>> DOUG ANDERSON: The story of action in American
thought and culture always coincides with
the story of experience; in fact experience
becomes the honorific word for all of the
pragmatic thinkers.
Action is a primary theme in American thought
from the pragmatists back, and from the pragmatists
forward.
>> MARTIN JAY: Even before the pragmatists,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's great essay
on Experience is one of the locations of that
term in the American vocabulary. You know,
it's one of the places where it's given
a kind of thematic importance.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: "Action is with the scholar
subordinate but it is essential. Without it
he is not yet man. Without it, thought can
never ripen into truth."
>> MARTIN JAY: And of course James and others
took Emerson quite seriously.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Both Dewey and James wrote
encomia for Emerson.
>> MARTIN JAY: Experience was, as I said earlier,
in terms of one of its acceptations, close
to experiment. And the point that certain
pragmatists in their more instrumental moods
always made was that you have to intervene
in the world. You have to act that thought
alone was insufficient. That pure contemplation
was not enough.
>> ANNE ROSE: This need to not only have an
idea but to want other people to accept it,
number one. To want it to be tangible, concrete
and lived out.
>> MARTIN JAY: So experience was one of the
ways in which people were drawn back into
the world.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: so evasion of Cartesian
subjectivism requires and analysis of our
subjectivity in our being gripped by the world
in which we are involved necessarily and engaged.
>> VINCENT COLAPIETRO: By Cartesianism I mean
the primacy of subjectivity or selfhood and
it's basically the spectator, the I as spectator,
the I as originally solitary and only eventually
and in some respects incidentally social.
>> MARTIN JAY: The great pragmatist innovation
in a way although I think it's shared by
some European thinkers is to move experience
away from a purely subjective, internal, and
in some way even solipsistic moment into a
far more englobing kind of concept in which
both subject and object were immersed.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: The word experience carries
risks of misunderstanding. The most obvious
risk is that we'll misunderstand it in the
Cartesian way somehow as subjective mental
events, somehow inside. I think Descartes
is confused. As mental events somehow inside
a non-spatial, container.
>> RICHARD RORTY: Descartes and Locke gave
us a picture of "experience" as something
taking place within us that was distinct from
anything physiological and I don't think
we need a notion of some non-physiological
processes taking place within us.
>> MARTIN JAY: Certainly, critics like Richard
Rorty have found that they were, perhaps,
overly reliant on a covert metaphysical notion
of experience and he wants to get beyond that
and even chuck out the idea of experience
itself as unnecessary, stressing language
and stressing a different level of interpretation
rather than a level which moves us back to
experience, primordial or otherwise.
>> RICHARD RORTY: I think that people like
Wilfrid Sellars are right in suggesting that
the notion of "experience" is more trouble
than it's worth.
That, if you talk about linguistic behavior
and the social practice of using language,
that you give reasons for and against performing
a certain action, you have captured everything
that's unique about human beings.
You don't also have to have an account of
something called "human experience".
So I think that the notion of "experience"
as a topic of philosophical inquiry was an
unfortunate seventeenth century invention.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: In my way of looking at
it, that's a very thin account of "why
experience".
And without going into philosophical argumentation
about it, I think what gets lost here are
a number of things. One is a sense of history.
Even if one gives articulation linguistically
to history, you lose the influence, I mean
the actual, hard core influence on your social
habits.
And I think that's a drastic oversight of
a linguistic account.
>> RICHARD RORTY: I think that if you just
forget about notions like "experience"
and "consciousness" and just talk about
social practices, including, particularly,
linguistic practices, you won't miss anything
that's philosophically significant.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Peirce has this three-categoried
system of philosophy and the second of these
categories is called secondness and secondness
is better described in experiential terms
as resistance, constraint, otherness, something
that is antagonistic.
So this secondness stuff seems to me to get
thoroughly lost in the linguistic turn because
there's nothing really pushing back.
The pushing back is already enfolded into
my linguistic story, into my habits of speech
and so on.
And you lost the sense of the gratingness
of living through a life.
I think it's important that any philosophy
that moves forward whether it's neo-pragmatism
or pragmatism or idealism or materialism that
it not lose this sense of, or this strong
sense, not just of an intellectual "other",
but of a radical, what Peirce used to call
"bruteness" that confronts you.
You know, when you bump your head on the door,
which is one of the ones he talks about, or
when you're, if you've experienced any.
I have a great example.
I used to work on a dairy farm. I was bending
over to put feed into the stanchion for this
very gentle cow and the gentle cow very gently
raised her head and of course on the forehead
it's all bony.
The thing knocked me clear back against the
wall.
This very gentle-seeming little cow. Bang!
And I'm back against the wall.
Now, to tell this as a linguistic story is
to miss the hard core bruteness of the experience.
So however else you want to go on about telling
this pragmatic story, whether you want to
take this linguistic turn or stick with the
experience-version that Dewey and James work
on, I think it's crucial that this kind
of thing not be missed.
Because that's really at the heart of everything
that the early pragmatists were doing.
>> MARTIN JAY: What the pragmatists used experience
for was a kind of all-purpose tool to make
the traditional separation between subject
and object or between contemplation and action,
to make these essentially antiquated and to
move beyond them into a world of action, a
world that was more process oriented, a world
that could involve pluralism and intervention,
sometimes instrumental, sometimes aesthetic,
but a world which was not simply settled.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: So this becomes not only
a tool but a prerequisite for becoming an
American scholar.
>> MARTIN JAY: So that Dewey in particular
thought that experience was a term that could
have positive political impacts and of course
we know in pedagogical terms his whole educational
theories were based on notions of experience
rather than on notions of simple book-learning
and theory or doctrine. So these were all
a variety of ways in which pragmatists made
sense of experience.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Both William James and Charles
Peirce draw on the psychologist Alexander
Bain, a Scottish psychologist of the day who
argues that what belief is is a willingness
to act.
If you believe something, you will be willing
to act on it.
And you'll learn about what it was you believed,
because the cash value of that idea is gonna
be worked out in what happens when you act
on it.
So action, purpose, experience: all of these
are ways of understanding what we thought
we thought.
What the ideas are.
What our beliefs are.
And that's the story of the pragmatic tradition.
