ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 2018
II. James
We now move from Königsberg at the close of the 18 th Century to Boston at the opening of the 20 th. The impact of Darwin on the social sciences was at its height while William James was constructing his version of pragmatism – indeed, Philip Wiener wrote a book length study of the role of evolution on the development of pragmatism itself( Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 1949).
Henry Levenson’ s introduction to the 1996 edition of A Pluralistic Universe similarly sees a philosophical reaction to evolutionary theory as one of James’ main points. He quotes,“ the vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened and the rising tide of social democratic ideas, have changed the type of our imagination”( PU p. 30).
Yet despite the huge scientific gap between them, there are solid connections between Kant and James. Murray J. Murphey, who drew upon Wiener’ s book in his influential article Kant’ s Children, claimed“ Cambridge pragmatism was, and is, more indebted to Kant than to any other single philosopher.” Murphey’ s argument is that the pragmatic conception of meaning as simply the end result of inquiry concerning an object that results in a habit of action, in Charles Pierce’ s famous definition, while appearing to be aligned with empiricism and the scientific method which grew out of it, actually began with Pierce’ s rejection of the empiricist claim of the origin of knowledge in sensation. Instead, Pierce relied on his interpretation of Kant’ s transcendental unity of apperception – the ability to tie‘ all appearances’ together into‘ one experience’ – except that Pierce and the pragmatists emphasized the origin of transcendental apperception not in a divine mind, but in an actual human community of thinkers and actors. Pierce later totally revised his theory of inquiry, but by then James had picked up the ball and run with it. James’ pragmatism, however, was more radically empirical than Pierce’ s.( cf. James’ discussion of truth in Pragmatism p. 97-99). That being said, James was a far less systematic philosopher than Kant, and one must pick out passages among his works and connect disparate threads to arrive at anything like a coherent account. For the sake of brevity, I’ ll restrict myself to connecting a few dots.
First, as discussed above, pragmatism’ s epistemology is future oriented – truth is the end of inquiry that results in a habit of action – hence it is teleological in character: action deliberately directed towards a goal. Second, inquiry into truth is also a communal process that begins in the historical past, but extends into the indefinite future. The commonalities with Kant’ s discussion of purposiveness in nature now appear in sharper relief.
Third, James developed his radical pragmatism in part in order to reconcile empiricism and its materialistic world view with what he called the“ religious demands of human beings.” The reason was not to preserve dogma, or to privilege theologically based forms of knowledge. Rather, it was in service to the pragmatic quest for truth as a means of improving human life.
In arguing against the materialism of Spencer and the social Darwinists, he pointed out that Spencer himself equated theistic notions of spirit with the then-modern conceptions of matter and energy:“[ b ] oth terms... are but symbols, pointing to that one
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