The Cave and the Light
Page 63
It was precisely this demoralizing despair that Peirce was trying to fight against. Surely there had to be a more secure way to find our place in the world, Peirce believed; a way to rebuild the foundations of both thinking about and living in a universe governed by change, uncertainty, and chance. An America that ceased to believe truth and justice, right and wrong, are as real and important to life as the laws of evolution and physics, was doomed.25
In this, Peirce sympathized with Common Sense Realism. Indeed, he considered his new philosophical path as only a deeper furrow in the direction already charted out by Reid, Witherspoon, and their followers. Still, the old Common Sense school had made two fundamental errors. The first was that it confused certainty with objectivity; the second was that it confused doubt with lack of clarity. In fact, common sense judgments, even our most certain and universal ones, are bound to change with the accumulation of new evidence. “Original beliefs only remain indubitable,” Peirce wrote, as long as they seem applicable to our current conduct. When they aren’t, they can change with a sudden flash of insight.
The classic example is our knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun. At one time, believing the opposite seemed the height of common sense, while those who doubted were deemed either idiots or frauds—as Galileo had found out. Today, however, anyone arguing that the earth is the center of the cosmos would seem the real idiot, as much as the man who insists the earth is flat. Rutherford and Niels Bohr would even apply the heliocentric solar system as their “common sense” model of the atom.
How “flat earthers” (or “global warming deniers”) become repellent to our common sense has little to do with objective evidence, Peirce realized. It has everything to do, however, with how we weigh doubt in the balance of outcomes. The more vital the consequences, the less tolerant we are of doubt and the more certain of our judgment. Yet doubt, Peirce pointed out, is the starting point for acquiring all certain knowledge. What Peter Abelard had believed about logic and theology—“Through doubting we come to understand”—Peirce insisted was the basic rule for modern science as well. It is the desire to clear away doubt that leads to genuine empirical investigation and to arriving at the truth. But with it comes a realization that some of “our indubitable beliefs may be proved false.”26
Some beliefs have to remain fixed. We may doubt that the sky is really blue; science teaches us it isn’t. But we cannot doubt that it seems blue. We cannot doubt that we live in the real world, but we can’t be certain all our judgments about it are accurate. What we can know is that they are our judgments and that they have inescapable practical consequences. “The Critical Common Senser,” Peirce wrote, “holds there is less danger to science in believing too little than believing too much. Yet for all that, the consequences of believing too little may be no less than disaster.”27
Peirce was the most original American thinker of the 1800s. Yet before his death in 1914, he remained largely unknown and his important writings unpublished. It was left to his friend William James to turn his new way of thinking about the relationship between reason and truth into a philosophical guided missile that would light up the skies of America, and Europe, as well.
He was born in 1842 in New York City; his father, Henry James Sr., was a celebrated religious figure and his brother a distinguished novelist. His own claim to fame was to translate the traditional problems of philosophy into a distinctive American idiom. James charmed professional and amateur readers alike with vivid phrases like “the buzzing blooming world of reality,” the “cash value” of ideas and propositions, and “the bitch goddess success.” His gift for putting abstruse problems in ordinary language also allowed him to redefine the old battle between rationalism and empiricism—or ideas versus facts—as essentially a clash between two types of human personality, the “tough-minded” and the “tender-minded.”
“Empiricist,” he wrote in 1907, “means your lover of facts in all their crude variety, rationalist means your devotee to abstract and eternal principles.… The individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, [while] the individual empiricist prides himself on being hardheaded.”
He drew up their character in two contrasting columns:
THE TENDER-MINDED THE TOUGH-MINDED
Rationalistic (going by principles) Empiricist (going by facts)
Intellectualistic Sensationalistic
Idealistic Materialistic
Optimistic Pessimistic
Religious Irreligious
Freewillist Fatalistic
Monistic Pluralistic
Dogmatical Skeptical
The two philosophers James saw as epitomizing the tender-minded versus tough-minded split were probably Hegel and John Stuart Mill.28 Still, with the exception of optimism and pessimism (and here James was thinking of the optimism of Hegelians and Marxists in believing history has a final purpose), it’s clear he was really talking about the perennial split between Platonists and Aristotelians in a distinctly American guise.
Indeed, he might have been standing in front of Raphael’s School of Athens when he wrote that the clash between the tough- and tender-minded “has formed in all ages a part of the philosophical atmosphere.” Each has a low opinion of the other. “The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads”—in other words, as a collection of weak-willed Percy Shelleys or Walt Whitmans. “The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal”—a nation of John Waynes.
However, James realized that “most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line.” What was needed instead was a stable blend of the two temperaments.29 What was needed, William James believed, was an intellectual creed tender-minded enough to show us our connection to something outside ourselves; but also tough enough to deal with robust reality, whether it’s a presidential election, analyzing the behavior of atoms, or driving a locomotive across the Great Plains.
James called his creed Pragmatism. He had borrowed the term from Charles S. Peirce,30 which was summed up in Peirce’s statement that “to understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true.” Truth, in short, emerges from the consequences—what Peirce called the upshot—of what we say or believe.31 We go back to the example of the earth going around the sun or vice versa. If we wished, the debate could go on endlessly; no matter how indubitable the evidence on paper or in photographs, some margin for doubt could still emerge, no matter how tiny.
But try launching the space shuttle on the assumption that we live in a geocentric universe and see what happens. “Seeing what happens” is not only a factor in figuring out whether a scientific theory is true or not. For William James, it is the factor, now and forever, in all forms of knowledge. To know something is not to arrive at a final state of mental being or a form of inner consciousness; or even (as Wittgenstein would soon claim) a certain logical form. It is a constant process involving the perceiving self and “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material of our later reflection.”32
It was a groundbreaking insight—possibly the most important of the twentieth century.33 Scientific truth, Peirce had asserted, was no more a series of breakthroughs to intellectual certainty than predicting the weather. Instead, it is a series of constant laboratory experiments in which we test hypotheses, run the numbers or heat up the test tubes, and see what comes out.34 William James affirmed the same was true of life. We grope and feel our way along step by step, trying out and sticking to what works and dropping what doesn’t. Our knowledge grows in spots, James liked to say.35 It is from this humble process, not from enacting some series of a priori principles or a transcendental Diktats à la Hegel, that human progress is made. It was in a profound sense an outgrowth of the old Common Sense Realism—“common sense is less sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly lost”—and one perfectly suited, James thought, for America, the Common Sense Nation.
A modern reader has an easier time grasping what James meant than his Gilded Age contemporaries did, because of our experience of commuter traffic. As a commuter we see the map, we know the rules of the road, and we know where we are headed. We even have the last word in technology over GPS, which is supposed to know all the answers and supply us with all the knowledge we need.
But once we’re in our car, we find that the quickest route recommended by GPS is blocked by an accident, while the alternative is temporarily closed for construction. We are forced to try a series of different routes, sometimes relying on our past experience, sometimes asking advice from taxi drivers or passersby, and sometimes based on pure hunch. We decide to cut through a parking lot here or even head back across town there. But we never turn around and give up or abandon the car to hitch a ride to the airport instead. We accept the consequences of the decisions we make on the move and keep going until we finally reach our goal.
Once we get to our destination—and this is true whether it’s an office building or the truth of a proposition—we can retrace our route on the map and say, “Here’s how I got here.” But as with most of life, James would argue, how we got there was never according to plan. The journey unfolds instead through a series of deliberate choices, based on what we know has worked in the past and what we think will work now.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once quipped, “Life is a bowl of strategies.” William James would have agreed, although he put it somewhat differently: “An idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.”37
Understandably, some critics have branded his Pragmatism a squishy form of moral relativism. Others, alternately, see it as an ideology peculiarly suited to a nation of engineers and capitalist entrepreneurs.38 But James himself could counter that what we call fixed moral principles are themselves the end products of the same experimental process, including the Ten Commandments. What kind of society could exist, after all, where men were free to covet their neighbors’ wives and cattle or commit murder on a whim? God’s command is one thing, and an important thing. The proof, however, is in the doing.
In fact, James’s Pragmatism is inherently conservative in Edmund Burke’s sense—and Aristotle’s. Every subject of knowledge, Aristotle wrote in Book II of the Ethics, has its own method. We learn to play the flute by studying the best flute players; we learn to understand mathematics by studying with the best mathematicians. The same is true of our ethical and social life, Aristotle argued: by following the best-tested rules of our predecessors, we can expect the best results.39
If others in the past have done what I’m trying to do successfully in a certain way, whether we’re talking about self-government or conducting a business deal or a marriage, then I should be inclined (though not necessarily required) to do it that way, too. James’s Pragmatism doesn’t cut us off from Burke’s definition of society as “the partnership of the living, those to come, and those who came before.” Far from it. It imbeds us in it, as an active participant in the same perennial search for answers.
Finally, James’s Pragmatism was pluralistic. Philosophers since Plato had assumed there was one way out of the cave: their way. Now thanks to James it turned out there may be more than one way at any given moment—particularly when at almost the same time, modern physics, including quantum physics, was revealing that the cave itself was constantly changing.
Charles Darwin had made process the basic structure of biology. By the time of William James’s death in 1910, Boltzmann, Einstein, and Bohr were showing that an evolutionary process governed the basic structure of the physical world as well. To such a world, James offered a vital message. We need to be open to possibilities, since circumstances might one day prove our assumptions wrong—including circumstances of our own making. The power of the individual to change, not only his own life, but the world, was not diminished but affirmed, by the precepts of Pragmatism.
So instead of Plato’s universe of moral absolutes, Pragmatism leaves us with a universe of probable outcomes. “So far as man stands for anything,” James wrote, “and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes.” Still, in order for this approach to work, we need a destination—just like the commuter in traffic. The goal of James’s Pragmatism was to arrive at a truth that works, not just go with the flow.
And here we come to the other, tender-minded Platonic side of James’s thinking, on the issue of religious belief.
His The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) drew a sharp differentiation between trying to treat religion as a set of truths and seeing it as a set of beliefs that give force and meaning to our lives. Truths are ideas we can verify; false ideas are those we can’t.40 We may not be able to prove God exists; but believing He does can change our lives and actions in profound ways that, from the Pragmatic standpoint, can actually make that belief true. “There are cases,” James said, “where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.”
James liked to use the example of a train robbery. A pair of bandits rob an entire train of passengers because the robbers believe they can count on each other if they encounter trouble, while each passenger believes resisting means instant death, even though they outnumber the thugs a hundred to one. The result is a robbery. However, “if we believed that the whole carful would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted.”41
Or take the mountain climber who has to leap an immense and deep chasm in order to return home. If he believes he can make it, he can make it. If he hesitates and jumps halfheartedly, he will plunge to his death. Beliefs, James believed, are rules for action, including (or especially) Christianity. Religious belief helps us to overcome the maybes and the self-doubts that lurk in the normal interactions of life. It can inspire a mountain climber to superhuman acts or a drug addict to stop taking heroin. It can inspire people to resist a fearsome tyranny or save others from the same threat.
“The world interpreted religiously,” he told a European audience in 1902, “is not the materialistic world over again with an altered expression.” It looks and is different from the one a pure materialist sees and through which he moves, even with the benefit of science. An Aristotelian view allows us to see clear and far. A Platonist belief may help us to see farther.
“St. Paul long ago,” he wrote in Varieties, “made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of everyone,” he continued, became the driving force of modern Christianity and its humanitarian offshoots from penal reform to aversion to the death penalty. It is “the tip of the wedge, the cleaver of the darkness.”42
In America, William James created an entirely new school of philosophy, Pragmatism, which spawned followers in logic, sociology, and the other social sciences. In Europe, however, he had an impact unlike any other American thinker before or since. Henri Bergson hailed James as a soul mate for his celebration of “the immediate flux of life” as the essential grounding of all knowledge. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Georges Sorel and Max Weber both relied on his demolition of the notion that knowledge is an essentially contemplative activity.
The Logical Positivists, meanwhile, were quick to clai
m him as one of their own, for seeing life as well as science as a constant process of experiment out of which a unified picture of reality gradually emerges.†43 This affinity may seem odd, since unlike the men of the Vienna Circle, James had seen the benefits of religion and metaphysical belief in people’s lives. He was even open to the possibility that they might in fact be true, including spiritualism and life after death.
At the same time, however, James shared the Vienna Circle’s detestation of tyranny and fanaticism in either its intellectual or its political form. He was horrified by those like Hegel and Marx who celebrated conflict and violence as necessary steps in human progress, or those like Nietzsche who saw in man’s dark side a source of healing vitality.44 To despise compassion as weakness is not an expression of the love of life, but its opposite.
From the serene perspective of Gilded Age Harvard Yard, James had been inclined to treat these threats somewhat lightheartedly. “To my personal knowledge,” he once wrote, “all Hegelians are not prigs but I somehow feel as if prigs end up, if developed, by becoming Hegelians.” But what would keep their ideas at bay, he believed, and keep them from seizing power was a nation of men and women committed to what experience teaches us works. Such a people can afford to be realistic about the challenges of the present, but also optimistic about the multiple possibilities for the future. Like the train passengers defending themselves against the armed thugs, they will be inclined to say to one another: We can do this, and do it together.