Some Thoughts About Different Approaches to Pragmatism (pt. 5)
Not surprisingly, James’ pragmatism bears some resemblance to Nietzsche’s; after all, they were near contemporaries in time. Both are interested in how the individual constructs his (or her) world, based at least in part on psychological needs and one’s personal agenda. James does appear to put more emphasis on the empirical roots of pragmatic truth than does Nietzsche, whose emphasis on the will-to-power overshadows all other concerns.
In some ways, though, James seems to foreshadow Wittgenstein. First, James roots his pragmatism not only in the individual’s experience, but also in the history of the race. Today’s common sense is yesterday’s discovery, passed on through the culture and the conversation of the ages. My new truths may be those I discover or invent to meet my own needs, but James says the new truths have to learn to live with the old ones, which are often community property. This isn’t exactly a Wittgensteinian language-game, but it certainly is more communal than Nietzsche’s brand of pragmatism, which lauds the Superman who creates his own values by his own will alone. Second, like Wittgenstein and unlike Nietzsche, James is tolerant and even supportive of religious belief for those who find it meaningful. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes of religion as a somewhat regretful outsider. Religion is the live fire of passion; philosophy only poking around in the ashes to see what can be learned after the fire has burned out. While he himself did not understand the religious language-game as an insider would, he accepted that it had meaning for believers. Likewise, James accepted that some “tough-minded” sorts would never get the meaning of religion and never see any point in it, while some “tender-minded” would need it above all else, and many would seek a faith that had a foot on both sides of that stream. Nietzsche, by contrast, rails against those who would embrace an other-worldly faith, urging us to “be true to the earth” and accept only material values and realities.
This may be more interesting and helpful to me as I sort through James than it is to you; but I enjoyed the exercise and I hope you gained something too. It seems to me, then, that even such anti-Kantian thinkers as Nietzsche develop a pragmatism that owes more to transcendental idealism than to empiricism. In Nietzsche’s case, this means his pragmatism is rooted in ontological theories about the will as both a psychological and cosmic force, theories that themselves are not really pragmatically founded. For Wittgenstein, no such ontological assumption is necessary or even really conceivable; the structures of the mind are rooted only in human behavior, which is the real primordial reality, creator and justifier of the concepts of any particular language-game. James dedicates his lectures on pragmatism to J.S. Mill, and his allegiance to empiricism is obvious in his philosophy.
One final observation: as I pointed out, James relies on a form of the coherence theory of truth to rein in the wild flights of fancy that might otherwise propose any sort of “useful” fiction. By contrast, Wittgenstein is only interested in showing how the concepts of a particular language-game follow their own grammar, their own rules, and are consistent within that language-game. It is a subject of dispute among students of Wittgenstein just how permeable the boundaries are between language-games. That is, some claim may make sense in the religious language-game that is simply nonsense in the science language-game. Some would argue that there must be some overall language-game of my life that contains the others; but others would say that the language-games can be mutually independent, and a person may engage in multiple language-games that are irreconcilable. In that sort of Wittgensteinian perspectivism, a claim could be both truth and false, depending on the context in which it was used; so long as the concept is used correctly in the particular context of the associated human activity, and everyone understands it well enough to act together according to the rules of the language-game, the concept is “true.” Likewise, Nietzsche holds to a form of perspectivism, based even more fundamentally on a form of nihilism. Nothing is true except the will to power, and the fact that the individual wants to live and thrive; so concepts are “true” if they are true for me and help me live a healthier, more creative and vigorous life. My truths may not be your truths, and there is no way to reconcile them. To James, the truth claims of another are at least a challenge to my own, and if there is a reason for me to do so I will try to reconcile them with my other beliefs; and always, I must reconcile my truths with one another. Nietzsche would see the truth claims of another as a struggle of wills, and I should feel free to simply ignore them. I don’t even have to try to reconcile them with each other, so long as they all help me to live: as he writes, “the will to a system is a lack of integrity.” If my life is integrated, I don’t have to concern myself with whether my ideas are logically consistent. And for Wittgenstein, the idea that I should reconcile my ideas with one another is false; it is simply the decision to set one language-game over as judge of another. If both language-games reflect human behaviors that serve a purpose for those who engage in them, there is no further reason to try to explain one in terms of another. So both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein favor complete perspectivism and multiple, incompatible “truths.” James holds out the possibility of one truth to which we could all agree, albeit a rather broad and vague pragmatic truth; and this final unity is more of an ultimate goal or ultimate hope rather than a present reality. Still, even the possibility of finding a shared framework for the search for truth is more than Nietzsche or Wittgenstein think possible.