William James and the Tough and Tender-Minded

This afternoon, indolent and slothful, lax and swelling with sweet slack, after a walk in the woods, I began reading in a stack of books begotten via my maxed-out library card. In a book of quotations, Jewish Wit and Wisdom, I ran across this:

"A cartload of pasteurized milk for nurslings at four o'clock in the morning represents more service to civilization than a cartful of bullion on its way from the Sub-treasury to the vaults of a national bank five hours later."

And:

"People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and subway."
-Both quotes are attributed to Simeon Strunsky, who I had to look up.

                                          The melancholic William James, 1842-1910

This reminded me of William James's first lecture of 1906, the first of eight he gave at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and there was at least one of the eight at Columbia, in January of 1907. All the lectures were open to the public, and the crowds were overflowing with blue-collar thinkers, readers and intellectual types.

Possibly my favorite book of Philosophy of the Roaring 20th century - in the sense of James as a canonical thinker, that sort of Philosophy - all eight of the lectures can usually be found in cheap and delightfully readable editions under the title Pragmatism, although I've also seen those collected lectures titled Eight Lectures on Pragmatism. Anyway, you can download it for FREE here.

The Strunsky quotes reminded me of the first lecture, "The Dilemma In Philosophy," in which James addresses the gulf between rationalism and empiricism and says most of you people are probably a mix of both; if you think a lot about it you may be perplexed by the inconsistencies in your worldview, and what should you do?

James says rationalistic philosophers are "tender-minded" in their disposition. They're generally intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, and dogmatic. They insist on going by principles.

For James, the empirical ("tough-minded") philosophers like to go by facts and they're sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, and skeptical.

106 years ago, some of these terms commonly meant something slightly different than they do today, and in characterizing the tough-minded and the tender-minded, James is not choosing any term in a loaded way. When he says the tough-minded are "sensationalistic" he means they make sense of the world via their sense organs and he means to contrast this with the tender-minded person's "intellectualistic," in which he means those people know things by reading philosophy books and other textual High Kulch efflorescences filled with abstractions, "wisdom" and erudition.

Strunsky's quotes illustrate the thoroughgoing tough-minded 'tude.

There's a passage in this lecture that's become oft-quoted, but it's so good I have to be another who quotes James, on pragmatism and these two types of dispositions:

"Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course - give us lots of facts. Principles are good - give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it one way, but as indubitably it is many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many - let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable, but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism can be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth - your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours."

O! How cosmically hilarious I find this passage! What a heretic! Because it seems so-so-so true to me. Because it's utterly, scandalously and outrageously playing tennis with the net down, to piss of the stuffy academicians. Because James dares to talk to the rabble in such a way. Because he lets the farmers and shop-keepers know that they really ought to keep on being philosophically-minded, to keep thinking, or as Robert Anton Wilson said, "Keep the lasagna flying." Because really: for James, these are only words. And because, for some of us who were on to James and Pragmatism before reading this, we knew he was going to deconstruct just about all of the hallowed terms in Western philosophy from the previous 2500 years. (His pragmatic colleague John Dewey published a book in 1920 titled Reconstruction In Philosophy.)

                                      Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, 1646-1716, one of the
                                      mostly stupendously brilliant nuts history has ever
                                      seen fit to throw our way.

In this same lecture, by way of discussing the extremes of tough and tender-mindeness, James uses six paragraphs to really skewer Leibnitz's extremely rationalistic tender-mindedness in a way to make even Voltaire blush.

James starts in on Leibnitz with, "Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalistic mind." James pulls no punches: "superficiality incarnate" is Leibnitz's Theodicy. James tears it to shreds, not because he dislikes Leibnitz, but because the extremely tender-minded can be incredibly callous to actual human suffering in justifying suffering in a perfect world made by a perfect God. James quotes long passages from Leibnitz, then writes, "Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me." Then he cautions the crowd, he didn't need to go back to a "shallow wingpated age," for these kinds of minds are around now.

[I realize more information and a fleshed-out take on Leibnitz has arisen since 1906, and we know he was an incurable brown-noser with the royal and rich, but Bertrand Russell and others have shown that Leibnitz had a second, very different, much more tough-minded view of things...for which I will perhaps save for some future blog-warble. Leibnitz was one of the great minds ever, in my opinion, although I still consider James's points on the Theodicy very strong.]

James begins to contrast Leibnitz's "airy and shallow optimism" with a then-current-day anarchistic pamphleteer and vocal critic of Unistatian imperialism after the 1898 war named Morrison I. Swift, who collected atrocities committed against the poor and working class from newspapers and commented on the stories. One of the stories begins:

"After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east-side tenement-house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid..."

"Such is the reaction of the empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare," James writes, meaning Morrison I. Swift's mind. But James was sympathetic here: "Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a little further than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue."

I have gone on far too long about just this one (of eight) lectures from 106 years ago, and bid adieu.

Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation: A Brief

Bohr (1885-1962, Nobel Prize Physics 1922), the Great Dane, one the main constructors of the most successful physical theory mankind has ever come up with, the quantum theory, was an enigmatic personality, and anyone wishing to delve deeply into how physics, psychology, language, philosophy, and "reality" all commingle will be repaid by reading in the numerous well-written versions of Bohr's life upon the 20th century scientific stage. In the past year I've at times mired joyfully in Manjit Kumar's Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality; a challenging graphic novelization of Bohr called Suspended In Language; and a few others, but most fruitfully, Niels Bohr's Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Politics by Bohr's physicist friend Abraham Pais, which may be the ultimate biography of Bohr so far.

Ever since Bohr could remember he was interested in philosophy, "to dream of interconnections." Soon after, still as a boy, he found himself dizzy from contemplating the nature of language and the problem of making communication free of ambiguity. This would inform his interpretation of quantum mechanics, an interpretation which stymied his friend Einstein over and over. Einstein, as most of you know, did not like the indeterminate, statistical nature of physical reality at its atomic and subatomic levels. There must be something wrong with quantum mechanics, it must be incomplete, there must be something "solid" at the bottom of reality. But Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation held sway.

                                        Bohr chose the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol for his coat of arms. 

Starting in the late 1920s, at every conference in which Bohr and Einstein met, Einstein had concocted an ingenious gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) that would baffle Bohr and force him to admit the quantum theory was incomplete. Bohr would listen to Einstein and become vexed. While others went off and mingled, joked and carried on conversations over drinks, Bohr would retire to his hotel room to try and deal with Einstein's latest thought experiment...and he always succeeded in answering Einstein's objections! (Except for maybe that one EPR thingy....)

In 1927, Bohr thought his interpretation - which included Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle - was right. His basic idea was the principle of complementarity. Physicists had been troubled by the fact that, when they tried to find out if the nature of light was particular or wave-like, they found that it was both! It depended on the way the experiment was set up. Most physicists thought they needed to find the one best way to set up an experiment to see, once and for all, if light was "really" a wave or if it "really" came in particles. (A few creative types posited that light was a "wavicle," but few in the physics community were satisfied with this.)

Bohr said: no matter what you do, you will never come to a proof that it's waves or particles. He was convinced that waves and particles were complementary phenomena. And so was almost everything else.

Here's Bohr, giving a thumbnail version of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the quantum world of nature:

"There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."

When I first read this, my mind went in seven directions at once. To this day, I still marvel at this conception, which is still probably the most "conservative" interpretation of quantum physics, and the one most commonly held by physicists, probably...That is, if those physicists working on solving problems involving the quantum level think at all about the implications about what the equations imply about Nature; at least one generation of Unistatian physicists were trained and encouraged to NOT think about the philosophical implications, as I touched on HERE.

What Bohr seems to be saying is that we can't know about Nature. Or rather, what we say about our findings using our best instruments and minds only says what we can say about how we've decided to model nature, not what it "really" is. We can only describe what our instruments and nervous systems and mathematics register about our conceptualizations about nature. We are inextricably one-remove from any sort of "ultimate physical reality," and indeed, we cannot know if even that exists. We either made that notion up at some point, or it was a holdover from our thinking as evolved apes. When we use our best conceptualizations, and no matter how indeterminate the equations were, the experiments "work" the way we think they should work, and things don't fall apart suddenly: it's as good as we can get. And it's been pretty damned good. Best physical theory EVER! But: undergirding it all is statistical probabilities. We don't know how Nature operates for "sure." (Yet? No. Bohr is saying we can't know. And he's okay with that. Are you? Why does it "matter"?)

Every notion that we have about anything is a map, and there are relief maps, political maps, Mercator projections, globes, population-diffusion maps, agricultural maps, weather maps...you can think of many, many more. We all inherit versions of map-models about "reality" from our local culture. Some of us extend knowledge and create new maps, to help us think about some small corner of "reality" in a new way. Maps are always in flux in space/time/quantum "reality."

Looking at things, observing them, changes them. At least at the atomic and subatomic levels. Maybe it works on macro-levels too...

Bohr continued to write and talk about complementarity throughout his life, both in physics and in other domains of life, such as biology, anthropology, language, and psychology. In 1957 he gave a series of lectures at M.I.T, and the first one was titled "The Philosophical Lessons of Atomic Physics." He stressed the complementary principle, and his friend and biographer Abe Pais thinks Bohr might have gotten the notion from the American pragmatist philosopher William James, who had used the term "complementary" in a similar way in 1891, many years before Bohr had started to use it, and Bohr is on record as admiring James: "I thought he was most wonderful." Bohr also admired Lao Tzu and Buddha, but not most Western philosophers. He admired fellow Dane Kierkegaard's language, but not the thought so much.

Many academic philosophers commented unfavorably about Bohr's "complementarity" and Bohr said they didn't understand it.

Some physical and more everyday examples of complementarity:

• -subject/object
• -spectators/actors
• -figure/ground
• -mechanical/statistical
• -faith/doubt

In a similar way that pragmatism has been called an "anti-philosophy," Bohr's "complementarism" (Pais's term for Bohr's philosophy writ large) also strikes me as being at-odds with the Western tradition of philosophy. Pais quotes Pascal, saying he thinks Bohr would agree: "To ridicule philosophy is truly philosophical." (Pensees, Part VIII, #35)

I like this passage from Pais's biography of Bohr:

"Bohr's own definition of a philosopher, not found in the OED, goes as follows. What is the difference between an expert and a philosopher? An expert is someone who starts out knowing something about some things, goes on to know more and more about less and less, and ends up knowing everything about nothing. Whereas a philosopher is someone who starts out knowing something about some things, goes on to know less and less about more and more, and ends up knowing nothing about everything."(Pais, 421)

Many people were baffled by Bohr's complementarisms, and he acknowledged this and said that they were "seeds for thought." Here's one of Bohr's favorite story-jokes:

"Once upon a time a rabbinical student went to hear three lectures by a famous rabbi. Afterwards he told his friends, 'The first talk was brilliant, clear and simple. I understood every word. The second was even better, deep and subtle. I didn't understand much, but the rabbi understood all of it. The third was by far the finest, a great and unforgettable experience. I understood nothing and the rabbi didn't understand much either.'" (Pais, 439)

However Niels Bohr fits into the history of thought, his predecessors and especially those who were influenced by him, have greatly influenced my quasi-stances on just about everything, leading, for better or worse, towards some state of overweening generalism.

For 6 and a half minutes, here's some viddy on how the Bohr model of the atom got going, etc:

Sombunall Philosophical Problems

I picked up the neologism "sombunall" from Robert Anton Wilson, who was heavily influenced by Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. Because in the sensory-sensual phenomenal-existential world no one can ever say "all" about anything - we are almost always abstracting -  he advocated the practice of using "some but not all" instead, which turned into the new word "sombunall." So far, it has not seemed to catch on, but I'm putting in for sombunall right here, right now, and some but not all of you will find this idea worth practicing, if only to see how it might alter your consciousness over a week or three?

[Exercise: try to say all or "everything" about the gadget you're using now to read this. It's a digital gadget. It's some color or colors. It has words on it. These words indicate other words, people, ideas. If you're using, say, an Apple product, say everything about Steve Jobs: his life, character, his ideas, how he collaborated with others to get the gadget onto your table, lap, palm of your hand, etc. Then go into who influenced Jobs. Who were his parents? His parents' parents? What about the electronics inside the gizmo? What are they made of? Silicon? Who figured out that silicon was a good element to play around with when making gizmos? Do quantum mechanics figure into how your computer operates? How did those ideas come about? What about the idea of a "blog"? On and on and on: we CANNOT say "all" except in very restricted domains in which there are countings and everyone agrees upon the meaning of the countings and reasonings.]
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I've been reading Aristotle on meteorology, and have been having a blast, and I'll try to relate that blast here soon, but I've been thinking about philosophy as an endeavor, and how distasteful many professional thinkers and philosophers have found the pragmatic movement. It's easy to see it lambasted as an anti-philosophy, because it seems to do away with the 2500 year old questions, or many of them.

A sort-of current philosophically pragmatist line: If, since at least Plato, we have tried to find a definition of "truth" that satisfies everyone and we have failed, perhaps it's time to drop the inquiry and change the conversation. Pragmatists think the old philosophical question has ceased to qualify as "edifying discourse." They'd rather keep things interesting. Because pragmatists see human knowledge as always contingent, and our language games (influence of quasi-pragmatist Wittgenstein here, and we're talking Philosophical Investigations) indicate that language does not "copy" the world, and rather, we think metaphorically and whether we know it or not, we are heavily influenced by "strong poets."

I see the haters of pragmatism as something like drug addicts: don't you go around saying that the quest for the ultimate definition of beauty is a defunct mission! I've put my whole life into that problem! I'm strung out on beauty! Or rather, capital B Beauty. I will be the one who finally - somehow - gets to the One True Essence of Beauty. (il est ridicule!)

Cool. We're not saying you shouldn't "do" that pursuit; we're only saying you will not find a final vocabulary in which everyone will agree what "beauty" "really is." And fer gawdsakes: as least be a little playful in your quixotic quest. Your humorless thick academic prose about beauty seems unseemly!
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Beware the semantics of "pragmatic." You will see it used disparagingly, and often in a way that seems to want you to unpack it mentally as "soulless and uncaring and bureaucratic." This is not the pragmatism I'm talking about here.
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The briefest outline of pragmatic thought for further inquiry and delvers and the gloriously inquisitive: Charles Saunders Peirce (say "Purse") ----> William James ---->John Dewey----->Richard Rorty.

                                               John Dewey: merged pragmatism with Hegel
                                               and scientific inquiry: "Instrumentalism"

There seem very many interesting sidelights to these guys (all Americans, so maybe that's part of the distaste?), and I'm leaving out a tremendous lot of top-notch people thinking in the pragmatic vein.
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By way of tantalizing illustration: In an interview of Richard Rorty from 1998, in Munich, conducted by Wolfgang Ullrich and Helmut Meyert:

Q: How can we relate the idea of the heroic poet with the liberal ironic figure whose model we ought to emulate?

Rorty: In my book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, I defined irony as recognition of the contingency of one's "final vocabulary." This is simply consciousness of the fact that the deepest convictions one holds are the result of past poetic and creative achievements. This goes along with the recognition that there will never be a final poem. There will always be space for self-creation, because no previous act of self-creation can be ratified by some nonhuman authority.

When it comes to philosophy, however, it doesn't always make sense to call the supersession of one poem by another a victory. Sometimes, within philosophical traditions, problems aren't solved --- they, along with the ways in which we formulate them, are simply forgotten. In Nietzsche's words, "Philosophical problems are not solved, they become frozen."

Nietzsche is completely right. Russell made the same point when he said that nobody had refuted Bergson, but everybody had become bored with him. Philosophical problems are transitory, as are the vocabularies with which they are formulated. For this reason, there will always be a tension between the clarity of the old languages and the crudeness of the new suggestions about how we might speak. - from Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews With Richard Rorty, p. 72
-END OF RORTY INTERVIEW SECTION-

                                  Richard Rorty, my favorite academic philosopher of the late 20th c.
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I've read a lot of Rorty, and he's open to someone finding some new way of reading, say, Bergson here, and opening up a novel and fruitful discourse on the phenomenon of how we experience time, or even humor, two topics Bergson wrote on. And there was a time when Bergson was on a hot streak. Henri Bergson had his halcyon days, aye.

One of the most difficult but rewarding books I've ever read was Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which provided a very convincing argument for something I had been piecing together for a long time, via my readings of the so-called "Great Books," yet Rorty articulated many tens of times better than I ever would or could have: our ideas and language do not "mirror" the "true world." The idea that we can arrive at truths that "correspond" to some putative "actual reality" somewhere "out there" has been an idea that has held sway in Western thought for around 2600 years at least. And the 20th century epistemologies strongly suggest it's wrong: language doesn't "copy" the world, it's a part of the world. We are natural beings who somehow, via the wonders of evolution, arrived at a seemingly freakish mode of symbol manipulation. And we mistake these symbolizings for Ultimate Reality. (Well, sombunall of us do. Others of us seem to have happily glommed on to Rorty's sense of "irony.")
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And for the present-day "neo-pragmatist" philosophical thinker, you consider sociopolitical problems as a species, your own and others' quest for self-creation and your own unique vocabularies as another species. How these two species meet seems up to you. But something like "Missing Public Discussions" seems to me NOT philosophical as a species. Rather, it seems to me entirely public, and of interest to everyone in anything that would seek to self-describe itself as a "democracy."

Here's 2 mins of Rorty on "Truth":

Brief Excursion Through the "Dangerous" Land of the "Intellectuals"

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, one of the Titans of 20th c. High Culture thought, and Generalistic enough to have made significant contributions to the philosophy of science and the history of philosophy, is notable in these spaces for his massive The Open Society and Its Enemies. It's usually found in two volumes: 1.) The Spell of Plato, and 2.) The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. 


Written during what is commonly called "World War II" it's still a bombshell of a book, and, while famous, seems to me criminally under-read (because fat and difficult?), and worse: unheeded. NB the Wiki link I have there for the book(s) and the presence of Leo Strauss and his typically baroque critique of Popper. Ironic: Strauss is the Godfather (and I mean that in at least two common semantic senses) of the Neo-Conservatives. Listen to the ministers in the George W. Bush cabal about why they went into Iraq. Bush's cabinet and ministers were loaded with Neo-Cons, and they got the U.S. into a $3,000,000,000 Iraq "war" - untold death on both "sides" - that will, I think, prove almost fruitless, and possibly to have made the overall situation worse. And Strauss and his cabal (more on them is some future rant) illustrate Popper's thesis (based on my reading): it has always been socially and politically dangerous to follow great intellectuals as if they had the One True Key to reading history, a path to some teleological breakthrough (AKA "historicism" in the Academy) that would lead to things like "The End of History," the "end of ideology," finally, the utopia in which things turn out - as one prominent American fascist popularly put it, "the way things ought to be."


There seems a horrific irony to Straussians and their dismissal of Popper (and they don't like the idea of an open society, from what I can tell) and what happened under the reign of King George the Turd.


I have gone on too long about Popper's massive volume, and really haven't said much, except that he has a crucial point we should heed in our thinking on political matters. There is much room for discussion around Popper's thesis, and I hope to address some particular aspects later. Suffice: intellectuals and their ideas have had some massively unpleasant consequences when played out in what we so laffingly call "the real world."


Anyone want the Amazon link to Popper's book(s) for more info, etc? They're here and here. Or better yet: be (unfortunately) the first person in seven years to check out one of these volumes from your local public library!
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An elaboration from a slightly different angle: Ian Buruma, on "Why Is Intellectualism Met With Suspicion In the U.S."

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This talk about famous philosophers, their weighty tomes, their extraordinary erudition, etc, reminds me of a golden passage in William James's Eight Lectures On Pragmatism. He's been discussing his idea of the role of individual philosophers and their basic personal temperaments that give rise to massive systems of thought (and is it possible that their systems - whether "tough-minded" and empirical, or "tender-minded" and rationalistic, are merely extreme examples of...autobiography?), and that, for us more slightly down-to-earth types trying to make our way in the absurd dense thicket of philosophical thought, we are correct when we read, say, Hegel, and think foremost, "What an odd egg this Hegel is for writing such a dense book of ideas such as this!" 


The idea applies to all the Great thinkers, probably.

Here's William James, addressing a large popular crowd in 1906, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, in his talk, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy":

"Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost every one has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows. They don't just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know off-hand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of 'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel - I prudently avoid names nearer home! - I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the universe were actually true."
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After the 20th century worldwide bloodbath, well-grounded thinkers might want to ground themselves further, if they haven't already, in Popper and James. They complement each other. I mention them here in the spirit of a basic plea for more sanity on Earth, and to remind philosophers and/or intellectuals in all possible social standings: your ideas have consequences, your articulations reverberate and ripple outward and what you do and say MATTERS.