0 The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 25, No. 4, October 1994 0026-1068

BOOKS

Reviews

William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague. By William Joseph Gavin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 227.

This volume presents, with occasional revisions and interpolations, a number of the author’s previously scattered essays. It was possible to gather them together with only minimal re-working because, even in their original appearances, they were all connected by a fundamental underlying theme. This theme, drawn from Gavin’s careful study of William James over the last several decades, is the importance of recognizing the vague. As James puts it in The Principles of Psychology (1890): “It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention”

To suggest that vagueness can function as the organizing theme for serious philosophizing might seem initially to be completely misguided. As Gavin notes, philosophers have traditionally gone the other way: “most have pursued certainty, objectivity, and some form of universal truth” (p. 1). The point of James’s statement, and of the present volume, is that all too often philosophers have confused the search for such finalities with their prior existence in ‘reality’ - once we have cleared away any initial ‘appearances’ to the contrary. For James, Gavin writes, it is a fundamental mistake to conceive of reality “as clear and distinct, or as immediately given, finished” (p. 179). This theme of recognizing vagueness is present, moreover, throughout James’s work: “in such traditional areas as perception, science, language, and metaphysics he developed outlooks that are best framed or articulated in terms of the importance of the vague” (pp. 12-13).

Gavin sees the traditional denial of vagueness to be the result of several key philosophical blunders that repeatedly engaged James’s criticisms: “we have assumed that experience is finished, whereas it is actually still ‘in the making’ ’,; “we have assumed that experience is made up of substantive parts, that these have a value, and that the transitive parts are simply neutral connectives”; and “we have relied too heavily on language and on concepts qua concepts, which are them- selves oriented toward exclusivity rather than integrated richness” (pp. 17-18). Now that these mistakes have been recognized Gavin maintains that for James, if we can reinstate the vague, “the ‘richness’ and ‘intensity’ of life can be developed” (p. 2).

(P. 1).

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Part One consists of four chapters that collectively display the pervasiveness of “the fringe, the edge of experience, the ever-not- quite, and so forth” (p. 182) in James’s work. Chapter One demonstrates initially the roots of this recognition of vagueness in his psychological discussion of consciousness as a “stream. ” In consciousness, there is both richness, due to its changeability and continuity, and intensity, due to our personal involvement and selectivity. Gavin then connects up this discussion of the ongoing and unfinished nature of personal conscious- ness with James’s notion of a “more” found in religious experience. Here Gavin’s focus is The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). For James, the essence of religious experience as an indicator of possibilities beyond the present gets lost if we emphasize doctrines and institutions because they must replace its vagueness - and its tension, richness, and intensity - with simplifying finalities.

In Chapter Two, Gavin begins with a discussion of aspects of James’s volume, Pragmatism (1907), especially his consideration of God as neither pre-existent and perfect (as Rationalism requires) nor fully present to the senses (as Empiricism requires). For James, a more vaguely conceived God - in process, self-discovering, developing in conjunction with human contributions - is possible. In addition, James is convinced of the inadequacy of our traditional tools of reasoning to deal with the subtle possibilities inherent in religion’s “more .” As Gavin writes: “To the end, James remained an advocate of the thesis that the human being can experience more than he or she can intellectually conceptualize . . .,’ (p. 45). Gavin then develops this theme of the limits of logic as it appears in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), where James uses the “more” of religious experience as a wedge to lay open the claim that “reality is not only broader than the known; it is broader than the knowable” (p. 49). Moreover, Gavin explores here James’s beliefs that by our attempts to live in and to understand our developing situations we contribute to their eventual realization and that we therefore should recognize the importance of our commitments in the face of these inchoate possibilities.

Chapters Three and Four take up the theme of vagueness in theorizing and in language. Gavin begins with science, where claims to objectivity and neutrality are the strongest and where appeals to the concept of ‘law’ are the most compelling. For James, however, the element of the personal shows itself in the selectivity of inquirers - in the particular fields they choose and in the solutions they propose - so much so that these laws become for James, in Gavin’s words, “heuristic devices” (p. 58). In a similar way, James rejects the usual separation between percepts and concepts as a simplifying abstraction that can be vicious in its results for our attempts to understand reality. We need to recognize that, in James’s words from Some Problems in Philosophy (1911), “[wle harness perceptual reality in concepts in order to drive it better to our

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ends” (p. 67). That concepts are tools for making what is vague appear more precise is part of James’s larger view, from The Principles of Psychology, that “language works against our perception of the truth” (p. 69). Even when James is more favorably inclined toward language as necessary for thinking and communicating, he still believes that, with its seeming precision, it can be dangerous to our attempts to understand pure experience.

Part Two consists of a pair of chapters that carry on dialogues with other philosophers. Gavin’s intent here is to uncover the extent of Jamesian assumptions present in their work, as a means both of understanding these philosophers bettter and of recognizing the pervasiveness of James’s position. Chapter Five considers the relation- ship between the emphasis upon vagueness in James and aspects of C. S . Peirce’s work on science. In particular, Gavin points to Peirce’s faith in the possibilities of long-term inquiry in science as an instance of simplification. He is especially interested in indicating how Peirce’s acceptance of a kind of scientific realism is grounded in an evolutionary cosmology, and how Peirce’s commitment to this cosmology exceeded the available evidence. Chapter Six examines the political thought of John Dewey and Karl Marx, with a special emphasis upon their faith in cooperation and science. Gavin finds in each case that, in spite of explicit specific rejections of deterministic or optimistic expectations of success, there is a faith that exceeds what is justifiable and that is grounded in a method of social reform - different in each case, of course - that has not been proven to be able to effect the anticipated results. Gavin notes that all three cases constitute significant but indeterminate situations, “situations where one has to make decisions, before all the evidence is in” (p. 125). And, because the decision will affect the outcome in each of these “live,” “forced,” and “momentous” situations, Gavin sees the faith commitments not as hasty undertakings but as justifiable instances of James’s “will to believe.”

Part Three, entitled “Applications,” reaches beyond this largely textual discussion of vagueness to apply James’s insights to two very different practical topics. Chapter Seven briefly sketches out an analysis of modern art. Here Gavin’s intention is to present James’s perspective - that vagueness is ever-present in our encounters with pure experience - as one powerful approach for understanding the central movements in the world of painting from Monet to Pollock and beyond. Gavin maintains that the turn from emphasizing the art object to emphasizing the many encounters with it has resulted from a clearer recognition of the vagueness of the aesthetic aspects of experience. In addition, this clearer recognition of vagueness has led to the rejection of the assumed boundary between ‘art’ and ‘non-art,’ and to our increased ability to recognize a contributory role for ourselves in aesthetic encounters that are rich and intense and invite continual re-interpretation. Chapter

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Eight applies James’s insights to the realm of medical practice by means of developing what Gavin sees as the connection between recognizing the vague and developing empathy for patients. Here, his procedure is to uncover the mood of analytical medical practice driven by the twin quests for objectivity and certainty, and then to suggest that empathy is to be developed differently: by recognizing the intersubjectivity present in our pre-refined experience.

A restatement of the key aspects of James’s analysis that Gavin hopes will serve as a stimulus to live life more fully - more richly and intensively - follows in what he calls a “(non)conclusion.” All in all, this is a clear and well-written volume that strongly presents Gavin’s claim that “overflowing vagueness may well be the central thread in the Jamesian corpus . . .” (p. 158). Gavin’s style of argumentation is modest in its own goals and accomplishments and respectful of other writers, and he demonstrates a solid familiarity with the contemporary secondary literature on James, especially the work of: Daniel Bjork, George Cotkin, Eugene Fontinell, John J. McDermott, Gerald Myers, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Ellen Kappy Suckiel. William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague is a solid contribution to James scholarship.

This volume is also a solid contribution to the broader philosophical literature. It challenges the tilt of too much philosophical inquiry toward the simplifying and the intellectualistic, the final and the certain. The natural situation upon which philosophy comments does not reflect such order, however comfortable it has long been to philosophers to pretend that it does. Gavin quotes in this regard James’s comment from The Will to Believe (1897): “In the great boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom come out . . . even” (p. 1). Philosophical discussions, on the contrary, have too often suggested that they do. This volume also offers a well-rounded presentation of an anti- foundational position that was developed long before our current controversies arose. For James, our philosophical perspectives are both perspectives - attempts to gather and order the flow of pure experience - and ours - reflecting the situations in which we find ourselves. Gavin’s volume should enrich James’s stature in the current debate.

My own difficulties with the volume arise in spite of my acceptance of the vagueness of natural existence and of our inquiries into it; and they are, I suspect, less attributable to Gavin than to James. Specifically, I am much less sanguine than James is about making connections between the vague and the “more”. Vagueness suggests that indeterminacy remains a component of all our attempts at knowledge and control: we cannot fully know or control because of the opacity and open-endedness of reality. The “more” suggests, however, something extra: there are explanations and powers beyond those of natural existence. The former suggests humility and care in our actions; the latter, dependency and

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wonderment in the face of the mystery of being. I am not denying that James is correct in recognizing a pervasive religious element to experience. I am reluctant, however, to accept his super-natural interpretation of this religious element.

Gavin is, of course, correct to present this connection between the vague and the “more” in James’s thought; but he perhaps could have indicated more explicitly that the upshot of James’s emphasis upon vagueness can be divorced from his longing for the super-natural, and that readers - unlike James - might not want to imbue the overall discussion of vagueness with this theological tincture. It may be, of course, that the super-natural possibilities of the “more” are what draw Gavin to James. It may also be that they are correct in emphasizing this interpretation of the vague. In any case, James maintained that philosophizing should contribute to living life more intensely and zestfully, and that it can do this only if it is alive to the vagueness of our human situation. Readers of this fine book cannot fail to be so influenced in their philosophizing.

James Campbell The University of Toledo Toledo, Ohio 43606 USA

Anti-foundationalism Old and New. Edited by Tom Rockmore and Beth Singer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Pp. 251.

The structure of this collection of essays suggests an intriguing project - to reveal the contemporary foundationalisdanti-foundationalism debate as having an historical depth which motivates a pragmatist solution. The first six essays are historical explorations (Anaximander, Plato, Augustine, Gassendi, Hegel and German Idealism, Nietzsche) of anti- foundational themes. The last four essays are discussions of varieties of pragmatism all of which reject the foundationaYantifoundationa1 dicho- tomy in philosophy. The essays’ cumulative effect is a sense of historical depth in the foundationalism debate which gives increased power to the succeeding arguments for a pragmatist alternative.

The essays work with differing strength depending on their level of generality. Joseph Margolis’ careful reflection on Anaximander’s fragment and its commentators, leads the reader from a perspicuous analysis of this text, through Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida, finally to his own view that “conceptual analysis cannot but be radically provisional” (36). His intriguing transitions give us a sense of both the diversity and the continuity of the anti-foundationalism debate.

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Plato is treated in a somethat pedestrian way by Ronald Polanski who finds that he is not a foundationalist because of the equivocal self- reflexivity of the dialogues as exemplified by the Theatetus. Polanski ends a section with the curious remark that “[Tlhere is a sort of nascent pragmatism in Plato’s assumption of principles only insofar as they lead to viable theories” (48), but one wishes to know more about how that viability might be ascertained.

Gary Calore’s essay on Augustine follows Margolis in beginning with a careful look at a specific text, Confessions, Bk XI, in which Augustine puzzles about time. Calore works through commentary to show that Augustine’s need for foundations produces his tangles with time, thereby suggesting indirectly that paradox is one of the pitfalls of foundationalism.

The essay on Gassendi and the following essay on German Idealism both suffer from trying to do too much. Fred Michael and Emily Michael suggest the possibility of a non-foundational empiricism by contrasting Lqcke’s foundationalism with Gessendi’s theory of ideas. Their conclusion, that Locke’s simple ideas intuitively apprehended are foundational, whereas Gassendi’s “uninterpreted data from the senses” (p. 103) are not, turns on a reading of “foundational” which needs more elaboration. The essay might have been stronger had it followed the lead of Calore and Margolis, focusing on a single short text from Gassendi and extending its implications. Tom Rockmore’s piece has a similar difficulty, hopstepping through Hegel’s precursors and successors, then mentioning Hegel’s circular epistemology without settling down to detailed discussion of its implications for anti-foundationalism until the last two pages. There we have a bare mention of consonance between Hegel and pragmatism on the reciprocity of thought and experience as well as the radical claim that idealism is “basically pragmatic (121).” A particular account of the way in which a “fully elaborated theory might be tested in the application to experience” (121) as well as a brief discussion of the account of categories in Hegel would have helped us to see pragmatism’s Hegelian debt and divergence in a clearer light.

Nietzsche would seem to be a pivotal figure for a collection like this one. His discussion of truth as congealed metaphor and his notion of the reconstructive yet incomplete power of language, both seem echoed in the discussions of Dewey, James, Randall and Rorty which end the collection. Thus Wilhelm Wurzer’s essay, “Nietzsche and the Problem of Ground” is appropriately positioned in the collection, the last classical essay before the turn to pragmatism. But Wurzer, instead of drawing out the themes in Nietzsche’s work which would give historical depth to the antifoundationalist turn, argues instead that the will to power functions as a “principle of ground” for Nietzsche. This may be true but it is not fruitful in this context. The result of the foundational function of the will to power, Wurzer points out, is conflict between

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“the disruptive critical genealogy of reason . . . and the Dionysian faith in humanity . . .” (p. 138) This too may be true, but had he begun with this dialectical conflict between the unraveling of foundations which genealogical critique produces and the passion Nietzsche feels for a particular vision of human freedom, Wurzer might have led us to reflect on the grandparents of views of language and truth which are central to pragmatism.

Charlene Haddock Seigfried opens the discussion of pragmatism with an essay aptly named, “Bridges without Piers.” She begins by asking about a common anomaly: foundationalist language in pragmatism, in James in particular. Why is it there? She finds James to be an “ambivalent figure” with a “yearning for eventual closure” but whose view has a “radical core” which this essay proceeds to explore. “The originality of pragmatism ,” she writes, “consists in by-passing [the distinction between appearance and reality] by staying on the pheno- menal level and demonstrating that true appearances can be distin- guished from false ones without one’s ever appealing to a reality hidden beneath the appearances. Pragmatic analyses are therefore not foundational” (144). Nor are they anti-foundational. Seigfried, with an exactly illuminating use of metaphor, goes beyond James to offer us a really elegant view of the shape and necessity of pragmatism. In three short sections: reality-for us, the “plasticity” and indebtedness of pragmatic truth, and the rejection of discrete sensations as foundational to belief, she pulls from James a lucid introduction to pragmatist thought. In passing, she points out that in his use of the masculine pronoun, James himself is an example of his own claim that “each of us chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit” (150). This is a hint of the sympathy between the project of this collection and methods and concerns of feminist theory which Seigfried reiterates in her final argument for the necessity of pragmatism. If, as she argues, a pragmatic understanding of lived experience leads us to see that notions of verified or cumulative truth become “paleontological remains” (154) (an expression reminis- cent of Nietzsche), then, “our thinking becomes dangerously utopian if we think we already know concretely in what a perfect world consists, without having to continually revise our beliefs in light of the experiences of those participating in the construction of actual com- munities” (162). The appeal here to the plural experience of constructed lives is at the heart of contemporary discussions of feminist theory.

Pragmatism is a view which stretches to the breaking point our sometimes atrophied philosophical vocabulary. The pragmatist writer must be particularly innovative and judicious in her choice of paths around the bifurcations of the foundationalism debate, Sandra Rosenthal’s account of pragmatist epistemology argues that this debate may be prescinded if only one understands scientific method in a way

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which does not “sever experience from its creative, interactive unity with . . . that which is independently there” (179). Her discussion suffers from a difficulty quite like the one Seigfried notes in James. How can one describe the indebtedness of beliefs without reference to an “independently there” - which sounds foundational? Rosenthal writes, “for all the pragmatists, the structures of things grasped by the knowing mind do not reach a reality more ultimate than the processive interactions of temporally founded experience, but rather, the lived- through grasp of felt temporality opening on to a processive universe is the very foundation for the emergence within experience of meaningful structure” (176). Rosenthal sees the foundationalism antifoundational- ism debate as being a consequence of the metaphysical requirement that experience be passive data or subjective response, i.e. that these be contradictory alternatives, ontologically opposed. But the attempt to avoid this requirement on one side or the other calls up language which suggests reinstating it. Rosenthal succeeds best when she reaches for new metaphors, as for example, when she describes true belief as working to anticipate possibilities when it “cuts into” the independently real (180).

Traces of pragmatism’s slippage in the attempt to overcome the alternatives it eschews can be found in many other versions. One way to deal with this instead of trying to imaginatively rework the language of philosophical perspective is to give in. As Beth Singer points out in her essay, “Metaphysics without Mirrors,” this is Rorty’s path, an anti- foundationalism which understands itself as a-positional, as merely edifying (196). Singer argues that John Herman Randall’s systematic “metaphysics of cultural change” shows another route for the pragmatist urge in the age of postmodernism. Randall escapes Rorty’s option by holding that every process or substance has a constitution which is temporal or functional, allowing both relativity and determinacy at the same time and escaping the implication of an ultimate substance or particular starting point. Her discussion of Randall’s account of categories and their relation to grammatical function is extremely provocative, particularly as it leads to an account not of mind, but of “the thinking situation” which seems to take us around the puzzles of the “mental mirror.” Randall is not often read. Singer’s essay suggests this may be a serious error.

The collection is aptly concluded with a lucid, elegantly simple account of metaphysics as “conceptual construction and re-orientation’’ (222), “Metaphysics and Validation,” by Kathleen Wallace. A brief response to Rorty, Rescher, and Davidson on the question of the end of metaphysics, leads to her positive alternative, that “we consider metaphysics as the constructing of a categorical framework . . .” a way of mapping the world rather than an explanation of the world” (214-15). Literary devices, myth, allegory and metaphor function in philosophy to

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effect conceptual orientation by reshaping concepts and categories. The myth of the cave, Wallace says, does this for the idea of the Good in Plato. Noticing the effect of literary devices in metaphysics shows us the way metaphysics “exhibits some feature, relation, dimension or pos- sibility” rather than making a truth claim (218). Luce Irigaray’s rereading of canonic texts (the cave myth as well as others)’ to unravel the conceptual construction produced by central metaphors, would offer a stellar example of the view Wallace articulates here. But the question which arises for philosophers reading Irigaray is the question which Wallace comes to and the one which appropriately ends the collection, the question of validation. We can cope with this question only, Wallace says, if we give up three dogmas: “that mind is cut off from reality,” “that there is ‘the’ way the world is,” and “that the only knowledge that counts as knowledge is the having of true beliefs” (226-7). In exchange will come other modes and standards of evaluation. “Is the proposed transformation or orientation intellectually compelling” (227)? “Does it enable us to understand and manipulate dimensions of the world” (228)? Is it a “conceptual cul-de-sac” (229), does it contradict established scientific theory (230), or does it offer “a persisting or recurrent power to interpret” (230)? Wallace’s redefinition of meta- physics as “apt generality” (234) is itself an example of conceptual re- orientation, offering us a banquet of beginnings for continued reflection as to how there might be diversity in metaphysics as well as validation. My hope is that this excellent essay and the others in this collection will, in spite of the title, reach their intended audience, for the title does not sufficiently convey the strength, imagination and richness of these ways around the foundationalism/antifoundationalism dilemma.

Ann Kramer Clark Saint Mary’s College Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 USA

See Speculum ofthe other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)

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