Poets, Partial Stories, and the Earth of Things: William James between Romanticism and Worldliness

Abstract

In view of pragmatism’s undeniable success in various fields, from literary studies to law, the question inevitably arises: Why pragmatism? In other words, one wonders what exactly pragmatism has to offer. What is it good for? Seeking to answer this question, one can argue that one ought to see pragmatism as a worldly and oppositional criticism (somewhat in the Saidian sense). William James’s understanding of the worldliness of pragmatism is of the utmost importance in this context. In this chapter, I discuss James’s brand of pragmatism by focusing on its worldly aspects. This is done in two steps. First, I will analyze the worldliness of his version of radical empiricism and his function as a public philosopher. Second, I will complicate my results by underscoring that one might see James, together with Emerson and Whitman, as a strong poet who prepared for the establishment of a postmetaphysical literary or poeticized culture in the Rortyan sense. In other words, there are two intertwined narratives here. On the one hand, one possibility of framing the history of American pragmatism would be to argue that there is a connection between the Jamesian understanding of worldliness and Cornel West’s leftist version of neopragmatism as he developed it in The American Evasion of Philosophy and other texts. On the other hand, one might feel inclined to see a similarity between James and Rorty’s liberal brand of pragmatism insofar as both stress the importance of creative and innovative redescriptions offered by a strong individual or poet.