Pragmatism & On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

[alice wellintown]

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

                         --Whitman

An excellent text to start with is William James's "On a Certain
Blindness in Human Being." It's not too long and it introduces the
easiest cause, Perspective.

Perspectivism is present in the West as early as Xenophanes and we all
know that Protagoras taught that "Man is the measure of all things"
and that the problem of subjectivity is a key one in Western thought
through to Existentialism--Kierkegaard to Nietzsche.

How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed
whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence
without interpretation, without "sense," does not become "nonsense,";
whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively
engaged in interpretation... (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Walter
Arnold Kaufmann. The Gay Science; With a Prelude in Rhymes and an
Appendix of Songs. New York: Random House, 1974. Section 374, p. 336.)

But what has this to do with Inherent Vice or even with Pynchon's
works? How can one argue that P's works are about work, are also
satires, and fit neatly into the tradition of both American Dark
Romance (Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, see also Painting the Dark Side,
Blythe and Ryder) and American Pragmatism?


OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only
because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we
were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind
could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a
stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in
life more valuable or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties
to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the
stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the
significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so
far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other
persons' conditions or ideals.


http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jcertain.html