On Pragmatism

　　 Section 1　　The Birth of Pragmatism

The etymology of pragmatism

'Puragumachizumu' is the Japanese reading of the English word 'pragmatism' as it was. It is, so to speak, a borrowed word. This word has been translated into 'jitsuyosyugi(practicalism)' in spite of a recent trend of making the foreign words into Japanese according to the pronunciation. Although a lot of researchers, thereafter, criticized that this Japanese 'puragumachizumu' did not suit very well, it became familiar to them after all in our country. In short, there was no proper translation for pragmatism. It might have been because the 'pragmatism' had numerous faces of thought rather than because the Japanese did not have its rich vocabulary of Japanese words.

At first glance, the details of this term appear to be born with a beginner-like mind. William James also says that pragmatism has been derived from 'pragma' that means 'an act' or 'a fact as an event' in Greek and its plural form 'pragmata'. This word is especially a historical term of Bolibious and shows a political act and a political event managed by the practical individuals. Thucydides asserted that the description of history should not be narrative and theatrical and was to take facts as they were. Bolibious, who promoted to this idea, explained that the history was to describe the pragmata accurately. It depends on this idea of his that the description of the ancient history is said to be pragmatic.

It is thought that this 'pragmatic history' is between a narrative history and a history as a science according to Bernheim. If amplified, its feature is as follows: "When the personal conscience or the subjectivity occurs in a cultural race", it flourishes most brilliantly "wherever and whenever the progress of historical events seems to be restricted by personal motive and aim in fact". Therefore, it tends to "seek to explain all of them from the personal impulse" and in this case "the history is defined simply as a knowledge of the events, and thence man learns what is useful or harmful in the political life and what is useful for a good and happy living." (The translators of Bernheim's Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft, Akira Sakaguchi and Tetsuji Ono interpreted 'praktisch' as 'jitsuyoteki' in this book. Incidentally, Goro Hani interpreted it as 'jissaiteki'.)

Well, in the history of philosophy, it is universally known that Kant used a word 'pragmatisch' as an example of playing a negative role for his philosophy in the essay, 'A Critique of Pure Reason'. A moral law took a priori and affirmative imperative in the Kantian practical world. It was true that there was a law of taking a posteriori (empirical) and hypothetic imperative, but Kant described it not as 'moralisch' but as 'pragmatisch' that meant the cleverness in pursuit of happiness of self. Therefore, even an above-mentioned 'pragmatic history' was only a history for teaching what consideration should be given in order to defend and gain the profit for this philosopher.

However, the word 'pragmatisch' came not only to differ from 'praktisch' entirely but also to be handled as an antagonistic word especially by the Kantians in the future after all because Kant regarded this 'moralisch' as 'praktisch' in a true meaning. It can be thought that 'pragmatism' came to be known as 'jitsuyoshugi' because most Japanese interpreters translated 'practical' into 'jissenteki' and 'pragmatic' which corresponded to it into 'jissaiteki'.

The coinage made by Peirce's persistence

Later, a thinker, who paid attention to the 'pragmatisch' which Kant used, came into the world in America. His name is C.S. Peirce, an initiator of pragmatism. As he had started learning philosophy from Kant, he was able to regard 'pragmatish' and 'praktisch' extremely antagonistic, but reversed Kantian concepts in spite of admitting his usage. That is, according to Peirce, 'pragmatisch' showed how to relate to the act in the human realistic world while 'praktisch' showed how to relate to one in the imaginary world only of pure reason. This American philosopher, with an scientific attitude, emphasized the former word that seemed to consider the relation to the end of human act because of indifference to the mind of experimentalist in the latter one. Such a view of his seemed to have proven that he was an ordinary American.

Now, consider the word 'pragmatism'. At first Peirce advocated it to represent the common idea to the members of the "Metaphysics Club" in about 1870's. It is guessed that the naming of pragmatism was often discussed between him and James who was also a member of this club. They considered 'practice' above all things as they were about to make an idea clear by making it related to action as described later. Therefore, the members ought to have named the common idea 'practicism' or 'practicalism' as James advocated at that time. But Peirce who knew the special usage of Kantian 'praktisch' avoided naming that word and persisted in naming it 'pragmatism'. On the other hand James who did not show the effect so much followed Peirce's insistence and introduced the idea of "pragmatism" to the people in his essays some years later.

The pragmatism with many aspects

But pragmatism known in the streets was James's 'practicalism'. He was not so strict about the distinction between 'pragmatic' and "practical' as Peirce because 'practical' was nothing but a word which was related to the realistic act of man for James (and the English-speaking people). Therefore, this 'practical' was used as if it was a key word, so to speak, in James' introduction to pragmatism naturally. (Actually, it has become an incontrovertible fact, especially in Japan, that the translation of this word into not 'jissenteki' but 'jissaiteki' by interpreters with respect and modesty to the Kantians became one of the reasons why pragmatism was considered as a thought unlike 'philosophy'.)

Certainly, 'pragmatism' is a coinage of Peirce. This word, however, has become a common noun which also implicates many ideas of other thinkers since then. First of all, James himself renamed his 'practicalism' a pragmatism, and thence he took back the term 'practicalism'. Troublesomely, as Peirce thought that 'pragmatism' had become peculiar to James he purposely called even his pragmatism 'pragmaticism'. J. Dewey, who was known as the crowner of pragmatism, advocated 'instrumentalism'. Because even they, three leaders of pragmatists, maintained their own pragmatism, it may be natural that other pragmatists developed their own theories such as 'humanism', 'social behaviorism', and 'experimentalism', etc.

Why is it so? It may be because the word pragmatism is too vague. As described at the beginning, it means 'activism' or 'practicalism' if literally translated. With this, a concrete image of pragmatism is not caused easily though it may be something that confronts the theoretical one. Thus, it might have been necessary for 'pragmatism' to have the name such as somebody's pragmatism or to have the alias by emphasizing the purpose or the content.

　 Section 2　The Varieties of Pragmatism

The pragmatism as an American mind

Next, let me introduce various opinions of the pragmatism in order to secure their common feature. It is often said that pragmatism is the only philosophy which the United States grew. It was because pragmatism was extolled as an American idea and developed as a movement in this country rather than because its thought was asserted by an American. The members of 'Metaphysics Club', the proponents of it, had the intellect and the American temperament besides. Being polemic, they reflectively used to say "what will become of this?" when the talk got confused. When the presented opinion did not form a belief to lead us to action, they omitted it as an abstract and useless idea just like Occam's Razor, and they kept talking. So to speak, the cutlery becomes 'a cutlery' only when it actually cut. Unexpectedly, it matched the Americans in the frontier spirit era to consider that 'thinking' was a form of the act for solving the problem and that 'an idea' should be available for an individual who conceived it under the circumstances where he lived.　

　The pragmatism in the first strict meaning, consequently, was 'a way of making each other's idea clear' to match the opinions. Peirce showed this mutual agreement among the members as a document of which title was 'A Method of Making Our Ideas Clear'. Its well known maxim for being difficult to understand is as follows: "Consider with effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." This maxim was introduced and quoted like as the pragmatism's sutra in any case. At the same time it extended the sense in various ways connected with the visions of pragmatists because of being exactly a 'method'.

Peirce's pragmatism

I have already described that the originator of this maxim renamed pragmatism to pragmaticism in his case. He restated as follows with the intention of removing the difficulty of this maxim in his later years (1905): "The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of the rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol."

Here we may notice his philosophical concern at least though this statement was as difficult to understand as that maxim. That is to say, his pragmatism is a thought for logic. The logic in the broad meaning is to clarify the conception or the word, and to secure the standard and the method for that. The symbol in the broad meaning is a 'significance' which is provided in the relation with the object. Pragmatism is an elucidative method of such a 'significance'. Peirce tried to derive the answer of the problem of how to express the reality correctly as a general one experimentally (or argumentatively in the speculative way) on his standpoint that the 'significance' was extracted from 'something realistic'. The reason why those two declarations of Peirce are to be connected here is that he supposed the result of the experiment always affected a practical attitude, namely an action.

James's pragmatism

The pragmatism came to be known generally after James published his essay 'Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results' in 1898. James's pragmatism was actually originated in his own intention of expressing in the wider field than Peirce's though it was often said that the former began from the misunderstanding of the latter. James, first, recognized the content of mutual agreement in the 'Metaphysics Club' as 'a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable'. This pragmatist understood Peirce's maxim of pragmatism as follows: "...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." That was because he was convinced that any idea would show an actual difference in the behavior if it was different even a little.

It was important to understand something realistic correctly in Peirce's pragmatism. On the other hand, James's pragmatism was a procedure to make use of something realistic in the experience by showing the acceptable value of our thought about it (even if it was what James thought). Its concept, as a program for us to try to do something, suggests an orientation where the reality seems to change over. Therefore, his pragmatism is a mediate way of thinking to make any idea workable in the actual world. In addition, James comes to derive 'pragmatism's truth theory' from this notation. It is, in general, understood as "it is true because it is useful" or "it is useful because it is true". He accepts this explanation for the present. But what he intends to show in this case is that the truth of a state of mind means ' the function of a leading that is worth while'. Therefore, the new truth is 'a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions process of the mind' that succeeds to the old one and corrects it.

Expecting the principle fixed to James' 'pragmatism' falls into the own inconsistency because he, as an anti-intellectualist, asserts that a philosophy is 'the expression of a man's intimate character' and the tendency of a philosopher is determined by his 'temperament'. If forced to regard his pragmatism as a doctrine, it consists always 'in the middle of two theories' or is like 'the corridor to which the innumerable rooms face in a hotel' metaphorically. Though this idea of pragmatism was not good enough as a theory, it was useful and might have been welcomed by the Americans at that time when individual survival was an urgent issue of the day.

Dewey's pragmatism

It is usually said that John Dewey has completed the pragmatism since James and Peirce. Though I cannot discriminately say what 'completion' is because of various opinions of this word, I know for a fact that the whole of his thought is supposed to have succeeded to their ideas and applied them though he does not seem to have tried to spread the word "pragmatism" as much as they have done. In fact as Dewey has been influenced by Peirce and James, he gives an address of thanks to them while entering the path of philosophy through Hegel's thought. Episodically speaking about Dewey' declaration, he was influenced not by two pragmatists but by a logician Peirce and a psychologist James.

Compared with these three philosophers, Dewey, according to himself, paid attention to man's biological characteristic while Peirce to the logical aspect of things and James to man's psychological structure. This statement of Dewey became a model by which the difference between three pragmatisms was showed later, and came to be used similarly by all sorts of commentators while being taken somewhat in the broad sense.

Well, Dewey's pragmatism is termed 'instrumentalism' as described before. Why can this word indicate a completion of pragmatism? The first reason is that it is derived from Dewey's outlook on man. He supposes man is 'an organism which treats the environmental matter by making good use of a scientific intellect'. Peirce was somewhat indifferent to man with a living body inspite of emphasizing his scientific intellect. James, who paid attention to man with the living body, was attracted too much by his personal psychological mechanism. Then, Dewey has conceived the outlook on man that supplemented two views by looking upon human being as social existence and understanding his intellect as an ability to treat the matter in the organism.

The second is that the instrumentalism may be an expansion and a transformation of the James-like transformation of Peirce's maxim.

The concept of instrumentality originated in the pragmatic maxim as a way of making the ideas rather workable than clear. On the assumption that man's thinking was a biological function, Dewey regarded the intellect only as a natural existence and as a tool of human life.

Thus, James' pragmatism was mainly concerned with idea and its harmony as his scope of human sociality was narrow. On the other hand that of Dewey was a way of thinking which attempted to disentangle the absolute confrontation between theory and practice and to bridge science and philosophy, including adjusting organism to environment.

The other pragmatisms

If I should enumerate other pragmatism, it would be the thought of G.H. Mead. To our regret, his thought has been absorbed to that of a four years senior colleague Dewey. Considering from his postmortem publication, while espousing 'social behaviorism' he distinguished services rather in the presentation of the social realization of pragmatism, that is, the perspective that was gained through the sociality of self and its communication, and its social relativity than the elucidation of pragmatism itself.

Moreover, F.C.S. Schiller's 'Humanism' is especially known as the pragmatism outside the United States. This philosophy is a paean to man, which almost means that what regulates the reality is a personal behavior and that he is not so much a measure of all things as a creator through Schiller's voluntarism.

　　　 Section 3　The Future of Pragmatism

The end as a movement

It is generally said that the pragmatism was a thought which became popular from the beginning of the 20th century to the 30's, and analytic philosophy and logical positivism has taken the place of it in the history of philosophy since then. Nevertheless, the lovers of pragmatism, especially, think that it is parent to most theories thereafter, or otherwise that it is submerging in the mind of individuals who get benefit from science after it ended as a movement. The analytic philosophy or logical positivism is only attempting to clarify the meaning of intellectual product after all and takes a pragmatic attitude in a broader meaning even if it might be a peculiar and original idea for its advocators. In that sense, the pragmatism may be an instrumental Proteus that appears everywhere as long as man is considered to be an experiencing subject.

Pragmatism might be a certain doctrine if it was regarded as 'a standpoint where the theory and practice were united in the word of action, and the formation of a knowledge by the action was insisted (according to Seiji Ueda)'. The fixation and the non-humanization of the theory itself, however, won't be done if pragmatism assumes the thinking itself to be an activity which responds to a situation. Thus, this philosophy can keep step with other theories whether empirical or rational according to the context of action. James says that the pragmatism agrees with positivism in its disdain for metaphysical abstractions; with nominalism in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects.

Now, enumerate what doctrines (or features) pragmatism implies according to other pragmatists themselves and interpreters, except the current description.

American materialism,　Meliorism,　Scientism, Phenomenalism, Tychism, Utilitarianism,　 Individualism, Experimental naturalism,　Experimental empiricism, Experimental rationalism,　Subjectivism (Solipcism), Eclecticism, Common evolutionism (Biological theory),　Operationalism, Relativism, Plural empiricism, Adaptationism, Philosophical naturalism,　Temporarism, Personal idealism, Anti-intellectalism (Voluntarism), Anti-philosophy,Illogical principle, Fascism, etc..

It is an unmistakable fact that these are still used as alternative words for "pragmatism" that ended a movement whether affirmatively or negatively.

The evaluation of pragmatism

There may be no other theory that is condemned by the expert philosopher than pragmatism today. It is true that pragmatism is acknowledged as a thought in a special era in America and is positioned as a past theory in the philosophical history, but few people boast that its idea is great to make an epoch. Moreover, few philosophers regard themselves as a pragmatist no matter how well they understand pragmatism. Inversely, the term 'pragmatist' is rather used as a byword by which the opponent is criticized or a word to indicate the individual without thought.

Why is that? The ultimate one of many reasons might be that the world of 'philosophy'　has been scooped up to today by intellectualism. Intellectualists after Plato generally have been supposing that what is called intellect originally works without any relation to our body and is able to control it even if with the relation to it. From that standpoint, the pragmatism's idea, so far as it asserted 'the thought is a stage of action' (as Shunsuke Tsurumi said), might be supposed to rebel against 'philosophy', not to speak of being 'philosophical'.

This tendency seems to be notorious among Japanese intellects. As German idealism has been the main current of the imported philosophy since Meiji era in Japan, the pragmatism, which is genealogically an empiricism with a tendency of anti-intellectualism, is rather evaluated as 'a fake philosophy led by the philosophical researchers without an ability of understanding philosophy'. (Genyoku Kuwaki) In addition to this still living tradition, it was purposefully criticized for the lack of thought and ideality by Marxism, which advocated the practical philosophy, with a feeling like a hate against close relatives. Besides, it has been deprived of its philosophical right for the reason of an American ideology especially by the left intellects since the World War II though a few critics of prudence evaluated as follows: "'pragmatic method' may be accepted though 'pragmatism' itself cannot be." So to speak, it might have come from saying, "I reluctantly spend money though I do not worship it." Such a statement might be a cunning treatment to pragmatism by the intellectualists who tended to think that "it should be" than "it is".

The whereabout of pragmatism

　 How is pragmatism in the future? If the coming of the global environment and the worldwide situation that do not accept 'frontier spirit' is supposed, the utilitarian aspect of it, namely 'jitsuyoshugi' will be used only as a daily intellectual gimmick at most by individuals in addition to being disregarded by the intellectualists from the beginning. Nevertheless, pragmatism seems to have an art of corresponding to new 'environment' and 'situation' as long as man's 'living' is related to not 'something ideal' but 'something real' whether positively or negatively.

If pragmatism were discussed after 1930's, it might have been because of the criticism against the system of old dualistic 'knowing' and the epistemological insistence in pursuit of the way of 'recognizing' that overcame it. This philosophy has been suggesting 'the dawn of new philosophy' by invoking the escape from the old custom of thinking considered to have a form of recognition going straight from one direction to another whether 'knowing' is 'the comprehension of object by subject' or "the appearance of object before subject'. It is clear that this idea is corresponding to the coming of the new outlook on environment (therefore, the new view of the world and human being). I think analytic philosophy has tried to answer this question by investigating into the language. In that sense, an author of An Analysis of Recognition and Evaluation C. I. Lewis, a writer of TheMethod of Logic W. O. Quine and G. Bergman who advocated Linguistic Turn are successors of pragmatism.

Now, the philosophical situation of pragmatism seems to be changing radically. For instance, a genuine neoteric R. Rorty has come to assert that pragmatism attempts to escape from the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity, namely the picture of Self and World contacting on and off, borrowing his terms. His pragmatism is supposed to suggest the possibility of 'new philosophy' to wipe out the vestige of dualism in spite of succeeding to the mediating characteristic of pragmatism that James and Dewey used to describe with unassuming modesty.

Pragmatism could not help being considered as 'practicalism (jitsuyoshugi)' as it was born in the situation where subjectivity and objectivity, or man and nature (environment) were opposite to each other. Is it too penetrating to think that pragmatism will be a good partner of us to explain the future practical wisdom if we come to recognize that they are intimately in the correlation?

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