Guest Column

...For some reason which I can't quite remember, this seemed to me a monstrously pernicious idea, an error which if permitted to live and propagate would probably put an end to civilized intelligence forever...

...Dewey has no cosmolocv and can have none with such a definition of truth...

...Important conclusions, it seems to me, are to be drawn from this fact, but not the conclusion he drew...

...To be principled without being fanatical, and flexible without being opportunistic, summarizes the logic and ethics of pragmatism in action," Hook tells us...

...And I want my friends who confuse religious piety with libertarian conservatism to know that with their fixed bias against what they call "relativism," and their holding fast with a grip like an infant to Christian mythology, they are much closer to pragmatism than they think...

...1 had the luck to study and teach under John Dewey for several years and got it stuck in my head that those words mean something...

...I go the whole length of Sidney Hook's admiration for Lincoln, but it brings me to the opposite conclusion: namely, that Lincoln had as little kinship with the 20th-century ideological maneuver called pragmatism as anybody in history...

...It is going to be sad for me if I have to mount the ramparts all alone in this battle to hold some meaning in the words pragmatist and pragmatism—hold it against emotional sapping tactics from both Left and Right...

...I want those who fall for it to know what they are letting themselves in for...

...Not only Karl Marx but Abraham Lincoln was a pragmatist...

...At any rate, that is why I want to keep clear the meaning of the words pragmatist and pragmatism...

...I've been intending for some time to write a grandmotherly essay suggesting a mental house-cleaning on this subject, and I thought incidentally I might throw in a few of the neglected facts about John Dewey...

...It wasn't so very long ago—at least not more than a century—when Sidney Hook, just fresh from a PhD at Columbia, advanced the thesis that Karl Marx was, to all intents and purposes, a pragmatist...

...Broadly enough interpreted, this remained the dominant motive in all his philosophizing...

...Abraham Lincoln, he announced in enormous headlines, was a pragmatist...

...His argument in the lectures later published as Pragmatism (which, by the way, I had the luck to attend) was as naive and as religiously motivated as that...

...In this effort I always believed I could count on the loyal—and, better still, the scholarly and logical—assistance of Sidney Hook...

...In fact, any man with high principles who is loyal to them and yet also is a wise guy is a pragmatist...

...For it is impractical to mix the purpose of an act with the definition of the facts upon which it is to be based...

...If pragmatism were, as so many think, an ideological glorification of America's hard-headed practicality, one might plausibly maintain that Abraham Lincoln would have been sympathetic to it...

...I indulged in a six-month debauch of scholarship —an indulgence I rarely permit myself, for I am a temperate man—and came up with a 52-page brochure which, in my opinion, demolished Sidney Hook's thesis and tore it from existence root and branch...

...Dewey's mistake was to identify truth not with the contribution of the moment of suspense but with the happy outcome of the whole process...

...Nor do I think that, if he had felt the need, he would have favored this elaborately impractical way of meeting it...

...Thinking is practical—its suspension of the stream of impulse is practical—for the very reason that it guides the impulse with reference to data which are relevant to but not affected by it...

...If thought in its rudiments is a delayed response, a suspense of action enabling memory and imagination to make a more circumspect adjustment than is possible to blind instinct, is it not obvious that in expert thinking this suspense of action must be more, and not less, complete...

...It is the expansion of that moment of suspense that gives us science, the life of reason and, in the high sense, truth...

...I didn't see anybody else on the horizon having the peculiar background necessary to save mankind from this disaster, so I took it upon myself...

...Unfortunately for the meanings of words, it also summarizes moral integrity and sound intelligence...

...What they mean, moreover, is mighty near the opposite of what many supposedly learned people think they do...

...It was an adroit maneuver...

...But now I find that all my labor and eloquence, and the risk to my brain tissue, were futile...

...But one morning not long ago I unfolded The New Leader [March 18] and found Sidney Hook himself indulging, although from a different angle, in the same slovenly use of the words pragmatist and pragmatism...

...If the truth is what works, and it works to believe that God exists, then it is true that God exists...

...But in my opinion it subtracted authority from science and rational speculation without really adding it to moral judgments...

...It pervaded his speculations but found its concentrated expression—if anything Dewey wrote can be called concentrated—in his paper on "The Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality," to be found in the publications of the University of Chicago for 1903...

...Conceivably, that is a reason why Sidney Hook, who has been waging such brilliant war in the press lately against pernicious forms of wishful thinking, finds it easy to ignore the precise tenets of his philosophy...

...The art of valid thinking must be an art of setting aside not only action but the whole preoccupation with its purposes...

...I think Dewey was right in emphasizing the fact that thinking developed as an instrument for the solution of specific problems of action...

...Indeed, I think it tinges the entire life of the mind with a flavor, by definition ineradicable, of wishful thinking...

...The effective working of an idea and its truth are the same thing," he wrote, "this working being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth, but its nature...

...It subtracted authority fro-n all judgments...

...I think Lincoln would have defended those spiritual values without ideological complications, by simply asserting that, if you wish to live a rewarding and rich life, they are essential...

...Dewey's original motive in groping after this definition of truth—he told me more than once—was to give moral judgments the authority possessed by the judgments of material science, to reconcile what he was teaching in Sunday school with what he was reading in Huxley's physiology...

...At least he was not given to sentimental bunk and self-deception...

...That any such defense was needed had certainly never occurred to Lincoln's mind...

...But pragmatism is almost the opposite of that—an effort to defend the values called spiritual against a glorification of America's hard-headed practicality...

...Not only was Dewey's primary motive to defend moral values against the ravages of material science, but William James was concerned to defend against the same danger his belief in God...

...I don't believe in pragmatism myself...

...Indeed, there were moments in the writing when I doubted whether Sidney himself would survive the attack...

...It was not a thesis but an emotion that I was tilting against...

...Moreover, it is one of the things that make Dewey's philosophy so dull...