Matt, Bo, Ron, all MOQers and Ham too: Here's a little paper I did for my pragmatism class. You've already seen sections of it, it hasn't yet been graded and it is a bit of a mess in this format (Although I tried to clean it up a bit). If you can manage to see past all that it might provide a clear picture of how all three of James doctrines (pure experience, radical empiricism and pragmatism) work together as a whole. I could have used a dozen Pirsig quotes to show the parallels but the assigned length wouldn't allow that. You can probably imagine well enough without the explicit references.
Why the will to believe, all by itself, isn’t good enough. TEMPERAMENT IN GENERAL William James said, “a man’s vision is the great fact about him” (John J. Stuhr Editor. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays. Oxford University Press, 1999, page 156). He depicts the history of philosophy as a battle of temperaments, as a series of competing worldviews. “A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character”, he tells us in “The Types of Philosophic Thinking”, and the various systems of thought “are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one’s total character and experience, and on the whole preferred” (PCAP 156). This is a recurring theme in his essays. In the “The Will to Believe” he says, “it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions” (PCAP 231). In “The Dilemma of Determinism” he says that all beliefs operate on a certain kind of faith. “All our scientific and philosophic ideals are alters to unknown gods” (PCAP 216). He is not defending the faith of the schoolboy, who said, “faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true” (PCAP 241). He is not dismissing philosophy as mere opinion nor granting permission to think with one’s gut. Instead, he’s stressing the importance of the vision that precedes and is given expression by our thought systems. Robert Pirsig’ analogy speaks to this idea of truth. He says we should examine philosophies the way we examine works of art, “like paintings in a gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the ‘real’ painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value”, adding that our tastes and preferences are “the result of our history and current patterns of values” (Robert Pirsig. Lila. Bantam Books, 1991, page 100). Following Pirsig’s analogy, my aim here is simply to examine what James has painted by way of his essays, which, in this case, can all be found in Stuhr’s anthology. I’ll start with the notion of temperament and then sketch the elements of his philosophy, namely pure experience, radical empiricism and the pragmatic test of truth. If James is right about the relation between temperament and philosophy, his philosophy will give us a certain picture that suits his temperament. JAMES'S TEMPERAMENT In “The Dilemma of Determinism” he describes two rival philosophies, determinism and indeterminism of course, as the expression of two basic types of temperament. “What divides us”, he says, “is different faiths or postulates” (PCAP 218). Here he uses his own temperament as an example, telling us that determinism violates his own “sense of moral reality through and through” (PCAP 227). Because of the doctrine’s perfect chain of causality, determinism does not admit “chance” into the scheme. He tells us that one of his determinist friends confessed to being sickened by the thought of a world with “chance” in it. But James thinks “chance” is just an unflattering word for “freedom” and the chance James is most concerned about is “the chance that in moral respects the future may be other and better than the past has been” (PCAP 229). This, he says, “is the vital air which lets the world live” (PCAP 228). For James, the world of the determinists is a claustrophobic place where our efforts, hopes, choices and regrets are foolish illusions. In “The Types of Philosophic Thinking” James looks at rival philosophies in terms of their level of “intimacy”, eliminating various options along the way for their lack of intimacy. He rules out both materialism and theism for being too alienating, for example. “Theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to God” (PCAP 157). His quest for the most intimate type of philosophy leads him to conclude that, “the only opinions quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within the general scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field of vision” (PCAP 158). At this point, the two most intimate and worthy options are the “philosophy of the absolute” and James’s own radical empiricism. Both of them, James says, “bring the philosopher inside and make man intimate” and “both identify human substance with the divine substance” (PCAP 159). Despite this sympathy, James finds that the unity of absolutism is not so unified after all and so is not as intimate as his temperament would like. As James explains, the Absolute, “in its field of perfect knowledge” is very different from me “in my field of relative ignorance” and this leads to a “radical discrepancy …almost as great a bar to intimacy …as …monarchical theism” (PCAP 160 and 161 respectively). At this point we have our champion, so to speak. James’s own pantheistic monism is left standing in the field and the most intimate picture of the world. His temperament demands a world that is free and open and with which we are deeply connected or rather identical. PURE EXPERIENCE So what is the “substance” that man shares with the divine? As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/) says in their article on James, he “set out the metaphysical view most commonly known as ‘neutral monism’, according to which there is one fundamental ‘stuff’ that is neither material nor mental” (SEP 2). The ‘stuff’ that serves as the ontological ground is what James calls “pure experience”. As he describes it in “A World of Pure Experience”, “the instant field of the present is always experience in its ‘pure’ state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone’s opinion. This is as true when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual” (PCAP 189). In this view, there is an objective reality but it is not a world of pre-existing physical things. Instead, an object is a group of qualities that we find interesting enough to notice and name (SEP 8). Pure experience itself is “only virtually classifiable”. This does not deny the reality of objects or cast them as merely subjective. He sees them as patterns or habits we form out of that undifferentiated field. Mind and matter, subjects and objects, man and god are among those habits. As Pirsig and others have pointed out, this underlying “substance” doesn’t have to be classified in any particular way and our habits don’t exhaust this reality. The infinite possibilities and radical freedom implied by this ontological ground gives James the intimacy and freedom he seeks, but it is limited. It is limited by experience rather than an objective reality in the materialist sense. RADICAL EMPIRICISM In “A World of Pure Experience” James lays out the rules of his empiricism. “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced”, he says, and “a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation” (PCAP 182). This doctrine seems exceptional in its even-handedness and there is an elegant symmetry to its demand that nothing be ignored nor left out. It almost seems innocent and yet it serves as a direct attack on his determinist and idealist rivals almost as soon as it is introduced. “Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities” and this gap “has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome” (PCAP 184). Here he complains that the empiricists have been ignoring certain experiences in their constructions, namely the continuity of experience. His other rivals, the idealists, are guilty of trying to plug this gap by giving reality to abstractions that are aren’t found in experience. The continuity of experience included in radical empiricism eliminates the need for such metaphysical glue. James says, “this is the strategic point …through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy” (PCAP 183). The central demand of radical empiricism, that we should include all experience and add nothing to it is exactly what makes it so radically empirical. Experience is reality and reality is experience. “Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is to be really continuous, in a world where experience and reality come to the same thing” (PCAP 186)? PRAGMATISM This is where the rubber meets the road. In his essay titled “What Pragmatism Means” James provides the central idea of pragmatism when he says, “truth is one species of the good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief …for definite, assignable reasons” (PCAP 201). Or, as he says in “The Dilemma of Determinism”, “the only escape is by the practical way”, which “says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for our recognition” and here “we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of things” (PCAP 226). Here his ontology and empiricism feed into his pragmatism. Because it doesn’t have a materialistic bias or otherwise stick to traditional empiricism, the truth of an idea will be tested against lived experience instead of facts or objective reality. In “What Pragmatism Means”, he says pragmatic truth promises to “follow either logic of the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences” (PCAP 202). James said, “the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and to me, at definite instances of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one” (PCAP 195). Above all, I think this is what Dr. Sandra Rosenthal means by “workability”. Or, if you believe those hacks over at Stanford, James says truth is a kind of good “because we can ‘ride’ on them into the future without being unpleasantly surprised” (SEP 14). That is the sense in which they are workable or true ideas. Taken all together, this give James a world where we are actively engaged and in contact with truth and reality and we are free to try to find better truths. “The great point is that possibilities are really here”, that whatever the controversy is “the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now” (PCAP 229). Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Boo! Scare away worms, viruses and so much more! Try Windows Live OneCare! http://onecare.live.com/standard/en-us/purchase/trial.aspx?s_cid=wl_hotmailnews Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
