Pragmatic Intellectuals Facing Loss in the Spirit of American Philosophy

fifteen pragmatic intellectuals Facing Loss in the Spirit of American Philosophy y final remarks are not so much a philosophical discourse as M an essay or an exhortation from the vicinity of the heart. This stems not from any disdain on my part for philosophical discourses, but from the way I see the question at hand: the question of the future of pragmatism and, perhaps, of American philosophy more widely conceived. It is a question from which I cannot extricate myself. Be- cause I work under the influence of American thinking, any answer I give bears personal consequences. And as was noted in chapter 2,it is precisely this personal dimension that, for some at least, separates pragmatism from philosophy. As Paul Carus put it in response to William James’s work: ‘‘In the philosophy of a man like William James the personal equation is the most important item. This attitude is desirable in a poet, but not in a philosopher.’’1 Thinking about pragmatism’s future engages me in a question of and a quest for vocation, and it is on these that my essay will focus. I proceed in the hope that Dewey is right in maintaining that ‘‘The future as well { 234 } pragmaticintellectuals 235 as the past can be a source of interest and consolation and give mean- ing to the present’’ (LW, 2:20). As an invocation I borrow some words from the late Rev. Gary Davis, who was among the best twentieth-century American blues guitarists. Reverend Davis was perplexed by the technical, positivistic attitude of those who came to apprentice with him, mostly young, white, middle-class males. I begin with his response to this phenomenon: I’m subject to mistakes. All of us are. Sometimes you’re going East, and you’re actually going West. That’s the way it happens with all of us sometimes. Mistakes is the best start in life. You know too much, you understand, then you done made a mistake already. You be too perfect, then the mistake’s already been made. But you go to try to do a thing and make a mistake to start off with, then that’s the best start in life. It gives somebody a chance to correct you.2 Pragmatic Intellectuals Pragmatism, by some quirk of fate, was granted its own Indian summer at the close of its first century—with renewed interest in both its originators and its revisers, pragmatism’s life has been extended. Yet it has long been a question, especially, perhaps, for pragmatists, what it means to be a ‘‘pragmatic intellectual.’’ As a new century brings November to this Indian summer, the question becomes more press- ing. Despite their emphasis on practice, pragmatists are, for ordinary persons, simply parts of the aggregate of intellectuals and academics. C. Wright Mills observed in 1942 that ‘‘Pragmatists have typically been sons of the middle class rising within these strata into rather comfortable academic professions.’’3 On the other side, philosophers and other intellectuals have long assaulted pragmatism for its lack of sophistication. Carus, with his noted candor, put it as follows: ‘‘I go so far as to look upon its [pragmatism’s] wide acceptance as a symp- tom of the immaturity and naı¨vete´ that obtains sometimes even in the professional circles of our universities.’’4 An even more humor- 236 philosophy americana ous, more frightening, and, if true, more damning assault on pragmatism’s professional place was made by Albert Schinz: In our days of democracy, philosophic ideas are no longer dis- cussed among the chosen few, but by everybody, by the masses; the result is that philosophy is no longer free to express truths which might be dangerous for the masses. Philosophy must express only useful, moral, pragmatic truth, even though truth itself lie in an opposite direction. Pragmatism is nothing but this adulterated philosophy; philosophy sold to democracy.5 It is difficult not to have a nagging suspicion that Schinz had some- how come across Richard Rorty’s ‘‘The Priority of Democracy to Phi- losophy’’ and ‘‘Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism’’ in 1909.The cultural pressures from both directions continue to effect a sense of doubt concerning their vocation on the part of at least some pragmatic intellectuals. The terms of the phrase ‘‘pragmatic intellectuals’’—much like the terms of Emerson’s phrase ‘‘American scholar’’—generate an internal tension as well; they resist yet at the same time demand one another. Pragmatic intellectuals are thinkers whose pragmatism tempers their intellectualism and whose intellectual dimension both underwrites and undermines their pragmatism. Pragmatic intellectuals of the present generation are not only pragmatists but also thinkers averse to various doctrines and features of various pragmatisms: thinkers who are in some part self-aversive. All of this is perhaps an indirect way of saying that pragmatism, at itsheart,isopentoitsownpassing,itsownloss.Livingintoand through this loss is what it means to be a pragmatic intellectual in the early twenty-first century. The belief that one must face the passing of one’s own ideas and, more positively, that one must constantly reawaken to new angles of vision is a persistent one in the tradition of American thinking. Jona- than Edwards’s ‘‘Personal Narrative,’’ for example, reveals a soul never certain that its latest conversion is genuine and final. Having reflected on his soul’s journey through a lifetime of conversions, Ed- pragmaticintellectuals 237 wards, ever hopeful for signs of his own salvation, still finds himself in the precarious environment of doubt. Emerson, throughout his early essays, harps on the importance of self-aversion, of the ability to draw new circles and move to higher platforms: ‘‘Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’’ (CW, 2:33). Thoreau identifies himself repeatedly with chan- ticleer, always on the verge of announcing a new awakening. The pragmatists, each in his way, captured and systematized this transitional, itinerant spirit of American thinking. Peirce’s fallibilism, James’s pragmatism and radical empiricism, and Dewey’s experimen- talism all play on the finitude and contingency of our best thinking. The ‘‘scientific spirit,’’ Peirce says, ‘‘requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them’’ (CP 1:55). We must always think and believe under the possibility of revision—we must always be willing to face the loss of our own thinking and to understand that our failures may, both presently and in some long run, be as instructive as our successes. The pragmatic intellectual emerges from and within this intellectual history—this actual career of thought. To be willing to face this loss, one must understand oneself always to be located in transition. However, one must also be able to be at home in the transition. This transitional status, as each of the pragmatists has noted, means that not only as professional intellectuals without a clear cultural place, but also as human beings, pragmatic philosophers live in a world of risk and precariousness. Pragmatism’s Loss What will it mean for pragmatists to give their attention to pragmatism’s own transitional and precarious status? How shall pragmatism face its own losses and failures in its own future, as, for pragmatists, I think it must? ‘‘Pragmatism,’’ as Carus observed, ‘‘appeared comet- like on our intellectual horizon’’;6 moreover, it came advertised by Peirce, James, Dewey, and Schiller as a method for establishing mean- ing and conducting inquiry. As James put it: 238 philosophy americana It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories like a corridor in a hotel. No particular results, then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means.7 Two items of note appear in this originary description. First is the description of pragmatism as a ‘‘method’’ that ‘‘means,’’ pragmati- cally speaking, ‘‘an attitude of orientation.’’ To this I will return below. The second item is that although pragmatism is a method, it does not appear unenvironed: ‘‘It lies in the midst of our theories.’’ Thus, as James well knew, despite the suggestive innocence of this particular passage, pragmatism never appeared without having been inoculated with some constitutive worldview or other: Peirce’s trini- tarian realism, James’s articulate pluralism, Schiller’s humanism, or Dewey’s naturalism. These thinkers arrived not as what Royce called ‘‘pure pragmatists’’; they arrived as pragmatic intellectuals. As John McDermott puts it: Despite some surface ambiguity, a careful reading of James will show it to be clear, both textually and thematically, that for him pragmatism is a methodological application of his radical empiricism. In that sense, to call James simply a pragmatist is misleading and, indeed, without radical empiricism as a metaphysical base, pragmatism is subject to the savage philosophical critique it has received.8 The point was made less elegantly in 1909, when Edwin Tausch observed that ‘‘Mr. James still believes in theoretic grubbing and brood- ing; he is still a philosopher.’’9 This second item of James’s description of pragmatism is especially important to highlight in light of some contemporary readings of the history of pragmatism. The career of pragmatism is and has been dy- namic. It is not the career of a method alone, but the career of a method, as attitude, engaged in rethinking and reconstructing particular and idiosyncratic conceptions of experience and nature.

Load more