From: Valence (valence10@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 03:18:04 GMT
Hey again David,
Begging aside...
DMB says:
... it seems the pragmatists were reacting to something, but its a mystery
to me and would like to know what particular bee got under their bonnets.
RICK offers:
Here's a passage that suggests James did in fact have his sights aimed at
metaphysics (at least in part)....
WILLIAM JAMES (from 'Pragmatism', 1907, chap.2)
Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You
know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a
great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the
formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie,
afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the
spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the
universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of
which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or
power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle, and
to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. 'God,'
'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names.
You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical
quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word
as closing your quest. 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.
RICK
On a side note, I've always felt that this passage casts some doubt onto
Pirsig's claim that the Metaphysics of Quality is an extension of
pragmatism. I can't help but to think that James would view Pirsig's
"Quality" and "Dynamic Quality" as merely two more of the "solving names"
which he seems regard with disdain in this passage. James contrasts
Pragmatism to the solving names of metaphysics and offers it as an
alternative to such linguistic solutions. The Metaphysics of Quality seems
in many ways to be just sort of philosophy that James was trying to
'debunk'.
rick
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