83. Pragmatism

ON OCTOBER 3 he began yet another course of lymph injections. They were, over the years and on the whole, the most successful treatment for his recurring nervous exhaustion. A few weeks later he began galvanic therapy again. Despite the usual blizzard of obligations—an Anti-Imperialist League lunch, a visit and a lecture by his old friend Pierre Janet, Charles Peirce’s writing to say he was down to his last twenty-nine cents and could James lend him five dollars?—James stuck to his lecture preparation and on November 14 delivered the first of the pragmatism lectures to what he called a “splendid audience” of about five hundred people.

He prepared elaborate outlines for the lectures, but except for the opening lecture he did not write them out fully until after they were delivered, because he was trying to preserve as much spontaneity and directness as was consistent with intellectual clarity. “The whole lecture-business now-a-days,” he had recently explained to Henry, “save where there is a stereopticon or exhibition of facts not presentable as ‘reading-matter,’ or where the lecturer is an artist in his line and speaks without notes, is doomed to second-rateness... A read lecture is doomed to inferiority—to really succeed the lecturer must speak and command his audience.” By Thanksgiving he had delivered four lectures, but he had written out only one and half of another. His eighth and final talk was on December 8. On December 9 he noted that he had two lectures written out in full. The audience, “the intellectual elite of Boston,” he called it in a letter to Henry, stayed at around five hundred. After the final lecture he was “called before the curtain.”¹

He had begun with the highly unconventional assertion that the history of philosophy is not so much a history of ideas as a history of a “certain clash of human temperaments.” Philosophy for James is always ad hominem. This grounding of philosophy not just in feeling but in temperament enrages certain readers, but it seems to others the long-overdue light of common sense. Whether you are a rationalist, “meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles,” or an empiricist, “meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety,” depends, says James, on your temperament, not your logical reasoning. He further sweeps it all up under two headings: the tender-minded, who are “rationalistic (going by ‘principles’), intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willed, monistic and dogmatical,” and the tough-minded, who are “empiricist (going by ‘facts’), sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic and skeptical.” We can see in James himself a mostly tough-minded temperament, but with strong tender-minded leanings toward religion and a belief in free will. Perhaps we should not be surprised that James offers pragmatism as a mediating philosophy. Recognizing the “conflict between science and religion,” James says, the ordinary person “wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion.”²

The opening lecture, like the original California talk “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” frames the whole series in religious terms. “Empiricist writers give [the ordinary person] a materialism, ratio-nalists give him something religious, but to that religion actual things are blank... I offer the oddly named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand.” “Invent a vulgar (comparatively) and mercenary name for it,” Henry advised him, “and don’t, oh don’t spell it heartbreakingly.” Much as William James loved teaching, and as good as he was at it, he wanted a larger, more general audience. The pragmatism lectures have frequent references to the world beyond the college walls; democratic impulses were an essential part of James’s temperament. Warming to the close of his first lecture, he said, “The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds.”³

He began the second lecture with “the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism.” He puts it a trifle austerely and abstractly. It will be the consequences of the principle, not the statement of it, that will really matter. “To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object.” Put more simply, “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere.”⁴

Appealing again to temperament, to what he elsewhere calls the “massive cues of preference,” James says, “A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.” Trying, despite his obvious enthusiasm, not to claim too much for it, he says pragmatism is, “first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth.” “True” is, as we have seen, more a verb than an adjective or noun for James. Truth happens to things and statements. “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.” Pragmatism’s “only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted.”⁵

In the third lecture, James stops to exclaim over how completely Darwin’s ideas have triumphed over the old rationalist argument from design. “Darwin,” James says, “opens our minds to the power of chance happening to bring forth ‘fit’ results if only they have time to add themselves together.” Pragmatism derives directly from Darwin. Variations that confer a benefit—an adaptive advantage—survive. A variation is judged entirely by its results; how it originates doesn’t matter. Pragmatism is the recognition that activity and the consequences of activity are what matter.⁶

If pragmatism is a profoundly Darwinian philosophy, it is also, importantly, a literary one. James makes reference to or quotes from G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Dante, Wordsworth, and Browning. He quotes Walt Whitman extensively. This literary side of James’s work is not a matter of ornament or showing off or name-dropping, nor is it just a gift for phrase and metaphor. John Dewey correctly perceived that James’s “power of literary expression strikes one at first glance.” In another context James said, “People’s sense of dramatic reality is what they will certainly obey, no matter how much they pretend to follow nothing but points of evidence.”

James understands his basic task of explaining how things are as in part a literary enterprise. Writing a friend, he said, “You bring vividly home to me the literary need of reconciling and mediating forms of expression.” For James, writing was fundamentally about “taking it out of technical into real regions of persuasion.” So James loved it when Walt Whitman said, “Who touches this book touches a man.” He quotes these words, then adds, “The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them... is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education.” For James as for Whitman, real literature ran way deeper than fashionable literary language. “No one,” said Whitman, “will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance.” And James wrote, “I don’t care how incorrect language may be if it only has fitness of epithet, energy, and clearness.” Neither do most readers.⁷

James would call the book comprising the lectures Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, a staid title that hid the excitement he felt as the subject opened out in front of him. “I didn’t know,” he would write Flournoy in January 1907, with the lectures behind him, “until I came to prepare [them], how full of power to found a ‘school’ and to become a ‘cause’ the pragmatistic idea was. But now I am all aflame with it, as displacing all rationalistic systems.”⁸

James had thought of dedicating Pragmatism to Dewey, Schiller, and Papini, his co-conspirators in the war of philosophical liberation against the imperial absolutists, but to do so would have left out Peirce. Besides, James really wanted to throw in his lot with the utilitarian tradition—since he was concentrating on the utility of pragmatism—so he dedicated the book to John Stuart Mill. Over and over in the eight lectures that comprise Pragmatism, James comes down firmly for philosophy as a guide to action. He believed now, as he always had, that any philosophy is good in vain if the reader tosses it aside, as Samuel Johnson had observed of certain works of literature. “True ideas,” James says in lecture six, “are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.” He took it a step further: “Verifiability... is as good as verification... Beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure.” Truth, which James says “is simply a collective name for the verification-processes,” is one of the “th” words. “Truth is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”⁹

In James’s final lecture, on December 8, it all comes down once again to action. “Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world—why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making?” James makes his appeal to the reader’s or hearer’s own sense of dramatic reality. He appeals psychologically, philosophically, and literarily to what we feel and think of as the real situation. Pragmatism, says James, accepts the possibility that the world is various, pluralistic, “made up of a lot of eaches.” It accepts, too, the possibility that all may not be at last right with the world. “I find myself,” he says, “willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying ‘no play’...I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is... When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.”¹⁰

This is, when you get right down to it, a religious attitude, a way of facing final things, pragmatism’s eschatology. “No fact in human nature,” James had said in his Edinburgh lectures, “is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.” Now he said that the genuine pragmatist is one who “is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities.”¹¹

James’s ambitions for pragmatism were breathtaking. When he compared the pragmatist movement to the Protestant Reformation, he was not being ironic. Just as he was launching the lectures in October 1906, he wrote to Giovanni Amendola, one of Papini’s Italian pragmatists, “I think that pragmatism can be made—is not Papini tending to make it?—a sort of surrogate of religion, or if not that, it can combine with religious faith so as to be [a] surrogate for dogma.” Saving his best shot for last, as he had in Edinburgh, he closed his pragmatism lectures by saying, “On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.” This is not the Protestant God, not the Christian God, not monotheism.

Saying it was too late to “start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture,” he closed with one of his characteristic analogies, already quoted, but now bearing a whole new weight of meaning. “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So,” he ends grandly, “we are tangents to the wider life of things.”¹²