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.
I think you're sanctifying James and demonizing Rorty. (Sadly, you're far from alone.)
ReplyDelete"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."
I think you are reading too much into James' corridor metaphor (credited to Papini) to claim James thinks we must "respect" all opinions. Tolerate, definitely. Engage with and debate, probably. But respect? I think not. Did James respect imperialism? No. He harshly criticized it:
"The country has once for all regurgitated the Declaration of Independence and the Farewell Address, and it won’t swallow again immediately what it is so happy to have vomited up. It has come to a hiatus. It has deliberately pushed itself into the circle of international hatreds, and joined the common pack of wolves."
https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/19-american-empire/william-james-on-the-philippine-question-1903/
Are you familiar with Rorty's alternative pragmatic metaphor-the bazaar and gentlemen's clubs:
'Like Geertz, I have never been in a Kuwaiti bazaar (nor in an English gentlemen's club). So I can give free rein to my fantasies. I picture many of the people in such a bazaar as preferring to die rather than share the beliefs of many of those with whom they are haggling, yet as haggling profitably away nevertheless. Such a bazaar is, obviously, not a community, in the strong approbative sense of "community" used by critics of liberalism like Alasdair Maclntyre and Robert Bellah. You cannot have an old-timey Gemeinschaft unless everybody pretty well agrees on who counts as a decent human being and who does not. But you can have a civil society of the bourgeois democratic sort. All you need is the ability to control your feelings when people who strike you as irredeemably different show up at City Hall, or the greengrocers, or the bazaar. When this happens, you smile a lot, make the best deals you can, and, after a hard day's haggling, retreat to your club. There you will be comforted by the companionship of your moral equals.'
'Objectivity Relativism and Truth' pp.209-210
I think this is a much more realistic metaphor than James's. In a Bazaar (Rorty's public sphere), you must interact with others. You must come to agreement on some minimal norms for interaction so you can exchange a range of goods and services. In James's corridor, no interaction is suggested, you merely "pass through" it.
Yes, Rorty criticized Religion, sometimes harshly. But he ultimately advocated a place for it in his liberal utopia. Rorty's bazaar was at least as tolerant and engaging of opposing views as James's corridor.
PS I enjoy your blog posts and Twitter tweets.
Not demonizing, not yet. Just asking questions.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback.
"This [monistic reading of Whitman] is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication." Respect.
DeleteSorry. The sanctify/demonize rhetoric WAS a bit over the top. I was taking out my anger towards Rorty-haters on you.
ReplyDeleteYou want to see respect? THIS is respect--Rorty describing religious fundamentalism as a "visionary poem"(!):
"the struggle between relativism and fundamentalism is between two great products of the human imagination. It is not a contest between a view that corresponds to reality and one that does not. It is between two visionary poems. One offers a vision of vertical ascent toward something greater than the merely human; the other offers a vision of horizontal progress toward a planetwide cooperative commonwealth."