Philosophical Notes to My Friends Book

I read this as I have read it before for a grad course I am teaching on Language, Literacy and Democracy. And Pragmatism. This book is a series of lectures James gave more than a hundred years ago to help explain pragmatism as a method, not as just yet another philosophical position. It's a method of approaching truth as against abstract theory. Seeing truth not as Truth and the self as something clear and solid we need to discover but multiple, social, shifting, flexible, continually constructed in engagement with experience. Which makes it sound like a lot of contemporary postmodern philosophy. Right, the ideas have been around for centuries, nothing new, James says, and these skeptical "show me" ideas continued through the work of contemporary pragmatist practitioners such as Richard Rorty. Anti-"isms," which can be single theoretical explanations of the world, like Marxism, Feminism, anti-racism. Single bullet explanations that are fixed and a-contextual. Grand Theories that claim to explain How the World Works. Bull hockey to that, James says.

The central idea here is that the meaning (or truth) of any idea ' philosophical, political, social, or otherwise ' has validity only in terms of its experiential and practical consequences. In other words, you think this, you believe this. . . so what? What difference does it make in the world? What good is to believe that? James and pragmatism HATE abstractions and the emptiest most ethereal reaches of philosophizing. They're anti-dogma. As one raised to believe in a Calvinist brand of religion, I have some history that leads me to say amen to James and draw closer to anarchy (against a fixed system of rules) than fascism, let's just say.

James is also responding to Darwin, who was of course all the rage in the late nineteenth century. Darwin says, among other things, that we are mostly determined by our biology, by genetics. He shows us this true through scientific experiment. And he has a point. But James says nope, anything that claims you are completely determined by any one thing in particular ways is just plain limited. You are changing and always will be. Not fixed by experience but open because of it.

James and the pragmatists say that you in part make yourself and your world. A hopeful view, perhaps a little naive, you say, you cynic, but as a teacher, I have to believe in possibilities for learning and life, and James helps me not be so. . . hopeless about the world and its future. He helps, at least. And as someone in academia, I hitting it helps to be less certain than too damned cocksure of oneself.

James, the brother of novelist Henry, was one of the great thinkers of his time. He wrote Principles of Psychology to help found that field, he wrote Varieties of Religious Experience to examine people's experience with belief/religion/psychic phenomena, in various cultures. He's a little stuffy and not all of what he cared about then matters to me, but I still like his contribution to thinking about thinking.