This semester a really good friend on the phone reminded me to recall why I love James and why I am a Jamesian rather than seeking a correct interpretation of James. I can get lost in philosophy forgetting the questions for people for the questions of philosophy. Questions for people are the direct consequences that such inquiry bears upon the meaning and significance of life. They are mostly existential concerns, and they are the upshot of asking philosophical questions more generally. Questions of philosophy are the pure scholarly questions and are usually written in such a way that to concern only other philosophers. These questions can be reproduced uncritically and lose sight of the consequences they bear in our shared experience of the world.
Now, it’s okay to get lost in what we love and answer the questions of philosophy. I should not forget that the questions of philosophy are not divorced from the questions for people. This friend is right that I haven’t connected them in a while in my published writings and he didn’t call me out as a pragmatist. He might as well have because I am admitting he’s right in recent articles. I’ve been setting up answering a few questions for people but I have not been as transparent about the long game being played. So let me list elements of my long game.
First, the appeal of the Divine in process is a divine that accords with science and can be a rational replacement for much that is wrong in contemporary religion. Philosophy can show better accounts of what the divine can be without losing out on versions of naturalism that are true or the fact that in our inability to have access to certainty about which account of the Divine is true we only have how our idea of the Divine effects our experience and our practices.
Second, James shows us the limits of how phenomenology works as radical empiricism and reigns in the delusions of phenomenologists about the natural attitude that I’m fed up with in Continental circles. Husserl’s critique of the natural attitude is often more strawman and phenomenologists are often uncritical about it and not listening to science as they should (and I’ve been one of them as a phenomenologist).
Third, James shows us how blind we can be towards others and why we should humble ourselves to the experience of others as thee starting place of value inquiry. Pluralism is just fact when one takes into account the ontological scaffolding of how experience relates and functions.
Fourth, Scheler shows us how our emotional life connects us to values and why personal existence is shot through and saturated in values. So anyone who adopts Heideggerian methods in phenomenology generally is guilty of avoiding how values are part of any fundamental ontology. Therefore, the majority position of Continental anti-realism as Braver describes is extremely flawed when it comes to ethics. Nietzsche is wrong about the phenomenology of love and descriptive rigor regarding value experience.
Finally, this union of the phenomenological and the pragmatic also means that the irreducible richness of experience is part of the natural world and any naturalism must take seriously the first and second personal perspectives. So eliminative naturalism like the Churchlands is false.
Some of these are more questions of philosophy than questions for people and others are more questions for people.
Still, I do not shy away from one prospect. When I inhabit questions of philosophy that are not relevantly applicable or apparent how they are applicable to questions for people, it’s fine to continue with the questions of philosophy. Someone else may figure out how such a purely theoretical concern maps onto experience in a way that I did not. Theoretical questions now may become the pragmatic concerns of some future efforts. The point is to be constantly experimental in attitude regarding one’s own philosophical efforts. I call this the pragmatic boomerang. A question of philosophy may have an upshot that I or someone else never intended. It comes back in a shocking and surprising way.
The Horizon and The Fringe 