Philosophy 170 Course Notes

An Introduction to Pragmatism and the American Context

Copyright 1999, 2000 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711

Few of our Founding Fathers would ever have challenged the centrality of religious belief in American life. While their experiences with England had informed them well that no state should force specific religious institutions on its people, few of them took this position out of any antagonism directed toward religion itself. Religious faith and classical education remained strong throughout the first half of the 19th Century and well into the second half. "Until after the Civil War, philosophy as taught in American schools had a huge significance in the eyes of its practitioners and their supporters. The philosopher connected with an institution was the custodian of certain truths necessary to the successful functioning of civilized society. His job was to convey these truths to the youth who would one day assume positions of leadership. At Harvard, as at many other colleges, philosophic instruction had a practical value greater than other parts of the classical curriculum. The president of the college often taught the final course in moral philosophy in the senior year to insure the insemination of proper beliefs." (Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (Yale University Press, 1977) p. 9) Almost without question, philosophy was studied as a source of religious inspiration and a justification of religious belief; the union of religious faith and moral philosophy was essential to civilized society.

Religion, classics, and philosophy had not suffered during the scientific enlightenment preceding the second half of the 19th Century and one must ask "Why?" this was the case. The answer lay in the fact that enlightenment had left the world partitioned between animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic. With this partition in place, the advance of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and geology was all directed toward the inorganic, as its object, and merely edified the organic, mankind, by exemplifying human intelligence. Science did not threaten humanity, which continued to reside in the world as the centerpiece to divine creation. The principle of Vitalism became the focus of this division; according to Vitalism, neither scientific principles nor scientific procedures were applicable to the organic realm.

All of this began to change, however, by the middle of the 19th Century. As early as 1828, in fact, Wöhler discovered that an inorganic compound, ammonium cyanate, could be converted to an organic compound, urea. Other examples of organic synthesis followed. Of course, Darwin's suggestion (Origin of Species, 1859) that an animal species evolves naturally rather than being a permanent divine creation was a direct attack that could not be ignored; and within a decade (The Descent of Man, 1971) Darwin applied his theory to the human species itself. The development of thermodynamics in the second half of the 19th Century was directed toward the study of heat and work, of course, and it was clear that both heat and work existed in the organic realm as well as in the inorganic realm. Physiologists began to apply thermodynamics to the study of animals; indeed, by the late 19th Century, physiologists were studying sensation and perception by taking apart and understanding the human eye as though it were a mere machine. Applications of science to the organic realm had gone so far, in fact, that neurologists (early precursors to psychiatrists) were using magnetism and electric shock in therapeutic procedures intended to cure mental problems such as hysteria. It was not the case that science had just attacked religion, in other words; science had passed over the whole line of division between the inorganic and organic realms. As the assertion of scientific principles was being extended from inanimate objects to animate objects, Vitalism was left on the defensive, finding less and less importance in an overall understanding of the organic realm. If nothing in all of this had to result from divine creation in some special way, then weren't all traditional values --- religion, classics, and philosophy --- brought into question?

The impact on human spirit produced, ironically, by human enlightenment itself, was catastrophic. In Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "God is dead!" and meant by that the idea that we had made belief in god impossible ("And we have murdered Him!"). Existentialism developed as a dramatic, literary, and philosophic tradition, attempting to work through the implications of the human despair brought on by the loss of human spirit (something that was divine in humans). In America, Pragmatism attempted to work through similar problems from a very different direction. Indeed, the early Pragmatists --- Peirce, James, and Dewey --- were all scientific enthusiasts who embraced the superiority of scientific reason and criticized traditional philosophical methods. While Existentialism remained alienated from religion and traditional morality; James debated in favor of religious belief and wrote a famous book, Varieties of Religious Experience, while Dewey wrote extensively on traditional ethics.

In part, this divergence in character between European Existentialism and American Pragmatism was due to the way that the Pragmatists accepted the philosophic tradition of metaphysics as their target of criticism. Let us take a moment, then, to understand the problem of metaphysics and its relation to the conflict between science and religion.

The subject of metaphysics comes formally from Aristotle's book of the same name. In fact, in his book, Physics, Aristotle considered the objects of nature and their properties, nature being exactly what we all experience in the world as we know it. In the book which came to be called Metaphysics, Aristotle took into consideration a number of other objects that allegedly exist but are nevertheless not experienced in nature. To use Immanuel Kant's terminology, there are two presumed realms, the "phenomenal" which we witness in experience and the "noumenal" which we do not witness at all. One might hastily ask why we would bother with the noumenal realm; but the problem is that both Aristotle and those who came before him believed that various objects of the noumenal realm cause the existence, properties, and relations of the phenomenal realm to be as they are. Plato is a good example. Disturbed by the changeableness of everything in the natural world and seeing agreement on anything in this world of opinion as hopeless, Plato asserted the existence of extra-worldly real Ideas (Forms) which are permanent. Knowledge addresses these real Ideas and is superior to opinion which only connects with the changeable objects of the world. Thus, on this metaphysical basis, Plato was able to construct his ideal republic, a place where justice could be served because "philosopher kings" would rule, applying their knowledge of real principles.

The history of philosophy is difficult to separate from the history of metaphysics, from Greek thought onward. Descartes divided up the philosophical discussion of man between a physical Body and a metaphysical Mind. Leibniz, a mathematician to the end, conceived of the whole being accountable as Monads, complete individual concepts. And Hegel imagined that the entire creation derives from Idea spontaneously and dialectically alienating itself through Nature to Spirit, a self-conscious material object whose history is the progressive story of perfecting the concept of Freedom through successive manifestations of the State. Hegel's philosophy was pervasive in the early 19th Century; indeed, Dewey wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hegel. But in the eyes of the Pragmatists, metaphysics was precisely what was wrong with the philosophic tradition and the reason why that tradition could be so easily invaded by the advance of science. We could solve this problem if we just set about understanding scientific reason in detail; and this is why Peirce's papers on the logic of science are viewed as the birthplace of American Pragmatism. What Pragmatism wanted to demonstrate was that scientific reason, correctly understood, could be applied equally well to traditional problems of value and human action where understanding and agreement could be reached without the need of grounding in metaphysical constructs.