William James' Pragmatism

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 10 of 13

William James’ Pragmatism
Integral Mind Free in Life Experience
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 5, 1985

Transcript:
The date is September the 5th 1985. This is the 10th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Transformational America. Tonight's lecture is entitled. William James Pragmatism, Integral Mind Free in Life Experience.
The continuing crossroads. It must occur to you that it's interesting that each Thursday night we're at a crossroads. That in fact, we've been at a crossroads for six years. And probably the mysterious thing about it is we're at the same crossroads. It's just that like revolving doors, the individuals keep changing and the countries keep changing, but the crossroads is always there. And that crossroads has a sign on it that says the real, zero miles. So, we're trying to establish on what map is this road sign because we are having trouble believing the road sign that the reel is zero miles away. And we would like to know in terms of what geography is this is zero miles away. Because only with a context, can we believe anything. And that's a problem for human nature.
And it's one of the problems that William James addressed himself through all of his life. What kind of context does it take for a human being to believe that he has recognized the real? And through a long lifetime James came to understand that human beings of past times in past countries and past traditions all required an absolute idealism. That it was the essential ingredient in order to believe that they could recognize the real. And James was rather crushed in his lifetime because he realized that for many human beings this was no longer the case.
Now James is very difficult to appreciate purely in the American tradition as we've been going along. There is a whole other ordinance background, which I can't bring in here, which is European thought in the 19th century. Not only European thought but European experience. And about three years ago, two years ago, we did 13 lectures on the 19th century background at The Gnostic Society. And we showed how the 19th century European experience of self and life and mind underwent a progressive de-materialization in the 19th century. That almost decade by decade one could plot the disappearance of the essential elements that went to make up the idea absolute. And this de-materialization in the mind began to seek in the exterior world the materialization that was disappearing inside the individual. And there came a period where the individual disappeared completely on the inside and the exterior world became completely static because it became so larded with the balancing materiality that it froze itself. And in this moment of panic European society tore its own throat out in 1914. And the year 1914 is a year where there was like zero gravity to the European psyche.

James died in 1910, and he was a seer. He was experiencing on very profound levels. Levels that we could probably use the term psychical to apply to. It was experiencing this but had in addition to the European character and European background, the American tradition.

Now just recall that James constantly with his brother and his father was exposed to Europe. He went maybe two dozen times in his lifetime. Constantly going back and forth. He spoke and read and thought in German, as conveniently as he did an English. French, the same way. He could get along in Italian. He could probably fudge his way through and in Spanish. James was very cosmopolitan. He was almost as much European as he was American.

And in fact, the central theme of his brother, Henry James, is the American who goes back home to Europe and finds that he has at home in Europe. That the integrating of the American consciousness into the European tradition is what all of Henry James novels are about. And when you read or try to read Henry James novels, he cannot tell a story straight. William James used to write to him all the time. Especially when The Golden Bowl came out 1899. He said, I have a terrible time trying to read your dear brother. You have convolutions on your convolutions, and I can't keep track of it. He said, why don't you just write a nice, normal, straight story about human involvement. Publish it under my name. I'll give you the money for it. I'd just like to have the experience of reading something beautifully simple, which I know you can do. And Henry replied, he said, I'll be glad to do it, but I'm sort of tired tonight. Which was a coy strategic way of saying no dice. If I can't do it at one sitting, I'm not going to do it.

The curious thing about Henry James work is that when you try to fold the American character into the European experience, you come up with a plate full of spaghetti. It's absolutely [inaudible] because the American experience is very peculiar. Extremely peculiar. And it does not fold into the European psyche at all.

In fact, one is reminded of the old Chinese illustration that had the seven sages of Asia in one huge boat. And six of the sages were together up near the brow. And one sage was exile to the back of the boat by the tiller. Confucius and Lao-Tzu and Buddha and the rest of them all got along. But the guy they couldn't get along with was Bodhi Dharma, the Zen master. He was like poison because he represented a no mind tradition that had no reality in any kind of a focus. And that if you try to fold that into a mentality it dissolves it.

The American character by the end of the 19th century when it was pure was like Bodhi Dharma. It was outrageously arcane. If you really get into the individuals that we have lectured on Franklin and Jefferson and Thoreau, and Whitman and Melville, they will dissolve all of the traditional beliefs that you may have. They will dissolve the European theater and not just leave a bare stage. They'll dissolve the bareness and the stage also.

The contemporary of William James, exact contemporary, Mark Twain, who we went through. And we saw the Twain had reached the point where he had dissolved the mental structure of the world and had come to recognize that he could no longer believe in his own humor and lost the saving grace of humor. The substrate of the saving grace of humorous is compassion. Compassion, Karuna in Sanskrit, is the context, the substrate out of which humor arises. And Twain realize he didn't have it. William James strove, to keep alive in himself that sense of compassion. That sense of humor. But had to let the other element go. And so, Twain and William James are like two complimentary modes in the American character that reached very clear consciousness in the first decade of the 20th century. But both of them found that they had an insufficiency in themselves. One didn't have enough compassion and the other didn't have enough insight. And it sounds strange to say, not enough insight about William James. He had enough insight to be afraid of his insight, and that's not quite enough.

And if we back off of our insight, because we don't have enough amperage to see through it, what we establish in ourselves is the blankness of the frame of reference. And there's nothing more frightening than that. The existential feeling tone that comes out of that is sheer loneliness. With a big L. And that we recoil from. Almost like a physiological revulsion. Because the realization of that kind of a loneliness, which a frame of reference of nothing presents to us, is terrifying. And the only anecdote for that is to be able to see your way through it.

And James did not have enough of that. He had a psychologist and a philosopher's background, but he did not have the capacity to go through that ultimate frame of reference. And at the end of Pragmatism, he quotes Walt Whitman, who did. And he quotes Walt Whitman's poem, which I'll read to you later tonight called To You. And the first lines run,
Whoever you are now I placed my hand upon you that you be my pawn. I whisper with my lips close to your ear. I have loved many men and women and men, but I love none better than you. Oh, I have been dilatory and dumb, I should have made my way to you long ago. I should have babbled nothing, but you. I should have chanted nothing but you.
And of course, he is talking about the cosmic inner self through lifetime after lifetime. Through being character after character. That there was only one reality, only one being. And that all the personas, all the characters, were like these revolving doors. These various personages at these crossroads where it was zero miles to the real.

But James in Pragmatism wrestling with this and even bringing this poem near the end says in comment,
Verily a fine and moving poem in any case. But there are two ways of taking it both useful. One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The glories, grandeurs, they are yours absolutely. Even in the midst of your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to be inwardly you are safe. But pragmatism sees it another way. To be respected also, the pluralistic way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified to which the hymn is song may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken. Or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures upon yourself or others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so that you are willing to accept your own poor life. For it is that glorious [inaudible] you can at least appreciate plot furnish. The audience is so brave. A total world. Forget the low in yourself then, think only of the high. Identify your life there with. Then through angers, losses, ignorance, [inaudible]. Whatever you thus make yourself. Whatever you thus most deeply are picks its way.

The dividing line here, and for James, the central issue of pragmatism is that you can have a beginning, or you can have an end, but you can't have both. You can have an absolute at the origin of the world. Or you can have an absolute reached at the end of the world, but you can't have both. And that this was the dilemma that his mind in his time had come to see. And the dilemma for them was that they could no longer in any way except empirically, culturally, individually, an origin. Because if they did they were locked into a static system, which jailed them existentially. And that they were the first generation to understand that. So that they had to opt for a grand finale rather than an origin. And that God would be at some time, but not yet. And that the problem was that nothing was finished yet. Man, wasn't finished yet. The world was not finished yet. And this was where the freedom came in. This is where the life came in. This is where the pragmatic method came in, because one did not ask on what basis did you believe, but one helped to create your believing in the choices that you made in looking at purposes, rather than in looking at the bases or axioms.

And this was a complete about face. This was in fact, in terms of Heraclitus description and in antidromic a complete change around. And of course, Nietzsche writing at the same time called this period the trans evaluation of all values. And it was an alchemical change in consciousness. And it was focused and noticeable most in the European mentality. And if you recall, in the year 1900, the European mentality covered the world. Not just the British empire. We think of the British and the French and the Germans and the Spanish. Europe. Russia. The European mentality covered the world. And our experience in the 20th century has largely been conditioned by the drying up of these waters of this disbelief. And the recovery of many peoples and many individuals finding themselves drying out from this existential predicament and recognizing that it did not apply to their traditions. That their traditions were intact.

If there's any meaningfulness in the statement that [inaudible] made in 1949 in [inaudible]. That the Chinese people have stood up. It was that they have shaken off the water of the European drowning of ideas. And this has been progressively the case throughout the 20th century. So much so that many Europeans have in their own right been discovering that they are not existentially alienated at all. That this was a sea change of the mind of the time, but in no way was the real situation for individuals.

In Pragmatism James tried to find a method by which individuals in his time and coming afterwards would have a way of coming to understand themselves in terms of purpose, rather than in terms of axioms. Rather than in trying to base a life on what you believed base a life on what you were able to discover. So that experience and not believe was the mode of human life. So that the emphasis was always upon a psychological awareness rather than a mental structure. So that dynamic process was the key rather than static theology. And it was this shift that James was really the champion of.

And in being the champion of this, an aspect which is almost hidden and almost not understood by anyone until very, very recently was that this was an expression of the very technique, which began with Benjamin Franklin. Because Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of the individual was exactly this kind of pragmatic life. The most arcane thing about Franklin. if you remember, his Hermetic kingship was not that he carried on the European Hermetic tradition as some kind of a Magus but that he transformed as the tradition had transformed. And he made the open life whatever it will be. That was the arcane structure. That man was capable of development indefinitely. That there were no ceilings. That he did not know, he could not imagine what the limitations were for a human being.

And what happened was that the arcane traditions, which had developed from Raymond Lull and Roger Bacon right up to Franklin's time had progressively show that the interior experience, the mystical interior experience of the individual is in no way limited by the material externality that temporarily defines it. That that externality is not only temporary but is permeable. And all you have to do is live that life. And it's not necessary to decorate it or ornament it or fortify it by any limited sets of conditions. And this was Franklin's great discovery. That arcane man is cosmic man freed to be what, what he can be. Wholesomely exchanging with the entire world, the entire cosmos. Free to be. Free to choose. Free to interact. And this is where William James is very much an American. Very much in this tradition.

But as I pointed out earlier what compromised James was his participation in the European ethos. That there was a lack of fundamental confidence to really live that life. That James always translated it into the European notion that one had to understand it. And the American experience is different from the European, because we do not have to understand in order to live, we are willing to live, even though we don't understand, hoping that at some time we will understand. But recognizing that it may not happen and it's not essential. Where the European mind conditioned as it is by its history, by its limitations, comes to an absolute stop if its belief is stopped up. And this is a difference. And pragmatism, therefore, is an expression of the American view of life. And more than a philosophy, it's a way of living.

The first lecture on pragmatism that James ever gave was an 1898 in Berkeley, California. And he didn't develop it into a series until 1906. He was at Stanford university in the spring of 1906. He was there when the great earthquake struck San Francisco. And in fact, it flattened many of the buildings of Stanford university, which had just been recently built and set up. And all of the brick buildings were collapsed. The women's dormitory the levels fell in on each other. And miraculously only two people died on the Stanford campus and the 1906 quake. He made his way back to the East. He retired from Harvard university. It taught there for 35 years. They brought him to Columbia in New York City to lecture. And he decided to give his pragmatism lectures there at Columbia. And they had set up a room for him that held 200 people and 2000 people showed up. The only place that would hold that number at that time at Columbia was the teacher's college, the big auditorium at the teacher's college. And in eight lectures, he presented what he had presented in Stanford. And it was so well received that he was invited to go up to Boston and gave the lectures again in Boston in 1907. And then it was published in 1907 in June.

And the book was called Pragmatism a new name for some old ways of thinking. And there eight lectures and it caused a sensation at the time. And it caused a sensation exactly in this kind of a mode. For James’ fame, remember he was one of the most famous men in the world at this time household world, like Tolstoy or like Twain. James opened the book of philosophy and crinkled the pages and said, We are not going to be able to read beyond this point until we understand this page. And on this page is one simple point, that we know now that there's no way to know if what we believe is true. That there is no way at all, logically that we can be definite and know that what we know is true. So that we're sort of forced by an intellectual gun at our temples to look to the future. To be pragmatic. To instead of building upon a belief system, founded like pillars into the axiomatic basis of belief we have to now leave that whole comfortable structure and start living a moral life because that's the only kind of life that can really build.

And of course, along with the Pragmatism lecture at Stanford in 1906 was his great lecture on The Moral Equivalent of War, which we reprinted in Berkeley at the beginning of the Vietnam conflict and put about 25,000 copies around the world. And the importance of the confluence of Pragmatism and The Moral Equivalent of War was that man now must become ethical. He must learn for himself what to do and what not to do and teach it to others. And teach it to himself. That there's no longer any kind of a Decalogue which you can depend upon that is always going to be there. He now realizes that the Decalogue may or may not be there. He cannot be certain. And therefore, he has to live the moral life rather than believe a moral structure. And that this was the difference.

And he said, the only future that can just be imagined is a world where increasingly all human beings are free to ethically participate in making the future. Otherwise, there will be no future. And that this was the existential decision that had to be made available for everyone. It wasn't an esoteric way of selling democracy around the world. It was making very clear that we don't have any other alternative, but spiritual democracy.

And of course, the great friend of William James, the great politician who explained this, who developed this, was Woodrow Wilson. And when he said, we have to make the world safe for democracy, jaded European statesmen heard this as trying to establish an American empire. They didn't hear that Wilson was saying like Lincoln was saying, the world is a unity, and we can't have it any other way. We all have to live together, or none of us are going to be able to live at all. But of course, it was heard and ground up by a jaded mentality that posited all of these words into belief systems and nationalistic backgrounds and said, these guys are just trying to horn in. the Americans just want to commit. And how do we know? Look what they did in 1898, they went in and took the Philippines. They went into Cuba. We know about those guys. They came from us. They are our ancestors. And what the Europeans could never understand was that the American character changed. That there was an alchemical transformation. The American character is different. It’s different.

It takes a long time for people to recognize the difference in this country between Chinese and Japanese. But once you do, there is no mistake. You never mistake a Chinese mind for a Japanese mind. And there's just that kind of a difference between the American mind and the European mind. The American mind is very affine to the China's mind. Just as the European mind is very affine to the Japanese mind.

There's something like an American doa which doesn't stand for some rigidity compelling us to be. That we can't have our being in a rigidity, no matter how sweet and nice it is. That we have to take our life energies and ethically and conscientiously individually, work with that in order to make a life for ourselves. And it has to be pliable. It has to be mobile because we really believe that we don't know what we're going to come up against. For the American experience space is an open frontier. For the European experience it's a resource to be commandeered, to be focused back upon Earth. It’s a whole different outlook. A whole different outlook.

One could go into the difference between the American and Russian space programs. And you can see it there. You can see the difference in the character. I think we've mentioned this before. There have never been Russians on the moon. Why can't they go? Because you have to be free inside to go. Mother nature sends her children out, but those who are still tied to her apron strings cannot go. It's a metaphysical fear.

The dilemma in philosophy is the first lecture in Pragmatism and James brings all of these issues out that we have been talking about. And he says, we have a difficult time realizing. He says,
We measure the total character of the universe is we feel it against the flavor of the philosophy proffered us and one word is enough. Some nebulous concoction. Some wooden straight-laced thing crabbed artificiality, musty, schoolroom products. Sick man's dreams. Away with it. Away with all of them. Impossible. They are impossible. Our work over the details of a system is indeed what gives us our result and impression of philosophers. But it is on the result and impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy as measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions by the immediate perceptive epithet, with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own.

And he says the traditional way was to accept the teachings. And these are the teachings. They were handed to us and we're handing them to you, and you hand them off. But the American tradition, the teachings will be open. That was the teachings that was handed down and now they're handed to us. Be open. And we have progressively understood that this means be open. That the security, the safety, is in the freedom, not in the retreat. That the successful static system is a prison. And it's impossible. Impossible for us.

James says, that really in pragmatism there is nothing absolutely new. It's just the awareness that it is not a content. It's not a belief but is a method only. It is just a methodology. It's a theory of truth that has no dogmas. And it has no doctrines. Only the method. Because from Franklin to William James is the career of discovering how to actually be open and how to be conscious of that process. How to be self-conscious of that process. And what that openness is, what that individuality is, is forgoing the entire development of the kinds of structures that theology loved. That metaphysics loves. Not to get rid of the mysterious. Not to get rid of the arcane. But to face it squarely that the mysterious is in fact, unknown largely. And that this is truly wondrous and there's not a cause to repel us from life but rather is the shining example for our curiosity, for our integrity to grow even more. That this is the difference. So, it's a theory of truth.

He says, it's very difficult when put into these terms for people to accept, because it comes to them then through these words and through this kind of presentation as an idea. Purely as an idea. So instead of understanding it as a method we understand it as an intellectual content. And the only way that an intellectual content can be understood is to have it placed in filed on a map of intellectuality. And this is what James is constantly trying to forbid happening. He's constantly sabotaging this act. So that instead of getting a message, one is only aware of that there are some process of inquiry going on and that the message is unknown. Or ironically, that the message is that the message is unknown as of yet. Therefore, we have to keep experiencing, we have to keep hypothesizing for ourselves that it may be this, but it may be something else. We don't know. We have to continue to find out. And so, logic rather than being a syllogistic structure for the mind to pattern itself on logic becomes a theory of inquiry to try and find out what there is to find out. And this is different.

So that pragmatism is a method but secondly has also a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. It's a method, but it's also indicative of what truth is. That truth is not something static, but is something dynamic that is being made now by our participation with the act of finding. So that whatever truth there is requires our best decisions and our best participations in order to make it happen. So that the individual responsibility is very high. Because if we don't commit ourselves to it sufficiently, then the truth that is found that is made that is discovered is going to be deficient to that extent. So, it turns out that the ethical man has had a very easy time of it when he's able to quote chapter and verse and say, should do this and shouldn't do that. That now everything is up for grabs and requires not just a rote 10% kind of participation, but an extemporaneous hundred percent participation. And that this ethical reality is so existentially terrifying to people in 1906, that they're balking from it and bringing up all kinds of rationalizations to criticize it. And James again, and again, points out that the press is constantly misstating. And he says, there seems to be a pattern to this.

How do we know what's true then? He says that pragmatic criteria of truth is not a criteria, but he is a practical, and this is where the word [inaudible] action. It's a practical consideration. And it can be said very simply, what difference does it make in your life that you assume such and so to be true? Does it make a difference in your life? Would it make a difference if the opposite or if something else were true? So that one has to experiment and it's this process of inquiry to find out what helps you to live ethically hundred percent? What helps you to increase the veracity of your sense of life? What enriches your experience as a human being? That those are the areas that are hotter and hotter and hotter. And if one falls back on the old intellectually slovenly thing of just saying, well, we're not supposed to do this, and we're supposed to do that, then one is getting colder and colder and colder. And if this is a problem.

So, an idea is true so long as to believe it, it is profitable to our lives. We have to, we have to forgive the business metaphor here, profit. What is profitable to our lives. And not only to our lives but to the inner penetrate lives, which other individuals have with us so that we have this. So that we have kind of a quality. He writes at the end of chapter lecture three, which was called Some Metaphysical Problems. He says,
Pragmatism alone can read a positive meaning into this. For she turns her back upon the intellectual, his point of view altogether, which was that God's in his heaven and all as well. That's the real heart of your theology and for that you need no rationalist definitions. Why shouldn't all of us rationalist as well as pragmatists confess this. Pragmatism so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate practical foreground as she is accused, accused of doing dwells just as much upon the world's remoteness perspectives. But does it in this method of openness. Where it's the individual integrity that is the prime quality and not the traditional belief.
That the traditional belief, if it is valid, is going to come back into experience anyway. That you don't have to be afraid that it's going to be lost in the shuffle. Because as long as you keep your integrity up and you follow the method of openness consistently, this will re-introduce anything that is valid in the universe back into our lives. But in such a way that we will have personally discovered it and recovered it. And that its validity will no longer be contingent upon belief, but it will be a actual created quality of experience. And he says, this person is free. And this person will defend those discovered qualities with all of the integrity that he has at his command.

END OF SIDE ONE

Machines can't record those kinds of words. Let's take a break.

[inaudible]. Above it says spirit and below it says matter. There’s a line widens and then comes back and the line inside it reads mind. Mind? Mind. [inaudible].

Those structures like that are psychic projections from us. And what James is talking about psychologically is that the only way in which mind occurs at all is in terms of its own structuring of experience. This is the only possible way in which it can occur. Whether it exists outside of that occurrence or not is unknowable. But if we limit human experience to mental order, we will suffocate. So, we have to find a way to convince ourselves that there's life outside of the mind. Really outside of the mind. And that the dilemma of modern man is that he has a really tough time believing that because his whole belief structure, the whole way in which he believes is mental and is part of this mental structure.
So, pragmatism was a move to do an end around an end run around all of these conundrums, which had come up. That spirit and matter do not exist because of the mind. Though they may have mental properties for us. But that our life experience has got to include them. And the only way to include them in terms of what they are, is to find a way to shut our mouths and not talk all the time. To turn off the computations and just live. And that for our own mental health, we have to find some practical way to do this. Otherwise, we are forever jailed within an increasingly elaborate mental structure, which becomes increasingly unwieldy. And that does it gross insert, injustice and a mis-service when it comes to relating to other people, because we try to include them, their lives, into our mental structure and they don't fit. And we get angry because they fit. And why are you misbehaving? Why do you do this to me? And nobody's doing anything to anybody except misapprehending the whole series. And that when this happens on a global scale, we've got a nightmare.

So, James is talking very elegantly and very eloquently about a real situation. And he's bringing in the fact that, yes this is in fact a traditional problem but can no longer be seen as a traditional problem. So, we have a little bit of a paradox here.

So, in Pragmatism he has a lecture called The One and the Many. He says,
Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision for the world's unity. Few persons ever challenged this definition, which is true as far as it goes for philosophy has indeed manifested all things about all things it's interest in unity. But how about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity is only one of them. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned along with the reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness. Along with coming up with a system of unity, this is also the attention to detail.
And we would say that somebody would be a deficient were they to go around, chanting all, all, all, all. Fine. But there's more than just chanting all, there are the details. There is the variety. It is this relevant.
So that, “The scholarly mind”, he says,
of encyclopedic philological type [inaudible] man essential of learning has never lacked for praise along with your philosopher. Along with the person who can think the system out to completeness is also the man of learning. What our intellect really aims at is neither variety, no unity taking singularly, but totality, which is that brought together in this acquaintance with realities diversities is as important as understanding their connection.
So, variety and unity together. The one and the many.

And he goes on to say, there are many ways to talk about unity and he lists about eight or nine different ways. Two have them of interest to you. “The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically speaking, is there generic unity.” Generic unity.
Things exist in kinds. There are many specimens in each kind and what the kind implies for one specimen it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular. That is unlike any other fact and soul of its kind. In such a world of singulars all our logic would be useless. For a logic works by predicating of the single instance what is true of all of its kind. With no two things are alike in the world we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones.

Now, this is a very profound thought. For the experience psychologically of somebody who has alienated is that they are unique and one of a kind and nobody knows it. And they're all out there alone. And literally intuition is that thought no longer works for that person. The logic of the world no longer works for that person. That in there being ground up into singularity, into being alienated, they are one of a kind. And there's no connection between them and anything else or anyone else. And this alienation, this being ground down, not blossoming as a unique person individually, but being ground down to an alienated one of a kind with no context and no contact, has its complement in the rise of the mass state. And the alienated individuals and the mass state form a psychological totality. Very, very potent in our time. Potent because it's a compulsion. It's an archetypical compulsion. We don't have them, they have us. And the only way not to get electrocuted by like by that is not to touch those lines. To know enough but don't touch those together.

A great profile of that personality that is eradiated by that archetype is Eric Hoffer in his book, The True Believer [The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements]. It's a very beautiful, reasoned profile of that character. The true believer for whom the cause is his self. His only possibility of self. It's a compulsion. It's a disease, much like alcoholism.

Part of the compulsiveness of this is accepting the dire need for an absolute. And that absolute returning that dire needfulness in the way of this compulsiveness. So that the state becomes an absolute. An absolute necessity in just this way. So, the problem of the one and the many. Extremely potent problems psychologically in our time.

He writes, Pragmatisms main function is to unstiffen our minds. To relax this kind of static tenseness, which over ideation produces in human lives. To let a little bit of spirit and that matter permeate. Penetrate. To air out the mind. Yes, we still have a mind. Yes, we still think. But the structure is not compulsive it's experimental. So, we say with humility that we just don't know yet. We think that this is the way things are, and we expect that it's going to work this way, but we're willing to learn. The willingness to continue to learn is not only a sign of humility, but it's a sign of psychological acuity. Not just accepting a condition, because that seems to be the best way to work but recognizing the condition of it. Not in terms of its conditionality from a compulsive or necessary standpoint but recognizing that life is better this way.

He writes about how our knowledge seems to grow in spots. That the whole mind doesn't change all the time. There are certain areas or certain spots. And all this is in the lecture on common sense. And so, he writes,
My thesis now is this, that are fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent times. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human minds development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon the stage but have never succeeded in displacing it. Let us consider this common stage first as if it might be final.
And he goes on to talk about this.

And he says that, “The common-sense way of rationalizing is to set up sets of concepts. The most important of which are these,” and he lists them. Concepts, and the word for this is not so much a list, but as a matrix. “Thing, the same or different. Kinds. Minds. Bodies. One time. One space. Subjects and attributes. Causal influences. The fancy. The real.” James, “We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine that perceptions follow when taken by themselves.”

And this is part of the discovery, the psychological discovery of 20th century human beings is that when we analyze ourselves in this way and we get down to primals and we abstract them and take them out of the habitual context, they seem to disappear on us. They seem not to be firmly grounded at all. So that the recognition then psychologically is that all of these primal elements work together and only by working together do they make sense. And what is that sense is what we call the mind. And that sense James is calling to common sense. And yet experience shows us again and again, from modern science and from the complex introspections of the 20th century, that common sense is limited. That this mind is limited. That in fact, not only is this mind limited, but it's in danger of winking out into insignificance in terms of the very experience, which is now affordable to human beings.

And so, we have a crisis of spiritual courage. Just putting those words. That having spiritual courage is a real difficult thing in the 20th century. But we cannot go back paradoxically to the old tried and true traditions of infusing spiritual courage into human beings by giving them a tradition, by giving them a philosophy, a religion, a background. Because that very process itself is the one that got us into this jam. Into this conundrum. Which is what in philosophy you would call [inaudible]. It's a conundrum. It's a damned if you do in a damned if you don't.

So, James says, the only thing we can do as intelligent human beings is to reopen up all of the negotiations about reality on every front whatsoever and recognize that whatever it has veracity is going to reoccur in the universe. That if it doesn't reoccur, then it just isn't there for us. But it also means that we have to explore now, everything. Everything needs to be re-explored. So, we can't be smug on any issues whatsoever. And so, the ethic for the new person is to have the spiritual courage to go on and inquire and experience and explore. But recognizing that you have to do this with other people. There has to be an inner penetrate community of people. And this requires a very high ethical order.

He talks about how common sense would love to think there are permanent things, and we find out increasingly there are no permanent things. And that “there are two points,” James writes,
“that I wish that you retain from the present lecture. The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to suspect it.” To suspect common sense.
That in spite of there being so venerable, of there being so universally used and built into the very structure of language it's categories may after all only be a collection of extraordinarily successful hypotheses historically discovered or invented by single human beings but gradually communicated and used by everybody. By which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences. With the surface of nature so satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes, that it certainly would have lasted forever, except for the extraordinary intellectual vivacity of Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley, [inaudible] Kant and all the rest.
That these extraordinarily sharp minds poked through. Poked through the defining boundaries of common sense and pointed out and said, there's more. That is not in common sense.

So that the experience of a human being trusting this mind discovering that the world has more to it than common sense is to have the whole mental experience beginning to blur. And to begin to experience vertigo. Confusion. Chaos. And James says the tendency, the fearful tendency, that every human being has is that when faced with this is to reach back and find something that stays there. Something that's permanent. And he says that the pragmatist says don't reach back because at this point, anything you grab onto will electrocute you. That the way out of chaos is not to grab onto something, but to agree an ongoing series of contexts. And just that process of increasing the context will transform the chaos into a cosmos. And whatever values you want it to find, you will find, but in a discovery, not in the reaching back desperately to try and recover. It has to be a discovery, not a recover. And that this is extremely difficult for modern man, because it hasn't been done.

Now, James was not in possession of a cultural background, which is available now in the late 20th century. We know from a vaster experience in a deeper array of civilized experience that this has happened before in human beings. It happened in the 1st century in Alexandria. It happened in China at least twice. When the [inaudible] dynasty started and later when the Hung dynasty started. We know that the experience occurred at the tail end of the Olmec civilization, just before the rise of the classical Maya. We know that it happened in Egypt during the reign of [inaudible]. And we can see that other human beings have gone through this. And that's like rather going through a threshold, which is a crisis of spiritual courage. And that the wrong choice every single time was to try and go back and recapture something from the past and foist that upon the future through the problem of the present. That that was the wrong choice every single time. That it never worked. That the whole methodology of that process does not work. You can't take the skeleton out of the coffin and force it upon the baby and think that baby's going to grow up. It has to be free to grow in its own way. So, that the problem psychologically in the 20th century is learning the toughest courageous act of all the spiritual courage to be free. To experience the wholeness that is there and not be fearful of that. It is existentially the most difficult decision of all.

And then near the end of his lecture series in the lecture The Notion of Truth, James writes,
Pragmatism on the other hand, asks its usual question. grant an idea, or I believe to be true. It says grant that. Then ask what concrete difference will it being true, making anyone's actual life? How will that truth be realized? Not realized mentally but realized in the sense of lived out. How's this going to work?
This is what the American pragmatist usually asks, how is this gonna work? This sounds like a great idea. How's it gonna work? We need to get that river over here fertilizing this land. Good idea. How is it going to work? Well, we're going to have to shovel and make irrigation ditches. Well, great. Let's do that. How are we going to regulate the water coming down and all that? So eventually the pattern, the context widens. And in this experiential discovery we find out how it works.

What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? Suppose it isn't a good idea, what's going to happen? So, they to begin to widen out an amplifier seeing so that we're not seeing in terms of a structure, but we're seeing in terms of context, which is different. And you can say that context is a structure, but it's a process structure. It's different.

But in that process structuring what becomes more and more real and definite are the phenomenon themselves. They begin to occur. That river. Yeah, these fields. These people. This season of rain. So, the specific actually the phenomenal actually comes into view comes into focus. Clear.

“The moment pragmatism asks this question, what is short is the truths cash value and experimental terms.” Franklin Wright used to use the term payoff. What's the payoff? The payoff is we're going to irrigate those fields and we're going to eat.
The moment pragmatism asks this question it sees the answer. That true ideas are those that we can assimilate. That we can validate. We can corroborate and verify. And false ideas or those that we cannot. That is the practical difference. It makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth for it is all that truth is known-as.
That's hyphenated, known-as.
This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true. Is made true by events. The process namely of its verifying itself is its verification. Its validity is the process of validation.
This is what pragmatism is.

Incidentally in China Dewey’s pragmatism was the most popular philosophy before the 1930’s. How are we going to do it? How's this work? How are we actually going to get this done? What is this going to mean if we do this? And it's back. It's back.

He writes then about our pragmatistic conception, “In our cognitive, as well as in our active life, we are there for creative.” Are creative.
We add both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. We're not limited. The world stands ready, malleable, waiting to receive whatever touches it's getting by our hands. Like the kingdom of Heaven it suffers human violence, willingly.
It engenders, truths upon it because we're invited to participate to do this. We're invited to do this.

He says, he writes, “No one can deny that such a rule would add both to our dignity and to our responsibility as thinkers and as human beings.” So that this is an inspiring notion. So that there's the essential contrast that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity. While for pragmatism, it is still in the making in a way it's part of its complexion from the future. So, this was an essential difference.

And the alternative between pragmatism and rationalism in the shape, which we now have it before us is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge. It concerns the structure of the universe itself. For we're not only looking at a structure in the mind, we're looking at the shape of the [inaudible]. That there's something cosmic in this, which we're participating in. Which we are pragmatically discovering was coming out all the time. And ironically enough, synchronistically enough, we come out with a new mind just in time to get born to be in a new universe. Is it planned? We don't know. Because we haven't lived in that universe yet with that mind, but we sure want to find out. And we're gonna.

This was James’ pragmatism. And of course, the great experiment proponent was John Dewey. And we'll get to him next week and we'll see how Dewey and his masterful interiorization of what all of this meant. Not psychologically so much, but Dewey was constantly looking at two other items that James didn't get around to. One was how do we learn? What does education then look like if we are thinking in this way? Well, it sure doesn't look like any of the schools that we can see. So, we're going to have to have new ones. And secondly, governments are going to have to change. They're going to have to be responsive to actual human beings. Not the other way around. And so, government and education will become the great focuses of Dewey’s pragmatism. Whereas psychology and philosophy where that for James. And if you can stand it, I'll be here next week.

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