Hey Adrie and all interested MOQers:
I just bought just about everything James ever wrote and I'm working my way
through "Pragmatism" at the moment. James offers pragmatism as a way to
reconcile the two major camps in philosophy; rationalism and empiricism. He
says the main difference between these two broad schools is a matter of
temperament or personality. He even describes them in terms of romantic and
classic, just like Pirsig does. This is the basic context in which James is
making his points in favor of pluralism, in favor of a pluralistic universe. He
is pushing back against the monistic vision of the Absolute Idealists and, at
the same time, he's pushing back against the positivists and materialists. As
you might suspect, it would be hard to find a thinker who did not blend these
two opposed schools to some extent and so we are really talking about matters
of degree or degrees of emphasis.
His notion that we need many cognizers is a reaction against Absolutism,
specifically the view that says human suffering doesn't mean much in the long
run. As the Absolute unfurled through the process of history, it was held, many
human being would die on "the slaughter bench of history". James thought this
view was morally outrageous and a "ghastly" "monument to artificiality". To
make his point he recounts a true story from the pages of a newspaper. A clerk
named John Corcoran got sick and lost his job as a result. After three weeks,
desperate for money, he took a job shoveling snow but he was too weak from his
illness and was forced to give it up after only an hour. When he got home to
his wife and six children, who were all hungry, he found that he and his family
had been ordered to leave their home for non-payment of rent. The next morning
he killed himself by drinking a glass of carbolic acid. This particular example
represents many similar cases of human suffering, but
the Absolutists kept their optimistic eyes on the perfection toward which the
Absolute was headed. James tells this story and then offers quotes from his
Absolutist friends:
In "The World and the Individual" Royce says, "The very presence of ill in the
temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order."
In "Appearance and Reality" Bradley says, "The Absolute is the richer for every
discord and for all the diversity which it embraces."
Then James says:
"He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is
philosophy. But while professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of
guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and
explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known
to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the
universe is. What these people experience IS reality. It gives us an absolute
phase of the universe. It is the personal experience of those best qualified in
our circle of knowledge to HAVE experience, to tell us WHAT IS. Now what does
THINKING ABOUT the experience of these persons come to, compared to directly
and personally feeling it as they fell it? The philosophers are dealing in
shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the mind of mankind - not
yet the mind of philosophers and of the proprietary class - but of the great
mass of the silently thinking men and feeling of men, is coming to this view."
(from Pragmatism in W.J. Writings 1902-1910, p.499. Emphasis is James's in the
original.)
Which brings us back to the "many cognizers" quote:
"The truth is too great for any one actual mind, even thought that mind be
dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life
need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely
public and universal." (James says in the intro to his "Talks to Teachers")
This not only puts decency and compassion back into the picture, it honors the
democratic spirit too. The rationalism that he's fighting here, like Plato's
lofty idealism, is practically contemptuous of empirical reality. You know,
this world of appearances is just so many shadows on a cave wall - and all
that. This is the philosophy of snobs who don't like to get their hands dirty,
of aristocrats who pretend the really real reality has nothing to do with
blood, sweat and tears. Not to mention music.
"The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems and
systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far
off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the
illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfect
eternally complete." (Pragmatism, p.498)
At this point it's worth remembering that Plato was the original rationalist.
As Pirsig tells it, Plato's mistake was to turn Quality into the same kind of
otherworldly perfection. "He had encapsulated it: made a permanent, fixed Idea
out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth." (ZAMM, p.378)
Pirsig says that Plato took the living, dynamic "Good" of the sophists and
converted it into a reified abstract ideal. Likewise, Pirsig says that his MOQ
is a "continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy.
It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism [Dewey's name for pragmatism]"
And he adds that his Quality "is direct everyday experience" and "not a social
code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute" (Lila, p. 366)
And so this philosophy was born to solve human problems more than philosophical
problems. It's aim is to help improve things in the here and now. It's about
what ideas can and cannot do for us, their purposes and limits. In fact, James
thought humanism was a better name for this philosophy.
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