of the consequences of this relation on the development of James’ ethical views.

AUTHOR

ANNA M. NIEDDU Universita di Cagliari anieddu[at]unica.it

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The Reception of William James in Continental Europe

Jaime Nubiola

AUTHOR'S NOTE

A previous version of this text was presented at the William James centennial celebration held in the University of Coimbra in November of 2010. I am very grateful to Edmundo Balsemao Pires for his kind invitation to take part in that event. A previous version was presented in September 2010 in a conference held in Oxford by the Rothermere American Institute. I am really grateful to Giovanni Maddalena, Erik Norvelle, Jason Panone and Hilary Putnam for their help, and to the Department of Philosophy of Harvard University for its generous hospitality to prepare this paper. I am also indebted with Howard G. Callaway and Rossella Fabbrichesi for their useful suggestions to my presentation in Coimbra.

I. Introduction

1 “Growing up zigzag” is the title that Robert Richardson assigns to the section dedicated to William James’s early years in his well-known biography. Travelling with his family, James attended schools not only in the United States and England, but in France, Switzerland and Germany, and was also privately tutored. According to Louis Menand, “when William was thirteen [1855], William and Henry had attended together at least ten different schools” (Menand 2001: 92; Lewis 1991: 72). On May 26th 1858, William writes to his friend Ed Van Winkle from London: We have now been three years abroad. I suppose you would like to know whether our time has been well spent. I think that as a general thing, Americans had better keep their children at home. I myself have gained in some things but have lost in others. We have got a general knowledge & education which we could never have acquired at home, but on the other hand we have not gone through the general routine which we should have done in America. (Corr. 4: 16; Richardson 2006: 23)

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2 This early observation of sixteen-year-old William already suggests a permanent tension in James. Throughout all his life he was “a nostalgic cosmopolitan, flying from perch to perch, now yearning for home, now equally eager to escape” (Perry 1936: I, 177). He was fluent in French and German, and at least competent in Italian,1 and traveled a lot through-out Europe. As Jack Barbalet has written, By the time he died in 1910 at the age of 68 years, William James was undoubtedly the most influential American thinker of his period; indeed, of any period. His European reputation was possibly even higher than his standing in America. James not only represented to European thinkers the American advances in psychology and philosophy, for which he was largely responsible, but he entered into the formation of contemporary European thought as much as he did American.

3 In view of the horizon of the William James centennial celebration, the aim of my paper is to try to provide a vivid sense of James’s personal involvement with Europe and particularly with Continental philosophy, giving some indications about the different countries. The topic is genuinely immense, and I will give only some thick brush strokes for some countries, paying particular attention to Spain as a case study. Hence, my paper will be divided into three sections, after this introduction: 2) Europe in James; 3) James in Europe: friends and interlocutors; 4) James in Spain: translations and readers. A number of names and facts will be mentioned, since they provide the general framework for understanding the reception of William James in Continental Europe, but I will try in particular to high-light the personal relations between William James and some of the most relevant European thinkers of his time.

II. Europe in James

4 It is not easy to establish what in James was European and what was American. With the exception of the year he passed in Newport (1858-59), he lived in Europe from the 13th year of his life until the 19th, “the most fertile years in new experiences, where the spirit is most eager to know,” as his early biographer Le Breton (1929: 34) writes, and he returned to Europe once and again for health and academic reasons.

5 James came back to Europe in 1867-68 to recover from his nervous breakdown. He attended physiology lectures in Berlin, stayed in Dresden, took the baths in Teplitz, visited Heidelberg, Geneva, Paris and in November of 1868 he returned to Harvard not really recovered, but to try to finish his medical degree (Simon 1998: 102-14). As is well known, William James credited the reading in April 1870 of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier (1815-1903) and learning of “his definition of free will – sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts” (William James Diary, 30 April 1870; Simon 1998: 127), as a key step in his recovery from depression.

6 He came back to Europe in October of 1873 (London, Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, Dresden) and returned to Cambridge in March of 1874 to teach anatomy and physiology at Harvard. In 1880 James was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard and spent the summer in Europe for “intellectual sustenance”: he hoped to meet some of the European philosophers with whom he had been corresponding and to expand his small philosophical ‘club’ (Simon 1998: 169). He stayed in London, Heidelberg and the Swiss Alps. James would return to Europe several times in the following years: the sabbatical year 1882-83, alone and “rattling around Europe at a furious pace” (Richardson 2006: 224-5): Germany, Prague, Venice, Paris and London; with his wife and

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children in 1892-93; sabbatical and convalescence in Europe throughout 1899-1902; trip to the Mediterranean with Henry, 1905; Hibbert Lectures at Oxford 1908-09; and the final trip to Europe, March-August 1910, as a last attempt to recover his failing health.

7 Hundreds of European places, thousands of letters, providing a detailed testimony of his feelings, his meetings and his experiences. Europe invigorated him with its strength and prosperity: “he felt there manly and energetic” (Simon 1998: 251). In this sense it may also be observed that the Europe familiar to James was – besides England – France, Germany and Switzerland, and in those countries he usually stayed in rich and developed environments. In particular, as Perry notes, “the lack of art in the environment made it impossible that James should ever be completely reconciled to the ‘American scene’” (Perry 1936: II, 254). For instance, on December 1908, James writes to Charles A. Strong from Cambridge, On the whole I don’t wonder at your choosing to live more and more abroad. We’re a thousand years behindhand in so many things; and the attained social character of European civilizations generally is more erfreulich than those mere suggestions and possibilities of good, that are perhaps more abundant here. (Corr. 12: 138)

8 In sum, as Perry writes of James, “when he was in America he longed for Europe; when he was in Europe he longed for America […]. His weariness was always associated with the present and communicated a rosy and seductive quality to the absent” (Perry 1936: II, 37). During his long stays in Europe James developed a profound ambivalence towards the United States. James’s answer in December of 1895 to Carl Stumpf – who had invited him to attend the International Congress of Psychology to be held in Munich in the summer of 1896 – is very revealing (Perry 1936: II, 189): I wish for many reasons I could go. Such things keep one from fossilizing and prolong one’s possibilities of “adaptation.” Nevertheless I have little hope. I ruined myself financially by my last excursion en famille to Europe, and nothing but the need of foreign travel for my health could justify so speedy a repetition of the process. Moreover, it unsettles my Americanism (that tender plant) to go too often abroad, and that must be weighed against the intellectual and social advantages of the Congress. It is no light matter to feel foreign in one’s native land. I am just beginning to feel American again, when this temptation comes!

9 As a contrast with this, I cannot resist recalling James’s letter to his wife at the end of March 1905 after a two-hour walk through Naples, a Mediterranean city of the real Europe: From ½ past 4 to ½ past six I walked alone through the old Naples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the very poor, vocal with them too, their voices carry so that every child seems to be calling to the whole street, goats, donkeys, chickens, and an occasional cow mixed in, & no light of heaven getting in doors. The street floor composed of cave like shops, the people doing their work on chairs in the street for the sake of light and in the black inside, beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be hard to match. I have come here too late in life, when the picturesque has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me like a passion, and such sights would have then been the solidest of mental food. I put up then with such inferior substitutional suggestions as Geneva & Paris afforded – but these black old Naples streets are not suggestions, they are the reality itself – full orchestra. (Corr. 10: 575)

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III. James in Europe: Interlocutors and Friends

10 I have mentioned already how William James credited the reading of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier as a decisive step in his recovery from depression. In fact, the relationship and correspondence between them extended over a quarter of a century (Perry 1936: chaps. XLI-XLIII).2 Intellectual and personal friendship and fame were two really important elements in James’s life. He had a lot of friends in Europe, who opened the doors to his relationships and enhanced his fame. On this issue, I love to recall the anecdote from the end of April 1905, when James was in Rome for the Fifth International Congress of Psychology: He went to the conference hall to register, “and when I gave my name,” he told Alice, “the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me, or words to that effect.” His effusive admirer called in one of the officers of the congress, who, just as impressed, implored James to give a talk at one of the general meetings. “So I’m in for it again,” James admitted with delight, “having no power to resist flattery.” (Corr. 11: 17; Simon 1998: 332)

11 The following year 1906, William James published in the Journal of Philosophy his well- known paper on “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy.” I want to quote only the opening lines: American students have so long had the habit of turning to Germany for their philosophic inspiration, that they are only beginning to recognize the splendid psychological and philosophical activity with which France today is animated; and as for poor little Italy, few of them think it necessary even to learn to read her language. Meanwhile Italy is engaged in the throes of an intellectual rinascimento quite as vigorous as her political one. (James 1906: 337)

12 James describes vividly the enthusiasm for pragmatism of Giovanni Papini and the small band associated with the journal Leonardo (1903-07): Prezzolini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola and others. “The Italian pragmatists,” James concludes the paper, “are an extraordinarily well-informed and gifted, and above all an extraordinarily free and spirited and unpedantic, group of writers” (James 1906: 341). As the reader may know, there is an historical problem here on the reception of pragmatism in Italy that only recently has started to gain due attention: the appropriation of William James by Mussolini and Italian fascism, after the first World War, in part through the mediation of Papini, but mostly from Mussolini himself, who according to Perry, “not only knew at least fragments of Jamesian doctrine and found them to his liking. He also remembers having made James’s personal acquaintance.” In his book published in 1935 – when il Duce still ran Italy – Perry was at pains to do justice to the whole affair (Perry 1936: II, 574-9). A thorough study is still missing, although some steps have been taken in that line suggesting that the pragmatist genealogy of fascism is truly unfounded (Diggins 1972: 221-2; Myers 1986: 414-5 and 592-3; Maddalena & Tuzet 2007). What also can now be said is that this misappropriation of James by fascism had the result of causing in Italy an almost complete neglect of Italian pragmatism until very recently (Dal Pra 1984; Santucci 1995).

13 A highlight in the reception of William James’s thought and pragmatism in Europe, and in particular in Germany, was the III International Congress of Philosophy, held in Heidelberg in September of 1908, at which the proposals of the pragmatists were in the center of the international debate. James M. Baldwin, Emile Boutroux, Wilhelm Jerusalem, Christine Ladd-Franklin, Emile Meyerson, Hugo Münsterberg, Eugenio d’Ors,

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Josiah Royce, Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, Giovanni Vailati, and many others attended the conference (Elsenhans 1908/74). Bergson figures in the program as a keynote speaker, but he was not able to attend due to an untimely illness in Switzerland and was replaced by the president of the conference, the neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband.

14 The first speaker was Josiah Royce on “The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion” which opened the general discussion on pragmatism and truth. Royce opposed several forms of pragmatism and all relativism, suggesting as his own position the label of “Absolute Pragmatism” (Royce 1908/74). According to the reports of the conference, the traditional dominance of Kantism and neo-Kantism of Germany and France (in this country due mainly to the influence of Renouvier) had been challenged by the fresh air of pragmatism coming with juvenile strength from America and England (Ugarte de Ercilla 1908: 210-4; Alexandre 1908: 930-40; Fullerton 1908: 573-7). The core of the debate was the conflict between the relativistic stance of pragmatism and the metaphysics of idealism, between truths related to real human life and eternal truths. One of the main voices was F. C. S. Schiller arguing that the idea of an “independent, supernatural, eternal, incommutable, unachievable, inapplicable, and useless truth” was a childish delusion: for Schiller, “in its most important sense Truth was a social product” (1908/74: 711-9 and 92; Tröhler 2008: 70). In his report of the conference H. Delacroix notices de absence of William James, the “chef d’école” of pragmatism, together with Wundt, Lipps, Flournoy and a few other philosophical luminaries of the day (Alexandre 1908: 928; Delacroix 1908: 529).

15 James’s volume of Pragmatism was also published in Germany in 1908, only one year after its original publication, translated by Wilhelm Jerusalem, the Austrian Jewish philosopher and pedagogue. Let us recall the original “Preface”: The pragmatic movement, so-called – I do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it – seems to have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many different points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait until we got our message fairly out.

16 In that preface of April 1907 William James provides further readings on pragmatism. He mentions John Dewey in America, Schiller in England, four French philosophers (Milhaud, Le Roy, Blondel and de Sailly) and a forthcoming book by Papini, but no German philosopher is referred to. In this sense, it is not unwarranted to say that pragmatism was received in Germany with hostility by the academic establishment, which leaned more towards Kantism and Hegelianism. As Perry writes, “although Ernst Mach was an important forerunner of pragmatism, while Simmel and Ostwald were greeted by James as allies, pragmatism gained only a slight foothold in Germany, and that mainly in Austria! Even the three philosophers just mentioned accepted it as an interpretation of method in the physical or social sciences rather than as a philosophy” (Perry 1937: II, 579-80).

17 The sympathetic correspondence with Jerusalem beginning in 1900, who was an early admirer of James and his translator into German, is very revealing. For instance, in November 1909 Jerusalem writes him from Vienna: “The misunderstandings of and the opposition against Pragmatism lies deeper than I thought at first. Science wants a

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theoretic or static, a timeless truth […].” At the end of the letter, Jerusalem adds: “Of my translation almost 500 copies are sold, not much but more than nothing. There is hope then, that little by little we may get convertites and with their help to take arms against the barren speculations of pure logic” (Corr. 12: 361-2). As we now know, the first World War changed the entire intellectual European stage, and both pragmatism and idealism soon became part of the past. The strength of Husserl (Herzog 1995) and the attraction of Heidegger, in spite of their intellectual connections with pragmatism, eclipsed the figure of William James totally.

18 Of course there are strong links between William James and several German scientists of his time like Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Stumpf. The continued relations between James and German universities may be perhaps epitomized by the hiring of Hugo Münsterberg to take charge of the Harvard laboratory of psychology in order to replace James (Perry 1937, II: 138-54). All the letters between William James and his German correspondents are nowadays a real treasure of intellectual delight, but it seems to me that there is no real German philosopher amongst his more active correspondents. American pragmatism and German philosophy were in opposite camps with a very difficult middle ground.3 As Hilary Putnam writes in his preface to volume 10 of James’s correspondence, “absolute idealism was indeed to be swept from the scene but not by pragmatism, although pragmatist polemics may have played a part in its demise.” It was replaced, first in England and later in the United States by what is now called analytic philosophy. But, “however, – Putnam adds – pragmatism is presently undergoing a revival; the story is certainly not yet finished!” (Putnam 2002: xxxii-xxxiii).

19 Mentioning Vienna, it is fair to make a brief reference to James’s relation with Freud. Since this has already been studied (Singer 2003; Segal 2005), I want only to mention here James’s impression of Freud after meeting him during the twentieth annual celebration of Clark University (Rosenzweig 1994). He writes to his Swiss friend Théodore Flournoy: “I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits, so that we may learn what they are. They can’t fail to throw light on human nature, but I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed by fixed ideas. I can make nothing in my own case with his dream theories” (Corr. 12: 334). In fact, the boom of Freud and psychoanalysis after first World War and the fading away of James’s optimistic account of emotions has a lot to do with Freud’s conception of emotions as “irrational forces that, if not properly discharged, lead to neurotic symptoms.” As Barbalet concludes this comparison, “Freud’s account resonated perfectly with a political, social and economic world that was experiencing not only the irrationality and violence of total war, but also economic depression and dislocation” (Barbalet 1994, and 2007).

20 But it is time to move to Paris, since France was the golden door for James’s introduction in Europe. Not only Gaston Milhaud, Édouard Le Roy and Maurice Blondel, mentioned in the preface of “Pragmatism,” but in particular Henri Bergson and Émile Boutroux were friends and interlocutors of William James in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Also, a really interesting area of research is the impact of James’s thought and pragmatism on the French Catholic environment. Very recently a collection of studies on this issue has been published under the general title of The Reception of Pragmatism in France & The Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890-1914, edited

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by David G. Schultenover (2009). A similar full-length study for each country would be required to get a clearer view of James’s impact in Continental Europe.

21 As Perry writes, “without any doubt the most important philosophical and personal attachment of James’s later years was that which he formed with Bergson” (Perry 1937: II, 599). Henri Bergson was a towering figure in the French philosophical scene. The friendly affinity between both philosophers is clear and mutually acknowledged: “Neither philosopher ever made any claims of priority; each rejoiced to find the other in possession of the truth, and was almost extravagantly appreciative of the other’s merit. The similarity of their doctrine,” Perry rightly asserts, “is not complete or extraordinary – and does not disparage the originality of either” (Perry 1937: II, 600).4 I will cite only one quotation from Bergson’s letter of July 20, 1905 to James: […] to my mind, one of the most striking arguments that one can invoke (from the external point of view) in favor of American “pragmatism” and the “new philosophy” in France is precisely that these two doctrines have established themselves independently of one another, with different points of departure and different methods. When, under such conditions, two doctrines tend to coincide, there is a good chance that both of them are in the vicinity of the truth. (Perry 1937: II, 616-7)

22 The second great name to be mentioned is Émile Boutroux, who was the best friend of William James in France during the last two years of James’s life. Although their philosophical positions were diverse – as with Bergson – “their friendship ripened quickly into love,” Perry writes. As James acknowledged six weeks before his death: “To have known you is one of the pleasantest episodes of my life, and the memory of it will always be a satisfaction” (Letter of 16 July 1910, Corr. 12: 570). Only a few months after James’s death Boutroux would publish his well-known introductory book to James’s life and philosophy (Boutroux 1911).

IV. The Case of Spain: Early Translations and Readers

23 William James sailed on the steamer Spain from New York to Europe on October 10th, 1873, but he did not visit Spain nor stay for any length of time in any other Spanish- speaking country throughout all his life.5 Nevertheless, James’s thought and books were received early on in Spain by prominent scholars such as Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), and Eugenio d’Ors (1881-1954). In fact, it is possible to assert that, contrary to a superficial impression, there is a deep affinity between the central questions of James’s thought and the topics and problems addressed by the most relevant Hispanic thinkers of the twentieth century.

24 Without any doubt, a sign of the warm reception of William James in Spain is the early translation of a number of four of his books during his lifetime. The first translation of James into Spanish appeared as early as 1900. It was a two-volume translation of the Principles of Psychology (1890), by Domingo Barnés, a well-known Spanish educator of his time, a member of the famous InstituciónLibre de Enseñanza, and an expert in psychology and sociology. Besides the Principles, Barnés translated a dozen books by contemporary authors such as John Dewey, Henri Bergson and others. The second translation of James into Spanish was Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899), which appeared in 1904 translated by Carlos M. Soldevila. Three years later, the first translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience into Spanish was completed by

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Miguel Domenge Mir under the title Fases del sentimientoreligioso. Estudiosobre la naturalezahumana.

25 The fourth translation of James into Spanish was The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy in 1909, under the title of La vidaeterna y la fe [Eternal Life and Faith]. The translator was Santos Rubiano (1871-1930), an army doctor who was a pioneer in the application of the methods and concepts of modern psychology in the Spanish army. A veteran of the Philippines and North African wars, he was trained as a psychologist at Cornell University in the United States in1916, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Public Education (Bandrés & Llavona 1997). In that year Rubiano translated Psychology. Briefer Course, which had a second edition in 1930. After the opening page there is a photographic reproduction of a hand-written text from William James dated on the 22nd of March of 1908. The text is the following: 22.III. 08 … and am very glad to authorize you as my official translator. Believe me, dear Doctor, with sincere and grateful regards, yours very truly. Wm James Dr. Santos Rubiano

26 Rubiano includes a lively “biographical-critical foreword” in his translation of the Briefer Course. He writes that in this book “not only does the professor speak, but also the genius and the believer,” and that James “was able to create from his own personality his own method of teaching, and [that] in his personality it was possible to find not only a philosopher but a good man” (Rubiano 1916: xiii). Besides these two works, Rubiano translated Pragmatism into Spanishin 1923, and in 1924 The Meaning of Truth as well as a new translation of Talks to Teachers.

27 Coming now to the original production on James in the Spanish speaking countries, in 1961 Pelayo H. Fernández studied in detail how Miguel de Unamuno read William James, his frequent quotations of James and his marginal notes in the works by James in his library. Fernández’s conclusion was that Unamuno’s pragmatism was “original with respect to that of the American, from whom he absorbed only complementary features” (Fernández 1961: 13). However, Izaskun Martínez (2007) has convincingly argued that the abundance of facts that Pelayo Fernández lists bears witness to a permanent impact of James on Unamuno’s intellectual development.

28 In the case of José Ortega y Gasset, John Graham published a careful study in which, after noting Ortega’s hostility to American pragmatism, he reveals “many basic connections, similarities and points of identity, so that concrete influence and dependence seem more plausible than ’coincidence’ between Ortega and James” (Graham 1994: 145). Graham gives evidence that Ortega read James early in his career, and that Ortega was aware of James’s radical empiricism as having anticipated the central notion of his own “rational-vitalism” (Graham 1994: 147-52). His evidence of James’s impact on Ortega by German sources, themselves influenced by James, is especially convincing (Donoso 1995: 499).

29 I want to bring attention to what Ortega writes in a footnote in his well-known What is Philosophy?: “With this I suggest that in pragmatism, aside its audacity and naivety, there is something profoundly true, even though it be centrifugal” (Ortega 1982, 41 [my italics]). If I understand this passage correctly, what Ortega is trying to say is that pragmatism is a valuable philosophical tradition, but it is alien, foreign (“centrifugal”) to the mainstream of European philosophy. Moreover, as Graham noted (Graham 1994:

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146), there is an autobiographical text of Ortega in which he seems to assert that pragmatism, which began outside the boundaries of the European stage, did not reach its full maturity until it was integrated in the framework of German philosophy, that is, in the mainstream of his own philosophical position (Ortega 1980: 14). This is for me one of the main avenues for further exploration concerning the overlapping of pragmatism and Hispanic philosophy: if one understands Ortega’s thought as a German flourishing of pragmatist roots, it is possible to bring the most distinctive traits of Hispanic philosophy and James’s philosophy closer.

30 In contrast with Ortega, Eugenio d’Ors is perhaps the Hispanic philosopher most conscious of his personal connection with American pragmatism. By 1907 he had defined himself as a pragmatist, driven by the same desires as moved his American counterparts, whom he hoped to outstrip by recognizing an aesthetic dimension of human action that could not be reduced to the merely utilitarian (d’Ors 1915: II, 373-5). In fact, d’Ors was able to meet William James in Paris on May of 1910 when James visited Boutroux at the Foundation Thiers and meet there the “intelligent young laureates at the Foundation” (Perry 1937: II, 567-9; Corr. 12: 570). Forty years later, in 1947, in his El secreto de la filosofía, which crowned his philosophical career, d’Ors generously acknowledges his debt to the American tradition (d’Ors 1947: 12). It might be said that William James was present in d’Ors’ thought and writings throughout his entire life (González & Nubiola 2007).

31 In brief, in Spain William James was received with enthusiasm by some young scholars like Eugenio d’Ors or José MaríaIzquierdo (1910), but the more common reaction was the hostility of the German oriented philosophers and also Scholastic thinkers (Arnáiz 1907: 617-27 and 855-67).

V. Conclusion

32 As Cushing Strout (2001) has written, James was “a cosmopolitan American patriot who could speak to the world.” William James was credited by the historian H. Stuart Hughes with being “the revivifying force in European thought in the decade and a half preceding the outbreak of the First World War” (Stuart Hughes 1958: 397). I deeply agree with this position; nevertheless I am of the opinion that a full study about James’s virtual disappearance from Europe after the First World War is now required.

33 My impression is that the general resurgence of pragmatism over the last decade has also brought about a rediscovery of William James and his thought. The recent rediscovery of James and other figures of Classic American Pragmatism might be a key factor for overcoming the naturalism of reductionistic stripe which dominates most of the contemporary philosophical scene.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALEXANDRE M., (1908), “IIIe Congrès International de Philosophie (Heidelberg, 31 août, 5 septembre 1908). Compte Rendu des Séances,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, XVI, 927-1066.

ARNÁIZ M., (1907), “Pragmatismo y humanismo,” Cultura Española, 5-6, 617-27; and 7-8, 855-67.

BANDRÉS J. & R. LLAVONA, (1997), “Santos Rubiano: la introducción de la psicología científica en el ejército español,” Psicothema, IX/3, 659-69.

BARBALET J., (2004), “William James: Pragmatism, Social Psychology and Emotions,” European Journal of Social Theory 7, 337-53.

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DIGGINS J. P., (1972), Mussolini and Fascism. The View from America, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

DONOSO A., (1995), “Review of Graham’s A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset,” Hispania 78, 498-9.

ELSENHANS T., (1908/1974), Bericht über den III. Internationalen Kongress für Philosophie zu Heidelberg 1.bis 5. September 1908; Kraus reprint, Neldeln/Liechtenstein.

FERNÁNDEZ P. H., (1961), Miguel de Unamuno y William James. Un paralelopragmático, Salamanca, CIADA.

FULLERTON G. S., (1908), “The Meeting of the Third International Congress of Philosophy, at Heidelberg, August 31 to September 5, 1908,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 5, 573-7.

GONZÁLEZ A. & J. NUBIOLA, (2007), “William James en Eugenio d’Ors,” Anuario Filosófico XL/2, 413-33.

GRAHAM J. T., (1994), A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset, Columbia, MI, University of Missouri Press.

HERZOG M., (1995), “William James and the Development of Phenomenological Psychology in Europe,” History of the Human Sciences, VIII, 29-46.

IZQUIERDO J. M., (1910), Del Pragmatismo, Ateneo de Sevilla; reprinted in 2009. Available at [unav.es/ gep/IzquierdoDelpragmatismo.pdf].

JAMES W., (1900), Principios de psicología, translation by Domingo Barnés, Madrid, Daniel Jorro, 2 vols., 2nd edition, 1909.

JAMES W., (1906), “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, III, 337-41.

JAMES W., (1907-08), Fases del sentimiento religioso. Estudio sobre la naturaleza humana, translation by Miguel Domenge Mir, Barcelona, Carbonell y Esteva, 3 vols.

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JAMES W., (1909), La vida eterna y la fe, translation by Santos Rubiano, Barcelona, Heinrich; reprinted as La voluntad de creer y otros ensayos de filosofía popular, Madrid, Daniel Jorro, 1922.

JAMES W., (1916), Compendio de psicología, translation by Santos Rubiano, Madrid, Daniel Jorro; 2nd edition, 1930.

JAMES W., (1923), Pragmatismo, Madrid, Daniel Jorro.

JAMES W., (1924), El significado de la verdad, Madrid, Daniel Jorro.

JAMES W., (1924), Psicología pedagógica (para maestros). Sobre algunos ideales de la vida (para estudiantes), Madrid, Daniel Jorro.

JAMES W., (1926), The Letters of William James, edited by his son H. James, Boston, Little Brown.

JOAS H., (1993), Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

KALLEN H. M., (2001), William James and Henri Bergson. A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life & Responses and Reviews, Bristol, Thoemmes Press.

LE BRETON M., (1929), La personnalité de William James, Paris, Hachette.

LEWIS R. W. B., (1991), The Jameses: A Family Narrative, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

MADDALENA G. & G. TUZET, (2007), I pragmatisti italiani tra alleati e nemici, Milano, Albo Versorio.

MARTÍNEZ I., (2007), William James y Miguel de Unamuno: Una nuevaevaluación de la recepción del pensamiento pragmatista en España, Doctoral diss., Universidad de Navarra, Spain.

MARTÍNEZ I. & J. NUBIOLA, (2007), “Unamuno’s Reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience and its Context,” in Fringes of Religious Experience. Cross-perspectives on William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, S. Franzese & F. Kraemer editors, Ontos, Frankfurt, 157-68.

MENAND L., (2001), The Metaphysical Club, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.

MYERS G. E., (1986), William James: His Life and Thought, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

ORS E. d’, (1915), Glosari de Xenius, Tallers Gráfics Montserrat, Barcelona, II, 373- 5.

ORS E. d’, (1947), El secreto de la filosofía, Barcelona, Iberia.

ORTEGA Y GASSET J., (1980), “Medio siglo de filosofía,” Revista de Occidente 3, 5-21.

ORTEGA Y GASSET J., (1982), ¿Qué es filosofía?, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe.

PERRY R. B., (1937), The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols, Boston, Little, Brown.

PRA M. Dal, (1984), Studi sul pragmatismo italiano, Naples, Bibliopolis.

PUTNAM H., (2002), “Introduction,” in The Correspondence of William James, vol. 10, Skrupselis I. & Berkeley E. M. (eds), Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, xxv-xlvii.

RICHARDSON R. D., (2006), William James. In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. A Biography, Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

ROYCE J., (1908/1974), “The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion,” in Berichtüber den III. InternationalenKongressfürPhilosophie, T. Elsenhans (ed.), 62-90.

ROSENZWEIG S., (1994), The Historic Expedition to America (1909). Freud, Jung and Hall the King-Maker, St. Louis, Rana House.

RUBIANO S., (1916), “William James. Bosquejo biográfico. Nota crítica sobre su ideario psicológico,” in James W., Compendio de psicología, ix-xxvii.

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SANTUCCI A., (1995), Empirismo, pragmatismo, filosofia italiana, Bologna, CLUEB.

SCHILLER F. C. S., (1908/1974), “Der Rationalistische Wahrheitsbegriff,” in Bericht über den III. InternationalenKongressfürPhilosophie, T. Elsenhans (ed.), 711-9.

SCHULTENOVER D. G., (2009), The Reception of Pragmatism in France & The Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890-1914, Washington, The Catholic University of America Press.

SEGAL R., (2005), “James and Freud on Mysticism,” in William James and “The Varieties of Religious Experience”: A Centenary Celebration, J. Carrette (ed.), London, Routledge, 124-32.

SIMON L., (1998), Genuine Reality. A Life of William James, New York, Harcourt Brace.

SINGER J. L., (2003), “Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations: Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud,” Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 5, 461-83.

SKRUPSELIS I. & E. M. BERKELEY, (1992-2004), The Correspondence of William James, Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia, 10 volumes. [It is referred as Corr. followed by the number of volume and page.]

STROUT C., (2001), “William James and the Tradition of American Public Philosophers,” Partisan Review 48, available at [bu.edu/partisanreview/archive/2001/3/strout.html].

STUART Hughes H., (1958), Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890-1930, New York, Knopf.

TRÖHLER D., (2008), “Lange as Homeland: The Genevan Reception of Pragmatism,” in T. S. Popkewitz (ed.), Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey. Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 61-83.

UGARTE DE ERCILLA E., (1908), “Tercer Congreso Internacional de Filosofía,” Razón y Fe, XXII, 210-4

NOTES

1. “Tell Aleck to drop his other studies, learn Italian (real Italian, not the awful gibberish I try to speak),” Letter to his wife, 31 March, 1905; Corr. 10: 575. 2. On the 2nd of November of 1872, James writes to Renouvier: “Je puis dire que par elle [votre philosophie] je commence à renaître à la vie morale,” Corr. 4:430. 3. An essential study about the impact of American pragmatism in Europe, the misunderstanding of pragmatism as a utilitarian theory of truth in Germany (including some connections with Nazism) is Joas 1993. In particular, the role of Eduard Baumgarten (108-11) in this process should be taken in account. 4. On the contrasts between Bergson and James, besides Perry 1937, ch. LXXXVI, “James and Bergson: Relations and Influences,” 599-617, see the volume of Kallen 2001, and Putnam (2002: xxxvi-xxxii). 5. This last section of the paper is an abridged version of the text co-authored with Izaskun Martínez on 2007.

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ABSTRACTS

By the time of his death in 1910 at the age of 68 years, William James had become the most influential thinker not just of his own period, but indeed of any period. As the sociologist Jack Barbalet has written: “His European reputation was possibly even higher than his standing in America. James not only represented to European thinkers the American advances in psychology and philosophy, for which he was largely responsible, but he entered into the formation of contemporary European thought as much as he did American.” The aim of this paper is to provide a vivid sense of James’s personal involvement with European thought generally and continental philosophy specifically, giving some indications about various European countries, but with particular attention to Spain as a case study. Accordingly, the talk divides into three sections: (1) Europe in James; (2) James in Europe: friends and translations; and (3) James in Spain: translations and readers. A number of names and facts will be mentioned, since they provide the general framework for understanding the reception of William James in Continental Europe, but in particular the personal relations between William James and some of the most relevant European thinkers of his time are highlighted.

AUTHOR

JAIME NUBIOLA Universidad de Navarra jnubiola[at]unav.es

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From Consistency to Coherence Whitehead’s Transformation of James’s Epistemic Conservatism

Dennis Soelch

I. Introduction

1 What pragmatism is, whether it refers to a philosophical method, a specific theory, cultural politics, a literary theory or a mixture of all of these, has been part of the controversy surrounding pragmatism from its very beginning. Accordingly, there seem to be as many names for the movement as there are thinkers, which becomes most explicitly manifest in Peirce’s famous abandonment of the term “pragmatism” in favour of “pragmaticism.” The genealogy of pragmatism, however, has hardly ever been questioned. The classical period or first generation of pragmatism consists of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Ferdinand C. S. Schiller and, on its legal and sociological side, Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Herbert Mead. Contemporary pragmatism or the second generation comprises at least three major strands which can be subsumed under the headings of cultural pragmatism, analytic pragmatism and continental pragmatism. Pragmatism as cultural politics is usually regarded to revolve around Richard Rorty, while prominent representatives of analytic pragmatism include Willard Van Orman Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Nicholas Rescher. Although less commonly used, the denomination of continental pragmatism is often employed to refer to the writings of Karl-Otto Apel and Juergen Habermas. But notwithstanding the fact that the list of canonical neo-pragmatists has grown extensively, there is widespread agreement as to who falls within the pragmatist tradition and who does not. One of the most significant thinkers in the wake of William James, however, whose work can and must be regarded as a major contribution to pragmatist thinking, has so far been unduly neglected. Although Alfred North Whitehead is not counted among the pragmatists, his work not only helps to bridge the gap between American and European philosophy, but at the same time links classical pragmatism with its contemporary, more analytic versions. This development can best be illustrated by reference to the respective methodologies and theories of truth. James, I shall argue, advances a specific form of epistemic conservatism which modifies the pragmatic

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concept of a proposition’s or theory’s applicability in order to avoid a separation of experience into isolated, discontinuous fields of knowledge. The Jamesian theory of knowledge comprises both an empirical dimension that gets manifest in the notion of an idea’s “cash-value,”1 and a rational or subjective dimension succinctly expressed in the notion of “consistency.”2 This twofold conception is spelled out and elaborated on in Whitehead’s most systematic philosophical work Process and Reality. Profoundly influenced by James’ philosophy, Whitehead’s project of devising a speculative cosmology based on a pragmatic methodology introduces a number of criteria that allow him to offer a more refined, systematic theory of knowledge. Most significantly, the criterion of consistency is replaced by that of coherence and supplemented by the demand for logic in order to ensure a comprehensive, unified theory. Although limited in scope to a metaphysical description of the world, this form of speculative pragmatism avoids the common charges often levelled against James.

2 Whitehead, I will argue in this paper, is methodologically a pragmatist in the Jamesian sense of the term. A re-assessment of his philosophy with particular focus on its pragmatic methodology requires us to elaborate the intriguing relationship between the two thinkers. Hence, in a first step I will follow some of the various traces of James’ thought in Whitehead’s oeuvre to allow for an estimate of the degree of James’ influence. Despite the fact that Whitehead’s perspective on the history of philosophy poses a serious challenge to interpreters and almost makes impossible a clear account of how far his thought falls within a certain tradition, there is evidence to suggest that James played a major role in his philosophical development. In fact Whitehead’s appreciation of James does not only concern the critique of consciousness as a substance and the turn towards a functionalist psychology, but also, on a much more fundamental level, James’ methodology. Hence, I will in a second step reconstruct the Jamesian understanding of pragmatism as both a method and a theory of truth with particular focus on the concept of consistency. On this basis it will then be possible to outline the Whiteheadian approach and to re-assess his place with the philosophical tradition, before pointing out the differences between the two conceptions by dint of the aspect of religious experience. Finally, I will give an outlook as to the development of pragmatism from James to contemporary trends via Whitehead as a linking figure.

II. James, Whitehead and the American Renaissance

3 For every philosopher it is possible to find another one who praises him as a genius, a trailblazer and precursor of his own thinking. In some cases, however, this admiration comes somewhat as a surprise, because the respective types of thought seem to differ more than they seem to agree. This is particularly so with the philosophies of William James and Alfred North Whitehead. The former is known as a public intellectual, skeptical about logic as a reliable tool of metaphysical enquiry, his writings vividly concrete and sometimes almost as intimate as a confession. The latter, on the contrary, is renowned for being a brilliant mathematician who spent a decade trying to rebuild the foundations of logic and whose major work is a masterpiece of complex abstractions. Hence, when Whitehead attributes to James “the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy”3 and stylizes him as the central figure in the foundation of the American Renaissance,4 some elaboration and clarification is required.

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4 James had died in 1910, fourteen years before Whitehead’s arrival in New England. It is highly probable that Whitehead had already taken to perusing James’ works while still being a professor of mathematics in London and that he was familiar with pragmatist thinking prior to settling in his adopted country. As early as in 1898, when he was working on his Treatise on Universal Algebra, he mentioned the contributions to logic and symbolization made by Peirce, whom he would later name in one breath with James. The first explicit reference to James dates back to 1910, when the reader of Whitehead’s entry on “Mathematics” in the Encyclopedia Britannica is referred to James’ Pragmatism for further reading on the question of “the one and the many.”5 Beginning with his transition to Harvard in 1924 – “the university of William James”6 – the American becomes omnipresent in his writings. Considering the fact that Whitehead took up his enormously productive philosophical task almost immediately after his arrival, it is difficult to imagine that he should not have been well acquainted with James’ philosophy by the time he started teaching and writing on philosophy. This is supported by Whitehead’s habit of ranking James as a matter of course among the philosophical classics, together with Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz7 or Hume.8 James’ oeuvre appears to have assumed a constant presence in Whitehead’s thought, so that a quotation must “of course”9 be borrowed from William James.

5 One of the most significant passages for Whitehead’s deep appreciation of James stands out in a letter written to Charles Hartshorne in 1936. Whitehead refers to Charles Peirce and William James as “the effective founders of the American Renaissance,”10 while at the same time comparing Peirce to Aristotle and James to Plato. Certainly a comparison to Plato is “the highest possible Whiteheadian praise.”11 But at the same time the reversal of the actual chronology stresses a central aspect of Whitehead’s own philosophical credo: The close link to the logic of science in Peirce’s pragmatism is seen as an analogy to Aristotle’s systematization and limitation of Plato’s wide range of thinking. Hence, the analogy is not simply a form of praise and approval, but indicates Whitehead’s preference for the Jamesian approach that transcends the positivistic boundaries of scientifically analyzable phenomena. This is not least obvious in the continuation and criticism of James’ Varieties of Religious Experience in his own study Religion in the Making, which reveals Whitehead as a close and attentive reader of James, whose non-sensualistic concept of experience he embraces. Next to William James, Whitehead is one of the first thinkers of the 20th century to approach religion by way of an appreciation of its factual givenness as an existential and cultural phenomenon.

6 Although the two never met personally, the lasting impact of James’s work on Whitehead is one of the most fascinating and challenging in 20th century philosophy. Craig R. Eisendrath was one of the first to come to the conclusion that Whitehead spells out the systematic account James himself never produced.12 More recently, Michel Weber13 and Scott Sinclair 14 have elaborated on the relation between James and Whitehead, shedding light on common motifs and shared approaches to the concepts of time, feeling, consciousness and religion. Thus, it is all the more surprising that the “developmental relation to pragmatism”15 in Whitehead has not yet been made the object of a detailed study. His pragmatic background is already tangible in some of the early essays published as The Aims of Education in 1929, where he develops a pragmatist approach to epistemology and even semantics16 which to a certain extent anticipates the more elaborate findings of the late Wittgenstein. Although he does not explicitly engage in the discourse on classical pragmatist conceptions, the notion of pragmatism

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continuously reappears in all his major writings. With regard to science, religion and philosophy Whitehead appeals to the “pragmatic test,” concluding in the identification of pragmatism and that “self-evidence, which sustains itself in civilized experience,”17 thus putting philosophy as a whole on a pragmatic basis. In the present paper I will restrict myself to Whitehead’s contribution to pragmatism in the context of philosophical cosmology, mainly focusing on his magnum opus Process and Reality.

III. Consistency and James’ Theory of Truth

7 James defines pragmatism as both a philosophical method and a theory of truth,18 and both aspects overlap and support each other. Taking up Peirce’s idea to bridge the gap between res and intellectus through human action, James refuses to regard truth as the stagnant isomorphic relation Rorty has referred to as a mirror of nature. A notion or concept does not require a trans-empirical quality to be able to direct us to experiential reality. Within a radically empiricist world ontologically only definable as experience, the criteria for a concept’s truth value must itself be experiential, i.e. the core of a true idea is its function of successful guidance.

8 Truth must not be isolated from actual experience, and all instances of hypothetic scientific truth ultimately rest on particular practical experience in the widest sense of the term. For James, truth is a gradual concept, whose cash-value depends on how well it serves to guide us to new experiences. It is, moreover, a processual concept, since the truth of a proposition is not a definite quality to be revealed in the course of its practical application, but refers to the continuous adaption of a human agent to a world of stubborn facts. Verification as the final confirmation of a proposition’s a-temporal truth value is impossible, first of all because that would presuppose a universe dominated by consistent principles – an ontological premise James explicitly refutes19 – and second of all because final verification would require an objective perspective which is never given in a world of subjective experience. Hypotheses can only be true conditionally and might eventually be falsified.

9 The pragmatic theory of truth is anticipated as early as in James’ Principles of Psychology, in which the idea of Humean atomistic impressions is boldly refuted. Relations between objects of perception and cognition are not external and to be construed according to the laws of logic, but are directly apprehended. “Let us use the words psychic overtone, suffusion, or fringe, to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly perceived.”20 Connections between sensually perceived phenomena are included and transmitted in ordinary perception, although they are not apprehended as distinct objects. The classical, Thomistic theory of truth, which is built on the idea of an isomorphic representation of things in the mind, is unable to explain our awareness of the relatedness of events and objects. Instead of mirroring isolated sense-data, concepts are “purely teleological weapons of the mind.”21 Pragmatism elaborates on this specific teleology of concepts, and while in the Principles the external, or rather experiential, world is regarded as delivering relations in the form of diffuse sensations, James’ later writings focus on the converse relationship. “To ‘agree’ in the widest sense with a reality, can only 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.”22 If truth cannot consist in an exact copy of reality, true ideas or beliefs are characterized by

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their teleological content, which allow for a successful orientation among experiential relations, i.e. orientation in the empirical world. Truth is not a property inherent in specific ideas and independent of being tested against the world of stubborn facts and which beliefs may count as true beliefs turns out in the process of their application. Truth thus becomes an experiential concept that is subject to empirical, though by no means positivistic, testing.

10 However, apart from the empirical dimension usually associated with a pragmatist conception of truth, the Jamesian approach comprises a rational dimension that is introduced under the heading of consistency. It is not only the establishment of a successful relation to the experiential world that is satisfactory, but also the agreement between newly found ideas, propositions, theories with those already accepted as true. “Above all, we find consistency satisfactory, consistency between the present idea and the rest of our mental equipment, including the whole order of our sensations, and that of our intuitions of likeness and difference, and our whole stock of previously acquired truths.”23 The demand that new theories be consistent with older ones is probably the decisive rational criterion in James’ pragmatist conception of truth, although it is hardly ever appreciated in its full significance. Consistency ensures unity of experience in the face of an inescapable epistemic pluralism that results from the fact that concepts as teleological instruments are always employed to serve individual interests.

11 This subjective dimension of the Jamesian theory of truth can be characterised as a form of epistemic conservatism that can neither be classed among the foundationalist theories of knowledge nor among those generally referred to as coherence theories. Epistemic conservatism does by no means denote a unified position or clearly defined concept, but has come to stand for a variety of different epistemological theories.24 In its most naïve formulation it states that “the fact that a person believes a proposition [is] at least a prima facie epistemic reason in support of the proposition believed.”25 It would take us too far to enlarge on the intricacies of the current debate concerning the epistemic value of internal states. It will suffice at this point to bear in mind that all versions of epistemic conservatism share the assumption that the fact that an agent holds a certain belief plays a major role in the agent being justified in having this belief. James’ argument, if I understand him correctly, functions on three different levels, namely on a psychological, an ontological and a pragmatic one.

12 In matters of belief, James states, “we are all extreme conservatives.”26 This is what I will call his psychological argument for epistemic conservatism. James’s version of pragmatism, in contrast to Peirce’s and even to Dewey’s, highlights the importance of the subjective, individual genesis of truths. With regard to their beliefs, people just find it enormously difficult to give up deeply rooted convictions, and concepts that have stood the test of applicability function as a criterion for the evaluation of novel ideas. Percepts, concepts and theories alike are affected and need to find a place within a coherent scheme, before they can be accepted as true. A prominent example for the demand for this form of consistency is the discovery of radium, whose radiation and energy production seemed to contradict the law of the conservation of energy, until measurement and law of nature were “re-married” through the concept of self- transforming atomic nuclei; a process in scientific activity that was to repeat itself decades later in the postulation of anti-neutrinos to explain the energy balance of beta radiation.

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13 Consistency is not a criterion that counts from the very beginning and restricts the field of possible discoveries and experiences, but is a psychological demand that bears post-ponement. As long as a belief is constitutive for its own verification, such as the belief in my ability to jump across an abyss, it would be irrational to abandon my belief ex ante, just because it is not consistent with other beliefs. It is only in moments of reflection that potential contradictions within the field of my beliefs show and result in an “inward trouble.”27 This is particularly significant with regard to religious phenomena as discussed in The Will to Believe and the Varieties of Religious Experience: We are justified in considering a proposition to be true for subjective reasons, if a decision is existential and cannot be put off. But even if such a belief is prima facie justified, its cognitive content must allow a comparison with other beliefs – after all the crucial point for James in that respect is that the acceptance of a hypothesis on pragmatic, external grounds enables us to achieve the particular evidence required. Its truth value is a relative one, whose particular use earns it an advance of trust, which, however, must maintain itself at least in the rational process of making our ideas cohere. “New truth is always 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.”28 Ultimately the subjective starting point decides which truths make up the core of beliefs. As new experiences have to stand the test against the organic whole of individually accepted beliefs, impressive religious experiences made early in the personal biography will in most cases result in a more are less religious worldview. Complete consistency is a limit- concept, which is in effect never achieved, but which guides the formulation of comprehensive theories.

14 The second dimension of James’ epistemic conservatism is not, like the psychological one, restricted to saying that we actually are conservative when it comes to modifying existing beliefs, but holds that consistency with what we already believe is a necessary condition for a belief to be acceptable as true. Genealogical consistency of beliefs systematically corresponds to the coherence of the individual components of our body of theoretical knowledge, and apart from the psychological thesis, James advocates a specific form of coherentism.29 Epistemic externalists arguing against epistemic conservatism or coherentism usually pose the question, why the fact that different beliefs do not contradict one another should be a criterion for the truth of each of the individual beliefs. James’s answer refers back to his experiential ontology. From a radically empiricist point of view the stock of previously acquired truths is itself part of experience, which a pragmatically interpreted correspondence theory of truth must take into account. Intellectual satisfactions are “all mere matters of consistency – and emphatically not of consistency between an absolute reality and the mind’s copies of it, but actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and habits of reacting, in the mind’s own experienceable world.”30 If reality can only be described as experience, and our old beliefs, our commonsense, and even our language form part of the stream of experience there is no alternative to considering all beliefs as necessary criterion to judge whether a belief is true or false. At the same time it is clear that James epistemic conservatism does not issue in a holistic coherentism, but in a conception that allows for a gradation of a pluralism of truths. The more satisfactory relations between different experiences a hypothesis generates, i.e. the greater the sum of satisfactions it produces, the ‘truer’ it is.31

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15 The third dimension of James’ epistemic conservatism is based on a purely pragmatic argument. To a certain extent it runs vertically to the epistemological argument of a coherence theory of truth, because it prima facie allows for individual, isolated propositions or ideas to be true. The function of “satisfactory working or leading”32 in James is a conjunctive criterion for truth, in which objectivity and subjectivity are synthesized to constitute truth relations in the framework of our experience. But methodologically James clearly differentiates between the psychological and the empirical aspect: “We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty.”33 The endeavour to achieve consistency between the individual propositions is secondary to the genesis of empirically successful concepts. It is only when a notion or a concept has proven its cash-value that the necessity arises to demand consistency. This differentiation is entirely in accordance with James’s emphasis on the inertia of existing truths: A novel idea, which contradicts established concepts, will only gradually become accepted and will be considerably modified in the course of its integration. As long as the hitherto isolated proposition is not successfully applicable to the experienced reality, the criterion of consistency is prima facie insignificant. Such a purely instrumental conception of truth, however, would face the problem of admitting discontinuous theories which approach different fields of experience by means of different concepts, thus undermining James’s intention of equally doing justice to science, religion and morality. The danger of a separation of theories, each of which might be successful in its own subject area, might issue into a competitive struggle for supremacy, which in the twentieth century almost seemed to have been won by the causal explanations of the natural sciences. Principally, as even Rorty acknowledges, “scientific inquiry is best viewed as the attempt to find a single, unified, coherent description of the world.”34 While Rorty attempts to exclude religious experience from a unified philosophical theory in order to privatize and depoliticize it, James aims at the inclusion of all the diverse dimensions of experience. Consistency is necessary, because only when no field of experience is privileged can we ensure that the possible scope of novel experience does not become limited and restricted.

16 It is on the basis of this conception that James’ pragmatism can be defended against the common charges leveled most prominently by Bertrand Russell and, more recently, by Nicholas Rescher, according to whom the Jamesian focus on affective, subjective satisfaction brings with it the danger of their “disassembling into a virtually endless proliferation of purposive contextualizations.”35 It is often neglected that intersubjectivity does play a significant role in James’ philosophy. Already in the Varieties does he point to the fact that a religious belief – as well as a scientific theory – is philosophically unsatisfactory, if it excludes a large part of our experience. God or the divine is experienced individually, but it is experienced as something that has objective reality and is related to the rest of the universe. A purely private God is not a God we want to believe in. Rorty’s argument that at least religiously inspired belief is immune from confirmation and coherence, because it is not subject to intersubjective standards,36 neglects the fact that relevant beliefs are always susceptible to rational critique. As an intellectually sincere person I cannot avoid accepting the criteria of rationality of my fellows to such a degree that a merely privately held hope for a transcendent power will in most cases not pass the comparison with other beliefs. “[T]he greatest enemy of any of our truths may be the rest of our truths,”37 and one of

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the truths consists in accepting divergent beliefs in other individuals as one experience in our own coherent system of beliefs. As implied in the notion of the cash-value,38 the satisfactoriness of truth oscillates between individual and public as much as money is only valuable in a social setting. Each individual’s experience, like its ideals or moral convictions, always represents a partial segment of the totality of experience. At least as philosophers, who are aware of the fact that their experience might not be historically and culturally representative, we need to “throw in our own spontaneous ideals, even the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideas which are fairly to be judged.”39 Rationality might not mandate that we have our beliefs tested by others, but we do at least need to consider alternative beliefs and integrate the fact that these other, potentially conflicting beliefs exist into our personal coherent scheme. Intersubjectivity is not a prioritized criterion in James, but starting from the idea of consistency it is obvious that intersubjectivity enters into each subjectively structured totality of experience.

IV. Whitehead’s Transformation of James’ Theory of Truth

17 James’s approach to truth anticipates a methodological enterprise that finds its most concise formulation in the philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead, the pragmatic character of which has escaped the attention of critics. At the beginning of Process and Reality Whitehead outlines the task and the method of his so-called speculative philosophy. “Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of ‘interpretation’ I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme.”40 The idea of the necessity of a cosmological scheme is then elaborated on as meaning the applicability and adequacy of the basic metaphysical concepts. A notion is applicable if there is at least one item of experience which is thus interpretable, and it is adequate, if the entire texture of human experience is capable of such interpretation. Both aspects taken together form the “empirical side”41 of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, while logic and coherence constitute its rational side. Translated into Jamesian terms, the applicability of a concept consists in its experiential satisfactoriness. The pragmatic methodology underlying Whitehead’s project of devising a philosophical cosmology starts from a level different from sensory perception and individual experience, as metaphysics is based on the data of the sciences and civilized experience as manifest in language, conduct, literature and art. In that sense, it is first of all the individual sciences that proceed pragmatically by developing notions and experimentally testing their working value.42 Metaphysics then is pragmatism functioning of the level of the philosophy of science, with the purpose of revising the sciences’ terminological and methodological presuppositions. The function of coordinating the sciences is guided by the hope that their results might eventually result in one all-encompassing system. Accordingly, metaphysics means a systematic account of everything that can be experienced and thought about on the basis of the coordinated assumption of every other theoretic inquiry.43 “Whatever is found in ‘practice’ must lie within the scope of the metaphysical

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description”44 and the “pragmatic test”45 to be passed by a philosophical cosmology is whether every instance of experience can be interpreted by recourse to its notions.

18 At a first glance the concept of adequacy seems to contain and make redundant that of applicability. The distinction between a sufficient and a necessary condition, however, does not simply reflect the cosmological system aimed at, but the mode of procedure.46 The metaphysical enquiry starts by interpreting one specific field of human experience in order to ensure the applicability of the abstract scheme thus gained. It then gradually proceeds by searching for principles of higher generality until it finally results in a universally applicable theory. Such a comprehensive, all-embracing scheme cannot be arrived at by inductive inference, but relies on abductive reasoning, which Whitehead terms philosophic generalization. “In this description of philosophic method, the term philosophic generalisation’ has meant ‘the utilization of specific notions, applying to a restricted group of facts, for the divination of the generic notions which apply to all facts’.”47

19 Whitehead is not entirely clear about the status of the final, adequate cosmology. Do we necessarily arrive at one single generalization, no matter if we choose psychology, religion, aesthetics or physics as a starting point? Does the temporal, processual nature of the universe ultimately undermine the systematic enterprise, because even the most abstract principles are incapable of capturing a continuously changing world? While in Process and Reality Whitehead tends to embrace the melioristic idea that progress in the formulation of ultimate generalities is possible, his later works suggest a much more careful optimism, re-verberating in the famous concluding remarks of his last lecture, namely that “exactness is a fake.”48 Although the topic is worth some detailed elaboration, for my present purpose it suffices to regard adequacy as a regulative ideal, which is to guard us against the different versions of biologism, physicalism or idealism, where the actual level of generality of the basic notions is overestimated.

20 One of the cornerstones of Whitehead’s version of pragmatism is his interpretation of William James’s epistemic conservatism, which is developed as one part of the rational side of his speculative philosophy. Here, the criterion of logic primarily refers to basic logical ideas, such as the law of non-contradiction and the principles of inference, while coherence, as in James, demands that the fundamental concepts not be isolated. Ignoring the psychological dimension of James’ theory of truth, Whitehead particularly focuses on its epistemological and pragmatic aspect.

21 Whitehead defines coherence as meaning that “the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other, so that in isolation they are meaningless.”49 Other than in James, coherence is not primarily a subjective criterion that refers to a, not necessarily verbal, feeling that things fit, but is grounded in language. Coherence means a basic inventory of concepts whose fundamental notions form a non-hierarchical web and which cannot be understood in isolation. Each single term presupposes a systematic background that assigns to it a specific meaning as part of the system. Like in a puzzle, where the function of each single puzzle piece can only be deciphered in view of the complete picture, the meaning of each single notion results from its role as part of the whole. “The notion of the complete self-sufficiency of any item of finite knowledge is the fundamental error of dogmatism. Every such item derives its truth, and its very meaning, from its unanalyzed relevance to the background which is the unbounded universe.”50 What could, in the vocabulary of the late Wittgenstein, be understood as the embeddedness in a Sprachspiel, is a never

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ending process aiming at the ideal of a completely defined metaphysical system. What we encounter in Whitehead’s holistic coherentism, in contrast to James’ epistemic conservatism, is the leapfrogging of a continuous genesis of individual propositions which are then gradually brought into coherence. Although the system lives on the data delivered by the sciences, human civilization and the history of philosophy, it is created as a systematic totality. Hence, by recourse to the intersubjective stock of different experiences the system blends out their subjective genesis without denying that experiences do have a history. It takes into account the experiences that have evolved over centuries and across cultures, but avoids the danger of having a particular starting point which regulates and potentially limits the discovery of further elements to be integrated into the coherent scheme.

22 The reliance on language in Whitehead’s cosmology, however, is not absolute, and coherence is not a purely logical-analytical criterion, but to a certain extend entails a subjective component. On the one hand language as such is, by its very nature, under- determined and unable to precisely capture the meaning of the fundamental notions, and on the other hand the relevant systematic background depends of the significance ascribed to it. In a philosophical cosmology, words and phrases that have their origin in the individual sciences or everyday language are forced to stand for a generality foreign to their genuine usage and “remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”51 Semantics may help us to avoid contradictoriness in our terminology, but the exact meaning of each notion in the specific context itself cannot be adequately expressed in words.

23 The epistemic holism advanced by Whitehead also draws heavily on the pragmatic argument developed by James. Theoretically, a complete cosmology might explain all but one fact of human experience on the basis of its fundamental notions. This is precisely the case in what Whitehead identifies as a bifurcation of nature: Although the sciences have successfully managed to explain natural phenomena, their basic theoretical conceptions have turned out to be unable to do justice to human feelings and intentions. Instead of revising their theories, however, the sciences have tried to explain them away by either completely ignoring them or by regarding them as epiphenomena, making mutual critique among the sciences and commonsense impossible. Unless these notions form an integral part of the general scheme, however, it lacks coherence. The interdependency of the foundational theoretical notions is to prevent us from simply adding something to the scheme in order to explain an exception not covered by the scheme as such. The result is a metaphysical scheme that can account for all aspects of experience by fusing them into a coherent system.

V. Religious Experience in James and Whitehead

24 The different ideas of consistency and coherence in James and Whitehead do have practical consequences that can best be shown by reference to the phenomenon of religious experience. Among the factors relevant for the genesis of new experience in James’ pragmatist thinking are not only empirical data, but also desires and emotions.52 Such emotions could, for example, appear in the form of religious doubts which may well influence an entire worldview. The starting point chosen for a coherent philosophy is thus essential for the resulting theory. “What we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or connected in some

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intellectual way, and then to use this as a tally by which we ‘keep tab’ on the impressions that present themselves.”53 As experiments occur successively and later theory formations take place in line with earlier ones, potential differences between individual sciences tend to become more pronounced in the course of time. The same holds true for the different fields of experience in individual people, where scientific knowledge might contradict the person’s moral or religious convictions. Although philosophy aims at overcoming such gaps, James is aware that, psychologically, conservatism will largely determine how far such a gap can be bridged. Hence, he defends religious experience as one element of a holistic philosophical perspective, but does not conceive it as mandatorily required. In James, God’s cash-value is put on trial by our previously accepted truths, but vice versa presents a challenge for scientific findings: “The truth of ‘God’ has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it.”54 For him, experiences are primarily individual and for those who have never had religious experience, there is no reason to integrate the hypothesis of God into the web of their truths. From the perspective of a religious person such a view might be deficient, but it fulfils the criteria of coherence and non- contradiction.

25 Whitehead, in contrast to James’ focus on the genealogy of truths, demands that every single element of the entire texture of human experience be made a part of a coherent philosophical cosmology. Whitehead goes beyond James, although he sides him against Peirce’s restrictive focus on the logic of science. His focus is on the “texture”55 of human experience in the sense of a cosmology which is not only coherent, but also adequate. The consequence is that the existence of religious experience as such must be counted among the integral aspects of a complete description of reality. As long as there are human beings who have religious experience it needs to be included in a coherent cosmology. Owing to a systematic approach that takes up Jamesian individual experience and transforms it into an objective datum, Whitehead’s version of pragmatism is better suited than James’s to arrive at what James himself considers to be an essential requirement of philosophy: “Philosophy must, in any case, complete the sciences, and must incorporate their methods. One cannot see why, if such a policy should appear advisable, philosophy might not end by foreswearing all dogmatism whatever, and become as hypothetical in her manners as the most empirical science of them all.”56 If “sciences” does not only refer to the natural sciences, but also the humanities, thus comprising every element of human experience, a philosophical cosmology needs to take account of all phenomena. It must not be left to the individual genesis of beliefs, nor must it be left to the fundamental assumptions that have evolved within a specific cultural environment. A philosophy that truly wants to mediate between religion, morality and the natural sciences will naturally develop into the holistic coherentism anticipated by James and advanced by Whitehead.

VI. Epilogue

26 The development and transformation outlined above sheds light on the continuity of the pragmatist tradition. In the second half of the twentieth century, a number of philosophers have contributed to a revival of pragmatist thinking, the most significant and influential among them certainly being Willard van Orman Quine. In 1930, fascinated by the Principia Mathematica, Quine became a student of Whitehead, who also

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supervised his dissertation on The Logic of Sequences: A Generalization of Principia Mathematica. Not only does Quine inherit James’ and Whitehead’s project of refuting and overcoming “the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.”57 He also develops a holistic theory of truth closely related to the pragmatist programme of his predecessors. In repudiating the boundary between analytic and synthetic frameworks Quine approaches a holistic pragmatism that is obviously in line with James and Whitehead. “Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.”58 Novel findings are integrated into a scheme or theory based on a scientific heritage that we can imagine as being culturally and historically contingent. Whenever the sensory input delivers data inconsistent with the stock of previously acquired hypotheses, the heritage is warped, i.e. modified to better suit the data generated in the ongoing process of discovery. While, as in James, the individual is the epistemologically conservative element that owns the scientific heritage, the established conceptualizations are products of the social endeavour of science.

27 Equally indebted to the pragmatist approach sketched above is C. I. Lewis in his endeavour to test the acceptability of propositions in the framework of formal systems. While there can be different alternative formal frameworks that are all valuable instruments for reasoning, the best system, relative and absolute, proves itself on pragmatic grounds. A particular logical system is the appropriate instrument with regard to a certain range of application. The pragmatically most effective formal system is the one that entails the widest range of purposes, i.e. the system which allows for a formal verification of the widest scope of different propositions.59 Despite the narrow focus on logic and mathematics, Lewis shows that coherentism can be translated into a formally analyzable methodology in which propositions are verified within a formal system, while the system itself is tested against experience.

28 The list of pragmatists continuing the epistemological strand of pragmatism may certainly be extended to include such thinkers as Hilary Putnam, Juergen Habermas and Robert Brandom. What is most important, however, is that an analysis of the transformation of one aspect of pragmatist philosophy, namely its theory of truth, challenges the commonly accepted genealogy of pragmatism. The usual assumption is that pragmatism, anticipated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism, was developed around the turn of the century by Peirce, James, Dewey and some of their disciples. It then fell into oblivion for a time of almost forty years, leaving a gap that, according to some interpreters, is even highlighted by the fact that none of the new pragmatists have devoted much time to a close examination of classical pragmatist positions.60 Basically every work on the genealogy of pragmatism either implicitly or explicitly states that it was only after this gap that pragmatism was rediscovered and built upon by scholars as different as Willard V. O. Quine, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty. There can, of course, be no doubt as to counting all these authors among the pragmatists, although Quine himself did time and again appear to have turned against pragmatism. We should be aware of that fact, however, that there has never been a real temporal gap between classical pragmatism and contemporary neo-pragmatism. There was a continuous development from James to Quine and others through the philosophy of Whitehead, who left a form of pragmatism which on the one hand is closely related to James’ thought and which on the other hand develops it into a

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philosophical theory much easier to approach from an analytic point of view. The attempt at turning classical pragmatism into a comprehensive theory which satisfies the demand for logical consistency has a long history that can be traced back to its very beginning. With Whitehead as the ‘missing link,’ the pragmatist tradition appears to have taken a rather linear development, while at the same time a Whiteheadian perspective on James’ philosophy helps to shed light on some of the neglected and often underestimated details of his pragmatism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BAUERLEIN M., (1997), The Pragmatic Mind, Durham/London, Duke University Press.

CHRISTENSEN D., (1994), “Conservatism in Epistemology,” Noûs, 28 (1), 69-89.

COTKIN G., (1985), “William James and the Cash-Value Metaphor,” et cetera, 42 (1), 37-46.

EISENDRATH C. R., (1971), The Unifying Moment. The Psychological Philosophy of William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1975), Pragmatism, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K. (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1975a), The Meaning of Truth, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K. (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1976), Essays in Radical Empiricism, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K., (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1977), A Pluralistic Universe, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K., (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1979), Some Problems of Philosophy, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K., (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1979a), The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K., (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1981), Principles of Psychology, Vo. I-III, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K., (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

JAMES W., (1985), Psychology. Briefer Course, Burkhardt F., Bowers F., Skupskelis I. K., (eds.), The Works of William James, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

FOLEY R., (1983), “Epistemic Conservatism,” Philosophical Studies, 43 (1), 165-82.

FUMERTON R., (2007), “Epistemic Conservatism: Theft or Honest Toil?,” in Gendler T. & Hawthorne J. (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Vol. 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

KANN Ch., (2001), Fußnoten zu Platon. Philosophiegeschichte bei A. N. Whitehead, Hamburg, Felix Meiner.

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LEWIS C. I., (1956), Mind and the World Order. Outline of a Theory of Knowledge, New York, Dover Publications.

LOWE V., (1990), Alfred North Whitehead. The Man and His Work, Volume I: 1861-1910, Schneewind J. B., (ed.), Baltimore/London, John Hopkins University Press.

QUINE W. V. O., (1980), From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

RESCHER N., (2000), Realistic Pragmatism. An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy, Albany, State University of New York Press.

RORTY R., (1998), “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” in Putnam R. A., (ed.), 1998, The Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

SINCLAIR S., (2009), “William James as American Plato?,” William James Studies 4, 111-29.

WEBER M., (2002), “Whitehead’s Reading of James and Its Context (Part One),” Streams of William James, 4 (1), 18-22.

WEBER M., (2003), “Whitehead’s Reading of James and Its Context (Part Two),” Streams of William James, 5 (3), 26-31.

WEBER M., (2007), Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics, Frankfurt am Main, Ontos.

WHITEHEAD A. N., (1910-11), “Mathematics,” Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 17, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 878-83.

WHITEHEAD A. N. (1956), Adventures of Ideas, New York, MacMillan.

WHITEHEAD A. N., (1967), Science and the Modern World, New York, The Free Press.

WHITEHEAD A. N., (1967a), The Aims of Education and Other Essays, New York, The Free Press.

WHITEHEAD A. N., (1968), Modes of Thought, New York, The Free Press.

WHITEHEAD A. N., (1968a), Essays in Science and Philosophy, New York, Greenwood Press.

WHITEHEAD A N., (1985), Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, Griffin D. R., Sherburne D. W., (ed.), New York, The Free Press.

WHITEHEAD A. N., (2005), Principle of Relativity, New York, Barnes and Noble Books.

NOTES

1. James (1975: 97). 2. James (1975a: 105). 3. Whitehead (1967: 143). 4. Lowe (1990: 345). 5. Whitehead (1910-11: 881). 6. Cited in Lowe (1990: 141). 7. Whitehead (1968: 2). 8. Whitehead (1956: 240). 9. Whitehead (1967: 50). 10. Lowe (1990: 345). 11. Sinclair (2009: 112). 12. Eisendrath (1971: xiii). 13. Weber 2002, and Weber 2003.

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14. Sinclair 2009. 15. Sinclair (2009: 115). 16. Cf. Whitehead (1967a: 106f.). 17. Whitehead (1968: 106). 18. James (1975: 37). 19. James (1977: 140). 20. James (1981: 249). 21. James (1981: 961). 22. James (1975: 102). 23. James (1975a: 105). 24. Cf. Foley 1983, Christensen 1994, Fumerton 2007. 25. Fumerton (2007: 63). 26. James (1975: 35). 27. James (1975: 35). 28. James (1975: 35). 29. James himself, while usually speaking of “consistency” on one occasion also uses the notion of “coherence” with regard to the application of the pragmatic truth conception to past history (James 1975: 103). 30. James (1976: 135). 31. Cf. James (1976: 129). 32. James (1975a: 89). 33. James (1975: 98; emphasis added). 34. Rorty (1998: 85). 35. Rescher (2000: 18). 36. Rorty (1998: passim). 37. James (1975: 43). 38. The notion of cash-value is analyzed in more detail in a brilliant article by George Cotkin (1985). 39. James (1979a: 151). 40. Whitehead (1985: 3). See also Kann (2001: 100-12) and Weber (2007: 87-108). 41. Whitehead (1985: 3). 42. See the early reference to the necessity of a pragmatic approach in the sciences in Whitehead (2005: 60). 43. A thought that is also expressed in James (1985: 1): “Most thinkers have a faith at bottom there is but one science of all things, and that until all is known, no one thing can be completely known. Such a science, if realized, would be Philosophy.” 44. Whitehead (1985: 13). 45. Whitehead (1985: 13). 46. Cf. Kann (2001: 110f). 47. Whitehead (1985: 5). 48. Whitehead (1968: 96). 49. Whitehead (1985: 3). 50. Whitehead (1968a: 100). 51. Whitehead (1985: 4). 52. Cf. James (1975: 35). 53. James (1975: 84) 54. James (1975: 56). 55. Whitehead (1985: 4). 56. James (1979: 19). 57. Quine (1980: 20).

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58. Quine (1980: 46). 59. Cf. Lewis (1956: 32) 60. Cf. Bauerlein (1997: x).

ABSTRACTS

The significance of A. N. Whitehead’s contribution to 20th century metaphysics has become widely recognized. The focus on the novelty of his process ontology, however, has led to a view that isolates him from the mainstream of the tradition of Western philosophy. Hence, it is often overlooked that on the methodological level Whitehead is a pragmatist, whose much quoted indebtedness to William James is reflected in the project of his speculative metaphysics. A detailed analysis of the respective theories of truth and knowledge in James and Whitehead illustrates their common methodological approach and allows us to assess the role of Whiteheadian thinking within the pragmatist tradition. James advances a form of epistemic conservatism that supplements the pragmatic idea of a concept’s cash-value with the demand for internal consistency. New beliefs have to fit in the totality of all previously accepted convictions in order to become accepted as true. James argues his case on three levels – a psychological, an epistemological and a pragmatic one – and develops a theory of truth that comprises an empirical and a rational dimension. Whitehead takes up this two-sided approach, but modifies the idea of genetic consistency into that of systematic coherence. The fundamental concepts of an ontological theory must not be isolated from each other to allow for a cosmology which is both rational and satisfies the pragmatic test of applicability. With the close relation of James and Whitehead in mind, the latter can be identified as the ‘missing link’ that bridges the gap between the so-called classical pragmatism and its more analytic versions as advanced by Quine, Lewis and Rescher.

AUTHOR

DENNIS SOELCH Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf Dennis.Soelch[at]uni-duesseldorf.de

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James and Whitehead Assemblage and Systematization of a Deeply Empiricist Mosaic Philosophy

Paul Stenner

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Thanks to Michel Weber, Dennis Soelch and Maria Teixeira for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Part One

I. Assemblage and Systematization

1 I take the view that Whitehead (1861-1947) systematizes the body of thought assembled by William James (1842-1910). Specifically, I suggest that, via his concept of the actual entity/occasion, Whitehead systematizes James’ radical empiricism into a “deep empiricism”2 that lends new weight and depth to James’s vision of a non- or self- foundational ‘mosaic’ philosophy. These two terms – assemblage and systematization – are used by Whitehead in his late book Modes of Thought. System is important, he suggests, but before its work commences we need to attend carefully to the prior work of assemblage. This is because the work of systematization presupposes a restricted collection of primary ideas, and it criticizes these general ideas with specialist methods. Assemblage is the working up, cultivation and entertainment of those more general primary ideas. When systemization is applied to a meager assemblage of ideas, the result is pedantry and exclusion. This sensitivity that Whitehead shows concerning the dangers of premature systematization is important. Consider, for example, that he characterized James’ entire intellectual life as “one protest against the dismissal of experience in the interest of system.”3

2 What is valuable about Whitehead’s systematization is that it retains and deepens James’ core “radical empiricist” contention that all reality is experiential.4 This

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deepening of radical empiricism, however, extends the concept of experience well beyond James’ preferred psychological territory of conscious human experience. In Whitehead’s thought the notion of experience becomes an ontological concept that is implicated in all events, whether ‘psychological,’ ‘biological,’ ‘chemical’ or ‘physical.’ In a memorandum dated exactly a month before his death, James remarked that his system remains “too much like an arch built only on one side.”5 Whitehead ‘rounds’ that system out by complementing James’ focus on the psychological with attention to territory associated also with the so-called natural sciences. Together, James and Whitehead forge a revolutionary mode of thought, yet to be widely appreciated, that cuts across disciplines, supports progressive political action, and puts ideas, feelings and values back into the world.

II. On Crystallizing “Vaguely Similar Aspirations”

3 William James, with characteristic modesty, expressed the hope that one day his Weltanschauung or pattern of thought might serve as the nucleus for the crystallization of a respectable system of philosophy. Despite this modesty, he was keenly aware towards the end of his life that his type of thought might be part of a “great unsettlement”6 within modern philosophy which was “on the eve” of a “considerable rearrangement.”7 Partly because of the priority his thought gives to parts over wholes or to facts over principles, he gave the name “radical empiricism” to his Weltanschauung, and because he considered such facts of experience to be plural, he referred to radical empiricism as a “mosaic philosophy.”8 James identified the gestation at stake in his own style of thinking, not just with the pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey and co., but also with Bergson in France, although he described this as only a “dim identity.”9 Change was in the air of philosophy, and in this atmosphere, he suggests at the beginning of his essay The Experience of Activity, “almost any day a man with a genius for finding the right word for things might hit upon some unifying and conciliating formula that will make so much vaguely similar aspiration crystallize into more definite form.”10

4 In the preface to Process and Reality, Whitehead announces just this kind of ambition when he expresses his indebtedness to Bergson, James and Dewey and describes his “preoccupation” as being to “rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti- intellectualism.” Whitehead greatly admired William James and considered him to have played a key role in the opening of a new epoch in philosophy. In the first chapter of Science and the Modern World he refers to James as an “adorable genius,” no less, and in the chapter on science and philosophy he compared James’ essay Does Consciousness Exist? with Descartes’ Discourse on Method from 1637, attributing to James “the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy.”11 The keynote of this new stage is process, and the articulation of a process ontology requires a radical re-thinking of the concept of an entity.

III. What is an Entity?

5 Notwithstanding the high praise, Whitehead saw room for improvement in James’ philosophy.12 In Does Consciousness Exist?, for example, James insists that consciousness is not an entity, but that it is a function, and that its function is knowing. Whilst Whitehead is in full agreement with the thorough critique of the Cartesian thought

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substance at play here, he nevertheless gently criticizes James for not addressing what he means by an “entity” or by the word “stuff.” These words, he points out, do not tell their own story and indeed the notion of an ‘entity’ is so general that it could mean anything that might be thought about. In this case, even a function would be an entity of sorts.

6 This questioning concerning the meaning of “entity” is not mere wordplay on Whitehead’s part. In fact, I suggest that Whitehead’s main contribution to the systematization of James’ type of thought is his sustained effort to generate a viable concept of ‘entity’ which, to employ James’ terms, does not preclude entities also being functions. The bulk of his philosophy of organism, for example, is devoted to a general clarification of the status of an actual entity. The positive doctrine of Process and Reality, Whitehead states, “is concerned with the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of ‘actual entities.’ ‘Actual entities’ – also termed ‘actual occasions’ – are the final real things of which the world is made up.”13 Whitehead’s notion of an entity is compatible with James’ notion of a function, since, as we shall examine in the following section, an actual entity is not a static and stuff-like thing (a thing that endures) but a primary organism whose main characteristic is the activity of patterning possibilities into actualities (a thing that occurs).

7 Effectively, in rethinking the basic concept of “entity,” Whitehead is refusing a position according to which some things in the universe are fundamental and static entities, whilst other things, which are not entities in this manner, might instead have the quality of being processes or functions. Whitehead, by contrast, pursues the idea that all actual things are in process. This includes those things that our limited intelligence grasps inadequately as static entities. Seemingly solid and static things like mountains are in fact implicated in such geological processes as plate tectonics and erosion, for instance. Any failure to apprehend this is a function of the relatively short-term duration of unassisted human sensory and cognitive functionings.

8 That James maintains this taken-for-granted distinction between entity and function is a symptom of the fact that, despite his heightened attunement to process with respect to human psychology, James never systematically developed a fully-fledged process metaphysics. That is to say, he never fully developed an ontology which extends the keynote of process well beyond the activities of human experience to encompass all things. This is not an original claim. As Victor Lowe put it, “the doctrine that experience comes in drops or pulses, each of which is an indivisible unity, is to be found in the psychology of William James; but James never outlined a system of the world on this basis.”14 Eisendrath makes a similar point when he observes that “James reforms Descartes by doing away with the soul and allowing the thoughts themselves to achieve subjective unity in the conscious field. His analysis is limited to consciousness; Whitehead’s extends to the whole organism.”15 Again with reference to James’ “bud” theory of subjective unity, Pred suggests that although it clearly influenced Whitehead, the latter “went much farther into the formation of the bud than James knew was possible and elaborated a comprehensive monism that was beyond James’ reach.”16 Since I am suggesting that the actual entity concept serves to systemmatize James’ notion of pure experience, before turning to “pure experience” I must first examine Whitehead’s basic unit.

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IV. Whitehead’s Basic Unit: The Actual Entity

IV. a) The Atomic Nature of Actual Occasions

9 Taking seriously the idea that all things might be ‘in process’ demands considerably more than the recognition of processes like plate tectonics and erosion. To better understand Whitehead’s actual occasion/entity concept one must grasp that it is an atomic concept. As a famous mathematician and theoretical physicist prior to his career as a philosopher, Whitehead was more aware than most of the fact that, during his lifetime, “the stable foundations of physics […] have broken up.”17 Relativity theory and quantum theory effectively rendered “the old foundations […] unintelligible,” and a core aspect of those old foundations was the idea of irreducible material atoms whose endurance with “simple location” in space supposedly provides the basic building blocks of the universe. Such atoms would supply the bases for all physical processes, but would not themselves be processes. During a relatively short period of time this “mechanical” notion of a passive substratum of self-contained bits of matter gave way to a conception of matter as the modification of energy: sheer activity. In the new scientific view: The fundamental concepts are activity and process. There are essentially no self- contained activities within limited regions. These passive geometrical relationships between substrata passively occupying regions have passed out of the picture. Nature is a theatre for the interrelations of activities. All things change, the activities and their interrelations. To this new concept, the notion of space with its passive, systematic, geometric relationship is entirely inappropriate. It has thus swept away space and matter, and has substituted the study of the internal relations within a complex state of activity. This complex state is in one sense a unity. There is the whole universe of physical action extending to the remotest star cluster.18

10 Whitehead was acutely aware of the need for an alternative atomic concept that might replace the now obsolete concept of substance, and in 1920 he put the problem in the following terms: “If we are to look for substance anywhere, I should find it in events which are in some sense the ultimate substance of nature.”19 Seven years later in Process and Reality his terminology had shifted from events to actual occasions/entities, with the latter defined as the limiting type of event (with just one member). To put it succinctly, Whitehead’s doctrine of the actual occasion puts the things that occur (events or occasions) prior to the things that endure (the old concept of “entity”) and thus makes the concept of process the atomic basis of all things.

IV. b) The Organismic Nature of Actual Occasions

11 This way of thinking radically reconfigures our basic modes of thought. The idea of a fundamental material atom had supported a bifurcated conception of the universe in which issues of experience were associated with high-level human subjectivity and kept separate from an objective concept of nature as a brute material externality upon which the concept of experience has no purchase (a “shallow” empiricism). Whitehead’s atomic notion of an actual entity, by contrast, is modeled upon the image of a primary organism undergoing an experience. Whitehead thus conceives the kinds of natural actual occasions dealt with in physics as events or occasions “entertaining” and “patterning” a locus of energy:

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Whatever else that [physical] occasion may be, it is an individual fact harbouring that energy. The words electron, proton, wave-motion, velocity, hard and soft radiation, chemical elements […] all point to the fact that physical science recognizes qualitative differences between occasions in respect to the way in which each occasion entertains its energy.20

12 It should be clear that Whitehead’s actual occasion concept is not applicable only to human “experiences” but is an ontological notion that extends a model of experience to all natural processes. Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism,” in other words, was not content with extending the concept of experience to include the life-processes of biological organisms. For him, the real challenge was to posit a unitary philosophy of radical immanence (with nothing “outside” of nature) capable of expressing the continuity that exists between high-grade human experience, at one extreme, and the subject matter of physics, at the other: An occasion of experience which includes a human mentality is an extreme instance, at one end of the scale, of those happenings which constitute nature. But any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff, founded upon vague phrases whose sole merit is a comforting familiarity. We should either admit dualism, at least as a provisional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science.21

IV. c) The Ontological Nature of Actual Occasions

13 As a systematic metaphysician, Whitehead was thus aiming at nothing less than a generic ontological description that, without negating important differences, would be applicable to all actual occasions at all times, from the occasions that compose an electron, through those that compose a single-celled organism, to those which compose the personal being of the reader of this text. This task demands a radical relational rethinking of the old bifurcated subject/object dualism but, importantly, it does not demand its abandonment. On the contrary, the actual entity concept multiplies the subject/object dualism and distributes it throughout the entirety of a nature rethought as an ongoing process of expansion (as new micro experiences build on the expressions of previous micro experiences). Importantly, therefore, the subject/object relation is no longer conceived in epistemological terms as a conscious “knower” representing an objective “known,” but in ontological terms as a creative activity (on the part of such an occasion) of lending actual form to the data that composes the inherited universe of that occasion. Each occasion of actuality is the process of a “subject” lending form or pattern to the objects implicated in its momentary field of activity: Thus the Quaker word “concern,” divested of any suggestion of knowledge, is more fitted to suggest this fundamental structure. The occasion as subject has a “concern” for the object. And the “concern” at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it. With this interpretation, the subject-object relation is the fundamental structure of experience.22

14 The description Whitehead offers in Process and Reality and his later works amounts to a notion of an actual occasion/entity as an activity of realization whereby a subject concerns itself with its manifold data, patterning them into a novel unity in the process.

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IV. d) The Self-Realizing Nature of Actual Occasions

15 Whitehead refers to this activity of realization in terms of a complex of prehensions whereby, when those prehensions are “positive” (i.e. when the data are accepted into the constitution of the subject-in-process of formation), the occasion feels its objects, composing them into a configuration. Incompatible aspects of data, on the other hand, are negatively prehended or excluded from actualization. The “experience” at play here is thus not a “representational” matter, as if the prehension were some stage play about a reality occurring elsewhere. Rather, the experience is the activity of realization whereby the “potentiality” immanent in the objects is “actualized” in the form of a real co-creative becoming-concrete (concrescence). Far from being a representational “picture” of a “real world,” subjectivity is the very becoming of objectivity.

16 Through concrescence many things (objects, data) are thus grasped or prehended via a process (i.e. through the becoming of an actual occasion) into a new unity. The many become one. Potentialities, by definition, can be actualized in various different ways, but, in a given occasion, are in actual fact only actualized in one way. “Experience,” understood in this Whiteheadian way, is thus a process of conjunctive synthesis. Creativity is central to this process, since something new is added to the universe by the experience (i.e. the pattern itself is added): “[T]he many become one and are increased by one.”23 Once it is created, however, the experience (i.e. the process of self- realization considered in terms of its own novel internal constitution or in terms of the immediacy of its self enjoyment) enters the actual world as an “expression” that might in turn be “felt” as part of the next occasion of experience. Hence the occasion considered in terms of its own “internal” process of feeling is an “experience” and the occasion considered as the newly available product of this process is an “expression.” To use the vocabulary of Process and Reality the experience is the self-becoming of a ‘subject’ and, once it has become, the result is a “superject” that takes its place as data for future subjects in process of emergence. In this way, the experiencing subject does not pre-exist the objects it prehends (superjects/expressions), but creates itself through feeling them. Whitehead’s principle of relativity is based on this unfolding dynamic whereby the subject (experience) becomes the superject (expression) which in turn becomes the object for a new subject. It therefore ‘belongs to the nature of every “being” that it is a potential for every “becoming’’ (Whitehead, 1927-28/1985: 45). Once an actual occasion becomes a determinate superject, then it can play the role of one of the many objects that are the concern of another actual occasion with its process of creative conjunctive synthesis.

IV. e) The Ordering of Actual Occasions Into Discontinuous Continuities (Society and Nexus)

17 Since an actual occasion is a pure occurrence that does not endure in time it makes a rather paradoxical “atomic” or “basic” unit. How to account for our routine experiences of continuity and endurance on the basis of the idea that the “completely real things” are happenings and do not endure in time and space? The solution is that routinely encountered things such as buildings, trees, mountains and dogs – which clearly do have histories and endure in space – are not actual occasions. They are more or less coherent orderings of many actual occasions. Such a nexus of occasions can spread itself temporally and spatially, and thus form the basis of time and space. When

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a nexus (a loose arrangement) has its own emergent self-sustaining mode of order, Whitehead refers to it as a society. The occasions that constitute a society thus share a self-sustaining “togetherness” – a definite socially conditioned form that flows from the fact of their mutual prehensions. What we call a “tomato plant,” for instance, would be a nexus of occasions involving various societies. Some ‘social’ occasions are contiguous such that one follows another in a manner that engenders temporal “thickness” or endurance (i.e. temporal order), and some are spatially related contemporaries whose simultaneous activities engender a three dimensional spatial order. These forms of order thus give rise to phenomena that we routinely treat as if we were dealing with a single actuality. For many purposes a society can indeed be treated as a unity and does indeed possess a degree of self-sustaining “individuality,” but in fact any such “continuity” must be ultimately be thought in relation to the “discontinuities” (atomic occasions) that compose it. As we shall see later, composition into increasingly complex forms of social order creates the conditions for actual occasions capable of increasingly complex and intense forms of experience, and vice versa.

V. Whitehead’s Ontological Prehension of Jamesian Psychology

18 Before turning to James’ notion of pure experience, I will further consider how White- head appropriates certain aspects of Jamesian thought into his novel ontology, raising the latter’s “psychology” to the ontological status of ordered actual occasions. In particular I will suggest that Whitehead’s engagement with James’ notion of the co- conscious transition informs his solution (just outlined) to the problem of a discontinuous (atomic) basis to natural continuity (or flow).

V. a) Thought is Itself the Thinker (The Creature Creates Itself by Way of Its Feelings)

19 The distinction between the micro-cosmic (actual occasions) and the macro-cosmic (nexus and society) summarized in section 4.5 explicitly builds upon James’ more specific psychology of the “stream of consciousness” in which he describes unified “moments” of “thought” (“micro” atoms) which link together over time (“macro” assemblages).24 Indeed, James, at some stage or other, touches upon practically all of the features of an actual occasion rapidly sketched above. The “subject” (momentary “I”), for instance, effects a conjunctive synthesis through “feeling” an immediately past “I” in a novel context. This, for James, is a “transitive” process of self-realization (a bird in flight) that yields a “substantive” (a bird perched) that feeds into the next occasion of the process of becoming. The unification is for James a selective process through which only certain possibilities are actualized, and these “decisions” are implicated in creative development. These features, for instance, are discernable in the following famous quotation: The I which knows [thoughts] cannot itself be an aggregate; neither for psychological purposes need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego viewed as ‘out of time.’ It is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. […] thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond.25

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20 Here we have a clear statement of the “atomic” nature of “thought,” which is neither “an aggregate” nor a thing “out of time” but instead a series of “moments,” where each new moment emerges from and “appropriates” its immediate predecessor. James also deals with what he calls the continuity/discontinuity issue quite explicitly in Chapter X of Some Problems of Philosophy where he articulates an atomic conception of “buds” or “drops” of perception and puzzles over how such a discontinuity-theory (with “certain units of amount bursting into being at a stroke”)26 can be reconciled with a theory of continuity (“for if the drops or atoms are themselves without duration or extension it is inconceivable that by adding any number of them together times or spaces should accrue,” 155). Each bud or drop is an occasion of conjunctive synthesis that yields a new unity of experience to be inherited in turn by the next “drop.” In Chapter 2 of Process and Reality Whitehead makes the case that an actual entity is an act of experience by explicit citation of this passage of text: The authority of William James can be quoted in support of this conclusion. He writes: “Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, [106] they come totally or not at all.”27

V. b) The Example of the Co-conscious Transition

21 James refers to this most intimate form of “conjunctive relation” as the co-conscious transition – i.e. “the passing of one experience into another when they belong to the same self.” James contrasts the ways in which my own experiences are with one another with the ways in which my experiences and your experiences are with one another. Although I can empathize with how you are feeling, I cannot experience your experiences directly – I have a discontinuity-experience in this respect. By contrast, “What I do feel simply when a later moment of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that though they are two moments, the transition from one to another is continuous. Continuity here is a definite sort of experience.” Here we can see a) a concept of moments (actual occasions) and b) a concept of their arrangement into a society of such occasions, each following on from the next in a temporal sequence (what James is here calling “continuity”). Insignificant as this may sound, James places great importance onto the co-conscious transition. Consider the following extract from A World of Pure Experience: Within each of our personal histories, subject, object, interest and purpose are continuous or may be continuous. Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately experienced. “Change” in this case means continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into philosophy.28

22 To demonstrate the intimacy between the two thinkers on this point, I now quote from Whitehead’s Modes of Thought where, having discussed the basic derivation of experience from bodily functioning, he stresses a second equally important source: But our immediate experience also claims derivation from another source […]. This second source is our own state of mind directly preceding the immediate present of our conscious experience. A quarter of a second ago, we were entertaining such and

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such ideas, we were enjoying such and such emotions, and we were making such and such observations of external fact. In our present state of mind, we are continuing that previous state. The word continuing states only half the truth. In one sense it is too weak, and in another sense it overstates. It is too weak, because we not only continue, but we claim absolute identity with our previous state. It was our own very identical self in that state of mind, which is of course the basis of our present experience a quarter of a second later. In another sense the word continuing overstates. For we do not quite continue in our preceding state of experience. New elements have intervened. All of these new elements are provided by our bodily functionings. We fuse these new elements with the basic stuff of experience provided by our state of mind a quarter of a second ago. Also, as we have already agreed, we claim an identification with our body. Thus our experience in the present discloses its own nature as with two sources of derivation, namely, the body and the antecedent experiential functionings.29

23 Whitehead here explicitly engages with James, agreeing on the great importance of this kind of experience of transition, but modifying slightly James’ emphasis on continuity in order to make more room for his epochal theory of actual occasions (yes, continuity, but also discontinuity as each occasion is an irreducible unity which brings new elements into play). This is a key aspect of Whitehead’s effort to “rescue [James’, Bergson’s, Dewey’s] type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism” since an over-emphasis on continuity here can lead to the solipsistic form of subjectivism that these thinkers are often charged with.30 Whitehead is much clearer than James that causality is at stake in this kind of co-conscious transition (and from two sources), and that this causality forms the hidden bridge between conscious experience and the full variety of events that compose the universe. Whitehead makes this explicit in Adventures of Ideas when discussing causal efficacy (I will return to this in the final section) under the description of non-sensuous perception: In human experience, the most compelling example of non-sensuous perception is our knowledge of our own immediate past. I am not referring to our memories of a day past, or of an hour past, or of a minute past. Such memories are blurred and confused by the intervening occasions of our personal experience. But our immediate past is constituted by that occasion, or by that group of fused occasions, which enters into experience devoid of any perceptible medium intervening between it and the present immediate fact. Roughly speaking, it is that portion of our past lying between a tenth of a second and half a second ago. It is gone, and yet it is here.31

24 Both philosophers thus give prime significance to James’ “co-conscious transition,” but Whitehead universalizes this importance via his concepts of the actual occasion and their collection into enduring forms of order, thus extending it well beyond human experience. Actual occasions that include this kind of high level (e.g. conscious) human mentality are at one extreme end of a scale of events that includes all of the happenings that constitute nature. Whitehead, as discussed earlier, is obliged to include this extreme because he refuses to place human nature in a transcendent position “outside” of nature. Features of this description of human experience must therefore also enter into descriptions of less complex, developed and specialized actual occasions (including the flux of energy that characterizes the kinds of natural occasions dealt with by physicists). It is not insignificant that Whitehead ends his last book with the following remarkably clear statement of the key to his philosophy: “[…] the operation of mentality is primarily to be conceived as a diversion of the flow of energy […]. The key notion from which such construction [of a cosmology] should start is that

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the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life.”32

25 Whitehead’s concept of an actual occasion, in sum, is compatible with James’ radically empiricist emphasis on experience, and particularly with his notion of discrete “buds” or “drops” of experience, but extends it into the depths of nature (hence “deep empiricism”). An actual occasion (or actual entity) is nothing less than an act of experience.33 Through this act the “actor” becomes (and “knows”) itself through the conjunctive synthesis of many things that are other than itself. This extension makes the concept of process the cosmological keynote. James intuited this but resisted systematizing it. His radical emphasis on experience, for example, was certainly central to his understanding of process, since the “function” of an experience can only be to feed into the becoming of another experience: “According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which […] are themselves experiences.”34

VI. James’ Basic Unit: Pure Experience

26 Since I am suggesting that Whitehead’s concept of actual occasions of experience deepens and systematizes James’ prior concept of pure experience we must now briefly examine the latter concept.35 “Pure experience” is crucial to James’ radical empiricism, and he unfolds it most clearly in two essays from 1904 (Does consciousness exist? and A world of pure experience). For the purpose of making explicit the resonances with Whitehead’s concept, it is sufficient to identify the following five aspects of the concept:

VI. a) Materia Prima

27 Like the actual occasion concept for Whitehead, pure experience functions for James as an alternative to the Cartesian starting point of two substances: “if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff “pure experience,” then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.”36 Pure experience is thus the name James gives to the materia prima of everything.

VI. b) Instantaneous Actuality

28 As with Whitehead’s actual entity, James makes the concept of actuality central to pure experience. Pure experience is “plain, unqualified actuality [...] a simple that.”37 The concept of actuality at play also has a temporal connotation of being instantaneous. Pure experience is thus the “instant field of the present.”38 As the instant field of the present, a pure experience cannot be true or false or subjective or objective since it just is what it is, a simple that. To draw pure experience closer to Whitehead’s basic concept, we might thus fairly call pure experience an actual instant.39

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VI. c) Virtuality

29 As a simple that or actual instant of unqualified experience, however, we need to understand that pure experience is there to be acted upon in the course of a future experience. One actual instant of experience thus shows up, not just as a pure actuality, but as potential for a future instant which might put it to use and qualify it in various ways. A pure experience can therefore be true or false, objective or subjective, in what James calls a virtual sense. Simple actuality is thus always to be conceived in relation to a virtual future experience in process of gestation. This is why James qualifies the “purity” of pure experience as in fact “only a relative term.”40 The actuality and the virtuality are of equal importance and must be grasped together in an unfolding dynamic. One portion of experience is always entering into some sort of a relation with another portion of experience. We imagine a future meal and then we see and smell that meal and then we eat that meal, for instance.

VI. d) The Flux or “Sensational Stream” of the Actuality/Virtuality Dynamic

30 This actuality/virtuality dynamic is clearly at play when James defines the concept of pure experience in terms of the “immediate flux of life.”41 This flux pre-exists later forms of reflection and conceptual categorization, for instance, and furnishes them with the material they put to use. Hence if pure experience is a pure actuality, then it is an actuality pregnant with virtual possibilities – it is a that “which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats.” Or again, “the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.”42 Such discursively and conceptually ordered sensation is one possible future becoming of the unverbalized flux of feeling that James invokes with the name “pure experience.” In a marvelous multiply mixed metaphor, James writes of qualities and definite objects that flower out of a stream of pure experience or sensational stream, only to melt back into it again in the next experience.43

VI. e) Mind and Matter as Virtual Possibilities

31 James insists that pure experience has the potential to be acted upon in relation to the details of an object known, and it has the potential to be acted upon in relation to the details of a knower that knows an object. Mind and matter, as virtuality actualized, are thus achievements that are the effect of a kind of retrospective doubling or re-entry of pure experience by a later experience. This is essentially what James means when he insists that consciousness is a function rather than an entity: “subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the [pure] experience is “taken,” i.e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content.”44

32 James writes in this context of the transformation of a day-dream into a conscious reflection in terms of abstracting a certain content and “connecting it to a new group of associates which make it re-enter my mental life.”45 He also gives the example of a conscious experience of a pen as contrasted with the simple ‘that’ of a pure experience

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of a pen: “The pen, realized in this retrospective way as my percept, thus figures as a fact of “conscious” life. But it does so only so far as “appropriation” has occurred; and appropriation is part of the content of a later experience wholly additional to the originally “pure” pen. That pen, virtually both objective and subjective, is at its own moment actually and intrinsically neither. It has to be looked back upon and used, in order to be classed in either distinctive way. But its use, so called, is in the hands of the other experience […].”46

VII. Radical Empiricism and Deep Empiricism

33 So far, I have suggested that Whitehead systematizes James’ pure experience with his concept of the actual entity, and in so doing extends the concept of experience into the heart of nature, thereby deepening radical empiricism. Instead of repeating steps already made elsewhere, I will instead now ask the pragmatic question: What practical difference does this make? My answer concerns what Whitehead calls security of intellectual justification.47 Whitehead affords greater confidence about retaining the value of some of the more tendentious and vulnerable aspects of James’ thinking. Specifically, these include: a) his explicit resistance to transcendental explanations and insistence upon the ultimate immanent unity of a plural universe; b) his “constructivist” stress on the importance of self-generating creativity in a universe in process of creative advance;48 c) the notion that together an immanent universe of self-generating creativity is a universe without foundations or rather one that is self-foundationing; d) his implicit conception of this plural universe as characterized by an internally unfolding “evolution” of different grades of existence which together compose a hybrid or mosaic unity of many regions, and; e) the importance given to subjective experience, including feelings, emotions and values, which are not split off from broader nature, but taken seriously as natural forms of a most refined and valuable grade.

34 Together, I group these interrelated features under the label of “deep empiricism.” Deep empiricism accepts that “nothing shall be admitted as fact […] except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient,”49 but, following Whitehead, extends the concept of an experient to all of the occasions that collectively constitute the universe. James did indeed suggest such an extension, but he did so rather tentatively and there is no doubt that his experiential home-territory was the domain of experience characteristic of human psychology. James thus writes that we can continue, as radical empiricists, to believe in existence beyond our limited human experience, but: the beyond must, of course, always in our philosophy be itself of an experiential nature. If not a future experience of our own or a present one of our neighbour, it must be a thing in itself in Dr Prince’s and Professor Strong’s sense of the term – that is, it must be an ex perience for itself whose relation to other things we translate into the action of molecules, ether waves, or whatever else the physical symbols may be. This opens the chapter of the relations of radical empiricism to panpsychism, into which I cannot enter now.50

35 Notwithstanding such clear suggestions as this, to the extent that James tended to draw his philosophy from experiences in the domain of human psychology, his radical

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empiricism tended towards what we might call a wet empiricism: an empiricism that nourishes itself in the waters of James’ famous “stream of consciousness.” I would characterize Pred’s51 interesting application of James and Whitehead in this way, since his basic rule of engagement is to “take one’s own unverbalized experience in the stream in the moment as a touchstone for one’s philosophical claims.” Without questioning the undoubted value of this procedure, from a deep empiricist perspective, such streams run along a surface largely innocent of the tectonic heat and pressure raging in the depths. Direct intuitive identification with all modes of experience becomes a major challenge in this context, and it becomes necessary to supplement keen attention to one’s own stream of experience with speculation (“the play of free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic”)52 based on a wider pool of data. In thinking Whitehead and James together, it is therefore important to attend to some of the less explicit and focal features of James’ thought (his “fringe,” as it were). Here I can do no more than schematically fill out the five points just listed:

36 Point a) resistance to transcendental explanations is an obvious feature of both James and Whitehead. Both reject what I will call the figure of the transcendental unifier. An obvious example would be the rejection of Kant’s big idea that the synthesis and integration (unification) of sensation is accomplished by a priori (transcendental) features of the understanding. In the political domain both thinkers also rejected the idea of top-down transcendentally justified political regimes. In both cases, the forms of order that give rise to unification are construed by James and Whitehead as radically immanent: mentality, for instance, is internal to matter and not an externally imposed alterity, and political value is not externally imposed upon otherwise dumb citizens, but cultivated intrinsically. In both examples, in a gesture reminiscent of Spinoza, the figure of the transcendental unifier is replaced with an argument for immanence. The value of immanence is nicely conjured by James’ notion of the universe as a “tissue” of experiences within which context new experiences unfold.

37 This refusal of explanations that unify by a proposed transcendence of experience is of course central to James’ definition of radical empiricism according to which “everything real must be experience-able somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.”53 The same challenge is issued emphatically by Whitehead: “The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, ‘In no way.’ The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature.”54 This is summed up in his ontological principle: “no actual entity, then no reason.”55

38 Point b), concerning constructivism, comes out clearly in this context when James writes that knowledge of sensible realities “comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time.”56 This deep constructivist emphasis on making is decisive to James, and yet extremely vulnerable to dismissal. It is pivotal to his re-thinking of consciousness since, for James, consciousness and matter are not two halves of a doubly composed essential reality. One does not obtain consciousness or matter by a process of subtraction, but by a process of creative addition. Consciousness is a becoming rather than something that already is. James insists on the fact that experiences “become part of our consciousness

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in their entirety, they become physical in their entirety; and this result is achieved by addition.”57

39 This form of constructivism is to be contrasted with more familiar representational epistemologies in which knowledge is merely a matter of the representation of an external reality by a transcendent knowing mind. To quote Whitehead, it is a matter of “the cumulation of the universe and not a stage-play about it.”58 It is a matter, to use another Whiteheadian phrase, of creative advance. I suggest the phrase “deep constructivism,” as a contrast to, for example, Kant’s shallow constructivism which is restricted to the knower or experient whose sense of the world is interpreted as a complex construction. In discussing the manner in which actualities are “pulled” out of virtual possibilities, by contrast, James suggests that really “it is the problem of creation; for in the end the question is: How do I make them be? Real activities are those that really make things be, without which the things are not, and with which they are there.”59

40 James repeats this point when he writes that “the unity of the world is on the whole undergoing increase.” This notion that “the universe continually grows in quantity by new experiences that graft themselves upon the older mass”60 is more or less clearly expressed by James’ metaphor of his radical empiricism as a mosaic philosophy composed of disparate and plural facts. In other words, and here we reach point c), there is no ultimate foundation to the mosaic of experiences. James puts this more prosaically when he likens the bedding that holds together the pieces of an ordinary mosaic to the way in which most philosophies are bedded in transcendental terms such as Substances, transcendental Egos or Absolutes. In the mosaic of radical empiricism there is no such bedding: “it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement.”61 This is the core of a radically non- foundational mode of thought in which the basis of one experience is another. It is interesting that James identified this feature as the essence of humanism: “though one part of our experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is… experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing.”62

41 Turning briefly to points d) and e), in the essay A World of Pure Experience James offers two similes to contrast absolute idealism with empiricism. The universe of absoluteidealism, he suggests, is like an aquarium or a gold-fish bowl – one can see the fish clearly through the transparent medium of water. Reason can easily penetrate the scene and connect up the parts in lucid fashion. In contrast to this, James invites the reader to imagine the universe of empiricism as “one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another.”63 Compared to the crystal globe of the aquarium, this latter image stresses the imperfect intimacy of various different elements of experience, which are characterized by discontinuity and mixture, having in common only the bare fact of being assembled together. The kind of reason that can make sense of the nucleus of the skull is confounded by the feathers and finds no connections between the other appendages except their bare co-presence.

42 The mosaic metaphor of radical empiricism sits somewhere between these images of empiricism (the Dyak head) and idealism (the goldfish bowl). The idea expressed by the mosaic metaphor is that there are regions of consistency (goldfish bowls) within a

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broader (and growing) hybrid totality (Dyak head). Each region of consistency might have its own grade of unity or its own internal connectivity, but the grade of unity proper to one region need not extend to that constituted by the neighbouring piece in the mosaic. The universe of experience forms a hybrid unity composed of numerous grades of unity, each subject to its own “logic.” The internal connectivity or consistency alluded to by this phrase “grade of unity” suggests that what makes such a grade consistent is the existence of a shared type of connectivity that runs through it, unifying the many singular experiences (occasions) that compose it. That is to say, the occasions of experience that compose a “grade” are internally connected and connectable one to another, forming, as it were, a self-referential system of operations.

43 Each grade of unity or region of consistency in James’s Dyak head might hence be considered a society in Whitehead’s sense of a group of occasions sharing a self- sustaining form of order or mode of “togetherness.” Taking the co-conscious transition as an example, it is clear that one occasion of conscious experience connects up with the next occasion, and that this continuing process yields the apparent unity of our “stream of consciousness.” A conscious experience cannot connect in the same direct way with, say, a biological event such as the release of a neurotransmitter, or a societal event such as the uttering of a promise. The release of a neurotransmitter might connect directly to the emission of a synaptic electrical charge, but not to a discursive utterance, which can connect directly only to another discursive event. There would thus be a society of neural occasions, a society of conscious occasions and a society of discursive occasions. The heterogeneous assemblage of various different grades taken together would make up a more loosely connected nexus. A promise might not be directly connected to a conscious experience and a chain of neural activity, but it would certainly depend upon the existence of both of these grades of connectivity, and much more besides. To simplify some of the implications of James’ mosaic metaphor, I propose consideration of Whitehead’s suggestion of a rough division of nature into six loosely distinguishable grades of co-ordinated complexity: 1. Human existence, body and mind. 2. All other animal life. 3. All vegetable life. 4. Single living cells. 5. All large-scale inorganic aggregates. 6. All happenings on the infinitesimal scale disclosed by modern physics.

44 The forms of ordered connectivity that characterize the actual occasions composing large-scale inorganic aggregates (a mountain range, for example) are repetitive and conformal and correspond to what we call the physical laws of nature. Although no hard and fast boundary can be drawn between inorganic and organic grades, a single living cell, by contrast to an inorganic aggregate, forms its own bounded micro-system of connectivity. A living cell, for Whitehead, is a structured society of actual occasions that includes within its nexus a number of subordinate non-living societies. Groupings of non-living molecules, for example, are arranged in intricate structural patterns within the membrane of the cell boundary. The complex internal milieu created by these patterns fosters certain peculiarities of activity (and hence of experience) that are not to be found outside of that milieu. That is to say, a physical molecule is a physical molecule whether located inside or outside a living cell, but the occasions in

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which it is implicated may differ radically as it moves in and out of the living context of a cell.

45 We thus have two pieces of James’ mosaic, or two broadly distinguishable grades of order (5 & 4 above). This distinction allows an insight into what quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger described as the “obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry” to account for “the events in time and space which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism.”64 The price paid for the internal complexity of the living cell is, contra Darwinian dogma, a comparatively fragile, insecure and unstable existence (compared, that is, to inorganic forms). The pattern of a living cell is a delicately balanced and improbable arrangement that is constantly in the process of breaking down and hence constantly in the process of reconstructing itself. This reconstruction requires what we call food – i.e. the stealing away of material from the outside to be used in the reconstruction of the inside.

46 As we move from 4 to 3, 2 & 1 we move to even more complex regions of consistency that involve the coordination of many cells that together provide a specialized self- sustaining form order capable of occasions of experience ever more peculiar and rarefied. Compared to a vegetable, an animal body has a highly centralized organization. This means that an animal body contains numerous centres of experience, coordinated into a hierarchy of complexity, such that higher centres receive their data from the expressions of lower centres. Whitehead distinguishes human existence from other animal life, not in absolute terms, but, in part at least, because of the highly centralized control of our bodies via a high-grade brain. As he puts it in a memorable phrase, the human body is “a set of occasions miraculously coordinated so as to pour its inheritance into various regions within the brain.”65

47 This hybrid mosaic is a plurality, but its pluralism is the product of an “evolution”66 of sorts from a more primordial flux. James, for example, hints that originally chaotic pure experiences gradually differentiate over time into more orderly grades. Such a view, of course, is consistent with the pluralistic non-foundational constructivist ontology of immanence (i.e. “deep empiricism”) shared by James and Whitehead. That is to say, to paraphrase Whitehead, we must explain the emergence of the plural variety of more abstract things from the more concrete things.

Part two

I. Transversal Liminality: Parasitism & Symbiosis

48 The remainder of this paper will attend to this key problem of the emergence of more abstract strata (or orders) of experience and expression from more concrete strata, and of the relations between such strata. This problem is at play in Whitehead’s notion of a creative advance via phases of transmutation leading gradually from energy to the intensity of human emotion. In the sections following this one I will suggest that Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference usefully systematize a series of often implicit distinctions made by James between energetic, perceptual, conceptual and discursive orders of experience. A creative synthesis of these two sets of concepts enables an account of how progressively more abstract forms of experience and expression can emerge from more concrete forms, whilst also recognizing that the emergence of a more abstract stratum

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forever transforms the more concrete modalities. Addressing this issue requires a way of conceptualizing what I will call the transversal and liminal problem of the thresholds between such strata (regions of consistency, grades of unity, modes of connectivity). It is, in other words, one thing to identify the shared form of connectivity proper to a Whiteheadian “society,” but quite another thing to grasp the relationships across different grades in the context of a heterogeneous nexus. The classic transversal problems of the inanimate/living, body/mind, and psychic/societal distinctions have their home in this heterogeneous problem-space,67 but here I will focus on relations between the distinguishable modes of human experience just mentioned. Both Whitehead and James placed great importance on these transversal questions of liminality. For James, “Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges […]. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn.”68 Philosophy, “like life, must keep the doors and windows open.”69 For Whitehead, life itself is a threshold phenomenon which “lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain.”70

49 Earlier we saw in this context how James reached for transversal concepts such as “re- entry,” “appropriation” and being “taken twice.” In Principles of Psychology, James approaches the problem as follows: The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so […]. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world [note – this would now be identified as level 6 above]. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this.71

50 This “filter” metaphor suggests that when a given manifold of experience is re-entered by a new manifold there is a selective appropriation of data at play, such that only certain relevant material is “sifted” and “taken” up into the new manifold. This sifting process is associated with the emergence of a “higher” state or grade of unity from a “lower”: “We say […] a higher state is not a lot of lower states; it is itself. When, however, a lot of lower states have come together, or when certain brain-conditions occur together which, if they occurred separately, would produce a lot of lower states, we have not for a moment pretended that a higher state may not emerge. In fact, it does emerge under those condition.”72

51 James’ filter metaphor gives a neat sense of the abstraction at play in these liminal transitions, since a filter literally “abstracts” a usable selection from a rejected body of material that is sifted away. Eating food is abstraction in this basic sense, and the alimentary canal a sophisticated filter. This kind of image is certainly at play in Whitehead’s category of transmutation, in his identification of the explanatory purpose of philosophy with the task of explaining the “emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things,” and in his claim that the task of philosophy is “to recover the totality obscured by the selection.”73 The filter metaphor, however, suggests a rather passive, wholly subtractive and mechanical relation between the experiential grades at play. Whitehead’s notion of an actual occasion for which the

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operation of mentality effects a diversion of the “flow of energy” suggests a more active and additive (contructive) force at play along with this “subtractive” process, as does his notion of food as theft and, more specifically, his analysis of increasingly complicated phases of concrescence which combine the contrasts at play between successive and simultaneous “mental,” “physical” and “hybrid” prehensions into cumulatively intense and complex experiential occasions. As Whitehead puts it: “The process of concrescence is divisible into an initial stage of many feelings, and a succession of subsequent phases of more complex feelings integrating the earlier simpler feelings.”74 This more active and additive (constructive) relation between the occasions of experience of different societies or grades of order is also implied when James occasionally writes of truthful experiences in terms of a subject reaping from its objects a harvest of sensations.

52 Feeding, harvesting, stealing and diverting are forms of appropriation, “grasping” or selectively prehending. Much as with cooking a meal, the “subtraction” of relevant ingredients is but a stage towards the synthetic process (“addition”) of preparing the new unity of a cooked meal. This “active” aspect is clear when Whitehead defines “feeling” technically as the activity by which a concrescent actuality “appropriates” its datum “so as to make it its own.”75 An increase in complexity is made possible by the “taking” (subtraction) and “giving” (addition) whereby a grade of unity profits from the grades in its environment by picking only the ‘desired fruits’ and harvesting only the ‘cream of the crop’ for constructive purposes of its own. I have found Serres’ notion of parasitism useful in this context, since from one angle this activity resembles, not just the relation of a “superior” to an “inferior,” but also the parasite/host relation.76 From this perspective, the task of recovering “the totality obscured by the selection” is part of the ethico-political art of coordinating a sustainably symbiotic life of shared intensity without self-defeating exploitation (i.e. a process of balancing the “give and take” involved). For Whitehead, the diversions that lead to increases in the complexity of grades of experience serve first of all to increase the intensity of experience proper to an occasion. The complicated structure of a living cell, for example, means that the occasions at play in its milieu benefit from an amplification of intensity, bought at the cost of stability. Rather than being entirely determined by the past, such occasions acquire a responsiveness to the present by which they clutch at vivid immediacy through the capture of intensity. Conscious experience is thus conceived as the experience of a “final percipient” in a long parasitical/symbiotic chain that ultimately leads to the solar energy. The human being, viewed in this way, is quite literally a complex mosaic of disparate forms of order. Our potential for self-creativity is grounded in the fact that we are simultaneously creatures of biochemistry, creatures of consciousness and creatures of communication and culture.

53 Consciousness and materiality, within this mode of thought, far from being separate substances, are thus extremely contrasted grades of order with characteristic occasions of experience. As James put it “This would be the “evolution” of the psychical from the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, moral and otherwise emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage.”77 Between these extremes, however, we should find more complex gradations, and it should be possible to trace the active “filtering” process by way of which more abstract modes of connectivity “emerge” via re-entry, diversion and appropriation of a presupposed external milieu of more concrete connective operations.78 I propose that examples of such complex gradations are to be found in James’ implicit distinctions between energetics, percepts, concepts

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and discourse. This assemblage of concepts is systematized by way of Whitehead’s idea that symbolic reference “plays the difference” between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy. Finally I suggest a synthesis that provides insights concerning transversal relations between four distinguishable grades of order simultaneously at play in every occasion of human experience.

II. Energetics > Percepts > Concepts > Discourse

II. a) Energetics Contrasted with Percepts

54 The notion of the evolution of the “psychical from the bosom of the physical” suggests that James was beyond simply suggesting – as in the Does consciousness exist? essay – two complementary ways of acting upon a prior pure experience. It suggests, to re-iterate, that what we call the physical is a more primordial grade of order than the “psychical,” and that the psychical itself entails some sort of appropriation, re-entry or re-traversal of the physical. The physical would then be a name for one kind of nexus of occasions, and the psychical a name for another manifold that is parasitical, as it were, upon its physical matrix.

55 This interpretation is consistent with some of James’ more enigmatic assertions. For example, James discusses a basic energetic form of shared connectivity by which physical things mutually affect one another. A pipe as a physical thing, for instance, can form a connective group with other such physical things, such as tobacco to put in it, fire to light it with, and so forth. This idea of the pipe as energetically related to comparable physical “associates” can be contrasted with the pipe abstracted as a percept. As a mental percept, the pipe is related to a different society of “associates”: it is associated with a manifold of comparable percepts, other images, sensations and perceptions for instance, such as the taste of tobacco and the smell of smoke. James thus evokes an internally consistent society of energetic connectivity, and an internally consistent society of perceptual connectivity, but there is some discontinuity between these types. The energetic pipe can be smoked, but the pipe taken as pure percept has direct relations only to other percepts. In the first context the pipe is taken as a physical entity with its own physical history, process of production in a carpenter’s workshop, history of being bought and sold in a shop, of encountering other objects such as tobacco and fire, etc. In the second context it is taken as a connective element in a field of consciousness related to the personal biography of the one having the experience. It may, for instance, be the first pipe the person has ever seen or ever smoked. They can also make the image of the pipe disappear simply by closing their eyes, only to have it replaced by a perception of darkness.

56 To adopt James’ terminology, the same pipe – the pipe of pure experience – can be thought of as being on the intersection of at least two lines, a line of physical history and a line of personal biography. Both lines are equally actual, but rather different in nature. Each experiential line is a creative achievement that is the effect of a retrospective doubling or re-entry of one experience by another. In Jamesian terms, the “virtual” pipe of pure experience is appropriated and used as part of the content of a new experience of the pipe as conscious percept or as energetic physical fact. It can be both to the extent that it is situated on the intersection between the two lines. Here are two examples of James deploying this “energetic/percept” distinction:

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[…] speak of the pure unit as “the pen.” So far as the pen’s successors do but repeat the pen or, being different from it, are “energetically” related to it, it and they will form a group of stably existing physical things. So far, however, as its successors differ from it in another well-determined way, the pen will figure in their context, not as a physical, but as a mental fact. It will become a passing “percept,” my percept of that pen.79 […] as the general chaos of all our experiences gets sifted, we find that there are some fires that will always burn sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some waters that will always put out fires; while there are other fires and waters that will not act at all. The general group of experiences that act, that […] wear [their natures] adjectively and energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitably to be contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures, fail to manifest them in the “energetic” way. I make for myself now an experience of a blazing fire; I place it near my body; but it does not warm me in the least […] I account for all such facts by calling this whole train of experiences unreal, a mental train. Mental fire is what won’t burn real sticks; mental water is what won’t necessarily […] put out even a mental fire.80

57 Having indicated the “energetic”/“percept” distinction, James nevertheless insists on their ultimate connection, since both are made of the same basic material of pure experience. Both grades of order are ultimately energetic, but the energy of percepts is radically abstracted and canalized, yielding the strong contrast enabling the distinction. So, having first made the distinction in Does Consciousness Exist?, James immediately adds a footnote to keep the doors and windows open, stressing that “there are also ‘mental activity trains’ in which thoughts do ‘work on each other’.”81 The society of percepts, in other words, reaps only certain fruits from the energetic harvest that provides its matrix. The new and more abstract economy of perceptual occasions of experience is in this sense parasitical upon groupings of lower grade energetic occasions (perhaps with great symbiotic potential).

II. b) Percepts Contrasted with Concepts

58 This first distinction between a group of energetic associates and a comparable but distinct perceptual manifold thus maps broadly onto the subject-object split that is the theme of James’ consciousness essay. But James finesses this with other relevant distinctions that allow us to discern more complex gradations. For example, he distinguishes percepts from concepts. Concepts are groupings of non-perceptual associates that are thus distinct both from percepts and from energetics.

59 Conceptual societies are non-perceptual because they concern the world merely thought-of and not directly seen, heard or otherwise felt. Where percepts are continuous and meaningless (a perception being just what it immediately is), concepts are discrete, each meaning just what it means.82 There is thus a perceptual grade of order which takes the form of a flux of sensation into which data from all of our senses enter in a “big booming buzzing confusion,” and there is a conceptual order composed of associates of discrete concepts, “just as real as percepts,”83 but more abstract. Concepts thus include such non-perceptual experiences as memories and fancies.

60 Having carved this distinction, James once again keeps the doors and windows open by insisting that “they are made of the same kind of stuff, and melt into each other when we handle them together.”84 James stresses the distinction between percepts and energetics by writing: “In a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will hold a painted ship.”85 He uses the same idea to stress the

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common ground between percept and concept: “Conception is not like a painted hook, on which no real chain can be hung; for we hang concepts upon percepts, and percepts upon concepts interchangeable and indefinitely.”86 In fact, however, the relation is not completely interchangeable since percepts come before concepts both phylogenetically87 and ontogenetically. 88 If we “wrap” our percepts in ideas, that is because perceptual experience is prior in both these senses.89 Conceptual societies of occasions presuppose and act upon perceptual societies just as percepts presuppose and act upon energetic occasions.

61 Nevertheless, in the environment of a creature capable of conceptual thought, the relation can become interchangeable. Our fancying of a pipe (concept), for instance, might terminate in an encounter with the image of a pipe (percept) that might in turn terminate in a coenesthesic (multi-sensorial) experience of smoking. In this way, James writes about the knowing of a percept by an idea. It is, once again, a question of one experience – a conceptual experience – appropriating and working with the expression of another, in this case a perceptual experience. Indeed, this interplay of concept and percept is at the core of James’ understanding of pragmatism. His 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.”90 Concepts are thus tested by way of percepts. There is no fancying of a pipe, and no memory of a pipe without some relation to the perception of a pipe (even if that pipe happens to be momentarily lost). The pipe as concept, to summarize, presupposes the pipe as percept, but, unlike a percept, a concept forms knowledge about an object – and that object may be merely a possible object, a proposition rather than a factually existing perception. The concept, in other words, reaps only certain fruits from the perceptual harvest, creating by abstraction a new economy of connectivity (a society of new and more abstract actual occasions) parasitical upon it, but with great symbiotic potential.

II. c) Concepts Contrasted with Discourse

62 James hints at a third distinction relevant to our concerns. He does not develop the contrast, but I include it because of its increasing relevance since the post- Wittgensteinian “turn to language” in philosophy and the “textual turn” in the social sciences and humanities.91 The suggestion is that language based communication forms its own distinct grade of order. For the most part, James’ comments indicate that this system can distract us both from perceptions and conceptions. He therefore chastises those who are too enamoured with words and who mistake verbal descriptions for concepts, percepts or energetics. In addressing one critic, for instance, he says “all I can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words for what is true of what they signify. They stay with words, – not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them.”92 James also warns that if we are to hold fast to the co-conscious transition we must ‘take it at its face value […] [i.e.] first of all to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again seem rationally possible.”93

63 This last warning also indicates that words and concepts, despite lacking direct connectivity, nevertheless presuppose transversal relations. Words “drive us” to invent

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concepts, for example, but also each “new book verbalizes some new concept.”94 Discourse exploits conceptual mentality, abstracting from it a new economy of communicative connectivity. Whitehead too draws attention to the ambiguous relations between language and propositions (which he thus refuses to reduce to language). He regularly warns against trusting linguistic phrases, insisting that language is not the essence of thought (an assumption that has become prevalent since the “textual turn”). Language and thought are, however, thoroughly interwoven, such that it is not going too far to assert “that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind.”95

III. Causal Efficacy, Presentational Immediacy and Symbolic Reference

64 Energetics, percepts, concepts and discourse – as “curiously incompatible groups”96 – are thus candidates for distinguishable grades of experience in James’ thought. Each grade involves of experiential associates, but each nevertheless shares a common energetic heritage as “pure experience.” We can thus see each grade of experience as a piece in a larger mosaic of experience, yielding the immanent unity of a plural universe. The mosaic metaphor, however, is rather flat and two-dimensional. In deepening radical empiricism, I am suggesting that we attend also to the “evolutionary” and transversal aspects that James hints at and that Whitehead develops in more detail. For Whitehead, these grades would be sets composed of cumulatively more complex actual occasions. An “occasion” “bud” or “drop” of conceptual experience must thus be thought of as presupposing and “containing” layers of modified perceptual and energetic experience, the concept being, in a sense “grafted on to the older mass.” “The fundamental principle is that whatever merges into actuality, implants its aspects in every individual event.”97 But given the unified nature of each occasion of experience, once “grafted on” the conceptual element will radically transform any more primitive ingredients. The experiences of us “talking apes” will likewise be forever modified by our powers of language use, since “that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions.”98

65 I suggest that Whitehead’s causal efficacy and presentational immediacy are directly comparable to Jamesian “energetics” and “percepts,” and that Whitehead thinks what James calls “concepts” in terms of symbolic reference. In a striking passage of Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead describes the word “experience” as “one of the most deceitful in philosophy”99 and proceeds to analyze it into three modes, “each contributing its share of components to our individual rise into one concrete moment of human experience.”100 Causal efficacy and presentational immediacy are both modes of perception and symbolic reference is the mode of “conceptual analysis.” Presentational immediacy is equivalent to James’ percepts because it refers to sense- perception. It is the appearance of the outside world objectified by way of the senses as a constitutive aspect of our experience. It is mediated by qualities like colour, sound, taste and odour implicated in a system of spatial relatedness (spatial extension). This system of spatial extension has an impartial feel: it “presents” to us the immediacy of an external world. This is so whether what is immediately presented be delusional or not: an image of a pipe in a mirror, for example, still involves a set of spatially related colours and shapes, as might a drug induced hallucination. Presentational immediacy is

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thus characterized by an effect of externality and spatiality, along with a certain barrenness implied by the phrase “mere appearance.”

66 Classic “shallow” empiricism is based upon the assumption that presentational immediacy is the sole perceptual modality. For Hume, causality is a secondary matter, derivative from conceptual thought. For Whitehead it is primary and primitive and it is the basic form of perception: causal efficacy. There are clear links between Jamesian “energetics” and Whiteheadian causal efficacy. James, for example, does in fact use the phrase “causal efficacy” in two essays (The Place of Affectional Facts,101 and The Experience of Activity102), and he explicitly challenges what I have called the “shallow empiricist” assumption that there is no direct perceptual experience of causal efficacy since causality is derivative from conceptual thought and an “illusory projection outwards of phenomena of our own consciousness.”103 We have already touched upon causal efficacy as a mode of non-sensuous perception in the section on the co-conscious transition. What enters our new experience without taking the sensory route is precisely our state of experience from the immediate past, roughly a quarter of a second ago. Causal efficacy is “the hand of the settled past in the formation of the present.”104 The patterned product of a prior experience (its expression) provides the bulk of the “data” felt in the course of the next, now actualizing, occasion of experience. The two perceptual sources of experience in this case are thus the causal efficacy of the immediately prior state of mind, and the modifications wrought on the new state by way of experience from bodily functionings associated with the sensory perceptions of presentational immediacy. Causal efficacy is heavy with a sense of derivation from the past and its relevance for the future (its emphasis is temporal), whereas presentational immediacy is a complex and superficial product that halts at the “show” of the externally projected contemporary world of the present (its emphasis is spatial). Causal efficacy arises from a vaguely sensed ‘beyond’ that shapes us, whilst presentational immediacy projects the clarity of an externality that arises from within.

67 Since causal efficacy is primitive, it obviously cannot be reduced to this example of co- conscious transition. It is, for Whitehead, the dominating and aboriginal experience of lower organisms (the conformal physical feelings of physical occasions are perceptions of causal efficacy). Also, the data from the senses play a double role: we see the pipe (an array of colours and shapes exhibiting the contemporary world as an external special scheme) and we see it with our eyes (our bodily organs imposing their past characters onto the present experience); we smell “the smoke” with our nose and taste it with our palate. Thus “perception in the mode of causal efficacy discloses that the data in the mode of sense- perception [presentational immediacy] are provided by it.”105 In order to generate its sense of an external spatial world of qualities, sense perception must reap the fruits provided by causal efficacy. In so doing, as with the relation of language to concepts and concepts to percepts, the host risks being obscured from view by the sophisticated constructs of its parasite. Here we are also close to James’ idea of re- entering and following a pure experience in two complementary (physical and mental) directions: the smoky smell points outwards, to the pipe smoke and its energetic associates; and inwards, to our nasally mediated experience, and its context in a personal biography. Causal efficacy is essentially a reformulation of Spinoza’s concept of power as capacity to affect and be affected or, to use Locke’s definition, as a twofold relation: “viz. as able to make, or able to receive, any change: the one may be called

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‘active,’ and the other ‘passive’.”106 For Whitehead, “the problem of perception and the problem of power are one and the same.”107

68 Abstracted as two modes of pure perception, neither the powers of causal efficacy nor the percepts of presentational immediacy admit of error. The feeling of the present conforming to the past “just is” that feeling, and the vision of a patch of shaped colour in a spatial array “just is” that vision, irrespective of whether it might refer to a “physical” pipe, a painting of one, or a drug induced hallucination. The key issue now concerns actual occasions whose unity effects a synthesis of the two modes in a manner that combines and contrasts the vague, affectively toned and temporal objectifications of causal efficacy with the spatial externalities of presentational immediacy in a single complex experience. What Whitehead calls ‘symbolic reference’ involves those occasions (restricted to higher organisms) in which components of presentational immediacy (a shape here, a colour there) are taken as symbols for the components of causal efficacy (an energetic force affecting and being affected by me). This is the most fundamental form of symbolism, defined as the act of taking something (the symbol) for something else (the meaning). The sense data is “taken for” a causally efficacious entity. Such symbolism does, of course, admit of error: we risk no error in reporting that we see a roundish patch of brown elongated on one side, but we can be wrong if we correlate this with an energetic object and say we have seen “a pipe”: “Thus coloured shapes seem to be symbols for some other elements in our experience, and when we see the coloured shapes we adjust our actions towards those other elements. This symbolism from our senses to the bodies symbolized is often mistaken […] [but] it is the most natural and widespread of all symbolic modes.”108 For Whitehead, the propositional experience associated with Jamesian concepts emerges precisely from the difference (the contrast) between these two types of perceptual experience.

IV. Synthesis – This is not a Pipe

69 Finally, I will illustrate my synthesis using Magritte's famous picture of a non-pipe (some of these ideas are developed in greater depth in Psychology without Foundations).109 In a visual anti-metaphor, Magritte offers us an image of a pipe under which is painted, albeit in French, “this is not a pipe.” I am suggesting that there are three ways in which “this is not a pipe” and hence four different ‘pipes’ at play in the art-work. Together, when woven into a process theory stressing activity or action they provide a mnemonic for the full spectrum of human experience: The first pipe corresponds to Jamesian energetics and Whiteheadian causal efficacy, but since the common ground for these is the Spinoza/Locke concept of power, I will name this first pipe power. The second concerns percepts and presentational immediacy, but since we are dealing with a painting I will stress visual percepts and name it image. The third concerns Jamesian concepts and Whiteheadian symbolic reference, and I will name it proposition. The fourth is the linguistic pipe of “discourse,” but since an “e” word is required for aesthetic purposes I will take the liberty of naming it enunciation.

70 With respect to the distinctions, first, Magritte’s work suggests a rather obvious distinction between the “power” pipe and its “image.” Compared to what we sometimes call a “physical” pipe, the mere image lacks certain powers to affect us and

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be affected by us. It cannot be touched, smelled or tasted. The physical pipe is multi- sensorial and can be smoked. The distinction is not absolute, however, and the image is better thought of as an abstraction from these prior powers, such that energy is diverted, transformed and canalized. In the process of abstraction to the pipe image, all but the visual aspect is lost. But that image still has powers, albeit powers that are considerably focused and concentrated in comparison to the physical pipe with all of its powers. Here we have causal efficacy contrasted with presentational immediacy. Experiences and expressions of image presuppose and canalize experiences and expressions of power. This [image of a pipe] is not a pipe.

71 The second distinction Magritte’s painting provokes is between the image and the pipe as proposition. Taken as Whiteheadian pure perception, the image is in fact the experience of a spatial array of qualities like shapes and colours. We look up at this coloured shape and say, or think, – there is a pipe. This is an act of symbolic reference in which we – albeit unconsciously – make the “leap of faith” of taking the image as a symbol for the physical pipe. It is, in other words, to make a proposition. It is to think something like “I propose that these shapes are a pipe.” This leap of faith presupposes the concept of a pipe. Were Magritte’s painting shown to people from a culture with no experience of pipes, they would be more likely to see it as a more or less interesting coloured shape, or perhaps to misrecognise it as something more familiar. They would not lack the image, but they would lack the concept. This [proposition of a pipe] is not a pipe.

72 Through symbolic reference, the pipe as propositional experience synthesizes and correlates the pipe as image, on the one side, with the “energetic” pipe and its more extensive powers to affect us and be affected by us, on the other. Often this creative “joining up” achieved by symbolic reference is unproblematic and highly advantageous (we can see things remotely, and then use them intimately), but it is prone to error. Imagine that the painting were so realistic that we were tempted, after making the leap of symbolic reference, to reach out and pick up the pipe from the painting. We would be disappointed as our hand met the flat canvas. We would be like Aesop’s dog who drops his piece of meat in order to lunge at its reflection in the still water of a lake. Such an experience may be frustrating, but it is also potentially productive in the provocation it offers. It offers new contrasts for new experiences. We, like the dog, would be confronted, for example, precisely with the difference between what we would call “appearance” (presentational immediacy) and “reality” (causal efficacy). This difference is also the contrast between a mere fact (there I see an image in a still lake) and its importance (there may be something I, a hungry dog, can eat).

73 Finally, Magritte skillfully lures us to encounter the fact that the discursive enunciation “this is not a pipe” is itself clearly not a pipe with full powers, nor an image, nor a proposition. The linguistically mediated occasion of experience prehends all of these things into a new and more abstract form of unity. To what does the word “this” refer, for example? Does it refer to the image or to the concept? For sure the word ‘this’ is not a pipe, since we cannot smoke a word. But is the word “this” not also an image? Magritte has certainly taken great care to paint “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” so that it resembles writing, but as part of an artwork, is it not just more image? Magritte himself draws attention to this: “In a painting, words are of the same cloth as images. Rather, one sees images and words differently in a painting.”110 Once again, as we move up from abstraction to abstraction we must recognize that something “energetic” is retained, in

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more and more canalized form, with every “leap.” Language remains causally efficacious, but in a highly circumscribed domain. We can talk about war without getting hurt, and we can talk about pipes without getting burnt. This [enunciation of a pipe] is not a pipe.

74 In sum, we have multiple ways in which “this” is not a pipe, and these ways shed light on four distinguishable modes of experience. The discursive pipe is not the propositional pipe or any of the others. The propositional pipe is not the pipe image. And the pipe image lacks the causal powers of the energetic pipe. But even the “power” pipe is not the full story, for its “pipeness” is possible only in the context of those complex human forms of life mediated by discursive practice, concepts and so forth, that we “by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated” from the chaos. Each mode of experience re-enters, appropriates and builds upon experiences from the prior modes. In fact, in a more complete account, it would be necessary to show how the transitions in each mode can be divided into a subjective (experience) and objective (expression) aspect that together provide the epochal basis for process.111 Power, for instance, combines the capacity to be affected (experience) with the capacity to affect (expression); image as perceptual experience has its corollary in the motor expressions of sensori-motor circuits; speaking/writing (expression) presupposes experiences of listening/reading, and so forth.

75 Furthermore, with each leap in abstraction or amplification of virtuality, the possibility of error is increased along with the stakes involved in the gamble of futurity. That is why we say “to see is to believe, to touch is to know.” To say “to see is to believe” contrasts the risks of mere conceptual thinking with the relative security of perception. But the saying “to touch is to know” contrasts the risks of mere seeing with the comparative security of physical feeling. It goes without saying, of course, that you should not believe everything you read or encounter by mere hearsay.

Conclusion

76 In this paper I have suggested that Whitehead’s philosophy of groupings of actual occasions serves to systematize James’ radical empiricism. The result is a “deep empiricist” process ontology. A self-foundationing plural universe gives rise through time to numerous different grades of order which together compose a mosaic unity. Experience and expression are central to this unity, although, through Whitehead, these must not be conflated with high-grade human consciousness. Human experience and expression, although dominated by the abstract deliverances of discursive communication, are in some sense continuous with non-human modes. A synthesis of James and Whitehead in this respect suggests that every discursive exchange implicates, at the very least, conceptual, perceptual and energetic regimes of experience.

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NOTES

1. Lowe (1941 a&b); Eisendrath 1971; Lukas 1989; Rescher 1996; Griffin 1998; Pred 2005; Weber 2006; Sinclair 2009; Weber & Weekes 2010; Weber 2011. 2. Malone-France 2007; Stenner 2008; Brown & Stenner 2009. 3. Whitehead (1938/66: 4). 4. Griffin 2009; Weber 2011. 5. James (1911: viii). 6. James (1912/2003: 21). 7. James (op cit.: 22). 8. James (op cit.: 22). 9. James (op cit.: 81).

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10. James (op cit.: 82). 11. Whitehead (1926/85: 177). 12. It should be emphasised here that Whitehead states quite clearly in Science and the Modern World that he did not arrive at his organic conception of the world via psychology and physiology (the route James took), but through his study of mathematics and mathematical physics. He also recognized that other thinkers had, in certain specific ways, gone further in the production of a new settlement of thought than James. He compares James with Descartes on the grounds that neither thinker offered a definitive solution to a philosophical problem, but, on the contrary, both opened new epochs of thought by virtue of their clear formulations. Bergson – whose physiological style of thought kept his epoch ‘on the move’ – is compared with Locke. 13. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 18). 14. Lowe (1962: 263). 15. Eisendrath (1971: 41-2). 16. Pred (2005: 141). 17. Whitehead (1926/85: 21). 18. Whitehead (1934: 36). 19. Whitehead (1920/2004: 19). 20. Whitehead (1933/35: 237). 21. Whitehead (1933/35: 237). 22. Whitehead (1933/35: 226). 23. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 21). 24. Cf. Teixeira 2009. 25. James (1890/1950: 378-3, 399-400). 26. James (1911: 154). 27. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 68). 28. James (1912/2003: 26). 29. Whitehead (1938/66: 160). 30. In a 1936 letter to Charles Hartshorne Whitehead compared James to Plato, but also suggested that James ‘expressed himself by the dangerous method of overstatement’ (cited in Sinclair 2009: 111). In comparing these two quotations relating to the co-conscious transition, I think we can actually witness Whitehead correcting this tendency in James. 31. Whitehead (1933/35: 232-3). 32. Whitehead (1938/66: 168). 33. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 68). 34. James (1912/2003: 33). 35. I stressed earlier that I am not suggesting that James was Whitehead’s only influence here. Another obvious influence is F. H. Bradley’s metaphysical notion of feeling (Bradley 1985). 36. James (op. cit.: 3). 37. James (1912/2003: 12). 38. James (op. cit.: 12). 39. Whitehead, however, makes a technical differentiation between the notion of an ‘instant,’ conceived as a simple primary entity, and an occasion. For Whitehead there are no simple instants, since each instant is always an occasion in which various matters of fact are grouped, ordered or patterned. James, however, is using the word ‘instant’ in a way that is compatible with a Whiteheadian occasion, hence my decision to risk confusing concept and word here. 40. James (op. cit.: 49). 41. James (op. cit.: 49). 42. James (op. cit.: 49). 43. James (op. cit.: 50). 44. James (op. cit.: 12).

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45. James (op. cit.: 113). 46. James (op. cit.: 69). 47. Whitehead (1933/35: 45). 48. I have opted not to tackle the theological aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy here. These aspects centre around his notion of eternal objects. This is a very important issue that I do not wish to foreclose on at this point. 49. James (1909: 372). 50. James (1912/2003: 46). 51. Pred (2005: 17). 52. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 5). 53. James (1912/2003: 83). 54. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 20). 55. Whitehead (op. cit.: 19). 56. James (1912/2003: 30). 57. James (op. cit.: 30). 58. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 237). 59. James (1912/2003: 95). 60. James (op. cit.: 47). 61. James (op. cit.: 45). 62. James (op. cit.: 102). 63. James (op. cit.: 25). 64. Schrödinger (1990: 3-4). 65. Whitehead (1933/35: 243). 66. I use inverted commas here because, as I have merely hinted at, Whitehead offers a valuable critique of Darwinian evolutionary thinking that reframes the dogmas of survival and competition and does away with the metaphysics of scientific materialism (cf. Chapter 1. of Whitehead 1929). 67. Luhmann’s concept of irritation is relevant here. Adapting Maturana & Varella (1985), Luhmann distinguishes organic, psychic and social system types that, being ‘operatively closed,’ can exert mutual influence only by irritation (Cf. Luhmann 1995). Affectivity can be theorized on this basis (Stenner 2005). 68. James (1912/2003: 45). 69. James (1911: 100). 70. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 105-6). 71. James (1890/1950: 288-9). 72. James (1890/1950: 162). 73. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 15). 74. Whitehead (op. cit.: 220). 75. Whitehead (op. cit.: 164). 76. Serres 1982; Stenner 2004, 2005; Brown & Stenner 2009. 77. James (op. cit.: 19). 78. For comparable arguments in the context of natural science see von Foerster 1960; Jacob 1976; Atlan 1981; Serres 1992. 79. James (op. cit.: 68). 80. James (op. cit.: 17). 81. James (1922: 17, note 21). 82. James (1911: 48-9). 83. James (1912/2003: 101). 84. James (1911: 107). 85. James (1912/2003: 31).

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86. James (1911: 107). 87. James (op. cit.: 47). 88. James (op. cit.: 51). 89. James (op. cit.: 109). 90. James (1911: 60). 91. Cf. Brown & Stenner 2009. 92. James (1912/2003: 55). 93. James (op. cit.: 26). 94. James (1911: 26). 95. Whitehead (1938/66: 35-41). 96. James (1912/2003: 7). 97. Whitehead (1926/85: 187). 98. James (op. cit.: 49). 99. Whitehead (1927: 16). 100. Whitehead (1927: 17). 101. James (op. cit.: 77). 102. James (op. cit.: 85). 103. James (op. cit.: 77). 104. Whitehead (op. cit.: 50). 105. Whitehead (op. cit.: 53). 106. Whitehead (1927-28/1985: 57). 107. Whitehead (op. cit.: 91). 108. Whitehead (1927: 4). 109. Brown & Stenner 2009. 110. Cf. Foucault (1982: 38). 111. Methodologically, the events of human experience would thus be composed of a gathered multitude of temporalities expressible as at least four dimensions, intersecting in any given moment: an archeology of enunciations; a genealogy of propositions; a biography of images; and a history of powers.

ABSTRACTS

This paper contributes to a growing body of philosophical and psychological work that draws parallels between the writings of William James and Alfred North Whitehead1.1 In Part One I introduce Whitehead’s distinction between assemblage and systematization (section 1) and suggest that Whitehead’s philosophy was in part a systematization of James’ psychological and philosophical assemblage (section 2). The systematization is based on a rethinking of the entity/ function contrast (section 3) by way of Whitehead’s concept of the actual entity/occasion (section 4). This permits a process- oriented ontological extension and James’ notion of pure experience (sections 5 & 6), which yields a deepened version of radical empiricism (section 7). The four sections of Part Two build a more specific argument that James’ often implicit distinctions between energetic, perceptual, conceptual and discursive modes of experience can be systematized by way of Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. Following the suggestion of Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une Pipe artwork,

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this yields an analysis of the sum of human experience into four progressively integrated factors: power, image, proposition and enunciation.

AUTHOR

PAUL STENNER The Open University paul.stenner[at]open.ac.uk

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The Stream of Consciousness and the Epochal Theory of Time

Maria Teresa Teixeira

1 William James is widely known as one of the theorizers of pragmatism, and also for his pioneering work on consciousness. Jamesian pragmatism relates to the rejection of intellectualism, and from an early stage to the notion of thought, or consciousness depicted as a continuous flux, like a “river” or a “stream.”1 Later in his philosophical development, James also pictured the world as something unfinished that flows and keeps growing.

2 In William James’s philosophy, rationalism is contrasted to pragmatism: “for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future.”2 What emerges then is what is still in the making, not what is completed and pre-established. Real existence consists of real things, which are in the process of coming into being. We can actually apprehend these things that are ‘still in the making’ by a stroke of intuition. But they are not ready-made and clear-cut; also, they do not lie about awaiting our appropriation of them. Reality is a process of coming into being, a flux that unravels itself so that it can achieve its own existence. Reality “mounts in living its own undivided life – it buds and burgeons, changes and creates.”3

3 William James can thus be considered as one of the forefathers of process philosophy. His philosophy was certainly an enduring inspiration for other process philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, and it gave rise to a new literary genre: the stream-of-consciousness novel. We can count Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Marcel Proust as some of the most illustrious writers who have explored this technique.

4 In The Principles of Psychology consciousness and its temporal succession are presented as a continuous stream. Thought is in a continual change. James depicts thought as something that “goes on”:4 “Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous.”5 He says that “continuous” should be defined as “that which is without breach, crack, or division.” Consciousness cannot be divided into bits; on the contrary,

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it flows like a stream. However, we can identify different states of consciousness within the flow. But they are not external or contiguous to one another. There is a relatedness that accounts for the continuity of the flow of consciousness, although there is no recurrence of the same state of consciousness. This is the reason why we never think the same thing twice. James anticipates here what will be established later in the philosophies of Bergson and Whitehead’s as the irreversibility of time.

5 In chapter IX of his Principles of Psychology, entitled “The Stream of Thought” he writes: Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared.6

6 Every state of consciousness is different from every other state of consciousness; there are no frozen, permanent thoughts making their appearance every now and then in consciousness. Also, every thought is a novel state of consciousness, no matter how close it may resemble other thoughts. Recognition is the effort of bringing into consciousness an old idea, so that it can be the “same” idea. This effort must be considered as something extra that adds on to the original idea and thereby introduces novelty.

7 The early James thus seems to consider memory as a psychological effort that reconstructs an old idea. We will see later that, from the very beginning, the idea of an ontological past is implicit to James’s philosophy in so far as he emphasises the introduction of novelty in his temporal stream of consciousness. Novelty is indeed a character of temporality; novel temporal states emerge from an ontological past that constitutes them in absolute novelty. However, James only admits to an ontological past in his late writings as a consequence of Bergson’s influence.

8 The novel states of consciousness that emerge can be identified and individualized. They seem to crack the stream of consciousness if we consider them as independent units. In fact, they are discrete units and exhibit a character of discontinuity. However, the flow of consciousness persists; distinctness does not break the continuous, ongoing activity of consciousness. “A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we may be stunned and confused for a moment by the shock as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has happened. But the very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo.”7

9 James compares the stream of our consciousness to a bird’s life “made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”8 Also he calls “the resting-places the ‘substantive parts,’and places of flight the ‘transitive parts,’ of the stream of thought.”9 These transitive parts i.e. the places of flight of the flux account for the unity of thought. This metaphor has frequently been misinterpreted.

10 Henri Bergson criticised this distinction in a letter he wrote to William James in January 1903,10 and in another one he wrote to Floris Delattre years later in 1923.11 He writes that in his durée réelle there is no flight, and no rest. In other words, there is no instantaneous immobility, no static places of rest. Only transition is real. Reality is continuous and indivisible change. He considers the stream of thought to have a

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psychological nature, whereas his durée is metaphysical. Bergson’s criticism seems to draw a line between his durée réelle and James’s stream of thought.

11 On a closer examination, however, Bergson’s durée is in fact quite near the Jamesian stream of thought. The resting-places in the stream of consciousness cannot be considered as “breaks in the thought.” There are no “cracks” in the stream of thought, only soft patterns and stream-flows. On the other hand, Bergson’s continuous flux is not homogeneous and its continuity should not be confused with the mathematical continuity of time, which is not true duration. It is but an endless repetition of the same mathematical element. The Bergsonian continuous flux is a dynamic continuity; also, the heterogeneity of duration is the true character of reality. Different states of consciousness succeed one another introducing thereby novelty in this continuity. Hence, there are no two identical states of consciousness; they always differ even when they exhibit a close resemblance. For duration carries novelty within itself. James’s resting-places in the stream of consciousness are thus comparable to the heterogeneity of the durée réelle.

12 Bergson seems to acknowledge this argument in his preface to the French translation of William James’s work on Pragmatism. He writes: “To be sure, our experience is not incoherent. At the same time as it presents us with things and facts it shows us relationships between the things and connections between the facts: these relations are as real, as directly observable, according to William James, as the things and facts themselves. But the relations are fluctuating and the things fluid. This is vastly different from that dry universe constructed by the philosophers with elements that are clear- cut and well-arranged, where each part is not only linked to another part, as experience shows us, but also, as our reason would have it, is coordinated to the whole.”12 The resting-places are now “the things that are fluid,” and the places of flight “the relations that are fluctuating.” There are no static places of rest, no instantaneous immobility; things endure in their inescapable, continuous flow. James’s stream of thought exhibits no clear-cut divisions; the succession of states is a flow from one state to the next: interpenetration, as Bergson would call it.

13 This heterogeneous, continuous flow can be described as epochal. For it presents discontinuities that can be identified as distinct phases in the flow of reality, which are not to be considered as “cracks” in the stream. Process philosophers have developed distinctive epochal theories of time. William James argued that the stream of our experience comes in discrete durational units. Alfred North Whitehead held that “Time is sheer succession of epochal durations.”13 Henri Bergson emphasized the qualitative multiplicity characterising the states of our consciousness. However, all three conceptions of consciousness and temporality are quite close.

14 Bergson mostly emphasised continuity. He is often misinterpreted and his continuity is taken for an undifferentiated flow that unravels in ceaseless glide. However, the Bergsonian flow is multifarious and does not preclude an abundant diversity of states of consciousness. As the flow unravels, it carries all the indestructible past that is present to the novel present that unrolls. The ontological past allows for the emergence of novelty; the emergence of novelty is only possible because temporality is duration. Different states of consciousness endure in such a way that their particular way of enduring characterises and differentiates them absolutely. They draw on the indestructible past for their coming into being; and the ontological past necessitates the emergence of the novel for it reinvents itself as the flow of consciousness is

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enriched by the novel states of consciousness. This heterogeneous flow is thus epochal; different states of consciousness are identifiable although they are not clear-cut and separate. The Bergsonian durée endures and in so doing characterises absolutely each and every state of consciousness that cannot, nevertheless, be separated from the entire flux. Inseparability and heterogeneity thus describe epochal time.

15 Whitehead emphasises what he calls the atomic character of reality. He is also often misinterpreted. Actual entities, the basic entities of reality, “the final real things” are of a temporal nature; they become and perish because of their temporal nature. This is often a point where some commentators grossly misinterpret Whiteheadian philosophy. They confuse the atomicity of becoming with clear-cut fixity, the indivisibility of becoming with the subsequent coordinate analysis of the actual entity that has attained satisfaction, i.e. completion. Actual entities are “drops of experience”; as such they are individualised and become as indivisible wholes. Their atomic character lies in their individualisation and their indivisibility. Each entity is said to be an epochal duration for it is temporal and individualised. “The epochal duration is not realised via its successive divisible parts, but is given with its parts.”14 Once actual entities have become as temporal wholes, they perish subjectively; but they also become transcendent and are thus objectively immortal. This means that the past is immortal and forever irrevocable. It will be the data for future actual entities, i.e. the next actual occasions will prehend previous entities and grow together to form a novel entity. Prehension is appropriation. Novel actual entities appropriate the past so that they can become into a totally novel synthesis. The past is constitutive of novel entities and thus reveals its ontological nature. It conditions them although it does not determine them in an absolute way.

16 Whitehead and Bergson’s ontological pasts are very similar: irrevocability and indestructibility result from novelty that is ever present in the temporal unravelling of reality. This new concept of temporality greatly diverges from the traditional notion of time that seems to originate from Saint Augustine. In Augustine’s doctrine the past does not seem to be indestructible, nor does it seem to have any existence because past things cannot be found anywhere: “For if there are times past and future, I wish to know where they are. But if I have not yet succeeded in this, I still know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if they are there as future, they are there as ‘not yet’; if they are there as past, they are there as ‘no longer.’ Wherever they are and whatever they are they exist therefore only as present.”15 Only the present seems to have existence: the past is there “no longer” and the future is not there yet. However, Augustine seems to identify some coexistence of the present with the past when he names three distinct times as: “a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future.”16 He also emphasises that the three times coexist in the soul and that the “time present of things past” is memory. In a certain sense, we could say that Augustine’s memory is already ontological for he seems to be aware that it constitutes present beings. Also, the present seems to have a certain thickness because, in a certain sense, it coexists with the past and tends to already include an expectant future.

17 Temporality and continuity are thus important themes in process philosophy. James’s philosophy as a philosophy of process is not a philosophy of substances, or a philosophy of things. He is mainly concerned with time, change and discontinuity. James’s analysis tries to find out if the additions to the existing reality have a

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continuous, or a discontinuous nature. One could say this is the founding inquiry concerning the epochal theory of time. Indeed the inquiry about continuity and discontinuity is an ever-present question in almost all philosophies of process. Zeno’s famous arguments against motion and its paradoxes are an old favourite of Western philosophy, and also of process philosophies.

18 William James discusses the question of discontinuity as well as Zeno’s paradoxes in chapters X and XI of his Some Problems of Philosophy,17 both entitled “Novelty and the Infinite.” He writes: “On the discontinuity-theory, time, change, etc., would grow by finite buds or drops, either nothing coming at all, or certain units of amount bursting into being ‘at a stroke’.”18 In other words, reality either grows by abrupt units of being that emerge by a single action, which is an addition of novelty, or it does not grow at all. These novel additions to reality are finite and indivisible. However, due to the excessive intellectualism of our ways of thinking, we tend to consider that novel additions to reality are a set of infinite, innumerable steps, which can always be divided into ever-smaller units.

19 Nevertheless, reality can be said to have an atomistic constitution, but only in the sense that there are whole, indivisible units of duration and extension that come into being at one stroke. Reality has a discrete composition, and our knowledge of reality grows by “buds,” or “drops” of experience. We either have an experience that is whole and given by a single action, or we have no experience at all. Jamesian atomism (as well as Whiteheadian atomism) should not be misunderstood. The units that compose reality are atomic because they are undivided and individualized. The discrete constitution of reality does not allow for divisibility ad infinitum. Atoms are undivided and indivisible wholes; also, they are complex syntheses.

20 The question of continuity and discontinuity is an old inquiry that has haunted philosophy for centuries. Zeno, the Eleatic was the first to formulate the question of divisibility ad infinitum. He was primarily concerned with showing that motion did not really exist. Zeno’s paradox of the flying arrow attempts to demonstrate that if the arrow occupies successive points in space, its motion is nothing more than a sum of its positions in space; thus truly the arrow does not move. As Aristotle had already pointed out, “the flying arrow is at rest.”19 William James states: “If a flying arrow occupies at each point a determinate point of space, its motion becomes nothing but a sum of rests, for it exists not, out of any point; and in the point it doesn’t move.”20

21 In the Achilles paradox, Achilles’ race to overtake the tortoise is also reduced to a collection of successive points with no extension or duration. According to Zeno, Achilles never manages to overtake the tortoise because he must occupy all the successive points where the tortoise has been positioned. Each time he gets to the tortoise’s last position, the tortoise has already moved to a next successive point. So Achilles, in order to catch the tortoise, would have to do the incredible thing of reaching the end of an endless series.

22 The mathematical notion of a continuum (not to be confused with a qualitative or dynamic continuum) arises from Zeno’s paradoxes. The mathematical continuum can be infinitely divided. It is composed of exterior, contiguous elements, endlessly repeated. It differs from a qualitative continuum, such as James’s stream of thought or Bergson’s continuity of change in that it does not allow for novelty and real duration. In the real world there are no small intervals of time that can be divided ad infinitum, no instants without any duration, which would be the only truly indivisible units of

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time. Time has thickness; there is no infinite divisibility of time, no mathematical instant corresponding to the present. In his Principles of Psychology, James describes duration: The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were – a rearward-and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the out- set a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning from its end.21

23 As we have said, James metaphorically refers these units of duration as “drops or buds” of experience; they are also “pulses” of reality.22 These units of duration, which make up time, are whole, finite and indivisible. If they were otherwise, if those drops of experience included a changing process, then again we would have Zeno’s paradox and their process of being could never be completed. If time were infinitely divisible, as is required by our intellectualist logic, then, we would not be able to reach the end of any temporal experience, like Achilles and the tortoise: That being should immediately and by finite quantities add itself to being, may indeed be something which an onlooking intellect fails to understand; but that being should be identified with the consummation of an endless chain of units (such as points), no one of which contains any amount whatever of the being (such as “space”) expected to result, this is something which our intellect not only fails to understand, but which it finds absurd.23

24 If time were infinitely divisible it could not elapse, for no end could be reached. No matter how much time had already passed, before the remainder could elapse, the earlier part of it should first pass; the earlier half should always elapse first, so that no end could ever be reached. This can be expressed by the convergent series: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16…

25 James solves this problem of the “infinite regress” in Zeno’s paradoxes by postulating an epochal theory of time; he proposes that time comes in discrete units of duration, which are whole, indivisible and unchanging. If they were not so, i.e. if they were an ever-changing divisible process, time would again appear to be a mathematical continuum made of tautological repetitions.

26 Units of duration, also called epochs by Alfred North Whitehead, are changeless indivisible wholes that succeed each other. They are, all of them, diverse wholes that introduce novelty into reality. Whitehead expresses this unchangeable nature of durational wholes in his own peculiar phraseology: “Actual entities perish, but do not change; they are what they are.”24 He also writes: “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.”25

27 Whitehead’s interpretation of Zeno’s paradoxes is based on James’s approach. White- head emphasises the mathematical solution of Zeno’s paradoxes, but still he maintains that these sophisms endanger mainly our treatment of becoming and time.26 Whitehead says that, according to Zeno, every act of becoming requires an immediate predecessor. However, this need for an immediate predecessor implies an additional premise that is not found in Zeno’s paradoxes. Instead, there is a “vicious infinite regress,” which can only be over-come by postulating an epochal theory of time. Durational units are atomic, in the sense that they are whole, indivisible, complex, individualized, and

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changeless; becoming is by its very nature changeless: “there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.” Becoming implies the rejection of its own divisibility and change whilst becoming proceeds, as well as the constitution of a novel individual entity: The conclusion is that in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but the act itself is not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become.27

28 Thus the temporal process is a process of wholeness: “The epochal duration is not realised via its successive divisible parts, but given with its parts.”28

29 In Whitehead’s philosophy, the indivisible basic temporal unit, the actual occasion endures through a certain period. This endurance is its coming into being; it is also its own effect of distinctiveness, i.e. the actual occasion becomes as it is because it has its own particular way of becoming, it has its own period of becoming and being. Each actual occasion is an epoch, i.e. an arrest. This arrest is comparable to James’s places of rest; it is not a break in the continuity of reality, but it allows for individualization. Actual occasions are individuals, even though they are not external to each other. The passage of things is not “a mere linear procession of discrete entities.”29 Discreteness is indeed a character of actual occasions, but there is no linearity in their process of coming into being. Durational units can thus be individualized; that is the very reason why they are atomic and epochal.

30 Nevertheless, Whitehead’s discontinuities do not imply the denial of continuity between actual occasions. They do imply, however, that the process of constitution of an actual occasion is not divisible into other component processes which would be themselves actual occasions. In other words, becoming is not composed of other acts of becoming.

31 The process of becoming does not occur in time because it is the very creation of time; the act of becoming is whole and indivisible. Becoming is not included in a pre-existing container where it can come about at a certain instant. Rather it is a temporal epoch that is created by its process of coming into being; temporal epochs have duration, and are not instantaneous. Their completion supplies them with actuality, but their distinctiveness and individualization comes from their durational nature, which defines and determines their coming into being. Once they have become, actual occasions, which we could also call durational units, perish and are prehended or appropriated by other novel actual occasions, which thus initiate their own process of becoming. Time unveils “a sheer succession of epochal durations,” but it is by its very nature incomplete. Novel actual entities succeed one another so that process is never completed; indeed it could not be so, for it would not be process otherwise. The Whiteheadian epochal theory of time implies that every actual occasion has a spatial volume; it atomizes reality but does not break it into pieces, neither does it crack continuity.30 For “there is a becoming of continuity.”

32 Bergson also examines Zeno’s paradoxes. Bergson is mainly concerned with the indivisibility of motion. He states that Achilles does not occupy the successive positions occupied by the tortoise. He does not fall into step with the tortoise; he simply runs and over-takes it. Bergson does not consider the mathematical solution, which deals with a sum of the infinite geometric series that results in a finite number,31 nor is he concerned with the question of infinite regress and infinite divisibility. He holds that

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Achilles steps differ from the steps of the tortoise. Achilles’ steps do not reproduce the steps of the tortoise; neither does Achilles follow up the exact positions of the tortoise. He simply runs and overtakes it! Achilles does not occupy the successive points in space occupied by the tortoise. Bergson writes: “All points of space necessarily being fixed, I must be careful not to attribute to the moving object itself the immobility of the point with which it coincides […] How can a progress coincide with a thing, a movement with an immobility?”32 In Creative Evolution, Bergson again considers Zeno’s paradoxes: “At bottom, illusion arises from this, that the movement, once effected, has laid along its course a motionless trajectory on which we can count as many immobilities as we will. From this we conclude that the movement, whilst being effected, lays at each instant beneath it a position with which it coincides. We do not see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although a certain time is required for it; and that though we can divide at will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a thing.”33 Bergson distinguishes real movement from the motionless trajectory along its course, which can be drawn after the movement is completed. Motion is whole and indivisible; it takes time and flows uninterruptedly; the line of its trajectory is a mere post-representation of a durational reality. Duration is in fact the primordial fact characterizing reality.

33 Thus, as we said above, Bergson’s durée can also be considered as epochal. The continuous flow of reality seems to preclude temporal units distinguishable from each other. But the continuous flow is made up of states of consciousness that interpenetrate and are referred to as “states,” even though they are not external to each other. Lack of externality does not mean absence of distinctness. Rather it means there is a qualitative multiplicity. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson writes: Shall we say that this duration has unity? Undoubtedly a continuity of elements prolonged into one another partakes of unity as much as it does of multiplicity. But this moving, changing, coloured and living unity scarcely resembles the abstract unity, empty and motionless, which the concept of pure unity circumscribes.34

34 Duration is thus qualitative and heterogeneous. In consciousness we find states that succeed each other and melt into one another.35

35 Thus duration is continuous but it also consists of discrete units, which can be designated as epochs. There are different rhythms of duration that can be identified as temporal units, each one diverse from the other. In Matter and Memory, Bergson writes: In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being.36

36 Each rhythm of duration, we could say, is a temporal unit, for it defines each creature absolutely providing it with its own way of being, which is of durational nature. Rhythmical entities require the existence of discrete units; for without them there would be no rhythm. These rhythms can thus be identified, and although they are continuous within the flow of reality, they are distinguishable from one another. They can thus be considered as epochal. In Bergson’s philosophy the epochs emerge as the successive interpenetrating states of consciousness; they are time as it is lived by our consciousness.

37 Consciousness is the Bergsonian paradigm for duration of all entities. Bergson extends the application of the notion of consciousness to the material world to point up the similarity between different levels of duration. This analogy should not be

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misunderstood; neither should it be taken in a literal sense. Whitehead found a better term to express the same thing: “prehension.” He too conceives the ultimate elements of matter with a vibratory character. Bergson and Whitehead tried to express that matter, as well as life have duration. Matter endures in a much quicker rhythm than the rhythm of our consciousness. Our perception of the world involves the contraction of these material vibrations and thus reconciles the different modes of enduring. Every creature endures and has, therefore, an elementary level of memory, which Bergson designates, borrowing from Espinoza, as ‘mensmomentanea.’ This ontology of matter precludes the instantaneous and establishes reality as undeniably epochal. “All duration has thickness; real time has no instants.”37

38 William James also holds that creatures differ amongst themselves in accordance with duration.38 Their “specious present” may be more, or less contracted. His notion of the “specious present” asserts, “The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration.”39 James borrows the idea of the ‘specious present’ from E. R. Clay: “Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three […] nonentities – the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present.”40 The “specious present” is a misleading designation for it suggests that the present lived by our consciousness is not truly real. According to E. R. Clay the real present is the instantaneous mathematical present. If each fraction of time is infinitely divisible into smaller and smaller elements, we can but conclude that the real present is an instant without duration and thus the existing present is instantaneous. Indeed, what is true is the very opposite: the so-called “specious present” is the time lived by our consciousness that has always some thickness, and its own determined rhythm. Real time is epochal whether endured by our consciousness, or by matter. Otherwise, it would not be real time.

39 For Bergson, as well as for James and Whitehead the present is not an instant without duration. The present time has thickness; it endures and thus relates to the past. In his Principles of Psychology, James writes: “Duration and events together form our intuition of the specious present with its content.”41 It is worthy to note that in James’s doctrine duration does not yet coincide with events, as it does in Whitehead’s philosophy, or with the flux of consciousness, as it does in Bergson’s theory. He states: the distinctly intuited present merges into a penumbra of mere dim recency before it turns into the past which is simply reproduced and conceived. […] This sense of recencyis a feeling sui generis, and may affect things that happened hours ago. It would seem to show that their brain-processes are still in a state modified by the foregoing excitement, still in a “fading” phase, in spite of the long interval.42

40 James distinguishes two pasts: one that is “directly intuited” and another that is “simply reproduced and conceived.” The former correlates with primary memory, the latter with “memory proper or secondary memory.” This distinction is important because it asserts that the only true past is the one that mingles with the specious present, and in a certain way coincides with it; also, it seems to depend wholly on material brain-processes, without which the “fading” phase would be impossible. The sense of “recency” is the main feature of this kind of memory. On the other hand, “memory proper” is always indirect recall: recollection is not a past state, but a present one that succeeds a past state that has for ever vanished. Consequently, recollection is

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a present state that is completely external to the past state that originated it; the past state no longer exists and the recollection is simply a similar duplicate that exists in the present.

41 The past not directly apprehended is dead and gone; it has no ontological existence, even though it may leave behind material traces in the brain. The stream of consciousness thus seems to flow into nonentity. The past is not integrated into the stream; the different states simply fade away and vanish.

42 When we consider other process philosophies we will find that the past has a different status. Bergson holds that the past engulfs the new states of consciousness and preserves them, so that every novel state incorporates every previous state. He stresses the flux of reality as well as the persistence of the past, which is carried by it. The Bergsonian durée carries novelty within itself as it creates reality; and it pursues its course carrying all the indestructible past. The past is present to the present; Gilles Deleuze speaks of a contemporaneity of the present with the past in Bergson’s philosophy.43 Also, the past preserves itself because it endures: But only then did I become aware of the fact that inward experience in the pure state, in giving us a “substance” whose very essence is to endure and consequently continually to prolong into the present an indestructible past, would have relieved me from seeking, and would even have forbidden me to seek, where memories are preserved. They preserve themselves […].44

43 Memory is by its very essence duration; so there is no place really where we can find it. This is the reason why Bergson holds that pure memory is immaterial and cannot be found in the brain: To make the brain the depository of the past, to imagine in the brain a certain region in which the past, once past, dwells, is to commit a psychological error, to attribute a scientific value to a distinction entirely practical, for there is no exact moment when the present becomes the past, nor consequently when perception becomes recollection.45

44 The fact that the past is present to the present does not allow for any exactness in the distinction of present and past, neither does it permit of any real local- ization. The flow of consciousness, although uninterrupted, preserves the whole past within itself. I believe that our whole psychical existence is something just like this single sentence, continued since the first awakening of consciousness, interspersed with commas, but never broken by full stops. And consequently I believe that our whole past still exists. It exists subconsciously […].46

45 The flow of consciousness, which is whole, is also epochal; its indivisibility attests to the indestructibility of the past, which can nevertheless be identified in different epochs. Also, Bergson considers that it can manifest itself in its wholeness as a present experience (cf. the near-death experience of life-review). This manifestation is of psychological nature, although the past itself is ontological.

46 Conversely, James seems to admit only present mental states, for he seems to deny any ontological status to the past considering only conscious states directly intuited.

47 So far, in the treatment of memory, we have but referred the early philosophy of William James. However, in our previous analysis of the stream of consciousness we considered the later James and concluded that the addition of discrete elements to reality characterizes a stream of thought without any breaks. We also spoke of recognition as the effort of bringing into consciousness an old idea so that it can be the “same” idea. This effort was then considered as a new addition that introduced novelty;

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novel states of consciousness could be identified as distinct from each other, but they did not break the stream that persisted in its flow. We also quoted in favour of our theory from James’s late work, although we could already find our argument in Principles of Psychology, in its chapter on the stream of thought, from which we also quoted. We can now say that the introduction of novel, discrete additions in the stream of consciousness, in some way, attests to the persistence of an ontological past and the irreversibility of time, even though James is not clear about this point and sometimes even contradicts it.

48 Also we can resort to James’s works on mysticism to find there an ontological, subliminal memory that seems to surpass Bergson’s indestructible past and Whitehead’s immortality of the past. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James refers the subconscious self as a “psychological entity.” He quotes from Myers’s essay on subliminal consciousness that establishes that the self is far more extensive than it can know or manifest. James then comes to the conclusion that: “the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, […] is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.”47 Here William James comes quite close to Sri Aurobindo’s concept of subliminal memory: The surface memory itself is a fragmentary and ineffective action pulling out details from an inner subliminal memory which receives and records all world- experience, receives and records even what the mind has nor observed, understood or noticed. Our surface imagination is a selection from a vaster more creative and effective subliminal image-building power of consciousness. A mind with immeasurably wider and more subtle perceptions, a life-energy with a greater dynamism, a subtle-physical substance with a larger and finer receptivity are building out of themselves our surface evolution. A psychic entity is there behind these occult activities which is the true support of our individualisation.48

49 In his late life, near to his death James wrote a paper called “A Suggestion about Mysticism”49 where he overtly accepts Bergson indestructible past and its ontological character. He refers the field of consciousness in a somewhat Bergsonian style: The present field as a whole came continuously out of its predecessor and will melt into its successor as continuously again, one sensation-mass passing into another sensation-mass and giving the character of a gradually changing present to the experience, while the memories and concepts carry time-coefficients which place whatever is present in a temporal perspective more or less vast.50

50 Time is now real and responsible for the introduction of novelty. In a way it extends the temporality of the stream of consciousness, where novelty was already implied but not wholly developed. This extension depends on the recognition of the status of memory as ontological and constitutive of the different creatures.

51 It is not surprising then to find that that Whitehead’s doctrine on time and creativity borrows a lot from James’s theory. Whitehead’s actual entities become and perish subjectively but remain forever as objectively immortal. Their perishing is a means of objectification, so that they can be apprehended and incorporated in the ontological constitution of their successors. This alternate perishing and coming into being is known as process. It is a creative activity for each actual entity that comes into being is self-creating, although it draws from its predecessors. “The notion of prehension of the past means that the past is an element which perishes and thereby remains an element in the state beyond, and thus is objectified.”51 Consequently novelty is always introduced into process; it goes on indefinitely and is never complete.

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Thus each actual entity, although incomplete so far as concerns its microscopic process, is yet incomplete by reason of its objective inclusion of the macroscopic process. It really experiences a future which must be actual, although the completed actualities of that future are undetermined. In this sense, each actual occasion experiences its objective immortality.52

52 Incompleteness reveals itself in the determination of a future not yet determined but that will be erected on the objective immortality of actual occasions.

53 Thus Whitehead’s past is ontological because it is constitutive of the actual entities; it is also irrevocable like Bergson’s, and introduces novelty into reality.

⁂

54 The philosophical theories of William James, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead are founded on the principle of process. The flow of reality is uninterrupted, but it is also made of heterogeneous states that can be differentiated but not separated within the flux. The ontological, indestructible past adds novelty to reality for it refuses tautological repetition and unveils itself in the novelty of the present time.

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CAPEK Milic, (1972), “The Fiction of Instants,” The Study of Time, 1, New York, Springer-Verlag, 332-44.

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SIPFLE David A., (1969), “Henri Bergson and the Epochal Theory of Time,” in P. A. Y. Gunter (ed.), Bergson and the Evolution of Physics, 1969, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.

TEIXEIRA Maria Teresa, (2009), “Epochal Time and the Creativity of Thinking: Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead,” Concrescence – The Australasian Journal of Process Thought, 77-85, [concrescence.org/index.php/ajpt/article/view/67/31].

TEIXEIRA Maria Teresa, (2010), “Whitehead, Processo e Realidade,” in M. Weber & R. Desmet (eds.), Chromatikon VI Annales de la philosophie en procès Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, Les éditions Chromatika.

VANZAGO Luca, (2005), L’Evento del Tempo. Saggio sulla filosofia del processo di A. N. Whitehead, Milano, Associazione Culturale Mimesis.

VERE C. Chapell, (1969), “Henri Bergson and the Epochal Theory of Time,” in P.A.Y. Gunter (ed.), Bergson and the Evolution of Physics, Knoxville, The University of Tennessee Press.

WAHL Jean, (2004), Vers le concret. Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine. William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.

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WALLACK F. Bradford, (1980), The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Albany, State University of New York Press.

WEBER Michel, (1999) “An Argumentation for Contiguism,” in Streams of William James The Newsletter of William James Society, 1 (1), Spring, 11-3. [williamjamesstudies.org/streams.html].

WEBER Michel, (2000), “James’s Contiguism of Pure Experience,” in Streams of William James The Newsletter of William James Society, 1 (3), Winter, 19-22. [williamjamesstudies.org/streams.html].

WEBER Michel, (2003), “Whitehead’s Reading of James and its Context (Part II),” in Streams of William James The Newsletter of William James Society, 5 (3), Fall, 26-33. [williamjamesstudies.org/ streams.html].

WEBER Michel, (2005), La dialectique de l’intuition chez Alfred North Whitehead, Frankfurt, Ontos Verlag.

WICKER Marie-Noëlle, (1998), “Passé, présent, futur. Vraies et fausses conceptions du temps,” Analyses et réflexions sur Henri Bergson La Pensée et le mouvant, Paris, ellipses, 67-70.

WHITEHEAD Alfred North, (1961), The Interpretation of Science, Selected Essays, A. H. Johnson (ed.), Indianapolis, New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

WHITEHEAD Alfred North, (1967), Adventures of Ideas, New York, The Free Press.

WHITEHEAD, Alfred North, (1985), Process and Reality, Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York, The Free Press.

WHITEHEAD Alfred North, (1997), Science and the Modern World, New York, The Free Press.

WHITEHEAD Alfred North, (2000), Concept of Nature, New York, Cambridge University Press.

NOTES

1. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 239. 2. “Pragmatism and Humanism,” in Writings 1902-10, 519. 3. “A Pluralistic Universe,” Ibid., 751. 4. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 225. 5. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 237. 6. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 233. 7. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 240. 8. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 243. 9. Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 243. 10. Mélanges, 579; Correspondances, 80. 11. Mélanges, 1418; Correspondances, 1052-55. 12. The Creative Mind, 178-9. The italics are mine. 13. Science and the Modern World, 125. 14. Science and the Modern World, 125. 15. Confessions, Book XI, XVIII, 23. 16. Confessions, Book XI, XX, 26. 17. Writings 1902-1910, 1061. 18. Writings 1902-10, 1061. 19. Physics 239b, 30. 20. “Some Problems of Philosophy,” in Writings 1902-10, 1062. 21. p. 609-10.

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22. “A Pluralistic Universe,” Writings 1902-10, 760. 23. “Some Problems of Philosophy,” Writings 1902-10, 1076-7. 24. Process and Reality, 35, [52]. 25. Process and Reality, 35, [53]. 26. Process and Reality, 67-9 [105]-[108]. Science and the Modern World, 124-7. 27. Process and Reality, 69 [107]. 28. Science and the Modern World, 125. 29. Science and the Modern World, 93. 30. Process and Reality, 68 [105]. 31. L’évolution créatrice, 311. 32. Matter and Memory, 248; “Tout point de l’espace m’apparaissant nécessairement comme fixe, j’ai bien de la peine à ne pas attribuer au mobile lui-même l’immobilité du point avec lequel je le fais pour le moment coïncider; […] Mais comment un progrès coïnciderait-il avec une chose, un mouvement avec une immobilité?,” Matière et mémoire, 210. 33. “Au fond, l’illusion vient de ce que le mouvement, une fois effectué, a déposé le long de son trajet une trajectoire immobile sur laquelle on peut compter autant d’immobilités qu’on voudra. De là on conclut que le mouvement, s’effectuant, déposa à chaque instant au-dessous de lui une position avec laquelle il coïncidait. On ne voit pas que la trajectoire se crée tout d’un coup, encore qui lui faille pour cela un certain temps, et que si on peut diviser à volonté la trajectoire une fois créée, on ne saurait diviser sa création, qui est un acte en progrès et non pas une chose,” L’évolution créatrice, 309. 34. The Creative Mind, 142. “Dirons-nous que la durée a de l’unité? Sans doute une continuité d'éléments qui se prolongent les uns dans les autres participent de l’unité autant que de la multiplicité, mais cette unité mouvante, changeante, colorée, vivante, ne ressemble guère à l’unité abstraite, immobile et vide, que circonscrit le concept d’unité pure,” La pensée et le mouvant, 189. 35. Time and Free will, 128; Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 95. 36. p. 275. “En réalité, il n’y a pas un rythme unique de la durée; on peut imaginer bien des rythmes différents, qui, plus lents ou plus rapides, mesureraient le degré de tension ou de relâchement des consciences, et, par là, fixeraient leurs places respectives dans la série des êtres,” Matière et mémoire, 232. 37. Duration and Simultaneity, 52; “[…] toute durée est épaisse: le temps réel n’a pas d’instants,” Durée et simultanéité, 51. 38. Principles of Psychology, 639. 39. Principles of Psychology, 609. 40. The Alternative, 167, quoted in Principles of Psychology, 609. 41. Principles of Psychology, 636. 42. Principles of Psychology, 636; cf. footnote. 43. Le bergsonisme, 55. 44. The Creative Mind, 57-8, “Mais alors seulement nous nous aperçûmes que l’expérience interne à l’état pur, en nous donnant une ‘substance’ dont l’essence même est de durer et par conséquent de prolonger sans cesse dans le présent un passé indestructible, nous eût dispenser et même nous eût interdit de chercher où le souvenir est conservé. Il se conserve lui-même […],” La pensée et le mouvant, 80. 45. Mind-Energy, 69. 46. Mind-Energy, 70. “Or, je crois bien que notre vis intérieur tout entière est quelque chose comme une phrase unique entamée dès le premier éveil de la conscience, phrase semée de virgules, mais nulle part coupée par des points. Et je crois par conséquent que notre passé tout entier est là subconscient – […],” L’énergie spirituelle, 56-7. 47. Writings 1902-10, 457-60.

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48. The Life Divine, 543-4. 49. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 7 (4) (Feb. 17, 1910), 85-92. 50. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 7 (4), 85-92. 51. “Response” Alfred North Whitehead The Interpretation of Science Selected Essays, 218. 52. Process and Reality, 215 [327]-[328].

ABSTRACTS

The Jamesian notion of the ‘stream of consciousness’ is closely related to the epochal theory of time. It also stems from an attempt to resolve the old aporia contained in Zeno’s paradoxes. Time flows like a ‘river’ or a ‘stream,’ but still it grows by ‘drops’ or ‘buds.’ These basic units of time are whole and indivisible, but they do not ‘crack’ or ‘divide’ reality. Other process philosophies also include this notion of a continuous time that, nevertheless, integrates these interrelated units that account for individualisation without any breach of continuity. Henri Bergson’s durée and Alfred N. Whitehead’s epochal theory of time clearly illustrate this doctrine. The examination of memory and the status of the past as a positive existence also emphasise the temporal aspect of reality. Existing reality grows out of its past, which endures in the newborn actuality.

AUTHOR

MARIA TERESA TEIXEIRA Universidad de Coimbra mtmvteixeira[at]gmail.com

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Essays

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The Sign of the Four Italian Pragmatists Retold

Giovanni Maddalena and Giovanni Tuzet

AUTHOR'S NOTE

A previous and partial version of this paper has been published as introduction of Maddalena-Tuzet 2007.

1 Italian pragmatism has been investigated many times by historians of philosophy, but rarely are scholars of Italian pragmatism, both Italian and foreign, actual pragmatists.1 That is why it has been so often misinterpreted. Here we want to justify the importance of this small group of people more as representatives of a pragmatist movement than as singular systematic thinkers. This paper aims to be a pragmatist contribution to the study of our four philosophers. A contribution that treats them for what they called themselves: Italian pragmatists. And this makes it possible to see, or at least to glimpse, their “allies and enemies,” according to the wording of one of Leonardo’s columns, which allows us to expand our vision to the rest of the Italian and international culture of the age.

2 The center of Italian pragmatism was the periodical Leonardo and the Italian pragmatists are, above all, those who created and edited Leonardo – namely, Papini and Prezzolini – and secondly those who joined Leonardo because of their personal friendship with the two young intellectuals and because of philosophical conviction – namely Vailati and Calderoni. Then there are all those who collaborated on Leonardo: Amendola, Regalia, Cecchi, Vacca, Borgese, and many others. We will not concern ourselves with these last only because their participation was not motivated by the study of pragmatism itself, but rather by certain affinities between their ideas and the personalities and tastes of the Leonardians. They were not pragmatism theorists even when they applied it to other fields, such as zoology, literature or mathematics. It would be necessary to carry out a study on them specifically, but it behooves us to focus our attention firstly on those who in some way sought a philosophical

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formulation of pragmatism. In this sense, Papini, Prezzolini, Vailati and Calderoni represent the essence of what we can say about Italian pragmatism.

3 In the first part of the paper, it is necessary to point out that there were, in fact, philosophers who had an original way of thinking and can be grouped together under a single name and a national connotation: the Italian pragmatists. Many scholars, in Italy and abroad, have doubted it, and continue to do so, above all focusing their attention on the thought of Vailati, whose philosophical interpretation is the real watershed for understanding the Italian movement gathered around the Florentine journal.2

4 It is often claimed that Papini and Prezzolini were confused and conceited “brats” and that, instead, Vailati and Calderoni were serious scholars who had truly understood the avant-garde philosophy in America and that they grafted it onto their own already developed studies, thus developing a personal version of it (Garin 1963: 283). If one reads Leonardo and studies the thought of these authors carefully, one realizes that there was among the four men a common matrix, and that this was, in effect, the line of the journal that they, not by chance, proclaimed “the official organ of Italian pragmatism.” As a sign of their deliberate and substantial commitment, they founded the Florence Pragmatist Club. It was an attempt to create a non-academic school of philosophical thought (as, after all, Papini had already tried to do with the Vinci group some years earlier)3 and it cannot be said that it was simply a sally by young men in search of dramatic gestures. Certainly, Leonardo’s season of pragmatism was brief, from 1904 until the final phase of the journal in 1907: that is, from the moment in which the relationship with Vailati and Schiller caused the ideas of Papini and Prezzolini to evolve in a more markedly “pragmatic” sense, abandoning the more generic propositions of the Vinci group (the part of the group most tied to art distanced themselves and founded Hermes).4

5 The critics have often underestimated the simple and double characteristic of being both “pragmatists” and “Italians,” which was affirmed by the protagonists of this intellectual adventure. It is said that pragmatism was not involved or that they had not properly understood it; that being Italian did not signal a peculiarity of their philosophy, but rather an accident of the philosophical attitude – neopositivist or scientistic or liberal – of Vailati and Calderoni and of the literary, extravagant and “magical” attitude of Papini and Prezzolini. Of course there are reasons to hold this view;5 but we think that the landscape was a little more complicated than the protagonists themselves sometimes were maintaining. The reasons for this strange overlooking of that complexity in the history books can perhaps be traced to the fact that the four men could not easily be ascribed to any of the political or philosophical factions that fought in Italy at the beginning of the XX century and that went

6 back and forth for the rest of it. When they wrote, the Italian pragmatists were neither positivists nor idealists, and it was not easy to insert them – then or later – among the Catholics or the freemasons, the communists or the fascists, the liberals or the socialists. If we add together this lack of a strong, already consolidated identity to the brevity of the pragmatists’ season and to the sporadic nature of their writings, as well as an intrinsic theoretical weakness we will speak about soon, one understands why they were so long forgotten, and why later, when they were rediscovered, a stronger identity was attributed to them a posteriori: as precursors to analytical philosophy or to the philosophy of science or to the action philosophies or to psychology.

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7 What emerges, as we will see in the second part of the paper, is that the Italian pragmatists understood much more about pragmatism than was said. Papini and Prezzolini were young, but they were not unprepared, and their friendship with Vailati helped them greatly to grow and to develop the salient points of the philosophical problems that they perceived. One need only read “Il pragmatismomesso in ordine [Pragmatism put in order]” (L III/2, April 1905), with its famous assertion of the “corridor theory,” the “Cronaca pragmatista [Pragmatist chronicle]” (L IV/5, February 1906) where Papini distinguishes three types of pragmatism and the “Introduzione al pragmatismo [Introduction to pragmatism]” (L V/1, February 1907), to realize that what we have before us is not the slapdash aping of a fashionable philosophy. If one looks at the introduction written by Papini, many years later, to the writings of Calderoni and Vailati on pragmatism,6 one understands that the awareness of pragmatist ideas and of their importance had not escaped the Florentine writer; one sees instead the signs of a serious understanding and acceptance of pragmatist theory.

8 In the third part, we will see that there was also a large part of pragmatism that Italian pragmatists did not grasp because they did not know it. But in their misunderstandings they signaled a need and possibly a weakness of the whole pragmatist movement.

9 Finally, by indicating the real gap between them and their American “masters,” we will try to explain and assess the standard interpretation that makes them naïve pragmatists. Jaime Nubiola, speaks of “Mediterranean pragmatism,” referring to this need to avoid losing the concreteness of the individual in the realization of the universal laws of mathematics and logic, physics and psychology; a need one can find also in Eugenio d’Ors, Unamuno, Bergson, and Schiller.7

I. Not Just “Brats”

10 Papini is recognized, in many ways, as the central figure of Italian pragmatism, albeit there are different interpretations on his character. Leonardo was his creature, as Prezzolini confirmed in a conversation with Mario Quaranta in 1982, shortly before he died.8 In the first issues, Prezzolini limited himself to participating with editorials and other writings. Later he would work side by side with Papini as an editor, also lending a hand with financial management. It was in any event Papini who decided the main direction the journal would take. The different programs of Leonardo were his, from the first ones in 1903 (n. 1-3) to those which made explicit the pragmatist positions with the particular meaning given to them by the Leonardians and finally to those of the final years that were open to occultism. His exuberant personality was the intellectual and emotional heart of Leonardo. Papini decided the cover graphics with the innovative drawings by De Carolis and the use of pen names – the famous Gian Falco (Papini) and Giuliano il Sofista [Julian the Sophist] (Prezzolini). He sent Prezzolini to France to meet Bergson, and then went himself to meet him, later reporting in Leonardo the great French philosopher’s positions – not without a personal slant and, at times, even a completely personal, voluntary “misrepresentation.”9 At the same time, he used the content of the journal to address psychological problems that brought him closer to James’s ideas.10 In the first years of the XX century, after all, the reception of pragmatism in Italy coincided with that of James, even if the reverse is not true.11 Papini and the other Italian pragmatists had a meeting with James during the 5th International Congress of Psychology, held in Rome in 1905: the American philosopher

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left the meeting enchanted by the Florentine writer’s personality.12 It was Papini who became friend with Vailati and subsequently established a significant epistolary relationship with Miguel de Unamuno, who recognized him as a privileged interlocutor and was an attentive reader of Leonardo. It was also Papini who wanted to give to the occultists the possibility of expressing themselves in the columns of the Florentine journal, and in the end, he was the one who decided to close the journal down.

11 Papini was not only the “brat” who in the end showed himself to be a conformist, stigmatized by Garin; his thirst to find “a reason to live” was able first to rally the young people of the Vinci group, and later to charm a protagonist of the cultural scene of the time like James and a logician of the caliber of Vailati, who would remain bound to him in a deep, personal friendship full of respect. Certainly, his assertions were often off-key and were negatively affected by his image because of his youth and time. Papini, however, was aware of having particular gifts and was convinced he wanted to fight against a world burdened by affectations and academic formality, bereft of any value for one searching for a reason to live.

12 Prezzolini was just as witty and a more subtle polemicist than his friend. Perhaps he did not have the same instinctive philosophical consciousness as Papini, but he followed the impetus of it. It was Prezzolini who went to meet Bergson and maintained a relationship with F. C. S. Schiller, the English pragmatist. From his articles on Bergson and Schiller as from his debate with Calderoni (from L II/3 November 1904 to LIII/2 April 1905) emerges the stature of a true thinker who not by chance would contribute to the discovery of authors and themes that otherwise would have remained unknown to the Italian public.

13 Suspicions of connections between the pragmatists and fascism have often fed the critical studies, especially American ones, and were centered on Prezzolini.13 It is an accusation that one also finds in De Waal’s book (2004) but which is difficult to document, excepting a generic observation by Mussolini and a problematic genealogy of fascist thought in La Voce. The accusation seems, in reality, unfounded: Leonardo’s season ended in 1907 and Italian pragmatist thought, with its bold individualism and its problems connected with meaning, methodology and psychology, provides very few theoretical pretexts for fascism, unless one considers the generic call to action, which, however, is associated with almost all the cultural expressions of the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, not even the dates favor this interpretation: when there were the pragmatists, fascism did not exist yet and when there was fascism, the pragmatists were not around anymore, either because they were dead or because they had completely changed their cultural affiliations.

14 Vailati, who died in 1909, was much older than his two Florentine friends: he was 40 years old when the other two, both 22, started Leonardo. He belonged to the school of Peano, with whom he had collaborated on writing Il Formulario, one of the works that were fundamental for the birth of mathematical logic, and he had already taught three History of Mechanics courses at the University of Torino. He was current, and he kept himself current, on everything published in Europe in the fields of his interest, which expanded progressively from mathematics to the history of science, from comparisons of the various sciences to the philosophical method. The results of this activity, which would be rediscovered decades later, can be compared, at least in extent and spirit besides certain assonances in the direction of his thought, to those of Charles S. Peirce. The friendship between Papini and Vailati, whose theoretical motives were so crucial,

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is perhaps the secret of Leonardo.14 The great logician educated Papini in the truest sense of the word; he drew out of the magma of Papinian needs a minimum of philosophical and critical structure without substituting his own ideas to those of his friend, for whom he always had respect and admiration. Vailati commented on Papini’s work in every issue of Leonardo, correcting, reproaching, but always trying to underline the direction which would keep Leonardo both disruptive and precise at the same time. Papini, as we know, did not always follow Vailati’s suggestions, but this does not mean that he was not influenced by the teachings of his friend and mentor. Vailati’s stay in Florence from 1904 to 1905, due to his nomination by the Academy of the Lincei to coordinate the national edition of Torricelli’s works, is perhaps the most interesting period of Leonardo, when foreign authors met and conversed with Italians and among themselves. It was here that Papini’s plans for a true culture outside academia found most success.

15 Calderoni was the only true student of Vailati. Born in Ferrara, he graduated in law at Pisa in 1901, with a thesis on positive science and criminal law, where he had already expounded his thoughts on the themes of personal responsibility, voluntariness in action, and the role of belief in determining voluntary actions. These themes, elaborate and precise, would return in his later reflections, influenced by Vailati and inspired by pragmatism, and bound in particular to Peirce’s pragmatic maxim; Calderoni in fact maintained that voluntary action is that which can be modified by the beliefs that foresee the effects of it. It would be Calderoni who led Leonardo, with the writings “Le varietà del Pragmatismo [The varieties of pragmatism]” (L II/3, November 1904) and “Variazioni sul Pragmatismo [Variations on pragmatism]” (L III/1, February 1905), to the discussion with Prezzolini about the meaning or meanings to be given to the term “pragmatism.” But it was not only with pragmatism that Calderoni occupied himself: he wrote about psychology, epistemology, the theory of perception, law, politics, morality, economics; in short, he focused on empirical and social sciences, as much on theoretical issues as on practical.15 It can be said that among the Italian protagonists, he was the one who, strong in the methodological lessons learned from Peirce and Vailati and his law studies, tried to extend pragmatism and its methods to the social sciences. Indeed, his most important and well-known work, “Disarmonie economiche e disarmonie morali [Economic disharmonies and moral disharmonies],” published in 1906, tries to apply certain principles and acquisitions of political economics to ethics. Whether his way of treating the themes of ethics and normativity was satisfactory is, however, dubious, but the originality of his attempt is undisputed and did not fail to arouse heated debates (engaged in by Croce, among others). With his mentor Vailati, Calderoni also wrote essays of notable acumen and clarity, such as “Le origini e l’idea fondamentale del Pragmatismo [The origins and fundamental idea of pragmatism]” and “Il Pragmatismo e ivarimodi di non dirniente [Pragmatism and Various Ways of Saying Nothing],” but a premature death in 1914 hindered him from bringing to fruition and articulating in the best way his many provocative ideas that were already influencing the whole Italian cultural environment.16

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II. What Did the Italian Pragmatists Understand of American Pragmatism?

16 Perhaps we should note the differences because the cliché of the critics, sometimes with very different connotations and slants, is that Papini and Prezzolini understood very little, borrowing only a few confused concepts from James, while Vailati and Calderoni had grasped the essence of pragmatism, albeit only in the Peircean sense. However, we think that, their strong differences aside, the four men shared the same understanding of pragmatism. Therefore, putting aside their individual philosophies, we want to see what aspects of original pragmatism might have emerged to the eyes of a Leonardo reader.

17 At first glance, it seems that very little remains of American pragmatism. The Italian pragmatists mixed pragmatism with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, with Saint Teresa and Pascal, with Kierkegaard and the occultists. On the other hand, in Leonardo one reads essays on Russell and Poincaré, Pikler and Duhem, Brentano and Juvalta. Each author, taken singly, could be said to have a connection with pragmatism, but all together they seem truly far from an organic whole.

18 In addition, there was a limited understanding of the subtle distinctions between James and Peirce and, even less, of the single systems of the one and the other. The pragmatism they knew about seems more composed of slogans than of reasoning. Citations of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim appear continuously, with all the misinterpretations of utilitarianism and arbitrariness that it had already aroused in the United States. Then there is Vailati’s critique of “What is Pragmatism?,” Peirce’s article published in “The Monist” in April of 1905. Leonardo published James’s “La concezione della coscienza [The conception of consciousness]” from the conference in Rome (L III/ 3, June-August 1905), his “Le energie degli uomini [The energies of men]” (L III/I, February 1905) and various reviews. James is much more present than Peirce, but in his case as well one finds in Leonardo all the classic impressions due to the doctrine of the “will to believe,” an “unlucky” title according to James himself (James 1967: 457), as it inspired an infinite number of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Dewey is cited five times and Lady Welby twice. Instead, appearing many times are Bergson, with whom Prezzolini had a constant and personal relationship, Schiller and Unamuno, the latter a bit forcedly but significantly counted among the pragmatists. The richness of these last relationships brings to mind the possibility of identifying a common matrix, if one exists, of the European or “Mediterranean” version of pragmatism, and gives an idea of the vast “pragmatist” frequentation that a Leonardo reader was able to have. It could be said, in short, that, as much as extension, Leonardo provided unique knowledge for its time.

19 As for depth of understanding, the tools were insufficient if one wanted to understand the Jamesian system and even more so, the Peircean. This weakness was not a small one: if the Italian pragmatists were not unfaithful in reporting and working out what they knew, they still did not grasp some of the deeper provocations found in the works of the American masters and simply missed, at times, the connection between the novelty of pragmatism and the historical antecedents which the American pragmatists thought they were connecting with. They defined personal historical antecedents but this was the cause of the majority of the misunderstandings by the critics and there

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often was not a philosophical horizon wider and deeper around which to place the problems that they treated.

20 The decisive element, however, is that, even though the previous observations remain true (noted by all critics, then and now) the Leonardians grasped the essence of pragmatism much more than the majority of their critics admits. There is one point that unites the apparently distant philosophies of Peirce and James: anticartesianism, the rejection of rationalism as much as empiricism, seen as an impoverishment of the richness of experience17 (see the critique of Descartes in the issue dated 27 January 1903: “Criticism of the world is, in him, a preliminary step and nothing more”). From this point of view the articles “I dispregiatori del pragmatismo [The disparagers of pragmatism]” (L III/4, October-December 1905) and “Cronaca pragmatista [Pragmatist Chronicle]” (L IV/5, February 1906) are essential; there were certainly differences between the Italian pragmatists, but they were all sure of one thing: the necessity of starting from experience as it is. The pragmatist sees the world as a collection of facts to which he gives a neutral collective name: for example ‘things,’ without saying if it is spirit, matter, or something similar. Standing before this world, he says: I observe that certain classes of things change when certain others change. Among the others there is a certain class of things that I will call beliefs, and when they change also change certain other things to which they refer. And that’s it! (L IV/5, February 1906)

21 Jamesian psychology and Peircean logic reject the vision of an inquiry starting from methodic doubt. The only doubt is the living one – according to Peirce – the one that relieves an intellectual and moral uneasiness and dissatisfaction that must be overcome. It is useless to pretend to doubt things that we do not doubt at all, in order to then recover them with a chain of reasoning starting from an empirical or rational primum that one must postulate a priori in order to then construct a chain of reasoning from it. Such a chain will only be as strong – not very – as its weakest link (W2: 212-7). Human reason, on the contrary, starts from a given experience, about which it is certain, and which can be shaken by events and by theoretical and practical problems, but which must be recovered. Reasoning that departs from such an experience does not resemble a chain, but rather a rope, whose strength is due to the sum and the braiding of its threads. This simple observation often escaped the critics, not least because it could not be included in these terms by the protagonists of Leonardo, who, as far as we know, did not know the first “pragmatist” document, the “anticartesian” series that Peirce published in the “Journal of Speculative Philosophy” between 1868 and 1869, where the anticartesian nucleus of his thought was affirmed (W2: 193-241). The one with the deepest awareness of the value of experience was Vailati, who in psychology saw the trait d’union between the refined theory of scientific discovery that Peirce followed and the will to believe that aroused enthusiasm in the followers of James, and compares the various sciences, physical and moral, to them – trying to show the internal structure of this “rope” that is reasoning. Vailati understood the typical characteristics of experience intended in a pragmatist way. As a matter of fact, in contrast to any pre-analytical standard, Vailati held a historical view of truth. The scholar who will not care about anything but the actual state of his science, as far as competence to judge the importance that actual research or evidence processes (that are now competing) can reach, is in a position similar to a geometer who would like to determine the trend of a curve knowing only one point or one linear element of it. (S2: 6)

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22 Vailati’s understanding of the evolutionistic turn of philosophy was as deep as his firm holding an absolute normative value of truth. Truth is in evolution because human theories change, but their changing is not an evidence for relativism but a progressive attunement with reality. Peirce would have said: an attunement that would be reached in the long run of inquiry. Vailati commented this idea in his letter to Papini written on the 22nd of July 1903: If I did not fear to adventure into the regions of metaphysics and to scandalize you too much, I would say that not only truths exist […] independently from human opinions (of whomever), but that they are the only things that exist in that way (i.e., to believe that a body exists is equivalent to believe that some expectative would be satisfied […] if we had it, and it seems to me that it does not imply anything else). “Reality” is only another name for “truth.” (Vailati 1971: 362)

23 Correctly Vailati underlines that this criterion of truth is a new way to maintain the ancient adaequatiorei et intellectus; a new way which is formally different as substantially close to the Aristotelian or Thomistic version. Still, this formulation stresses the importance of evolution, and therefore the event of truth. Truth is something that happens to an idea, as James would have said. This is why Vailati’s view cannot be equated with any analytic or empiricist pattern: sense and meaning of a term or of a proposition can never be saturated before the end of inquiry. The concept of truth is so wide to avoid both rationalism and empiricism and it brings a radical critique of any form of reductionism, in particular of the ontologization of analytic propositions (S1: 130-33). There are no a priori necessary truths: truth would be accomplished in the conditional future of experience.

24 This version of truth definitely overtakes any dichotomy between ideas and facts, as far as both evolve and can change reality up to the perfect attunement of the long run. […] this world of paper to which Galileo despised so much, the world of ideas and human imagination, is neither less real nor less sensitive nor worth studying or intelligent observing than the other world to which he dedicated his mind with so great success. Opinions, whether true or false, are always facts, and as facts they deserve and claim to be object of inquiry, tests, and explanation exactly as any other order of facts. And with the same end: through their varieties, through their complex structure and transformation, the end is to determine constant elements, uniformities, and laws to which they ought their dynamics. (S2: 4)

25 But also Papini, Prezzolini and Calderoni, each in their own way, rejected the idea of the indubitable epistemological primumand because of this, found a theoretical unity in their attack of both positivism and idealism. If they had been able to and had wanted to delve deeper into the writings of Peirce and James, they would have discovered all the phenomenological, semiotical and metaphysical depth that such visions involved, as well as their intrinsic and subtle differences. They attested, instead, to the pragmatic maxim and the “will to believe,” they understood them and discussed them: in this lies both their strength and their weakness.

III. What Did the Italian Pragmatists Add to American Pragmatism?

26 Italian pragmatists added to American pragmatism a personalistic existential tone and a nihilist disquiet. See Leonardo n. 2 of 1903 in which Papini asserts: “We will retain a single ambition: complete possession of reality.” Or Vailati’s letter in which he declares

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himself fully in agreement with Papini in his need for agreement between thought and action: Dear Papini, Upon my return from Bologna, I found your letter in Crema and now here the magnificent issue of Leonardo. Your article “Marta e Maria [Martha and Mary],” especially on page 7, column 2, clarified for me your way of seeing and understanding the philosophy even more wonderfully and energetically than any of your previous writing has done. There are those who have dreamed that which they couldn’t achieve and those who have achieved – or made it possible to achieve – that which no-one (and they less than others) has ever even dreamed of wanting. Now it is necessary the rising of those who proclaim that “doing” and “being able to do” only have value if they serve to “realize a dream” and that dreams only have value if one may hope to have the strength and means to realize them. The simultaneous recognition of both these two requirements is much more than is needed to give substance and life to a new orientation of the philosophical speculation; this has had and can have no higher scope. (Vailati 1971: 397)

27 In this ambition rests all their existentialism, which finds its prophets in the mystics and nihilists because all of them wanted a life that was intense, full, theoretical and practical at the same time. Respect for religious experience should be read in this sense, for Croce as well, whose idealism the pragmatists disdained as much as they loved his acumen in the details and his non-academic writing.

28 Existential personalism describes the love for the most complete aspirations of the mind experienced in vital particulars. Underlining the importance of the particular and the distinction between particulars as criteria to identify the meaning of statements is a constant characteristic of all the Italian pragmatists. Distinguishing means finding the true particular, vibrating with life, those that unite thought and action, separating them from what is universal and empty or generic or deprived of enough strength to become action. The spirit’s “desire to incarnate” which the idealists spoke about and which was especially urgent in Papini can also be found in the others, although in a less marked form. One must consider that this aspect of the person or of the individual was absent from American pragmatism, according to which the person is the result of a complex intersection of forces (physical, mental, intellectual) that move reality and thought and that, from a metaphysical point of view, rest either on different modalities of the same reality (Peirce)18 or on ultimate unities of experience that have nothing to do with individual consciousness (James).19 In this sense Italian pragmatism modified original pragmatism and involved taking a personal stance that James, much admired by them, pointed out in a letter to Papini saying that the Italian pragmatists had taught him “courage” (James 2003: 214).

29 Paradoxically, but entirely understandably, together with the emphasis on singularity and concreteness in which life and its general laws vibrate, one finds in the Italian pragmatists a nihilist background, which one notices especially in issue 10 of November 1903 and December 1903: it is the suspicion that life lacks a true reason, a suspicion that pressed them to adhere to pragmatism understood as a reaction of the will to the absurdity of existence. Papini would express it years later with the figurative expression: “I did not approve, I did not accept the universe as it was. My attitude was spiteful and proud, like Capaneo trapped in an earthly hell. And I tended to deny reality, to deny copies of reality, a despise of the rules of real life, and to remake, in my way, a different and more perfect reality” (Papini 1977: 233).

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30 It is a Nietzschean touch that turns up often in the four pragmatists in different ways and that often becomes a simple “relativism,” as in the practical realm for Vailati and Calderoni, according to whom each person can choose his own “table of values” and then organize the means to those ends (S2: 91). Behind this vision there is, especially in Papini, a certain reading of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Nietzsche, Bergson, in addition to James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. There is also, especially in Vailati and Calderoni, a reading of utilitarianism and English liberalism, of Bentham and Mill, but also of the recent political economy. Moreover, from the epistemological point of view, we cannot neglect the ideas treated by Newman and his division between real understanding of the particular and formal understanding of the universal (Newman 1973). Nor can we disregard the influence of Brentano, who was for many years a resident of Florence and often visited by the pragmatists, for the distinction between representation, belief and will (Dal Pra 1984). The latter theme, the unity of belief and representation, was the source of Peirce’s semiotics in “A New List of Categories,”20 which unfortunately the Italian pragmatists did not know, and which was the secret root of the unity of experience in Jamesian psychology that cropped up in his philosophical works as well. The fact of not having recognized such a unity, we may suppose, is the true beginning of the end of Leonardo from the theoretical point of view, the reason for which pragmatism was not, in the end, a satisfactory answer for its Italian supporters. Existentialist personalism and nihilism as love of the particular and suspicion of a complete answer mark the peculiarity of Italian pragmatism for good or for bad. Being committed to the comprehension of the particular (in this Newman has a certain importance), in real understanding as opposed to a formal or notional understanding is the reason the Italian pragmatists were so bold in their attempt to know and judge all that was produced in the intellectual sphere. On the other hand, opposition to formal knowledge often resolves itself in nominalism and in a consequent skepticism that at times seems to prevent the possibility of authentic knowledge. In the last issue of the journal, Papini says that the necessity of finding a reason to live is the most important thing to which Leonardo was not able to find the answer. Perhaps because there is no answer?

31 Here the pragmatists’ paths diverged: Prezzolini returned to idealism; Vailati simply stopped, as expressed in “La ricercadell’impossibile [The search for the impossible]” (L III/4, October 1905), maintaining that the search for ultimate causes has the nature of a utopian construct (which he compared to mathematical postulates); Calderoni remained anchored to the impossibility of rationally deliberating on ends and values; Papini would find an answer many years later in incarnation and Catholicism.21

32 The consequences of this type of understanding, personalistic and nihilistic, places before us different personal philosophies: at least in this sense, Papini was right when he said that there was no Italian pragmatism, but Italian pragmatists. Love of the particular, of the solidity of experience and the importance of the act of the will takes on a personal form.

33 From a practical point of view, this translates into a perennial battle, typically Italian, in a world made up of friends and enemies. For the Italian pragmatists, it was a matter of life and death and, in a certain sense, the end of Leonardo marked their defeat or at least the defeat of pragmatism as an essential weapon of this battle. Calderoni and Vailati, who felt this existential background less, were more disappointed by it, but even for them pragmatism was a weapon against superficiality and arrogance of

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thought, especially academic thought. The struggle against the narrowness of positivism and the redundancy of idealist monism are the emblem of this “militant” version of Italian pragmatism, characterized by the “courage” to risk one’s ideas and the need to find “allies” among thinkers from all over the world.

IV. What Did the Leonardians Not Understand About Pragmatism? Or Rather, Where Is the Italian Pragmatists’ Weakness?

34 In their journey from the abstract to the concrete they respected, after all, the epistemological terms of the idealists, as we can see in the editorials of all the first issues of Leonardo. “Personalisti e idealisti nel pensiero [Personalists and idealists in thought]” is the definition of the first issue of Leonardo, January 1903); “Un personalismo con fondamenti gnoseo logici [A personalism with gnoseological foundations]” says Papini in the article “Me e non Me [Me and not me],” L I/2, January 1903; overcoming life in the spirit in “Al di là della vita [Beyond life],” L I/7, March 1903; the interior man as the author of mystical creations in “Il segreto di Leonardo [The secret of Leonardo],” L I/8, April 1903). In this case it was Papini who wrote and, given his young age, perhaps idealism was the only tool available to him. Nevertheless, Papini was not the only one to reveal a certain inconsistency between a general philosophical understanding and his epistemological attitudes.

35 The rationalism and irrationalism that the personalist and nihilist pragmatist of the Leonardians alternated between in the different sectors of philosophical research were not able to dislodge the idealist gnoseological system that both Peircean semiotics and Jamesian psychology questioned. Thus, there is a strong difference between the declarations that bring to light the anticartesian core of pragmatism and the epistemological articulation which often refers to the same masters of their “enemies”: to Locke and Hume on one hand, and to Berkeley and Schopenhauer (through whom Kant, whom they often criticized, reappears) on the other. It is interesting that Papini, in an article in one of the first issues of Leonardo (“La favola del Sole e dell’Unico [The Fable of the Sun and the Only One],” L I/9, May 1903) says that monism is in the will but not in the act, that the world is not God, but is becoming God. Perhaps Vailati and Calderoni could not completely share an assertion of this kind, but their decision not to take a position on the ends that each one chose voluntarily remains in strong contrast, if not in contradiction, to methodological pragmatism. In this context, it is useful to recall that Vailati thought that deduction was the real tool of inquiry and he conceived it in such a way to imply the pragmatic turn that any conditional formula includes. But in this way Vailati had to accept that the principles from which we draw conditionals are postulates, chosen according to an arbitrary will. Peirce, his pretended American partner, hold a very different idea, building a complete relationship between reality and our reasoning both from an epistemic point of view – where abduction and its phenomenological, aesthetic and ethic foundations play a decisive role – and from a metaphysical point of view – where metaphysical realism is an essential part of the path of knowledge.

36 But also James would have never accepted an ultimate disembodied view of freedom. Freedom is always an attitude toward reality and it is intertwined with the whole

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psychological stream of thought. This continuity between reality and thought, that Dewey later articulated in his Logic, is the epistemic-metaphysical matrix of the “rope” of experience. And Italian pragmatists never grasped it.

37 A gap remains between the choice of the means and the choice of the ends, which Papini and Prezzolini resolved with the doctrine of the Man-god, Vailati and Calderoni with ethical relativism. In this way they left space for monism, whether idealist or nihilist, which they wanted to oppose. From this point of view, the parabola of Prezzolini’s thought returning to Crocean idealism is very significant.

38 Such a gap between the general intention of their philosophies and the epistemologies they could display – weak epistemologies in which there is a methodological abysm between the choice of means and the choice of ends – could therefore be generalized by saying that the Italian pragmatists lacked that which they sought: the synthesis of experience, which they saw, lived and wanted to penetrate – or “possess,” to use Papini’s term – both in extension and in intension (“the intellectual empire of all the beings in the universe” says Papini in the first issue of Leonardo). They claimed that they wanted to know this synthesis or deep connection (especially Papini in the initial phase and in the occultist phase of Leonardo) and, at the same time, did not want it (the mystery is the sun that bewitches and blinds in “La favola del Sole e dell’Unico [The Fable of the Sun and the Only One],” L I/9, May 1903) or that they did not want to occupy themselves with problems that concern spheres where consciousness cannot go (Vailati). In the end, this uncertainty proved fatal to Leonardo. When Papini wrote that there is no mystery, only the unknown and the unknown is that which is not, he condemned the need to possess that had driven him to a perpetual, empty search, forcing him to experience continual changes and great dissatisfaction. The others were more cautious in their assertions but there still remained in them this tension between a totality towards which reason tends and an epistemology that does not allow one to try to know it and to discuss it. Thus their philosophical attempts remain either incoherent or incomplete.

39 The theories that the Italian pragmatists worked out were not ever as significant as their theoretical needs and their philosophical taste thanks to which they brought an important philosophical theory to Italy and introduced their readers to the real problems of the philosophy of their time. One can say that, after all, they violated the most basic rule of knowing, which Peirce had summed up with the phrase: “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Papini blocked it in intensity, Vailati in extension, Prezzolini and Calderoni followed their friends and mentors, but the search never went so far as to fully confront the enigma of experience, the profound connection between thought and the reality of which it is a part.

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POZZONI I., (2004), “Disarmonie economiche e disarmonie morali. L’etica nella riflessione di Mario Calderoni,” in Annuario del Centro Studi Giovanni Vailati, anno 2004, 53-88.

POZZONI I. (ed.), (2009), Cent’anni di Giovanni Vailati, Milano, Liminamentis.

QUARANTA M., (1987), “Letture di Giovanni Vailati nella cultura italiana (1911-1986),” in G. Vailati, Scritti, Bologna, Arnaldo Forni Editore.

QUARANTA M., (2003), “Il programma di ricerca di Giovanni Vailati,” in G. Vailati, Gli strumenti della ragione, Padova, Il Poligrafo.

ROSSI M. M., (1923), “Il pragmatismo italiano,” Rivista di psicologia, XIX, 1923/1, 8-23.

ROSSI LANDI F., (1958), “Materiale per lo studio di Vailati,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 1958/1, 82-108.

SANTUCCI A., (1963), Il pragmatismo in Italia, Bologna, il Mulino.

SCHRAM PIGHI L., (1981), “Henri Bergson e la cultura francese nel Leonardo,” in Leonardo, vol. 1 (1903-1905), Bologna, Arnaldo Forni.

TORALDO DI FRANCIA M., (1983), Pragmatismo e disarmonie sociali. Il pensiero di Mario Calderoni, Milano, Franco Angeli.

VAILATI G., (1971), Epistolario: 1891-1909, ed. by G. Lanaro, Torino, Einaudi.

VAILATI G., (1980), Scritti filosofici, ed. by G. Lanaro, Firenze, La Nuova Italia.

VAILATI G., (2003), Gli strumenti della ragione, ed. by M. Quaranta, Padova, Il Poligrafo.

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VILLA G., (1962), “Sul pragmatismo logico di Vailati e Calderoni: la questione delle varietà del pragmatismo,” Memoria I, Memorie dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Bologna, Classe di Scienze morali, serie V, vol. X, 187-213.

VILLA G., (1963), “Alcuni aspetti del pragmatismo di Vailati,” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 18, 1963/3, 294-310.

ZAMBELLONI F., (1970), “Bergson e la filosofia italiana,” Filosofia, XXI (3), 331-60.

ZANONI C. P., (1979), “Development of logical pragmatism in Italy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XL, 1979/4, 603-19.

APPENDIXES

Abbreviations EP The Essential Peirce, 2 vols., ed. by the Peirce Edition Project, Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991-1998. The abbreviation is followed by Arabic numerals for volume and page. For example, EP1: 348. L Leonardo. The abbreviation is followed by a Roman numeral for the volume, and Arabic numerals for the issue, date, page. For example, L I/1, January 1903: 1. S Scritti of Giovanni Vailati (vol. 1: Scritti di filosofia; vol. 2: Scritti di scienza; vol. 3: Scritti di scienze umane), ed. by M. Quaranta, Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1987. The abbreviation is followed by Arabic numerals for volume and page. For example, S1: 34. W Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, 6 vols. published, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1981-2000. The abbreviation is followed by Arabic numerals for volume and page. For example, W2: 49.

NOTES

1. Among American authors see Colapietro 1994, and De Waal 2004. In Italy the great exception is the wonderful book by Santucci (1963), which has the single defect of being inevitably dated in a field, like that of pragmatism, where studies have advanced immensely in the last forty years thanks to the publication of James and Dewey’s Opera Omniaand, above all, thanks to the cataloging and publication (not yet completed) of the Peircean manuscripts. The references for those editions are the classic ones. The writings of John Dewey are published in The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by J. A. Boydston, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-91. The main edition of James are The Works of William James, ed. by F. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, I. Skrupskelis, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1975- and The Correspondence of William James, ed. by I. K. Skrupskelis and E. M. Berkeley, Charlottesville and London, University Press of Virginia, 2003. Peirce’s writings are published in C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, 8 vols., ed. by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss (vols. 1-6), and A. Burks (vols. 7-8),

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Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1931-1958; The New Elements of Mathematics, ed. by C. Eisele, The Hague, Mouton Publishers, 1976; The Essential Peirce, 2 vols., ed. by the Peirce Edition Project, Indianapolis and Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991-98 (EP). The Peirce Edition Project is working on the complete chronological edition, called Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, 6 vols published, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1981-2000 (W). 2. This view has been sustained above all by those who tried to treat Vailati as a precursor of the neopositivist thought. Among others is worth recalling Marcucci 1958, Lanaro 1980, Brodbeck 1963, Facchi 1952, Barone 1963, Cecchinel 1963, Geymonat 1963. A second interpretative stream has defended Vailati’s pragmatist identity opposing Vailati and Calderoni as followers of Peirce to the others, uncertainly stepping into James’ tracks. Among those, with Garin 1963, we have to mention at least Rossi 1923, Gullace 1962, Villa 1962, Zanoni 1979, and more recently De Waal 2007, and – partially – Colapietro 1994. More complicated is the methodological view held by Harris 1963 and Quaranta 2003, in which Vailati is a precursor of methodologies that only now emerge as important. In this Italian pragmatists were originally pragmatists but the only real philosophical contribution came from the great mathematician. Another important book is the one written by M. Ferrari (2006) whose interpretation of Vailati is not centered on pragmatism, but on his moral general belonging to European culture. Ferrari’s well balanced analysis casts a light on Vailati’s debt to Leibniz and to contemporary philosophy of mathematics and science. 3. L III/2, April 1905: 45. 4. Hermes was a periodical founded by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Enrico Corradini in 1904. They were interested in literary criticism and the painter Adolfo De Carolis was responsible for the graphical aspect of the periodical. Papini himself collaborated with Hermes in many of the twelve numbers, until the last publication in 1906. As for Papini’s Vincian proclamation, see the introduction by G. Luti to the complete edition of Leonardo 1903-07 (Firenze & Vallecchi 2003). In this volume it is possible to find the transcription of the “Discorsoai Vinciani” [Discourse to Vincians]. 5. “Presso di noi il Pragmatismo si divise quasi nettamente in due sezioni: quella che si potrebbe dire del Pragmatismo logico e quella del Pragmatismo psicologico o magico. Alla prima appartenevano Vailati e Calderoni ai quali moltissimo deve – […] – la teoria della scienza e la logica considerata come studio del significato delle proposizioni e delle teorie. La seconda era composta da me e da Prezzolini e noialtri, spiriti più avventurosi, più paradossali e più mistici svolgemmo soprattutto quelle teorie che ci facevano sperare un’efficacia diretta sul nostro spirito e sulle cose” [In Italy pragmatism was almost exactly splitted in two parts: one that we could call logic pragmatism and the other one that we could call psychologic or magic pragmatism. Vailati and Calderoni – […] – to whom theory of science and logic intended as studies on meaning of propositions and theories are indebted, belong to the first one. The second one is composed by Prezzolini and me, more adventurous, paradoxical, and mystical kind of men. We developed above all those theories which made us hope for a direct efficacy on our souls and on things] Papini, SulPragmatismo, in Papini (1977: 7). 6. See the introduction to Calderoni-Vailati (1918), written by Giovanni Papini. 7. Many contributions in Maddalena-Tuzet 2007 cover these relationships. On D’Ors and pragmatism see the chapters by M. Torregrosa & A. González (p. 245-54, 255-72). On the Unamuno-Papini relationship see the contribution by I. Martínez (167-8). About the acquaintance with Bergson and Schiller see the chapter by M. Luisi (179-200) and the Appendix by M. Quaranta (273-85). 8. Interview with Giuseppe Prezzolini by Mario Quaranta, “Quaderni razionalisti,” n. 2-3, primavera 1983, 77-84. 9. “Enrico Bergson, come tutti i maestri buoni, non può avere scolari, ma solo lettori amorosi che, appena abbian capito, debbon buttar da parte i suoi libri e sprofondarsi, per conto loro nel fiume dell’intuizione” [Henry Bergson, as any good professor, cannot have students but loving readers

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who – as soon as they understand – must throw his books and deepen their selves into the river of intuition] (from the introduction written by G. Papini to Bergson (1913: 3-4)). See also Marinotti (1997: 149-78), SchramPighi 1981, Zambelloni (1970: 331-60). 10. Papini writes about his interest in psychology in Papini (2005: 177-8). There are also many articles in Leonardo where Papini and Prezzolini discuss the problem of soul and psychology (L II/ 2, June 1904: 29; L III/2, April 1905: 41-43; L III/3, June-August 1905: 123-4). See also Garin (1966: 53) and Mori (1972: 213-27). 11. Antonio Aliotta is a perfect example of this problem. He elaborated a deep interpretation of James’ psychology, but frequently went beyond James intention. See Aliotta 1902, 1940 and 1949. 12. James (2003: 27-9). See also Colella 1994, and Colapietro 1994. 13. For the doubts on Prezzolini and pragmatism in general see Jacobitti 1981, and the balance made by Colapietro 1994. 14. The theoretical similarity of the two philosophers appears in Leonardo (L IV/5, February 1906: 59-60), but also in some letters that Vailati wrote to Papini (Vailati 1971: 397). 15. See Calderoni 1924, which is a posthumous collection of his major writings. 16. On his influence on Italian philosophy see in particular Lanaro 1979, Parrini 1979, Borsellino 1979, Pontara 1979, Toraldo di Francia 1983, Pozzoni 2004. 17. See W2: 193-210 and W2: 211-41. See also the conferences James made in Harvard and published in 1907 as Pragmatism: A New Name for Same Old Ways of Thinking (James 1975). 18. EP1: 348-51; EP2: 2-3. 19. See his 1904 and 1905 papers Does “Consciousness” Exist? and The Notion of Consciousness (now in James 1967: 169-83, 184-94). 20. W2: 49-58. 21. See for Papini’s conversion the Introduction to his Storia di Cristo (1984: 32-4).

ABSTRACTS

This paper is a contribution to the study of the four classical Italian pragmatists: Papini, Prezzolini, Vailati and Calderoni. They are seen more as representatives of a pragmatist movement than as singular systematic thinkers. The center of Italian pragmatism was the periodical, Leonardo, where these authors discussed and presented an original and provocative understanding of pragmatist philosophy. Thier understanding of pragmatist philosophy has often been underestimated by the subsequent literature. They showed a good comprehension of the novelty brought by American pragmatism but, ignoring some of the most important epistemic aspects of Peirce’s and James’s theories, their philosophical proposals often missed consistency. However, even in their misunderstandings, they signaled a need and possibly a weakness of the whole pragmatist movement. Italian pragmatists underlined the importance of the concreteness of individuals in the realization of universal laws of mathematics and logic, physics and psychology. But, this attitude suffered from some serious tensions between metaphysical assumptions and methodological claims.

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AUTHORS

GIOVANNI MADDALENA Università del Molise maddalena[at]unimol.it

GIOVANNI TUZET Bocconi University giovanni.tuzet[at]unibocconi.it

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Naturalism and Metaphors Towards a Rortian Pragmatist Aesthetics

Kalle Puolakka

I. Introduction

1 The work of Richard Rorty, arguably the most significant neopragmatist philosopher, has received very little support in aesthetics. Rorty’s fellow pragmatist Richard Shusterman has presented the most systematic critical assessment of Rorty’s work, and some parts of his pragmatist theory are in direct confrontation with Rorty’s views. Shusterman’s most significant misgivings concerning Rorty’s neopragmatism from the point of view of aesthetics are connected with the dominant position he sees Rorty placing on language in the constitution of human experience (Shusterman 1997: 158-62; Shusterman 2006: 227n2). Instead of embracing the view of human experience found in John Dewey’s pragmatism that emphasizes its layered character Shusterman equates the conception of experience he sees underpinning Rorty’s work with a view called “hermeneutic universalism,” which is usually used as a short term for a conception in which language is considered the essential condition of thought and meaningful experience (Shusterman 2000: 238-9, 253-4). Moreover, when the individualistic aestheticism characterizing the activity of “the liberal ironist,” the central figure of Rorty’s social philosophy, is taken into account, Rorty’s views ultimately drift surprisingly far, Shusterman claims, from the democratic and communal aims central to John Dewey’s aesthetics (ibid.: 246-50). Hence, a pragmatist conception of aesthetics must be built on a different kind of ground than Rorty’s work provides.

2 Shusterman’s criticism of Rorty’s neopragmatism, however, is by no means unproblematic. By criticizing Rorty’s work for slipping into a view which he terms “linguistic mentalism” (ibid.: 258), Shusterman arguably associates Rorty’s neopragmatism with a philosophical conception known as “linguistic idealism,” a metaphysical doctrine which sees reality as essentially language-constructed. This kind of reading of Rorty’s work has in recent commentary literature been seen to provide a highly misguided view of its philosophical underpinnings.1 The significance of this body of literature in this context is that it directs the focus onto an aspect of Rorty’s

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neopragmatism that Shusterman does not take properly into consideration in his critical reading of Rorty’s work. This is the connection Rorty’s neopragmatism bears to the tradition of naturalistic philosophy. The basic tenet of Rorty’s naturalism maintains that a human’s relationship to his or her surroundings is constructed purely causally in the sense that it does not contain any kinds of mediating elements, such as mental representations. This naturalistic outlook serves as a foundation for Rorty’s critique of empiricist conceptions of knowledge that he supplements with the idea of “the myth of the given” introduced by Wilfrid Sellars.

3 Taking up the naturalism characterizing Rorty’s neopragmatism and the critique of empiricist conceptions of knowledge it involves might seem irrelevant to aesthetics. This, however, is not the case. The full relevance of these parts of Rorty’s neopragmatism is revealed once they are connected with a view underlying Rorty’s conception of literature, namely Donald Davidson’s theory of metaphor. Davidson’s account of metaphor is important for Rorty’s general naturalistic outlook, for, in his opinion, it provides an ample framework for explaining the significance and value of art, literature and other similar phenomena in the context of naturalistic philosophy. Davidson’s view, in other words, implies that “a proper acknowledgement of the cultural role of imaginative literature (and, more generally, of art, myth, and religion – all the ‘higher’ things) is [not] incompatible with a naturalistic philosophy” (Rorty 1991: 124).

4 Observing the influence of Davidson’s theory of metaphor on Rorty’s conception of literature deepens the problems of Shusterman’s critique of Rorty’s neopragmatism. This is because the decisive feature of Davidson’s view of metaphor which separates it from other influential accounts is that it does not explain the work of metaphor by assuming metaphors possess a second, metaphorical level of meaning above the literal meanings of utterances that is assumed to ground the content of a metaphorical expression (Davidson 1984/78: 245). Instead, Davidson unpacks the mystery of metaphors by concentrating on the effects metaphorical uses of language cause. Davidson does acknowledge that metaphors “make us notice aspects of things we did not notice before, bring surprising analogies and similarities to our attention and […] provide a kind of lens” (ibid.: 261). What Davidson, however, denies is that “metaphor does its work by having a special meaning, a specific cognitive content” (ibid.: 262). This is in other words to say that in the Davidsonian scheme, the work of metaphor is not primarily explained in linguistic terms. This is also shown by Rorty’s understanding of Davidson’s approach, for he compares the effects metaphors are described as having on conversations in the Davidsonian model with the effects such phenomena as slapping one’s interlocutor’s face or kissing him have in similar situations (Rorty 1989: 18). Rorty, in fact, explicitly calls the phenomena, the effects of which bear a likeness to the effects of metaphors, “non-linguistic” (Rorty 1991: 167).

5 In the following paper, I shall discuss Rorty’s conception of literature in light of the effect Davidson’s theory of metaphor had on it, as well as re-examine the relevance of Rorty’s neopragmatism for pragmatist conceptions of aesthetics and philosophy of art. Though it will form a sort of background, dwelling on the problems of Shusterman’s critique of Rorty will not play a major role in the paper. I raise this issue primarily to situate my own stance on Rorty’s pragmatism within some other readings it has received in philosophy of art.

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6 I begin the paper by examining the impact Davidson’s account had on the view of metaphor Rorty’s neopragmatist naturalism includes. One way in which the high prospects Rorty assigns to Davidson’s ideas in explaining art’s significance within a naturalistic framework can be illuminated is by way of examining the role Rorty sketches for metaphors in his postmetaphysical liberalist culture, and especially the value he sees them having in enhancing one of the central values of this kind of society, namely solidarity. Rorty does not himself connect his naturalistic account of metaphor with the social role he attaches to metaphors that explicitly. My belief is that the more fully worked out reading of this connection I shall offer provides new insights into the reasons that make metaphors valuable for Rorty’s postmetaphysical liberalist cultural aims. This investigation is also significant with respect to Shusterman’s critique of Rorty, for I believe it shows that there is a strong communal aspect in Rorty’s thinking on aesthetics and literature that readings addressing Rorty’s views through the notion of the liberalist ironist, such as Shusterman’s, fail to embrace. In fact, my belief is that Rorty’s conception of art and literature overlaps in some significant ways with the emphases central for John Dewey’s aesthetic theory. I close by outlining some wider implications the fuller account of Rorty’s philosophy of literature provided in the paper has for the place of pragmatism within contemporary aesthetics. Pointing out the similarities between Rorty’s and Dewey’s conceptions of aesthetics will be an important part of this examination. In my opinion, the assessment of Rorty’s work I provide shows that Shusterman’s view of its relevance for philosophy of art and aesthetics is too negative.

II. Naturalism and Metaphors in Rorty’s Neopragmatism

7 As Michael Williams points out, to talk of naturalism in connection with Rorty’s work may sound strange, given that Rorty’s name is usually associated with postmodernism and other such traditions of thought with very different philosophical undercurrents from those characterizing forms of naturalism (Williams 2009: xv). This is especially the case with such fields as aesthetics and philosophy of art. One of the central features of Rorty’s naturalism is that, in Rorty’s hands, naturalism turns into a purely negative view, in the sense that it rejects certain traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between human beings and their surroundings without, however, offering a detailed positive view in their place which would try to provide more satisfactory analyses about truth, knowledge, and reality, which preoccupy the views it opposes.

8 In short, the view of human subjectivity Rorty opposes is the idea that we are in touch with our surroundings in terms of representations and that the character of our contact with the world is determined by how closely the representations our minds contain correspond to the way the world actually is. The decisive difference between this deeply grained conception of what it is to be human, which, in Rorty’s opinion, has dominated most of modern philosophy, and his naturalism is that in the latter case human’s relationship with his or her surroundings is considered purely causal by nature, that is, to put it in Rorty’s own words, naturalized theories of the mind and language of the kind he supports make “all questions about the relation of either to the rest of the universe causal questions, as opposed to questions about the adequacy of representation and expression” (Rorty 1989: 15).

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9 Davidson has helpfully formulated this distinction in terms of a distinction between “causal intermediaries” and “epistemic intermediaries” (Davidson 2001: 144). While sensations do have a causal role in our beliefs, they do not by themselves determine the content of our beliefs and, hence, they cannot serve as reasons for our beliefs (ibid.: 143). This view of justification is in line with the Sellarsian critique of empiricism Rorty draws on, which maintains that sensations are by themselves mute and that they cannot, therefore, be cited as reasons for beliefs but that justification always takes place in “the logical space of reasons.” Rorty summarizes the view of the relationship between the mind and the world arising from these different accounts by saying that “the pragmatist recognizes relations of justification holding between beliefs and desires, and relations of causation holding between these beliefs and desires and other items in the universe but not relations of representation” (Rorty 1991: 37).

10 The kind of naturalism Rorty supports implies a position that many may find unappealing. This is the fact that it does not construe a decisive difference between the character that a human’s relationship to the world takes and that characterizing the relationship of other animals. For naturalism, this difference is more a matter of difference of degree than of kind. Both relationships are constructed purely causally, the causal processes involved in human life simply being much more complex in character (Rorty 2007: 113-4).

11 Rorty thinks that a decisive reason why this sort of naturalistic outlook on human subjectivity has been opposed is that it seems to jeopardize the supposed uniqueness of humans among other creatures, as well as the high value we attach to our products like works of literature. One way in which the threat in question here can be expressed is that, as Rorty himself puts it, the naturalistic view of the kind underlying his neopragmatism would seem to imply that we “secrete […] symphonies as our spleen secretes dark humors” (Rorty 1979: 44).

12 The worry expressed in this response to naturalism, however, is unwarranted. The causal relations constructing our lives do not have their origin solely in natural processes but humans have the power to create artefacts with similar impacts, and in Rorty’s view metaphors are among the most powerful tools of this kind. Explaining the development of human life solely by natural causes will take one only so far. An explanation of how humans developed “from the relative mindlessness of the monkey to the full-fledged mindedness of the human […] takes us off into neurology and thence into evolutionary biology,” while an explanation of how we got “from speaking Neanderthal to speaking postmodern […] takes us into intellectual history as the history of metaphor” (Rorty 1989: 16).

13 Yet, any account of metaphor will not do for Rorty and it is precisely Davidson’s theory that Rorty considers a particularly apt basis for developing an explanation of the significance of culture within a naturalistic philosophy. The main reason for this is that it is metaphysically on the same plane as the naturalist outlook he supports. For Rorty, Davidson’s view of metaphor does not merely mark an attempt to get hold of a cunning phenomenon of language but it squares well with the concerns of naturalistic philosophy in general. Most importantly, Davidsonian philosophy of language allows us to see language, not as a medium between self and world but as a tool for doing different sorts of things. For Rorty, this view “is part of a larger attempt to get rid of the traditional philosophical picture of what it is to be human” (ibid.: 19).

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14 What makes Davidson’s theory of metaphor naturalistic for Rorty is precisely the rejection it exhibits towards the idea that metaphors carry a special kind of message, that is, that metaphors include, in addition to their literal meaning, a kind of ideal level of meaning that grounds their cognitive content. The general goal of Rorty’s naturalistic account of metaphors is to call into question the meaningfulness of explaining the value of art by assuming that art communicates cognitive content in a way similar to some other fields of discourse in our culture, such as science. Instead, Rorty insists, we should try to explain the significance of literature and other cultural artefacts in other ways than by “trying to ‘broaden’ either semantic or epistemic notions” (Rorty 1991: 163). This is precisely what Davidson’s approach to metaphor makes possible, for: by putting metaphor outside the pale of semantics, insisting that a metaphorical sentence has no meaning other than its literal one, Davidson lets us see metaphors on the model of unfamiliar events in the natural world – causes of changing beliefs and desires – rather than on the model of representations of unfamiliar worlds, worlds which are ‘symbolic’ rather than ‘natural.’ (Ibid.)

15 Effective metaphors make us see things in a different light. Yet, metaphors do not have to be assumed to possess cognitive content to achieve this. Rorty elaborates the naturalistic account of the cognitive value of metaphor with the distinction between causes of beliefs and reasons for beliefs. Metaphors are for him similar to other “unfamiliar noises” we encounter in that their functioning cannot be fully predicted by our present means and they cannot be assigned determinate content by our present cognitive resources. For this reason metaphors cannot serve as reasons for beliefs. This, however, does not deprive metaphors of cognitive significance, for their lack of cognitive content does not imply that they could not have a causal role in shaping our beliefs and desires. Good metaphors make us attend to novel aspects in our environment and they can, thus, make us change our beliefs. This, however, does not mean that the metaphor expresses the novel belief we come to hold as a result of the cognitions the metaphor causes in us. From a naturalistic perspective, it is in other words a mistake to think that a metaphor’s capacity to reveal new aspects in one’s surroundings is based on its conveying information that we come to acquire as a result of grasping the meaning of the metaphor (ibid.: 169). As Davidson himself explains, “joke or dream or metaphor can, like a picture or a bump on the head, make us appreciate some fact – but not by standing for, or expressing the fact” (Davidson 1984/78: 262).

16 This is to say that despite their lack of cognitive content, metaphors are nevertheless responsible for a lot of cognitions that may eventually cause us to change our beliefs. This shows how metaphors can be effectual without possessing definitive cognitive content; if a particular metaphor “had not turned up, we would not have been moved […] to formulate and deploy certain sentences which do have such [cognitive] content” (Rorty 1991: 168). Even though they do not themselves express beliefs or open up symbolic worlds, metaphors, by making us attend to novel aspects in our environment, can have a causal role in the formation of our beliefs. This explains how metaphors can be cognitively significant, that is, how they can change our beliefs without possessing cognitive content of the kind beliefs possess. From Rorty’s point of view, the mistake of empiricist conceptions of knowledge and cognitive-idealist theories of metaphor is thus ultimately one and the same, namely a failure to see that “a stimulus to knowledge” does not itself have to convey knowledge (ibid.: 169).

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IV. Metaphors of Solidarity and Imagination

17 Bringing the naturalistic undercurrents of Rorty’s neopragmatism into sharper focus highlights previously unnoticed aspects in his work on philosophy art. It also undermines the critical reading Shusterman has presented of Rorty’s work. If metaphors are central means of cultural change and development, and if in Rorty’s account their effect is compared, not to the effect linguistic items like beliefs and sentences have on us, but to the effects engendered by various non-linguistic phenomena, it is arguable that Shusterman’s understanding of Rorty as a strong textualist is misguided. Recent pragmatist work in aesthetics seems to follow Shusterman’s conception of the role of language in Rorty’s philosophy rather closely. The strength of these accounts is, however, weakened by their failing to take into consideration the impact of Davidson’s view of metaphor on Rorty’s view, and how Rorty’s philosophy of literature builds on his conception of naturalism.2 The slight one- sidedness characterizing the reception of Rorty’s work within aesthetics and philosophy of literature is unfortunate, for it has no doubt discouraged attempts at more thorough assessments of its value for aesthetics. I shall provide such an assessment at the end of my paper, and working out the communal aspect of Rorty’s thinking on aesthetics revealed by the position metaphors have in his social philosophy, a topic I shall now turn to, will be important for this purpose.

18 The full import of Davidson’s account of metaphor for Rorty’s neopragmatism becomes apparent from the position Rorty assigns to literature and metaphors in the postmetaphysical, liberalist society he sketches. Especially solidarity receives an important position in Rorty’s view. By solidarity Rorty refers to a feeling of communality between human beings and to the capacity of being alert and sensitive to the kinds of pain and humiliation people may be subjected to. Rorty’s account of liberalism is founded on Judith Sklar’s view of liberalists as “the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do” (Rorty 1989: xv). For Rorty, solidarity is an inherently local phenomenon, which is to say that it has to be constructed out of different pieces in different contexts and perhaps even recreated from the most unexpected elements once new unforeseeable situations emerge, rather than something to be understood in terms of a common human nature people share and as something already waiting for us in advance (Rorty 1989: 94).

19 The attempt at increasing the “sense of ‘us’” Rorty finds central to the feeling of solidarity requires “skill at recognizing and describing the different sorts of little things around which individuals or communities center their fantasies and their lives” (ibid.: 93). Hence, one capacity receiving an important role in the enhancement of solidarity is imaginative engagement with other people. The sense of us lying at the heart of solidarity requires that we develop ways of discerning similarities and differences between human groups upon which the feeling of communality underlying solidarity can be built. As Rorty explains the importance of imaginative engagement for his position on solidarity, “skill at imaginative identification does the work which the liberal metaphysician would like to have done by a specifically moral motivation – rationality or the love of God […]” (ibid.).

20 Metaphors are important parts of this imaginative engagement. Since the feeling of solidarity requires perceiving similarities and differences between oneself and those

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one tries to relate to in a given context, a metaphor achieving this sort of bond becomes an important means of enhancing solidarity. Metaphors can make us notice novel similarities between different things and in this respect they have a role in increasing the presence of solidarity. However, it seems that Davidson’s naturalistic view of metaphor manages to embrace the role Rorty attributes to metaphors in enhancing solidarity in a particularly apt way. This is because it is in line with the contextual and contingent account of solidarity Rorty offers. This account insists on the impossibility of fixing a permanent ground for developing a method for enhancing the presence of solidarity and instead emphasizes that attempts at increasing solidarity always take place in contingent historical circumstances and that it may thus require unforeseeable building blocks.

21 The scepticism the naturalistic account of metaphor exhibits towards the idea that metaphors carry a cognitive content implies a highly rich and dynamic view of the effects of metaphors. Metaphors do not transmit belief-like states with a specified content which the receiver, after having grasped the content of the metaphor, places alongside his or her current beliefs, and which he or she then assesses in relation to them, ultimately either rejecting or accepting the belief the metaphor conveys. The naturalistic account provides a different view of the effect of a metaphor. As the metaphor does not say anything more than what the words in their literal meaning express, neither does it straightforwardly tell how the likenesses the metaphor draws attention to should be understood (Davidson 1984/78: 255). This shows that working out the significance of the metaphor requires much more effort and sensitivity of perception than the mere weighing of the validity of a newly encountered belief. In the Davidsonian model, the effects of metaphors thus become highly multi-faceted and intensive phenomena, and the change in beliefs they cause are comparable to an awakening kind of state, like the experience of regaining consciousness after a blow on the head.

22 Though Rorty does not develop his view of metaphors as one of the central means for enhancing the feeling of solidarity in relation to Davidson’s naturalistic account that explicitly, the picture of the engagement with a metaphor that view implies reveals the full significance metaphors may have in furthering the social values central to Rorty’s liberalism. The engagement with a metaphor structurally overlaps in some significant respects with the sensitivity and alertness to contextual detail Rorty finds central to the enhancement of solidarity. Metaphors stir the same kind of mental powers that are also at the heart of the construction of solidarity, and thus metaphors become important devices for developing those capacities required in the enhancement of solidarity. There is no common set of rules or axioms with the help of which it could be possible to spell out what the capacity to feel solidarity with one’s neighbours in every possible situation requires. Similarly, it is impossible to give a definite list of how the similarities a given metaphor can cause us to see should be understood and the effect the metaphor may have on our beliefs and desires. As in the case of solidarity, all one can do with respect to metaphors is to stay imaginatively alert. In this respect, it is understandable why Rorty thinks that the question “How do metaphors work?” is in fact in no substantial sense different from such questions as “What is the nature of the unexpected?” or “How do surprises work?” (Rorty 1991: 106).

23 These reflections show that for Rorty the value of metaphors lies primarily in the platform engagements with metaphors afford for the development of the imaginative

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mental powers central to the enhancement of solidarity. Yet, metaphors are not only important as surprising “unfamiliar noises” but the process in which a metaphor gradually loses its metaphorical quality and as a result of which it begins to resemble literal expressions with a specified and shared content can have valuable outcomes as well. The distinction between causes and reasons becomes important once again. According to Rorty, for Davidson the distinction between cognitive content and “mere stimuli” does not mark a definitive and permanent metaphysical divide between different realms of reality, instead it simply concerns how we are prepared to embrace, handle, and account for the things falling under these categories. That is, we can predict expressions with a definitive content, in the sense that we know what beliefs they are used to express and how they are related to other established expressions in our culture. These sorts of noises can be used to express beliefs precisely because they have a role in different patterns of justification, and they can thus serve as reasons for beliefs. However, metaphors as unfamiliar noises, which lack definitive and predictable cognitive content, cannot enter into the patterns of justification.

24 The functioning of a metaphorical expression however changes as the metaphor begins to lose its metaphorical character, in other words when the metaphor begins to acquire a determinate content similar to that which literal expressions possess. As a result of this development, metaphors “cross the line from ‘mere’ causes of belief to reasons for belief” (ibid.: 171). For both Rorty and Davidson, the difference between metaphors and other expressions of language does not lie “deep within the noise itself” but it is precisely a function of how the expression operates in a community. When a specified meaning becomes more widely associated with a particular metaphorical expression – a development Rorty calls “a process of familiarization” – that expression can be used to express a specified belief and it can thus begin to serve as a reason for belief. In the course of this process, the metaphor gradually becomes “stale,” in the sense that the similarities and ways of connecting associated with the metaphor become fixed. As a result, the metaphor loses its dynamicity and unpredictable character, that is, precisely those qualities that initially inspired Rorty to attach such a high value to metaphors in his postmetaphysical culture.

25 However, the process of familiarization is not completely a negative happening. Though becoming stale, the metaphor nevertheless enriches a community with a particular and novel way of making sense of the surrounding world or, as Rorty himself puts it, the familiarization of a metaphor enlarges “logical space” (ibid.: 124). Rorty maintains that we may find the insights some metaphors afford “so compelling that we try to make them candidates for belief, for literal truth” (ibid.). In other words, we try to make more and more people familiar with the interpretation of the metaphor we have found significant and to make them assign to it the same expressive content as we do. Now the value of the process of familiarization for the capacities required in the enhancement of solidarity lies in the fact that the metaphor’s becoming familiar to a larger group of people requires, within a community, a more wide-ranging utilization of imaginative mental capacities. Without this sort of more extended use of imagination from the members of a community the particular outlook associated with the metaphor could not become fixed as widely as is required in the process of the metaphor’s crossing the line from an unfamiliar noise to becoming a part of our patterns of justification. The metaphor must first become common currency for the community, so to speak, before it can enlarge logical space. A communal use of imagination is precisely what is required in incorporating a metaphor into a

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community. Thus, metaphors are not only significant as unfamiliar noises that cause surprising cognitions and that as a result make us reweave our web of beliefs and desires but the way in which metaphors become more widely used and familiar to a community has its own valuable outcomes as well.

V. Rorty and the Prospects of Pragmatist Aesthetics

26 Explicating the cultural significance Rorty attaches to metaphors through the naturalistic understanding of their functioning he draws from Davidson’s view provides new insights into the value metaphors may have for the liberalist goals characterizing Rorty’s social philosophy. It also reveals some new aspects in Rorty’s work related to aesthetics, for example that it includes emphases and ideas similar to those found in some other pragmatist-inspired aesthetic theories. This conclusion, I believe, has some wider implications for the place of pragmatism within contemporary aesthetics. Below, I shall sketch some of those implications.

27 One might think that pragmatist aesthetics would be one of the most flourishing traditions of contemporary aesthetics. Consider, for example, that one of the major figures of pragmatist philosophy, John Dewey, wrote a treatise on aesthetics, Art as Experience, which is marked by a richness and breadth of concern with very few equals in other philosophical traditions. Pragmatism’s prospects for providing an interesting outlook on aesthetics is also shown by a claim Dewey presented in 1930, which proclaimed that the next great era of philosophy “will emerge when the significance of the social sciences and arts has become the object of reflective attention in the same way that mathematical and physical sciences have been made the objects of thought in the past, and when their full import is grasped” (Dewey 1980/30: 18). Yet, pragmatism’s position within contemporary aesthetics does not correspond to the expectations these factors create. The tradition of Anglo-American aesthetics is still dominated by analytic aesthetics which has sometimes understood itself as a direct reaction against the murkiness and conceptual inaccuracies that Dewey’s aesthetics has been considered to be characterized by.3

28 Pragmatism’s significance for aesthetics, however, has not yet been examined in full. If Rorty’s views are not after all plagued by the kinds of problems Shusterman insists they are, it might be the case that precisely the Rortian themes raised in this paper are able to open up previously unexamined pathways for pragmatist aesthetics. One important reason why I believe these themes are worth a more detailed examination is that the aspects of Rorty’s philosophy of literature relating to the social and cultural function of art and the aesthetic the above reading reveals, overlap in some significant ways with the central tenets of John Dewey’s aesthetic theory. Rorty and Dewey just use a partly different terminology in connection with them, Rorty addressing them in terms of metaphor, while Dewey talks about imagination.

29 Imagination has an important part in Dewey’s aesthetics. For Dewey, “aesthetic experience is imaginative” (ibid.: 272). What I take Dewey to mean by this is that in aesthetic experience different individual elements form a complex unity and imagination is precisely the capacity that makes this tying possible. “When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination […],” writes Dewey (ibid.: 267). Dewey emphasizes the communal and cultural importance of imagination, and some moral philosophers and philosophers of education have developed the

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Deweyan conception of imagination further in their own fields. Dewey’s aesthetics has also been considered in these contexts,4 though not that thoroughly. Given the important position of imagination in Dewey’s aesthetic theory, these fields are arguably important for pragmatist aesthetics as well, and the ideas introduced in them can bring new viewpoints and issues to pragmatist aesthetics.

30 It is however important to note with regard to an examination of the relevance of Rorty’s work for aesthetics that Dewey’s and Rorty’s difference is only terminological. Rorty uses the concept of metaphor to tap into problems similar to those Dewey addresses. This is not a surprise, given that metaphor and imagination have a similar structure, namely to show something in a new light. In fact, in some of his later works, Rorty explicitly addresses the theme of cultural development through the notion of imagination, and he ascribes to that faculty the same kind of cultural role that he in his earlier works assigned to metaphors.5 In this respect, it is highly likely that Rorty’s neopragmatism is able to make an important contribution to a pragmatist view of aesthetics emphasizing the social and cultural significance of imagination and aesthetic experience.

31 Developments also in philosophy of literature open up new prospects for pragmatism. In his recent work Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson presents a multifarious critique of analytic philosophy of literature, which in many respects relies on ideas similar to those central to forms of pragmatism. The critical edge of Gibson’s work is directed to a tradition in analytic aesthetics in which the issue regarding the cognitive value of literature is framed as the problem of the referents of fictive names and how fictional sentences can possess truth-content. The major shortcoming Gibson sees in this tradition is that it approaches the problem of fiction too narrowly as a purely semantic question (Gibson 2007: 6-7). Gibson’s goal is not to provide a more successful analysis of the semantics of fictive uses of language but to undermine the position of this set of questions in attempts to shed light on the cognitive value of literature. He tries to open up a wider outlook on the relationship of fictional works to reality than semantic approaches provide. A central feature of Gibson’s critique is to show that the conception of language underlying the received understanding of the problem of fiction is too heavily bound to the idea that language’s capacity to represent the world serves as its source of meaningfulness. In this conception, language is in other words understood as a picture of reality. Fictional language appears problematic from this perspective precisely because it does not represent any worldly affairs (ibid.: 50-5).

32 As a basis for his criticism, Gibson offers an alternative picture of how language is connected with reality. He draws heavily on the philosophy of language of the later Wittgenstein in which the meaningfulness of language is explained in terms of the various roles pieces of language have in the rule-guided language games making up our linguistic community. Where Gibson sees the value of Wittgenstein’s ideas to lie is precisely in their presentation of “a thoroughly social, cultural conception of language,” which makes it possible to abandon the metaphysical commitments regarding the relationship between language and world involved in the language as a picture of reality conception (ibid.: 60).

33 Especially the reflections Wittgenstein puts forth on the standard metre stored in the Paris Archive are important for Gibson’s aims. In his view, Wittgenstein’s example is a particularly illuminating case of how there are other ways of being in connection with reality than through representation. According to Wittgenstein, the standard metre is a

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peculiar object in the respect that “one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long […]” (Wittgenstein 2001/1953: § 122). This is to say that the standard metre is not an instance of a metaphysical entity “being one metre long,” but it itself explains what it means to be one metre long. With his peculiar description of the standard metre, Wittgenstein’s aim in Gibson’s view is not to ascribe some property to the object. Rather, it is intended to draw attention to “the role the standard metre has in the practice of measurement” (Gibson 2007: 64). The standard metre is not a representation of a metre; it provides the standards for representing something as being one metre long and in this respect it is a means of giving structure to the world and one’s experience of it.

34 Gibson’s explanation of how fictional works of literature connect with reality builds upon the Wittgensteinian analysis of the standard metre. The events fictional works portray should not be understood as representations of real world events but, like the standard metre, they are to be understood as providing standards for a group of concepts by which we represent the world. A decisive difference between the standard metre and works of literary fiction, however, is that the cultural concepts, that is, such concepts as “love,” “suffering,” “exploitation,” and “devotion,” the contents of which literary works illuminate, are more complex than the practice of measuring and the concepts it includes. The standards for the concepts which Gibson sees as the focus points of literary fiction are not grounded on an unequivocal object “but upon very elaborate visions of human life” (ibid.: 71). Despite their complexity, it is, nevertheless, possible to formulate some standards for the application of these concepts and for Gibson, the narrative traditions of different cultures, by presenting us “refined, varied, and complex possibilities of perception and description,” serve as the archives for constructing standards for their application (ibid.). For example, Gibson argues that in Notes from Underground, Feodor Dostoevsky brings to our attention a suffering that “arises from a condition of mind in which one’s self and one’s world come to appear at once alien and revolting.” Gibson continues by noting that Dostoevsky’s work does not present a “mimetic duplication” of a case of suffering but in reading it we are engaged with “an object that is constitutive of a way in which we can see our world […].” In this respect, literary works have a kind of primacy to representation. They do not themselves represent cultural practices but rather they form a ground for making sense of them (ibid.: 129).

35 Within the confines of this article, it is impossible to give a more detailed examination of Gibson’s view of fiction. What is more interesting in this context is to observe the over-laps between Gibson’s philosophy of literature and pragmatist philosophy and aesthetics. It is for example noteworthy that the critical attitude towards the problem of fiction Gibson takes is in many respects similar to Rorty’s. Like Gibson, Rorty criticizes approaches to fiction which treat it primarily as a question about the semantics of fictive sentences. Rorty focuses on the tradition stemming from Bertrand Russell’s analysis of fictive sentences. For Rorty, too, it is central to reveal that this approach to fiction is tied to an understanding of language in which linguistic items are seen to derive their meaning from a relationship of representation to worldly objects and state of affairs, in other words precisely the same picture view of language that according to Gibson has dominated the issue regarding the cognitive significance of fiction (Rorty 1982/81: 110-4). Moreover, the cure Rorty offers for overcoming this framework is precisely the same as Gibson’s, namely the late Wittgensteinian view of language as a cluster of language games (ibid.: 129). For Rorty, its significance is

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precisely in that it involves a wholly different view of how language is connected with reality than the picture theory of language presents. Once the late Wittgensteinian view is embraced, the very meaningfulness of the questions found central to a successful analysis of the cognitive value of literature in the contemporary discussion on fiction in Rorty’s opinion evaporates. That is, “philosophical problems about fiction simply do not arise once the picture picture is dropped,” argues Rorty (ibid.: 130). This, again, is very much in line with Gibson’s position.

36 There are also other points of contact between Gibson’s philosophy of literature and pragmatist philosophy and aesthetics. First, Gibson opposes dualisms and separations similar to those different forms of pragmatism have tried to overcome, and second, besides the later Wittgenstein, Gibson cites other figures who have been associated with the pragmatist tradition, such as Wilfrid Sellars, whose critique of empiricism and the distinction between the space of causes and the space of reasons it includes forms an important part of Gibson’s critical examination of contemporary analytic philosophy of literature (Gibson 2007: 54-5, 61). Finally, Gibson’s attempt to see fiction in a wider perspective than as a purely semantic question can be seen to be at least partly similar in spirit to Davidson’s attempt to move the problem of metaphor outside the pale of semantics.

37 What, however, is noteworthy is that despite these overlaps in his book Gibson nowhere discusses pragmatist accounts of art and the aesthetic at length. Rorty and Shusterman are mentioned only in passing and Dewey’s views are not discussed at all. This oversight is a shame, for by providing a multifarious picture of the ways in which works of art are connected with aspects of human life different forms of pragmatism give a possibility for a highly systematic account of literature’s relationship to reality, and hence they can supplement Gibson’s account. A more detailed development of this pragmatist view of literature needs to be left for another occasion. However, it is my belief that the naturalistic conception of metaphor Rorty draws from Davidson’s work and the view of literature’s social role he develops on the basis of it will form a significant part of this more fully-fledged pragmatist account. In this respect, my view of the relevance of Rorty’s work for aesthetics and philosophy of art is quite different from Shusterman’s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRANDOM R., (2000), “Vocabularies and Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in Brandom R. (ed.), Rorty and His Critics, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

DAVIDSON D., (1984/1978), “What Metaphors Mean,” in Davidson D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

DAVIDSON D., (2001), Subjective, Objective, Intersubjective, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

DEWEY J., (1980/34), Art as Experience, New York, Perigee Books.

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DEWEY J., (1960/30), “From Absolutism to Experientialism,” in Bernstein R. (ed.), On Experience, Nature, and Freedom: Representative Selections, New York, Library of Liberal Arts.

FESMIRE S., (2003), John Dewey and Moral Imagination. Pragmatism in Ethics, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press.

ISENBERG A., (1987), “Analytical Philosophy and the Study of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, 125-36.

GIBSON J., (2007), Fiction and the Weave of Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

LEDDY T., (2005), “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

MALECKI W., (2010), Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory, New York et. al., Peter Lang.

RORTY R., (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

RORTY R., (1982/81), “Is there a Problem about Fictional Discourse?,” in Rorty R., Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press.

RORTY R., (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RORTY R., (1991), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RORTY R., (2007), Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

SHUSTERMAN R., (1997), Practicing Philosophy, New York, Routledge.

SHUSTERMAN R., (2000), Pragmatist Aesthetics. Living Beauy, Rethinking Art. Second Edition, New York, Rowman and Littlefield.

SHUSTERMAN R., (2002), Surface and Depth. Dialectics of Criticism and Culture, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press.

SHUSTERMAN R., (2006), “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2), 217-29.

TARTAGLIA J., (2007), Rorty and the Mirror of Nature, New York, Routledge.

WILLIAMS M., (2009), “Introduction to the Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition,” in Rorty R., Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition, Princeton and London, Princeton University Press.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (2001/1953), Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Brandom (2000: 160-1), Tartaglia (2007: 126), Williams (2009: xxvii-xxix). 2. For example, in his recent monograph (Malecki 2010) on Shusterman’s aesthetic theory, Wojcieh Malecki discusses neither Rorty’s naturalism nor the effect Davidson’s conception of metaphor had on Rorty’s philosophy of literature. 3. For example, Arnold Isenberg called Dewey’s Art as Experience “a hodgepodge of conflicting methods and undisciplined speculations” (Isenberg 1987: 128). For more on the reception of Dewey’s work within analytic aesthetics see Leddy 2005. 4. See especially Fesmire 2003.

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5. See Rorty 2007.

ABSTRACTS

This paper outlines a pragmatist aesthetic theory on the basis of themes relating to naturalism, metaphor, and solidarity found in Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. A central part of this attempt is to show that some previous readings of Rorty’s work in aesthetics are misguided. I begin by raising aspects of Rorty’s work that have been previously largely overlooked in aesthetics and philosophy of art, and which I believe undermine particularly Richard Shusterman’s critical reading of Rorty. I shall then move on to discuss the social role Rorty assigns to metaphors in his postmetaphysical liberalist culture and argue that the social and cultural view of art and the aesthetic Rorty’s philosophy of literature contains overlaps in some significant respects with some central points of John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics. I close by outlining some new set of issues for pragmatist aesthetics that emerge from the discussion of Rorty’s work presented in the paper.

AUTHOR

KALLE PUOLAKKA University of Helsinki kalle.puolakka[at]helsinki.fi

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Book Review

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Vincenzo COSTA, Fenomenologia dell’intersoggettività Roma, Carocci, 2010

Giovanni Maddalena

REFERENCES

Vincenzo COSTA, Fenomenologia dell’intersoggettività, Roma, Carocci 2010

I. Introduction

1 Can phenomenology and pragmatism, two early twentieth century theories, be alive today and furnish a valid possibility in our philosophical landscape? Moreover, can they work together? The operation does not seem impossible since Peirce himself held a phenomenology, which is an indispensable part of his never-finished system; James’s psychology is often a phenomenology, and Husserl recognized James as an interesting author because of his phenomenological insights. However, the parochial attitude has often undermined the possibility of a common path, notwithstanding noble attempts to use them together (i.e. Rosenthal & Bourgeois 1983). But, there are a few obstacles.

2 The first crucial point is the interpretation of Husserl’s thought. Reading Husserl’s thought in an idealist way does not permit to use his phenomenology for a completely new conception of being as the one held by pragmatists.

3 Second, it is not clear where the intersection has to be fixed. Where could phenomenology and pragmatism find a unifying concept or moment? Even Peirce’s classification of science that lists phenomenology and semiotics, indicating in the first the origin of the principles of the second one, does not solve the problem precisely, even though it suggests a possible strategy.

4 Third, contrary to what happened at the beginning of the last century, phenomenology and pragmatism should become clear about the new paradigms they foster. In their

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original version they proclaimed the revolution but they never got there, or never got far enough.

5 For these reasons, Costa’s book on intersubjectivity is a good starting point and very useful to overcome at least the first obstacle, and producing some insightful comments on the other two.

II. Milan School of Phenomenology and Costa’s Reading of Intersubjectivity

6 There are at least as many ways to read Husserl as to read Peirce. Costa belongs to an Italian phenomenological school, based in Milan, and founded by Antonio Banfi and Enzo Paci at the half of the last century. Various phenomenological streams stemmed from their lessons. One of the most important is the one led by Giovanni Piana in the ‘60s. Piana and his followers read Husserl in a realistic way, pointing out the difference between genetic and static approach to phenomenology, the power of passive syntheses as anti-subjectivist moment in the formation of the world, and the methodic relevance of Husserl’s reductions (Costa, Franzini & Spinicci 2002).

7 Costa is a powerful representative of this school of thought. Besides that, he chooses a topic as intersubjectivity, which amplifies this approach, and he has the gift of clarity.

8 According to Costa, Husserl never thought of founding intersubjectivity on a solipsistic ground. The phenomenological analysis that reduces everything to the certainty of the lived self is “not a dogma but a structure” (56). Moreover, it is a static structure that has nothing to do with the dynamic genesis of the self, which is naturally social.

9 The static structure of the self accounts for the difference between the phenomenological perception of our “experience” (Erlebnis) and any others’. This difference explains why we know we are not lying while we never can say the same about others. From this difference we can understand that the order of time is essential to read consciousness in a phenomenological way: my original Erlebnis belongs to a specific current of consciousness, to an ordered series of experiences that I can observe directly, while I can enter another’s consciousness only indirectly.

10 I think that phenomenology has to instruct or to simply to remind pragmatists of this crucial difference between our perception of ourselves and of the world. In Peirce’s phenomenology there is a phenomenological difference between firstness, secondness and thirdness which should catch the same issue. And some sort of recognition of this phenomenic difference, or rather, the concern for it, is certainly present in James’ psychology, and in Dewey’s and Mead’s logics. However, sometimes scholars have downplayed this phenomenological background focusing on more attractive semiotic and logic paths loosing the importance of this background.

11 Costa explores this fundamental theme in comparison with different approaches: Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Scheler’s, Schütz’s, Sartre’s phenomenology, cognitive sciences. His argument is that every other approach has to presuppose the phenomenological relationships that are founded in the experience of the self. Statically, then, the world and its sociality are founded by the self, and not the other way around: “if I had no experience of my action in my body, to be active in my body and to express myself in it, I could not apperceive a different body as expression of another living consciousness” (89).

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12 Here one may discover the critical point. Passing from the original experience of the self to others’ consciousness, Costa relies upon Husserl’s well known concept of analogy. He tries to read it as realistically as possible maintaining that the late Husserl understood analogy as a “passive intentionality,” an already-happened phenomenological synthesis that implies a necessary cross-reference among contents (90-1). Here analogy is not a form of reasoning but a form of intentionality. I will return to this point later.

13 Once ascertained the passage from the self to the other, Costa becomes a pragmatist. He denies almost any form of “empathy” in favor of an interactionist view of the world (110) so that signs, tools, culture have to be explained reading and interpreting another person and not magically entering his self-consciousness. Moreover, Costa uses Mead’s concept of significant gesture to account for the birth of culture, namely for the interpretation of another one through external signs (162). Originally, Costa ties comprehension to the important dimension of totality without which signs could only partially work. Without reference to totality, they work only as they work in animals, as sense stimuli, but they cannot have the teleological reference to everybody and every time in the future, which are typical of human actions. “I’ll do that for x and y,” implies somehow the whole history and that is why “promises” and similar acts are so important in human relationships: they express this reference to totality. It is a kind of remark that matches Peirce’s insistence on the teleological drive present in signs (Hulswit 2002; Short 2007).

14 Costa’s reading succeeds in giving us a thorough phenomenological account that encompasses many, and some of the best, insights of contemporary philosophy. He can combine his pattern with both pragmatism and hermeneutic narrative patterns rescuing from each scheme the part more akin to clarity and common sense.

III. The Point of Intersection

15 We saw the critical point is the intersection between phenomenology and semiotics. The crucial point is “analogy,” the kind of phenomenological operation that presides over our initial attribution of a mind to others. Correctly, Costa focuses on defending analogy from biological innatism and categorical transcendentalism, but he maintains that analogy is not a reasoning as well because it is an “ante-predicative association” (that comes before any predication), “a unitary synthetic phenomenon” (91, 92). Here the Husserlian belonging is winning out against the usual respect for common sense that Costa shows in his book. Why is “association” not a possible part of a reasoning? Why is “synthesis” not a reasoning, even if Costa himself reads it as a set of “internal rules of reference”? Peirce’s semiotic explains association as indexical, and internal cross references as iconic driven. They are the first part or move of reasoning, both statically and genetically conceived. The intersection between phenomenology and semiotics does not come with Mead’s significant gesture, as Costa suggests, but with Peirce’s classification of signs. Of course, it is a kind of intersection that conveys big issues, and probably also the link between Peirce’s phenomenology and semiotics has not been settled yet. However, this would be an interesting point to merge the two philosophies.

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IV. United Perspectives

16 Pure Peirce scholars will object that in Peirce there is no room for any internalism and that we should better get rid also of the foundation of the self on our phenomenological knowledge. However, Costa does deny that we get to the self through an external, sign- driven way, as far as we are describing the dynamic of reasoning. Only in a static dimension he stresses the foundation of the self on a continuity of time directly perceived, a dimension that classic pragmatists often downplayed favoring an inferential account. But this latter approach is not absolute and in any case it is worth discussing because in there we can find some of the most interesting suggestions of pragmatism about epistemology and metaphysics of the Self (see Calcaterra 2006) and of Continuity. Interestingly, the consistent understanding of this phenomenological perception as referred to the continuity of time seems to connect Costa’s insight to the more advanced theories on mathematical intuitionism that use Husserl and Peirce at once (see Zalamea 2008). According to this approach we can maintain that phenomenology and pragmatism refer to the same essential world of possibilities. The real issue is to understand how these possibilities become actual and necessary, and how the concept of continuity plays a decisive role in this understanding.

17 In order to complete this insight about the way in which the continuity of possibilities involves actualities and necessities, we should deepen the concept of syntheticity, probably more than what Peirce and Husserl did. I think they remained caught in a too much ‘like Kant’ view of synthesis, in its turn tied to a particular view of necessity.

18 Peirce’s semiotic can furnish the grammar for a different kind of syntheticity based on a very different conception of necessity as “habit of action.” Peirce’s view of mathematics and our ways of “doing mathematics” through diagrams that conveys universals into particulars can be the phenomenological and semiotic path that we need in order to get to this profound comprehension of syntheticity. It would be also a concrete and fertile field of intersection between phenomenology and semiotics, a field that would exploit and develop the inspiring insight of Costa’s book.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CALCATERRA R. M. (ed.), (2005), Semiotica e fenomenologia del sé, Torino, Aragno.

COSTA V., FRANZINI E. & P. SPINICCI, (2002), La fenomenologia, Torino, Einaudi.

ROSENTHAL S. B. & P. L. BOURGEOIS, (1983), Pragmatism and Phenomenology: A Philosophic Encounter, Amsterdam, Grüner.

HULSWIT M., (2002), From Cause to Causation. A Peircean Perspective, Dordrecht, Kleuwer Academic Publisher.

SHORT T. L., (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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ZALAMEA F., (2008), Filosofia sintetica de las matematicas contemporaneas, Bogotà, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

AUTHORS

GIOVANNI MADDALENA Università del Molise maddalena[at]unimol.it

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Richard BERNSTEIN, Filosofía y democracia: John Dewey Ramón del Castillo (ed.) & Alicia García Ruiz (trans.), Barcelona, Herder, 2010

Núria Sara Miras Boronat

REFERENCES

Richard BERNSTEIN, Filosofía y democracia: John Dewey, Ramón del Castillo (ed.) & Alicia García Ruiz (trans.), Barcelona, Herder, 2010

Dewey and the Task before Us: The Making of the Democratic Experience

1 This book review could also be entitled “John Dewey: Old and New,” recalling a distant resemblance to one of the most well known books of Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1930). But in this case the subject pursued under this title would be the development in the reception of John Dewey’s work in the past century. This is a genuine hermeneutical reflection on the significance of one of the most important American intellectuals in the present day.

2 The following questions could belong to what in the European tradition of thought is called a “hermeneutical” approach. In which context is Dewey’s philosophy to be understood? What could be the purpose of a collection of Richard Bernstein’s essays from 1966 until 2010, i.e. from the old to the newest Bernstein’s Dewey? What can the old Dewey say about the problems of democracy today? To answer the first question requires assuming a critical position towards our common philosophical past. The second question assumes a critical impasse between the old and new Dewey, and also the necessity to come back, in a reflexive way, to the origins from time to time. It means trying to break the distance but, at the same time, having to assume that a

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certain tension between past and present problems can never entirely be loosened. The hermeneutical question is thus bound to the practical interest of the common good. The answer to the third question demands not only a critical relationship to our shared past, but above all a compromise with the future: the task before us. And seeing the democracy as the task before us is exactly the clue that allows identifying the master key to Dewey’s thought, old and new: making of democratic experience. That is the spirit, the ghost, that also crosses Bernstein’s interpretation of Dewey.

3 In 1966 Bernstein shows his awareness of these considerations when he chooses a fragment of Dewey’s essay “Philosophy and Civilization” (1927) as representative of Dewey’s conception of philosophy: “The life of all thought is to effect a junction at some point of the new and the old, of deep-sunk customs and unconscious dispositions, that are brought to the light of attention by some conflict with newly emerging directions of activity. Philosophies which emerge at distinctive periods define the large patterns of continuity which are woven in effecting the enduring junctions of a stubborn past and an insistent future” (44). The interaction between immediate experience and critical distance, discretion and continuity, facts and values, the individual and the communal, theory and praxis, thought and action, is revisited in the 12 chapters that constitute the delicious introduction to Dewey’s thought in 1966. The book is completed with two other essays first published in Bernstein’s other books: “John Dewey on Democracy: the Task before Us” (from Philosophical Profiles. Essays in a Pragmatic Mode, 1986), and “John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy” (from The Pragmatic Turn, 2010). The book is attractive not only because it brings together all of Bernstein’s accounts of Dewey but also because it makes them available to a broad Spanish-speaking audience, whose access to the 1966 essays had been otherwise impossible, as Amazon and similar sales had not existed until a few years ago. A third merit of the book is obviously in its presentation of the intellectual development of John Dewey, which would be especially valuable to those who are not necessarily acquainted with one of the most classical American pragmatists. But it is also a good opportunity for other Dewey scholars to initiate a dialogue concerning the importance of Dewey for the tradition of the American pragmatism in particular as well as the complex relation between philosophy and democracy in general.

4 A fourth appeal of the book, which may not be as obvious as those mentioned before, consists in the mode and style of the presentation. Rather than chronologically, Dewey’s philosophy is introduced via different topics. The book contains the obligatory references to Dewey’s life without being excessively biographical. An interesting philosophical discussion takes place without assuming a heavy metaphysical background. Bernstein’s keeps a modest tone, achieving a lightweight introduction to such severe questions. The effect is seriously meritorious and the effect is a result of a conscious and delicate treatment of Dewey’s deepest philosophical concerns. And this is of course the most Deweyan way to attend his conception of philosophy, which requires a combination of “modesty and courage.” Attending to his conception is the “only way I know of,” writes Dewey, “in which the philosopher can look his fellow man in the face with frankness and with humanity.”1

5 Dewey’s philosophical themes were rich and various, reaching the variety of spheres of human life, from psychology to the nature of scientific inquiry, from arts to values, and from education to the ups and downs of political life. A short explanation of Dewey’s main contributions to philosophy can be helpful in showing the complexity of his

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thought. The first and primary concern of the man Dewey could be the vision of philosophy as a critical and reconstructive task. This is true if we decide to enter in a reflexive dialogue with the past philosophical traditions which may nowadays sound trivial, since making history of philosophy is part of doing philosophy. However, when Dewey started doing philosophy, he could have reflected on any American philosophical tradition. As Bernstein points out, the origins of Dewey’s philosophy are an imprint of the conjunction between the philosophies of Hegel and Darwin. This is in fact a double consideration of human reality as a dynamic reality, called either Geist or Nature. This is a world-view that contrasts strongly with the quiet realism or the sober transcendental idealism. For realism, the objects stay as such, isolated and exposed to our senses waiting to be discovered. For transcendental idealism, the Ding-an-sich may remain a mystery, but we can keep ourselves satisfied by seeing it through the conceptual system projected by the categories of human understanding.

6 In some restricted sense, realism and transcendental idealism may admit surprises and adventures. But this sense is far away from a world of relations and transactions, in which the whole composition remains constantly changing. It forces one into a state of permanent reconstruction of his experience, not because the discretional elements of experience wait for its essence to be perceived or revealed, but because what we experience is a constantly changing reality. Experience itself is complex in how it is part of a structure that involves a whole framework beyond the instant act of perception, recalling experiences of the past and looking forward to the future. As Bernstein shows from the first chapters, the most exciting find of Dewey’s theoretical philosophy is the discovery of another concept of experience, which is opposed to what Dewey called “the orthodox description of the experience” (98). The unorthodox description of the experience is an attempt to overcome the classical dualisms in epistemology (experience vs. reflection, subjectivity vs. objectivity, activity vs. passivity) that Dewey considers to be misleading. In this way, experience and nature could not be understood as two opposing realities since all experience takes place within nature. Nature must thus be redefined as a “variety of transactions” (119). Reconsidering and reconstructing the complex unity of experience allows Dewey to state that “every reaction is adventure, risk,” for every living being compelled to give a response to its environment (111). Following this argument it is easier to notice the coherence between Dewey’s theoretical philosophy and his philosophy of science. Dewey understands scientific inquiry as the reconstruction of an undetermined, obscure, confused or problematic situation and, in addition, finding the solution. Every situation is a preliminary stage for future problems whose specificity cannot be known to ourselves in the present and depends on unimaginable situations arising from our actual perspective. We not only have natural history but nature also has its own history.

7 Stressing the continuity of the experience within nature finds its counterpart in Dewey’s definition of values. Dewey takes the divorce between science and values as one of the most dangerous illness of our times (152). The naturalist fallacy between facts and values since Hume is causing more damages to our pursuit of a good life than what we could suspect: moral life is also a subject of inquiry, of choosing the right ends, of experimenting by using imagination with hypothetical possibilities of action, in an analogous way as we do in the natural science. This is without a doubt one of the most controversial points in Dewey’s philosophy. Bernstein places Dewey in the Aristotelian tradition: values do not exist in an independent realm of pure ideas. They are relative

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to the concrete situation and depend on a complex process of deliberation. Values ratified by deliberation deserve the special name of “consummatory experiences” (154). It could be interesting in this point to figure out a connection between Dewey’s consummatory experiences and Dilthey’s Erlebnisse or Husserl’s Lebenswelt. They are all a means to underline the continuity of experience between the spheres and times of human life.

8 The moral philosophy of Dewey is summarized in a few traits. One could think that Dewey’s formula for the dealing with practical conflicts is relatively easy: Reasoning + Experience = Practical Intelligence. But that would be a false presumption. Becoming an intelligent, experienced individual, means learning to make the correct decisions and takes a lot of work. It requires training in basic habits and dispositions that have to be embodied in our community. Our commitment is not fulfilled until we take the forging of a certain form of life. Our personal task should consist in embracing the unique form of life that promotes equally common goods and individual development. Here we arrive to the cornerstone of Dewey’s philosophy: the school as the labor of our democracy. Dewey’s “pedagogic creed” converges with Dewey’s “democratic faith.”

9 What is striking of Bernstein’s reading of Dewey is how soft this step from theoretical inquiry to practical reason seems to be. This is a very delicate step, showing the bridges where Kantian philosophy makes a sharp division. But this is not affirmed in the sense of a naive moral realism, but more in the spirit of “fallibilistic humanism” (236) that Bernstein appreciates in Dewey. The continuity of the experience, whether in facts or values, becomes a very important topic in Bernstein’s latest reflections. Perhaps is he turning more and more to William James and the vision of an integral life in a Pluralistic Universe? A pluralistic world, as James stated, is more a federal republic than an empire or a kingdom. Bernstein revisits James in The Pragmatical Turn in a radicalized way, exploring the ethical consequences of his cosmological pluralism, which can no longer be ignored. Or it might be true also the other way round in Dewey’s eyes: “Pragmatism thus has a metaphysical implication. The doctrine of the value of consequences leads us to take the future into consideration. And taking this into consideration of the future takes us to the conception of a universe whose evolution is not finished, of a universe which is still, in James’ term, ‘in the making,’ ‘in the process of becoming,’ of a universe, up to a certain point still plastic.”2 Being a “naturalistic humanist” means that one abandons the belief that “nature is an indifferent, dead mechanism.”3

10 “A pluralistic universe is open to both tragedy and melioration,” writes Bernstein about James. Dewey agrees with him in the chapter of Experience and Nature called “Existence as Precarious and as Stable” noting that: ”Comedy is as genuine as tragedy.”4 We cannot postulate a direct or univocal relationship between theory and praxis of the philosopher’s thought, but certainly we can identify theoretical tendencies that make some practical virtues more “probable.” The detractors of pluralism argue that pluralism is a philosophical position claiming for respect for all sorts of faiths and beliefs but it cannot give any strong theoretical argument to support its own compromise with the democratic credo. Maybe as pluralists we should always maintain some sort of “bicameral disposition,” an unsolved tension between our compromise with our personal existential faith and an opening to the existential compromises of others.5 This is another reason to see democracy as a task before us, a task that demands more radicalization, because according to Dewey: “The end of democracy is a

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radical end. For it is an end that has not been adequately realized in any country at any time” (247).

11 This pragmatist and pluralistic approach has its weaknesses, of course. Bernstein recognizes several big Achilles’ heels in Dewey’s pragmatism: the analysis of concrete problems, the supplying of means to overcome the contradictions of democratic life, and the institutional analysis, among others. Dewey also admitted that our pluralistic world is something different to the pluralism he ascribes to Aristotle: “His plurals fall however, within a grammatical system, to each portion of which a corresponding cosmic status is allotted. Thus his pluralism solved the problem of how to have your cake and eat it too, for a classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants, has none of the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our actual world.”6 But it would be in Dewey’s spirit to allow open paths for further inquiry about how to improve our conditions of life. In the theory, some of his more important contributions were to denounce the misleading images that held us captive, to speak in a Wittgensteinian language: the epistemological metaphor of the spectator which advances what Bernstein will later call the “Cartesian anxiety.”7 The anxious search for ultimate foundations returns to philosophy under a plurality of forms. And the best strategy is not a confrontation with the enemy but a dialogical deconstruction of his seductive power and the emphasis of points for possible mutual understanding. Bernstein does this in two rounds. In 1966 against the most influent philosophical tendencies of the moment: phenomenology, philosophy of science, linguistic analysis and existentialism. In 1986 he deals with the false dichotomy between liberalism and communitarianism. In both cases the use of Dewey’s remedy has a healthy, comforting effect.

12 Perhaps this effect explains partially why European philosophers care about American pragmatism, besides being, as the American classical pragmatist has seen it, a further development of philosophy with European roots.8 In some sense, being a Pragmatist is like being an existentialist, assuming tragedy and improvement as human possibilities, but it is certainly more “hygienic” that Sartre’s nausée and sees human commitment not as a vain passion but as an enriching conquering of horizons. It allows being an individual without neglecting the civic compromise with the community. This community is not the abstract formal condition of Kantian categorical imperative. It is concrete and present. It allows being critical but still trusting, in contrast to skepticism. And requires a more critical use of divisions, names and labels, while stresses more continuities and relationships, transactions and constellations. It might be the philosophy that, following a well-known Hegelian sentence, captures its epoch in thoughts.

13 The introduction of Ramón del Castillo shows in a diaphanous way the advantages of these hermeneutical and pragmatist approaches to philosophy. He can present briefly what is at play between the conflicting narratives of contemporary American thought. He offers what a good introduction should offer to the curious ones who are new to Dewey: (1) a cultural and historical portrait of the rising, fall and rehabilitation of the intellectual figure of John Dewey at the beginning of the 20th century, which in turn, explains (2) what made Bernstein’s approximation to Dewey so surprising and interesting by that time, (3) that his first dealing with Dewey can be proven for its continuity and its revision in the brief two new translated essays, and (4) what role Dewey plays in Bernstein’s philosophical career as a pragmatist himself. The

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translation of Alicia García Ruiz has a wonderful cadence that gently accompanies the rhythm of the thoughts presented. Two recommended bibliographies include one from Richard Bernstein in 1966 and another by Ramón del Castillo and Alicia García in 2010. This informs the reader about the movements and the gaps within contemporary Pragmatism in this time interval.

14 We began with the claim that there is a possible hermeneutic and practical account of Dewey, which means nothing less than saying Dewey could help us to cope with the present problems of democracy. Bernstein already has an answer: what we need for the problems of democracy is more democracy. I would like to end this presentation of Dewey, with a reflection of Gadamer, a long-life friend of Richard Bernstein and the Founding Father of the philosophical hermeneutics. He said, that all human experience is part of an endless conversation. A conversation, as Richard Bernstein sees, is in its essence a thrilling human enterprise: “A conversation can be civilized, illuminating, intelligent, revealing, exciting. Truth may be relevant to a conversation, but so can many other things, and a conversation is not to be thought of as a disguised inquiry into truth or the discovery of foundations.”9 The tradition we belong to can also be seen as a conversation with all the voices in both the past and the present, merging into a complex polyphony. If we think of our traditions as conversations and our intellectuals as louder voices speaking from inside the community, we can also think of the philosopher as one who is not dead when he speaks his last word, but when his or her voice disappears of the conversation. And this is our decision and responsibility, to decide what to make in the future with Dewey, keeping in mind the old and the new.

NOTES

1. Dewey J., (1984), “Philosophy and Civilization,” in The Later Works, 1925-1928, vol. 3, Carbondale, Southern Illiniois University Press, 10. 2. Dewey J., (1984), “The development of American Pragmatism,” in The Latter Works, 1925-53, vol. 2, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 13. 3. Dewey J., (1984), “Experience and Philosophic Method,” in The Latter Works, 1925-53, vol.1, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 28. 4. Dewey J. (1984), “Existence as Precarious and as Stable,” in The Latter Works, 1925-53, vol.1, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 45. 5. Connolly W. E., (2005), Pluralism, Durham, Duke-University Press, 1. 6. Dewey, J. (1984), “Existence as Precarious and as Stable,” in The Latter Works, 1925-53, vol.1, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 48. 7. Bernstein, R., (1983), Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 16. 8. Dewey J. (1984), “The development of American Pragmatism,” in The Latter Works, 1925- 1953, vol. 2, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 19. 9. Bernstein R., (1985), “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Hollinger R. (ed.), Hermeneutics and Praxis, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 75-6.

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AUTHORS

NÚRIA SARA MIRAS BORONAT FECYT (Spain) / University of Leipzig (Germany) nsmira[at]ub.edu

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