Notes Towards Day 16: A Field Trip and....A Few Blazes

 exsoloadsolem taking notes...
(and leading us on...)

I. A Field Trip to the grave of Mary James Vaux
(Alice James's niece, and publisher of her Diary) &
the Morris Woods friendship bench (see photos!)

II. Read For Monday: "Conclusions" and Postscript" from
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), rpt. C.E., pp. 758-786
AND "The Ph.D. Octopus" (rpt. on-line from The Harvard Monthly, March 1903)

Upcoming on Wednesday, and the Monday following: visits from Haverford College history professor Paul Jefferson, who hopes we will eshew "dysfunctional gentility" for some lively sessions of  "dialectical roughhousing"; in anticipation and preparation: please read two essays by C.S. Pierce

III. Looking back @ "The Will to Believe":
MissArcher2: I became very engaged with the ideas in the text that were more concrete, like the situation in which a whole train of passengers is robbed by a few highwaymen because the robbers trust each other to behave in a certain way and the passengers do not. The functioning of society, according to James, rests on the condition of co-operation. [and what enables such co-operation....?]

Calamity:My favorite thought generated in class today was KyleeMason's synthesis of one of William James' points in "The Will to Believe": we make reasonable, not right, decisions. I think this is a reassuring argument; it is so realistic, and attainable. 

IV. For today (very! appropriate!)
"Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results"--
(like "The Will to Believe," an address to a Philosophical Union,
this one two years later, @ UCLA in 1898)

An occasion like the present would seem to call for an absolutely untechnical discourse ... connected with life rather than with logic ... with a practical outcome and an emotional musical accompaniment .... something simple enough to catch and inspire ... you ... with just enough of ingenuity and oddity ... to keep ... from yawning and letting ... attention wander away .... the final word of philosophy ... would bring theory down to a single point, at which every human being's practical life would begin .... and yet, I simply cannot ....

Philosophers are after all like poets. They are pathfinders. What every one can feel, what every one can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express .... They are ... so many spots, or blazes, -- blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience. They give you somewhere to go from. They give you a direction and a place to reach. They do not give you the integral forest .... But ... a sort of ownership. We can now use the forest ... the freedom of the trails they made. Though they create nothing, yet for this marking and fixing function ... we bless their names ....

No one like the pathfinder himself feels the immensity of the forest, or knows the accidentality of his own trails .... the poets and philosophers themselves know ... that what their formulas express leaves unexpressed almost everything that they organically divine and feel ....

I will seek to define with you merely what seems to be the most likely direction in which to start upon the trail of truth. Years ago this direction was given me by an American philosopher ... whose published works ... are no fit expression of his powers ... Mr. Charles S. Peirce ... one of the most original of contemporary thinkers; and the principle of practicalism--or pragmatism, as he called it ... is the clue or compass by following which I find myself more and more confirmed in believing we may keep our feet upon the proper trail ....

Thought in movement has ...for its only possible motive the attainment of thought at rest. But ... then our action ... can ... safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action ... thus to develop a thought's meaning we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions ... is ... a possible difference of practice .... The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates .... the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience ....

Let us assume that the present moment is the absolutely last moment of the world ... in that case there would be no sense whatever in some of our most urgent and envenomed philosophical and religious debates .... in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue ... is really involved .... In this unfinished world the alternative of "materialism or theism?" is intensely practical ....

Theism and materialism ... point ... to opposite outlooks of experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion ... are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved .... "The energies of our system will decay" ....

the true objection to materialism is negative ... it is not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest hopes...

The notion of God, on the other hand ... has at least this practical superiority ... that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved .... This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast...

Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation ... lie the real meanings of materialism and theism .... Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; theism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope ....

So far as our conceptions of the Deity ... involve ... definite experiences, God ... may be real .... religion is a living practical affair ... What keeps religion going is ... conversations with the unseen, voices and visions, responses to prayer, changes of heart, deliverances from fear, inflowings of help, assurance of support .... The power comes and goes ... just as if it were a concrete material thing. These direct experiences of a wider spiritual life .... form the primary mass of direct religious experience ... which furnishes that notion of an ever-present God .... "God" means ... just those ... experiences .... they are certainly the originals of the  god-idea, and theology is the translation .... The theistic controversy ... is of tremendous significance if we test it by its results for actual life ....

any discussion about monism or pluralism ... would .. be brought into a shape where it tends to straighten itself out, by bringing our principle of practical results to bear .... What exact thing do you practically mean by "one" ....? In what ways does the oneness come home to your own personal life? ....

it is the English-speaking philosophers who first introduced the custom of interpreting the meaning of conceptions by asking what difference they make for life .... The great English way of investigating a conception is to ask yourself right off, "What is it known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash-value, in terms of particular experience? and what special difference would come into the world according as it were true or false?" Thus does Locke treat the conception of personal identity ....So Berkeley with his "matter" .... Hume does the same thing with causation .... What seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action?

....The shortcomings and the negations and baldnesses of the English philosophers in question come ... solely from their failure to track the practical results compeltely enough to see how far they extend .... It is indeed a somewhat pathetic matter .. .that this is not the course which the actual history of philosophy has followed.....

May I hope, as I now conclude ... that the principle of practicalism ... will come to its rights...

IV. Let's test this out...
in the life of Isabel Archer? in our own....?
What difference would it have made, if what she called
"true" were based on its practical effects in her  life?
What difference might it make in yours...?
How does this extend/explain/untangle the complexities of "The Will to Believe"?