Three

TWO TALES ABOUT PRAGMATISM AND EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY (WITH AN INTRODUCTORY FAMILY TALE)

Carlos Thiebaut

1. Introduction

This paper focuses on the relationship between pragmatic and continental philosophies during two historical moments: the first, at the turn of the 19th century, was characterized by a series of failed encounters while the second, some 80 years later in the 1970s produced fruitful and ongoing debates and encounters. Two issues are employed to illustrate this contrast: a) the concept of nature and the relationship of science to philosophy and b) the idea of social hope and its place in democratic experience.

2. A Family Tale

Allow me to begin with a short family story. We need to go back some fifty years in time to a place where I used to spend long summer holidays, a place a bit further to the north of the country called Vilardevós, up in the mountains of Galicia and close to the Portuguese border. My grandfather, of whom I only had scraps of imprecise and anecdotal memories, had rebuilt his own grandfather’s house by the end of the 19th century and it was there that we all went at the end of June. A philosophy teacher since the beginning of the 20th century, my grandfather held part of his library in three huge, dusty bookcases covered with glass-panel doors which had seldom been swept clean. In spite of their size, I learned that these were only fragments of a mythically larger collection which had been held in his apartment in Madrid and which had been plundered during the Spanish Civil War, a year after he died. The books and papers, I was soon to find, were comprised of material from his student days, manuscripts of his published and unpublished books and articles, and what looked like his random summer readings. I would have been around 14 or 15 years old when I started to rummage around in the contents of the library and when my interest in the mythical, but mysterious character of its owner, began to grow. 48 CARLOS THIEBAUT

In those years —the early 60’s— we took philosophy in our senior year at high school. With what little knowledge of the history of philosophy I had, I soon developed an interest in the rare philosophy books kept in those three tall bookcases. Surprisingly, there were no classics ranging from Aristotle to Hegel (authors I was acquainted with), and there was almost no contemporary philosophy that covered phenomenology and existentialism (sources I afterwards guessed had been pillaged back in Madrid). One humid afternoon in August I had gone down into the library in one of my frequent excursions. Behind a stack of my grandfather’s manuscripts, I discovered a small cardboard box full of letters. Browsing through them, I found many names I did not yet know of; names such as Wundt, with whom my grandfather ended writing his dissertation on the melody of Mediterranean languages; or Eucken, another of his teachers in Leipzig; or Negrín, his roommate in Louvain and who was to become the last Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic. But there were others I was already acquainted with, such as the Galician writer Emilia Pardo Bazán or Unamuno. Such was the excitement I felt at Unamuno’s set of eleven letters that I remember dashing up the staircase and yelling out my discovery to my family. In order to bring this story to its conclusion, let me translate for you a very small fragment of the first letter of Unamuno’s correspondence, dated December 6th, 1898. It is a beautiful lesson in mentorship full of advice to a former student who had already started to test his wings as a philosopher. Unamuno, then a Professor in Greek at Salamanca, was trying to lighten up some darker moments experienced by this young philosophy graduate who was unable to see a clear way ahead, but who nevertheless seemed to be defining his theoretical interests. He writes:

You have an excellent treatise of psychology in English, by the North American W. James, The Principles of Psychology. You also have The Feeling of Effort. In logic you have the excellent The Principles of Logic, by Bain.1

No other books or philosophers are mentioned in a long letter that soon moves on to other advice dealing with what we might describe as “strategies for surviving” the suffocating cultural climate of Spanish monarchical restoration. I find it fascinating, and at the same time melancholically depressing, that as early as 1898, early, that is, in the Spanish cultural time zone, Unamuno would advise a young philosopher —who probably would have studied only scholastic and neo-scholastic doctrines in Salamanca and the nevertheless liberating vagaries of Krausism in Madrid— to read two of James’ books and to go back to Alexander Bain, a colleague of Stuart Mill, but also an acknowledged predecessor of Pierce and James. I learnt only a year ago that Eloy —that was my grandfather’s name—, perhaps due to his