32. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 699-723

Self-Consciousness: Self-Realization (André Gide, D.H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky); The Field of Consciousness (Henry James, William James)

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André Gide: The Value of Inconstancy


In these excerpts from Later Fruits of the Earth (1935) and his journals for 1923, Gide embraces the fluidity of the personality as a form of liberation, looking back in particular to the repressiveness of his strict upbringing. "I feel that what is diverse in me is still myself," he asserts, rejecting the ancient command to "know thyself." In his experience, "only rather poor and limited personalities succeeded in finding and understanding themselves." He chooses instead "the perpetual and elusive process of becoming." 


In his childhood, he recalls, "My parents had accustomed me to act, not according to my inner urge, but according to an ethical rule outside of me, which they considered applicable to all men.... Not to have acted, in whatever combination of circumstances, precisely as I was expected to act seemed to me abominable to such a point that all inner peace was immediately compromised, that peace without which I believed that I could not live." Following the rule seemed to them true freedom, while not following it made one "a slave to his passions." As a result, "they have an illusion of acting freely while already their choice has ceased to be free."


But liberating himself from "the rigorous puritan upbringing by which my parents had fashioned my childhood" brought about a recognition that he had achieved a kind of sincerity that replaced the hypocrisy of rule-following: "I never seemed more moral to myself than at the time when I had decided to cease being moral; I mean: to be moral henceforth only in my own way."

Henceforth, acting in any way whatever and not giving myself time to reflect, my least acts seemed to me more significant since they were no longer reasoned out. At the same time I delivered myself from anxiety, perplexity, and remorse.

Finding a historical pretext for the instinctual life, he observes that "The Greeks ... recognized as many gods as there are instinct, and the problem for them was to keep the inner Olympus in equilibrium, not to subjugate and subdue any of the gods." And he observes that for the people "I consider among the best tempered, happiness lies not in comfort and quietude, but in ardor. A sort of magnificent using up is all the more desirable to them since they are constantly being renewed by it and do not so much suffer from the wearing away as they rejoice in their perpetual re-creation." 


This leads him to the assertion that, as this life is all we are given -- he rejects the idea of immortality -- we might as well make the most of it, accepting "that almost perfect satisfaction I enjoy in effort itself and in the immediate realization of happiness and harmony." He turns Christ's command, "Sell all your goods and give them to the poor," into an injunction to liberate himself from moral conformity: "I began then to seek out which, among the thoughts, opinions, and tendencies of my soul and mind that were most familiar to me, were the ones that I most certainly derived from my ancestors, from my upbringing and puritan formation," and to get rid of them. "I soon felt my soul only as a loving will ..., palpitating, open to all comers, like unto everything, impersonal, a naïve confusion of appetites, greeds, desires." 


But once again he finds the words of Christ applicable to his situation: "Why should you be troubled?" 

I surrendered then to this provisional disorder, trusting in a more sincere and natural order that would organize itself, I thought, and believing moreover that the disorder itself was less dangerous for my soul than an arbitrary and necessarily artificial order, since I had not invented it.

He also rejects what he sees as the spiritual pride of the puritan: "Considering ... that nothing separates one more from God than pride and that nothing made me prouder than my virtue, I began to detest that very virtue and everything on which I could pride myself, everything that allowed me to say: I am not like you, common run of men!" By standing puritan-Christian morality on its head, he found his way, or the freedom of lacking a way: "Every step I took forward was a venture into the unknown." 




D.H. Lawrence: The Living Self 


Like Gide, Lawrence finds an affirmation of this life, rather than a narrow moral path leading to the next one, provides true liberation of the spirit. And in the essay "Why the Novel Matters" (1936) he proclaims the novel to be the true holy writ. 


He begins with a rejection of the mind-body dualism: "We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it," but argues that "the tin can business, or vessel of clay, is just bunk. And that's what you learn, when you're a novelist. And that's what you are very liable not to know, if you're a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person." The body is what matters. 

Every man, philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That's the end of man alive. As for the words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf.

"Only connect," urged E.M. Forster, and art is a medium for connecting one human being to another, via Lawrence's "tremulations in the ether." 


"Nothing is important but life," Lawrence proclaims. And the artist is the true affirmer of life. "The philosopher, on the other hand, because he can think, decides that nothing but thoughts matter. It is as if a rabbit, because he can make little pills, should decide that nothing but little pills matter." The scientist, he says, works on inert things: "he has absolutely no use for me so long as I am man alive." 

Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the parts.

Earlier in the anthology, Lawrence had rejected the notion that the sun was "a sphere of blazing gas" as a reductionist view of science. It is the novelist, he says, who gets the point, who sees things as a whole. "And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog." Novels, too, "are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do." 


Lawrence naturally has a broad view of what a novel is: He includes the Bible ("but all the Bible"), Homer and Shakespeare as "the supreme old novels," because "They set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate growth in one direction." Like Gide, Lawrence values process, becoming: "All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another." He acknowledges that the individual maintains a kind of integrity, but that it's impossible to isolate: "It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of myself, and that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern." 


The peculiar value of the novel is that its "characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead." This is the great function of the novel, to demonstrate the difference between being alive and being dead. "To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point," and "in the novel you can see, plainly, when the man goes dead, the woman goes inert. You can develop an instinct for life, if you will, instead of a theory of right and wrong, good and bad." For "only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living." 




Rainer Maria Rilke: The Self and Reality 


Rilke's letter to "L.H.," written in 1915 -- a time of war -- expresses the difficult relationship between an individual and a cosmos that increasingly seems severely alien. In fact, Rilke expresses "astonishment over the fact that men have for thousands of years [dealt] with life (not to mention God)" and yet "remain such helpless novices, so between fright and subterfuge, so miserable." He refers to "God and gods" as a shorthand for the undying sense that humans are dwarfed by their environment. 

Who knows, I ask myself, whether we do not always approach the gods so to speak from behind, separated from their sublimely radiant face through nothing but themselves, quite near to the expression we yearn for, only just standing behind it -- but what does that mean save that our countenance and the divine face are looking out in the same direction, are at one; and this being so, how are we to approach the god from the space that lies in front of him?

Humankind may, in fact, be confronting the same dilemma as the gods -- so rather than a separation, perhaps there is a harmony of purpose between us and ... whatever you want to call it. 

Let us agree that since his earliest beginnings man has shaped gods in whom here and there were contained only the dead and threatening and destructive and frightful, violence, anger, superpersonal stupor, tied up as it were into a tight knot of malice: the alien, if you like, but, already to some extent implied in this alien, the admission that one was aware of it, endured it, yes, acknowledged it for a sure, secret, relationship and connection.

Instead, why not recognize the gods as a projection of humanity, "a part ... of the human mind" and that this "tension" between the individual and the universe is self-defeating, a tension against oneself? Like God, death is not external, not the "other." To treat them as outside oneself is a mistake. 

Nature knew nothing of this removal we had somehow accomplished -- if a tree blossoms, death blossoms in it as well as life, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends out a rich expression of life, and the beasts go patiently from one [to the] other -- and everywhere about us death is still at home and he watches us out of the cracks in things, and a rusty nail, sticking up somewhere out of a plank, does nothing day and night but rejoice over death.

By accepting that the universe is not alien, that in the midst of life we are in death, we liberate ourselves.  




Wassily Kandinsky: An Expressionist Credo 

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

Wassily Kandinsky, c. 1913? 

Kandinsky's 1913 Concerning the Spiritual in Art is one of the intellectual documents of Expressionism, proclaiming the necessity of the subjective element in painting and the other arts. 

The artist is not only justified in using, but is under a moral obligation to use, only those forms which fulfill his own need. Absolute freedom from anatomy or anything else of the kind must be given to the artist in his choice of means. Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.

As such, art's function is "the development and refinement of the human soul," and a reaction against not only materialism but also the doctrine of "art for art's sake." The center of the credo is Kandinsky's proclamation: "The artist must have something to communicate, since mastery over form is not the end but, instead, the adapting of form to internal significance." For Kandinsky, "communicating" certainly does not mean slavishly reproducing external objects, but baring the contents of his soul. Art is a kind of priesthood in which  "the artist has a triple responsibility: 

1. he must return the talent which he has; 
2. his actions, feelings and thoughts, like those of every man, create a spiritual atmosphere which is either pure or infected;
3. his actions and thoughts are the material for his creations, which in turn influence the spiritual atmosphere."

Beauty, in short, "is produced by internal necessity, which springs from the soul."

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition X, 1939

Henry James: Centers of Consciousness 


The preface to The Princess Cassamassima (1908) is late James, which means dense and mannered prose, entwining itself around a topic without clinging to it. In essence, what James is arguing here is that the novel needs a central consciousness expressed through a character who is neither a fool nor someone so intelligent that his awareness prevents him from being detached from the action in which he takes part. 

We care, our curiosity and sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient. Hamlet and Lear are surrounded, amid their complications, by the stupid and the blind, who minister in all sorts of ways to their recorded fate.

It is Hamlet and Lear, of course, whom we care about. Not Regan and Goneril or -- unless one is Tom Stoppard -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. On the other hand, "no 'story' is possible without its fools -- as most of the fine painters of life, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, have abundantly felt." But they knew that to put the fool at the forefront, to have the narrative point of view that of the fool is to put it "within the scope of a denser and duller, a more vulgar and more shallow capacity," resulting in "a picture dim and meagre." They know to place "a mind of some sort -- in the sense of a reflecting and colouring medium -- in possession of the general adventure." 


When Scott fails to do so, in The Bride of Lammermoor, the novel fails: "Edgar of Ravenswood ... has a black cloak and a hat and feathers more than he has a mind," whereas Hamlet, "while equally sabled and draped and plumed, while at least equally romantic, has yet a mind still more than he has a costume." In Tom Jones, Fielding falls somewhere in between: Tom "hasn't a grain of imagination," but the novel succeeds because "his sense of bewilderment obtains altogether on the comic, never on the tragic plane." Moreover, he has an author, "handsomely possessed of a mind" so "that we see him through the mellow air of Fielding's fine old moralism, fine old humour and fine old style, which somehow really enlarge, make every one and every thing important." 


The trick is to find the novel's center of consciousness in a character who "may feel enough and 'know' enough -- or be in the way of learning enough -- for his maximum dramatic value, without feeling and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his proper fusion with the fable." George Eliot presents her characters' "emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness," which become "our own very adventure." 




William James: The Stream of Consciousness


Henry's brother William is an expert on consciousness, as these excerpts from The Principles of Psychology (1890) demonstrate. It's a difficult thing to be an expert in: "No one every had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day is a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree." We think, therefore we are, but more importantly, we are always thinking, and not in discrete little packets of thought. And even if we can isolate a thought, or an idea, we find that it mutates over time: "Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive view of the same thing."

A permanently existing "idea" or "Vorstellung" which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

Thought is continuous. "I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature," but there is no breach within the individual mind. Consciousness may be interrupted -- by sleep, by anesthesia, by trauma -- but "within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous. Even after an interruption, "the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self." We don't -- except perhaps in exceptional, pathological cases -- awake from an interruption of consciousness feeling as if we are not the same person. And "the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt." If there are gaps, somehow we span them. 

To expect the consciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does not see.

The "common whole" that bridges the gaps "is myself, I, or me." Consequently, "In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."


Even violent irruptions into the stream are nevertheless part of it. "Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it." Context is everything. "Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know." 


But although the stream of consciousness flows steadily, we don't perceive it that way. "Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings." The parts of it where it seems to perch, James calls the "substantive parts"; the flights are the "transitive parts." But it is difficult to examine the transitive parts because of what Heisenberg would later call the uncertainty principle: 

As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas [i.e., switch on the lights] quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. 

Or trying to measure the position and the velocity of an atomic particle simultaneously. 


The consciousness has its own grammar and syntax: "We ought to say a felling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use."


Yet that every datum in our remembered experience has its own context ought to be obvious when we try to remember a name that's on the tip of our tongue. If someone suggests another name, we know it's not the right one. There is a gap there that only one name will fill, just as only one piece of the jigsaw puzzle fits the gap in the picture: "A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the senses of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term." 


In our use of language, "large tracts ... are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense." We have "rapid premonitory perspective view of schemes of thought not yet articulate," so that we can read aloud a passage that we've never seen before and anticipate the words we should emphasize and the direction that the sentence is taking. 

And this foreboding of the coming grammatical scheme combined with each successive uttered word is so practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression of intelligence.

So although consciousness may seem to be made up of discrete bits of perception, a "halo or penumbra ... surrounds" them and "escorts" them through the stream.  

20. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 424-450

Nature: Mechanical Force (Henry Adams, F.T. Marinetti, D.H. Lawrence); Indeterminancy (William James, John Dewey, Werner Heisenberg)

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Henry Adams: The New Multiverse

In 1900, Henry Adams was 62 years old, a nineteenth-century man with, as he says, an "eighteenth-century education," facing the twentieth century and feeling unprepared for it. In these selections from The Education of Henry Adams (1918) he attempts to come to terms with the change he has witnessed during his lifetime -- and the changes to come.

Henry Adams, c. 1875

The first excerpt centers on his reaction to the death in 1870 of his sister Louisa. Writing of himself in third person, as he does throughout the Education, Adams treats Louisa's death as an encounter with nature: "He had never seen Nature -- only her surface -- the sugar-coating that she shows to youth." But Louisa's death from tetanus, "after ten days of fiendish torture," was anything but sugar-coated. "Death took features altogether new to him.... Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm; she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with charm."

He was shocked by Nature's "attitude toward life" and by "the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit by torturing a poor woman.... For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person." It's not a unique reaction to the cruel death of a loved one, but Adams could not assimilate it either emotionally or intellectually:

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was -- a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces -- and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace.

Notice that Adams acknowledges Mont Blanc as "what it was" materially, but he also acknowledges the mountain as an object perceived by the mind and unified by the imagination -- the characteristic nineteenth-century duality.

Thirty years later, he is at the "Great Exposition of 1900" in Paris. World's fairs of this sort had been, since the one in London at the Crystal Palace in 1851, showcases for "progress," a concept that Adams was not fully willing to accept. He takes as his guide through the "chaos" of the exhibition's scientific and technological marvels his friend Samuel Pierpont Langley, an astronomer, physicist and aviation pioneer. Langley's enthusiasm was hardly able to overcome Adams's skepticism, and his horror at such things as "the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour." But it was the "great hall of dynamos" that most challenged his imagination: "the dynamo became a symbol of infinity ... he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross."

No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.

Langley himself admits to being puzzled by the recent discovery of radium, which "denied the truths of his Science. The force was wholly new." The discovery of radiation has revealed "a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movement imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other." But unlike Adams, "Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused -- physics stark mad in metaphysics."

The world, to Adams, became a play of forces, even in an area in which he was something of an expert:

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

He realizes that he is unprepared for this world, whereas a "child born in 1900 would ... be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it.... As a matter of taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all was for the best in a scientific universe." But then he projects still further:

At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth -- equally childlike -- and he would wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much.

It's a rather remarkably visionary statement, an extrapolation based on the rate of change in the previous century into the next. Did any public intellectual comparable to Adams speculate in 2000 as provocatively about the life of the mind in 2100?  Or has that become merely a game for journalists?  He sees the attempt of his century to educate for the next as "folly."

The teacher of 1900, if foolhardy, might stimulate; if foolish, might resist; if intelligent, might balance, as wise and foolish have often tried to do from the beginning; but the forces would continue to educate, and the mind would continue to react. All the teacher could hope was to teach it reaction.... Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and ... the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law.... The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration.

Returning to New York in 1904, and reflecting on the skyline that had changed so radically during his lifetime,
Adams finds himself thrust into chaos. "The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity" -- which had once brought the world into some sort of unity and coherence -- "roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight."


F.T. Marinetti: The Joy of Mechanical Force

F.T. Marinetti, date unknown

If the machine age baffled and terrified Henry Adams, it was welcomed vigorously by Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement, whose manifesto excerpted here is a kind of rock 'n' roll celebration of anarchy, whose buzzwords are danger, courage, daring, revolt, struggle, and whose emblem is the roaring motorcar controlled (barely) by a ruthless daredevil driver who rolls over everything in his path.

Futurism, as its name implies, rejects everything from the past, especially museums and libraries, and wants "to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, of archaeologists, of guides, and of antiquarians." Marinetti concedes of museums that "They can be visited once a year as the dead are visited once a year," but that's enough.

Marinetti's Futurism is also a cult of youth, which once again suggests the rock rebels of the 1960s -- "Don't trust anyone over thirty." Marinetti suggets, "When we are forty, let those younger and more valiant than us kindly throw us into the waste basket like useless manuscripts." As for art, it "can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice." But the art that the Futurists actually produced hardly strikes us as violent and cruel. The most significant of the Futurist artists was Umberto Boccioni, who responded primarily to the call for art that would demonstrate movement and dynamism:

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

Futurism also had a vogue in Russia before the revolution, as in this work by Natalia Goncharova, again emphasizing the need for speed:

Natalia Goncharova, The Cyclist, 1913

D.H. Lawrence: The Physics of Human Character

One writer you wouldn't expect to respond to Marinetti's manifesto was Lawrence, the worshiper of the great god Pan. But in a letter to his editor, Edward Garnett, in 1914, he speaks of Marinetti approvingly, perhaps because of his anti-intellectualism. Lawrence tells Garnett "that which is physic -- non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element." He objects to the "moral scheme" in Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as "dull, old, dead," and proclaims "it is the inhuman will, call it physiology, or like Marinetti -- physiology of matter, that fascinates me."

And so, in a famous statement about characterization in fiction, he announces:

You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego -- of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element.

Both coal and diamond are allotropes of carbon, he says, "and my theme is carbon." Or, in another metaphor, "the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, as when one draws a fiddle bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown."


William James: Pluralism, Pragmatism, and Instrumental Truth

William James in 1906

Giving up on universal truth, James forces us to recognize that the truth is what works. That, at least, is pragmatism in a nutshell, boiling down these excerpts from James's writing in 1907 and 1909. "The pluralistic world," he explains, "is ... more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom."

Pragmatism recognizes that metaphysics is something like a game involving "magic words." Each word "names the universe's principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest." But pragmatism treats each word "as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed." Pragmatism uses all the various metaphysical theories where appropriate:

It agrees with nominalism, for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions and metaphysical abstractions.

In particular it disdains certitude and dogma: "When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty." We now know, however, "that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations.... They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as some one calls them, in which we write our reports of nature."

The central premise is: "that ideas ... become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.... Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak." The best approach to changing ways of looking at the world is flexibility: "The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions." (But did "time and space" really remain "untouched" by Einstein's theory of relativity? Just asking.)


John Dewey: Thought as a Natural Event

John Dewey, date unknown

In this excerpt from the 1925 Experience and Nature, Dewey takes on the question of the act of knowing itself: "uncertainty, ambiguity, alternatives, inquiring, search, selection, experimental reshaping of external conditions," and argues that the phenomenon is of equal importance with "the world of objective nature." It is the nature of things themselves that generates "ignorance and inquiry; doubt and hypothesis; trial and temporal conclusions."

The conjunction of problematic and determinate characters in nature renders every existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in design. To be intelligently experimental is but to be conscious of this intersection of natural conditions so as to profit by it instead of being at its mercy. The Christian idea of this world and this life as a probation is a kind of distorted recognition of the situation; distorted because it applied wholesale to one stretch of existence in contrast with another, regarded as original and final.

Indeterminacy is a characteristic of things, as "moralists and poets" have discovered when they speak of the fact that "mountains, the emblems of constancy, appear and disappear like the clouds." The atom, once thought of as the fundamental building block of matter "is now reported ... to embody a temporary equilibrium in the economy of nature's compromises and adjustment. Every existence is an event."

Dewey rejects the idea that we should be troubled by impermanence and flux:  "It is something to be noted and used.... The eventful character of all existences is no reason for consigning them to the realm of mere appearance any more than it is a reason for idealizing flux into a deity." Instead, we should recognize "the slower and regular rhythmic events [as] structure, and more rapid and irregular ones [as] process." This is to express "the function of one in respect to the other."

A house has a structure; in comparison with the disintegration and collapse that would occur without its presence, this structure is fixed. Yet it is not something external to which the changes involved in building and using the house have to submit. It is rather an arrangement of changing events.... Structure is constancy of means, of things used for consequences, not of things taken by themselves or absolutely.

"Matter" is not something rigid and fixed, and "both mind and matter [are] different characters of natural events, in which matter expresses their sequential order, and mind the order of their meanings in their logical connections and dependencies." If we forbade the use of "mind, matter, consciousness as nouns," we would find that their adverbial and adjectival forms, "conscious and consciously, mental and mentally, material and physically," expressed the reality much better. The world "is not finished and ... has not consistently made up its mind where it is going and what it is going to do."


Werner Heisenberg: Non-Objective Science and Uncertainty

Werner Heisenberg, date unknown

Both James and Dewey were on to something that Heisenberg finally pinned down as the "uncertainty principle," which demonstrated conclusively that the interaction of mind and matter was real and crucial. In this 1955 excerpt from The Physicist's Conception of Nature, Heisenberg pins down what distinguishes modern science from its nineteenth-century predecessor: "In the nineteenth century nature still appeared as a set of laws in space and time in which man and man's intervention in nature could be ignored in principle, if not in practice." The materialists of the nineteenth century assumed that atoms were "the real and immutable substances [whose] arrangement and motion ... create the colourful phenomena of the world of our senses." But the discovery of radioactivity that troubled Henry Adams and vexed his friend Langley revealed that "the atoms of chemistry could no longer be considered as the ultimate indivisible building-stones of matter."

Still, resolving the atom into an assemblage of protons, neutrons, and electrons kept the idea that these were "building-stones" and that they constituted "the ultimate objective reality" alive for a while longer. But then it was discovered that "in the case of the smallest building particles of matter, every process of observation produces a large disturbance."

We can no longer speak of the behaviour of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them.

Science "cannot simply speak of nature 'in itself.' Science always presupposes the existence of man and, as [Niels] Bohr has said, we must become conscious of the fact that we are not merely observers but also actors on the stage of life." Because scientific observation has an effect on the thing observed, "The scientific world-view has ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word."

When we speak of causality, we "refer to our belief that events in nature are uniquely determined, or, in other words, that an exact knowledge of nature or some part of it would suffice, at least in principle, to determine the future," and "that there are immutable natural laws that uniquely determine the future state of any system from its present state." But atomic physics no longer accepts the validity of this premise. Max Planck discovered "that a radiating atom does not deliver up its energy continuously, but discreetly in bundles ... the emission of radiation is a statistical phenomenon." Quantum theory put the kibosh on determinism. And then,

It was discovered that it was impossible to describe simultaneously both the position and the velocity of an atomic particle with any prescribed degree of accuracy. We can either measure the position very accurately -- when the action of the instrument used for the observation obscures our knowledge of the velocity, or we can make accurate measurements of the velocity and forgo knowledge of the position.

Moreover, our very conceptions of the atom are mutually exclusive. We can consider it as like a little planetary system with electrons revolving around a central nucleus. Or we can "imagine that the atomic nucleus is surrounded by a system of stationary waves." Or "we can consider the atom chemically" and "calculate its heat of reaction when it becomes fused with other atoms.... Each picture is legitimate when used in the right place, but the different pictures are contradictory." As a result, "the incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory."