[MD] william James.

[david buchanan]

Hey Adrie and all interested MOQers:

I just bought just about everything James ever wrote and I'm working my way through "Pragmatism" at the moment. James offers pragmatism as a way to reconcile the two major camps in philosophy; rationalism and empiricism. He says the main difference between these two broad schools is a matter of temperament or personality. He even describes them in terms of romantic and classic, just like Pirsig does. This is the basic context in which James is making his points in favor of pluralism, in favor of a pluralistic universe. He is pushing back against the monistic vision of the Absolute Idealists and, at the same time, he's pushing back against the positivists and materialists. As you might suspect, it would be hard to find a thinker who did not blend these two opposed schools to some extent and so we are really talking about matters of degree or degrees of emphasis.

His notion that we need many cognizers is a reaction against Absolutism, specifically the view that says human suffering doesn't mean much in the long run. As the Absolute unfurled through the process of history, it was held, many human being would die on "the slaughter bench of history". James thought this view was morally outrageous and a "ghastly" "monument to artificiality". To make his point he recounts a true story from the pages of a newspaper. A clerk named John Corcoran got sick and lost his job as a result. After three weeks, desperate for money, he took a job shoveling snow but he was too weak from his illness and was forced to give it up after only an hour. When he got home to his wife and six children, who were all hungry, he found that he and his family had been ordered to leave their home for non-payment of rent. The next morning he killed himself by drinking a glass of carbolic acid. This particular example represents many similar cases of human suffering, but the Absolutists kept their optimistic eyes on the perfection toward which the Absolute was headed. James tells this story and then offers quotes from his Absolutist friends:

In "The World and the Individual" Royce says, "The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order."

In "Appearance and Reality" Bradley says, "The Absolute is the richer for every discord and for all the diversity which it embraces."

Then James says:

"He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is philosophy. But while professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience IS reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It is the personal experience of those best qualified in our circle of knowledge to HAVE experience, to tell us WHAT IS. Now what does THINKING ABOUT the experience of these persons come to, compared to directly and personally feeling it as they fell it? The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the mind of mankind - not yet the mind of philosophers and of the proprietary class - but of the great mass of the silently thinking men and feeling of men, is coming to this view." (from Pragmatism in W.J. Writings 1902-1910, p.499. Emphasis is James's in the original.)


Which brings us back to the "many cognizers" quote:


"The truth is too great for any one actual mind, even thought that mind be dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal." (James says in the intro to his "Talks to Teachers")


This not only puts decency and compassion back into the picture, it honors the democratic spirit too. The rationalism that he's fighting here, like Plato's lofty idealism, is practically contemptuous of empirical reality. You know, this world of appearances is just so many shadows on a cave wall - and all that. This is the philosophy of snobs who don't like to get their hands dirty, of aristocrats who pretend the really real reality has nothing to do with blood, sweat and tears. Not to mention music. 

"The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfect eternally complete." (Pragmatism, p.498)

At this point it's worth remembering that Plato was the original rationalist. As Pirsig tells it, Plato's mistake was to turn Quality into the same kind of otherworldly perfection. "He had encapsulated it: made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth." (ZAMM, p.378) Pirsig says that Plato took the living, dynamic "Good" of the sophists and converted it into a reified abstract ideal. Likewise, Pirsig says that his MOQ is a "continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism [Dewey's name for pragmatism]" And he adds that his Quality "is direct everyday experience" and "not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute" (Lila, p. 366)

And so this philosophy was born to solve human problems more than philosophical problems. It's aim is to help improve things in the here and now. It's about what ideas can and cannot do for us, their purposes and limits. In fact, James thought humanism was a better name for this philosophy.