William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture

By Deborah Whitehead

“Continues and adds to a rich conversation among American philosophers concerning the origins of pragmatism and its possibilities for the future.” —William Gavin, University of Southern Maine

William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture focuses on the work of William James and the relationship between the development of pragmatism and its historical, cultural, and political roots in nineteenth-century America.

Deborah Whitehead reads pragmatism through the intersecting themes of narrative, gender, nation, politics, and religion. As she considers how pragmatism helps to explain the United States to itself, Whitehead articulates a contemporary pragmatism and shows how it has become a powerful and influential discourse in American intellectual and popular culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780253018243

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WILLIAM JAMES, PRAGMATISM, AND AMERICAN CULTURE

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

John J. Stuhr, editor

Editorial Board

Susan Bordo

Vincent Colapietro

John Lachs

Noëlle McAfee

José Medina

Cheyney Ryan

Richard Shusterman

WILLIAM JAMES, PRAGMATISM, AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Deborah Whitehead

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2015 by Deborah F. Whitehead

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Whitehead, Deborah.

William James, pragmatism, and American culture / Deborah Whitehead.

pages cm. — (American philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-01818-2 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01822-9 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01824-3 (eb)   1. James, William, 1842–1910.   2. Pragmatism.   I. Title.

B945.J24W455 2016

191—dc23

2015026141

1 2 3 4 5    21 20 19 18 17 16

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1Varieties of Pragmatism

2Genealogies of Pragmatism

3Pragmatism and the American Scene

4The Gender of Pragmatism

5The Revival of Pragmatism

Conclusion: Continuing the Argument

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

MANY DEBTS WERE INCURRED during the process of bringing this book to fruition. First and foremost, my sincere thanks to Dee Mortensen, editorial director at Indiana University Press, and to John J. Stuhr and the American Philosophy Series editorial board for believing in the project’s potential. I’m also very grateful to the press’s anonymous reviewers for their careful readings and insightful suggestions, all of which helped to make this a much better book. Thanks are also due to the production team at Newgen, especially project manager Frances Andersen, and to Cynthia Lindlof for her skillful copyediting. Any errors that remain, of course, are my own. The writing of this book has been generously supported at various stages by grants from Harvard Divinity School, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, and the Dean’s Fund for Excellence and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. For nurturing the project from embryonic to dissertation stages, and for modeling the kind of teaching and mentorship, rigorous and engaged scholarship, and creative interdisciplinarity that I aspire to, I thank my Harvard committee members David Lamberth, Francis Fiorenza, James Kloppenberg, and especially my advisor, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. My colleagues and friends at Harvard, particularly those in the Religion, Gender and Culture program, shaped my work and modeled intellectual community for me in lasting ways. Thanks also to my students and colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies and the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder, and to colleagues near and far in American studies, philosophy, religious studies, and media studies, from whom I have learned and continue to learn so much. I presented earlier versions of some of this material at conference sessions hosted by the William James Society and the American Academy of Religion’s Pragmatism and Empiricism in American Religious Thought Group, and I am grateful to members of those groups for their generous responses and stimulating questions. Thanks also to Joshua Wright for his assistance with the index. Last but certainly not least, I’m grateful to James, to my parents, and to our extended families for their sustaining love and support. To my daughters, Grace, Lily, and Julia, each of whom has an inimitable way with words: I couldn’t be prouder to be your mom. This book, and everything else, is for you, with all my love.

Abbreviations

ALL ABBREVIATED CITATIONS and references are to The Works of William James, published by Harvard University Press (Frederick Burkhardt, general editor, and Fredson Bowers, textual editor; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London), or to The Correspondence of William James, published by the University Press of Virginia (Ignas K. Skrupselis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, editors; Charlottesville, Virginia, and London). The abbreviations and full references (including original publication dates) are as follows:

WILLIAM JAMES, PRAGMATISM, AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Introduction

The pragmatistic philosophy . . . preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and . . . it neither begins nor ends by turning positive religious constructions out of doors—it treats them cordially as well.

I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that you require.

William James, Pragmatism

WHEN THE AMERICAN psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) sought to explain the meaning of pragmatism, the philosophical tradition he helped found, in a way that would popularize it for a public audience, he decided to tell a story about a mountain camping trip gone wrong. So he began the second lecture of his book Pragmatism, What Pragmatism Means, with a memorable anecdote relating a raging metaphysical argument over a squirrel and a tree:

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?

James continues:

In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: Which party is right, I said, "depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him. . . . Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other."

Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English round, the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute. (PM, 27–28)

By pointing out that the entire metaphysical dispute actually depended on a very simple distinction—the simple meaning of the verb phrase to go round—James succeeded in resolving the argument to the satisfaction of the majority of his fellow campers. For James, the story became a powerful illustration of the pragmatic method: primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable (PM, 28).

Myra Jehlen draws a parallel between this illustration of the pragmatic method as found in James’s narrative and the founding narrative of America. She argues that James’s choice of words to illustrate the usefulness of pragmatism was an impulse from the heart of his American identity.¹ Emerging from his solitary ramble in the wilderness, James comes upon the chaotic camp scene and attempts to restore peace among the group through the application of practicality and common sense. While his fellow campers are caught up in what he terms abstraction and insufficiency, . . . fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins, James the pragmatist turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. In contrast to the clouded, directionless thinking of his colleagues, James brings with him the empiricist temper, with the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretense of finality in truth (PM, 31). He is a Columbus-like figure, bringing civilization and order to what was wilderness and chaos. In this sense, Jehlen tells us, the story James tells of pragmatism’s beginnings is a characteristically American story.

This book explores what it might mean to more fully understand and analyze pragmatism, in both its formative late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century period and its late twentieth-century revival, as a distinctively American story. I argue that we can identify several persistent themes in Jamesian pragmatism and its inheritors—narrative, origins, mediation, nation, and gender—all of which reflect ongoing dialogue with pragmatism’s historical and cultural contexts as well as help us situate and interrogate pragmatism as a characteristically American philosophical tradition.

James’s Pragmatism, published in June 1907, was based on a series of Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston in late 1906 and again at Columbia in early 1907 and printed as delivered, as James said, with some emendations (PM, 5). Ever conscious of his audience, James opens the lectures by stating that everyone has a philosophy, a more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. Moreover, individuals’ impressions and feelings determine their reactions to professional philosophers: "In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds" (PM, 9, 25).

This impressionistic, populist, somewhat abstract style of presentation characterizes the lectures throughout, a style that grows directly out of James’s own understanding of communication, one more given to evocation than precision.² Contemporary pragmatist communications theorist John Durham Peters has noted that James shifts the crux of communication from fidelity to an original to responsibility to the audience; the task of the speaker is not the representation of unvarnished truth but rather the evocation of truth for others.³ Through recognition of the rhetorical force and affective power of James’s writing, as well as attention to how he draws out key metaphors and themes, we can deepen our understanding of the relationship between James and his late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century context, in turn enriching our understanding of the development of the American pragmatist tradition.

James is widely recognized for being a gifted writer as well as a great philosopher. His writing is full of metaphors, tropes, and images that illustrate various elements of his and his opponents’ views. Some examples, discussed in more detail later, are the illustration of the pragmatic method using the squirrel and the tree; the image of pragmatism as a great corridor with multiple doors opening out of it; the famous analogy that human beings may exist in relation to the wider universe as the cats in our drawing rooms exist to us; and the metaphors of gathered flowers, snapshots, and the revolving lantern to describe concepts carved out from the stream of sensibility. These are often used to great effect to create memorable impressions in the minds of James’s readers, which makes his thought more accessible and understandable. This feature of James’s writing is, however, a double-edged sword. It accounts for much of the praise he has received from admirers who find that his clear, nontechnical prose exemplifies a democratic, humanistic mode of doing philosophy. However, it also has attracted sharp criticism from those who either took the metaphors too literally (the most famous example is probably James’s use of the term cash value to describe the pragmatic method, which has occasioned no small amount of critique) or took their presence as evidence of reduced philosophical rigor.⁴

Acknowledging the highly rhetorical function of many of these images and metaphors is necessary for an understanding of James’s work, but it makes their critical analysis somewhat problematic initially. Must one conclude that the images in his writing, because they serve an illustrative purpose, are merely supplementary or perhaps even irrelevant to his overall arguments? Such a conclusion seems to reinforce the classic gendered hierarchy of rhetoric and logic/dialectic, in which rhetoric is devalued as unnecessary and unjust, the deceptive knack made up in the guise of philosophy. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates defines rhetoric as a knack, like cookery, which impersonates an art or techne and is itself unable to give an account of its methods. As a form of flattery, rhetoric, gendered female, enters into the art of justice deceitfully and pretends that she has become what she has entered.⁵ While rhetoric is designed to flatter and persuade, philosophy or dialectic is oriented toward truth, justice, and the Good. Susan Shapiro argues that philosophy was built in opposition to rhetoric as its primary other and that the distinction between masculine logic and feminine rhetoric is a gender division and hierarchy built into the very emergence of philosophy as a discipline, constituting philosophy itself through a series of gendered splits between reason and unreason, soul and body, the good and pleasure, truth and illusion.⁶

Similarly, Michèle Le Doeuff has argued that philosophy defines itself through a disciplined self-deception grounded in a desire to justify and name itself through a separation from rhetoric and images: Philosophical discourse is inscribed and declares its status as philosophy through a break with myth, fable, the poetic, the domain of the image.⁷ According to Le Doeuff, images employed in a philosophical text have been regarded as extraneous to the text’s argument, which embodies masculine logic and reason.⁸ Le Doeuff shows instead that these images are actually fundamentally embedded and implicated both in particular philosophical texts and arguments and in the very mode of philosophical argumentation itself. Images are often invoked in philosophy at points when an argument’s problematic areas or weak spots threaten to be exposed, making the dissimulation of rhetorical imagery a necessary feature of the philosophical method itself. Far from imagery being incidental or irrelevant to a philosophical text, it actually serves to constitute that text’s very claims, to underlie its basic assumptions, and to rhetorically close off any objections through the force of its affective power. The deconstructive method advocated by Le Doeuff destabilizes the gendered hierarchies masked by philosophy’s claim to be based solely on logic and reason, showing that philosophy’s own foundational myth, which characterizes itself as solely concerned with the realm of logic and straightforward argumentation designed to seek truth, is a disguised rhetorical flourish.

Two of the most enduring descriptions of the pragmatist tradition as James presents it in Pragmatism are its new oldness and its invocation as a via media, a middle way. This mediating function of pragmatism, whether construed as new or old, as going back to Socrates and Jesus, or as arising out of a kind of neopragmatist postmodernist nihilism, seems to be one of the most enduring images of pragmatism. This mediation is celebrated by those who find in it a refreshing anti-professionalization of philosophy and a return to the concrete, and criticized by those who read it as a kind of vulgar instrumentalism. Pragmatism has always been a philosophy of mediation, a reviewer of a recent volume on pragmatism and feminism notes, identifying common ground between epistemic positions (idealism and empiricism), between political frameworks (liberalism and communitarianism), and between ethical schools (deontology and virtue ethics).⁹ Even so, Cornel West has observed that the mediating role of pragmatism imparts a power to subsume aspects of other contending positions [and] permits pragmatism to domesticate and dilute for its own purposes.¹⁰ Indeed, there is much to be critically analyzed about the rhetoric of pragmatism as mediation. But of all the other vivid images and colorful rhetoric employed by James, out of all eight of the lectures composing Pragmatism, the idea of pragmatism as mediator remains enduringly popular and present. James largely drops this depiction of pragmatism by Lecture III in favor of substantive discussions of theories of monism and pluralism, knowing, truth, and humanism but returns to it again at the conclusion of the lectures:

But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require. (PM, 144)

So in the end, it is pragmatism’s mixed, mediating temper, located between the extremes, that James commends to his popular audience as the philosophy that best meets their needs. Pragmatism’s value can be said to lie in the work of collecting and synthesizing it can do for his audience and readers, each of whom will make his or her own ventures severally. Pragmatism itself is mixed as most of us are.

The pragmatist renaissance of the late twentieth century celebrated the rediscovery of the American pragmatist tradition and its holy trinity: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism, understood in very basic terms as the body of thought developed by these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers and their followers, was redefined as neo-pragmatism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It was frequently proclaimed to be the only originally American philosophical tradition, which generally emphasizes inquiry understood as the quest for small t truth modeled on the scientific method, democracy, experience, fallibilism, naturalism, and the indispensable connection of theory and practice as some of its basic principles. Philosophers, theologians, social and political theorists, communications theorists, legal scholars, historians, feminists working in all of these fields, and many others have since the 1980s produced scores of conferences, books, and papers on pragmatism, touting its usefulness and ready applicability to a myriad of theoretical and practical issues. Although no one can agree on a single definition, the term itself and the tradition of American pragmatism represent a point of convergence for scholars working with often strikingly different theoretical frameworks and disciplinary approaches.

For many scholars, pragmatism has provided an intervention, productive staging ground, or point of rapprochement for thinking in new ways about old (and new) topics. In the writings of James, Peirce, and Dewey, as well as those of their heirs and interpreters like Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Cornel West, Jeffrey Stout, Robert Brandom, Richard Bernstein, and Charlene Haddock Seigfried, many glimpse possible solutions to entrenched debates or at least ways of helpfully reframing philosophy, theology, politics, historiography, and critique. Others disagree, arguing that pragmatism lacks the critical apparatus necessary for contemporary theorizing, remains too thoroughly enmeshed in its early twentieth-century framework, or is theoretically unsophisticated compared to Continental modes of thought.

What interests me about these debates and their pragmatist interventions, and therefore what makes this book different from a myriad of others that have been published on pragmatism, is not so much the issue of who interprets pragmatism correctly or critically enough, or how we can expand the pragmatist canon to make it more inclusive, or whether pragmatism does in fact provide workable solutions to contemporary theoretical or political issues. To be sure, all of these treatments have provided necessary and valuable contributions to the contemporary reassessment of the pragmatist tradition. But my interest is pragmatism as an American story, as a mode of American cultural rhetoric and narrative, as a way of explaining America to itself at critical moments in U.S. history. The question I ask is not so much How does pragmatism (or James, Peirce, and Dewey) help us think about particular contemporary philosophical debates or social or political issues? but rather "How does a critical theoretical framework informed by philosophy, religious studies, gender studies and cultural studies help us think about pragmatism: what it means, what it signifies, how it is constituted in and through its undeniable engagement with American culture in the past and in the present?" A narrative approach to pragmatism’s American identity focuses attention on how stories about pragmatism, both sympathetic and critical, have been told and retold.

The themes of religion, gender, and nation figure heavily in the pragmatist narratives I analyze here because of their resonance with contemporaneous historical and cultural events, but some readers may question why these themes in particular. In part it is to remedy a lacuna in pragmatist scholarship. Despite a growing and impressive body of work on gender and nation in the pragmatist tradition, these themes are still underrepresented in pragmatist scholarship and have not been analyzed together. Seigfried’s groundbreaking Feminism and Pragmatism (1996), discussed in detail later, both consolidated and fostered a still-vibrant interest among feminist theorists and philosophers in the classical pragmatist tradition. Likewise, growing interest in the theme of nationalism in the pragmatist tradition is exemplified by the work of William Connolly, Leela Gandhi, Bernadette Baker, and Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta, among others, each of whom engages with James’s pluralism as a potential resource for critically interrogating particular constructions and commitments of the modern nation-state.¹¹ As the ensuing chapters show, these themes have been intertwined in the history of the pragmatist tradition, and much may be gained from thinking through them together in the present.

As many pragmatist scholars have noted, far from being a peripheral interest, religion, pragmatically defined, actually constitutes a central category and concern in the writings of classical pragmatists James and Dewey, who viewed one of the primary tasks of modern philosophy to be coming to terms with Americans’ twin commitments to modern science and religious faith. James influentially formulated pragmatism as a middle way between facts and values, science and religion. This notion of pragmatism as a middle way, as literally a mediating discourse between various orientations and shifts in philosophy, religion, and American culture, is central to my book. I also show that this middle way pragmatist method is explicitly gendered female by James: she, referring to pragmatism, unstiffens our theories, preserves a cordial relation with facts, while also treating religion cordially as well (PM, 43–44). What does it mean to say that pragmatism is a she? Cultural studies informed by feminist theory bring this hitherto largely unexamined feature of James’s work to the fore and help us address its implications for thinking about pragmatism in the present. In so doing, we see how for James, gender becomes a way of thinking about the relationship of philosophy and religion to American culture.

The issue of pragmatism’s relationship to nationalism is also a complex one, as indicated by the variety of contributions to the recent anthology Pragmatism, Nation, and Race.¹² While U.S. intellectual historians have long inquired into the complexities of the relationship between pragmatist thinkers and their environments, much of this work