Why Pragmatism Doesn’t
Work
by Andrew Kern
September, 2009
[This article was originally
published at the CiRCE blog,
Quiddity]
During the last session at the
2009 CiRCE conference I tried to weave things together into a
practical structure that people could take home to think about
and implement. I believe that the most important idea discussed
at the conference was the contrast between propriety and
pragmatism - and therefore between justice and utility, and
nature and abstract object.
Modernist thought found its clearest and fullest expression in
two late 19th century philosophers whose teachings have
dominated 20th and 21st century practice: William James and
Friederich Nietzsche. James was a Pragmatist. On the other hand,
it’s hard to say whether any principle ordered Nietzsche’s
thought. He once said that he despised the great systemetizers.
For him, it was about experience, not thinking (though he did
the latter a lot). I would probably call him a Perspectivist
(one who believes that truth is not knowable as a thing in
itself – we all just have a perspective or worldview), but even
that implies a rational structure to his thought that he would
laugh at. James and Nietzsche were both, strictly speaking,
anti-philosophers, or at least, anti-metaphysicians. James
wanted to know the “cash value” of an idea. Truth is what works.
Nietzsche wanted to know how an idea would lead to life, to
flourishing.
I’m sympathetic with both of them. They lived at the end of an
“Age of Ideas” launched by the Enlightenment, especially Kant
and Hegel. Ideas had become ideologies, and no ideology had been
big enough to order souls or society. So James and Nietzsche
directed thought away from thinking and gaining knowledge to
acting and gaining power. I can see sense in this. The trouble I
can’t escape is this big question of Nature. James and Nietzsche
(and virtually all Enlightenment and 20th century thinkers)
didn’t believe in the Idea of Nature.
To philosophers of the Enlightenment, Reality is not determined
by (is not equal to) a thing’s nature. Rather Reality is
determined by personal and social constructions - what they
believed ideas to be. So rather than focus on the appropriate
ways to treat a thing based on its nature, the Enlightenment was
concerned with adapting to one’s environment.
John Dewey, a good friend of William James and a co-Pragmatist,
went so far as to develop a philosophy of education that was
rooted in the concept that the world around is not knowable in
the Christian classical sense. Instead, he claimed that
knowledge is the adaptation of an organism to its environment.
As this played out over the 20th century, it led to some stark
ideas. For example, knowledge isn’t the end we should seek, but
practical applications. We shouldn’t contemplate ideas, we
should produce measurables. We shouldn’t read old books burdened
down with Christian classical assumptions about reality (most of
all, that things have a nature); we should read books that are
“relevant” to immediate issues for children.
This isn’t the place, and it would take too long to develop this
thought, but I will simply assert here that these commitments
fall horribly short of the aspirations of the Christian
classical tradition.
Consider:
-
The pursuit of virtue is
replaced by adaptation to one's environment, which is a polite
way of saying, “seeking power.”
-
Reverence for human nature is
replaced by the use of schools to bring about the Darwinian
world these philosophers believed in.
-
Love of learning (i.e. of
knowledge) is replaced by fear of testing.
-
Great books are replaced by,
forgive me, twaddle.
-
Liberal arts and classical
sciences are replaced by subjects, all equal, all
disconnected, all meaningless.
-
Christ the logos is replaced by
…
-
Contemplation is replaced by
production.
-
Ideas are replaced by
constructions.
-
Nature is replaced by permanent
change.
-
Propriety is replaced by
utility.
-
Purpose is replaced by utility.
-
Wisdom is replaced by skillful
adaptation.
-
Being as the foundation of
thought is replaced by utility.
-
Change is exalted to the status
of divinity.
-
Whatever cannot be measured is
reduced to what can be or disregarded as irrelevant.
-
Personhood is swallowed up in
futility.
-
Freedom is replaced by
compulsive efforts to satisfy instincts.
-
Justice is replaced by
measurable social criteria, under the guise of equality.
-
Community becomes an effective
marketing buzz word because everybody wants it but nobody
knows how to get it.
-
Truth is what you make it.
-
Goodness is what you determine
it to be.
-
Beauty is what you like.
In the classical tradition, all these ideas were considered
independent realities. In other words, truth was truth whether
you discovered it or not. You could construct an idea that was
wrong. But consider how reading is taught now, both to children
and to college students. It’s seriously influenced by the
philosophy of constructivism, which says you create your own
meaning.
It’s not that they are entirely wrong. Of course, we see things
from our individual perspectives. Of course we construct meaning
from our experiences. But that doesn’t mean that there is no
knowable reality beyond our own perspectives and no knowable
meaning to which we can compare our constructions.
We see through a glass darkly. But there is something
that we see. And as our vision more closely aligns with what is
actually there, the better we perceive truth and the wiser we
are. There’s all the difference in the world between teaching a
child that what he sees is all there is to see and teaching a
child that he can improve his vision through training.
But the educators who dominated 20th century practices
systematically undercut the students’ capacity to perceive truth
and their confidence that it was knowable. As a result, we have
schooled our children into the least educated people in the
history of the world.
Pragmatism doesn’t work. It excludes too much from its vision.
It cuts short the quest for wisdom. It disables the mind. It
redirects our attention to power. We need to absorb what it had
right, but we need to transcend it with a restored love for
truth rooted in the nature of things.
It might seem un-American, but if you want to train a mind, the
only way to do so is to feed it ideas to contemplate.
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