A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature. For James, the absolutist scheme appeals to the tender- minded, the pluralistic scheme to the tough James thinks more is at risk morally. The absolutist view leads to dogmatism. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. James is not proposing a relativistic world; he advocates neither a doctrine of caprice nor a denigration of all things rational, and he does not mean that we just create, or make up, our own truth; these are common misinterpretations of James.
It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri- fication. We could try to verify each one, but we would never succeed. We take most of them on credit and must trust the verifications claimed by others as much as we do our own. Nevertheless, there is an important difference. James is not attached to a pre-constituted set of categories. Instead, he finds his categories as he finds the material they organize: experimentally and experientially with others.
Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
Themselves, tell us nothing. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a whole there be, leans on nothing. We exchange, lend and borrow ideas through social intercourse. We are indebted to our social order and, importantly, to each other.
No one person creates a new science or a new ethic ex nihilo. Will an abstract principle be the answer? For James, no philosophy of ethics in the old, a priori sense is possible. He writes:. We have no revelation but through man. James H. James W. Skrupskelis I. Berkeley eds. Glendower Evans in I take James to mean that the pluralism of the world is really about the plurality of individuals that we encounter in our experiences.
The rule remained unnoticed for 20 years until James took it up in the address he delivered at the Philosophical Union at the University of California at Berkeley in If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what made them different from the rest? These ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they are there.
In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have been a convert of the Salvation Army, and bad a nightingale singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while be labored.
Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang? But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. See how the hard ribs. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.
Poverty makes men come very near each other,, and recognize each other's human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in God. I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem. But I am sure that the poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and revelations of God.
Let him resist the characterlessness which often goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where he lives.
Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so long. The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs.
The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured-for what? To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.
This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be out conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none. You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop under our hands.
We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, ,ve have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others where we least descry it.
And now we are led to say that such inner meaning can be complete and valid for us also, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal.
To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we 'have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal,-novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another.
This shows that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.
Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance, possibly have them on the most copious scale.
Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of men.
But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous. It is quite obvious that something more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration.
Inner joy, to be sure, it may have, with its ideals; but that is its own private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are to have depth, if we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.
The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the older more familiar good.
In this case character, though not significant' totally, may be still significant pathetically. But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to be reaching a confused result.
I seem to be just taking things up and dropping them again. But please observe in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend singly to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.
But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result. Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will.
But it is an answer, all the same ' a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things. Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives.
And, when you -ask bow much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough standard for shaping your decision.
In any case, your imagination is extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which we professors are supposed to be able to impart.
To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one brief practical illustration, and then close. We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the labor-question; and. I use the brief term labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they provoke.
They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals. They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible mistakes.
Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the dissatisfied poor.
And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken, are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of everybody else's sight.
Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen to the end of time.
But if, after all that I have said, any of you expect that they will make any genuine vital difference on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture. Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some of her successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have left the firm land.
The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying bands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more.
But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other.
In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing, with no progress, no real history. Publication Type. More Filters. What, if anything, makes a life meaningful? This question is obviously important but has not received much attention from normative theorists. Although there is relatively little philosophical … Expand. View 1 excerpt, cites background. Richard Rorty repudiated W.
Thrilling though it may be, Rorty would say, there is no need to weave … Expand. African theories of meaning in life: A critical assessment. In this article, I expound and assess two theories of meaning in life informed by the indigenous sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. According to one view, a life is more meaningful, the … Expand. William James on Truth and Invention in Morality. In what follows I shall investigate how the notions of truth and invention inform our moral life.
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