Widely regarded as the paramount American contribution to intellectual history, pragmatism is both a reflection of and a commentary on American culture. At the same time, pragmatism traditionally has worked against nationalistic sentiments, focusing on ideals such as pluralism, amelioration, individualism, communities, and creative (as opposed to institutional) democracy. So too, pragmatism is a cosmopolitan movement that engages with British and continental philosophies. Thus, one of the more intricate and controversial issues in pragmatist criticism involves determining how and to what extent the movement captures aspects of an American ethos at different historical moments. A number of contemporary scholars have revisited the roots of pragmatism to address this question. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club has perhaps done the most to create a narrative about the relationship between post-Civil War American society and the birth of pragmatist thought. Other critics such as Joan Richardson and Paul Grimstad have analyzed how landmark works of literature enact connections between the emergence of pragmatism and cultural transformations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. These latter studies have buttressed an ongoing development in scholarship, the growth of literary pragmatism as a field unto itself.1 On the one hand, this expansion is built upon reexaminations of a long-standing tradition in American letters: the textual confluence of literature, philosophy, and commentaries on American identity. For example, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau are famous for creating such conjunctions, and not coincidentally, scholars often consider them the forerunners of pragmatism. On the other hand, the increasing codification of literary pragmatism points to a recent interest in demarcating new methodological approaches to pragmatic thought that not only include literature but also afford it a central place. Such approaches are not defined by a single principle or strategy. Instead, they display a shared tendency to capitalize on the eclectic, creative, and narratological elements of pragmatism in order to break down divisions between philosophy and literature, commentaries and narratives, and concepts and beliefs.
The purpose of this book is to develop a new study of literary pragmatism that spotlights the late nineteenth-century origins of the movement. Focusing on the intersections between Henry James’s works of fiction and the theoretical writings of William James, Charles Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the book seeks to delineate both a literary approach to pragmatist philosophy and a philosophical understanding of literary pragmatism. The original version of pragmatism was a multifaceted and cross-disciplinary movement, loosely united through a handful of methodological principles. Yet we can locate underlying connections between the writings of the first pragmatists through analyses of their overlapping uses of figurative language and their creation of different protagonists. Dispersed across the works of William James, Peirce, and Holmes, these specifically literary elements tie together their models of pragmatic experience, while also highlighting the differences in their disciplinary and methodological approaches to pragmatism. My book aims to demonstrate that the primary contextual link in their uses of literary language and characterization consists of references to their shared cultural and material environment, late nineteenth-century America. In particular, these writers populate their works with references to touchstones of sociopolitical and cultural consolidation, including the Civil War, the completion of the railroad, the shifting legacy of the American Revolution, and the emergence of the corporate economy. In this way, figurative constructions of an American historical context are woven into pragmatist depictions of experience. Henry James’s fiction serves as the laboratory where these literary aspects of pragmatist thought find full expression, but his works also illuminate the theoretical writings, creating a reciprocal interplay between literature, philosophy, and material history.
The crux of my approach involves tracking long threads of figurative language and examples of characterization across pragmatist writings and James’s fiction. The main goal of this approach is to translate the insights that pragmatism offers concerning the relationship between individual experience, material society, and the acquisition of truth (or truths) into a series of interlinked portraits of protagonists and characters occupying different social settings. William James, Peirce, and Holmes all have their own ways of interpreting the fluid relationship between the individual and society. However, in their writings, “the individual” is not so much an abstract persona as a protagonist—a specific type of character with unique traits and attributes. Each theorist develops his version of a pragmatic protagonist, while also sketching corresponding social settings. They place their protagonists in a world full of institutions and machinery, looming structures, edifices, and industrial modes of transportation. In the process, they supply diverse snapshots of a society shaped by transformative changes in late nineteenth-century America: the Civil War, the corporatization of the economy, the legacy of the Revolution, and the expansion of the railroad. At the same time, metaphoric and symbolic references to railroads, firearms, finance, and revolution also frame how their protagonists interact with their settings. The protagonists of pragmatism occupy a late nineteenth-century American context, and, by extension, this context shapes their identities as characters. Literary language thus brings together crosscurrents in form and content, creating the “figures” of pragmatism: the protagonists who emerge within the narratives of philosophical thought and the late nineteenth-century American contexts that serve as the forums for their experiences.
My book therefore seeks to parse the relationship between the individual and society in early pragmatism, directing attention to the way the pragmatists traverse boundaries between technical and literary formulations of experience and truth. As William James argues in his 1907 manifesto Pragmatism, the pragmatic theorization of truth hinges on the notion of experience. James states, “Truth, for [a pragmatist] becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience,” a point James sets against the rationalist principle that truth must involve an “absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality” (34). Indeed, one of the preeminent insights of pragmatism is the basic idea that truth is not based on a correspondence between the separate entities of consciousness and externality.2 For pragmatists, “consciousness” is not an organizing principle or a unified locus of individual identity, but a product (one among many) of the self-generating and limitless movements of experience. Thus, like any concept, the notion of “subjectivity” only acquires meaning for the individual in the course of her experiences: “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” (Pragmatism 28). Experience involves a fluid and reciprocal movement between the individual and her surroundings. But then, how do we define experience in the literary pragmatist approach? What kinds of “truths” emerge within the flux of experience? And how does the literary interpretation of “the individual” inflect the acquisition of such truths?
As the literary writer among the early pragmatists, Henry James articulates the widest and richest array of answers to these questions. James’s figurative language brings to full fruition the interconnections between late nineteenth-century American social contexts and references to the Civil War, the American Revolution, the corporate economy, and the growth of the railroad. Similarly, James’s works flesh out the protagonists of pragmatism, offering characters who both reflect and extend their defining attributes. Nurtured in late nineteenth-century America, such attributes cover a wide spectrum, from emphatic moralism to qualified amorality, from a trust in institutional authority to a suspicion of it, from vulnerability to courage to martial valor. James’s characters complicate these traits, putting pressure on them and showing how they morph through circumstances and interpersonal relationships. Part of the significance of positioning James as a through line in early pragmatism rests on how he diversifies the pragmatic understanding of the relationship between experience and truth. Among other things, James shows us that this relationship does not follow a set pattern. In his fiction, “truth” can be the product of a single individual’s experiences, specifically the experiences involved in developing, acting upon, and reaping the consequences of particular beliefs.3 Such beliefs rarely remain fixed and stable during this process. For James’s characters, experience usually involves the acquisition of truth through doubts that modify and even destroy long-held convictions.
The contribution this book makes to scholarship begins with the premise that James’s fiction provides the most complete expression of how early pragmatism envisages a relationship between experience and truth. Other monographs have offered comprehensive studies of the origins of pragmatism, but they tend to place James in the background, as Menand does in The Metaphysical Club. On the other side, works that do consider the relationship between James’s literature and pragmatism usually have focused exclusively on the connection between his novels and the theories of his brother William. Furthermore, these works have tilted their literary analyses toward William James’s famous “stream of consciousness,” a metaphor that informs the investigation of the (Henry and William) Jamesian portrayal of subjectivity in Sämi Ludwig’s Pragmatist Realism, Jill Kress’s The Figure of Consciousness, and Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism. Among monographs published in the last few years, Lisi Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism and Grimstad’s Experience and Experimental Writing consider James’s writings alongside the works of other authors, such as Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust (Schoenbach), and Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville (Grimstad). This book is built on the thesis that James should be placed at the forefront of early pragmatism, as it unfolds through the writings of all three thinkers, William James, Holmes, and Peirce. Working in the context of previous literary pragmatist approaches to James, the book expands the picture of James as an author committed to the dialectics of experience, ideals of action, and the fluid and ceaseless interplays between experience and truth. At the same time, the book also solidifies his place within the entire movement by emphasizing the centrality of his approach to characterization and figurative language. The complexity of his language and the diversity of his characters show us how literature plays out (to rephrase one of William James’s book titles) the varieties of pragmatist experience.
The Origins of Pragmatism: Myths, Maxims, and Institutions
Pragmatism has always been connected to American national identity, but just as the degree of cohesion in late nineteenth-century (and present-day) America is open to debate, so too, even in its formative stages, pragmatism was not a unified school of thought. Nonetheless, there are parallels between late nineteenth-century national unity and the originary development of pragmatism. Cornel West describes pragmatism as a “continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment” (5). Traditionally, the American identity of the movement has been associated with concerns such as democracy, pluralism, individuality, practicality, and, most famously, social amelioration.4 But these characteristics also speak to a structural intersection between pragmatism and the national ethos that is built around a shared use of mythology. G.W.F. Hegel anticipated at least one point of contact between American mythology and pragmatist thinking when he wrote in The Philosophy of History: “America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of World’s History shall reveal itself” (86). Looking ahead from the early nineteenth century, Hegel expected that the world-historical concept of freedom would unfold in a wholly original manner in America. From this idealistic (and totalizing) point of view, the post-Civil War era of consolidation represented a new stage in the expansion of freedom, since the institutional ideal of amelioration (the destruction of slavery and the enforced reunification of the nation) reaffirmed the revolutionary heritage. In this sense, pragmatism came on the scene at a moment when at least one part of the collective imagination was receptive to a new ideal of national unity founded on the principles of democracy and amelioration.
The first pragmatist thinkers, William James and Charles Peirce, supported the idealistic parallel by affording the birth of pragmatism a mythic status. In their hands, the emergence of pragmatism became an event, a synchronization of universality and particularity. Most scholarship has accepted the synthesis, maintaining that the massive and diverse movement began in a close-knit circle, the Metaphysical Club that flourished briefly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872. The group included among its ranks Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.5 As Menand discusses, the multitalented Chauncey Wright was the leading figure in the original group, since he essentially lived for intellectual debate.6 But James and Peirce gave the Metaphysical Club its historic stature by claiming that Peirce read a paper at the final meeting in which he used the term pragmatism to express his approval of the definition of a belief as “that upon which a man is prepared to act” (Philosophical Writings 270).7 It is questionable as to whether Peirce really did introduce the term pragmatism at this point, but then again, perhaps the significance of the issue resides in its indeterminacy.8 The process of affording some literary cohesiveness and even drama to the birth of the philosophy captures one aspect of the way mythology may function in intellectual as well as national history.
The counterpart to the myth is the written declaration of a principle—a philosophical maxim. Both Peirce and William James articulated versions of the maxim of pragmatism, albeit three decades after the final meeting of the Metaphysical Club. In a 1903 lecture (published later as the “Maxim of Pragmatism”) Peirce asserts, “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have: then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (Essential Peirce, vol. 2: 135). As critics have noted, this turgid formula focuses on the anticipation of consequences. But the version of pragmatism that has lived more for posterity is grounded on the actual manifestation of consequences, a transition that began with William James’s discussion of the movement in Pragmatism.9 The term “transition” should perhaps be used under advisement because James’s emphasis that the “principle of Peirce” (Pragmatism 26) preceded his construction of pragmatism might well have been an attempt to support and direct attention to his impoverished friend. At any rate, James reproduces Peirce’s maxim, but then stresses, “To take in the importance of Peirce’s principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases.” James also states, “The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?” (26). In other words, the value of an idea or belief rests on the consequences that manifest themselves through the practical application of the idea or belief. James’s renowned conception of truth has been the most influential theorem within the larger structure of his pragmatism, mainly because he identifies the “theory of what is meant by truth” as one of the two pillars that form the “scope of pragmatism” (33) (the other one is the methodology itself). James writes, “‘Grant a...