Pragmatism

In his very readable The Metaphysical Club (2001), Louis Menand gives a number of pithy summaries of pragmatism, its sources, its varieties, and its fundamental beliefs.

The common attitude or idea among pragmatists has been “an idea about ideas.” Whatever their differences, pragmatists “all believed that ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools – like forks and knives and microchips – that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed taht ideas are produced not by individuals but by groups of individuals – that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some innter logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.”

Central to the pragmatist agenda was the conviction that “ideas should never become ideologies,” never become totalizing systems nor legitimations of the status quo nor even legitimations of unnuanced opposition to the status quo. Ideas should be accepted with skepticism, but should be freely dropped when circumstances change and other ideas prove themselves more useful.

As noted, Menand is far from attempting to press all pragmatism into one mold (one chapter is called “Pragmatism s “). He notes, for instance, that Peirce’s pragmatism was teleologically shaped in a way that Dewey’s was not (Peirce thought that the universe was evolving toward greater and greater determinacy). James’s pragmatism was infused with religious interests that are absent from many other pragmatists. Dewey’s ethic was an ethic of adjustment, compromise, conflict avoidance, an ethic for diplomats and men in gray flannel suits; James, with his hostility to “bigness and greatness in all their forms” was, in Menand’s words, “a philosophy for misfits, mystics, and geniuses.”

In part, the variety of pragmatism is a product of pragmatism’s diverse sources: “Pragmatism seems a reflection of the late nineteenth-century faith in scientific inquiry – yet James introduced it in order to attack the pretensions of late-nineteenth-century science. Pragmatism seems Darwinian – yet it was openly hostile to the two most prominent Darwinians of the time, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley; it was designed, in James’s version, to get God back into a picture many people felt Darwin had written him out of; and it had nothing in common with the thought of people like William Graham Sumner, or with the eugenic movement, which was based on the work of Darwin’s cousin, the statistician Francis Galton . . . . Pragmatism shares Emerson’s distrust of institutions and systems, and his manner of appropriating ideas while discarding their philosophical foundations – but it does not share his conception of the individual conscience as a transcendent authority.”

Menand highlights two of pragmatism’s deficiencies as a “school of thought.” First, it takes interests, desires, wants for granted, and asks how best to achieve them by examining the consequences of various kinds of action. What it fails to ask is where these wants come from in the first place, and it has no standard for judging the worthiness of wants. Second, pragmatism cannot account for the way people actually act on their beliefs. Many people act very much against their own interests because of their convictions. Menand’s final, and damning, judgment is that “There is a sense in which history is lit by the deeds of men and women for whom ideas were things other than instruments of adjustment. Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one.”

And a philosophy that cannot explain that cannot inspire martyrs. Pragmatism wouldn’t even want to. Don’t get excited, keep cool, there’s no need to fight about this – these express the ethical wisdom of pragmatism.