The James-Barzun Connection

One critical fact about the philosophy of William James is that it is a good deal more subtle than many newcomers to philosophy expect it to be.

The crude use of the word "pragmatism" to mean "unprincipled" or "opportunistic" has contributed to the false impression that there isn't a lot of intellectual/philosophical substance to it. Also, the fact that much of what James wrote on the subject was written with a wider audience in mind than his fellow academics, has had the unfortunate side effect of giving it a reputation in some quarters as the philosophy for those without the patience, or perhaps the intellectual heft, to read real philosophy.

Barzun, in A Stroll with William James, devoted his own considerable gifts to clearing up such misconceptions.

I won't retread that ground here but will move to a related problem: we associate pragmatism as much with Dewey as with James, and through Dewey it has come to have a close connection with "progressive education," which is itself in a rather bad odor in many quarters. One common reaction to this bad odor on the part of Jamesians (and I am guilty of this myself) is to say, "oh, what Dewey was doing was entirely different. You can't blame James for that." But Barzun doesn't do that.

Any two minds of the rank of James or of Dewey will have differences, each will have idiosyncracies at any rate and, from the point of view of the other, each will commit out-and-out errors. Still: James saluted at least the earlier phases of Dewey's thought, the ones James lived long enough to know about.

Barzun does observe that James "had no reason to imagine that schools would turn into places where death by violence, the drug habit, rape, and teenage pregnancy would count as educational problems." But what is more notable, from Barzun's point of view (given Barzun's long career as a teacher): Dewey isn't to blame for 'Deweyite' education either.

Barzun writes in Stroll that Dewey's ideas were "exploited by ignorant and irresponsible people—veritable Smerdiakovs—and impressed upon children, parents, and teachers alike. Anything less ‘pragmatic’ than the ineffectiveness of public schooling would be hard to imagine.”

[For those not as casually erudite as Barzun, it might be well to observe that Smerdiakov is a character in Dostoyevsky's great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the bastard son of Fyodor Karamazov.]

What Barzun fnds most valuable in James is not pragmatism, at any reading, but radical empiricism, a thoroughgoing opposition to any sharp cut between Mind and Thing, or Knowing Intellect and World Known. When we say with Descartes "I think," we are really saying that there is some chunk of experience that has an "I-quality" to it. Further, if we are Jamesians we will want to subject that part of experience to further examination, to understand that I-quality, and we will resist any temptation to make of it a metaphysical principle (a temptation to which poor Descartes famously succumbed.)

You might say, further, that for Barzun James was the expression in psychology and philosophy of High Romanticism at its best. James was rather late to play this role, but ... no matter. This is history, and it doesn't follow rigid time lines. James looked back toward and conceptually reflected, romanticism. As, in his still more belated way, did Barzun, that always-cheerful pessimist.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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