Copyright 1999-2000 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
The James and Peirce families were almost diametrically opposite. In contrast to Peirce's academic, indeed mathematical, family in the small community of Cambridge, James' family was cosmopolitan and moved in an annual cycle from New York (his birthplace) to Europe to Albany and back to New York. His father was connected with intellectual, artistic, and religious circles all over; indeed, part of James' slowness in entering Harvard was the temptation of studying art in Paris. For James, then, the harsh empirical, naturalistic realities of the Amazon produced a psychological crisis that delayed his education even more. This crisis between the seeming incompatibility of faith and the arts, on one hand, and the scientific facts, on the other hand, colored James' thinking for the remainder of his life.
Consult the notes on James' life for more details.
Pragmatism (Lectures at the Lowell Institute, 1906)
These lectures were given in November and December 1906, in Boston, and then they were repeated at Columbia University, in New York, in January 1907. They represent James' most widely read work and constitute a summation of his career. Nevertheless, they are somewhat frustrating in their repetitiveness and lack of focus. James always spoke to his audience in the broadest sense; hence, much of what we learn is the breadth of interests and concerns of cosmopolitan, intellectual people of the time. For James it was an exciting time in which two great themes of thought were pitched in battle and none other than human society was standing in between about to be crushed. Empiricism, tough minded objective science, on one hand, was driving our world view toward an inorganic physical reality that knows nothing of human purposes or divine ends. If you were tender minded and religious, Rationalism seemed to promise your only defense; yet Rationalism had generating a disgusting and unpromising diversity of metaphysical views that had no general power to convince. Kantianism had offered a highly intellectual passage between Rationalism and Empiricism but sacrificed religious belief and practice in the process. James could identify well with the concerns of his audiences; he had begun his career in a crisis state, looking for "a philosophy to live by." The tension between religion and science is right in the middle of this conflict.
There is little to no difference between James' problem and that of Kant. It is necessary to find a path that cuts between Rationalism and Empiricism. The big difference is that, in 1906, science had invaded religious territory to a far greater degree than in 1782. Compared to the New England views of the 1840s into which Peirce and James were born, it was no longer possible to argue that scientific observation of the world reveals the creative work of a God. By 1900 Darwin's work had explained evolution of the human species from "lower animals;" geology had explained the natural evolution of the earth's surface and discovered evidence of remote times; thermodynamics had been applied to biological systems, explaining them in terms of physical work and heat; and physiological psychology was beginning to explain perception in terms of optics and nerve sensitivities. To the tough minded scientist there was no "plan" to the world; the world was merely a spontaneously evolving more-or-less mechanical object in which human and divine ends are merely illusions.
In the height of this warfare for people's minds, James believed passionately that a movement which had only recently been called "Pragmatism" could solve the problem. Looking back in time, he saw this method of thinking first being applied by his friend Charles Sanders Peirce in his essays on the methods of science. In these essays, Peirce had clarified the relationship between action, habits, and beliefs. He had observed the progress of humans from primitive tenacity through authority to metaphysical speculation and delivered scientific method as the height of framing and fixing our beliefs. But he had also recognized that science is not accurately described by the "verificationist" principles of Positivism; science is better described as clarifying beliefs (ideas) by articulating their practical consequences. James combined this fundamental idea of Pragmatism with ideas about the nature of truth being suggested by Dewey and Schiller to recognize that the scientific method implies a continual process of clarifying ideas and testing them in new experiences. Thus, truth represents the successfulness of our ideas in practical experience. Truth evolves as we work toward ideas (beliefs) that offer better guides to action.
Of particular interest in the introductory lecture is James' view that philosophy, the love of wisdom, is something essential to every human and that we differ only in the detail and passion that we apply to this necessity. What professional philosophers add to this is logic and consistency, observing that most people have a high capacity to mix incompatible positions together. James returned to this issue in his final book.
While James' starting point was always Peirce's concept of clarifying our ideas by connecting them with their practical results and, incidentally, discarding metaphysical and other abstract ideas that could not be so connected, he moved swiftly beyond to link this with Dewey's concept that the realization of these clarified ideas in actual experience is the very nature of truth. The idea 'truth' indeed is pragmatically defined in this way. James connected this idea of truth with the spirit of "humanism."
Humanism, however, has a long history. The expression "civic humanism" was used in reference to ideas that emerged during the Renaissance. The Renaissance itself represented an extensive reflection on antiquity and discovery of the arts, literatures, philosophy, and science of Classical Greece. At the forefront of this discovery was the ideal of the city state as a model of civic society. But another dimension of this phenomenon was the fact that it represented people of the Late Middle Ages in Europe looking backward in time to an era of human freedom and intellectual empowerment that was unknown to Christian Europeans. Indeed, Scholasticism held a tight grip on thought and the sacred combination of King and Pope held its tight grip on society. People were used to "Truth" as established by authority so "civic humanism" was revolutionary in suggesting the potential of determining truths with individual human efforts and talents.
In James' era humanism continued to carry a threatening overtone for people who believe in established Truths. (Today, the expression "secular humanism" continues to play a similar role among the Christian Right.) Humanism, James suggests, is the "doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products." This idea offers James yet another avenue for pursuing Pragmatism and the contrast between the Rationalist and Empiricist positions.
Pragmatism is the philosophy of humanism. Unlike hard and fast Empiricism, it leaves a clear place in the universe for human contributions and human purposes. Unlike Rationalism, it rejects the idea of a finished world in which Truth and Reality are fixed. The Pragmatist, according to James, works into the future, clarifying beliefs by understanding their possible practical consequences and adjusting beliefs as experiences pass. Truth is judged on the basis of beliefs working well, of having practical results. Thus, people create truths by putting effort into demonstrating their results. Reality becomes an accumulated picture of how our ideas interrelate, and reality is an idea that continues to develop with us as we have experiences. Pragmatism, in this sense, does not reject noumenal objects or ends, but it requires them to be demonstrated in actual experience over a long time. They cannot merely be accepted on the basis of faith or of authority.
The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism
About two years after the publication of Pragmatism, James gathered into one volume a group of related journal papers that he had published from 1904 through the present. While the materials, ideas, and arguments brought forward in this volume overlapped completely with Pragmatism, the manner of presentation is strikingly different. While Pragmatism presents lectures to audiences of the general public, The Meaning of Truth presents papers that were published in leading journals of the time --- like Mind --- and were addressed to the narrower audience of professional philosophers.
Some Problems of Philosophy
In this volume, published after James' death in 1911, he intended "to round out [his] system" which seemed to have grown up somewhat awkwardly. It was really aimed at offering a general introduction to philosophy as a whole and to establishing the place philosophy occupies in our lives. As we see, while scientific and objectivist assumptions in the modern world have often looked down on philosophy, James takes the love of wisdom broadly and seriously. Science, in fact, is the child of philosophy, separated out into specific disciplines. Often science represents the working out of detailed answers to a line of questioning opened up by philosophy. Philosophy as such moves on to other broad questions. The tragedy of our time is our over-valuation of details above the general. As James attempts to show, living must be guided by general beliefs and dispositions that are rarely confirmed in detail.
As always, James sees two broad options dominating the intellectual scene --- Rationalism and Empiricism. The problem is that the former, while it embraces the general questions of importance, proceeds speculatively and dogmatically. The latter, while it is firmly rooted in experience, proceeds only within experience and excludes the general questions altogether. James' resolution of this useless dualism comes from the empiricist side and moves toward the Rationalist temper by observing that even our detailed analysis of experience must always be guided by provisional answers to the most general questions. The mistake made by the tough-minded scientific empiricist is not recognizing that empiricism alone gives no direction to scientific interests. The paths that we choose to study and, hence, the ideas that we put to the test and bring toward useful truths are guided by our general assumptions of worthiness and value.
In a final note, James brings these ideas back to the issue of religion. James' religious interests are not focused on deism --- the characteristics and existence of a
supreme being --- he is far more concerned with the issues regarding human life that are implied in religious belief. Thus, what is really at stake for religion is a
sense of purpose in life, a moral sense, and a validation of love or, more broadly, care. If we turn away from these beliefs as structuring concepts for human
experience, then they will not be empirically tested and will never rise to truth. On the other hand, if we risk belief or faith and submit these concepts to actual
test, then at least we have given them a faith chance for realization. The important thing is not to hide from the realities delivered in experience and not to
dogmatically cling to belief that are not borne out in practice. But it is not at all clear to James that religious practice is vacuous.
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