>> DOUG ANDERSON: The story of action in American thought and culture always coincides with
the story of experience; in fact experience becomes the honorific word for all of the
pragmatic thinkers.
Action is a primary theme in American thought from the pragmatists back, and from the pragmatists
forward.
>> MARTIN JAY: Even before the pragmatists, Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's great essay
on Experience is one of the locations of that term in the American vocabulary. You know,
it's one of the places where it's given a kind of thematic importance.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: "Action is with the scholar subordinate but it is essential. Without it
he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth."
>> MARTIN JAY: And of course James and others took Emerson quite seriously.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Both Dewey and James wrote encomia for Emerson.
>> MARTIN JAY: Experience was, as I said earlier, in terms of one of its acceptations, close
to experiment. And the point that certain pragmatists in their more instrumental moods
always made was that you have to intervene in the world. You have to act that thought
alone was insufficient. That pure contemplation was not enough.
>> ANNE ROSE: This need to not only have an idea but to want other people to accept it,
number one. To want it to be tangible, concrete and lived out.
>> MARTIN JAY: So experience was one of the ways in which people were drawn back into
the world.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: so evasion of Cartesian subjectivism requires and analysis of our
subjectivity in our being gripped by the world in which we are involved necessarily and engaged.
>> VINCENT COLAPIETRO: By Cartesianism I mean the primacy of subjectivity or selfhood and
it's basically the spectator, the I as spectator, the I as originally solitary and only eventually
and in some respects incidentally social.
>> MARTIN JAY: The great pragmatist innovation in a way although I think it's shared by
some European thinkers is to move experience away from a purely subjective, internal, and
in some way even solipsistic moment into a far more englobing kind of concept in which
both subject and object were immersed.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: The word experience carries risks of misunderstanding. The most obvious
risk is that we'll misunderstand it in the Cartesian way somehow as subjective mental
events, somehow inside. I think Descartes is confused. As mental events somehow inside
a non-spatial, container.
>> RICHARD RORTY: Descartes and Locke gave us a picture of "experience" as something
taking place within us that was distinct from anything physiological and I don't think
we need a notion of some non-physiological processes taking place within us.
>> MARTIN JAY: Certainly, critics like Richard Rorty have found that they were, perhaps,
overly reliant on a covert metaphysical notion of experience and he wants to get beyond that
and even chuck out the idea of experience itself as unnecessary, stressing language
and stressing a different level of interpretation rather than a level which moves us back to
experience, primordial or otherwise.
>> RICHARD RORTY: I think that people like Wilfrid Sellars are right in suggesting that
the notion of "experience" is more trouble than it's worth.
That, if you talk about linguistic behavior and the social practice of using language,
that you give reasons for and against performing a certain action, you have captured everything
that's unique about human beings.
You don't also have to have an account of something called "human experience".
So I think that the notion of "experience" as a topic of philosophical inquiry was an
unfortunate seventeenth century invention.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: In my way of looking at it, that's a very thin account of "why
experience".
And without going into philosophical argumentation about it, I think what gets lost here are
a number of things. One is a sense of history.
Even if one gives articulation linguistically to history, you lose the influence, I mean
the actual, hard core influence on your social habits.
And I think that's a drastic oversight of a linguistic account.
>> RICHARD RORTY: I think that if you just forget about notions like "experience"
and "consciousness" and just talk about social practices, including, particularly,
linguistic practices, you won't miss anything that's philosophically significant.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Peirce has this three-categoried system of philosophy and the second of these
categories is called secondness and secondness is better described in experiential terms
as resistance, constraint, otherness, something that is antagonistic.
So this secondness stuff seems to me to get thoroughly lost in the linguistic turn because
there's nothing really pushing back.
The pushing back is already enfolded into my linguistic story, into my habits of speech
and so on.
And you lost the sense of the gratingness of living through a life.
I think it's important that any philosophy that moves forward whether it's neo-pragmatism
or pragmatism or idealism or materialism that it not lose this sense of, or this strong
sense, not just of an intellectual "other", but of a radical, what Peirce used to call
"bruteness" that confronts you.
You know, when you bump your head on the door, which is one of the ones he talks about, or
when you're, if you've experienced any.
I have a great example.
I used to work on a dairy farm. I was bending over to put feed into the stanchion for this
very gentle cow and the gentle cow very gently raised her head and of course on the forehead
it's all bony.
The thing knocked me clear back against the wall.
This very gentle-seeming little cow. Bang! And I'm back against the wall.
Now, to tell this as a linguistic story is to miss the hard core bruteness of the experience.
So however else you want to go on about telling this pragmatic story, whether you want to
take this linguistic turn or stick with the experience-version that Dewey and James work
on, I think it's crucial that this kind of thing not be missed.
Because that's really at the heart of everything that the early pragmatists were doing.
>> MARTIN JAY: What the pragmatists used experience for was a kind of all-purpose tool to make
the traditional separation between subject and object or between contemplation and action,
to make these essentially antiquated and to move beyond them into a world of action, a
world that was more process oriented, a world that could involve pluralism and intervention,
sometimes instrumental, sometimes aesthetic, but a world which was not simply settled.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: So this becomes not only a tool but a prerequisite for becoming an
American scholar.
>> MARTIN JAY: So that Dewey in particular thought that experience was a term that could
have positive political impacts and of course we know in pedagogical terms his whole educational
theories were based on notions of experience rather than on notions of simple book-learning
and theory or doctrine. So these were all a variety of ways in which pragmatists made
sense of experience.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Both William James and Charles Peirce draw on the psychologist Alexander
Bain, a Scottish psychologist of the day who argues that what belief is is a willingness
to act.
If you believe something, you will be willing to act on it.
And you'll learn about what it was you believed, because the cash value of that idea is gonna
be worked out in what happens when you act on it.
So action, purpose, experience: all of these are ways of understanding what we thought
we thought.
What the ideas are.
What our beliefs are.
And that's the story of the pragmatic tradition.