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Article Excerpt
Experience has lessons to impart. Its ability to teach, however, turns on our willingness to learn. Attending to the lessons of human experience brought American pragmatists of the nineteenth century to a new conception of philosophy, one that embraced the fallibilism that had long defined the natural sciences. It led them back to the abiding existential questions that underpinned the Wisdom Traditions of the past in order to explore the personal, social, and political trials of the present. These thinkers established a new intellectual tradition that allows us to "learn from experience." (1)
Classical pragmatism stood against the prevailing current of European philosophy, which continued to be motivated by Immanuel Kant's insistence that philosophy should be concerned with the limits and conditions of "pure reason," that is, reason devoid of empirical content. In contrast, American intellectuals such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Jane Addams, Ella Lyman Cabot, and John Dewey held that philosophy should concern itself with the messiness of human meaning, which James acknowledged as "various, tangled and painful." Philosophy ought to be understood, they thought, as the result of human beings thinking through the meaningful questions of living as embodied, thoughtful organisms. These questions can never be purely cerebral; they are laden with emotion, carefully negotiated in daily life, and pressed upon us in moments of personal and social crisis - always, therefore, empirically conditioned and experiential. Experience was to replace pure reason as American pragmatism's enduring lode-stone.
Pragmatism took the reconstruction of experience as its principal task: the only way to respond effectively to the dilemma that philosophy faced in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1907, William James called it the "present dilemma," but it now is more accurate to call it a perennial one. It is the crisis that philosophy faces when it jeopardizes its own relevance. Academic philosophy has spent the better part of the past century earning a deservedly bad reputation. Since the time of Socrates and Aristophanes, philosophy has been accused of being only loosely tethered to the world of human affairs, and today the string appears to have been severed completely. As Dewey noted in 1917, the "recovery of philosophy" is only possible if philosophers are willing to take a stand with the sciences, and a variety of other academic disciplines, on the ground of human experience.
Experience: the term reverberates as a noun, a verb, and ultimately as a command. While Bertrand Russell, echoing the sentiment of traditional empiricism, reduced experience to a description of "sense-data," the classical pragmatists insisted that human experience is defined by a particular qualitative dimension; by its purpose, effect, and the living memory of past experiences. Experience is not merely something undergone, but also, and always, something actively done. Dewey's Experience and Nature (1925) suggests that a human being, like any other organism, continually transacts with its natural surroundings, and this observation serves as the starting point of pragmatic naturalism. For human beings, however, Dewey presents this natural transaction not as a mere fact of existence, but an ongoing question concerning the transaction's origin, history, process, and destination.
While pragmatism maintained a scientific bearing, it was quite careful not to succumb to scientism. Dewey, amenable to the studies of psychology, biology, and early cognitive neuroscience, nonetheless held that these disciplines did not give us absolute answers, only useful perspectives on the variety and novelty that define our transactions with the affairs of nature. James, the father of experimental psychology in America, conceded, "[E]xperience as we know, has ways of boiling over and making us correct our present formulas." (2) Following his father Benjamin Peirce, C. S. Peirce made a name in mathematics and physics before cultivating a reputation in philosophy. He studied under the foremost mathematicians and physicists of the nineteenth century, but the young Peirce still concluded, "[W]ithout beating longer round the bush ... experience is our only teacher." (3) At times this teacher seems to know only one pedagogical method: the often painful process of trial and error.
Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, had been defined by the search for absolute and enduring principles that might serve as the foundation of human knowledge. In contrast, Peirce echoed Ralph Waldo Emerson by suggesting that experience happens as a "series of surprises" and continually - inevitably - defies the theories...
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