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
Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz, "Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,
Dass grad' die Reichsten in der Welt, Das meiste Geld besitzen?"
Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle 'wealth' as something distinct
from the facts denoted by the man's being rich. It antedates them; the
facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man's
essential nature.
In the case of 'wealth' we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is
but a name for concrete processes that certain men's lives play a
part in, and not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and
Carnegie, but not in the rest of us.
Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes,
as digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this
instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say
the man digests and sleeps so well BECAUSE he is so healthy.
With 'strength' we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly
inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and
explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles.
With 'truth' most people go over the border entirely, and treat the
rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in TH
are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as
the other things do.
The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction
between habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good
sleeping and digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping,
or always digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling
money, or a strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink
to the status of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly
truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their
intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities
are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any
habit to exist in the intervals.
'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of
our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of
our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the
long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all
the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences
equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING
OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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