Pragmatism and the Spirit of the Liberal Arts

Abstract

If pragmatism is conceived as a philosophy for which the meaning or truth of ideas is best evaluated in terms of their general utility, and if a liberal arts education is one that is understood as being essentially non-utilitarian, then the relevance of the former to the latter would seem difficult to establish. I argue here that such a difficulty is rooted in misconceptions, both of the nature of pragmatism as well as of the spirit and purpose of the liberal arts. This argument involves neither the rejection of pragmatism’s emphasis on practice and practical effects, nor a desperate (and, in my opinion, depressing) account of all of the things that a liberal arts education can be regarded as “good for.”1 I want to suggest instead that the distinction between theoretical and practical pursuits is sufficiently complex when viewed from a genuinely pragmatic perspective, that it cannot be used to support the claim that a liberal education has nothing to do with practice or practical affairs. In addition, I want to show that something like the philosophical anthropology generated by the classical pragmatists is required to make perfect sense out of the values and methods that typically shape learning activities in a liberal arts environment. The immediate inclination, when one’s objective is to assess the pedagogical relevance of pragmatism, is to turn attention directly to John Dewey’s voluminous writings dealing with the philosophy of education. But that is not my strategy here. Dewey is relevant enough, but it is the author of Human Nature and Conduct who draws some of my interest. Even more than Dewey, Charles Peirce’s thoughts about “developmental teleology,” “musement,” “self-control,” and the “will to learn,” and also Josiah Royce’s discussion of the “will to interpret,” prove to be enormously important for these