Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

James quotes British writer G.K. Chesterton extolling the great practical value of having a personal philosophy. James concurs: “you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and […] the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds” (1). However, James confesses to feeling trepidation at his “bold enterprise” of exploring philosophy, or “what life honestly and deeply means” and “our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos” (1).

James’s personal philosophy, which he will expound, is pragmatism. The founder of pragmatism—Charles Sanders Peirce—gave a series of lectures on it, and the audience had trouble following him. However, James is confident that his lectures will be interesting to his audience because philosophical questions concern everybody and are fascinating, even when all the technical points are not understood.

This opening material establishes James’s characteristic style—humble, warm, and personable—introduces the main topic in a friendly and disarming way. It is clear that the lectures are aimed at a non-specialist audience and, indeed, that James considers philosophy to be a topic of general interest. James presents himself not as a sage lecturing to students, but as a fellow thinker working as best as he can through various problems of universal concern.

True to the title of the lecture, James intends to inform his audience about present trends in philosophy. Philosophers have split into two opposite camps based on a “clash of human temperaments” (2), though philosophers try to ignore how their personalities might color their philosophical views. In fact, philosophers are influenced by disposition whether they admit it or not. To ensure that philosophical discussion is “sincere,” we ought to be open about our personal temperaments.

The two philosophical schools correspond to two common temperaments. On one side are the “tender-hearted” philosophers, rationalists who are devoted to “abstract and eternal principles” (3). On the other side are the “tough minded” philosophers, empiricists who are devoted to “facts.” Both groups are “antagonistic” and “have a low opinion of each other” (5).

To illustrate, James compares the “tender-minded” to refined Bostonians and the “tough-minded” to rugged inhabitants of the Rocky Mountains. However, he also emphasizes that few people are strictly on one side or the other; most of us are a mixture of both temperaments, which suggests that both facts and principles are necessary for life. The “tough-minded” school dominates philosophy at the turn of the 20th century—thanks to the centuries-long revolution in science, we are practically rooted in empiricism. Yet our scientific temperament is quasi-religious in character, and as such it demands room for religion as well as science.

The problem is that the two available philosophical schools are too one-sided. Empiricism is materialistic and refuses to accept God or traditional religion, claiming that everything is the result of blind evolutionary processes. On the other side, religious philosophy is now too abstract and has lost contact with concrete reality; it treats the universe as a closed system, perfect and completed, whereas scientific-minded people believe that the universe is still in process of evolving. Moreover, some present-day religious philosophy has been weakened by the rise of scientific materialism.

The major claim of Lecture 1 is that people want a philosophy that offers both “scientific loyalty to facts” and “confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type” (8). James argues that pragmatism fills this need. Pragmatism “can be religious like the rationalisms,” yet at the same time it can “preserve the richest intimacy with facts” (13). It can also combine science with a reverence for faith and human values.

Before concluding the lecture, James backs off a bit from his original characterization of the two philosophic temperaments. He concedes that it is to some extent a caricature, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking refuge from the “crassness of reality’s surface” in “a framework of ideal principles” (14) as the “tender-minded” have done. This shows James’s sympathy with various viewpoints and his frequent efforts to see multiple sides of an issue. Indeed, he will argue that one of the advantages of pragmatism is its ability to reconcile and harmonize.

Yet at the same time, James insists that his two-temperament caricature is useful for helping us understand the issues at stake in contemporary philosophy. All of us, consciously or unconsciously, are influenced by our natures and choose our philosophy on this basis. James argues that we need a way of sorting out which philosophy works best—and that pragmatism can best fill this mediating function. In this initial lecture, James establishes that his task will be to champion a new philosophy by presenting it as one that works well and harmonizes with our previous beliefs and intuitions.