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  • Pragmatism and the Spirit of the Liberal Arts
  • Michael L. Raposa

I

If pragmatism is conceived as a philosophy for which the meaning or truth of ideas is best evaluated in terms of their general utility, and if a liberal arts education is one that is understood as being essentially non-utilitarian, then the relevance of the former to the latter would seem difficult to establish. I argue here that such a difficulty is rooted in misconceptions, both of the nature of pragmatism as well as of the spirit and purpose of the liberal arts. This argument involves neither the rejection of pragmatism’s emphasis on practice and practical effects, nor a desperate (and, in my opinion, depressing) account of all of the things that a liberal arts education can be regarded as “good for.”1 I want to suggest instead that the distinction between theoretical and practical pursuits is sufficiently complex when viewed from a genuinely pragmatic perspective, that it cannot be used to support the claim that a liberal education has nothing to do with practice or practical affairs. In addition, I want to show that something like the philosophical anthropology generated by the classical pragmatists is required to make perfect sense out of the values and methods that typically shape learning activities in a liberal arts environment.

The immediate inclination, when one’s objective is to assess the pedagogical relevance of pragmatism, is to turn attention directly to John Dewey’s voluminous writings dealing with the philosophy of education. But that is not my strategy here. Dewey is relevant enough, but it is the author of Human Nature and Conduct who draws some of my interest. Even more than Dewey, Charles Peirce’s thoughts about “developmental teleology,” “musement,” “self-control,” and the “will to learn,” and also Josiah Royce’s discussion of the “will to interpret,” prove to be enormously important for these [End Page 64] considerations. This is true despite the fact that interest in the nature and purpose of education can hardly be said to have supplied the basic impetus for the formulation of most of these ideas.

My involvement of Royce in this discussion gestures toward a conclusion that most serious students of American intellectual history will be blithe to embrace: There is no one way of conceiving pragmatism (since, on some conceptions, Royce would be excluded); at the end of the day, we should be inclined to agree that there is not one “pragmatism” but rather many. This lessens the burden on my argument considerably. There may be versions of pragmatism (philosophical or armchair) from which any devoted champion of the liberal arts would be wise to flee. But beware of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The pragmatic insights to be explored here can greatly facilitate the task of formulating for a liberal arts education its essential raison d’être.

As a brief sidebar to this discussion, I want to say something about the rapidly expanding use of various technologies, certainly in higher education, but also in everyday life. A pragmatic analysis, I will suggest, illuminates the important ways in which exposure to the liberal arts enhances one’s capacity to evaluate one’s own technological practices, to discern better their effects on oneself, rendering them more deliberate and self-controlled. On this view, while it is still possible to see a liberal arts education as being in tension with certain other forms of pedagogy devoted to technology and to its practical uses, the former should by no means be regarded as “anti-technological”; rather, in the twenty-first century, the technologically sophisticated liberal arts student represents an important ideal to which educators should aspire.

II

Inquiries in the liberal arts ought never to be classified as having no practical purpose; rather, such inquiries are distinguished by the fact that their purposes are multiple and indeterminate, and so cannot be readily specified in advance. A better understanding of this distinguishing feature of the liberal arts can be achieved through careful consideration of Charles Peirce’s notion of a genuinely “developmental teleology.” Governed by such a teleology, human activities will not be locked on course in pursuit of some clearly envisioned end...

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