Reconciling Pragmatic Philosophy
Pragmatism is always and forever about practicality. The description of someone as pragmatic usually refers to someone who is grounded in reality, working free from both illusions and delusions, but also operating within the utilitarian. In other words, the pragmatic person has no time for mucking about with abstractions when there are concrete worries all around. How does this reconcile with the study of philosophy, then? James engages the power of imagery to make his case:
“Philosophy…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.”
Object Permanence
In “Humanism and Truth” James uses imagery to essentially describe what is known in psychology as “object permanence." He then proceeds to reveal where on the continuum of thought this discovery exists and it is at a very central position, indeed:
“The greatest common-sense achievement, after the discovery of one Time and one Space, is probably the concept of permanently existing things. When a rattle first drops out of the hand of a baby, he does not look to see where it has gone. Non-perception he accepts as annihilation until he finds a better belief. That our perceptions mean beings, rattles that are there whether we hold them in our hands or not, becomes an interpretation so luminous of what happens to us that, once employed, it never gets forgotten.”
The Mortal Coil
The familial literary DNA shared with his brother, noted novelist Henry James, shines through in the opening paragraph of “Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord.” William’s mastery of imagery rivals that of the best in fiction. It is a cornucopia of imagery that reaches the heights of the poetic which far exceed what one might naturally expect from the James brother most connected to the world of non-fiction literature:
“The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us.”
Pre-Post-Truth Non-Alternative Facts
In the history of mankind which existed before the current post-truth era in which for many people something becomes true simply because someone else said it is—in other words, in the entire history of mankind previous to 2016—there used to be this widely held assumption that it was just not a good idea to believe something as factual without at least some genuine evidence supporting the claim. In “The Will to Believe” James provides an extensive quote from fellow philosopher W.K. Clifford to as imagery to illuminate arguments lying at the heart of the rest of the essay:
“Whoso would deserve well of his fellows…will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away…If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence the pleasure is a stolen one…It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town.”
