The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought

5. James on Truth: The Preeminence of Body and World

5 James on Truth The Preeminence of Body and World James on truth may seem to be a worn-out topic. At least the epistemological aspect of James’s thought has been thoroughly covered, has it not? Don’t we know that James committed the howling error of confusing truth and confirmation of truth? But I think this critical judgment on James has been passed within presuppositions foreign to James’s own; his thought on truth has typically been misunderstood. We cannot look at James through the lenses of Descartes’ dualism and mentalism and expect to see what’s there. To get a clear view of what James believed, we cannot think there is a detachable epistemological aspect of his thinking, but must patiently reconstruct the evolving worldview that brought him inexorably to thoughts about truth. The very idea of a worldview was not very congenial to him, given its suggestion of abstractness. Yet he developed one because through painful experience, both as scientist and thoughtful human being, he couldn’t get minimal business done unless things wove themselves together and made sense in ways that were ultimate, irreducible. These weavings were useful at a rock-bottom level that most critics of his idea of truth as usefulness never imagined: a level without which all other ideas of usefulness make no sense, for without them there is no experience of world at all. James believed that his critics missed the point: the absolute priority of the meaning of truth, and the urgent need to make this meaning concrete. Of course, what is needed is the truth about meaning! But ahead of Husserl, and critical of the absolute idealists’ phenomenologies—and caught up in the toils and growing pains of his own clamoring thought—he couldn’t spell out the phenomenological method of clarifying and establishing meanings that actually got him around in life and in thought. Nor was he consistently aware of primal or indigenous-like insights strained and funneled to him, particularly through Emerson. As we have seen, the main focus of his professional life from 1878 to 1892 was the construction of a psychology that would avoid the metaphysical assumptions and presumptions of nearly all earlier psychologies. It would be natural-scientific and commonsensically dualistic: there are thoughts on the one hand and there are things on the other. We saw how his project failed. However, discarding what failed opened the way to creative achievement. James discovers that thinker and thought are in a key way identical to the world of things thought about. He has landed himself squarely in metaphysics : a maverick version of Schelling and Hegel’s identity-philosophy, a metaphysics he tried feverishly to complete before his death in 1910.1 He cannot accept the absolute idealists’ belief in a through and through unity of the world formed in an Absolute Mind through its dialectical logic. He opts for a “pulverized identity philosophy”: each bit of pure experience (anterior to and neutral between mental and physical, subject and object) is a “little absolute”: it spreads into what intellectualistic logic says it is not, into its own others. To escape from the Absolute, James devises his own kind of phenomenology, one abetted by his never completely quiescent artistic abilities, and by his keen feeling of kinship with the natural world. I would call this feeling primal and pragmatic. What do we actually have to think with? What are the resources of thought—not merely what we would like them to be if we were gods or goddesses. Assuredly it is not “sense data” supposed to be “in the mind”! Even in The Principles James had seen that such supposed mental particulars in the mind are derivative from particular interests and analyses (perhaps those of psychophysics). They are not building blocks of knowledge and 68 Reclaiming Sources and Possibilities reality. They are derivative, the fruit of abstraction from the immediacy of encounter with, and flow within, the world, abstraction that forgets itself. To think that philosophizing begins with sense data is to cheat at the start. It’s to jump the gun and to deny with all apparent sincerity what one has done. More and more he realizes the metaphysical implications of this idea. Before there can be any idea of mental particulars or sense data “in here,” perhaps caused by something “out there,” we must have an experience of simply being together with other...