Stoic Pragmatism

John Lachs

Description

Defining a philosophy of moral limits

John Lachs, one of American philosophy's most distinguished interpreters, turns to William James, Josiah Royce, Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and George Santayana to elaborate stoic pragmatism, or a way to live life within reasonable limits. Stoic pragmatism makes sense of our moral obligations in a world driven by perfectionist human ambition and unreachable standards of achievement. Lachs proposes a corrective to pragmatist amelioration and stoic acquiescence by being satisfied with what is good enough. This personal, yet modest, philosophy offers penetrating insights into the American way of life and our human character.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. What Can Philosophy Do to Make Life Better?
2. Stoic Pragmatism
3. Infinite Obligations
4. An Ontology for Stoic Pragmatism
Epilogue: The Personal Value and Social Usefulness of Philosophy

Sujets

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

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253007216
• Langue: English

Extrait

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
John J. Stuhr, editor
Editorial Board
Susan Bordo
Vincent Colapietro
John Lachs
Noëlle McAfee
José Medina
Cheyney Ryan
Richard Shusterman
STOIC PRAGMATISM
JOHN LACHS
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
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© 2012 by John Lachs
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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.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lachs, John.
Stoic pragmatism / John Lachs.
          p. cm. — (American philosophy)
ISBN 978-0-253-35718-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22376-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00721-6 (electronic book) 1. Stoics. 2. Ethics. I. Title.
B528.L334 2012
171'.2—dc23
2011048732
1  2  3  4  5    17  16  15  14  13  12
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
What Can Philosophy Do to Make Life Better?
CHAPTER 2
Stoic Pragmatism
CHAPTER 3
Infinite Obligations
CHAPTER 4
An Ontology for Stoic Pragmatism
EPILOGUE
The Personal Value and Social Usefulness of Philosophy
INTRODUCTION
Age clarifies. In the course of a life of reflection, one's attitude to the weightiest questions emerges only slowly. Given the demands of the academic world, professional philosophers are likely to start their careers writing about technical problems. The dialectic and the swirl of footnotes this requires obstruct self-discovery, so that they may think of the positions they take as capturing their deepest beliefs. That this is not so comes into view only late in life or not at all. If it does, it takes the form of writing something that one suddenly recognizes as expressing an idea one has always thought.
There is no easy answer to why self-knowledge eludes us for so long. Perhaps we need the varied experiences of life to determine where we stand. We may have to turn from the problems of philosophy to the issues that confront us in daily life. Possibly we need to live awhile with our favorite ideas to realize that they really do not matter. Whatever the reason for slow development, the arrival of self-recognition warrants celebration.
This book had its origin in such quiet personal joy. I take delight in thinking that I have now discovered my beliefs about some of the deepest problems, beliefs I think I have acted upon all my life. In my writing, I have come closer and closer to expressing these ideas, but I have not formulated them explicitly until a few years ago.
Concerns about materialist theories of mind occasioned me to start my career studying German idealists and defending epiphenomenalism. Work on mediation uncovered my devotion to the significance of individuals and the wholesome effects of immediacy. My exploration of human natures called attention to socially harmless but personally vivifying variety among us and the consequent need for toleration. It was, however, only recently that I managed to characterize my attitude to life as that of a stoic pragmatist. Once I did, it was easy to find traces of the position in earlier writings and in my decisions at crucial points in life.
Stoic pragmatists are committed to making life better until their powers are overwhelmed. When circumstances render aggressive affirmation no longer possible, however, they surrender to the inevitable gracefully and without complaint. As pragmatists, they insist on the centrality of intelligence in the conduct of life, but they extend the reach of good sense to the acknowledgment of failure or futility. Intelligence must guide not only our efforts, but also our surrenders both in daily endeavors and in decisions about the end of life.
The great question we face again and again is how long to pursue our goals with all our energy and when to pack it in. This is a matter of practical wisdom, and therefore it is easy to get it wrong. We may give up just at the stage where perseverance begins to reap results, or we may keep trying in the teeth of overwhelming odds. Cancer patients requiring painful treatment must make such decisions under adverse conditions, but even under the best circumstances we must often choose without adequate information. Consequently, we tend to follow our cognitive habits: pragmatists are unlikely ever to give up, while stoics may acquiesce too soon. If each belief-tendency modifies the other, we may enjoy more graceful and satisfactory lives.
Embrace of stoic pragmatism explains my acknowledgment of the significance of human finitude. There is nothing infinite about us, except perhaps our pretensions. Those who would assign us unending moral duties, striving, or desires are romantics of the ilk of Faust, maintaining that for humans nothing is enough and good enough. I feel sorry that they have not had any of the thoroughly satisfying experiences of life and that they cannot take pleasure in their nature and in the celebration of its limits. Stoic pragmatism does not keep us from aspiring; on the contrary, it invites us to live long and well. It also reminds us, however, of the great lesson of Ozymandias and of sound religion that even our greatest achievements return to dust.
The stoic side of my view explains also my conviction that many things riling people greatly really do not matter at all. This is the foundation of my desire to leave people alone to conduct their lives as they see fit, that is, of my respect for autonomy and also of the tolerant attitude I take to the harmless varieties of human nature. The pragmatist side of the position leads me to appreciate ordinary experience, immediacy, and the qualitative element in life. Santayana was my first love in philosophy, and there is no doubt that his attitude of distant assessment was that of a stoic. But he never allowed himself to become a part of the exertions of a community, and so he never felt the pull and charm, the full satisfaction of pragmatism. James and Dewey, on the other hand, saw only the surrender of stoicism and not its grace.
Stoic pragmatism would be of little interest to me if it were only a theory. I mean for it to guide practices and express attitudes that shape life and that can meet the pragmatic test of making it better.
CHAPTER 1
WHAT CAN PHILOSOPHY DO TO MAKE LIFE BETTER?
Philosophy: A Primer
Aristotle was right when he said that philosophy begins in wonder. To primitive cave dwellers, everything was in need of explanation and humans had very little of life in their control. The world must have seemed a magical and frightening place, full of mysteries and surprises. Reflection was an intermittent response wrung from the soul by circumstances; neither systematic nor persistent, it amounted to little more than puzzlement about the workings of the world.
Sustained inquiry tends to yield results, sometimes even a practical advantage. Thales, the first philosopher in the West, is reputed to have learned so much about weather and growing cycles that he managed to corner the olive market in Greece. Such coincidences of knowledge and practicality have been relatively rare in the history of thought, and Thales himself showed the other side of philosophy by clumsily falling into a well and drowning in the act of speculation.
Thales thought that in the last analysis everything is made of water. The Ionian philosophers who followed him continued to look for one or a few principles that would explain the movement of everything. In line with the tendency of philosophers, they exhausted or nearly exhausted the available alternatives. Some thought the hot, the cold, the wet, and the dry constituted adequate principles of explanation. Others gave pride of place to love and strife, to fire, or to an elemental continuum called “the boundless.” Heraclitus maintained that everything changes; Parmenides was certain nothing does. Again, as is frequently the case in philosophy, there was overgeneralization without the benefit of a procedure for selecting the best of a multitude of theories.
Plato
Plato's Socrates found mechanical explanations, that is, explanations by reference to the automatic operations of nature, inadequate. He called attention to the significance of purposes, and through them of knowledge and mind, for understanding what happens in the world. Plato was the first great systematic thinker of the West. His influence on subsequent generations has been so great that Alfred North Whitehead, an important twentieth-century philosopher, averred that all of philosophy may well be a series of footnotes to Plato.
Through the work of Plato, philosophy acquired a primary interest in human affairs. The earlier Ionian thinkers focused their reflections on the operations of nature; Plato, by contrast, viewed nature as but the backdrop to the drama of life in society. He attempted to develop a precise notion of justice and other virtues, drew a sharp distinction between knowledge and mere belief, and spent great effort at describing the political order that best promotes human flourishing. Most important, perhaps, Plato directed the attention of philosophers to the initially useful but ultimately futile search for the essence or inner nature of things.
Plato's so-called theory of forms amounts to the idea that everything has a nature that it shares with other beings of the s