Imbolc Full Wild Moon
“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” – William James
William James helped found and expand the American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism. This is not a publicly well known school of philosophy, partly because it does not lend itself well to sound bites like dialectical reasoning, theory of forms, Occam’s razor, cogito ergo sum.
His quote teases us toward an important element of pragmatic thought, namely that truth is something we live into or toward rather than an absolute. In fact, as this quote suggests, we can even change our own truth by changing our minds, our ways of thinking and the directions of our thoughts and in so doing, change our lives.
Pragmatism is a very American philosophical system, relying on the rough and tumble of human interaction with the world to get at what other systems find through deductive logic. It’s messy and inexact, but it binds itself tightly to the human experience.
Here’s a nice paragraph from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy that will give you the flavor of James’ thought. Pay special attention to the last sentence.
“James’s chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” sets out his voluntaristic epistemology. “We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he recognizes “resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117), including not only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of our prior beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human contribution” (P, 122). He also embraces a metaphysics of process in the claim that “for pragmatism [reality] is still in the making,” whereas for “rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity” (P 123). Pragmatism’s final chapter on “Pragmatism and Religion” follows James’s line in Varieties in attacking “transcendental absolutism” for its unverifiable account of God, and in defending a “pluralistic and moralistic religion” (144)based on human experience. “On pragmatistic principles,” James writes, “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (143).”
