The Promise and Limits of William James’s Pragmatism
One of the many surprises upon re-reading William James’s late lectures, collected under the title Pragmatism: a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, was his sympathetic citation, at the beginning of Lecture One, of G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics. It is hard to imagine two more uncongenial minds than Chesterton, the diehard Thomist, and James, the lapsed liberal Protestant, and it is hard to think of a book more at odds with James’s religious phenomenology, The Variety of Religious Experience, than Heretics.
On closer inspection, however, James’s invocation of Chesterton makes sense because it references two slender points of contact between them: their shared belief that the most important thing to know about a man (sic) is his philosophy, and that the important thing about said philosophy is the way it inevitably shapes the life of the human being who inhabits it. “It [philosophy] is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.”
James’s imagery here is that of Newtonian Physics — we live in a universe that wraps us in its causal webs, and our ability to respond to the nodes of this web constitutes our mute attempt to understand how we cope with life. It is not the kind of imagery…
