General Criticism Of Pragmatism
by Emile Durkheim

The General Spirit of Pragmatism

It has been said that pragmatism is above all an attempt to liberate the will. If the world is to solicit our activity, we must be able to change it; and for that to occur, it must be malleable. Things are not chiefly important for what they are, but for what they are worth. The basis of our action is a hierarchy of values which we ourselves have established. Our action is therefore only worthwhile if that system of values can be realised, made incarnate, in our world. Pragmatism thus gives a meaning to action.

Nevertheless, this preoccupation with action, which has been seen as the defining characteristic of pragmatism, is not, in my view, its major feature. Man's burning desire to transform things is apparent in the thought of all the idealists. When we have an ideal, we see the world as something obliged to conform to it. Pragmatism, however, is not a form of idealism, but a radical empiricism. What is there in it which could justify such a desire to transform things? We have seen that for pragmatism there are not two planes of existence, but only one, and consequently it is impossible to see where the ideal could be located. As has just been shown, God himself is an object of experience in pragmatist doctrine.

We can therefore conclude that pragmatism is much less of an undertaking to encourage action than an attack on pure speculation and theoretical thought. What is really characteristic of it is an impatience with any rigorous intellectual discipline. It aspires to 'liberate' thought much more than it does action. Its ambition, as James says, is to 'make the truth more supple'. We shall see later what reasons it adduces to support its view that truth must not remain 'rigid'.

General Criticism Of Pragmatism

We can now move on to the general discussion of pragmatist doctrines.

They can, first of all, be criticised for certain gaps in them. The pragmatists take too many liberties with historical doctrines. They interpret them as they wish, and often rather inexactly.

Above all, however, we must indicate the abstract nature of their argument, since it clashes with the general orientation, which they claim is empirical, of their doctrine. Most of the time, their proofs have a dialectical character; everything is reduced to a purely logical construction. This provides one contradiction.

But their thought presents other flagrant contradictions. Here is an example: on the one hand, we are told that consciousness as such does not exist, that it is nothing original, that it is neither a factor sui generis nor a true reality, but is only a simple echo, a 'vain noise' left behind by the 'soul' that has vanished from the heaven of philosophy. This, as we know, is the theme of the famous article, 'Does consciousness exist?', a theme which James took up again in the form of a communication in French to the Congress of 1905. On the other hand, however, the pragmatists maintain that reality is a construction of thought, that reality is apperception itself. In so doing they attribute to thought the same power and the same qualities as the idealists ascribe to it. They urge both epiphenomenalism and idealism, two incompatible theses. Pragmatism therefore lacks those basic characteristics which one has the right to expect of a philosophical doctrine.

Here we must ask ourselves a question. How does it happen that, with such defects, pragmatism has imposed itself on so many minds? It must be based on something in the human consciousness and have a strength that we have yet to discover.

The Fundamental Motivation of the Pragmatist Attitude

Let us ask ourselves, then, what feeling animates the doctrine, what motivation is its essential factor. I have said already that it is not a practical need, a need to extend the field of human action. There is, to be sure, particularly in James, a liking for risk, a need for adventure; he prefers an uncertain, 'malleable' world to a fixed and immobile world, because it is a world in which there is something to do. This is certainly the ideal of the strong man who wishes to expand the field of his activity. But how, then, can the same philosopher show us as an ideal the ascetic who renounces the world and turns away from it?

Actually, pragmatism has not been concerned with picturing a particular ideal for us. Its dominant trait is the need to 'soften the truth', to make it 'less rigid', as James says - to free it, in short, from the discipline of logical thought. This appears very clearly in James's The Will to Believe .Once this is posited, everything becomes clear. If thought had as its object simply to 'reproduce' reality, it would be the slave of things, and chained to reality. It would simply have to slavishly 'copy' the reality before it. If thought is to be freed, it must become the creator of its own object, and the only way to attain this goal is to give it a reality to make or construct. Therefore, thought has as its aim not the reproduction of a datum, but the construction of a future reality. It follows that the value of ideas can no longer be assessed by reference to objects but must be determined by their degree of utility, their more or less 'advantageous' character.

We can thus see the scope of the pragmatist theses. If, in classical rationalism, thought has this character of 'rigidity', for which pragmatism criticises it, it is because in rationalism truth is conceived of as a simple thing, a thing quasi-divine, that draws its whole value from itself. Since it is seen as sufficient unto itself, it is necessarily placed above human life. It cannot conform to the demands of circumstances and differing temperaments. It is valid by itself and is good with an absolute goodness. It does not exist for our sake, but for its own. Its role is to let itself be contemplated. It is so to speak deified; it becomes the object of a real cult. This is still Plato's conception. It extends to the faculty by means of which we attain truth, that is, reason. Reason serves to explain things to us, but, in this conception, itself remains unexplained; it is placed outside scientific analysis.

'To soften' the truth is to take from it this absolute and as it were sacrosanct character. It is to tear it away from this state of immobility that removes it from all becoming, from all change and, consequently, from all explanation. Imagine that instead of being thus confined in a separate world, it is itself part of reality and life, not by a kind of fall or degradation that would disfigure and corrupt it, but because it is naturally part of reality and life.' It is placed in the series of facts, at the very heart of things having antecedents and consequences. It poses problems: we are authorised to ask ourselves where it comes from, what good it is and so on. It becomes itself an object of knowledge. Herein lies the interest of the pragmatist enterprise: we can see it as an effort to understand truth and reason themselves, to restore to them their human interest, to make of them human things that derive from temporal causes and give rise to temporal consequences. To 'soften' truth is to make it into something that can be analysed and explained.

It is here that we can establish a parallel between pragmetism and sociology. By applying the historical point of view to the order of things human, sociology is led to set itself the same problem. Man is a product of history and hence of becoming; there is nothing in him that is either given or defined in advance. History begins nowhere and it ends nowhere. Everything in man has been made by mankind in the course of time. Consequently, if truth is human, it too is a human product. Sociology applies the same conception to reason. All that constitutes reason, its principles and categories, has been made in the course of history.

Everything is a product of certain causes. Phenomena must not be represented in closed series: things have a 'circular' character, and analysis can be prolonged to infinity. This is why I can accept neither the statement of the idealists, that in the beginning there is thought, nor that of the pragmatists, that in the beginning there is action.

But if sociology poses the problem in the same way as does pragmatism, it is in a better position to solve it. The latter, in fact, claims to explain truth psychologically and subjectively. However, the nature of the individual is too limited to explain alone all things human. Therefore, if we envisage individual elements alone, we are led to diminish unduly the amplitude of the effects that we have to account for. How could reason, in particular, have arisen in the course of the experiences undergone by a single individual? Sociology provides us with broader explanations. For it, truth, reason and morality are the results of a becoming that includes the entire unfolding of human history.

Thus we see the advantage of the sociological over the pragmatist point of view. For the pragmatist philosophers, as we have already said several times, experience can take place on one level only. Reason is placed on the same plane as sensitivity; truth, on the same plane as sensations and instincts. But men have always recognised in truth something that in certain respects imposes itself on us, something that is independent of the facts of sensitivity and individual impulse. Such a universally held conception of truth must correspond to something real. It is one thing to cast doubt on the correspondence between symbols and reality; but it is quite another to reject the thing symbolised along with the symbol. This pressure that truth is seen as exercising on minds is itself a symbol that must be interpreted, even if we refuse to make of truth something absolute and extra-human.

Pragmatism, which levels everything, deprives itself of the means of making this interpretation by failing to recognise the duality that exists between the mentality which results from individual experiences and that which results from collective experiences. Sociology, however, reminds us that what is social always possesses a higher dignity than what is individual. It can be assumed that truth, like reason and morality, will always retain this character of being a higher value. This in no way prevents us from trying to explain it. The sociological point of view has the advantage of enabling us to analyse even that august thing, truth.

Until now there has been no particularly urgent need to choose between the points of view of sociology and pragmatism. In contrast to rationalism, pragmatism sees clearly that error does not lie on one side and truth on the other, but that in reality truths and errors are mixed, the latter having often been moments in the evolution of truth. In the history of creations, there are unforeseeable novelties. How, then, could truth be conceived of as something fixed and definitive?

But the reasons that pragmatism adduces to support this idea are susceptible to a great many objections. Moreover, the fact that things change does not necessarily mean that truth changes at the same time. Truth, one could say, is enriched; but it does not really change. It has certainly been enlarged and increased in the course of the development of history; but saying that truth grows is quite different from saying that it varies in its very nature.

End of General Criticism Of Pragmatism by Emile Durkheim