The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism

2. The Historic Emergence of American Pragmatism

2 The Historic Emergence of American Pragmatism Pragmatism could be characterized as the doctrine that all problems are at bottom problems of conduct, that all judgments are, implicitly, judgments of value, and that, as there can be ultimately no valid distinction of theoretical and practical, so there can be no final separation of questions of truth of any kind from questions ofthe justifiable ends of action. C. I. Lewis American pragmatism can be understood as what happens to the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy when forced to justify itself within the professional perimeters of academic philosophy. The first articulators of American pragmatism-members of the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts-were learned professionals principally interested in demystifying science and, a few, in modernizing religion.l Unlike Emerson, they were preoccupied with method, yet their understanding of method was quite Emersonian. Much like Emerson, they were intent on viewing science as continuous with religion- both shot through with moral purpose. American pragmatism also can be seen as a variety ofcreative interpretations of the Emersonian notions of power, provocation, and personality in the context of academic culture, capitalist industrialization, and national consolidation in America. The crucial shifts accelerating after the Civil War-from agrarian to urban industrialization, from vocational education to professional training, and from entrepreneurial capitalism to monopoly 42 Charles Sanders Peirce 43 capitalism-created new circumstances and challenges for Emersonian discourse . The two great "founding" figures of American pragmatism-Charles Sanders Peirce and William James- provide the most penetrating revisions of the Emersonian evasion of modern philosophy and the most provocative affirmations of the Emersonian theodicy. Both figures acknowledged an inescapable influence of Emerson.2 Peirce on Scientific Method, Community, and Christian Love Charles Sanders Peirce is the most profound philosophical thinker produced in America. Like our greatest literary artist, Herman Melville, Peirce was largely ignored in his own time. Yet a kind of Peircean renaissance has been under way for some time. At present his genius is widely accepted among professional philosophers. Despite superb treatments of Peirce's thought, he remains, in many ways, an enigmatic figure.3 This is so not only because his corpus is so enormous with astonishing scope, but also because his viewpoints often remain underdeveloped. There is no doubt that Peirce is at his best in dealing with highly technical issues of semiotics, mathematical logic, rational technique, and scientific method. I suggest that though these issues are of great intrinsic interest to semioticians, logicians, and philosophers of science, they are, in Peirce's perspective, inseparable from his more speculative views about ethics, politics, and religion. Furthermore, Peirce's original conceptions of pragmatism-and later pragmaticism-are indebted to Emersonian sensibilities of philosophy as cultural criticism with moral purpose. Peirce is first and foremost a logician, with metaphysical proclivities, endeavoring to augment the human power to respond to provocation by new problems, for the purpose of fulfilling the potentialities of human personalities. In this sense, he revises and reinforces the Emersonian evasion and theodicy in American thought. There are three fundamental claims in Peirce's pragmatism, first, that the most reasonable way of arriving at warranted and valid beliefs is by means of scientific methodj second, that scientific method is a self-correcting social and communal process promoted by smoothly functioning habits, i.e., beliefs, upset by uncertain expectations, i.e., doubts, and whose sole end is "the settlement of opinion"j4 and third, that this scientific quest for truth is inextricably linked, though in no ways reducible, to the ultimate good of furthering "the development of concrete reasonableness," i.e., evolutionary love.5 It is apparent that Peirce is deeply wedded to the relatively new authority in the modern world, that is, science and its method. But, in good Emersonian fashion, he refuses to defer uncritically to this authority. Instead, he demystifies the scientific method into a human affair, into a set 44 The Historic Emergence of American Pragmatism of distinct social practices by which knowledge is produced. This role of pragmatism as cultural demystifying activity (focused on the supreme modern authority, science) permits Peirce to defend religion, not devalue or dismiss it. In fact, Peirce's conception of scientific method as a valueladen and normative social activity not only conjoins science and ethics but also posits (and invokes) a religious telos. Like Emerson, Peirce evades epistemology-centered philosophy by refusing a search for foundations and quest for certainty. In stark...