American Experiment (203 page)

But the weather change of the late nineteenth century far transcended even these remarkable advances. In science, there was a shift from “normal,” systematic reliance on step-by-step progress within established paradigms to imaginative leaps into the unknown, thus returning to the revolutionary pattern of great scientific breakthroughs of the past. In philosophy there was a revolt against the formal, “rational” metaphysics of the time, an exploration of new ways of understanding human motivation, of new perceptions of the relation between thought and action. These intellectual revolutions in turn stimulated new thought in law, history, political science, economics, and sociology.

The most transforming idea of the time was pragmatism, and it would become America’s single great contribution to the study of principles underlying knowledge and being. Like other changes in the American intellectual climate, the pragmatic movement seemed to arrive extrarationally, almost mysteriously—seemed to “have suddenly precipitated itself out of the air.” And no one so dominated and personified the pragmatic revolt as the author of these words, a most unrevolutionary-looking Harvard professor named William James.

On a late January day in 1907, William James traveled by train from Boston to New York, took up his room at the Harvard Club on West 44th Street, and immediately plunged into the intellectual life of Gotham. He lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted out every day of his stay, with members of the Philosophical Club of New York and with eminent biologists, mathematicians, and literati. He capped his visit by dining with a company that included Norman Hapgood, Finley Peter Dunne, and Mark Twain. The last, he wrote to his brother Henry and his son William, “poor man, is only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he’s a dear little genius all the same.”

Once again, James was captured by the heady intellectual beat of Manhattan. He was hardly a stranger to the city, having been born in the Astor House sixty-five years before, but in later life he had never managed to stay there more than a day and a half, he said, so repelled had he been by the “clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions.” Now, however, he seemed to find an
“entirely
new New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The
courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the
lightness
withal” gave him a kind
of “drumming background
of life that I never felt before.” On 44th Street, “in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and … found it simply magnificent.”

James even found the subways magnificent, “powerful and beautiful, space devouring,” as he roared back and forth daily between the Harvard Club and Columbia University. There, at Teachers College, he was giving a series of lectures on pragmatism. Originally scheduled for Schermerhorn Hall, with its 250 seats, the lecture had to be moved to the chapel, where an audience of over a thousand greeted him.

James’s listeners—many of them professional or amateur philosophers themselves—hardly expected anything new from their noted guest. He had given these lectures before, most recently at the Lowell Institute in Boston. They knew him to be the grandson of a multimillionaire businessman, the son of a well-known theologian, and the brother of the eminent novelist Henry James. They knew too that James had been heavily influenced by the half-legendary Charles Peirce of Cambridge, the amazingly versatile astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and logician who in 1878 had introduced something called “pragmatism” to the American lay public in an article in
Popular Science Monthly
called “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” After long bouts with bad health and deep depression, James himself had forged ahead, creating at Harvard the first American laboratory in psychology and helping gain recognition for the new science. Increasingly, he had immersed himself in philosophical study and was now the most celebrated philosophizer in America.

At Teachers College that night, James neither surprised nor disappointed his audience. He delighted them with his platform style—much moving about, gesticulating, and general animation—in contrast with the stereotype of the Harvard philosophers who, like Josiah Royce, sat immobile in a chair and rolled out their dogmas in sonorous periods. But, most of all, James impressed his listeners with his pithy comments.

“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread,’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives.” And now a new dawn was breaking upon philosophy.

The lecturer drew a distinction between “rationalism” and “intellectualism” on one side and “sensationalism” and “empiricism” on the other. “Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and
makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection—is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic.”

While the audience watched, fascinated, James chalked two columns on a blackboard, separating “rationalists” from “empiricists,” but with a new and provocative heading:

Most of you, James assured his listeners, were a mixture of both tendencies, had a “hankering” for both, but also were vexedly caught between “an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough….” The lecturer left no doubt where he stood. He rejected the world of philosophical absolutes, of the “transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school,” the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, Royce, of the absolutists who dwelt on “so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down.” He welcomed his listeners into the world “of concrete personal experience to which the street belongs,” multitudinous beyond imagination, “tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed,” contradictory, confused, gothic.

In succeeding lectures, to bigger and bigger audiences, James spelled out his views with never-failing gusto and pungency: that pragmatism “unstiffened” old, absolutist theories; that new truths were “go-betweens,” “smoother-overs” of transitions from old theories to new facts; that when we say that this theory solves a problem more satisfactorily than that theory, this means more satisfactorily
to ourselves;
and—emphasized again and again—a theory must be tested by how it works in practice, as a practical matter; that “any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely,
simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
instrumentally.”
And he limned the pragmatist in a few unforgettable phrases:

“He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad
a priori
reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.” Pragmatism meant
“looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

That James’s ideas struck philosophical sparks had long been clear, and he did not need to wait long at Columbia. The New Yorkers, he wrote a friend, at the evening gatherings “compassed me about, they wagged their tongues at me”; neither side gave in. In particular, he provoked the theologians who preached the very absolutes—the Good, the Just, the Godly, the Pure, Beauty, Truth—that the tough-minded questioned. James was attacked as antireligious, though he had grown up in a religious family and had undergone a religious experience one evening alone in his dressing room when he suddenly was seized by a “horrible fear of my own existence”—an experience from which he had emerged “twice-born.” He believed in God, but it was a less-than-absolute, a finite God, a position that enabled him to accept evil along with the goodness of God, and to urge men to rely on their own minds and wills and not merely divine intervention. So James—author of
The Varieties of Religious Experience
—could cope with theologians and metaphysicians.

But fellow philosophers and social theorists were a different matter. From Hugo Münsterberg, a onetime junior colleague and a German philosopher educated in the idealist tradition, came a polite but sharp comment: experience was not enough; he found reality in the fulfillment of will, as “transcendental power.” “And that is really
my fundamental problem: why do I care for a moral deed or a true astronomical calculation if they do not bring any advantage to me?”
Münsterberg asked in good Kantian fashion. Others accused James of caricaturing absolutism, of making pragmatism itself into a catchall absolute, even of lacking in “academic dignity.” James himself disliked the term “pragmatism” and all the baggage it had accumulated—he preferred the concept “humanism,” but it was too late—and he knew that Peirce himself felt that James carried pragmatism too far. Peirce preferred
his
kind of pragmatism, which he labeled “pragmaticism.”

If idealists, theological and lay, were repelled by aspects of pragmatism, the doctrine had special appeal to the practical men of law. Had not the very term, indeed, with its Greek root in
pragma
—“practical matter”—been extended by the Romans to mean “skilled in business, and especially experienced in matters of law”? Certainly it had a strong appeal to one
lawyer who happened to be a Supreme Court justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., hardly needed instruction from James on pragmatism; in the early 1870s, Holmes had met regularly in Cambridge with Peirce’s Metaphysical Club, which also numbered such luminaries as Chauncey Wright and John Fiske, as well as James. He and James as young men had spent long evenings “twisting the tail of the Kosmos,” and had remained in touch mainly by mail in later years.

“I heartily agree with much, but I am more sceptical than you are,” Holmes wrote James in thanking him for a copy of
Pragmatism.
“You would say that I am too hard or tough-minded,—I think none of the philosophers sufficiently humble.” Holmes had already responded to earlier writings of James on pragmatism. “For a good many years I have had a formula for truth which seems humbler than those you give … but I don’t know whether it is pragmatic or not. I have been in the habit of saying that all I mean by truth is what I can’t help thinking.... It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make
my
universe coherent and livable, not to babble about
the
universe.... To act affirms, for the moment at least, the worth of an end; idealizing seems to be simply the generalized and permanent affirmation of the worth of ends…. Man, like a tree in the cleft of a rock, gradually shapes his roots to his surroundings, and when the roots have grown to a certain size, can’t be displaced without cutting at his life….”

In his little masterpiece,
The Common Law,
Holmes—then forty years old —began with the flat announcement that the “life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” His revolt against legal formalism and absolutism led to some stunning opinions—notably to his dissent in
Lochner
v.
New York,
in which the Supreme Court struck down an act limiting New York bakery workers to a ten-hour day and a sixty-hour week. Holmes protested that the word “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment had been perverted. That amendment, he said, “does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s
Social Statics.
” A “constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.”

Asked once whether he had a general philosophy to help guide him as a judge, Holmes answered: “Yes. Long ago I decided that I was not God. When a state came in here and wanted to build a slaughter house, I looked at the Constitution and if I couldn’t find anything in there that said a state couldn’t build a slaughter house I said to myself, if they want to build a slaughter house, God-dammit, let them build it.”

For all his ability to eviscerate dogma with the lance of skepticism, however, Holmes’s pragmatism left him a divided thinker and judge. A
conservative himself, he delighted in puncturing conservative shibboleths; but he was too much the skeptic and ironist to enlist in any liberal or humanitarian cause, nor did he make any pretense of doing so. His rejection of both conservative and radical ideology made it difficult for him to take a consistent position on the great economic and social issues coming before the High Court; but, then, he did not believe in consistency. Even in law itself, however, his judicial opinions, Eugene Rostow said, lost their power to lead; it was “rare to find in one of his opinions the germinal idea or the creative suggestion which starts a line of decisions and guides later judges on their quest.”

Because Holmes and Louis Brandeis so often joined in dissent against their brethren’s decisions, Holmes acquired good standing with the progressives. He and Brandeis shared a pragmatic concern with the facts of the case, with the reality of social and economic circumstances. But in fundamental philosophy the two sharply diverged. “I’m afraid Brandeis has the crusading spirit,” Holmes said of his friend during the earlier Boston years. “He talks like one of those upward-and-onward fellows.” Fueled by volumes of facts, Brandeis did indeed move upward and onward as he both analyzed and embraced the idea of a liberal society based on democratic institutions and ideals of social justice. Holmes acquired fame as both a legal philosopher and technician, but without a social creed firm enough to bind his ends and means together into a creative and lasting force.