Truth and consequences

LISTEN. Today's poem ("...I begin to wonder about people—I wonder/if they also wonder about how strange it is that we/are here on the earth...") reminds me of this:

“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others —above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received and am still receiving.” Living Philosophies (via Chris Stevens, Northern Exposure)

Teachers are here for the sake of those others we call students, which makes it so gratifying to hear that one of them has mentioned to a colleague that I've made a memorable impression. We can't all be Einstein, but we can try to contribute in some small way to others' happiness while pursuing our own.

Today in Happiness it's chapter five of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds and glances at "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" (Pragmatism Lecture VI) and "The Gospel of Relaxation." (See also Ed Craig...) 

John Kaag says James's attention to determinism and free will, habit, and consciousness were among the "vectors of meaning" that saved his life. We should also notice that they were vectors of happiness. Meaning and happiness do converge in James's cosmos, and you really can't have one without the other. Nor can you have truth in pristine epistemic isolation. "To embrace the pragmatic theory of truth is at once a commitment to become more, much more, than a formal epistemologist." 

James had little use for 

the "bald-headed young Ph.D.'s" (ouch!) and their "desiccating and pedantifying" ways. His evident objection was not to their baldness, their youth, nor even their Ph.D.'s but to their cocksure belief in the exclusive primacy of an approach to philosophy that begins and ends in questions about the establishment of "certain knowledge" and insists on technicality and jargon at the expense of clarity for all except a very few specialists. James always declared himself on the side of experience, against "philosophy," wherever the latter had been shrunk to fit the limited dimensions or stylistic exclusivity of a "school" or discipline. He scorned some epistemologists' implicit view of reality as something necessarily twinned and correlated to whatever questions we happen at the moment to be asking about what and how we can know, as though abstract knowing were the highest purpose of life rather than one among many. Springs

Kaag shares James's discomfort with narrow academic professionalism/pedantry, and the sense that being a "student of life's value and worth" is a larger mission than that of many students (read professors) of philosophy. "Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation." We're often encouraged to forget that, we profs, and to get on with the production of ever more verbalities and verbosities. In the process, as we were saying last time, we grow (in yet another colorful Jamesian phrase) "stone-blind and insensible" to life's simple joys and pleasures. (We'll read that soon in context, in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.")

James's hallway (corridor) metaphor, treating pragmatism primarily as a method of negotiation and navigation among disparate interests and ends in philosophy and in life, reminds Kaag of James's beloved summer place in Chocorua with its fourteen doors "all opening outward." Pragmatism is a portal, not a sanctuary, "a place to dwell and meet the world" and maybe transcend it.

The distinction between truth and facts is crucial, for grasping the point of the pragmatic proposal that we reconstruct our conception of truth and our attitude toward it. "The facts may be out there, waiting for us to find them"--some of them--but the truth is our story about the facts"... and as we were saying in class yesterday, telling and acting from better stories about ourselves and the facts is an indispensable condition for creating a better society. 

The free will story is prerequisite to the kind of optimism (meliorism) we need to face our most daunting challenges. "It holds up improvement as at least possible," it gives us a chance. 

"The Gospel of Relaxation" has so impressed a friend that he now referes to it simply as "The Gospel," and I know instantly what he means. It's there that James speaks of the "buried life" or "inner atmosphere" of so many up-tight unhappy souls. Their Binnenleben has them too tightly wound. They need to let it go. Students need to relax before the big exam and trust their prior preparation, teachers need to relax in preparation for class and learn to "trust their spontaneity."

Back when I was still a struggling grad student, trying to figure out what I wanted to say about the philosophy of William James, I memorized this passage in Talks to Students ("On a Certain Blindness"):

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

I didn't know what exactly to say about that, then. Now I know he was talking about our respective "springs of delight," possibly the most propitious happiness insight any philosopher has ever articulated. Zest is what we want, and what we can have if we just learn to attend to our eagerness. 

For James, says Kaag, pragmatism was James's lifelong protest against resignation in the teeth of a Divine plan--of a Plan of any provenance, really--that might short-circuit our opportunity to seek salvation each in our own way, through our own effort and intellect and force of will.