The open air

 Back from the chilly Windy City (#APACentral22), with a warm glow and an eagerness to hone my message and get it out there, or at least talk about it with my friends and peers (almost-coextensive sets) there again next year. I'll go back to the Palmer House ("the longest continually operating full-service hotel in the United States") every February from now 'til Doomsday if I can. I'm fired up. Ready to go.

My friend Myron, who was hired to succeed my friend Daryl at Western Carolina and seems to be everybody's friend, makes it worth the trip all by himself. I've never met a more gregarious, light-spreading, room-cheering philosopher. Everyone's brother, in the Cornel West mode. He chaired the SAAP session and, as so often at these affairs, was the last person I greeted in the lobby on my way out the door. He's a platonic role model for the dour Eeyorish-types (nod to Rorty, whose larger message--in spite of himself--I now see as one of happiness and hope and meliorism) that predominate in our profession. 

So what is my message? This morning I'll put it this way: words and talk can be great, they're our most promising tool of amelioration if we learn to deploy them in a consistently judicious and honest way, less to "explain" and more to explore and connect.

But an over-emphasis and over-reliance on words and talk, to the exclusion of a larger nourishing connection to nature and experience (which meliorists must not throw out with the soiled bathwater of an uncircumspect empiricism), can be ruinous. As one of my slides put it, responding to Rorty's statement that "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": 

We peripatetic melioristic radical empiricists 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 what William James called the open air and possibilities inherent in nature. They’ll not then be so tempted to doubt in philosophy what they do not doubt in their hearts or on their feet.

In other words, far better this

    

than this:

  

Which is why I just had to get out at lunchtime for this:

Solvitur ambulando!

And that's why this morning's poem speaks so directly to me.

Go For a Brisk Walk

by Gene Guntzel

Go for a brisk walk every day
Either around dawn or sunset
And you may run into Chopin or Monet,
Charlotte Bronte or a mysterious brunette
Who turns out to be Maria Callas.
Bessie Smith, Jack Benny, you never knew,
The Duke of Earl slipping away from the palace,
Kafka and his fiancée strolling in the snow.
Melville whose book you meant to read,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, Princess Diana, Van Gogh,
Out walking, despite all they’ve been through.
“To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need,”
Said Emily Dickinson. (She’s here, too.)
Life is hard. Oh Lord, the miseries we bear
And yet it’s good to get out in the open air. WA

We encounter plenty of words and talk, out walking, but we also encounter the ground beneath our feet and the sky overhead. We encounter gravity and friction. We gain insight. We regain perspective. We get hopeful and happy. 

Poets and polytheists

My recent immersion in Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism brings back that early-grad school thrill of finding a philosopher so transgressively unafraid to say iconoclastic things no one else was saying, with stylish over-the-top rhetorical excess. Who knew you could get away with deliberately misreading classic texts, to squeeze them into one's own preferred mold of thought? Or that you could so redefine familiar words like poetry that they now meant whatever you wanted them to mean, Humpty Dumpty fashion. 

[O]nce one sees no way of ranking human needs other than playing them off against one another, human happiness becomes all that matters, and Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction one needs.

[P]oetry should take over the role which religion has played in the formation of individual human lives, and that nothing should take over the function of the churches... once you become polytheistic, you are likely to turn away not only from priests, but from such priest-substitutes as metaphysicians and physicists.

One can see [monotheists] as Nietzsche did, as blind, weak, fools. Or one can see them as James and Dewey did, as people who are so spell-bound by the work of one poet as to be unable to appreciate the work of other poets. One can be, like Nietzsche, aggressively atheist, or one can, like Dewey, see such aggressive atheism as itself a version of monotheism, as having “something in common with traditional supernaturalism.” PAA 28-9

Over-the-top, yes. But also provocative in ways that can positively enliven a classroom or an academic conference, as I suspect I'm about to confirm. The APA is already underway but I have another day's classes to teach before heading to the airport in the morning. I just hope the unruliest passengers aren't going to Chicago and don't turn up for "Promoting Happiness, Demoting Authority: Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn Revisited" and "Pragmatism and the Pursuit of Hope and Happiness." 

==

Postscript.

Live-tweeting the philosophy conference

These conferences involve a lot more sitting and listening than I'm accustomed to. I've amused myself by tweeting about it... 

Last tweets from the conference, before flying home in the morning:

The earth of things

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. 

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.

Meliorism, humanism, hope, and happiness

 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) 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

James, it's true, defended the right of believers to humble themselves before "whatever they may call 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.

Bertie Russell, meliorist

 Yesterday's gorgeous sunny harbinger of spring, a sleeveless bikeride, two dogwalk 60s sort of day that we get randomly and delightfully in winter here in the mid-south, has yielded to clouds and a forecast of rain. Not complaining. Take delight where it comes, and anticipate more. 

Of course, weather finds other ways to try and kill us down here. So do our politicians. Pick your poison. I sometimes imagine what life would be like in New England. Would I have learned to love cross-country skiing and snowmobiling and seven or eight months of what we call winter? It sure looks great on screen, on Trout and Coffee and Ally Marie.

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.

Keep hope alive.

And that's how I think I'll conclude my remarks in Chicago next weekend at the APA, where it will probably not be sunny and sixty-something. It wasn't the last time I was there this time of year, right before everything locked down. But it'll be a nice place to visit again.

“We American college teachers”

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. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank…The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like 'There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.' I have no trouble offering this reply, since I do not claim to make the distinction between education and conversation on the basis of anything except my loyalty to a particular community, a community whose interests required re-educating the Hitler Youth in 1945 and require re-educating the children of southwestern Virginia in 1993..."

— Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/3psrY57

A good day

 Yesterday was excellent. First day of the rest of my life. 

Got it off on the right foot by walking away from my building, when I first arrived on campus at 8 am, rather than heading in. Just felt an insistent need for an immediate walkabout, without distraction or delay. 

That used to be my default, in every weather: walk to work (like Henry), right after the long benumbing auto commute. Lately I've gotten soft, in winter, preferring the instant comfort of central heating. 

But it wasn't that cold yesterday morning, 40-something, so I parked and pivoted in the direction of the Tom Jackson Building rather than the James Union. Then on past Murphy Center, the stadium, the baseball field, the KUC, the library, the science building, the Naked Eye observatory, through the Peck Hall courtyard, hard left at Kirksey Old Main... 

A brisk forty-minute ramble around our lyceum grounds and now I'm vivified, revitalized, and ready to work. I feel great.

And what do I find waiting for me at my office door?

Well, the day just kept getting better. Had our first midterm report presentation in CoPhi #6, on the Buddhist notion of anatta. Great job, Kloey. And thanks for bringing little chocolate chip cupcakes, Eden.

Then in #9 more of us finally found our tongues, eager to comment on Julian Baggini's observation that kids these days seem less interested in asserting fixed and essential identities with respect to gender and sexuality.

Then in A&P we voted to go outside and bask in the sunshine of the Peck Hall stoa as we continued our discussion of Richard Rorty's anti-authoritarianism. Just as we concluded, our resident Methodist minister noted with some amusement Rorty's cheeky statement about how "we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists..." 

And finally, in Bioethics we shared Claire's sweet treats and were treated as well to outstanding presentations from Patricia (on pandemics of yore) and Curtis on food insecurity, nutritional illiteracy and related issues. I was reminded to tout Cousin Jamie's spirited "ministry" and Michael Pollan's clever (and now brilliantly illustrated) Food Rules.

And I got to bring home the rest of the goodies. And reaffirmation, yet again, that it (just about any it) is solved by walking. Solvitur Ambulando. That might make a decent tattoo.

After all these years

 Well that was a lovely V/b-day, fed (Radish's falafel and Edleys' catfish and Younger Daughter's donuts-Krispy Kreme and Donut Den-and cake) and feted and collegially well-wished. My old pal in Alabama, who bought me a drink on my 21st birthday the day after his own, sent me a photo of his Medicare card. A club that'll have even us.

I was gifted with a green light, symbolizing hope and possibility. Hope mine shines steadier than Scott's and Gatsby's. "And one fine morning..."

The day began with a nice message from S "celebrating another trip around the sun, now you've caught up with me," and ended with Older Daughter's "hope you've enjoyed another rotation around the sun as much as possible during this confusing time." But of course the sun's but a morning star. Why shouldn't I enjoy going round and round it?

And as I told her, the old stoic's morning mantra helps keep the confusion at bay.

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love… Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

I do in fact begin each day with those very thoughts. I don't know what it exactly meant to Marcus Aurelius to run wth the stars, but to me it means being endlessly wonderstruck by the sheer scale and improbability of a cosmos that needn't have included me and those I love but nonetheless, "in our ordinariness" as Professor Dawkins effused in one of his humbler moments, did. Does.

Yesterday I thought also, inevitably, of the inexorable passage of time. Did you see Chevy Chase on Sunday Morning?

That must be why I took Oliver Burkeman with us on our dogwalk yesterday. Four Thousand Weeks aren't so many, when the bulk of them are behind you.

“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”

We're never going to "master time," the feeling of "total authority" is a crutch and a delusion (as Richard Rorty also keeps saying, long after his string of days ended), so we may as well "stop erring on the side of caution." Choose "curiosity over worry." Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things most days, after all. 

So stop worrying and enjoy your life. Breathe. Run with the stars.

Acceptance

The local electric utility sent its contractor over yesterday, without warning, to “trim” along the fence and power line. For some inexplicable reason they trimmed to the ground, tore up the backyard, took out a section of fence in Dogland and did not replace it, and left. 

Then AT&T came to install a fiber upgrade they said would disrupt service for no more than a few minutes. So naturally we’ve been without internet ever since, and I’m pecking out this post on the phone.

Also, a mysterious pain in my right hand again disrupted my slumber.

Good time for a carafe of Seattle’s Best, and Mark’s morning meditation (the one I’ve installed atop my digital diary as a daily reminder):

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love… Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them." --Marcus Aurelius

Thanks, Emperor. Maybe things aren’t as bad as I thought.

But my reflections on RR’s pragmatic anti-authoritarianism have been squeezed, boiled down to just this: the chaos of our ludicrous fake-facts discourse and hyper-polarized politics just shows how unavailable anything resolutely authoritative is to us. 

Of course the facts are what they are, reality is what it is, but confirming the truth about facts and reality is a matter of messy “conversation”-not dispositive platonic imposition. 

Life is lived in lower-case, like it or not. I accept the lower-case universe. And I accept the moral of Carlyle’s quippy response to Fuller. Gad, we’d better.

The human abode

Interesting discussion in A&P yesterday of the Varieties of [Religious/Scientific] Experience, and their point of convergence in Carl Sagan's appreciation of WJ's longing to get back home. "Carl admired James's definition of religion as a feeling of being at home in the universe." What else is experience finally for, if not to acclimate us to our abode? 

The human abode, Dewey called it. Wherever we go, there we are. Wherever we are, there we go. Here we are. This is us, this natural world, this secular universe. The religious dimension of life here, on his view, embodies a "common faith" embracing nature and culture, anchoring us to the universe and to one another. Supernature can be dispensed with.

The way I'd put that point: supernatural yearnings are natural for some of us. Not for me, but for many. We can thus understand religion as the natural expression of that yearning to connect with something large and meaningful. We don't have to exit our universe to make that connection, it is implicit in the "natural piety" which is our inheritance and our birthright. 

Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic acquiescence in natural happenings or a romantic idealization of the world. It may rest upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an inherent constituent of a just perspective in life.

Natural piety plugs us into the "continuous human community in which we are a link" and, Dewey concludes, furnishes "all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race."  We need to make it "explicit and militant"--but don't call it atheism, which in Dewey's analysis too frequently spurns association with religion and piety and that universal human linkage some of us call humanism.

So we turn next in A&P to Richard Rorty, who was more partial to Dewey than James. One of our questions, in which you may detect a Saganesque echo: 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...? 

(I'm still puzzling over Gary's charge that Carl Sagan "misunderstood" Genesis, that it was never meant to be taken literally. That's enlightened Methodism for sure. But I think I understand from long experience that literal interpretations of Genesis are more nearly the rule than the exception, at least around these parts.)

But anyway, and most important of all: Can't we just all just get along? Those who come after us will have been counting on it.

A clean well-lighted corridor

First thing catching my eye, on parting the curtain this pitch-dark morn, is Venus blazing bright in the southeast. Good omen, for a semi-Thoreauvian who wears a tatted "morning star" under his sleeve. 

Or it would be, if omens were real. And maybe they are, in the natural non-mystical way that light prepares sight. Mercury and Mars are right there in Skyview's frame too, less nakedly visible but no less real. 

That's also the view from the pragmatic corridor, where I still find myself these days. Haven't made it to Rorty's bazaar yet, but I'll check it out soon. Like the star, the corridor invites expectation of hopeful hours ahead, hours of peaceable productivity and social amity. Expectation is not a promise, a guarantee, a specification of conditions, or a definition. But it is an inducement to get up and move, to risk a statement or two, to essay a thought and even dart to an aim.

The morning star for a corridor-roaming pragmatic mediator, just trying to keep all the tenants in Hotel Pragmatismo happy, is a symbol of civility. That's something sometimes hard to summon, when negotiating with adamantly insistent and demanding parties across the hall. But that's the mission, when you've taken the job of mediator. Pragmatism in that respect stands for no definite results save sustainable co-residency.  

So what are we talking about? We could be talking about definitions. Richard Rorty wonders about the best pragmatist definition of religion, and finds James deficient by comparison to the surprisingly militant Dewey who (he says) more adamantly forswears non-human undemocratic incursions from outside the natural and social bounds of the establishment (the "hotel"). 

Maybe. But from a mediator's circumscribed unpedantic perspective the best definition is probably none at all. "Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now." VRE II

Second-best would be the least disruptive of peace all along the corridor. It would be maximally inclusive, and would not presuppose contentious metaphysical supernatural entities or powers. 

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine...the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.

There is nothing in the known universe more natural than immediate personal experiences, nor anything more promising of happiness. So that's what a good pragmatic hotelier will fill the time with. Definitions aren't really so crucial, but experience is. Experience of the divine, whatever you may consider it and however you define it, is (for a radical empiricist) a natural phenomenon. "Any total reaction upon life is a religion,"  a tie that binds an individual to life. There's no need to get militant about that. Is there? Except, at least, when individuals become imperious and authoritarian in their "reaction"?

The corridor is long, tidy, and lit. We should enjoy our stay.

Our 19th century

It's Dickens' birthday. He was just 58 when he died, after penning and performing all those marvelous tales of 19th century travail. What a legacy of great expectations, as I stare down the barrel of another milestone birthday just a week away. What else might he have left us, if he'd had another seven healthy years!

Speaking of the 19th century...

I'd been getting a bit disappointed at the failure of so many of our department's interviewees' for the position of Assistant Prof to acknowledge, let alone enthuse about, a place in the curriculum for 19th century British and American philosophers. But that changed in our most recent bracket of zoom calls. One candidate loves William James, another wants to learn more about Peirce, another wants to do Darwin and the Brits, and another even mentioned Rorty. 

And that's my cue to burrow deeper into Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. Today's meditation is on a couple of arresting assertions in "Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism":

• "If atheism is interpreted as anti-monotheism, then Dewey was as aggressive an atheist as has ever lived."
• "Dewey is the better exponent of a properly pragmatist philosophy of religion" than James.

The first is questionable because atheism need not be defined primarily as anti-anything. Let's keep it positive, I say. Also, "aggressive" is not a word I generally associate with the Dewey of A Common Faith. But he does speak of becoming more "militant"...

We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.

 So we'll see.

The second is surprising, in light of James's eagerness to embrace the radical pluralism of Varieties. But Dewey's common faith is all about uniting our ideals and with an ameliorated reality in the future, and one could make a case for James's position being more retrospective, more about conserving past pieties that seem to have had a value for life according to their votaries. So again, we'll see. 

Dewey wrote The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, James dedicated Pragmatism to J.S. Mill. This is an Anglo-American meditation, and a conversation absolutely central to the 19th century philosophical legacy. 

So whatever the upshot of my morning meditation, I'm just buoyed to see young scholars on the horizon who are themselves engaged with these thinkers and their ideas. 

Impressed by the candidates for our 19th-cen opening who (without prompting) volunteer their enthusiasm for Mill, Darwin, Emerson, James. Less so those who laugh off "anglophones" as beneath serious consideration. No wonder so many students here don't know their own tradition.

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) February 5, 2022

Pragmatism and Religion

 In CoPhi today it's a bunch of churchmen invoking supernatural nonhuman authority. Pragmatic humanists don't share their enthusiasm for Divine incursion and spiritual/apologetic coercion, but pragmatic pluralists (who turn out to be the same pragmatists, tilting their hats just a bit aslant) are bound to "respect" whatever value for life the likes of Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas and their devotees credibly attest from that remote and august quarter. "Value for life" is deliberately vague, but it definitely excludes any over-narrow construction cast in strictly self-serving short-sighted terms. Value must be for life as a whole and in the long run. The question for a good pragmatist is never What's in it (just) for me?

That's the view we're examining in A&P, as we skip ahead in Pragmatism to the final pair of lectures. The penultimate Pragmatism and Humanism defends WJ's friend FCSS's (Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller of Oxford) "butt-end foremost statement of the humanist position," his avowal that the world possesses enough  plasticity to actually accommodate some and other of our various moral and existential desires. (Schiller was a parodist and later eugenicist whose acerbic sense of humor sometimes annoyed and perplexed James, but whose bout with illness prompted him to urge the life-advice I've always tried to honor: "Keep your health, your splendid health; it's worth all the truths in the firmament.)

To mix the metaphorical soup, the world is our block of marble; we carve it up according to our needs, wants, and impulses as expressed through actionable ideas. Thought engages reality, as the sculptor engages the marble. The marble is real and resistant to our chisel but not wholly resistant. It yields, to a greater extent than some Authoritarian Rationalist types would like us to know. For them, "reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future... still pursuing its adventures."

But, but, butt foremost: the pragmatic adventurer remains committed to the process of mediation between tough-and-tender thinking and living, and to accommodating even the Authoritarian Rationalist (Absolutist) type of mind when its perspective delivers sufficient value to those whose temperaments find it congenial. 

Finally, Pragmatism and Religion ends WJ's lectures just where Richard Rorty's begin in Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism (HUP 2021, posthumous).

"Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other," concludes WJ, "you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require." 

Rorty's lecture entitled Pragmatism and Religion commences with a declaration that pragmatism is "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."

Can those of us who think of ourselves as "pragmatistic or melioristic" (but decidedly not theistic) respect WJ's and RR's respective varieties of humanism alike? Can Jamesians and Rortians all just get along? Can they meet in Rorty's bazaar, if not in James's corridor? 

Still just asking questions here.

Explore Engage etc.

 What a lovely springy day we had to usher in February, yesterday. I biked across campus and got to class with time to spare, then biked back to find everybody in A&P (almost) itching to go out. So we ambled over to the stoa of Peck Hall, where the "painted porch" encourages us to Explore our world and Engage our minds.

 We explored William James's first Pragmatism lecture, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy, in anticipation of next week's encounter with neo-Pragmatist Richard Rorty. We wondered how "tough" or "tender" we might be, as we sort through all our different 'isms.

...tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other... The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.

Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course—give us lots of facts. Principles are good—give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many—let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy... practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth—your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours... (continues)

Living vaguely in this or that compartment sounds something like the pragmatic corridor, introduced in the next lecture (What Pragmatism Means).

Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

I want us specifically to explore whether Rorty sings from the same hymnal when he derides the appeal to non-human and supernatural authorities as "authoritarianism." James says any room on the pragmatic corridor whatsoever, when it is shown to have a value for the lives of those who occupy it, must be respected. Not inhabited, not endorsed, just respected. On its face that sounds a lot more accommodating and pluralistic than Rorty's position. We'll see.

And we'll also engage the ultimate pragmatists' question: what practical difference does it make to you or me, if there is or isn't some discernible difference between two old dead pragmatists? Why should we care?

Further down the stoa we're encouraged to enrich our lives and earn a living. Clarity with respect to those questions might contribute to the sort of enrichment we were talking about in CoPhi, the Epicurean gratification of a simpler and less stressful life spent doing the things that deliver peace of mind and a tranquil spirit. They might make a living worth earning.

 

Happy Groundhog Day! It's not so "cold out there," here--47 in middle Tennessee (Alexa says it's 30 in Punxsutawney), but it's wet and fecund. Spring is in the air. Respect must be paid.

Leaving the garden

 As we turn to the Epicureans and Stoics today in CoPhi, to WJ's Dilemma in A&P, and continue to ponder the ethics of "unstoppable" pandemic in Bioethics, a little more cosmic philosophy seems to the point. "How much more satisfying had we been placed in a garden custom-made for us," indeed... but we were always too restless, curious, and hungry for the garden. To become who we really are, we had to get out. We have to explore. We have to question, to converse, to try and know. We have to reject the non-human authorities who would impose a placid and passive existence.