A good example of this type of thinking can be seen in the modern church growth methods proposed by numerous "experts. Methods for evangelism are based on what brings in the biggest crowds. Success is measured by what "works" rather than what God's Word says is true. Ultimately, pragmatism fails as a test for truth. First, different ideas have seemingly "worked" for different people.
For example, pantheism has allegedly "worked" for millions of people throughout history and Islam has "worked" for countless Muslims. At the same time, Christianity has seemingly "worked" for countless millions. Which of these opposing views is true, if any? The pragmatist cannot offer a satisfactory answer to this question. As to your first sentence, I have been very careful to argue that we need to be practical, but that Pragmatism is an error. This is a statement that corresponds to observable reality and is therefore true.
Truth is incredibly practical, while utility is short sighted. I understand and sympathize with the emotional draw of Pragmatism. I feel the same draw sometimes. The problem with it is that it overthrows the human spirit and with it human communities and it leads, necessarily, to tyranny. I repeat, "we need to absorb what it had right," but truth is more important than immediate applications and propriety is more important than utility.
I will acknowledge the danger of "transcendence" and "the nature of things. View the discussion thread. The mission of the CiRCE Institute is to support teachers and parents who want to cultivate wisdom and virtue in their students through the truths of Christian classical education.
Your gift enables this work. Job Openings. What Is Classical Education? Lewis Lectures Posters. Donate back. Search form Search. Donate Log in Cart 0. Andrew Kern. Jul 30, During the last session at the conference I tried to weave things together into a practical structure that people could take home and think about and implement. Maybe the most important idea in the whole conference for me was the contrast between propriety and pragmatism, justice and utility, nature and abstract object.
Modernist thought found its clearest and fullest expression in two late 19th century philosophers whose teachings have dominated 20th and 21st century practice: William James and Friederich Nietzsche.
James was a Pragmastist. It's hard to say whether any principle ordered Nietzsche's thought. He once said that he despised the great systemetizers. For him, it was about experience, not thinking though he did the latter a lot. I would probably call him a Perspectivist one who believes that truth is not knowable as a thing in itself - we all just have a perspective or worldview , but even that implies a rational structure to his thought that he would laugh at.
Both of them are, strictly speaking, anti-philosophers, or at least, anti-metaphysicians. James wanted to know the "cash value" of an idea.
Truth is what works. Nietzsche wanted to know how an idea would lead to life, to flourishing. I'm sympathetic with both of them. For philosophers committed to the proposition that knowledge needs to be tested against some objective truth, that truths need to be grounded in some foundation of certain knowledge, James and Dewey remain figures whose work deserves condemnation, because it seems to such philosophers to give license to a kind of make-believe, where virtually every idea is warranted, or every expedient idea is warranted.
Beyond such philosophical criticisms, criticisms have come from other circles. Catholic thinkers and conservative religious thinkers more generally responded to the rise of pragmatism by arguing that its critique of universal truths, its critique of dogmatism was a kind of dogmatism in its own right, and bore the traces of a deep anti-Catholicism and secularism.
For such thinkers, pragmatism opened the door to moral nihilism of the sort that James had identified with Nietzsche, to a kind of relativism, to a deeply dangerous, "anything goes" approach to the world. This is not the time to talk about the debate surrounding World War I, a debate in which Dewey figured so prominently, but it's fair to say that his student and follower, Randolph Bourne, the brilliant cultural critic and Columbia graduate who had studied with Dewey, was the first of a whole series of radical critics of pragmatism who argued that pragmatists, in their insistence that what is true is what works, had essentially paralyzed the imagination; they had disabled the creativity of human beings in the face of an unjust order.
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