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Thoughts on an Essay about Pragmatism

In American History, Arts & Letters, Communication, Essays, Ethics, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Pragmatism, The Literary Table, Western Civilization on August 20, 2011 at 8:42 pm

Allen Mendenhall

The following post appeared here at The Literary Table.

Lately I’ve been reading a subject of interest to the lawyers, theologians, writers, and philosophers at the table: pragmatism.  (Pragmatism finds a way of encompassing any interest whatsoever.)  The following discussion is brief and does not do justice to the nuances of my subject: Ruth Anna Putnam’s essay “The Moral Impulse” (in The Revival of Pragmatism, Morris Dickstein, ed., Duke University Press, 1999).  Nevertheless, I proceed with eyes wide open. 

Putnam opens by referencing William James’s pragmatist metaphysics and its reliance upon feelings and the sensorial to get at the religious or moral.  This reference provides Putnam wide latitude to articulate her arresting point that people participate in moral value systems because they always retain agency even if their actions seem like products of habit.  People do not act in putatively moral ways simply because they are conditioned or determined to do so; they act in those ways because they want to do so.  The want is the moral impulse.  That one should act or think on an impulse does not evacuate that action or thought of all intelligence.  “It is not,” Putnam assures us, “to say that one does not have or has not given intellectually compelling reasons for that position” (63).  In fact, as James himself suggests, we may—notice he does not say ought to or must—entertain any moral impulses so long as they lead us toward critical currents of thought that have not been invalidated even if they have not been validated.  Using such Jamesian refrains as her starting-point and hesitating over the usefulness of a now catch-all signifier like “pragmatism,”[1] Putnam announces her intention to explore moral beliefs in the work of James and Dewey.  Her focus is on those moments of convergence and departure, with slightly more emphasis on the departure.  Without touching on all Putnam’s arguments about James and Dewey and their agreements and disagreements, I will here note one of Putnam’s more sustained and striking observations, which addresses the difference between James’s and Dewey’s moral values: the difference which, it turns out, is at the heart of her essay.

Having shown that James sees the question of free will in terms of determinacy and indeterminacy without essentializing that binary opposition, and having shown that Dewey rejects James’s position as a dualism that is fundamentally flawed, Putnam resorts to James’s position to lump Dewey into a determinist camp and James into a free will camp (which does not seem the same as an indeterminacy camp, but I will not get into that).  Putnam then resorts to Dewey’s position by implicitly allowing that these polarized categories will not do; for she suggests that Dewey questioned the amount of personal agency a person could achieve in a world that, in light of quantum physics, does not seem deterministic (64).  At any rate, her point in playfully adopting both a Jamesian and Deweyian perspective at once seems to be that despite the seeming differences between them, James and Dewey both “understand that morally significant choices express who we are and shape who we will be,” and that “this relation between character and conduct leaves room for choice, for moral growth or deterioration, even for dramatic reversals” (64).  The human mind makes deliberate choices based on evaluative criteria gained by experience in the tangible world.  That, I suspect, is a statement with which James and Dewey and I daresay even Putnam would agree. Read the rest of this entry »

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A Quick Musing on Death and Time

In Arts & Letters, Essays, Literature, Writing on August 5, 2011 at 10:48 am

Allen Mendenhall

There’s an essay by Abraham Cowley, the seventeenth-century poet, called “Westminster Abbey,” that’s so strikingly relevant that it reads as if it were written lately, perhaps by a man like Russell Kirk.  The speaker muses about his stroll through the great cathedral.  He remarks that the gloominess of the place, the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it would seem to fill the mind with melancholy and thoughtfulness.

Having spent the previous afternoon meditating in the churchyard and cloisters, amusing himself, he claims, with tombstones and inscriptions, he now considers the grave as a strange register of experience, a satire upon the dead.  “Most of them,” he says of the tombstones and inscriptions, “recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another: the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common to all mankind.”

Reduced to the facts of birth and life, as though nothing took place in between, the departed human reminds one of the permanent things, which find their most magnificent expression because of impermanence and death.

Cowley’s essay seems relevant because death is always with us, always relevant.  The contemplation of death, Cowley suggests, raises dark and dismal thoughts in timorous minds.  But to those who, like the speaker, take a broad view of nature in her deep and solemn scenes—who improve themselves on thoughts that others consider with terror—the contemplation of death is humbling and awesome, revealing as it does the vanity of grief.

As the speaker entertains himself by digging a grave, he considers “what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty, strength, and youth, with old age, weakness and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter.”

These bodies, imagined or seen, allow the speaker to feel an intimacy with death: an intimacy that ultimately leads him to reflect “with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions and debates of makind.”

“When I read,” the speaker declares, “the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.”

These words are only more resonant in light of the distance between us and Cowley, the some three-hundred-forty-four years that separate his death from the present.  What was real and existent for Cowley is not even memory for us.  We have memories of memories, and words recalling memories that we fill with our own experience.  But we don’t have the moments themselves.  We can’t have those back.