Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

William James

2024; Columbia University Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00358118-11012111

2688-5220

Thomas Pavel,

Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

As the back cover tells us, the new series My Reading answers a friendly question concerning literary works: "What it is like to love this book?," that is, how can one help readers care about the author of a literary work, imagine what this work shows, remember it, and let it participate in their lives? These aims are beautifully reached in Philip Davis's reflections on William James's worldview as "a literary way of thinking outside the realm of literature" (xii).Davis starts from James's own distinction between, on the one hand, "dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs" and, on the other hand, "hot and live ones" (2), a distinction meant to help us set up "intimate and continuous connections" (4) with what surrounds us, blow open "the walls of rigidified systems," and, by advising us to believe that life is worth living, suggest that this belief may "help create the fact" (6). Promoting an active personal involvement in one's life, James thought that concepts, being man-made abstractions, should not be allowed to tyrannize us. Uttering a sentence does not make the invisible, transcendent heaven of ideals resonate far above the cave in which we linger, according to the Platonic myth, but instead refers to things that are actively close to us. Ideas, therefore, sound "more like a verb than like a noun" (11), as does, for example, the word truth, which in fact means "is true," given that cognition, according to James, is just "a fleeting moment" in the movement of sensations, impulses, waves of thought, and feelings, whose concurrent action amounts to a "motor phenomenon" (10).Opposed to the sacrality of concepts and interested in body-mind cooperation, James holds views that are close to the anti-abstract, anti-idealist thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and his late nineteenth-century disciples whose influence dominated the "world's sorrow" period, as Frederick C. Beiser calls it. James, however, replaces these thinkers' distress, anxiety, and withdrawal with joy, energy, and "lightness of the heart," not unlike Nietzsche in his early philosophy, one might suggest, yet avoiding, or rather ignoring, the later Nietzsche's cult of power.James distinguishes between two kinds of knowing: the mental "knowing about" and the experiential "being acquainted with," the latter involving a close body-mind alliance. Self-awareness is also double: Me refers to our empirical core that senses its life experiences, whereas the thinking I considers these experiences from above. As for the language that attempts to express the two kinds of knowledge, in James's view one should never forget its vagueness, which resembles the "half-blind sensing process" (33) that also takes place when we listen to music. In such cases, we do not fully control our thinking, the question being whether "I" think or, more likely, "It" thinks in me (34). The "alogical" and "opaque" aspects of life cannot be forgotten, since, as Davis quotes James, "not unfortunately the universe is wild" (37).Language does help us face this turbulent, resistant universe and portray its peculiarities. The "pragmatic grammar" allows us to capture and express a variety of feelings, including those involved in conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs. There is, indeed, "a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but" (38), James writes, bringing everyday language closer to poetic language. Additionally, the kind of attention required by language offers "the best reason for the existence of literary criticism" (43), which trains us to read attentively, to perceive what James has called the "concrete pulses of experience" (44).In an equally persuasive way, Davis makes visible other links between James's thought and literature, one being the move from "as if" to "what if." "As if" suggests an encounter that asks something in us to respond. In a similar way, one can add, literary imagination invites us, as spectators, to story worlds that host both credible and implausible scenarios and human behavior, encouraging us to participate in the "as if" game. James's philosophy of life, however, goes one step further, inviting us to envisage new situations and, as acting individuals in real lives this time, dare switch from "as if" to "what if." We are thus challenged to have the courage to plan our lives and follow our visions. What at first appears to be an implicit possibility may thus become part of our actual life. Instead of controlling our impulse to act, decisions could and should promote adventure.Can philosophy help us get this kind of courage? The next chapter, "The Will to Believe" (a title borrowed from a collection of essays by James), helps us realize that, although our mind "always performs big summarizing" acts that go far beyond concrete details, James was particularly interested in the way we recognize indescribable individuals, their plus, their thisness. Individuality being found in "the recesses of feelings," self-reflection should not necessarily translate into a discourse about ourselves, but rather "incorporate these selves inside the thinking" (58), as well as inside the narratives about oneself. Davis's example is "The Lantern-Bearers," an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson about his childhood, but for readers of French literature it would apply equally well to Marcel Proust's lengthy self-descriptions of his main character's joys and sufferings as a child, at the very beginning of Remembrance of Things Past. Instead of simply asserting, "Since in my childhood I suffered from anxiety, I needed attention and discernible affection," the main character/narrator of this novel prefers to incorporate himself and his feelings in a long, detailed narrative of family events.This is so because readers take literature "as a second chance to think, translate, do over" (80). They are aware that the stories of other lives help them understand "more of the spectrum of human potential than any one individual can manage alone." Our thoughts act as an inner congregation, constantly in touch with other's thoughts and experiences, ceaselessly letting themselves be encouraged or put off, turning into representatives of "diverse times, people, situations, moods, meanings, chance, even different worlds and realities" (84). Just as the first few notes of a tune can lead to many endings, the tune being identified only when a particular end is reached, the beginning of a literary plot can continue in many ways, stimulating the readers' desire to find out what happens and letting them empathically feel what it means to make choices and take chances.Conversely, Davis continues, literature can make readers aware of problems they have, thus identifying their silent aspirations or desires. The answer to such discoveries should consist in "the testing, the trying, and the bare result" (86). A literary example is The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, William's brother, a story whose main character does not know that his main fault is his inability to pay attention to the emotions of those close to him. In French literature, one may suggest, Madame de Lafayette's novella The Princess of Clèves raises a similar problem concerning the difference, perfectly clear for the female protagonist but less so for her husband, between a spontaneous erotic attraction and the long-term loyalty that keeps a couple together.James's attention to nuances, hesitations, and the ever-presence of virtual alternatives to what is or seems to be helps us sense that the margins of reality are vague, indeterminate, resembling a "magnetic field" rather than a clearly determined territory. Like the great fifteenth-century thinker Nicolaus Cusanus, James insists that ideas are realized in a continuous spectrum from zero to one hundred, as are our psychological experiences, including the artistic ones. Being vague, unfixed within their continuous spectrum, ideas such as goodness and beauty could not serve as a final target for our attention. Since they work like adjectives that designate properties, rather than nouns that refer to essences, James warns us that "we can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, we grasp all other things by their means." In Davis's view, this assertion is "one of the most important sentences James ever wrote" (105); indeed, the person that looks through these lenses "is a palpitating field" (106).Reluctance to accept qualities as nouns leads James to reject "all big organizations, national ones first and foremost . . . all big successes and big results," given that true, valuable achievements "always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, . . . till history comes after they are long dead, and puts them on the top." Action, be it personal or collective, should refrain from aiming at overwhelming, final victories, but try, as Davis puts it, "to work, in small, within the crannies of the world" (109). In controversies, for instance, one should try to enter the point of view of one's opponents, feel its life power, and, decisively, "move the point from fearing the bad to wanting the good" (110). To take a literary example, is the opposition between romantic and realist literature always intractable? Not in the work of Balzac, who wrote impeccable realist novels such as Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot) but also published romantic, visionary novels and novellas, for example, The Wild Ass's Skin (La Peau de chagrin) and The Unknown Masterpiece (Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu).Davis then addresses Thomas Hardy's and W. E. B. Du Bois's objections to James's pragmatic optimism. Close to the late nineteenth-century deplorers of the Weltschmertz, most (but not all) novels by Hardy describe a world in which "wrongs cannot be righted" (Robert Frost's formulation, 116). As for Du Bois, after believing that racial prejudice would disappear in a Jamesian way thanks to the progress of education, he recognized the relevance of Karl Marx's emphasis on property and economic interests, and, turning to socialism, he supported the Third World's fight for independence. Davis, however, defends James's rejection of pessimism because "it left human beings unable to feel or to act" (135). Yes, oppression and lack of freedom do exist, the remedy being the choice of a "what if," that is, the willingness to imagine and follow a positive solution. Recognizing that there is "very little difference between one man and another," James nevertheless adds that "what little there is, is very important" (146). And because crowd-society is not a remedy, literature, which focuses on individual, personal situations and plays with what could perhaps be the case, has its own, irreplaceable role in human life.This role consists in making us feel that ideals are alive. After we reach the end of a novel or a play, after being in touch with the "raw, primordial, and originating energy" (155) they discharge, we discern why and how we "are not [just] readers but the very personages of the world-drama" (152). Literature reinforces the pluralist feeling that "the things of worth are all concrete and singular" (170), thus helping us capture the multiple ideals present in what is close to us and, consequently, unlock "what is 'there' and what could be 'our own'" (175). Alluding to My Reading, the title of the series, Davis touchingly concludes that after reading we meet our "My" again, together with what matters and with the attention and care it requires.__________Relying on William James's views, both pragmatic and pluralist, Philip Davis's book persuasively shows that literary works acquaint us with concrete, if often imaginary, cases of individual feelings and interactions, thus shedding light on our half-silent, unpredictable links with the world, connecting us with other thoughts and experiences within the hazy, indeterminate field of everyday reality, and training us to play "as if" games that could turn into "what if" approaches to our own future actions. Literature helps us confront the actual, individual faces of the world rather than appeal to abstract, predetermined ideas and descriptions and, by freeing us from the rule of transcendent essences, teaches us to understand individual, irreplaceable beings and situations.Davis's convincing reading of James supports concrete approaches rather than theory and pays attention to what literature tells us rather than investigate how its formal beauty delights readers. Attempts to identify lists of great works are relevant for establishing high school or college curricula, but they neglect the genuine wealth and diversity of literary culture. Admiration for grand, memorable works from The Iliad to Remembrance of Things Past should not make us forget the myriads of poems, novels, and plays worthy of being read, be they moving or funny or both. Marvelous as they are, high-brow tours de force like À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans or The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann cannot replace the mid-brow and low-brow literary works that all cultures brought forth and continue to produce.These works focus on close, multiple human relationships rather than assert the unity of the universe. Their themes and plots are about alliances and rivalries between characters within their families, neighborhoods, tribes, cities, and countries, alliances and rivalries that call into question what belongs to me, what I belong to, what I need to be mine, what I cannot believe would ever be mine, what those around me support or threaten, what peculiar moves, responses, necessary or contingent circumstances may lead to success or failure, predictably or not. Often, literature also makes us see what lies beyond these close links: some general obligations and conflicts of social life as well as mythical kinds of worldly governance. The fact remains that, as Davis's book convincingly shows, these wider constraints are always seen through the concrete and singular individual links each literary work chooses to present.To conclude, this substantial book offers a superb defense of the pragmatic, open-minded approach to literature. Inspired by William James's flexible, insightful philosophy, Davis invites literary scholars and readers of literature to listen to each other, share their perceptions, and accept the multiple ways of making sense of their interests. He thus brings reflection on literature as close as possible to a friendly conversation that trusts common sense.