LISTEN. Another look at the Dilemma of Determinism today, in CoPhi (previously discussed in Happiness), and at John Kaag's "Determinism and Despair" chapter in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.
The dilemma of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and ethical, in us... (continues)
We'd have to be pessimists, if we didn't think our various regrets might ever actually lead to constructive action on our part, to ameliorate the world's deficiencies and wrongs. We'd be conceding our permanent impotence in the face of its inexorable injustice. That's the left horn.
The right horn is subjectivism (not to be confused with subjectivity), which leaves us impotent and the world unjust but at least puts on a show "for the production of consciousness," gives us something to think about and deepens our appreciation of the deplorably un-closeable gap between how things are and how they should be.
That's a destructive dilemma, or for James it was. It was destructive of his volitional nature, his will to do something and not just think it. As John Lachs said, "There is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it."
Hollow is a good word for a world whose content is "indifferent" and whose actors are merely supposed to register sharp thoughts and feelings as they sit back and watch the gruesome play unfold. That's when, in Camus's later words, "the stage sets collapse" (cue Sisyphus and his stone) and a feeling of farce sets in. Intolerable farce, if you're James or a temperamental Jamesian. The future is then without "ambiguous possibilities," the play's denouement is already written, and we're just spectators.
No thanks, said James. Say I. That's "sick," in soul and solar plexus. A gut punch. Give us a universe of alternative possibilities and meaningful chances, let us improvise our lines, let us do and not just think and feel.
But of course it's in no one's power to give that, we must take it for ourselves. Take it upon ourselves to act as if that's our universe: a pluralistic world of possibilities and chances in which we can feel ourselves truly at home. “No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance."
Taking chances means risking failure, accepting no guarantee of success, rejecting the dilemma of determinism and embracing our fallible melioristic opportunity to write a better ending.
Nevertheless 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... Pragmatism Lec. 8
Speaking of better endings: we stuck with Andie McDowell and her daughter to the end of The Maid, after the unhappy middle acts. Alex and Maddy's chances look good. Isn't that all any of us can ask?
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