Department of Philosophy/RS
Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)
1301 East Main Street, Murfreesboro, TN 37132-0001
300 James Union Building
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* This slideshow linked at Hope and happiness in Poets and polytheists, posted 2.24.22
American Philosophical Association
Central Divison Regional Conference
Feb 25, 2022, Chicago-Palmer House
G4P. William James Society
William James
Chair: Tadd Ruetenik (St. Ambrose University)
Speakers:
Josh Fischel (Penn State-Harrisburg), "On the Return of the Preternatural in the Philosophy of William James"
James Phil Oliver (Middle Tennessee State University), "Promoting Happiness, Demoting Authority: Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn Revisited"
Jacob L. Goodson (Southwestern College), "Cries of the Wounded, Divided Selves, and Sick Souls: William James and the Consequences of Hearing the Cries of the Wounded"
American Philosophical Association
Central Divison Regional Conference
Feb 26, 2022, Chicago-Palmer House
G5L. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP)
Unraveling Modernity Through American Philosophy
Panelists:
Ken Stikkers (SIUC), "Pragmatism and the Early Frankfort School"
James Phil Oliver (MTSU), "Pragmatism and the Pursuit of Hope and Happiness"
Clara Fischer (Queen's University Belfast), "Affect and Emotions in Jane Addams’ Thought"
Deron Boyles (Georgia State University), "Activating Dewey’s Epistemology: Education as Reflecting and Knowing"
Brian Butler (UNC-Asheville), "Karl Llewellyn, American Legal Pragmatist"
It’s good to be back in Chicago, at the APA, in person and on the ground at a live philosophy conference. Those zoom rectangles just aren’t the same.
Like many of you I was last here about a hundred years ago: in 2020. Just the other side of the great lockdown. I reconsidered Royce. This time I’m here to reconsider Rorty.
My interest in Richard Rorty’s brand of pragmatism began when I arrived at Vanderbilt to begin grad school in 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was a topic of great interest among my profs and peers. Having and pronouncing a view of Rorty’s linguistically-turned, metaphor-slashing, meta-philosophically idiosyncratic iconoclasm seemed de rigeur. I was new to pragmatism and American philosophy, and impressionable. I soon latched onto “Willy James”...
My semi-articulated view of Rorty (and Rorty’s James), once I had one, was not especially sympathetic. In the decades since, I’d never had occasion to revisit or “redescribe” it with fresh eyes and the possibility of a more-favorable evaluation. That’s the occasion I’m here for today. I confess I’m still working through my ambivalence, but I also confess I now think my earlier take was hasty and a bit harsh.
My present revival of interest in Rorty has been sparked by a spate of posthumous publications…
Particularly Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, which touches directly on themes we perennially engage in two of the courses I teach in regular rotation: Philosophy of Happiness and Atheism and Philosophy.
“These lectures were the final, mature version and vision of his path-breaking pragmatism.”
"Pragmatism as Antiauthoritarianism" Part 1. Richard Rorty's 1996 Girona Lectures, with discussions.
Ferrater Mora lectures, University of Girona, 1996. Discussants: Robert Brandom, John McDowell, Bjorn Ramberg. These 10 lectures were published in 2021 by Harvard University Press. Parts 1 and 2 together are about 12.5 hours. Bob Brandom, 11.20.21 Part 1
Robert Brandom Seminar 2020 “Pragmatism and Expressivism” Lecture 7 Assessing Rorty’s pragmatism
Lecture 7 of 14.
Assessing Rorty’s pragmatism as antirepresentationalism.
Handouts, links to readings, and other documents available at: http://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses...
See Brandom website at: http://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/index.html
“…there are aspects of metaphysics, epistemology, and metaphilosophy that preoccupy contemporary neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty but that I treat only lightly and in passing. Much more waits to be said on this topic, more than I can or want to say, and I hope others will say it. We must all tell our own stories…Jamesian transcendence is in my view neither an epistemic nor an escapist impulse, both of which Rorty criticizes. SPGS 5
So, as Richard Rorty suggests, "we can, with James, relish the thought that our descendants may face live and forced options which we shall never imagine." And if, as Rorty goes on to say, "James was not always content to identify the 'wider self through which saving experiences come'" with some such feeling of human solidarity through the ages, he was much more at ease with this fundamentally naturalistic orientation to spiritual life than is commonly recognized. SPGS 201
…with obvious approval, WJ quotes James Henry Leuba as saying, “God is not known, he is not understood, he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometime as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness can ask no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.” (VRE, 398)"
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom:
James appreciated and sometimes espoused versions of historicism and relativism–relationalism is a better term for his view–but was no deconstructionist. He was a marvelous writer of accessibly literary philosophy, but he was at last a philosophical intellectual and not just a kibitzing conversationalist. Like Dewey and the other "classical American philosophers," he regarded all intellectual disciplines warily but with a real conviction of purpose. He believed that philosophers have an important function in our cultural life that is more than just talking, though talk they must if they are to execute the role assigned them with any competence. The deconstructive pragmatists follow James in thinking that what we call the world or reality is for us an abstraction from the totality of our experience. But they depart from him (and Dewey) abruptly and irrevocably when they fail to distinguish depths from shallows in that totality, and to preserve for philosophers an explicit responsibility to acknowledge and ply the distinction. Fortunately, says Edward Reed, "others have picked up the notion from James and Dewey that one can believe in real, thick experience and still be a philosopher."4 Despite being troubled by its occasional and maddening descent into trivia, James was unashamed to admit that he "believ[ed] in philosophy myself devoutly."5 James's emphasis on perceptual immediacy as the touchstone of something "deep" in our experience, whether trenchant and profound or merely misguided, is one of his most characteristic and recurrent motifs. It may be possible to be a "pragmatist" while renouncing the Jamesian depths, but it surely is not possible to do so and still be a Jamesian. But in the Jamesian spirit of inclusion, I will not here attempt to establish membership requirements for some closed "Friends of William James" society. SPGS __
I simply note the fact that James was painfully aware of difficulties in coming to terms with perceptual experience philosophically, some of them also Rorty's reasons for renouncing philosophy's traditional problems and purposes; but still he stuck with them. James's unremitting commitment to the presence of real depths in experience, which philosophy easily misses and discourse did not invent, is not easily skirted or dismissed by those who would represent themselves credibly as his lineal intellectual descendants. I dislike deconstructive pragmatism (by which I mostly have in mind Rorty's creative and deliberate misreading of James and Dewey, evidently aimed at eliding their distinctive differences from the continental tradition of Heidegger, Derrida, and others). I think James would dislike it too, for failing to take seriously the subjective experience of depth beyond words. It would be mean spirited to deny the deconstructionists their insights. Rorty's genius for "antiphilosophical" narrative and synthesis has raised the profile of American philosophy generally. But his sweeping attempts to transform the Pragmatists into irrealists of a specific sort are misleading. The attractiveness of dispensing with the notion of perceptual depths is undeniable: what can we really say about an experience that begins to lose clarity and vividness precisely when we speak of it? How, indeed, can we be sure that our talk about experience does not fundamentally alter our recollection of it, or even that any experience is "immediate" and "perceptual" at all? In other words, do we have grounds for asserting a phenomenal distinction between deep and shallow experience? James clearly thinks we do, with his admonition to "take reality bodily and integrally up into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape in which it comes."6 This is an intriguing, paradoxical challenge…does he mean that, by directing us away from concepts, philosophy may succeed in turning us toward reality? Something of this sort is suggested in his defense of Bergson: "In using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims of concepts generally, Bergson . . . show[s] us to what quarter we must practically turn if we wish to gain that completer insight into reality which he denies that they can give."7 SPGS __
…F. C. S. Schiller, a contemporary and ally of James's in the philosophical wars of their day, was also a philosopher of subjectivity; but in important ways Schiller was more "subjective," less a realist about nature and our experience in and of it, indeed, as its progeny. He may be more deserving of the lineal recognition that Richard Rorty sometimes hastily confers upon James. Schiller called himself a "personal idealist," in deliberate contrast to absolute or transcendental idealists like Green and Bradley. James, on the other hand, bristled at the charge that his radical empiricism was in any important metaphysical sense "idealistic." Like James, Schiller defended and celebrated subjectivity; but it is highly misleading to lump him and James with Rorty, indiscriminately, as antirealists. Of course, James held that human volition, with purposive intelligence its most useful tool, contributes mightily to the perpetual determination of a reality that is metaphysically under-determined from the start: there are always more real possibilities at any moment than the actual facts (minus the undetermined and unexecuted choices of individuals) can account for. Schiller and Rorty, and the "objective" pragmatists, agree on this. But James is distinctive in his conjoint emphasis on intractabilities as no less real than the world's plasticity. It sounds paradoxical, but James is a realist in part because he is so attuned to the different ways in which personal views and enthusiasms shape very "subjective" descriptions of the world, which are useful, accurate, and–in pragmatic terms–true. Here he distinguishes his own brand of realism from what he saw as Santayana's peculiar irrealism…
I’ve not, thankfully I think, retained a copy of the Rorty paper I stayed up all night trying to write on deadline in my first year for the late great John J. Compton, who still epitomizes for me the iconic Form of the properly presentable academic. (He also introduced me to “Willy James.”) He was kind enough to give me an extension, and ultimately a good grade… for all the good the extra time probably didn’t do to refine my grasp of Rorty’s project.
Later, working with John Lachs, I came to a stronger appreciation of the vitalizing presence of “immediacy” in our lives… In his final 1996 Ferrata Mora lectures at the University of Girona, Rorty criticized the uses to which empiricist philosophers have tried to put immediacy and perceptual experience. These criticisms remain a source of ambivalence and even consternation for me. And this is good! Questions and projects are an invitation to imaginative redescription. (And also to more immediacy and perceptual experience, JL would say.)
John Lachs's Practical Philosophy Critical Essays on His Thought with Replies and Bibliography (Brill, 2018) Immediacy and the Future by Phil Oliver
…A lightbulb went off, inside, and I finally thought I got it; I began to understand what Lachs meant by saying that we have it in our power to regard our acts as so many ends, not just intermediate steps on the way to some perpetually-postponed future fulfillment. Oh, I thought, so immediacy isn’t just another technical notion from the philosophers’ shop. It can be about mundane personal enthusiasm and simple delight in everyday experience, too.
That moment nourished several themes that eventually coalesced in my work. Now I had my thesis topic and a gestating book theme, eventuating in William James’s “Springs of Delight” (Vanderbilt, 2001) with its acknowledge- ment of Lachs’s “deft but unobtrusive direction that enabled me finally to sub- due the ‘Ph.D. Octopus.’”
James cautions that we not abuse the powers of intellect by substituting pure intellection for rounded perception. Still, it is in the broader sense an intellectual act to warn against the dangers of intellectualism. We must not forget that James was one of the first to use the term intellectual in a positive way, to describe his own activities and his professional as well as temperamental allegiance to reason, in the sense that is not unfaithful to the actual experience of individuals. One result of going with the flow of experience in the way suggested here is that we may begin to free ourselves from the wearying habit of subordinating all of our acts to remote futurity, and learn to enjoy and appreciate present experience now. There is no inherent conflict or final incompatibility between adopting both the purposive and goal-oriented and the aesthetic attitudes, although we typically cannot embrace both unreservedly and simultaneously. We must exercise discretion to know when each attitude is appropriate. But "normally it is quite within our power to regard our doings as so many ends. This could render each of our acts self-validating and joyous" (John Lachs, Intermediate Man [Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1981], 41). 33. SPGS __
When one switches from Kant to Hegel, the philosopher whom Sellars described as "the great foe of immediacy," these metaphors lose much of their appeal… there is no clear need for what McDowell describes as 'a minimal empiricism': the idea that experience must constitute a tribunal, mediating the way our thinking is answerable to how things are, as it must be if we are to make sense of it as thinking at all… we are constantly interacting with things as well as with persons, and one of the ways in which we interact with both is through their effects upon our sensory organs. [We] can be content with an account of the world as exerting control on our inquiries in a merely causal way, rather than as exerting what McDowell calls "rational control”... "a merely causal, not rational, linkage between thinking and independent reality will do, as an interpretation of the idea that empirical content requires friction against something external to thinking." — Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty https://a.co/aKXie3d
To that I say: “friction,” though, the blunt resistance and attraction of nature literally and palpably under foot, is what we peripatetic empiricists find most immediately salient in our everyday experience. We suspect a large chunk of the history of western philosophy, the chunk eager to think without friction, is a result of philosophers’ unhealthy sedentary ways. They need to get out more, to move about in the open air. They’ll not then be so tempted to doubt in philosophy what they do not doubt in their hearts or on their feet.
Better this…
"Sellars and Davidson can be read as saying that Aristotle's slogan, constantly cited by the empiricists, "Nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the senses," was a wildly misleading way of describing the relation between the objects of knowledge and our knowledge of them. McDowell, however, though agreeing that this slogan was misleading, thinks that we are now in danger of tossing the baby out with the bath. We need to recapture the insight which motivated the empiricists. He disagrees with Brandom's implicit suggestion that we simply forget about sense-impressions, and other putative mental contents which cannot be identified with judgments. The controversy between McDowell and Brandom is exciting wide interest among Anglophone philosophers because it is forcing them to ask whether we still have any use for the notion of "perceptual experience.". — Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty
That’s my baby…
"’The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience.’3 James points to the ephemeral, fleeting quality of immediate perceptual experience as the insuperable barrier to complete human understanding of the real. We cannot compass all experience, and it is only an ‘intellectualist’ error to suppose that any avenue of experience can be bypassed on the way to full understanding. We can in some way hope to ‘extract’ a conceptual translation of it, but concepts are not ‘deep,’ and discourse about experience is not experience in the primary sense (that is, it is not immediate or perceptual, though it may still be ‘perceptive’).” SPGS 38
The point is not to invoke perceptual experience in vindication of any particular sentence or proposition, but to acknowledge that our place in nature and our condition as natural beings cannot be swept under the armchair. The point is to have perceptual experiences, not just to think about them. To cut ourselves off from our native place and condition would be the most wanton self- and species-destruction. It’s why we’d better tread light, in the direction of Zuck’s metaverse.
“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. . . . In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.” VRE XVIII
WJ would happily have swapped his standard-issue conceptual shotgun for one of these.
Thoreau's tonic "wildness" is not just about weeds and rattlesnakes, but more the sense of a vital and open quality of experience that is ours if we have the fortitude and adventurousness of spirit to seize it. This is part of what "mystery" signifies for James as well, a quality invoked as much to inform his intellectual life as to counter what he considers its excesses. Mystery quickens our pulses, enchants our inner lives, and saves us from suffocating intellectual arrogance. We need it, Thoreau tells us; and James, ever sensitive to need, concurs. Whether this is true for us collectively, as a species, or just for some of us, as individuals, it represents a natural cap on our capacity for total knowledge.
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us, because unfathomable.
Thoreau and James both imply that the mystery of life is palpable and perceptible for those who allow themselves the luxury of stillness in which to appreciate it. But teachers are not still. "What an awful trade that of professor is," James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." Richard Ford's character Frank Bascombe expanded on the same theme: Real mystery, the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book, was to [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away-live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble. . . .”
Again, I’m still ambivalent. But I can declare that I’m glad to have re-entered the Rorty conversation. I do think he has important things to say, and he says them in provocative ways that shake the dust out of so many old academic exercises in ancestral deference. Important things, that is, beyond the prophetic visions so widely remarked just after the presidential election of 2016.
…something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
No matter how prophetic Rorty may have been in "Achieving Our Country," even he couldn't have imagined how absurd it would be to live in the age of post-truth-ranting Trump. His late turn to a greater focus on politics has been more than vindicated by subsequent developments. But in light of the bizarre fake-everything style of present public discourse, when neither freedom nor truth seem well cared for, is Rorty’s really a constructive voice for this moment? Rupert Read thinks so.
A question of real interest and importance to the general public, now, is: how do we remain solid about politics, true to sentiments on the doorstep, true to a basic sense of our inhabiting a shared reality, serious about changing the world for the better (or at least: stopping it from uncontrollably sliding into a worse and worse situation, vis a vis politics, democracy, inequality, climate, and more)… how do we do all this in a culture where we are more than ever suspicious that what we are told may be untrue, and more than ever suspicious about what it means for something to be true. Rorty offers a possible way forward, vis a vis this crucial question.
The way forward is away from the authoritarian template of anti-humanism, “away from the very idea of human answerability to the world” (or Reality) and towards one another. “I regard the need for world-directedness as a relic of the need for authoritative guidance… My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future.”
Pragmatism is a humanism, aspirationally at least.
This is quite a remarkable passage In Rorty's Universality and Truth lecture. Understand it, and you better understand his total weltanschauung.
"The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire 'liberal Establishment' is engaged in a conspiracy…These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with our fundamentalist students than do kindergarten teachers with their students…
When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian Scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization…” PAA 79
"The lectures try to sketch the result of putting aside the cosmological, epistemological, and moral versions of the sublime: God as immaterial first cause, Reality as utterly alien to our epistemic subjectivity, and moral purity as unreachable by our inherently sinful empirical selves. I follow Dewey in suggesting that we build our philosophical reflections around our political hopes: around the project of fashioning institutions and customs which will make human life, finite and mortal life, more beautiful."
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom: https://a.co/4F82CR9 xxix
It's Schopenhauer's birthday, for whom "happiness is an illusion, our desires can never truly be satisfied, and the only way to attain peace of mind is by maintaining very low expectations." He seems to be popular with young philosophers these days. SAD.
·22h
It’s Arthur Schopenhauer’s 234th birthday. Please celebrate by reflecting on the fact that his own mother closed a letter to him with these words: “If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.”
Replying to @RobertTalisse
And yet, a student in class this morning said he was the greatest philosopher of all time. I think we can do better.
Unhappy, unhopeful, unauthoritative anti-meliorist
"Dewey, like James, was a utilitarian: he thought that in the end the only moral or epistemological criteria we have or need is whether performing an action, or holding a belief, will, in the long run, make for greater human happiness. He saw progress as produced by increasing willingness to experiment, to get out from under the past. So he hoped we should learn to view current scientific, religious, philosophical, and moral beliefs with the skepticism with which Bentham viewed the laws of England: he hoped each new generation would try to cobble together some more useful beliefs—beliefs which would help them make human life richer, fuller, and happier."
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" https://a.co/2oy8NQv 3
KEYWORD: do
"I see the pragmatists’ account of truth, and more generally their anti-representationalist account of belief, as a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. So I shall begin by developing an analogy which I think was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to believe that Reality has an intrinsic nature."
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty: 1
With Whom is no Variableness, Neither Shadow of Turning
It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so:
That, howsoe'er I stray and range,
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change.
I steadier step when I recall
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.
From a pragmatic, humanistic, melioristic perspective it is not fortifying to contemplate eternity. One must do something for humanity in time.
"I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts – just as I would have if I had made more close friends." Richard Rorty, The Fire of Life - Poetry Magazine
“My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts,... if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” Charles Darwin, Autobiography
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
An old post from the Happiness blog, featuring a long-married pair of preeminent poets now both passed, reminding us why it's so vital that we humans keep moving forward and thinking about a better tomorrow.
That's meliorism, which "treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become."
"It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism." Isn't it? Meliorists move forward, ideal by realized ideal, to see what may be made of our brief and flitting lives and of those still to come.
The poets remind us as well that we mustn't squander what James called the sufficiency of the present moment. It's in such moments of presence that the "earth of things" speaks most eloquently of the continuity of all time and the remembrance of things past.
I don't think happiness really comes to rocks and rainfall and wineglasses, but the poet is entitled to her license. I think her point is that it's here amidst the stuff of life, or for us it's nowhere. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/04/the-things
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away
...
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
--Happiness by Jane Kenyon
Likewise, her husband the Sox fan. She's gone, and his attention has turned to his things…
William James, a poet among philosophers and an excellent philosopher of happiness, would have approved.
The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The center of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. Pragmatism
Happiness on earth must be found on earth. Even those who invest themselves in dreams of heaven still do their dreaming here.
Such a simple point, but so elusive for so many.
Inspired by @OSOPHER's⭐️post, I push back on James's vital question: "The really vital question..is, What is this world going to be? What is life
eventually to make of itself?" They're TERRIBLE questions & Pragmatism should help us stop asking them.
https://ironick.medium.com/retrospective-meliorism-just-try-to-suck-less-aef5f220491b
Only a redoubtable life-celebrant and cosmic optimist would have responded, just weeks before his own looming extinction in the summer of 1910, to Henry Adams's dark musings on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the "heat death of the universe" and so on, with this sort of blue-sky speculation:
“Though the ULTIMATE state of the universe may be its . . . extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the PENULTIMATE state might be . . . a happy and virtuous consciousness. . . . In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." SPGS __
…Imagination is one of our best tools, it enables us to describe and re-describe our lives and dreams. To dream, perchance to live. If you can think it you can maybe make it, or not. Either way, a flexible imagination is insurance against the possibility-denying platonic temptation to lock ourselves into an upper-case Reality without the prospect of amelioration. And we desperately need amelioration.
While I was out walking and riding in the sunshine yesterday I took Lord Russell with me. The BBC just brought out his inaugural Reith lectures of 1948, "Authority and the Individual." Younger Bertie was a platonist--"brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark"--, but he got over it. He became a meliorist. He grew up, into the understanding that our hopes, “though as yet they are largely frustrated by our folly,” remain “within our reach.” A better politics, a stronger democracy, a heritage of values still worthy to transmit to our heirs, remains a possibility… Bertie Russell, meliorist U@d 2.21.22
For those of us whose melioristic sympathies are rooted in William James's Pragmatism, the enlistment of Bertrand Russell as an ally in the moral equivalent of war may sound odd. James called him an ass ("Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known. Ass!"), he took nasty swipes at WJ and said the "logical outcome" of the Will to Believe when applied to religion and politics would be carnage. "What is wanted is not the will to believe but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite."
Nonetheless, I am struck more by the affinities of James and Russell and Richard Rorty as hopeful meliorists and humanists, and (though Rorty's general public demeanor was glum and Eeyore-ish) as philosophers united in their pursuit of happiness. Those affinities far outweigh any differences as to the best interpretation of the relation between belief and knowledge.
Meliorism, humanism, hope, and happiness are centered in forward-looking action, not armchair or seminar room contemplation. Rorty, Russell, and James (and let's add Dewey) share in the former's "protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality." Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
“William James used to preach the “will to believe.” For my part, I should wish to preach the “will to doubt.” None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate.” –1922 Conway Memorial Lecture, later published as Free Thought and Official Propaganda
“The Will to Doubt: Bertrand Russell on Free Thought and Our Only Effective Self-Defense Against Propaganda” by Maria Popova (The Marginalian)
James, it's true, defended the right of believers to humble themselves before "whatever they may consider the divine." But his more characteristic disposition was to exalt the ways in which beliefs of all sorts could get persons formerly humbled and crippled by the challenges of living off their knees, up and moving forward.
It's always, for happy hopeful melioristic humanists, a question of what value for life our respective commitments and projects may deliver. It's always our really vital question: "What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"
Happy the philosopher whose center of gravity has shifted to this earth of things and finite humans questing to do their bit to make things just a little better. Going forward.
…Who speaks for pragmatism?
A bigger question: What practical difference does it make?
What significant value for life hinges on whether we're Jamesians, Deweyans, Rortians, Humanists, Natural Pietists, Methodists, Genesis Creationists...?
And the most important question of all: Can't we just all just get along? Those who may come after us will have been counting on it.
The Human Abode, U@d 2.9.22
A larger loyalty, an expanding circle (Singer)-
Could we replace the notion of “justice” with that of loyalty to [a larger] group—for example, one’s fellow citizens, or the human species, or all living things? Would anything be lost by this replacement? …being rational and acquiring a larger loyalty are two descriptions of the same activity. This is because any unforced agreement between individuals and groups about what to do creates a form of community, and will, with luck, be the initial stage in expanding the circles of those whom each party to the agreement had previously taken to be “people like ourselves.” The opposition between rational argument and fellow feeling thus begins to dissolve…RR
And why stop there? A cosmopolitan identity embraces nothing smaller than the cosmos itself.
“The title ‘Hope in Place of Knowledge’ is a way of suggesting that Plato and Aristotle were wrong in thinking that humankind’s most distinctive and praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they really are—to penetrate behind appearance to reality. That claim saddles us with the unfortunate appearance-reality distinction and with metaphysics: a distinction, and a discipline, which pragmatism shows us how to do without … My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future.”
And that again, of course, is meliorism. Again, it’s our really vital question.
When Aristotle maligns the life of practical virtue, he illustrates its flaws by imagining the gods, who have no need to ameliorate anything. “We assume the gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy…”
Your life may be more or less consumed by amelioration, more or less awash with needs. There may be pockets of leisure in which to breathe…
Kieran Setiya (whose podcast Five Questions is excellent, btw) has spoken of amelioration as more chore than joy, a merely-negative struggle to put out fires that stands between ourselves and our happiness. But happy pragmatic meliorists do not agree.
...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable. Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism...
Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become. It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism... Pragmatism: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking...
(If you’d like to display your own meliorist sympathies I’ve been authorized to distribute a few of these.)
It is also clear that pragmatism must incline towards humanism…
“Some humans ain’t human”... or humane. The problem with appealing to non-human authority is that it too frequently is expressed in ways that assault humane decency.
Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe…I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher. WB VII
And pragmatism must incline towards fallibilism.
Novelist/ poet/farmer/activist Wendell Berry tautly summarizes the call to hope I find so prominent in James and Dewey: "A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study life and our conditions, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope."But, he elaborates significantly, the search must center on ourselves, in our own time: We can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use . . . [T]he man who works and behaves well today need take no thought for the morrow; he has discharged today's only obligation to the morrow.”
"What I like best about William James after all," Henry James scholar Sheldon Novick once told an online community of Jamesians, "is the relentless effort to express experience in ordinary language, as rigorous and coherent in its way as Emily Dickinson's poetry," and, in its way, as cheerfully restorative of life.
The Reith Lectures began in 1949, with Bertrand Russell's six-part talk on 'authority and the individual'. Every single lecture - with transcripts - is on @BBCSounds now.
Timely and helpful! An ironic concluding appeal to Lord Russell's authority will now punctuate my remarks on "Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" at the Chicago APA next weekend. Thanks, @BBCRadio4. *
Bertrand Russell - Authority and the Individual
The philosopher, mathematician and social reformer Bertrand Russell gives the inaugural Reith lecture series on the subject of Authority and the Individual.
REITH LECTURES 1948: Authority and the Individual Bertrand Russell
…Our emancipation from bondage to external nature has made possible a greater degree of human well-being than has ever hitherto existed. But if this possibility is to be realised, there must be freedom of initiative in all ways not positively harmful, and encouragement of those forms of initiative that enrich the life of Man. We shall not create a good world by trying to make men tame and timid, but by encouraging them to be bold and adventurous and fearless, except in inflicting injuries upon their fellowmen. In the world in which we find ourselves, the possibilities of good are almost limitless, and the possibilities of evil no less so…
Our present predicament is due more than anything else to the fact that we have learnt to understand and control to a terrifying extent the forces of nature outside us, but not those that are embodied in ourselves. Self-control has always been a watchword of the moralist, but in the past it has been a control without understanding. In these lectures I have sought for a wider understanding of human needs than is assumed by most politicians and economists, for it is only through such an understanding that we can find our way to the realisation of those hopes which, though as yet they are largely frustrated by our folly, our skill has placed within our reach.
Lecture 6: Individual and Social Ethics TRANSMISSION: 30 January 1949 - Home Service
If I thought the universe was capable of communicating, or caring to, I might have taken that tweet from BBC4 last Sunday morning as a mysterious message to stop scrolling and get back to work. But of course the universe doesn't care what I say here today in Chicago – except insofar as I do. And maybe one or two others.
So what I most want to say, in conclusion, is that Russell was right: “there must be freedom of initiative in all ways not positively harmful”... and this means Rorty must also have been right to insist on our anti-authoritarian freedom to initiate ever-flowing founts of imaginative redescription, to ameliorate our lives and sustain our dreams. He may just have been right, too: “take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself.”
Russell was also right to end his Reith lectures with the vision of a future in which our hopes, “though as yet they are largely frustrated by our folly,” remain “within our reach.” A better politics, a stronger democracy , a heritage of values still worthy to transmit to our heirs, remains a possibility.
Keep hope alive.
Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: 'true for me but not for you' and 'true in my culture but not in yours' are weird, pointless locutions. So is 'true then but not now.'--Richard Rorty
REITH LECTURES 1948: Authority and the Individual Bertrand Russell Lecture 6: Individual and Social Ethics TRANSMISSION: 30 January 1949 - Home Service
But liberty is not merely a cultural matter. No man is wholly free, and no man is wholly a slave. To the extent to which a man has freedom, he needs a personal morality to guide his conduct. There are some who would say that a man need only obey the accepted moral code of his community. But I do not think any student of anthropology could be content with this answer. Such practices as cannibalism, human sacrifice, and head-hunting have died out as a result of moral protests against conventional moral opinion. If a man seriously desires to live the best life that is open to him, he must learn to be critical of the tribal customs and tribal beliefs that are generally accepted among his neighbours.
Ethics, however, is not concerned solely with duty to my neighbour, however rightly such duty may be conceived. The performance of public duty is not the whole of what makes a good life; there is also the pursuit of private excellence. For man, though partly social, is not wholly so. He has thoughts and feelings and impulses which may be wise or foolish, noble or base, filled with love or inspired by hate. And for the better of these thoughts and feelings and impulses, if his life is to be tolerable, there must be scope. For although a few men can be happy in solitude, still fewer can be happy in a community which allows no freedom of individual action….
…A question of real interest and importance to the general public, now, is: how do we remain solid about politics, true to sentiments on the doorstep, true to a basic sense of our inhabiting a shared reality, serious about changing the world for the better (or at least: stopping it from uncontrollably sliding into a worse and worse situation, vis a vis politics, democracy, inequality, climate, and more)… how do we do all this in a culture where we are more than ever suspicious that what we are told may be untrue, and more than ever suspicious about what it means for something to be true. Rorty offers a possible way forward, vis a vis this crucial question.
I once asked Dick Rorty whether he would contemplate going into electoral politics himself. He answered strongly in the negative. It wasn't his role at all, it wasn't his forte, he said to me. His role was that of the public intellectual, trying to get people who were willing to think about politics to think about how the aim of politics needed to change, and how it needed to stay the same. Perhaps if there had been just a little more such thinking, the 'Free World' wouldn't now be 'led' by a man whose 'post-truth' rantings should make some postmodernists more than a little ashamed of themselves.
Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He also chairs Green House. Follow him on Twitter: @RupertRead
(https://twitter.com/tpmquote/status/1490026695620976641?s=02)
The project of following James's resolve to take subjective experience seriously in the only way any of us can, from his or her own angle of vision, has the necessary effect of "circumscribing the topic" and neglecting areas others might prefer to pursue. A circumscription is really a partial transcription of one's own inner life. In particular, there are aspects of metaphysics, epistemology, and metaphilosophy that preoccupy contemporary neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty13 but that I treat only lightly and in passing. Much more waits to be said on this topic, more than I can or want to say, and I hope others will say it. We must all tell our own stories. So here are some disclaimers: My interest in Jamesian transcendence is not motivated by a futile quest for some standpoint outside both "reality as a whole" (whatever that might mean) and our statements about it. I am not attempting to draw a reliable map to all possible senses of "transcendence." I do mention several prominent vehicles and destinations in order to orient the reader who wonders what on earth transcendence might mean, but I have left others out. That is as much a reflection of my own subjectivity as a statement about important meanings. Jamesian transcendence is in my view neither an epistemic nor an escapist impulse, both of which Rorty criticizes. True, James's radical empiricist commitment to personal experience does make him more hospitable to talk about transcendent entities and phenomena than traditional empiricists, but hospitable, we will see, within a naturalistic context and as a humane expression of his pluralism. He denies no important truths about the history and contingency of human convention and belief, or about human limits. SPGS 5
"’The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience.’3 James points to the ephemeral, fleeting quality of immediate perceptual experience as the insuperable barrier to complete human understanding of the real. We cannot compass all experience, and it is only an ‘intellectualist’ error to suppose that any avenue of experience can be bypassed on the way to full understanding. We can in some way hope to ‘extract’ a conceptual translation of it, but concepts are not ‘deep,’ and discourse about experience is not experience in the primary sense (that is, it is not immediate or perceptual, though it may still be ‘perceptive’). Some sympathetic modern readers of James, particularly impressed by this last point, think he anticipated certain late trends imported from the European continent (especially France) and meant not only to deny that the world beyond our words sanctions those ideas and conversations that ‘agree’ with it, but to detach language from the world. Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism seems to hold something like this view. Its least circumspect defenders typically reside in university departments of literature; philosophers who defend it usually describe their orientation as defiantly literary and historical rather than philosophical, reserving that term for the opprobrious censure of unreconstructed realists, antirelativists, and other reactionaries who do not concede the wisdom of a radically historicist and deconstructivist approach to intellectual life.” SPGS 38
The common core of religious feeling for James, we must remind ourselves, is not about God. Love of life is religion's spring. If we do not bungle our watch, we may aspire to transmit a richer inheritance of life than we have received. In that aspiration resides the possibility of one kind of transcendence in the direction of "something larger than ourselves" but possibly not larger than the collectivity of selves past and future whose tangential link is our present. This is transcendence with an irrepressible forward momentum, probing for the "next step" of our evolutionary epic and the chance to endure. So, as Richard Rorty suggests, "we can, with James, relish the thought that our descendants may face live and forced options which we shall never imagine." And if, as Rorty goes on to say, "James was not always content to identify the 'wider self through which saving experiences come'"93 with some such feeling of human solidarity through the ages, he was much more at ease with this fundamentally naturalistic orien- tation to spiritual life than is commonly recognized. And if, as A.N. Wilson suggests, such a conception strikes some believers as not Godly enough, that is merely a reflection of their own religious assumptions and not a legitimate objection to James's. SPGS 201
…with obvious approval, WJ quotes James Henry Leuba as saying, “God is not known, he is not understood, he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometime as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness can ask no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.” (VRE, 398)"
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom: https://a.co/f3uRbVW