Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of ThinkingJames, William
Philosophy
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
James, William
Pragmatism
Irrational! we are told. How can new being come in local spots and
patches which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of
the rest? There must be a reason for our acts, and where in the last
resort can any reason be looked for save in the material pressure or the
logical compulsion of the total nature of the world? There can be but
one real agent of growth, or seeming growth, anywhere, and that agent is
the integral world itself. It may grow all-over, if growth there be, but
that single parts should grow per se is irrational.
But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things, and insists
that they can't just come in spots, what KIND of a reason can there
ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of logic and
necessity and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole
philosophical machine-shop as you will, the only REAL reason I can think
of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here.
It is DEMANDED, demanded, it may be, to give relief to no matter
how small a fraction of the world's mass. This is living reason, and
compared with it material causes and logical necessities are spectral
things.
In short the only fully rational world would be the world of
wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled
instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or
intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the
phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other
condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are
only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes
and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts
of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to
compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called
secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of
organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we
turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want
information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In
these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing--the
world is rationally organized to do the rest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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