William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture

Deborah Whitehead

Description

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 19th-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.

List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Varieties of Pragmatism
2. Genealogies of Pragmatism
3. Pragmatism and the American Scene
4. The Gender of Pragmatism
5. Pragmatism Comes of Age
Conclusion: Continuing the Argument
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Pragmatism

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 21 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253018243
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WILLIAM JAMES, PRAGMATISM, AND AMERICAN CULTURE
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
John J. Stuhr, editor
Editorial Board
Susan Bordo Vincent Colapietro John Lachs No lle McAfee Jos 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
1 Varieties of Pragmatism
2 Genealogies of Pragmatism
3 Pragmatism and the American Scene
4 The Gender of Pragmatism
5 The Revival of Pragmatism
Conclusion: Continuing the Argument
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
M ANY 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 Sch ssler 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
A LL 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:
CWJ
The Correspondence of William James (1992-2004 [1861-1910]; 12 vols.)
ECR
Essays, Comments, and Reviews (1987 [1865-1909])
ERE
Essays in Radical Empiricism (1976 [1912])
ERM
Essays in Religion and Morality (1982 [1884-1910])
EP
Essays in Philosophy (1978 [1876-1910])
MT
The Meaning of Truth (1975 [1909])
PM
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1975 [1907])
PP
The Principles of Psychology (1981 [1890]; 2 vols.)
PU
A Pluralistic Universe (1977 [1909])
SPP
Some Problems of Philosophy (1979 [1910])
TT
Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1983 [1899])
VRE
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1985 [1902])
WB
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1979 [1897])
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
W HEN THE A MERICAN 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 na