Some Reflections on Pragmatism and Buddhism
Robert L. Greenwood
Whenever I write about Buddhism or Vedª nta, I feel as though I were a man born blind trying to discourse on the ethereal beauty of sunsets. This is, in part, because I have not had the privilege of experiencing the sublime states of which they speak. Nevertheless, I am not struck dumb by this realization for it is no different in kind from the predicament which faces all attempts to come to terms with the world of our experience, whether these attempts be named Buddhism, Ved~ nta, Christianity, Islam, or physics. These are all systems of thought whose professed aim it is to tell us how things are. It seems to me evident that they cannot all be correct accounts of how things are.
[1] I would, indeed, venture to say that at most one of them is correct. But then, by what criterion, or set of criteria, do we determine which, if any, is the correct view? Each proffers criteria; but what is required is a criterion, or set of criteria, which uniquely picks out "the truth," "reality," the "correct view." The philosophical view that there is a way the world is independently of how you or I or anyone else thinks about it is called "realism." All of us are born little realists. It is only after the puzzling discovery that some misguided people do not share our view of things, and that sometimes our sense experience misleads us, and that even the physical sciences must sometimes surrender truth-claims about well-confirmed and deeply cherished theories, that some of us less hardy souls begin to entertain doubts about the capacity of human beings for ascertaining truth. That we soon find ourselves reviled by the defenders of the truth, any truth, does not always dissuade us from our apostasy.One move that has tempted many when confronted with our human inability to establish the truth beyond pre-adventure, is to claim that there are many truths, a view known as "relativism". Indeed, one often hears in the throes of discussion the phrase, "Well, that may be true for you, but not for me." To be sure, if we were to admit such a possibility we have simply given up the whole notion of "truth." When someone says that something "is true," we all understand him to be making an objective claim about the world to which he expects our assent. Philosophers call this the correspondence theory of truth and some rudely point out that there is no way for us, in view of the facts of sense experience, to compare our statements about how the world is with how the world is. Sense experience provides us, at best, with a view of how the world seems to be, but still leaves us very much in the dark about how the world is.
Some writers, working in the Buddhist tradition, have talked about something they call the pragmatic theory of truth. Thus, for example, A. I. Herman states:
Buddhist pragmatism as a way of deriving (or identifying) truth from (or with) practicality, runs into the same problem that any pragmatic theory of truth encounters. Thus it might be extremely useful for me to believe the most outrageous things imaginable, e.g. that Guatama Buddha was a lady, that Hindus are inferior, that God does not hear the prayers of heretics, that this book is beautifully written, and so on. Now any theory that leads to absurdities, and the above all seem patently absurd, must be absurd.
It is not clear to me, however, that anyone ever held anything like the pragmatic theory of truth in the above form. William James is supposed to have been the father of this view, or at least, whenever the subject comes up the finger is invariably pointed at him. I suspect, although I cannot yet prove, that the Buddha was no more guilty of holding this view than was James. There can be no denying that James often sounded as if he believed that the working or usefulness of a belief was a sufficient condition for its truth. I suspect, however, that a careful reading of James will disclose that he never intended to give this impression. What James was stressing was that usefulness is a necessary condition for the truth of a view. This interpretation fits in perfectly with the pragmatic theory of meaning. I suspect that the readiness of people to charge anyone who avows pragmatism with believing that what is useful to believe is true is due to the paucity of knock-down-drag-out arguments in philosophy. Add to that the consideration that it is such an amusing pastime to think up counterexamples.
It is well known that James was inspired to adopt pragmatism by his friend Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce was a realist and therefore could not possibly have held a pragmatic theory of truth. One of Peirce’s arguments in favor of realism is the following:
The feeling which gives rise to any method of fixing belief is a dissatisfaction at two repugnant propositions. But here already is a vague concession that there is some one thing which a proposition should represent. Nobody, therefore, can really doubt that there are Reals, for, if he did, doubt would not be a source of dissatisfaction. The hypothesis, therefore, is one which every mind admits.
Now, if you hold a proposition that is useful to you and I hold a proposition that is useful to me and they are contraries, one of us is sure to be wrong and perhaps both of us are.
Perhaps Peirce did not, but James did, hold that usefulness was a sufficient condition for truth. After all, Peirce did change the name of his view from pragmatism to pragmaticism in order to distance himself form James. That issue, however, was over the interpretation of the pragmatic theory of meaning. For Peirce, "Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects...."
[4] That is, the claim that a diamond is hard means that it will not be scratched by many other substances. When Peirce gave this example he claimed that if a particular diamond had never been tested between its creation and destruction there would be no fact of the matter about its hardness. This appears to be the opening wedge into James’ more nominalistic interpretation of pragmatism. Later, Peirce insisted that he had been wrong; "it is a matter of real fact that it [the diamond] would resist pressure, which amounts to extreme scholastic realism."[5]Let us now listen to what James has to say about truth. I quote from his essay, "Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth."
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their "agreement," as falsity means their "disagreement," with "reality." Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course . . . .
Pragmatism....asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," its says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?"
The Moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.
[6]This is about as clear a statement of the correspondence theory of truth that one is likely to find in the philosophical literature. The pragmatic twist comes when someone says that "X is true" and the pragmatist asks, "How do you know?" If the one making the claim replies that it is self-evident, a priori, innate, agreeable to reason, or any of the other replies so often proffered, the pragmatist turns a deaf ear. If the reply is "Because A, B, and C follow from X, and moreover, A, B, and C are matters of our experience," the pragmatist will now listen whether he will agree or not. This last fact is a consequence of the pragmatic theory of truth which holds that working (or workability) is a necessary condition for the truth of a statement and not a sufficient condition. Only when the critic turns James’ statement of pragmatism around so that it reads "Ideas that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify are true," thus making working (or workability) a sufficient condition of truth, do we get the so-called pragmatic theory of truth. It is evident that this is an utter perversion of James’ intent. It is worth noting, also, that Peirce came to soften his criticism of James:
The most prominent of all our school and the most respected, William James, defines pragmatism as the doctrine that the whole ‘meaning’ of a concept expresses itself either in the shape of conduct to be recommended or of experience to be expected. Between this definition and mine there certainly appears to be no slight theoretical divergence, which, for the most part, becomes evanescent in practice.
David Kalupahana is another Buddhist scholar who attributes pragmatism to the Buddha. I quote from his work:
it may be said that the Buddha, in order to avoid metaphysical questions, occasionally adduced the argument from pragmatism or relevance. The Culla-Mª lunkyaputta-Sutta points out that the solutions to these questions do not lead to well-being and do not contribute to the higher religious life, to renunciation, dispassion, cessation, pacification, insight, enlightenment, or nibbana.
Notice the difference. Kalupahana is not claiming that the Buddha held such questions to be meaningless or that any possible suggested solution to them must be false. He held merely that solutions to these questions do not further the project of gaining enlightenment. I suspect that Herman has conflated the sense of "pragmatic" as "that which conduces to some end" with the incorrect sense of "pragmatic" as "that which works is true" and then assumed that since the Buddha was a pragmatist in the first sense he must be a pragmatist in the second.
Although pragmatism is the name of a method and not the name of a philosophical system or body of truths, pragmatists share a number of theses in common. Peirce, James, Dewey, and C. I. Lewis all reject the idea of the self as a non-spatial substance in principle separable from the body. That is, they all reject Cartesian dualism. In the East this is called the anª tman doctrine, a doctrine held by both Buddhism and Advaita Vedª nta. First, Peirce, who writes, "The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders today."
[9] James writes:To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it—for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist—that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made....
Dewey writes:
The idea that matter, life and mind represent separate kinds of Being is a doctrine that springs, as so many philosophic errors have sprung, from a substantiation of eventual functions . . . .
"Matter," or the physical, is a character of events when they occur at a certain level of interaction. It is not itself an event or existence; the notion that while "mind" denotes essence, "matter" denotes existence is superstition. It is more than a bare essence; for it is a property of a particular field of interacting events.
C. I. Lewis writes:
Some modes of....persistence, or continuities of a distinctive type, are very precious—our own continuity of memory, for example, or other aspects of our self-recognition. But if some exquisite and super-precious ‘being-in-itself’ is to be attributed, then I think that at least it is inexpressible.
Nor is Lewis any more sympathetic with the idea of a Kantian transcendental ego: "We cannot, unless dogmatically, construct experience from a hypothetical and transcendent mind working upon a material which likewise is something beyond experience."
[13] And, "That the phenomenalist treats mind as transcendent is a fallacy which is correlative to his treatment of the independent object as beyond knowledge."[14]Interestingly enough, these same writers condemn materialism also. Peirce writes that:
The materialistic doctrine seems to me quite as repugnant to scientific logic as to common sense; since it requires us to suppose that a certain kind of mechanism will feel, which would be a hypothesis absolutely irreducible to reason—an ultimate, inexplicable regularity; while the only possible justification of any theory is that it should make things clear and reasonable.
James expressed his view this way:
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.
Dewey writes:
That to which both mind and matter belong is the complex of events that constitute nature. This becomes a mysterious tertium quid, incapable of designation, only when mind and matter are taken to be static structures instead of functional characters.
Lewis writes:
I regard physicalism as an unsound metaphysical and epistemological doctrine....(Monistic materialism affords no solution [to the problem of knowledge], since it is equally problematic how one lump of mud can know another.
Buddhism undoubtedly shares with all the pragmatists so far discussed, not only the pragmatic method, the anª tman doctrine, and anti-materialism, but also a process world view in general. Any full elaboration of Buddhism and pragmatism, however, would demand far more time and space—indeed, volumes—than allotted on this occasion.
Notes
[1] Cf. Dewey, Pepper, Nª gª rjuna, and Jaspers on truth.
[2] A. I. Herman, An Introduction to Buddhist Thought (Lanham, New York, London: The University Press of America, 1983), p. 137.
[3] Justus Buchler, ed., Philosophical Writings of Pierce (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955), p. 19.
[4] Max H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1951), p. 78.
[5] Marcus G. Singer, ed., American Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 40.
[6] William James, Essays in Pragmatism (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1948), pp. 159-61.
[7] Ibid.
[8] David Kalupahana, Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis, (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1976), p. 160.
[9] Buchler, op. cit., p. 321.
[10] Fisch, op. cit., p. 148.
[11] John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1958) pp. 261-62.
[12] John D. Goheen and John L. Mothershead, Jr., eds. Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp. 341-42.
[13] C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 30.
[14] Ibid., p. 176.
[15] Buchler, op. cit., p. 322.
[16] Fisch, op. cit., p. 148.
[17] Dewey, op. cit., p. 75.
[18] Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1968), p. 664; p. 666.