Difference Between James and Contemporary Pragmatists
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Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind
by Renée Tursi
QuinnipiacUniversity
If the philosopher William James were to meet some of today’s self-proclaimed “pragmatists,” hemight be pleased by the enormous influence he has had a century after his death. He might also be a little dissatisfied by how some of his ideas have been drafted into new service.
When James published his Pragmatism in 1907, he caused something of a philosophical stir. By presenting a philosophy that based our intellectual and moral epistemology wholly in human experience, he was turning against some of the most popular theories of the day. To him, the world or “reality” did not reveal itself to us, as the “spectator-theory” rationalists(Herbert Spencer, for instance) had been claiming. Our minds were not simply mirrors reflecting back a completed, pre-determined picture. Rather, in his view, as influenced by Darwin’s ideas, thinking was adaptive in nature, not revelatory. Through the processes of our mind and of social agreement, we build truth out of our perceptions and sensations, James believed. So for him, the whole of the matter is about how those perceptions and sensations prepare us to react and act. As he wrote in 1898 in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” his first essay on the subject of pragmatism, “the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice” (Pragmatism 259).As James intended it, such a philosophical stance not only retained within it a form of moral reasoning, but also allowed our inexperience to lie in wait for new sensations. Those, in turn, we could shapeeven into metaphysical or religious truth.
By mid-century, however, despite the important legacy of James-follower [s1]John Dewey and his progressive pragmatism, we hear little of pragmatism itself, as analytic philosophy became the prevailing interest. It was really not until the language theorists of the 1990s rediscovered pragmatism for their own purposes that it came back into full bloom.Such well-received contemporary pragmatic philosophers as Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish have focused on language systems alone, as separate from experience.As Rorty writes, “there is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them” (80).In other words, for this kind of thinker, pragmatism is simply a form of postmodernism, and the quest for “truth” is off the map. Morality has been replaced by ethics, and spiritual inquiry certainly has no pragmatic basis here. As Fish suggests, “like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town” (265). To be sure, some current-day pragmatists-- Richard J. Bernstein and Hilary Putnam, to name two prominent philosophers -- have continued to shape a Jamesian/Deweyan pragmatism for the 21st century. Their work keeps a connection to “experience” and moral agency at the fore. But as Russell B. Goodman has pointed out, even within a year of James’s Pragmatism appearing in print, Arthur Lovejoy published an article in The Journal of Philosophy titled “The Thirteen Pragmatisms” (3).It goes to show that, right from its formal beginnings,this “ism” has defied restrictive definition and remains vigorous.
Given the postmodern pragmatists’ preoccupation with discourse, it is no surprise that poets have been centrally placed in the revival of pragmatism. Why, then, has Emily Dickinson been missing from the most prominent pragmatists’ conversation? When we consider the extent of her work’s ongoing linguistic contingency, a notion at the heart of contemporary pragmatic theorists, this omission is perhaps somewhat puzzling. Then again, since it is impossible to divorce Dickinson’s ways of seeing, knowing, and making meaning from a moral temperament, perhaps that aspect of her work is the sticky wicket. Nonetheless, it has been interesting to see how pragmatic interpreters account for her absence.
For instance, the pioneer of joining poetry and pragmatism, Richard Poirier, tends to find a way of bringing Dickinson into his essays on the subject, but generally, only by way of an example of something else. Take his Poetry and Pragmatism from 1992. This is a brilliant work that reclaims for Jamesian pragmatism, as fueled by Emersonian inquiry, what postmodern theorists thought they had discovered as their own: a method of optimistic linguistic skepticism that allows language’s “deconstruction” to become rife with opportunity for more knowledge.1 While in his work Poirier names Dickinson as among “the tribe of Waldo,” he nonetheless moves on to writers he deems “more firmly placed” than her in “an Emersonian pragmatist dispensation” (80). Yet he finds her poem, “Essential Oils” useful for its referral to the way Dickinson’s words are wrung and live on, like oil from a rose petal. He suggests that she had hoped “[r]eaders of the future will discover, as we do now, that the poet has managed to leave traces of herself inscribed forever in our shared language. Without intending to, Dickinson is in this instance writing as an Emersonian pragmatist.” (Poirier’s consideration brings to mind Henry James’s famous 1907 letter to his brother upon reading William’s Pragmatism; the novelist suddenly realized, he writes, “the extent to which all my life I have […] unconsciously pragmatised” (William and Henry James: Selected Letters489)).
More recently, Joan Richardson has explained her decision to omit Dickinson from her comprehensive A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (2007). While the poet’s work would “question, following her own reading in natural history, the idea of a world unfolding teleological design,” nonetheless it was“unavailable to the development of the aesthetic into Pragmatism,” Richardson writes (12). So in these two instances, we see intention and interaction as criteria Dickinson has failed to meet.
But, in discounting her fit as a postmodern pragmatist,many contemporary thinkers have missed the extent to which Dickinson has accord with James’s pragmatism and the significance of that harmony. Thus, because her form of skeptical inquiry links to a way of being in the world that fits with James’s pragmatism – namely, retaining systems of metaphysical and social interconnectivity within epistemological uncertainty -- she deserves to be a part of the intellectual history of this philosophy. The aim of my essay is to strengthen that link to James with the hopes that future critics may find ways to bring her more fully into pragmatic contexts.2
Almost twenty years ago Margaret Dickie, a rare proponent of Dickinson-as-pragmatist, hadtaken steps to call for a formal re-periodization of the poet. American literature anthologies have traditionally placed Dickinson in the pre-1865 split, so for teaching purposes the poet usually has found herself lumped with the Romantics. Dickie advised placing her squarely with the early modernists, where her epistemological and verbal contingencies could seem more at home. By reading Dickinsonas a pre-modernist what Dickie allows to emerge is the discovery of how insufficient the earlier categorizations come to feel when we consider that “[n]either Emerson’s representative man nor Whitman’s democratic speaker could serve as models for her poetry” (398). She cannot possibly participate in the male tradition of a “coherent narrated self,” Dickie argues, because her lyric ‘I’ finds “no available descriptions of the world that would fit her experience” (400, 398). Rather, through decentering, it merges into “multiple preferences” depending on what experience it takes on. Her type of lyric “I” is “neither an original nor an originator; she is always a version for which there is no first form” (398). This is Jamesian pragmatic contingency, an ongoing state of changeability and self-revision amidst a world humanly constructed. By that standard, Dickinson certainly could belong to this more progressive philosophical tradition.
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Whether Dickinson can be resolutely pronounced a pragmatist or not ends up being, ironically, an anti-pragmatic question. The more useful project would seem to be one in which we explore what comes of our reading Dickinson’s poetry as pragmatists ourselves. As James would have us ask the question, what difference does it make for us, one way or the other, to find pragmatism reverberating in her work? In effect this is taking Poirier’s observation that she was pragmatizing unintentionally as a starting point rather than an ending one. In approaching Dickinson through James’s methods, then, we can view many of her poems working out the kinds of uninscribed desires that pragmatic quests invite.
We catch her addressing forms of interiority pragmatically in an early fragment for what went on to become “There is a June when Corn is cut”: [s2]
There is a June when Corn is cut,
Whose option is within.
That is why I prefer the Power, for Power is Glory, when it likes,
and Dominion, too—3
While the poem’s final version would seem to be a conceit on the differing forms of sweetness between this life and the possibility of the next, both versions turn entirely on the notion of prospect. Nothing is finished. The mind can continue to explore – to “cut” into experience [s3]– to find worlds within worlds. What comes from within may hold the greatest force, an idea that leads her to echo a passage from the Book of Daniel [s4]she comes to like so well regarding the triumvirate of power, glory, and dominion. So dwelling in the possibility that can emerge from the core of oneself allows one a monarchical power – discovery, grandeur, and total authority. Such a view manifests one of James’s primary pragmatic tenets -- that “the knower is an actor” (Essays in Philosophy 21). What the philosopher means by this phrase is that the process of knowing is one of shaping the flux of an experiential flow of sensations in useful, meaningful ways. From birth, the mind is “in the game,” he tells us. Consciousness’ manifestation or multifarious “representations” are nothing less than socially agreed upon terms and classifications. Consciousness itself has no such “content” per se to be mined; “it” is a process, one of ongoing testing and discovery and self-reflective verification. The world, in other words, waits for us to write truths upon it and not the other way around. The way we communicate those truths principally is through words; though again, as distinct from some contemporary pragmatisms, James’s pragmatism would insist that communication is only a part of what’s significant, as we’ll see below.
The philosopher most certainly took his cues in this respect from Emerson, though James could not share that thinker’s monistic view of the universe. (Emerson, in turn, probably wouldn’t have been able to share wholly James’s sense of inner-generated external reality.)In “Nature,”Emerson famously speaks to the relationship between things “out there” and our mind’s conception of them, finding the world to be nothing less than purely “emblematic” of ourselves:
Whilst we see that [nature] always stands read to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
(53)
James seeks to explain this same human-centered dynamic:
Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. […] So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. […] ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.
(Pragmatism 31-32)
In this sense, the philosophical search for “truth” becomes a futile exploration; the only useful way at it, says James, is to ask what the human consequences are for one form of truth over another. The pragmatic method suggests that in our relation to the world that feels external – a quality James certainly doesn’t deny -- we should not be asking what we make of it. Instead, we should understand that we are at all times engaged in a self-spun process by which we are the source that is actively populating everything we aver – the feeling we have when we claim to see or to know, the feeling we have when we claim we don’t know, and everything in between. Most importantly, we are deciding how to behave in response. That is the truth. “Our minds are not here simply to copy a reality that is already complete,” he explained in a 1907 interview with The New York Times.4 “They are here to complete it, to add to its importance by their own remodeling of it, to decant its contents over, so to speak, into a more significant shape” (Perry 2: 479).
To appreciate how Dickinson’s work exhibits Jamesian approaches to knowing, we have to start with James’s transformation of our understanding of consciousness. His famous metaphor for the mind as a “stream” or flux of sensations that we take in through our senses was first set out in his 1890 Principles of Psychology. We usually can attend to only a small part of that stream, James explains, and it’s in such moments of alighting upon a particular of it that we construct an association or idea or thought. A great deal of his life work centered on accounting for this human negotiation between the flux of a world of experience pluralistic in nature (and thus not unified, as Emerson held), and a consciousness concerned with only its own interests. As he describes it in his “Stream of Thought” chapter in Principles, the human system of language has falsely created a separation between what he calls the “substantive” and “transitive” aspects of experience (1:238). The feelings in between “things” that we represent in language as conjunctions, such as “and” “if” or “but,” are as real as the nouns. Yet we relegate them to the background of our present moment. Most contemporary readers and perceivers would agree that Modernism’s project was most decidedly to bring those less articulated states into view. We need only put Picasso’s 1931 abstract painting “Still Life with Pitcher, Bowl, and Fruit” next to James Peale’s 1821 realistic “Still Life with Fruit” to see what happens when the transitions are shifted to the foreground. James took the lead in that sense by calling for a “reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life” (1:246).Dickinson’s way is likewise to find experience’s truth in the indirect: “The thought beneath so slight a film -- / Is more distinctly seen -- / As laces just reveal the surge -- / Or Mists – the Appenine –” (203).
James later radicalizes his earlier concepts of consciousness as a process into a formulation called “radical empiricism” that eliminates any sense of mind-body dualism. It presumes anything that is “real” has been experienced and anything “experienced” is real. “Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view,” he writes in “A World of Pure Experience” (Essays in Radical Empiricism 35). “Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are[…].” What we descriptively impose from the outside as “tendencies” should be more accurately seen as “feelings of tendency” too nebulous and indeterminate to name. When we compare two qualities, for instance, James says that it’s not their composition that we measure, but rather, our sense of their relations and distances.
Spiritually, the same conditions hold. Our universe of concrete expressible objects, he explains in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “swims” in a wider universe of abstract, deeper ideas whose “essential” goodness, beauty, significance, and the like we can recognize because of their practical results with us -- much like the effects of a magnet whose force we can feel but not grab onto (53). Dickinson seems to offer a similar arrangement when she wrote at some point to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson: “No dreaming can compare with reality, for Reality itself is a dream from which but a portion of Mankind have yet waked and part of us is a not familiar Peninsula.”5 James writes that while “we can never look directly at” the ideas of that deeper universe that extends beyond our own experience, for they are “bodiless and featureless and footless,” we can still
grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.