In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), Louis Menand tells the story of America's only home-grown philosophical school, Pragmatism. He tells it well--the book won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2002. A historian, Menand approaches Pragmatism through the professional biographies of four thinkers who together created it: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. The title is misleading--Pragmatism is anti-metaphysical to the core. It might better be called Philosophical Pluralism. I'm reviewing it here because Pragmatism is a corrective for overreaching by the two camps of absolute truth in today's world, religion and science. See my earlier review of Stephen Toulmin's Return to Reason. Pragmatism speaks to how people really come to believe the things they believe.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - Soldier, Jurist, Pragmatist
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was one of the few Harvard men in his class to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War, and he did so with courage and distinction. The war colored his future views against absolutist positions. He later socialized and studied with both James and Peirce, and at 40 he had a faculty position at Harvard. Holmes was almost immediately appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and later to the United States Supreme Court. He eschewed doctrinaire reasoning: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience," he penned (p. 341). In his Lochner dissent, he said that "general propositions do not decide concrete cases" (p. 342). So what does? Common law judges, using their "beliefs, sentiments, customs, values, policies, prejudices"--in a word, experience, or possibly culture (p. 342). Judgment, not logic, describes the process.
William James comes across as the least brilliant but the best writer of the bunch. Like Nietzsche, James was a psychological philosopher who had a knack for insightful concepts and readable prose, and he is still quite readable a century later. In his essay The Will to Believe, James used Pragmatism to defend the legitimacy of religious belief in an increasingly scientific culture. If our collective grasp of reality is irredeemably pluralistic, then no one perspective can read the others out of the book of human knowledge and experience. But Pragmatism is not a philosophical answer book; rather, it tries to be "an account of the way people think--the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs, and reach decisions" (p. 351). Of course, that account touches the way people form religious beliefs as well as the way they form scientific or aesthetic beliefs, so Pragmatism defends religious belief for a price.
Charles Sanders Peirce was American philosophy's missed opportunity. Brilliant and broadly trained in science and mathematics, he was also quirky and rather self-absorbed. He failed to gain a position in academic philosophy despite the dedicated sponsorship of his friend William James. Much of his later work was therefore fragmentary and incomplete, as he struggled to maintain his health and his finances in the face of unemployment and depression. Yet, Peirce might nevertheless be rightly regarded as the founder of both Pragmatism and modern Semiotics (the theory of signs). A short passage from Menand:
For Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the making of signs, and of the making of signs there is no end. If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words to be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary. Peirce didn't simply think that language is like that. He thought that the universe is like that.
 John Dewey, Philosopher and Educator
John Dewey favored education the way James favored religion. If you attended public school in America, you can thank the innovative Dewey in part for your doing projects, experiments, and "manipulative learning activities" rather than memorizing passages from dead English poets. He was the moving force behind the formation of the AAUP and the establishment of academic freedom for college professors. He was quite involved in various progressive social causes and, with his pleasant, mild personality, became sort of an ambassador to America for philosophy (he lived until 1952!). His engagement and his educational philosophy reflected his technical epistemological theory, which saw knowledge as being tightly linked to and dependent on doing and acting (p. 322). His "experimental logic" followed James in using psychology to inform philosophy. To do Dewey justice here, I'll quote from the Dewey entry in the IEP:
Dewey came to believe that a productive, naturalistic approach to the theory of knowledge must begin with a consideration of the development of knowledge as an adaptive human response to environing conditions aimed at an active restructuring of these conditions. Unlike traditional approaches in the theory of knowledge, which saw thought as a subjective primitive out of which knowledge was composed, Dewey's approach understood thought genetically, as the product of the interaction between organism and environment, and knowledge as having practical instrumentality in the guidance and control of that interaction. Thus Dewey adopted the term "instrumentalism" as a descriptive appellation for his new approach.
Conclusion. Pragmatism is not of merely historical interest. As Menand the historian points out in his final chapter, Pragmatism disappeared almost overnight at the start of the Cold War as equity and tolerance, hallmarks of Dewey's approach especially, went into sudden eclipse (p. 438-41). Then, forty years later, the Cold War simply evaporated and Pragmatism reemerged as a potent force. Seems almost like history, not logic, is pulling the strings of philosophy, doesn't it? Too, the sparkling Richard Rorty is the current exponent of Pragmatism, working to hold the middle ground between the representational absolutist claims of science and postmodern skepticism. That middle ground has something to offer religion as well as science and philosophy, and to us, we who ponder all three disciplines. Philosophy is, after all, really about us, not our disciplines.
12:41:57 AM 
|
|
