The lure of euphoric certainty: C. S. Peirce and William James

Pragmatism may not be uniquely American in its origins. The German thinkers F. A. Lange and Hans Vaihinger are pragmatist when they hold that believing something unproven by experiment could still be good for you. G. T. Fechner and the French philosopher Charles Renouvier encouraged William James to believe whatever James found to contribute in the long run to human happiness. Judith Ryan detects in James traces of Austrian thought, namely Ernst Mach: ‘What is valid for me is not what is true, but what I need.’ Whatever its provenance, pragmatism comes to have an instinctive appeal to Americans, with whom common sense comes robustly into play, the same national feature that John Dewey in ‘The Practical Character of Reality’ (1908) will call ‘gumption’ or ‘horse sense’, ‘taking hold of things right end up’. Charles Sanders Peirce says that pragmatism is nothing more than the application of the old saw that ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’, acknowledging James’ view that the value of a concept lies in the future conduct that issues from that concept. The meaning of a belief is the action that the belief makes possible. The Greek word pragma, as James points out, means action. It is a word from which ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ derive. Americans are thought to be both restlessly active and future-oriented, hence the native appeal to them of pragmatism. They are said to be impatient with making unnecessary, impractical distinctions. They are blessedly unreflective and optimistic, hence their resentment at Grübelsucht, a word William James uses to refer to the morbid melancholy brooding supposedly characteristic of Germans.