Holmes & Dewey, experience as culture

"…In 1925, John Dewey published his most wide-ranging philosophical book, Experience and Nature. Dewey used the term "experience" in that book exactly as Holmes had used it forty years earlier in the famous opening paragraph of The Common Law—as a name for culture. (Dewey later said that he wished he had called the book Culture and Nature.) And in the final chapter, he praised Holmes as "one of our greatest American philosophers," 6 and went on to quote a long passage from Holmes's essay on "Natural Law." Holmes read the book several times, with growing pleasure. He thought he had found in Dewey a philosopher whose conception of existence seemed to match his own. "[ A] lthough Dewey's book is incredibly ill written," he told Pollock, "it seemed to me … to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was." 7

Holmes sat on the Supreme Court for thirty years. He was finally persuaded to retire in 1932, and he died, in Washington, D.C., in 1935, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday. After his death, two Civil War uniforms were found hanging in his closet with a note pinned to them. It read: "These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood." 8

Dewey was sixty-six when he wrote Experience and Nature, and he was by no means finished. He retired from Columbia in 1930, but he continued to write and lecture; and in 1937, when he was seventy-eight, he traveled to Mexico to head a committee to investigate Joseph Stalin's charges against Leon Trotsky. Dewey admired Trotsky's courage and the dialectical sophistication of his mind; but, as he told one of the Americans traveling with him, he thought him "tragic. To see such brilliant native intelligence locked up in absolutes," 9 he said. Alice Dewey died in 1927, and in 1946, Dewey, now eighty-seven, married Roberta Lowitz Grant, who was forty-two. They adopted two Belgian war orphans, and Dewey enjoyed having them around while he did his work. In late 1951, while he was playing with them, he fell and broke a hip, and he never fully recovered. The following spring, he contracted pneumonia, and he died on June 1, 1952…"

— The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand
https://a.co/hp8b57S

Thinking is a social activity

 No individual alone, exclusively, can have the one and only right idea. Justice Holmes was expressing the pragmatic view,* in spite of himself. 

"He thought James had made scientific uncertainty an excuse for believing in the existence of a unseen world." 

         ...

"We do not (on Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours." --The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand 

* "Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands." WJ, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings 

RWE, ahead of schedule

Rereading Louis Menand...

"Emerson was a genuine moralist whose mistrust of moralism led him continually to complicate and deflect his own formulations. He was a preacher whose message was: Don’t listen to preachers. “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,”33 as he put it in the essay on “Self-Reliance.”

We are still going to church, in other words, but we’re no longer there to hear someone else tell us what to do. Emerson represented the tradition of the New England churchman, which is one reason he became an honored and respected figure despite his anti-institutionalism; and, at the same time, he represented that tradition’s final displacement. Unitarianism had rescued the integrity of the individual conscience from Calvinism. Emerson rescued it from Unitarianism—which is why after his famous address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, in which he scandalized the Unitarians by renouncing organized Christianity in favor of personal revelation, he was not invited to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.34

By the time he returned, religion was no longer an issue most people in Cambridge cared to fight about; the last of the anti-Darwinists were just going under. “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible,” Emerson announced in 1832, in a sermon in which he also announced his disbelief in a supernatural Jesus.35 He had, as usual, gotten there about a generation ahead of schedule."

"The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America": https://a.co/9b9ayvq

Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty’s Lifelong Argument

"… Contra MacIntyre, moral judgments incorporate both reason and emotion. Hume formulated that truth provocatively, saying that reason is always the servant of emotion. It's what pragmatists like James and Dewey meant by identifying the imagination as our key moral faculty; and it's why Rorty wrote that we should expect moral progress chiefly from the work of novelists, journalists, ethnographers, and other purveyors of thick descriptions rather than from philosophy..."

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/alasdair-macintyre-richard-rorty-liberalism/

A real education

That's what Henry Adams should have got, if he was paying attention, from William James's late-life "magnificent outburst" on behalf of the human spirit and against reductively, fashionably unwise popular science pessimism... truly a reflection of WJ's own "incandescent spirit," as his best biographer has written.

"Adams had, in his Education, drawn attention to a leading feature of the new American world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—its love affair with energy—and he had proposed the dynamo or generator as the symbol of that energy. William James’s life work was the discovery, retrieval, and harnessing of previously unused energies that lie dormant within us. So James was stirred, in June 1910, to rise in protest against the urbane and learned pessimism of his friend Adams’s book-length funk. Finishing Adams’s “Letter” in mid-June, James fired off a riposte. The beginning was jolly enough. Referring to the “Letter,” James said, “To tell the truth it doesn’t impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition, and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No, sir, you can’t do it,—can’t impress God in that way.”20

He then got down to cases. “I protest against your interpretation of some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of the original high-level energy.” Adams had neglected to remember, and James now reminded him, that history is “the course of things before that terminus,” and in the course of things it was a question of what use was made of any given spoonful of energy.

Physically a dinosaur’s brain may show as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man’s, but it can do infinitely fewer things, because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur’s muscles, while the man’s brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral etc. and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise—in short make history. Therefore the man’s brain and muscles are from the point of view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange, small as this may be, when measured in absolute physical units.

For this reason, James concluded, sweeping his hand across Adams’s chessboard, “the ‘second law’ is wholly irrelevant to ‘history.’”

It is impossible, after reading James for any length of time, to refrain from using italics oneself. But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!" --William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson

My current projects revolve around questions about the real meaning of education, and what sort of knowledge matters most. WJ remains the most reliable guide I've found, in exploring such questions. John Dewey is right there with him. 

There's a looming submission deadline for a conference concerning the latter's legacy for education. Does that legacy also bask in Jamesian incandescence? Might also be a question worth exploring.

Lee McBride

Another installment in the series...

What does American philosophy mean to you?

“American philosophy” is an umbrella term that denotes a collection of philosophies that arise out of those North American territories that would eventually become the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In the literature, we find essays like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” that call for “Americans” to break from their colonial Eurodescended doctrines and canonical figures and create their own views, write their own books, develop their own knowledge rooted in this place. Transcendentalism, pragmatism, American idealism, and naturalism are a few of the philosophies readily depicted via Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana.

But some of us have slowly started to recognize that the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island/North America and the Caribbean islands had/have philosophies of their own; that the enslaved Afrodescended peoples thrust into these lands as a product of the transatlantic slave trade developed their own American philosophies.

And thus, American philosophy (for me) includes figures like: Handsome Lake, John Wannuaucon Quinney, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Ignacio Ramírez, José Martí, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Aimé Césaire, Gloria Anzaldúa, Vine Deloria Jr., Édouard Glissant, María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Patricia Hill Collins, Guillermo Hurtado, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

How did you become an American philosopher?

I read William James’s Psychology: The Briefer Course as an undergraduate; I remember being terribly unimpressed. Later, once I started teaching my own courses (with MA in hand), I shoved James’s Pragmatism into my introduction to philosophy course—Plato, Descartes, Hume, and James. Even then, I was not an American philosopher; at the time, my focus was on ancient Greek philosophy.

But then I matriculated to Purdue University and found myself surrounded by trailblazing American thinkers: Paul B. Thompson, Leonard Harris, and Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Thompson taught me John Dewey, Josiah Royce, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, and agrarian ethics. Harris taught me Alain Locke’s value theory and critical pragmatism, Karl Marx, W.V.O. Quine’s Word and Object, and nuanced philosophies of race and racism. Seigfried taught me William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and pragmatist feminism. I was awash in a complex confluence of ideas. I ended up writing my dissertation on John Dewey and Alasdair MacIntyre under Charlene Haddock Seigfried.

How would you describe your current research?

I edited Leonard Harris’s A Philosophy of Struggle (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Erin McKenna and I co-edited Pragmatist Feminism and the Work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried (Bloomsbury, 2022). I authored Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed (Bloomsbury, 2021). Additionally, in 2021, I published an article on decolonial philosophy, titled “Culture, Acquisitiveness, and Decolonial Philosophy” (Decolonizing American Philosophy, eds. Corey McCall and Phillip McReynolds).

So, my recent research bears marks of Harris’s philosophy born of struggle, insurrectionist ethics, critical pragmatist ethical naturalism, Seigfried’s pragmatist feminism, black feminist visionary pragmatism, and decolonial philosophy.

My present works-in-progress develop three themes. First, I am highlighting the place of poetry and well-patterned language in philosophy, especially for those looking to exceed the dominant discourse, what Emerson might call our present circle. Second, I am deploying the decolonial insights I find in Sylvia Wynter and others to critique and complicate canonical pragmatist and agrarian thought. And third, I am writing a concise introductory book on the philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois (under contract with Indiana University Press).

What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?

I spend a lot of time engaged in food-related activities. I like to eat. I like to think that I am decent in the kitchen; that is, I like to cook. I garden (edible fruits and vegetables) when I can devote ample attention to my beds. Additionally, I love to travel, to immerse myself in new environments, to experience new cultures, and eat the food. And, before COVID-19, I used to do a lot of (power vinyasa) yoga.

What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

I am partial to John Dewey (especially, Individualism Old and New, Freedom and Culture, and the Ethics) and William James (especially, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Talks to Teachers On Psychology and To Students On Some Of Life’s Ideals). But people should be reading (more) Alain Locke (see The Philosophy of Alain Locke edited by Leonard Harris and African American Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures edited by Jacoby A. Carter).

Beyond these historical figures, I would strongly suggest: Leonard Harris, A Philosophy of Struggle; Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes; Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories; Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman,” “Is Development a Purely Empirical Concept or Also Teleological?,” and “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”; Elizabeth Anderson, “Pragmatism, Science, and Moral Inquiry” and “Moral Bias and Corrective Practices: A Pragmatist Perspective”; Kyle Whyte, “Indigeneity and US Settler Colonialism,” “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” and “Critical Investigations of Resilience”; and Kristie Dotson, “How is This Paper Philosophy?,” “Introducing Black Feminist Philosophy,” “On the Way to Decolonization in a Settler Colony,” “Black Feminist Me: Answering the Question ‘Who Do I Think I Am’,” “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” and “Tales from An Apostate.” These are brilliant scholars; each of them has left an indelible mark on my thinking...

Hash

I never tire of revisiting WJ's philosophical self-reproach. All truth-seekers should reflect on it, continually,

"I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book, which shall be epoch-machend at last, and a title of honor to my children! Childish idiot—as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!"

— The Letters of William James, Vol. II by William James
https://a.co/6o4BA3Q