Pragmatism in Europe

In his preface to Pragmatism (1907), James commented that the pragmatic movement was the focal expression of a number of philosophical tendencies suddenly becoming conscious of themselves and of “their combined mission.” He mentioned the French thinkers Maurice Blondel, Édouard Le Roy, and B. de Sailly and the Italian iconoclastic critic Giovanni Papini. Blondel was the author of L’Action (1893) and a spokesman for a voluntaristic and activistic theory of knowledge. He was a founder of the “school of action,” a liberal Roman Catholic group that was part of the Modernist movement (which employed the new historicocritical approach to the Bible and promoted a rationalistic interpretation of the faith). As early as 1888, Blondel appropriated the term pragmatisme, only to abandon it when he learned of American pragmatism, which was a more naturalistic philosophy than his own. Le Roy, closer to James than other French thinkers, also called his view “pragmatism.” In broad respects he was like James in holding that the truth and the full significance of beliefs is found in acting them out. Le Roy was a disciple of Henri Poincaré, who had argued that scientific theories are neither mere summaries of data nor deduced from axioms but are creative constructions, products of human thought and ingenuity. To the question of what limits are imposed on otherwise arbitrary conventions, of what justifies them, Le Roy suggested their convenience in use. James saw similar forms of pragmatism in the thought of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, Pierre Duhem, and Théodore Ruyssen, each of whom, according to James, accepted “the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality” and that “their great use is to summarize old facts and lead to new ones” so that they are a “man-made language, a conceptual shorthand…in which we write our reports of nature.”

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Another French thinker, Georges Sorel, reformulated Jamesian pragmatism and its emphasis on action into a “useful” doctrine of social criticism. The Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini later cited Sorel and James as two of his philosophical mentors. He claimed to find in James “that faith in action, that ardent will to live and fight, to which fascism owes a great part of its success.” To the democratic James, no lesson could have been more badly learned. A more immediate and direct form of James’s pragmatism occurred in Italy, with its centre in the journal Leonardo, under the leadership of Papini. James referred to Papini as “a brilliant, humorous and witty writer.” He called him a genius and was addressed in turn by him as “the Master.” Papini’s pragmatism, derived from James’s “The Will to Believe,” became a theory of the will to action. In action, through creative power and passion, humans achieve a kind of divinity. This romantic exaltation of action was appealing to artists but also to fanatics. Papini and his associate Giuseppe Prezzolini constituted the “magical” school of pragmatism, in the sense of seeking “divinely creative” power. They were opposed by the “logical” school of Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni, who were inspired by Peirce.

The British philosopher Ferdinand C.S. Schiller was the most famous pragmatist in Europe at the time of his death in 1937. An admirer and friend of James, he was initially a humanist, in the sense that he viewed both reality and knowledge as reflections of human activity—“the taken” rather than “the given.” He first came to appreciate James’s “The Will to Believe” in 1897 and subsequently acknowledged its impact on his thinking in an early important paper, “Axioms as Postulates” (1902). Schiller was a tireless critic of the “closed” systems of the English idealists F.H. Bradley, J.M.E. McTaggart, and Bernard Bosanquet. Instead, Schiller advocated an intellectual freedom consisting in open, plural, changing—and to some extent never finished—philosophical theorizing. According to Schiller, reality and truth are artifacts rather than eternal verities. The true and the false, basically forms of good and bad, are thus relative to the private purposes of particular individuals. Schiller attempted to describe and analyze the logic of the experimental “trying” through which such needs are satisfied. He viewed reality as wholly plastic: starting from initial postulates, one proceeds to construct schemes for achieving a satisfactory outcome of desire, finally rendering unformed possibilities into a common world of language and action. Schiller regarded all of science as derived from and inescapably guided by the psychological processes of human thought. Thus, in his system, man became the measure of all things.