Nietzsche remarks in his late work Twilight of the Idols that to practice philosophy is to perish under a burden one can neither bear nor throw off. Socrates saw his task somewhat differently. In a famous passage in Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates identifies himself as an intellectual midwife, barren of wisdom himself, but capable through dialectic of bringing to light the ideas of another, demonstrating them to be either realities or illusions. In the millennia separating Socrates and Nietzsche, many philosophers have attempted to characterize their profession, but perhaps no other effort is as thoughtful, picturesque, or precise as the statements given by these two immense forces of western thought. Yet to us, perhaps no other philosophers are as distant, unfathomed, and almost incomprehensible as these two great masters of irony. Nietzsche acknowledges this similarity by referring both to himself and Socrates as masters of the art of fencing; and like the elegant sabre, both philosophers belong to an age far different from our own. Each radically both modeled their era and simultaneously annihilated it. Each spoke feelingly about art, religion, freedom, and the individual in a way that few philosophers today would scarcely recognize. Each was condemned as a danger in his own time. Each advanced ideas that are considered simply untenable today.

At the dawn of the second millenium, 100 years after the death of Nietzsche, the earth has seen two disastrous wars without precedent in the history of the world. We have seen the rise and fall of both fascism and communism. The airplane has delivered both a new means of interconnection and a new means of destruction to the world. Human beings have developed the capacity to thoroughly destroy themselves at the press of a button. The dangers of the world no longer resemble even the ones that Nietzsche knew, much less those of Socrates. Triumph over the physical dangers of wars fought over ideas has rendered the world an unsafe place for dangerous thinkers and dangerous ideas, at least within society. Ideology has given way to humanist idealism, and absolutism has been banished in the face of pluralism, as a means to avoid the conflicts that nearly destroyed us. The quest for peace, tolerance, and understanding has become the torch held aloft by the majority of philosophers and the public alike. As thinkers and as a worldwide society, we have become pragmatists, forming a patchwork of ideas, cultures, and goals to attempt to raise the quality of human life.

The rise of humanism, pluralism, and pragmatism in their modern forms can all be traced to one remarkable man: William James. Perhaps no other American philosopher has been as influential in so many diverse fields, covering the breadth of the sciences, humanities, and religion. Certainly few have been as subtly original. James seamlessly stitches together vast knowledge of the history of thought, strong awareness of both Anglo-American and Continental contemporaries, and the popular idiom. The strains of his thought have not declared themselves boldly in a thunderbolt, annihilating metaphysical idols like Nietzsche, questioning reason like Hume, or attacking popular conceptions of "humanity" like Hobbes or Schopenhauer. Instead, they have sunk and seeped their way into our consciousness. In his most famous philosophical works, James advances the concept of Pragmatism, or the pragmatic method, a descendant of British Empiricism that, in James’s own words, represents the empiricist attitude "both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed."ⁱ The essential motivation of Pragmatism is relatively simple: to create a conception of truth that fundamentally reflects the nature of the concrete learning human mind. From another perspective, it is a method of determining the truth or falsity of an idea in a way that works for human beings, whether engaged in metaphysics, the physical sciences, psychology, or everyday life. Charles Sanders Peirce, James’s predecessor and the founder of Pragmatism, initiated the doctrine by proposing that the sole significance of an idea for a human being is the resultant action, and that by extension, the only significant conception of an object is our conception of practical responses to that object. By ultimately referring all truth to actual human beings, Pragmatism, particularly in James’s conception of it, could also be known as Humanism, a title that F.C.S. Schiller, a contemporary of James’s, advanced for the same doctrine.

In many ways, the pragmatic method and Pragmatism’s conception of truth are modeled after human epistemology. To understand James’s conception of the pragmatic method, the following passages (with my emphasis in boldⁱⁱ) are critical:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material or spiritual? – here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.ⁱⁱⁱ

This is essentially a clear reformulation of Peirce’s ideas of 1878. James re-emphasizes this notion, and his commitment to humanism, repeatedly throughout the text when he states that "The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life"^iv, or the following polemic against such "solving names" as God, Matter, or the Absolute:

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed^v…Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.^vi

James here initiates a conception of the dynamic and instrumental nature of all theories, which later extends into the basic dynamic and instrumental nature of all truth. He follows Schiller and Dewey in stating that "ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience."^vii Much is being said here. First, ideas do not correspond to truth statically, after the rationalist model; that is, it is impossible to say of an idea that it intrinsically is or is not true. Ideas become true. Furthermore, ideas become true by interacting with other things that we already know—by making one part of our experience more coherent through its relationships with other parts of our experience. A somewhat abstract example of this would be Newton’s Laws of Motion; not only did Newton have intuitive ideas about force and the interaction between physical bodies, he also had Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion, arrived at empirically, to which Newton’s Laws mathematically agree. Thus, Newton synthesized his practical knowledge (let’s say the falling apple) with scientific knowledge (of Kepler’s and Galileo’s discoveries, among others) to form a new conception of bodies in motion that yielded tremendous practical benefits and new understanding of the phenomena of the material world.

However, James does not merely suggest that correlation and consistency with prior beliefs and experience is an efficient or even desirable method to obtain truth; he states that it is the ultimate criterion of any idea whatsoever. As a psychologist, James offers the following description of human behavior:

The observable process which Dewey and Schiller particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain… So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. The new idea is then adopted as the true one.^viii

James goes further, pronouncing both the absolute fealty of knowledge to the demands of the psyche’s prior experience, and the essential relativity of truth in the pragmatic sense in the following passage:

[S]uccess in solving [a] problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.

The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism levelled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle – in most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconception is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them…. [N]ew contents themselves are not true, they simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula.^ix

The reason for my emphasis of this passage in particular will hopefully become clear later on in this essay; but here we see how James’s conception of human nature leads him to define truth in a very different way than the majority of his philosophical predecessors. By presupposing and even making necessary prior experience and knowledge, Pragmatism is clearly different from both Rationalism and Empiricism with their emphasis on skepticism and "fixed starting points" or "the given". Pragmatism’s starting point is the human being already taken as existing in a rather confusing material world and in social and psychological relationships. It is in fact closer to the Hegelian move to examine the world in its relationship to a preexisting concrete human being than it is to any real predecessor (apart from Peirce) in Anglo-American thought. James nowhere mentions Hegel or Kierkegaard, but James is in many ways closer to each than the two are to each other. His echo of their move away from both rationalism and positivism in favor of a more concrete understanding of humanity is one of several similarities to James’s predecessors on the Continent.

James complicates the matter somewhat further by introducing the concept of pluralism¹ into his conception of truth. The move is not entirely unexpected, and actually follows logically from James’s dictums regarding the nature of truth as rooted in expediency and prior experience. Obviously, the contents of each individual’s prior experience vary dramatically from person to person, culture to culture; furthermore, as every individual and every society’s concrete needs are different, so too will be their conception of the truth in terms of its determinate content. Prior to his essays on Pragmatism’s conception of the truth, James actually advances a pluralist idea of truth using his already implicit method of Pragmatism in the conclusion to his monumental study of world religions The Varieties of Religious Experience, particularly in the following passage, which also does much to capture the general tone and movement of James’s prose as well as the tenor his philosophy:

The practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us – a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds.

Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still today)² that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, all is saved… Common sense is less sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part… I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.^x

The themes and methods sounded in this passage are more fully and concretely represented in James’s treatment in both of his two later essays on Pragmatism ("What Pragmatism Means" and "Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth") as well as his early essay, "The Sentiment of Rationality." In many ways, James’s prescription for philosophy as detailed in "Sentiment" and Pragmatism is strikingly similar to Kant’s prescription for reality: whatever comes forth, we can expect that it must bear such-and-such a form, or go unrecognized. His demands are very clear—in order for a philosophy to be true, it must:

1. render the universe less chaotic then it was previously, in that it
2. lessens anxiety by making the future more or less certain;
3. appeal to powers, abilities, or emotions human beings both possess and esteem;
4. harmonize consistently with prior beliefs and experience, especially those deemed "common sense";
5. be logically possible;
6. produce meaningful and concrete practical benefits upon its adoption; and
7. leave room both for faith and for large variation in many particulars of the philosophy; i.e., it must be morally and intellectually flexible.

Furthermore, the philosopher is both justified in and authorized to develop a conception of the universe that fulfills these criteria by any means necessary; that is, independent of whatever scholastic or scientific scrutiny (or lack thereof) is employed in its conception, it will be a true philosophy insofar as it fulfills these pragmatic criteria. Pragmatism is far more interested in gaining truth than shunning potential error.

After David Hume and Immanuel Kant, there were (and still are) serious doubts as to whether or not truth, as it was understood then and as the majority of people understand it today (despite the rise of pluralism), was attainable by human beings. Reason had long been thought to be the pipeline to God, the Form of Forms, and/or the truth in its eternal, rational entirety. Kant seemed to circumscribe the limits of what reason could accomplish and what was knowable; questions of absolute certainty in the unseen were answered with an absolute denial of any positive knowledge whatsoever outside of the realm of pedestrian experience. Any grounds for knowledge of Truth in its full, absolute, immutable, and metaphysical sense, as promised by the Rationalists, was effectively lost. To overcome this epistemological difficulty, Kant’s great successor Hegel tries to incorporate both all of being and non-being into a massive historical system, introducing the concepts of objectification and dialectical (or thesis-antithesis) movement towards the truth. With Schopenhauer and the fruition of Romanticism on the Continent, we see a complicated return to the senses and the instincts, as being ultimately more certain and infallible than the processes of the Understanding: a direct attempt to circumvent the Kantian categories of knowledge, coupled with a large measure of disillusionment or pessimism. Kierkegaard similarly shows disillusionment towards both reason and Hegel’s historical approach, but chooses to turn to the inward, to the ethical, for truth: it is in Kierkegaard that we see the first serious modern presentation of the notion that truth is in its very nature deeply and ultimately subjective. All of these philosophers rely upon some redefinition of truth or an explication of an alternative (sometimes supersensory) method to obtaining truth to overcome the boundaries Kant laid upon knowledge.

The goal of post-Kantian attempts to justify "true knowledge" is not to refute those boundaries, but to frame the question "Can we know anything with certainty?" in a different light. James’s pluralist position. It is an attempt to reconcile what one is in possession of with what one believes is within the realm of possibility for human beings.

In the following paragraphs I offer what I feel to be my most serious objections to James’s presentation of his theory of truth and the arguments he uses to arrive at this theory. In the process, I hope to refine the conception of truth and our relationship to it as both knowing subjects and material human beings, or at least pose a challenge and counter-position to many theories popular today both inside and outside of philosophy. What will also hopefully emerge is a variation on the general epistemological and metaphysical themes of Pragmatism that adapts itself more easily for issues in social philosophy—both in understanding issues and institutions of social injustice and in addressing serious issues in bringing about social change, primarily through education. The task that lies ahead is as difficult as the potential fruits are promising. Much of what remains to be discovered here is directly opposed to much of the prevalent thought in social theory, education, and even philosophy. Yet I strongly feel that if these issues remain unaddressed, the larger ills currently plaguing the growing global society will similarly remain unaddressed and unchecked.

The ideas of Pragmatism by definition build upon our prior beliefs; harmonizing with them in such a way that it becomes a mode of thought taken as given; through interconnection with our conscious beliefs they attain the level of instinct. To identify and examine critically ideas obtained in the Pragmatic method is in many ways the most difficult task yet attempted—in part because it involves rooting out that which has become the deepest and most instinctive within us, and in part because we must employ pragmatic means to purify the pragmatic method. We can think of James as essentially offering the final argument in the 19^th century’s attempts to simultaneously overcome and further Kant’s criticism of knowledge. James offers a way out of the metaphysical crisis of knowledge, a means and a prescription through which human beings can obtain actual working knowledge of their surrounding universe. Furthermore, James suggests that all other attempts to gain knowledge—e.g., rationalism, empiricism, idealism, positivism, intuition, etc.—must ultimately be verified by Pragmatism’s conception of truth. There is no way to obtain true knowledge outside of the pragmatic method—that is James’s summary of the philosophy of the nineteenth century—we have no other way of guessing at a thing’s validity.

James justification for his identification of "truth" with beliefs that prove useful for practical gains in the following passage:

You can say of [a true idea brought into service] then either that "it is useful because it is true" or that "it is true because it is useful." Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification-process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience. True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset in this way.^xi

To this the objection must be made that once one has summarily defined "the true" as that which is cohesive with and expedient for human existence and experience, one necessarily regards as all that which has been christened with the name "true" as that which possessed utility in its very definition. Effectively, unless James has some other, hidden definition for the true, this statement reduces to the tautology "useful ideas would never have been called so if they were not useful."

Even if such semantic arguments are dismissed, one still does not have to concede James’s point. Without delving too deeply into an involved treatment of the nature of language, it seems that names, both of objects and concepts, have their function if not their genesis in distinguishing or determining what is named from other objects or concepts. While the motivation behind this determination may be ultimately or fundamentally rooted in expediency, it does not follow that every name is used to denote what is in essence expedient. The most striking example I can immediately think of is the word pedantry; a family-resemblance concept that, while its classification is in all likelihood born out of utilitarian motives, certainly does not pertain to anything really useful. It seems that this is the case for the majority of our names and classifications: they simply denote whatever it is they refer to (or in a negative sense, do not refer to), while very few carry heavy baggage with regard to their utility, even if they may be loaded down with many other hidden agendas. The concept of Truth seems to follow this pattern as well, even though it appears soaked with ethical, religious, and psychological values. Historically, setting aside a number of variations, we can imagine that the concept of truth originated in a way as to distinguish something termed "real" from something that was not (if such a concept of "real" existed prior to "truth")—perhaps out of awareness in distinguishing one’s dreams with one’s waking hours. Since the birth of human reason, this one problem has dominated philosophy: Am I awake? or might I still be dreaming? The positing of a distinction between experience that is true and experience that is illusory introduces the self-conscious skepticism that is the seed of all philosophy.

Regardless of the cognitive strategy or scholastic method with which one attempts to obtain true knowledge, it is premature to identify any cognitive process or any intermediary stage of that process with that which is really the goal of that process, namely, the attainment or cognition of true knowledge. To put it another way, no attained result can be automatically identified with the stated end. Simply because the pragmatic method a) purports to lead to true (or even useful) knowledge or more likely b) is the actual and necessary method of confirmation or criterion of any knowledge we have does not mean that we can identify all truth as having arisen out of the pragmatic method. In fact, the history of science and civilization seems to suggest precisely the opposite: that our pragmatic means of confirmation at each stage of development seems only to yield certain untruths, or half-truths that cause us no apparent harm or discomfort. For example, the average peasant woman in Europe prior to Copernicus’s discoveries about the nature of the solar system was not direly inconvenienced by her notion that the sun and the celestial bodies revolved around the earth, even though she was in error. It jibed with her sense-experience and general intuition about the movement of spatial bodies, and provided her with the degree of understanding required for tasks which had little to nothing to do with the revolutions of satellites; it may even have provided her with a great deal of psychological comfort to know that her home stood firmly at the center of the universe, rather than hurling wildly through vast expanses of empty space. By all accounts, what the woman believed was True according to pragmatism’s conception of the truth, although her account did not correspond with actual fact, in that certain facts of experience peripheral to the woman’s pragmatic needs were inconsistent with her notion.

There precisely seems to be the problem. Despite James’s eloquent descriptions of practical benefits motivating a belief in a theory’s truth, it is more often the case that concrete benefits and new understanding come only precisely after knowledge is introduced. As progress is made, real understanding too often lags behind. Individual human beings are invariably unable to judge the genuine potential for practical benefit or even consistency with reality of virtually all of our beliefs. The practical use we make of a belief comes after the fact. In fact, unless we impose a degree of skepticism on ourselves, or are forced to pause by an especially baffling situation, all of our beliefs, or at least the great majority, are necessarily seen as those with the greatest utility. Therefore, if James is taken at face value, then whatever any human being has faith in (a strong, regulating belief) would have to be considered true, or to use another popular expression, equally valid.

This is the foundation of a particular descendant of James’s thought, which I identify as sophisticated pluralism. Now, this position is tenable philosophically, and to a certain extent, as an actual metaphysical and epistemological belief in the material world. How far it can function, particularly as a social theory, remains to be determined. However, it seems as though this view of truth would be largely incompatible with the rigorous nature of the scientific disciplines, which James specifically targets as both a contributor to and a benefactor from the development of Pragmatism. The physical sciences in particular rely on a mathematical model of the universe that simply must be taken as universal or disproved and scrapped. Relativistic mechanics, unlike relativistic metaphysics, actually removes the human element, the belief in force, from its mathematical model to derive a perfectly ordered universe. Again, here, as with Copernicus, any practical application or acceptance as fact followed upon a single innovation. Until that point they effectively did not exist. Thus we see that at every moment, we stand in relationship to a potential truth that remains outside of our grasp. Particle motion at above-Newtonian speeds simply did not register in anyone’s imagination until the theoretical aspect was contributed by Einstein in a stroke of sheer brilliance; might I add, brilliance brought on through excellence in abstract reasoning and motivated by few, if any, practical goals whatsoever. Yet within Einstein’s lifetime, the war machines on both sides of the Atlantic were able to make use of the newfound knowledge in a profound and terrible way through nuclear fission. An aside. But what is further remarkable is that a belief would become untrue only to the degree that it would become doubted; i.e., the paradoxical situation that those on the path to new knowledge in fact become ignorant. This notion of truth seems not to conform to the way we usually speak about truth: a difficulty we shall have to revise, either through altering our notion, our discourse, or both. Yet it could be shown from text that something of this sort is maintained by James; for example, he demonstrates pragmatically that belief in God as the Absolute of the rationalists is for all practical purposes true by stating that "if theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged."^xii This is clearly an instance where, simply by virtue of belief, James is asserting truth.

Furthermore, this would seem to add no new content to the Protagorean notion that "man is the measure of all things" (hence the name Sophisticated Pluralism). It makes the notion of the truth essentially identical with that of positive knowledge

It can be argued that this example is a wry jest at rationalists, purporting that the sole justification of the deity is the lessening of anxiety of His believers—this of a God for whom their exist over 100 indefatigable rational proofs for—a rhetorical device used by James, who really advocated a much more orthodox conception of truth. This interpretation places James somewhat closer to the Hegelian model of knowledge, whereby the individual makes progress towards truth through continual adjusting of concepts and beliefs until he or she arrives at the determinate whole, in all of its interrelations.

Since Hegel has been introduced, and Hegel and James compared, perhaps it will facilitate the discussion of James to import a limited amount of Hegelian terminology to try to illustrate James’s (and many others who support similar views) apparent confusion. In the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, called "Sense-certainty," Hegel introduces a distinction between "certainty" and "truth".^xiii Certainty is first used in the treatment of Sense-certainty, the belief that knowledge is obtained with immediate certainty and determinateness independent of any other social or historical medium. Hegel attributes this view to the "Natural Consciousness", i.e., the potential Spirit/Mind before the element of negativity (or doubt) is introduced to initiate the philosophical or dialectical process towards a better Notion (Begriffe) of knowledge. Thus certainty represents individual stages of knowledge or belief, while truth represents the teleological goal of this process; ideally, the subject passes through and discards various stages of belief, taking what he or she has learned from each to determine the content and context of the next stage of knowledge. This concept of Certainty seems like a ready-made fit for the knowledge obtained through the pragmatic method. By subjecting each viewpoint to the pragmatic test, the pragmatist attempts to move closer and closer to adequate representation of the whole.³

Yet this seems incompatible with the notion of truth as a function of utility; if the goal is simply the interconnectedness of all facts of existence, how does utility enter onto the scene, except as a possible cognitive strategy? In this case, it would seem that utility or good would be simply an accidental and not intrinsic property of the truth; that is, while a belief’s value for us is the barometer by which we gauge its approximation to the truth, the possibility is acknowledged that many untruths similarly appear useful, perhaps to an equal or even greater degree than truth, and that also, many truths (that is, concrete facts about the universe) are inert, unnoticed, or even dangerous. Yet we see in our own lives that we are almost always in the end grateful for knowledge of the truth, even if we were happier or more content in our ignorance: knowledge of that which is perceived to be the truth, once attained, brings along with it its own utility. This poses a serious problem for James, as it reverts him back to the earlier model, whereby whatever was believed in with sincerity is taken as truth. While Kierkegaard might be willing to accept such a model, as he rejects outright many of the ends James seems to embrace, it seems that James would have to re-think his position to avoid this trap.

According to James, "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons".^xiv James is fond of such "practical" problems as tracing a cowpath to a hypothesized house at the end of the road. In reality, very few philosophical propositions are meaningfully verifiable in the way James proposes to any degree, and the greater charm and apparent benefit frequently belongs to the ideas that are the subtlest, but often also the most erroneous and ultimately the most hurtful, requiring the deepest incisions to cleanse them from the consciousness, if such a thing can ever be accomplished. The shadow of the future is long and broad, and for most beliefs, especially philosophical and theological ones, we are bluntly unaware of the real effects of a proposition until it has been genuinely tried and fought out over an extended period. Some of the most profound philosophical questions have been presented as what if?s; question marks on the human consciousness. While Nietzsche evinces wonderment at what human beings might accomplish once they cease to flow out into a God,^xv James blithely suggests that religious views that he himself considers obviously false are true on the grounds that they provide a degree of comfort. Nietzsche would add that the true has been identified with the useful because the untrue beliefs that are beneficial have not been exposed---in fact, they have been christened true for so long that the alternatives, regardless of their pertinence, actuality, or even potential pragmatic benefits have become unthinkable. Nietzsche anticipates James’s descriptive psychology by several years, but differs from him vastly in terms of his diagnosis of human epistemology, a difference that should be noted:

To derive something unknown from something familiar relieves, comforts, and satisfies, besides giving a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them: the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one "considers it true." The proof of pleasure ("of strength") as a criterion of truth.^xvi

In fact, several years before James, Nietzsche clearly details the way in which our dogmas dictate the terms of our belief; they are our regulative articles, and we cannot escape them. In The Will to Power Nietzsche identifies the philosopher’s burden as universal: "Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off."^xvii At some point between The Sentiment of Rationality and Pragmatism, James moves from a sociopsychological description of human behavior regarding philosophy and belief to a prescriptive determination of what truth and philosophical enquiry should be. The confusion between the inescapability and the embracement of illusion is troubling.

James is really guilty of one intellectual sin: identifying everything validated by the current method with which one obtains truth with the truth itself. This is not a new mistake: the Rationalists, who James works so hard to argue against, made precisely the same error. First, they thought to determine what was real in the material world through logic; eventually, they disdained the material world, and thought that only that which was logically proven was "real"—particularly when the dictates of logic became paradoxical, contradictory, or seemed to fly directly in the face of experience (e.g., the Greek thinkers Parmenides, Zeno, etc.). Pragmatism makes the same error in confusing its results with its goal. There is much that is realized in existence that will never even be thought of, let alone believed in; it belongs under the name "true" nonetheless.

Here it seems fitting to articulate the positive sense of truth that has re-emerged in our treatment of Pragmatism’s conception of truth. And it is equally fitting that James’s remarkable colleague and successor at Harvard University, George Santayana, has already articulated the transformation from belief in certainty to belief in truth for us so well:

The experience which perhaps makes even the empiricist awake to the being of truth, and brings it home to any energetic man, is the experience of other people lying… I learn that a report may fly in the face of the facts. There is, I then see clearly, a comprehensive standard description for every fact, which those who report it as it happened repeat in part, whereas on the contrary liars contradict it in some particular…And a little further reflection may convince me that even the liar must recognize that fact to some extent, else it would not be that fact he was misrepresenting; and also that honest memory and belief, even when most unimpeachable, are not exhaustive and not themselves the standard for belief or for memory, since they are now clearer and now vaguer, and subject to error and correction. That standard comprehensive description of any fact which neither I nor any man can ever wholly repeat, is the truth about it…

The word truth ought, I think, to be reserved for what everybody spontaneously means by it: the standard comprehensive description of any fact in all its relations. Truth is not an opinion, even an ideally true one; because besides the limitation in scope which human opinions, at least, can never escape, even the most complete and accurate opinion would give precedence to some terms, and have a direction of survey…

[T]ruth is not an existence that asks to be believed in, and that may be denied. It is an essence involved in positing any fact, in remembering, expecting, or asserting anything… [O]n the hypothesis that anything exists, truth has appeared… only one description of it in terms of essence will be complete; and this complete description, covering all its relations, will be the truth about it.^xviii

Thus we see that on what are essential pragmatic grounds—that is, the limits and focus of the knowing and existing human being—Santayana eloquently refutes the notion that the yield of any scope of survey, and the pragmatic method in particular, cannot be identified with the truth; and furthermore, cannot achieve it. It is the end goal, towards which progress is either made or not made, without its assumption.

It is only during self-posed philosophical (and often merely pseudophilosophical) reflection that the hypothesis-maker identifies the concept of a claim made with the concept of truth itself. What rationalists thought was true, was not; what rationalists thought was the correct way to get to truth, namely, mathematical proof, was not. What rationalists believed about the truth itself—that it was the whole of reality independent of any cognition of it (or including also all facts of cognition itself)—was true. In this, they were agreed with by the scientist and the common man alike, although each had a different method to reach this standard, whether logic, positivism, pragmatism, or revelation. Signs of coherence with the universe and practical good for us are just that—signs—that our knowledge is more and more attaining to harmony with the fixed shape and form of the universe. In this way, our knowledge increases, while the truth remains the same. When we are shown our error in any given erroneous hypothesis, in most cases we slap our foreheads in sudden comprehension—for it has always been so, and we should have known all along. Suddenly the facts of our consciousness line up to the new interpretation—an interpretation that surely contains its share of deviation, error, and poetic license in its representation—because it better reflects the truth that exists frankly uncaring of the degree to which any of us grasps it in its totality.

To a certain degree, self-deception is even necessary for human survival. The abstraction of philosophy and metaphysics (which James criticizes) in fact only continues the abstraction and simplification made by the understanding upon the chaos of material reality. It is evolutionarily expedient that we fictionalize or poeticize the world of flux around us into a nature of relatively fixed unities; it facilitates both sanity and comprehension. The locus of many of our most fundamental impulses in our unconsciousness rather than our conscious selves accelerates our reaction times and enables the duality between spirit and animal that makes human beings so peculiar and exciting. In extreme cases, we actively re-write our past or present experience even beyond crude fact for the express purpose of coping with it. Pragmatically, this fulfills the function of the brain, and saves both the mind and the body. However, its utility and enforced consistency with prior beliefs and experience do not render the contents of such a fiction any less poetical. It is highly advantageous to the species for certain drives to be sublimated to the unconscious, to instinct; it is how they operate with peak efficiency. We see in this case how from a strictly physiological standpoint, self-deception is of greater expediency than truth. As for larger social utility of truth vs. deception, Plato posed that question most dramatically in the Republic; that the case is strongly being made in refutation of Plato’s conclusions that the way of truth is the way of happiness as late as Nietzsche certainly implies that whether truth ultimately leads to happiness and deception or illusion to unhappiness is a question that is far from being answered. James assumes it as given that truth and utility are fundamentally inseparable—an assumption that admits of no real defense.

Finally, there are very few ideas of the scope suggested by James—that is, the profoundly metaphysical ones—which, once tried and then discarded, leave the thinker quit with only the loss of his or her time. If Pragmatism has contributed anything to philosophy, it is the profound awareness that regardless of whatever philosophical truth is obtained in philosophy, it is always the product of a distinctly human thinker. When the gateways are thrown open for any given hypothesis to be considered true on the basis of a limited coherence with prior beliefs (necessarily so, since its full implications cannot yet be plotted out) and some immediate good upon its adoption, invariably the false will roll in with the true. While James is willing to grant this as an acceptable loss and offer a pseudo-ethical argument about the duty to attain truth, he seems to fail to realize the degree to which an error, taken up casually, can ultimately damage both the individual and the species, seducing both out of its apparent utility. Schopenhauer admirably describes how "the abstract error can reign for thousands of years, impose its iron yoke on whole nations, stifle the noblest impulses of mankind; through its slaves and dupes it can enchain the even the man it cannot deceive."^xix Here Schopenhauer was speaking of logical error, the fallacies of which can often be rooted out, exposed, and overturned, albeit with the damage already done. Nietzsche’s critique of the so-called facts of consciousness (and the implications he feels to be disastrous arising from it), along with perhaps Hume’s criticism of causation, may perhaps be the sole examples of genuine attempts to root out philosophical errors that were hitherto sublimated as factual or "common sense". With no recompense to correct a long-standing error of pragmatism, the error becomes habit, it becomes instinct --- it becomes the path to decay. Pragmatism leaves itself prey to the philosophical propositions that present the sweetest cup of poison, and can leave an entire society to play out its disastrous implications for millennia.

An important fact to keep in mind is that the pragmatic method varies strongly from the majority of other philosophical methods in that it is a descriptive psychological and epistemological theory (and an excellent one at that) as well as a conjecture/prescription for truth. We cannot simply refute or alter the method from the philosophical closet—we must also work to understand its nature within society, and perhaps especially within ourselves. The brilliance of William James must ultimately rest upon his descriptive work as a psychologist and scholar of history, society, and religion. As social philosophers, we need to utilize this insight that James has provided for us in our understanding of historical events and their psychological basis and ramifications. As pragmatists, perhaps we need to be made deeply aware of the limits and warts of pragmatic theory, especially as it seems to draw so uncritically on the adequacy of human epistemology and "human nature" as its ultimate seat and justification

Consider the relatively recent example of slavery. Here the European slavers and slaveowners believed and acted entirely pragmatically; upon their first encounter with Africans, all of their instinctive beliefs and prior notions supported the belief that black Africans were inferior, savage people who seemed fit only for servitude. This notion was strongly supported by the realization of the practical gains to be made through the colonization and rape of the riches of Africa along with slavery in the Americas. After African slaves were made sick through disease and malnutrition, ignorant through lack (and even persecution) of education, the hypothesis came to come closer and closer to fulfilling itself. The Bible was radically reinterpreted as supporting slavery and (later) the oppression of Black Americans. The American Constitution ignored the self-evident doctrine of the Declaration of Independence (and its eminently pragmatic roots in Locke) that "all men are created equal." An entire nation washed and continues to wash itself in blood.

Now, one example, or even many, are not in themselves a refutation of Pragmatism, no matter how dramatically they are presented. However, it illustrates some serious difficulties in the pluralist and utility aspects of pragmatic method. For who does the adoption of a hypothesis have to yield practical benefits in order to be considered true? According to James, it seems that the hypothesis would be true for those persons for whom the hypothesis agreed with the facts of experience and yielded a practical gain; i.e., for this example, the slavers and the slave owners. Is there and can there be any meaningful notion of a responsibility to other human beings in determining the truth or falsity of a claim using the pragmatic method? It would seem that beliefs that have practical consequences for all (good or bad) cannot be evaluated by a partisan few, or at least that the notion runs into some difficulties in the very arena it is intended for; the interaction of concrete human beings.

Furthermore, the example of slavery^xx is also a demonstration as to how strong practical gains can lead to self-deception and a radical bastardization of the pragmatic "truths" to which a new truth must be referred to. One bad induction can spoil the whole bunch. When practical gains result in spite of the falsity of our hypothesis (a possibility that James seems to ignore), the problem is only amplified. We become tied or linked to that idea; much has been invested into it. To part with this "truth", particularly after so much has been altered or accepted either building upon or supporting it, is a psychological endeavour that may require too much. We see that the beliefs of a pragmatist are only true to the degree that they maintain one another. Allow one strong but perniciously false idea to creep inside the stronghold, and the entire fortress begins to sink into the swamp.

It is not only utility that makes an idea, however false, difficult to part with, but also the degree to which one is morally and/or intellectually comprised in its adoption, either before, during, or after the fact. The firmest believers in Nazi doctrine regarding the inhumanity of the Jews were not the generals and political officers but the often otherwise upstanding men and women who herded old people and children into the gas chambers. Belief in one’s own moral goodness is usually far more necessary than belief in the accuracy of one’s knowledge. The foot soldiers of villainy have to believe in the theories of the villain they obey – the alternative is simply unthinkable.

The need for moral and, to a somewhat lesser extent, intellectual (depending upon the individual) self-respect and social grounding trumps most other conscious and unconscious drives of the body. Our mind networks and provides internal support for nearly all of our closely held opinions, to produce the desired working framework for action within both sanity and moral justification. That is what James’s (and Nietzsche’s and Freud’s) psychological endeavour to arrive at truth has revealed to us. Recognizing these needs, and the profound psychological, metaphysical, and epistemological alterations made to compensate for them, is a step towards real progress in breaking down the inertial walls of opinion to true social change and genuine reform. For the first time, we realize that in many cases, it is not just a simple opinion that needs to be altered, or illumination that needs to take place, but that when one fights infamy one is often running headlong into interconnected and reinforced beliefs that constitute someone’s entire notion of what is fundamentally most real. All one has to do is examine the history of this country; the all-too-slow-to-change attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., spell out the diagnosis. While human beings may be characterized by their willingness to live on a chance of salvation, they are also profoundly resistant to change, and especially to admissions of guilt, moral lapse, or error in the realm that is probably most important: the spiritual and religious.

The breaking down of a man or woman’s ideals all-too-often lead to the breakdown of that person themselves—illustrated most memorably by the character of Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Furthermore, an attack here, where the individual is the most sensitive, poses a great danger both of alienating that individual and/or enraging him or her. No bringer of new ways or values can march in and out without the fight of their lives.

The interconnections between all branches of philosophy (and really all thought) on this topic are simply astounding: a treatment focusing on history and epistemology becomes the cognitive, which becomes the metaphysical, which is strongly linked to ethical thought and moral psychology. All of this proceeds as a direct consequence of the psychological and behavioral nature of the mind, and its ramifications reverberate through and focus on challenges to social, political, religious, and legal thought, particularly when any restructuring of society is attempted that poses a danger to ideals or beliefs that have become inculcated throughout a culture or sub-culture: As Alexis de Tocqueville admirably described the inertia forming in social development within the numerous, established middle class, and prophesied the resultant intellectual drain through economic influences, now it becomes more possible to describe the inertia of social development and radical thought through a set of integrated psychological factors.

Attempts at social change face another problem posed by James’s psychological theories about truth is the question of the radicals or avant-garde themselves. In many ways, by renouncing the prescribed values of society, such individuals are in a greater need of confirmation in their beliefs and hypotheses: they have staked much upon this gamble, and their ideals become greedier. Marx saw the hand of capitalism behind every social ill and labored for freedom for all; Nietzsche determined Christianity and "the soul superstition" to be at the root of most philosophical problems as hidden assumptions as well as the font of nihilism, anarchy, liberalism, and pessimism. The absence of God (or any determinate metaphysical content) is soon filled by an idol, usually a new -ism of one form or another.

Obviously, we would have much to gain if we could avoid falling in either trap: that of the radical and that of the reactionary. What would be needed to re-train our cognitive procedures, so that they still accomplished their goals, but that would minimize the effects of bad faith, and provide for a better criteria of sorting out the grain from the chaff? A different emphasis in education. In order to break from the fixed patterns of dogmatic thought, one needs to acquire a degree of mental flexibility; a real learning how to think about complex issues and voices that challenge our preconceptions.

First, a discipline needs to be imposed—one must learn to think critically, searchingly, aware of potential deception. Thus arises the rebirth of logic, abstract reasoning, and the pure sciences; a field of education that has been virtually abandoned at the secondary and elementary levels and which is ebbing at the academy due to the new emphasis on applications (and the implicit development of our citizens into a group of producers and consumers). When one has conquered the rules of logic and looked for answers with a skeptical, discerning eye, careful not to overstep oneself or to step incorrectly, then one has undergone the proper apprenticeship for further study.

The study of languages at an early age should also have the highest importance placed upon it. No other type of cognition utilizes as much of our learning resources as the development of a language in its peak time. Furthermore, one opens oneself up to a wealth of ideas, linguistic and literary textures, and artistic brilliance beyond one’s own culture.

Finally, one needs to exposed to and meaningfully encounter radical thought; not merely thinkers that stand opposed to the status quo, but thinkers who offer blindingly new perspectives on the universe and who push the very boundaries of thought itself. One must at many points encounter a thinker who stands diametrically opposed to one’s own position: one often learns far more from a foe than from any friend.

The following passage from Nietzsche expands on these ideas:

One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see—accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts…

 Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out. One need only read German book: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum a will to mastery—that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing…For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education—to be able to dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to do it with the pen too—that one must learn to write? But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers.^xxi

While truth in its full-bodied, absolute nature may remain forever removed from human beings, a social question that always is in need of address is any human being’s relationship to other human beings. This is particularly true when individuals or social groups interact who have fundamentally different conceptions of reality, morality, and humanity from one another. Here, then, I will address the question of pluralism, as that has been and continues to be the mantra of all cross-cultural coalition efforts. Being a philosopher, however, and not merely a sociologist, I will also touch on issues of pluralism and pragmatism as they affect the self-reflective individual as well as personal interactions. The goal: to construct a better worldview, one that aims towards social progress, personal freedom, and honoring the principles of social justice.

Pluralism arises partly as a realization of concrete differences between individuals and social or cultural groups, but primarily it owes its origins to skeptical objections to universalistic doctrines that ignore any differences whatsoever. To this day, it is still used in a wide variety of settings to introduce a degree of doubt or temperament to a statement that purports to understand more than it really knows. However, when an individual becomes disenchanted with his or her primary and regulative articles of belief, to which one had ascribed all immutable veracity to, the fall of their ideals leads to a strong temptation to suppose that all conceptions of truth or morality or aesthetics, etc. are equally groundless, relative, and valid. Coupled with a maturing awareness of perceptions of reality different from one’s own, this leads to what I call sophisticated pluralism.

As stated earlier, sophisticated pluralism maintains that every perspective on reality is equally true and valid. As such, it is a sworn enemy of universalistic claims in their implicit and explicit forms, and preaches an attitude of tolerance and acceptance for alternate viewpoints. Pluralism has gone through many disguises, appearing once as Sophistry, again as postmodernism, and in its new incarnation, the virtue of tolerance. ("Political correctness" is an overused and hard fought-over phrase.)

The main problem that sophisticated pluralism faces, especially when coupled with hard-nosed pragmatism, is that its basis is almost entirely theoretical; it has never matured intellectually from a thought-experiment in challenge to universalism. That no one human being can possess to absolute knowledge of the whole is easily accepted. However, the notion that all values are equally relative does not place me under any obligation to recognize a different value system from my own as valid, or at least to treat it as such. In the philosophy classroom, I may not be capable of demonstrating any conception of the world or morality as being superior than any other, or as being ultimately grounded; but in the practical world, the pluralist less than any one else is entitled somehow to equal consideration for his or her viewpoints. I am not compelled to listen to or accept a pluralist’s position by both a universal standard (a different morality is the right one) or a relativist standard (all morality is ultimately groundless and variable from people to people or culture to culture). The pluralist argument in this incarnation (as it is commonly found) is necessarily a pose rather than a real position, one that stands on its irrefutability and precisely nothing else. Its claims of higher understanding and sensitivity of other people and cultures are dubious at best.

All too frequently, sophisticated pluralism essentially reduces to a type of social contract: A gets B to agree to accept A’s ideas, A does the same for B. The fundamental motivation is to protect one’s own beliefs and ideas from external scrutiny or assault: "Leave my ‘truths’ alone, and I’ll leave yours alone." It, too, is a consoling attempt to overcome the Kantian limits of knowledge; one can possess truth simply by maintaining one’s own position, and what one has always believed is true! How comforting! The current strain of pluralism is not as bold as Protagorean Sophistry (from which its name arises); it still believes in the reality of truth, yet distributes it to everyone, and buttons up when any investigation comes to the door.

Furthermore, the current mantra and activism of Pluralism may actually preclude genuine interaction with people and cultures different from ourselves. Too often a pluralist will simply make a claim about difference without ever investigating another individual’s or culture’s true position. The relativist perspective frees them of that responsibility.

There is another type of pluralism – one that similarly defers to the notion of one’s own inability to grasp the whole. This is skeptical pluralism. Skeptical pluralism emerges from sophisticated pluralism in the same fashion that skepticism emerged from sophistry. Skeptical pluralism believes in a single truth, but professes a doubt over its own ability to obtain it; not out of categories of understanding or rhetorical difficulties, but out of a very real awareness of one’s own limits and failures as a human being. Skeptical pluralism does not accept its own perspectives or others as true or even equally valid—instead it views other individuals as potential sources of learning and perspective on the truth. The possible intelligible sources for human knowledge of truth include sense-experience, logical proof, pragmatism, knowledge relayed by other human beings (sometimes via proxy), and divine revelation. All of these sources are potential sources of illumination for the skeptical pluralist. Possessing a degree of doubt about his or her own abilities not out of shame but out of honesty, this mode of pluralist critically examines any material that comes his or her way—not just challenging the claims, but examining them, adapting them, adopting them. One has an attitude of mental flexibility; one wishes to avoid the traps of pragmatism and barren radicalism alike. One looks around and through things, attempting to gain a variety of different perspectives upon the universe, in much the same way that literature provides a new perspective. In this process it is sane to permit oneself some convictions, as preconditions for knowledge and other, new convictions: honesty, with oneself, always; failing that, companionship with someone who can be honest with you about yourself. A will to truth and a treatment of everyone with fairness and a measure of respect until they merit more or less.

Through this method, not the indefensible pluralism of sophistry, the young philosopher can build up knowledge of other people and other cultures, as well as him or herself. And if nothing else:

If ever in the future you should attempt to conceive or should succeed in conceiving other theories, they will be better ones as the result of this enquiry. And if you remain barren, your companions will find you gentler and less tiresome; you will be modest and not think you know what you don’t know. This is all my art can achieve—nothing more. I do not know any of the things that other men know—the great and inspired men of today and yesterday.^xxii

Philosophy cannot be separated from the particular men and women who practice it and whose life it changes. This is Socrates’s message; it is James’s. To deny thought, knowledge, and being their context in human reality is to do both truth and the understanding of these phenomena a disservice. It is in this sense that we look to a new pragmatism, a self-conscious pragmatism aware of the warts and thorns of existence. Until now we have lived backward; perhaps we can live forward.

____________________________

ⁱ William James, "What Pragmatism Means," Essays in Pragmatism, p.144.
ⁱⁱ As a general rule, the author's emphasis in text appears here in italics, while mine appears in bold.
iii ibid., p. 142.
^iv ibid., p. 144.
^v See note ii.
^vi ibid., p. 145.
^vii ibid., p. 147.
^viii ibid., p. 148.
^ix ibid., p. 149.
^x James, "Conclusions on Varieties of Religious Experience," Essays in Pragmatism, pp.139-140.
^xi James, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," Essays in Pragmatism, p. 162.
^xii James, "What Pragmatism Means," Essays in Pragmatism, p.154
^xiii cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 58-62, and onward.
^xiv James, "What Pragmatism Means," Essays in Pragmatism, p.154
^xv Nietzsche: This passage is quoted nearly verbatim from memory, but the text is lost.
^xvi Nietzsche, "The Four Great Errors", Twilight of the Idols: 5, p. 497
^xvii Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 522, p. 283
^xviii Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith, pp. 267-269.
^xix Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, 8, p.35.
^xx More examples could be named. The villainization of Jews in Europe, especially during World War II, is another striking recent example, which appears later in this text.
^xxi Nietzsche, Twilight, 6, 7 pp. 511-512.
^xxii Socrates, Theaetetus, 210c-d.