Pragmatism: An Old Name for a New Kind of Nihilism?*

In re: Mark Edmundson et al. v. William James

*My thanks to Peter Kuryla of Belmont College and Bruce Robbins of Columbia University for strong readings of a draft in progress, and to Nick Coccoma of The Similitude here at Substack for his nimble reply to Edmundson, which convinced me that there was room enough for another take on the meaning and significance of pragmatism.

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I

By 1920, pragmatism, now routinely classified as a quintessentially “American” philosophy, was the cutting edge—the intellectual component—of a cultural revolution that convulsed the entire world, from Western Europe to Central America and East Asia.

A laundry list of what this revolution bequeathed the 20th century would only begin with political phenomena like world war, progressivism, social democracy, corporate liberalism, communism, fascism, black nationalism, pan-Africanism, feminism, and pluralism; with artistic innovations like comics, moving pictures, modernism, popular world music (specifically: ragtime, blues, and jazz), literary naturalism, cubism, surrealism, and futurism; with scientific breakthroughs like electromagnetic radiation, relativity, and quantum mechanics; and with social-economic changes like global diaspora, urbanization, corporations, cartels, modern credit, consumerism, automobility, mass sports, higher education, anti-colonial imperialism, and post-colonial rebellion or revolution (in China, Mexico, and Russia). Notice how the lines between these categories tend to blur.

A similarly contrived list of just the European figures who experienced pragmatism as an intellectual earthquake that shattered the existing foundations and articulated the new conventions of “normal science” in every nascent discipline—philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, theology, history, literature, and psychology—would only begin with Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Georges Sorel, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Wahl, Emmanuel Levinas, Alexandre Koyre (nee Koyra), Alexandre Kojeve (nee Kojevnikov). and Paul Ricoeur in France; with Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, Eduard Baumgarten, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger in Germany; with Bertrand Russell, Frank Ramsey, Harold Laski, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the UK; with Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Papini, Giovanni Vailati, and Antonio Gramsci in Italy; and with Jose Ortega y Gasset in Spain. Notice how the politics of these figures tends to blur the line between Left and Right.

Pragmatism was, then, the farthest thing from an “American” philosophy—in fact, by the 1920s it had been appropriated by so many thinkers (professors, psychologists, writers, artists, journalists, politicians, activists) and adapted to so many local idioms and purposes that it had become the lingua franca of a trans-national, truly cosmopolitan cultural and intellectual discourse. But by the 1950s, it was a dead letter, killed off by the same people who would establish the American literary canon and who, not incidentally, would create the idea of “American exceptionalism,” the notion that the USA was (and is) somehow exempt from the laws of motion which govern the development of modern civilizations.

This murder is the turning point in the book I’m writing for the University of Chicago Press (The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008). Here I want only to sample its almost annual commemoration or reiteration—I mean the repeated, almost continuous efforts to exorcise the ghost of William James, who is now as persistent as any apparition out of Elizabethan tragedy, but especially the old mole himself, Hamlet’s father: though certifiably dead, he keeps speaking to us from beneath the boards we still tread.

The most recent rendition of this exorcism ritual is performed by Mark Edmundson, who, in a very personal essay for Harper’s called “Truth Takes a Vacation,” praises the most important pragmatist philosopher of our time—the late Richard Rorty—as preface to naming Donald Trump, the most flamboyant pimp of our time, the first pragmatist president.

Edmundson’s argument unfolds in four discrete steps. First, he extols the character of his late colleague, who was, he says, both respected and beloved in academic circles (to my knowledge, this was as true of Rorty as it was of his dear friend, Richard Bernstein, another great pragmatist philosopher, who just passed). They taught courses together at the University of Virginia, their families socialized, and Edmundson, who is a brilliant cultural critic in his own right, declares that “no one taught me as much as Dick did.” [1]

This elegy lets Rorty off the hook of the indictment of pragmatism, in the second step of the argument. Here Trump arrives as the fulfillment of what Rorty the public intellectual predicted in Achieving Our Country (1998), but also as the embodiment of what Rorty the scholar studied, sponsored, and advocated in academe: he “dedicated his life to advancing a view of truth—philosophical pragmatism—that helped lead Donald Trump to the White House.”

How so? It seems that pragmatism “isn’t a philosophy per se,” but instead “an approach to the world” founded, or rather afloat, on “a conception of truth” invented by Charles S. Peirce, James’s friend and part-time colleague at Harvard, who argued, according to Edmundson, that “the meaning of any statement lay in its predictive value—that is to say, in its practical consequences.” This characterization of pragmatism, which was a commonplace among philosophers in the early 20th century, allows Edmundson to claim, rightly I think, that it’s not to be understood as an arcane metaphysical system removed from the hurly burly of everyday life—including the unavoidable experience of markets and money—but rather as “the crystallization of long-standing tendencies in American culture.” As George Santayana, another colleague of James, put it in 1913, pragmatism emerged from the “subsoil” of unruly America, where “the moods of the dumb majority” pass for rigorous thoughts. [2]

The third step of the argument follows. In this unwashed region of commercial exchange, truth is transactional, provisional, and contractual, more like a bet on the future than an immutable inheritance—to put it in the language of James himself, who said that truth subsists “on a credit system” and proposed that ideas be assessed according to their “cash value,” truth is no more certain, fixed, or final than a promissory note. For Edmundson, this low altitude aligns pragmatism with the high theorists among the so-called post-modernists (Derrida is, as always, the poster boy), who resisted or rejected the urge to treat any given truth or fact as unassailable. But by the same token, it also reduces political discourse to the base level of Trump’s egregious fabrications, where anything goes, where all facts are contingent and no truths are secure.

Edmundson’s subtle purpose here is to avoid pasting the label of “first post-modern president” on 45. Observers who have done so “mean that Trump cared nothing for tradition, had no regard for truth, that he lied all the time.” The reality is worse because we can’t, in good neo-conservative fashion, blame the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and Heidegger for closing the American mind: it was already nailed shut by our own home-grown tradition. “Trump is far better understood as our first pragmatist president. Trump knew—and knows—that Truth has gone on vacation,” and this in accordance with a wish Rorty, the arch-pragmatist, made in a lecture Edmundson attended. [3]

The fourth step in the argument is what Edmundson intends as a refutation of, or at least an alternative to, the pragmatist conception of truth. This is where he invokes “ideals” that exist, somehow, “outside of time,” as an external reality to which we can assign the name of lasting Truth. I’ll return to it in concluding. For now I want to illustrate the striking tonal resemblance between his troubled critique of pragmatism and almost all previous critiques. In doing so, I’m rehearsing the rudiments of the exorcism ritual that has remained almost intact for over a century, to the point where it sounds like an incantation. I hope, as a result, to rehabilitate pragmatism but also to redeem the pragmatists themselves, especially the one who often appears as the jolly, perhaps demented but in any case “spooky” uncle in the family tree—William James.

II

The first round of the revolt against pragmatism came during the Great War, when a loosely affiliated group of literary modernists and lyrical leftists later known as the “Young Intellectuals” denounced John Dewey for his support of American entry on the side of England, France, and their allies. This group included Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Harold Stearns, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, among other “thought leaders” of the moment. [4]

Bourne led the way—every subsequent dismissal of pragmatism as a positivist program of adjustment to the “real world” either cites or echoes his anguished apostasy, and retraces his critical itinerary in emphasizing the “pragmatic acquiescence” to the new Leviathan of imperialist war. As a former student of Dewey’s at Columbia and a kind of outsider to the dream of uplift known as America (he was severely disabled long before any dispensation for his condition was available), he was well-equipped to make the case.

With his tragic death during the influenza pandemic, Bourne’s defection quickly became a talismanic remnant of the revolt against pragmatism, to be reverentially cited as a credential of left-wing standing—to be against that war, then as now, was to endorse the Socialist Party USA and the saintly Eugene Debs, whose opposition cost them membership, readers, and prison time. To be for pragmatism, then as now, was to covertly celebrate imperialism, thus capitalism, and to openly embrace the happy stupidity of “positive thinking” and adjustment to the “real world.” Brooks and Stearns, for example, were explicit in equating pragmatism with the straitened life of comfortable bourgeois conformity. [5]

“Our real awakeners,” Brooks exclaimed in Letters and Leadership (1918)—a path-breaking work in the formation of an American literary canon centered on what F. O. Matthiessen would later call the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s—are “the sociologists whose doctrine is the adaptation of man to his environment, the apostles of a narrow efficiency, and the pragmatic and realistic philosophers who stand behind them.” These new awakeners were influential because they seemed, and claimed, to represent an impending American Century: “Their philosophy has been the formulation, the rationalization of the whole spirit of American life since the Spanish war.” So the future they embodied would be disfigured by their inability to distinguish between means and ends: “Social efficiency is the ideal posited by Professor Dewey. But an ideal is an end, and social efficiency is not an end; it is a means towards the realization of human values.” [6]

In Liberalism in America (1919), Stearns, better known for his America and the Young Intellectual from a year earlier, similarly dwelled on the reversal of means and ends apparently accomplished by pragmatism; but he was even more afraid than Brooks of a future in which pragmatic intellectuals and politicians asked only if their ideas were effective; for this was a future in which moral relativism reigned: “Pushed to extremes, indeed, it becomes a justification for almost anything. . . . It is a philosophy so enamored of mingling with the warm living stream of everyday [life] that it turns with ferocity upon any claims for ethical resistance to the main current of events.”

Stearns here echoed the judgement of William James’s own colleague at Harvard, the world-weary George Santayana, who, as I noted earlier, thought that pragmatism was sunk too deep in the “moods of the dumb majority” to qualify as a philosophy, or even a rational approach to modern life. And Santayana himself, like Brooks, Stearns, et al., was already aware of Bertrand Russell’s exasperated response to James, offered before the Great War, in 1909.

Russell, the Cambridge don whose periodization of of Western philosophy—more specifically, his frontal assaults on James and Dewey—inspired Oswald Spengler’s doom-scrolling Decline of the West (1918), explained how pragmatism amounts to an extreme form of nihilism in two brilliant strokes. First he showed that pragmatism treats truth as a built environment, an artificial edifice created by plural human purposes and languages rather than as the singular, durable, self-evident residue of a unitary human experience: “In order to understand the pragmatic notion of truth [its ‘central doctrine’], we have to be clear as to the basis of fact upon which truths are supposed to rest. Immediate sensible experience, for example, does not come under the alternative of true and false. ‘Day follows day,’ says James [in Pragmatism], ‘and its contents are simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply come and are. The truth is what we say about them.’”

Russell was right, of course. According to James, all we have to guide us are semiotic artifacts, merely provisional, second-order truths that emerge, he insisted, only in the narrative time of historical consciousness and explanation. The one true world—”truth absolute and objective”—would appear just once, at the end of days.

Second, Russell reduced James’s “will to believe” to Nietzsche’s “will to power” by equating the effect of their similar exclusion of “non-human truth” from the settlement of philosophical (and political) debates. “The worship of force, as we find it in Nietzsche, is not to be found in the same form in William James,” he acknowledges, but goes on to hedge his bet: “Nevertheless, the excessive individualism of the pragmatic theory of truth is inherently connected with an appeal to force.” [my italics].

Russell here confuses consequential yet benign or peaceful action, a scientific experiment, say, or a social movement, with deadly military force, “ironclads and Maxim guns,” as he put it. Even so, his explanation of this oft-repeated equation— Durkheim and Sorel, for example, also equated Nietzsche and James in their works devoted to the explication and application of pragmatism—reveals the transcendent source of its enduring appeal, unto our own time and Edmundson’s reiteration of it. Russell put it this way: “If there is a non-human truth [and this from the avowed atheist!] . . . there is a standard outside the disputants, to which, we may urge, the dispute ought to be submitted; hence a pacific and judicial settlement of disputes is at least theoretically possible. If, on the contrary, the only way of discovering which of the disputants is in the right is to wait and see which of them is successful, there is no longer any principle except force by which the issue can be decided.” [7] [my italics]

Russell is, again, right to suggest that the (epistemological) alternatives to the pragmatist conception of truth require a a body of fact that is independent of human purposes, methods, and languages. And he is right to suggest that pragmatists can’t imagine such a non-human truth, not even—or especially—when they measure the consequences of the hypothesis called God. “No cognition without purpose,” to paraphrase Charles Peirce. But they would not agree with the conclusion that truths, pragmatically conceived, are unattainable without force, unless “force” is defined as action applied to achieve a desired or expected effect in the manner of scientific method, which attains and verifies certainty about the objects of knowledge only by manipulating those objects. As Marx put it in affirming the spirit of modern science, “the point is to change it.”

It remained for Lewis Mumford to put the finishing touches on the methodical slaughter of pragmatism carried out by the Young Intellectuals, the Agrarians, the Oxbridge dons, and, eventually, the Frankfurt School. His distinction in this regard was, on the one hand, to revoke the intellectual exemption his predecessors had allowed for James in ridiculing Dewey’s “instrumentalism,” and, on the other, to depict the originals of the American literary canon—Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman—as strangers to the “attitude of compromise” perfected by the “children of industrialism” who were partial to pragmatism.

After Mumford’s great book of 1926, The Golden Day, which ratified Brooks’s periodization of American literature and galvanized every subsequent generation of literary critics, the pragmatists sounded like so many philistines—unless you remembered that James and Dewey championed Whitman long before the literary critics got around to old Walt, or unless you read Kenneth Burke with attention to his close affiliation of Emerson, Whitman, and James. “Is not Whitman the poetic replica of James?” he asked, in Attitudes Toward History (1937), the only major challenge to the Young Intellectuals’ characterization of American letters until Ralph Ellison, Harold Cruse, and Richard Poirier came of age in the 1950s and 60s. [8]

Suffice it for now to quote Mumford to the effect that in James’s hands, pragmatism was a utilitarian calculus pure and simple, a shoddy reproduction of shop-worn ideas inherited from an antiquated intellectual past: “The new ideas that James achieved were not so influential as those he accepted and rested upon; and the latter, pretty plainly, were the protestantism, the individualism, the scientific distrust of ‘values,’ which had come down in unbroken succession from Calvin and Luther, from Locke and Hobbes and Hume and Bentham and Mill.” Mumford had simply removed the metaphor from James’s playful identification of pragmatism and the Reformation; in doing so, he could claim to have shown that there was nothing new in pragmatism, and that it was deeply implicated in producing exactly those values—or lack of values—which had made American culture such a disaster in the first place.

But Mumford did worry about the “persistent financial metaphors” James (and Dewey) always used to illustrate the pragmatist conception of truth. It, too, was a playful, and meaningful, usage, because the new credit economy created by the rise of corporate capitalism was something the “dumb majority” experienced on a daily basis. Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian novel of 1887, Looking Backward, summarized its mysteries: “Money was the sign of real commodities, but credit was but the sign of a sign.” James built on that slippery, vernacular foundation.

“Truth lives,” he said, “for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verification somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses just like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other’s truth.” (Mumford’s verdict on this thinking in the future tense of money—”the very words James used to recommend pragmatism should make us suspicious of its pretensions”—was later echoed by Max Horkheimer in an influential manifesto of the Frankfurt School, Eclipse of Reason [1947], and is of course reproduced in Edmundson’s obvious distaste for James’s commercial language.) [9]

The list of writers who shared and magnified the Young Intellectuals’ skeptical if not contemptuous attitude toward pragmatism is long, and it reaches into the present. A brief sample would include C. Wright Mills, Christopher Lasch, Casey Blake, Robert Westbrook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Diggins, Jackson Lears, Wilfred McClay, Peter Osborne, Brian Lloyd, Jeffrey Lustig, William Y. Elliott, Alan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Frank Owsley, and Howard Odum in the US alone. (The last six were affiliates of the literary grouping called the Southern Agrarians, which, like the Young Intellectuals, fetishized pre-industrial American culture, particularly as it was articulated in the 1850s, as the only usable past, which is to say the only source of literary values that could serve as a guide to civilized modernity. Elliott, the least known of them, was a Rhodes Scholar from Vanderbilt whose book of 1927, The Pragmatic Revolt Against Politics, explained pragmatism as an implicitly fascist doctrine; later, as the chair of Harvard’s department of Government—political science to the rest of us—he wrote The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy [1955], which made the case for anti-communist war in Southeast Asia, meanwhile advising the graduate students Henry Kissinger and Samuel T. Huntington.) [10]

Mark Edmundson now joins this pantheon of writers who think that pragmatism is both specific and intrinsic to American culture, and who believe that, as fugitives from the Truth, its practitioners end up denying the very possibility of any truth at all. Hence the tolerance of Trump’s falsehoods, and the more general inability of the American public—that “dumb majority” Santayana conjured—to make sense of our troubled times.

III

The writers who have criticized, dismissed, and/or ridiculed pragmatism are clearly an accomplished, even distinguished lot. So why haven’t they been able to kill it off, once and for all? Why does it keep coming back to life, so that the ghost of William Jame must be ritually exorcised on an almost annual basis?

Another way to pose the question is to ask, what makes pragmatism so appealing, and not just to the yahoos who call themselves Americans? What made it so compelling to the so-called continental philosophers of the early 20th century? And so dangerous to the Anglo-American empiricists (a.k.a. utilitarians, logical positivists, analytic philosophers)—not to mention the literary critics—who treated it, more or less, as a vulgar contaminant? How did pragmatism get a new lease on life in the form of post-structuralism, or, as it is colloquially known, “French Theory,” which, like the “British Invasion” of a slightly earlier moment, translated, revived, and enriched what began as an American idiom?

Bertrand Russell was surely correct in naming the pragmatist conception of truth its “central doctrine.” James himself said as much on several occasions, and most subsequent observers, including Edmundson, agree. So let me begin an answer with that, and work outward from there.

It’s pretty simple, really. In the name of science, pragmatism dismantles the correspondence theory of truth that regulates modern scientific method—or regulated it until complicated, first by relativity, then by quantum mechanics, now by quantum entanglement. According to this theory (a.k.a. the “natural attitude” of modern art history), good, correct, or truthful ideas are those that accurately represent an external reality that is self-evidently or demonstrably a matter of objective fact, which means that it is prior or impervious to observation. Either that or the knowing subject, the “transcendental ego” of Kantian metaphysics, is a fixed entity, equipped with an unchanging, trans-historical set of rules (or “categories”) by which natural or external objects can be properly, that is, accurately, apprehended or observed. Both renditions of reality posit or produce a “non-human truth” that is external or oblivious to our values and purposes—we discover the truth, we don’t make it.

Both renditions of reality also posit or produce an antithesis of subject and object, or thoughts and things, which is routinely codified in speech and other cultural practices as the immutable opposition of materialism and idealism, science and religion, base and superstructure, reason and desire, facts and values, and, yes, male and female. This is the crux of the matter. Pragmatists refuse to treat these dualisms—”binary oppositions,” in contemporary parlance—as given by the nature of things, as the terms of an either/or choice. Instead of antithesis, they grasp indissolubility, the constant interpenetration and interaction of these attitudes toward, and stances within, a reality being made by their application to the world.

And instead of identity, which collapses the difference between, say, reason and desire, in the manner of monism—romanticism is the most familiar model of this attitude toward reality, which is in and of itself a reality—pragmatists again insist on continuity or indissolubility. Reason and desire, or thoughts and things, are made of the same archaic substrate of consciousness (“stuff”), as James declared in his essays on radical empiricism, but they do not manifest symptomatically in the world as the same attitude or property. Peirce had perhaps the best way of explaining this continuity, which abides within difference: “Matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.”

The proverbial “death of the subject” is written in this refusal to assume an ontological difference between thoughts and things. But the real crisis so foretold is the end of objectivity—that is, some fixed, external reality on which all knowers, no matter where they’re situated in time and space, must agree as a given standard of judgement in assessing the truth of an observation. If the knower is included in the known, how can the object of knowledge be known “objectively,” as if the knower is not present? Is the wish then father to the thought—does an “ought” reside in and flow from the “is,” as against Kant’s view of the antithetical relation between ethical principles and historical circumstances? The pragmatist’s short answer to these questions is, respectively, It can’t be, and, Yes. And therein lies the scandal of pragmatism, according to both its critics and its advocates.

How to make these ideas clear, to borrow Peirce’s original challenge to philosophers? According to James, truth happens to an idea insofar as it is embodied in the world by human exertion, including the exertions we call writing and speaking. That is the plain meaning of the pragmatist conception of truth, which is a property to be measured by consequences, not predictions, because the consequences of an idea can’t always be foreseen—if the meaning of an idea expands its scope because its practical applications widen, its consequences will expand as well. For example, the idea of “freedom” is now more consequential than ever because most people can now assume it is a human right, not merely the prerogative of the powerful. Here is how the great modernist poet William Carlos Williams, a close reader of James and Dewey, summarized the pragmatist conception of truth: “No ideas but in things.”

Now, James, like Williams, situated this conception in the vernacular of his time, which was animated by four large social questions—the labor question, the woman question, the money question, and the trust question (the last two were pretty much the same thing, because everyone took it for granted that the stock market and the new industrial corporations were creatures of the new “credit economy”). He borrowed the metaphors that emerged in public, often political discussion of these questions to demonstrate that pragmatism could speak to the concerns of the “dumb majority” as well as the metaphysical conceits of his fellow philosophers. In his hands, the truth does, therefore, sound provisional, impermanent, even transitory; it is something that abides only if we continue to say it, believe it, and act on it. And this is what makes his critics just about hysterical, given to the hyperbole evident in the opposition I have cited.

Without a fixed, external reality or timeless, “non-human truth” against which we can measure the meaning and significance of any statement or program or purpose, they insist, one is forced to conclude that pragmatism is too vulgar—”homely, untechnical, and slangy,” as Russell exclaimed, or “scooping up a sentiment from quotidian American life,” as Edmundson puts it—to produce any lasting rules by which to think clearly, or articulate any ideals by which to order our lives, which is, after all, the point of doing philosophy.

These critics are unanimous, and quite clearly correct, in claiming that this vulgarity of pragmatism resides in its metaphors of the marketplace, and more specifically in its deployment of what Mumford called “financial metaphors”—those words and phrases that conjure a “credit economy” animated by stock-jobbing, speculation, and accounting methods that treat invisible, intangible items like “good will,” ideas, and mere expectations of income as real property to be protected by law, public policy, even force of arms. Max Horkheimer summarized this distaste for the very language of pragmatism in Eclipse of Reason: it “reflects with an almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture.” [11]

How indeed can a philosophy be built on such a vulgar, slippery, vernacular foundation? Our answer will depend on what we want from philosophy, or, as Herbert Marcuse would have it, from social theory, the intellectual heir to metaphysical speculation. If we think that philosophy must remain faithful to the general traits of our common experience, and so must become an interpretation of historical circumstances that are apparent to everyone, even the least reflective of us, then we will agree with Martin Heidegger—yeah, him, the last philosopher of history—in insisting that all metaphysical questions are “fundamentally historical” because it is only in philosophy “that essential relations to what is take shape.”

In other words, we will want philosophers to explain and justify our existence, not ignore or denounce it because it’s too brief and banal—too crowded with the immediate “material interests” of this or that social stratum—to be worthy of serious thought. And we will want historians to keep an Emersonian eye on the “barbarism and materialism” of all times, including our own, not to turn away from them in the name of propriety or patriotism. As Heidegger himself put it in commenting on Spengler’s plaintive narrative of decline: “If the past is to be disclosed authentically in terms of what it is, we will have to avoid bringing in questions that ignore the present historical situation.” [12]

IV

Like all previous critics of pragmatism, and of its bastard post-structuralist/modernist offspring, Edmundson thinks that present historical situation is precisely what must be escaped or ignored in devising answers to the real, perennial (read: metaphysical) questions that plague but also enrich our existence as human beings. He believes that a “capital-T Truth that is both traditional and foundational”—the alternative to the provisional truths provided by pragmatism—can be found in “the study and the interpretation of ideals.”

These ideals are left undefined, but we are told what they demand, and what they do. “An ideal is difficult and demanding to teach. It requires great effort. And it is not self-interested.” Edmundson also knows, somehow, where the pursuit of these ineffable goods must lead: “The ideals place the individual outside of time, in an eternal present, at least while she is pursuing them. . . . I’m not sure whether humans have souls, but I do believe that when an idealist pursues an ideal, she leaves what I call the realm of Self . . . and enters another state, which I call the state of Soul.”

So, in the present historical situation, Americans face the either/or choice between the probationary truths to be made by pragmatist methods and the timeless Truth to be discovered in the contemplation of ideals: “Pragmatism has won the field, and Donald Trump has shown us quite clearly where pragmatism unchecked by idealism leads.”

This way of posing the choice before us is of course a poignant reiteration of the opposition between ethical principles (ideals) and historical circumstances (realities)—between ought and is—which Immanuel Kant immortalized in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781): “For whereas, so far as nature is concerned, experience supplies the rule and is the source of truth, in respect to the moral law it is, alas, the mother of illusion! Nothing is more reprehensible than to derive the laws prescribing what ought to be done from what is done or to impose upon them the limits by which the latter is circumscribed.” [13]

And it is this very opposition that the original pragmatists, particularly William James, sought to undo, by rendering metaphysical conceits as practical social questions, by asking what the consequences of an idea were, and are—by grasping the “will to believe” as the regulative principle of the search for truth.

Is it possible, they asked, that our most durable and cherished ethical principles already reside in and flow from the historical circumstances bequeathed us by the past? That these ideals are latent and legible even in the most disgusting and depraved of historical conditions—including our present condition, the fully reified zone where dance moves and dumb ideas get instantaneously monetized at TikTok, where impending “deaths of despair” drive both mass shootings and revanchist social movements?

John Dewey’s observation of 1891 was the declarative form of these questions: “This, indeed, is the failure of the Kantian Ethics: in separating that which should be from what is, it deprives the latter, the existing social world as well as the desires of the individual, of all moral value; while, by the same abstraction, it condemns that which should be to a barren abstraction. An ‘ought’ which does not root in and flower from the ‘is,’ which is not the fuller realization of the actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that things should be better.”

In this restricted sense, James, like Dewey (and for that matter like Antonio Gramsci), followed the lead of G. W. F. Hegel by putting aside the transcendental epistemological question codified by Kant—“How do we know what we know?”—and instead asking, “What have we said we have known, how and why did we say it at that time?” Which is to say, by treating philosophical questions as answerable only by historical inquiry and consequential action in the world, where propositions can be tested, rather than by staging “thought experiments” or designing counter-factuals as if ideas don’t really matter much, anyway. [14]

The question that follows is the hard part; at any rate it appears to be the sticking point in every evaluation of pragmatism since Bertrand Russell called James’s bluff in 1909. Is pragmatism a “method only,” which treats reason in the manner of modern science—as a morally silent means to any end rather than, as the ancient philosophers and the medieval clerics would have it, the means to the end of discovering the good, the true, and the beautiful? In other words, is pragmatism an old name for a new kind of nihilism? The critics of pragmatism, including Mark Edmundson, are, as we have seen, unanimous in answering, “Yes, of course.” I would say, No, in thunder, and this in full view of its political pliability, which allowed theorists like Carl Schmitt to deploy its insights in the service of fascism.

To my mind, it is obvious that the point of a pragmatist approach to moral questions is to ground them in the actual state of social relationships, whether or not they seem sunk, as at present, in the vacuum of “transactional” or contractual models of personal and political interaction. For what good is a moral philosophy that doesn’t seek to explain how the relation between intentions and actions can be embodied in the real world as it is presently constituted—not as we would like it to be, nor as it would appear in the tabloid format of news from nowhere, “outside of time, in an eternal present”? [15]

A test of pragmatism, so conceived, can be conducted by asking how its adjournment of inherited epistemological dualisms (those unhappy “binary oppositions”) works in both raising and addressing the moral questions raised by an enterprise as boring and mundane as my own vocation, doing history—questions that boil down to the problem of commensurability.

Let’s see how it turns out. A commonplace among historians and their students is that interpretations of the past change over time, but that the past as such does not. E. H. Carr famously illustrated the axiom by showing that equally factual or truthful accounts of the same mountain can be obtained from different points of view, and yet the shape of the mountain never changes. He never bothered to ask how we decide that any one factual account of the mountain is superior to the others—he never offered a solution to the problem of commensurability that comes of acknowledging that there can rival but truthful accounts of the very same phenomenon. [16]

To do so is, of course, to evaluate the findings, the facts, according to the purpose of the point of view: if your purpose is to tunnel through the mountain, for example, an aerial view is practically worthless. But your purpose will have already been determined by your values, that is, what determines your approach to the mountain in the first place (and note that these values may have been imposed on you by your occupation).

So, the opposition between facts and values that informs any and all notions of objectivity, in doing history as in journalism, simply collapses. There is no body of fact independent of the model or method—the point of view—brought to bear on the object of knowledge, in this case a mountain, but the model or method is determined prior to its deployment by the purposes of the person(s) doing the viewing, and these in turn are produced by the values they hold. Which facts, then, shall receive accreditation as admissable evidence? Or, to put the same question differently, which model or method is superior not because it produces more facts, but because it accords with purposes we approve and the values we take to be self-evident truths?

To demonstrate that such philosophical questions—I don’t know what better adjective applies—must follow from even the most basic kinds of historical research and writing, I turn to the fundamental differences between William A. Dunning and W. E. B. Du Bois in interpreting the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Dunning was the distinguished professor of history at Columbia University who established an eponymous school of interpretation which convinced most Americans, including Woodrow Wilson the president and David W. Griffith, the pioneering director of “Birth of a Nation,” that the Civil War was a needless tragedy which became an unaffordable farce as it degenerated into the reckless stage of Reconstruction—that is, as it equipped the former slaves of the South to take up new roles as free men and women, and enfranchised black men to vote and to hold public office. Dunning trained dozens of graduate students, whose prodigious archival research at the state level proved his arguments so exhaustively, with thousands of facts, that they were routinely inscribed in textbooks until the mid-20th century, to the point where slavery almost disappeared from reputable accounts as a cause of the civil war and the backwardness of black folk—not the terrorist state apparatus of Jim Crow—always appeared as the obvious cause of their inferior standing at the law and in society.

Du Bois challenged the Dunning School arguments directly in 1935, with Black Reconstruction, 1860-1880, which claimed that the Civil War was exactly what the anti-slavery movement called it, an irrepressible conflict, and that Reconstruction was a stunning success precisely because the former slaves learned so quickly to use the resources provided them, first by the mere fact of freedom codified in the 13th Amendment and then by the 14th and 15th, which guaranteed them due process of law and the right to vote.

Du Bois’s account included a chapter called “The General Strike,” which showed that before, during, and after such legal/constitutional innovation, the slaves freed themselves by running to Union Army lines and forcing the federal government to define them as something other, or more, than contraband of war. They were 500,000 strong, making them the constituents of the largest slave rebellion in recorded history; almost 200,000 returned to the South as soldiers in the Union Army, black men sufficiently armed to destroy what was left of a slave system deprived of the core of its labor force.

Black Reconstruction also included a chapter that asked what motivated the Dunning School and why it had carried the day. Du Bois acknowledged the thousands of salient facts mustered by the professional historians with PhDs from Columbia—these far outnumbered what he had been able to compile from his single-handed research in the unpublished archive of the Freedmen’s Bureau—but he concluded that the real source of their success with academics and general readers alike was the virulent contagion of white supremacy.

There is no better explanation for the persistence, to this day, of the Dunning School’s interpretation in the everyday learning, teaching, and thinking of Americans on the topic of Civil War and Reconstruction. For example, it informed Florida’s recent rejection of an AP high school course in African-American History and its earlier exclusion of Critical Race Theory from all curricula, including, it seems, from those already scheduled in higher education.

Are these, then, the grounds on which can we plausibly claim that Du Bois’s account is a better interpretation than Dunning’s—by noting that it doesn’t suffer from the viral load of racism that has disfigured the historiography of the Civil War and Reconstruction even unto the present? If so, are we not acknowledging that our accumulation as well as our assessment of the relevant facts has been, and remains, determined by prior purposes, which are themselves products of the values we hold dear? And that the truth of this matter has changed accordingly, because what we have said about it has changed?

Notice that commensurability is here achieved not by finding the overlap of facts to which both accounts can appeal in proving its claims. The “General Strike,” the pivotal event in Du Bois’s account, never even attains factual standing in the Dunning School’s interpretation of Civil War and Reconstruction: it’s a non-event. So, the only grounds on which we can stake a claim to either’s superiority is the contested terrain where the different values and purposes that informed them have to be assessed in terms of their moral content and worth, as what Edmundson calls ideals, and as what pragmatists call consequences. But those ideals aren’t timeless or trans-historical artifacts. The ideals of racial equality and justice are little more than two hundred years old, and they’re still debatable—not always covertly, as the Supreme Court of the US, an institution founded on reasoned disputation in view of time-honored precedent, has recently demonstrated.

We come full circle in arriving at the scene of Du Bois’s intellectual rebellion against the received wisdom of his time.  For Du Bois the pan-Africanist was a protégé of William James at Harvard, and was one of the left-wing intellectuals—Thorstein Veblen and William English Walling were among the many others—who agreed with John Dewey’s advocacy of American entry into the Great War. And, like Alain Locke, another student of James from Harvard, Du Bois was also a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance, which, under the very noses of the Young Intellectuals who crowded New York City, fulfilled America’s cultural promise by adapting all the resources of industrial modernity, including mechanical reproduction, to the perfection of the black aesthetic and the causes of black representation, solidarity, and liberation.

Pragmatists don’t deny or vacate the truth. They haven’t written a recipe for bullshit, to use the technical term as developed by Harry Frankfurt. In other words, they don’t acknowledge but evade the truth as in lying, nor begin with willful ignorance of the truth as in bullshitting. Instead, they know that all truths are provisional or probationary, and plural, matters of mutual faith that work for the time being. If they endure, that is because they continue to work—because people can continue to believe in them. The expanding domain of the idea of freedom, for example, is a function of the idea that “all men are created equal”; in the absence of that notion of equality as a premise to actionable political thinking, which was in the beginning a preposterous, revolutionary principle, freedom would still be the property of the privileged few, not most or all of the rest of us.

But it’s a fragile truth that requires constant attention and elaboration, as recent debates about the “new” authoritarian bent of American politics have demonstrated. Pragmatists are better equipped than the proponents of democracy who think that equality is a timeless “ideal” or unquestionable Truth that needs no rigorous, ongoing defense, and, as a result, they’re also better equipped than the opponents of democracy who think that equality is the enemy of individuality—better equipped, that is, to see how liberty and equality go together in the making of democratic polities.

In short, they’re better equipped than all other interested observers to see how pragmatism is itself a necessary intellectual device in fortifying the truths we still hold dear.

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[1] On Richard Bernstein, see the lovely profile in The New Yorker, January 3, 2023. On Richard Rorty, see John Pettegrew, ed., A Pragmatist’s Progress? (2000); James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (2001), ch. 4, and Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (1994), ch. 10.

[2] Santayana, et al., quoted and discussed in Pragmatism and Political Economy, chs. 5-10

[3] Unlike Edmundson, Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Lynne Cheney, Telling the Truth (1995), blame foreign sources for college-educated Americans’ inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood—respectively, Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault. The pathetic Robert Bork is more inclined to blame indigenous sources—yes, the Declaration of Independence itself—for installing ridiculous ideas in American heads: see Slouching Toward Gomorrah (2002).

[4] On the Young Intellectuals, see Warren Susman, Culture as History (1984), Part I; Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community (1991); Livingston, Pragmatism and Political Economy, ch. 9, and citations therein.

[5] See James Livingston, “War and the Intellectuals,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 (2003): 431-50.

[6] See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941), particularly the preface, where the author cites Brooks and Mumford as inspiration for his canon-making periodization of American literature.

[7] Russell quoted and discussed in James Livingston, “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What Is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity?” in John J. Stuhr, ed., One Hundred Years of Pragmatism (2007).

[8] The alternative to the periodization of American culture and literature on offer from the Young Intellectuals and the Agrarians, which is codified (with qualifications) by Matthiessen in American Renaissance, can be sampled in Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (1937); Constance Rourke, American Humor (1931); Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1955); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967); Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977); and Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (1985). It is probably worth noting here that the whorehouse in Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was named “The Golden Day.”

[9] On Mumford, Horkheimer, and the import of those ubiquitous financial metaphors, see Livingston, “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy” and Pragmatism and Political Economy, chs. 8-10.

[10] See Livingston, The Intellectual Earthquake, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.

[11] On the redefinition of property at the law after 1890, which constituted a fundamental break from the common law, see John R. Commons, The Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1923), and more broadly, Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988).

[12] Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (1941). Heidegger quoted and discussed in Livingston, “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy.”

[13] Kant quoted and discussed in Livingston, Pragmatism and Political Economy, ch. 8.

[14] Dewey quoted and discussed in ibid. Marx and James were temperamentally quite different, but both vowed to “fight Hegel,” and both came to see that their apostasy was pointless.

[15] See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981), esp. chs. 3, 15.

[16] On E. H. Carr and later iterations of historiography, including the stalemate between Dunning and Du Bois, see my four-part essay at S-USIH.org, “What Is Called History at the End of History?”