From The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch:
When the British liberal L. T. Hobhouse objected that pragmatism―with its confusion of truth and "cash value," its cavalier indifference to principles, and its preference for action over thought, as Hobhouse saw it―could easily encourage collective irrationality and mob rule, James tried to correct this "travesty" of pragmatism ("by believing a thing we make it true," as Hobhouse put it) and then added, in effect, that the quarrel between Hobhouse and himself arose out of differing assessments of the modern predicament. For Hobhouse, the victory of the Enlightenment was precarious and the danger of relapse into barbarism always imminent. For James, on the other hand, the victory of the Enlightenment was so complete that it had almost eradicated the capacity for ardor, devotion, and joyous action. "We are getting too refined for anything," he wrote elsewhere, "altogether out of touch with genuine life." Accordingly, he told Hobhouse, "Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation."
I like this William James guy, and feel like I want to hear more from him. Is/Was he right in this dispute? It sounds like they both made some points. But those who fear superstition above all else have gone out of their way to stop it at its source, and it's amounted to tossing the baby with the bathwater.
2 comments:
It's funny their disagreement was about pragmatism because it's a book titled Pragmatism that anyone with an interest in Wm James's philosophy is advised to read. I don't own a copy of it now but It's a series of lectures he gave whose basic premise is to recognize that the human mind can give us only a rough approximation of the realities around us, so we should focus instead about what we can actually know.
He taught we are not at the apex of human understanding of the universe, our place in it, or even ourselves. Any belief that restricts the ability to move beyond our current understanding is unproductive, which means we need to redefine what we believe... chiefly that our human experience is not the highest form of experience that exists in the universe.
You'd likely be entertained by any of his works but that's the only one I know. The book I've been thinking about reading is James and Whitehead on Life after Death, the last one David Ray Griffin wrote.
Pragmatism sounds like a good starting place for those with an interest in James (e.g. me.) The question of what we can really and truly know is an old one, older even than Rene Descartes. I'm curious to see how he makes his case.
The idea that ours is not the highest type of experience in the universe must have been a controversial one at the time. The primacy of human knowledge and experience was the major push of Western science, philosophy, etc. since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And it's telling that now that questioning it has become mainstream, it's in favor of "thinking" machines that we created.
Also noted on David Ray Griffin.
Post a Comment