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
If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I know
to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have
been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree.
Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in
general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities
and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of
combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal
caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible
expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of
rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a
childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the
abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because
they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than
as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just
remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious,
how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness
of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of
our animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in
that great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality, which
the intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be
anything but abstract outlines? Was Cologne cathedral built without an
architect's plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is
concrete rudeness the only thing that's true?
Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I
have given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all
abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat
the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an
abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact
the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true.
Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their
philosophies, and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned
out piecemeal, and when the student is working at a system, he may
often forget the forest for the single tree. But when the labor is
accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarizing act, and the
system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing, with that
strange simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, like the
wraith of the man, when a friend or enemy of ours is dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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