Responses to Clark and Corcoran

Ever since William James speculated on the nature of truth, on "the moral life," and on the "will to believe," pragmatists and neopragmatists (count me one) have stepped forward to offer a tentative, contingent answer to the question, "what must Americans share in order to sustain a peaceful conversation about the nature of a democratic society?" The pragmatist's answer is that, in a world of multiple "truths," our best course of action is to throw away the notion that we must share a set of ideas and, instead, to focus our energies on the process or procedures we shall use to sustain the never-ending conversation about democracy as a work in progress. James thought we might be better off believing in God than not. In his 1896 lecture, "The Will to Believe," James notes that religion says essentially two things.

First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. . . .

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true. ¹

For James, the heroic "will to believe" leads him to reject "scepticism," which seems to him to prefer the "risk of loss of truth" to the "risk of error" (324). Rejecting religion might avoid error, if religion is untrue, but James would rather gamble that religion is true and risk that error. "On pragmatic principles," he writes in the "Pragmatism and Religion" chapter of Pragmatism (1907), "if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true." ² Out of the founder's mouth, then, we have a strong warrant for holding simultaneously the pragmatic view of truth and a religious faith.

Not all pragmatists are as religious as James. As Clark and Corcoran point out, some pragmatists--notably Richard Rorty--prefer to ground their faith in the democratic project not in religion (or in metaphysics) but in history, that is, in the history of actual democratic, utopian practices and in the vocabularies people have used to describe those practices. ³ As Rorty says, "liberal culture needs an improved self-description rather than a set of foundations." ⁴ And Rorty's definition of a "liberal" as a person who thinks that "cruelty is the worst thing we do" comes mighty close to the harm principle announced by Clark and Corcoran. ⁵

But pragmatism does not lead necessarily to secularism. Cornel West tells the history of pragmatic thought through a number of intellectuals (including Du Bois and Niebuhr) who combined pragmatism with religious faith, and West himself describes a "prophetic pragmatism" that provides a way of thinking about reality and democracy within a number of "different religious and/or secular traditions." ⁶ "The distinctive hallmarks of a prophetic pragmatism," he writes,

are a universal consciousness that promotes an all-embracing democratic and libertarian moral vision, a historical consciousness that acknowledges human finitude and conditionedness, and a critical consciousness which enables relentless critique and self-criticism for the aims of social change and personal humility. ⁷

For reasons he explains, West chooses to exercise his prophetic pragmatic stance toward the world from within the Christian tradition, but he stands by the point that the philosophical stance is wholly independent of one's religious (or even secular) beliefs.

And lest the reader think a pragmatic philosophy is friendly only to leftist politics, regard the work of neoconservative intellectual Peter L. Berger, who draws heavily upon the pragmatic tradition for his view of the social construction of reality. ⁸ When Berger writes as a Christian who happens also to be a sociologist--as in his A Rumor of Angels (1969), where he presents a strategy for "relativizing the relativizers"--he argues for a Niebuhrian "tragic" vision not far from West's, though the two land in decidedly different political places (West sees prophetic pragmatism as...