Vagueness and Tragedy

8/7/2019 Vagueness and Tragedy

1/20

1

Vagueness, Tragedy, and Teaching

Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the

sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of

whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that

surrounds and escorts it, - or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh

of its flesh; leaving it, it is true an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of thatthing newly taken and freshly understood.

- James, The Stream of Thought

C.J. Sentell

April 2008

In a brief passage in his earliest published work, The Principles of Psychology (1890), James

says that it is the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I

am so anxious to press on the attention.1 In Pragmatism (1906), James says, [p]rofusion,

not economy, may after all be realitys key-note, which leads him to ask further whether

there not after all be a possible ambiguity in truth? More strongly still, in Essays in

Radical Empiricism (1912), James says that, as it does appear, our universe is to a large

extent chaotic.2

The after all in these passages is important, for it works against an entire

tradition that seeks to domesticate reality (and our knowledge of it) with Occams razor

economic, lean, and clean. According to James, philosophers and others with a proclivity to

viscous intellectualism have failed to account for the importance of the vague in their

discourses on experience and life, focusing their energies on the various quests for certaintyand objectivity that dominate the conceptual landscape. Almost by necessity do such projects

exclude the inarticulate, inchoate, and profligate features of experience, and yet it is precisely

to these features that he would have us return in a reconsideration of it.

Following James, William Gavin advocates a return to the Jamesian vague. Though

prima facie it may seem strange or even ironic an appearance that, to be sure, fades with

understanding Gavin clarifies the meaning of the vague by situating it within the larger

context of James thought, and examines several of its specific consequences in the areas of

medicine and the arts.3 Nakai Pope and Barbara Thayer-Bacon, too, follow out the

1

William James, The Stream of Thought, in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott

(New York: Random House, 1967), 45.2Ibid., 197.

3 William Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 1992), see Chapters 7 & 8.


2/20

2

implications of a reconsideration of the vague for pedagogy and teaching. 4 In different ways,

each of these writers draw on James to illustrate the importance of vagueness to experience in

general, and to draw certain concrete consequences of it in various aspects of lived

experience. And while I agree with what each of these writers offer, in this essay I explore

the ways in which they have each missed a central correlate component of the vague in their

reconsiderations of it, namely, that of the tragic. In different ways, each has attempted to

articulate the contours of vagueness within a continuum of James writings that range from

his early work on the phenomenology and psychology of consciousness to his later writings

on radical empiricism. And to varying degrees each writer acknowledges the hermeneutic

dangers of over-emphasizing either of these sources at the expense of the other. 5 While

focusing too closely on the former might tend to treat vagueness solely as a feature of an

individuals experience, focusing too much on the latter might tend to construe the world

itself as vague. Either way, then, to get a comprehensive understanding of the vague

including its limits and implications requires a robust integration of the different voices

operating within the Jamesian corpus. More specifically, when one considers the ethical

dimension of James writings, one is able to augment their reconsiderations of the vague by

incorporating into it the tragic dimension of life. In this essay I would like to pick up this

discussion, contribute to it a consideration of the relationship between vagueness and tragedy,

and redraw some its implications for pedagogy and teaching.

* * *

Jamesian vagueness is a multifaceted and, by its very nature, slippery creature. To begin to

get a better understanding of what it is, it is helpful to delineate what vagueness is not. It is

not, for example, simply that which is not said or thought well; vagueness is more than a lack

of precision in words, ideas, or actions. Vagueness, in fact, is not a lack at all; it is not a

privation of precision to be remedied upon reflection and recognition. Rather, vagueness for

James means almost the exact opposite. In this sense, vagueness is precisely the profusion of

experience that overruns language and exceeds the capacities of human attention. Vagueness

is not a negative attribute to overcome, but a positive at least insofar as it is ineliminable

facet of experience. In this way, vagueness is experienced as the interaction between that

4

Nakia S. Pope, Toward a Pedagogy of Vagueness and Barbara Thayer-Bacon, More Thoughts on a

Pedagogy of the Vague, Philosophy of EducationYearbook (Champaign, IL: Philosophy of Education

Society, 2002), 416 427.5 Thayer-Bacon makes this point most explicitly in her response to Pope, cf. 424.


3/20

3

which undergoes experience and its surrounding environment. Put differently, we can speak

of the experience ofvagueness in the course of the overall continuity of experience.

Before going further, I would like to distinguish between two distinct kinds of

vagueness that appear as options for trying to understand the nature, scope, and role of it

within experience. The first type is a form a linguistic vagueness, which has subsidiary

concepts such as semantic, semiotic, and grammatical vagueness. The differences between

these senses are negligible for my present purposes, and I mention them only because they

elicit a possible relationship between language and vagueness that needs to be obviated at the

outset. Early on James speaks of the inarticulate in connection with the vague, which again

suggests that vagueness is not some failure of articulation or linguistic arrangement.6 Rather,

it points to the way vagueness concerns that which is beyond language, that which is unable

to be articulated. For James, that is, vagueness is not itself linguistic, i.e., it is neither about

the inscrutability of reference nor the inherent ambiguity of words. Vagueness does not

involve, pace Russell, word puzzles concerning the present king of France or the number of

hairs that constitute baldness.7 Neither is vagueness in the sense James employs it

grammatical or semantic.8 While there are no doubt puzzles of vagueness embedded in these

issues, this is not the vague James has in mind. Rather, James thinks that the overemphasis

on linguistic or conceptual vagueness is precisely that tendency in thought that stifles and

prevents a richer notion of the vague to be incorporated into experience.

A second type of vagueness that might be tempting to take up is some variation of

ontological vagueness. Shifting the subject of vagueness from language to the world,

ontological vagueness would involve a robust metaphysical conception of objective meaning,

i.e., meaning outside of its being made by particular subjects, wherein the world itself takes

on the characteristic of vagueness. Somewhat strangely, an ontological conception of

vagueness would make the world itself (or certain parts of it) vague, under-defined and

under-determined in certain ways, perhaps blurring the ontological stability of things at their

edges. While this type of vagueness is somewhat closer to what James has in mind, it

ultimately fails precisely at the point wherein the subject-object dualism becomes

6

William James,Psychology The Briefer Course (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press1985), 37.7

Cf. Bertrand Russell, On Denoting (1905), inLogic and Knowledge (London: George Allen & Unwin,

1956), and Vagueness (1923), in Collected Papers, vol. 9 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).8 Cf.Vagueness: A Reader. Edited by Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith. (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, 1996).


4/20

4

hypostasized and written into the order of things. Moreover, this characterization fails

because vagueness, for James, is not blurriness; vagueness is not haziness or fogginess of

experience.

Jamesian vagueness, in short, is not an adjective, but a noun and verb; it is

substantive and has weight, so to speak. This is because James philosophical vision of the

world is one of pure experience, of which vagueness is but one, albeit ineliminable, facet.

Because vagueness is a constituent feature of experience, it is important to consider briefly

the central contours of James metaphysics of experience so as to situate vagueness within its

context. William Gavin neatly characterizes three ways in which experience has been

traditionally construed so as to eliminate the role of vagueness that James wants to press

upon our attention, namely, 1) by assuming that experience is a discrete, synchronic, and

completed event, 2) by assuming experience is composed of substantive parts, which have a

value in themselves, and that transitives are merely neutral connectives, and 3) by relying too

heavily on language and concepts in philosophizing about experience.9

In order to

understand how James vision of vagueness fits into his larger metaphysics of experience,

each of these areas need to be considered.

The claims of some neopragmatists notwithstanding, the pragmatisms of James and

Dewey are not anti-metaphysical positions, and neither would they be better positions if they

were.10

To be sure, each was certainly opposed to a particular kind of metaphysics i.e., any

metaphysics of certainty or closure, any system by which the world is fixed, hypostasized, or

reified so as to be known, or any philosophy that claims to have the final word in matters of

experience or life but their philosophies nevertheless contain certain metaphysical

commitments. In fact, both Dewey and James are explicit and emphatic that all visions of the

world are saturated with metaphysical commitments of some sort or another, and that

metaphysics is a necessary constituent feature of any larger understanding of experience and

the world. Furthermore, each of these metaphysical commitments are contingent upon ones

thrownness into the world, whereby certain forms of understanding are inherited by way of

being born into a particular place, time, and body. That is, each worldview is tinged in a vital

way with personal interests, inclinations, and purposes that presuppose some larger

hermeneutic context in which they become meaningful. For James more specifically, even

9

William Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague, 17-18.10 I am thinking of Rorty here. See, for example, Deweys Metaphysics in The Consequences of

Pragmatism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).


5/20

5

metaphysics and this needs to be emphasized with metaphysics above all, precisely because

it is so often disassociated from the personal cannot escape the particularity of time, with

bodies in motion and at rest, moving with interests and purposes in a real and pressing

environment.

James metaphysics is above all one of experiential relations. James refers to his

metaphysics as radical empiricism, or as a metaphysics of pure experience, which lays

the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a

collection and the universal as an abstraction.11 It is within this description that we are able

to see Jamesian experience as a type of mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts that

recognizes particular differences by treating the universal the home and subject matter of

traditional metaphysics as a necessary though not sufficient abstraction in the order of

things. The specifically radical feature of James empiricism consists of neither

admit[ing] into its construction any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclud[ing]

from them any element that is directly experienced.12

In this way, a world of pure

experience is a world connected by experiential tissue.13 It is only through experience, in

other words, that life is meaningfully connected, with pure experience being the immediate

flux of life which furnishes the material order to our later reflection with its conceptual

categories.14 Within his metaphysics of experience, James strives to leave room for life,

which is precisely the room eliminated by traditional metaphysics, as [l]ife is confused and

superabundant, it is open-ended, fluid, overflowing at the edges and constantly outrunning

any attempt to fix it into one place.15

By making room for life within philosophy, James radical empiricism holds that

life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected.16

Moreover, in situating his

metaphysics within the realm of experience, James fashions a philosophical field in which

the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any

kind of relation experienced must be accounted as real as anything else in the system.17

Or, what amounts to the same thing differently put, [e]verything real must be experienceable

11

William James, A World of Pure Experience, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 195.12

Ibid.13

Ibid., 212.14

Ibid., The Thing and Its Relations, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 215.15

Ibid., A World of Pure Experience, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 194.16Ibid., 212.17Ibid., 195.


6/20

6

somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.18 That is,

relations are real and nothing real escapes from having an environment.19

In this way,

James radical empiricism points to an ecology of experience (or an experiential ecology)

that accounts for the reality of relations in the course of an experience always situated within

a particular place.

For James, relations are distinguished by their different degrees of intimacy, which

include relations of externality, simultaneity, similarity, difference, and activity.20 Because

experience is conceived as an open-ended activity always in the making, these relations are

especially important in that they conjoin terms into series involving change, tendency,

resistance, and the causal order generally.21 James also speaks of internal relations, or

relations that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing each other.

He immediately goes on to say: The organization of the Self as a system of memories,

purposes, strivings, fulfillments or disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all

relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each

others being.22 That collection of internal relations commonly referred to as the self,

then, just is this history of continuous relations between that which undergoes experience

amid its varying environs. Within each of our personal histories, James says, subject,

object, interest and purpose are continuous or may be continuous. Personal histories are

processes of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately

experienced.23

The key to understanding James conception of the reality of relations,

however, turns on recognizing that [n]o one single type of connection runs through all the

experiences that compose it, and that every relation needs to be accounted for to

comprehend the fully relational nature of experience.24

Relations, then, are what form the

connective tissue of experience. Through the warp and woof of the immediate flux, meaning

is made in experienced relations woven together in purposeful contingency.

Maintaining the continuity of relations is a key feature of radical empiricism. To take

the continuity of relations as central means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more;

18

William James, The Experience of Activity, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 279.19

William James,A Pluralistic Universe, inEssays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe

(Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967), 319.20

William James, A World of Pure Experience, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 196.21

Ibid.22

Ibid.23Ibid., 198.24Ibid., 197.


7/20

7

and to take it at its face value means first of all to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse

ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary

conceptions in order to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again

seem rationally possible.25

Just as traditional metaphysics has treated relations as static and

being true in some supernal way, James holds that an overemphasis on the linguistic and

the conceptual have eliminated space for the vague within experience.26

I mentioned earlier

that James begins early on to associate the vague with the inarticulable, and throughout his

writings he continues to have a discomfort with the almost exclusionary philosophical focus

on language, concepts, and logic. It is not that James wants so much to dispense with these

altogether though he does announce at one point, somewhat dramatically, that he is done

with logic27 but rather that he wants to show the ways in which such focus distracts

philosophers from attending to those features of experience that fall outside the scope of

language, concepts, and logic altogether. He says:

But the flux of [the world of pure experience] no sooner comes than it tends to fill

itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and

abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns

and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the

proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.28

Here James is pointing to the way in which the purity of pure experience is always and

only relative to the amount of experience that remains unverbalized and unverbalizable. In a

certain sense, words have the tendency to overdetermine experience or, rather, we are in the

habit of underdetermining experience by relying too exclusively on words causing us to

forget those facets of experience that fall outside the scope oflogos. Indeed, there can be no

doubt that for James there is thought outside of language and that there is not a necessary, a

priori logical structure of the world. Such a structure is made in the course of experience.

Thus, for James, experience is open-ended, entirely shot through with personal

interests and purposes, and always in the making. Experience is not had; it is not a static,

passive, or uninterested reception of a determinate world of objects standing in objective

relation to the subject. Rather, experience is always in the making; it is profuse, variegated

25

Ibid., 198.26

Ibid., 196.27 William James,A Pluralistic Universe, 212.28 William James, The Thing and Its Relations, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 215.


8/20

8

and variable, and always happens in a particular historical context and for particular

purposes. And it is precisely here that the vague begins to emerge. That is, the vague

appears in the negative space behind the salient features of experience selectively

emphasized; the vague is the unattended to the profligate relief of experience which is

necessarily left out of any given experience. Because the activity of experience is always

exclusionary, cutting-off that which is felt as unnecessary to purposes present and future, the

vague is the loss involved in any and every experience. James efforts to reinstate the vague,

then, are directed toward calling our attention to the limits of experience, to that which is lost

through its excess. Thus, to fail to attend to this excess and recognize its importance is to fail

to attend to the vague. Importantly, this attention is not merely negative; that is, accounting

for the vague is not just a limiting concept beyond which we know not what. Rather, James

means for the vague to be thought positively, in all its complexity, and with substantive

consequences for future experience.

In this sense, vagueness is the penumbra that trails the light of attention. Crucially,

however, attending to the vague does not eliminate vagueness, precisely because redirecting

the center of attention merely shifts the penumbra elsewhere. Vagueness persists within

experience, albeit in a different location defined by different interests and circumstances. As

features within experience, words and concepts limit experience by excluding meanings, on

the one hand, and calling forth certain other meanings on the other; [t]hey conceal, Gavin

notes, in the very act of disclosing.29

Moreover, for James the logical follows the

linguistic: Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will,

exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds itso I prefer bluntly to call reality if not

irrational, then at least non-rational in its constitution.30

This is why vagueness, for James,

is not a problem to be resolved, nor a thing to be clarified, but a province within experience

that is vast if only because focused attention leaves so much of the world unexperienced.

* * *

Having now outlined the general contours of radical empiricism, and the place of vagueness

within it, I now was to turn to the specifically pedagogical consequences of the vague. Pope

recognizes that the vague is rich in pedagogical content in that it works to remind us of

those features of experience that outrun all attempts at codification. He says that neglecting

the vague not only limits the broad and expressive nature of teaching, but it also models a

29 William Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague, 49.30 William James,A Pluralistic Universe, 212-213.


9/20

9

way of having experiencesthat neglects the novel, thinning experience down to its bare

substantial minimum.31

Pope takes the pedagogical upshot of this to call for an attempt to

cultivate in students an open attitude toward future experience so as to miss as little as

possible.32

That is, Pope seems to take the upshot of Jamesian vagueness to be an attitude

of curiosity that seeks out the vague so as to know it as vague. While Pope recognizes that

pedagogy is the province of all experience, his discussion of the implications of Jamesian

vagueness for pedagogy focuses primarily on schooling.33 Noting the classroom is

seemingly a hostile place for the vague, Pope then attempts to consider the ways in which

the vague may be integrated into the institutional space of the school.34 He examines the

ways in which measurement and quantitative analyses work to eliminate space for the vague

within schools, and the ways in which the standardization of knowledge and technique work

to overdetermine the classroom.

Thayer-Bacon follows Pope in thinking about the implications of vagueness for

teaching, and amends Popes analysis by suggesting that the attitude of openness that

vagueness engenders should not just be to miss as little of the world as possible, but also to

remember that there will always be something lost in every experience taken. The good

(and bad) news, she says, is that we can never get rid of the vague in our classrooms.35

This observation of the inevitability of the vagueness is no doubt correct, but it is

immediately effaced when she then asks whether the classroom really is a hostile place for

the vague? and What can we do as teachers to encourage the vague in our classrooms?36

In what follows, I would like to flesh out this tension between Pope and Thayer-Bacons

understanding of the Jamesian vague and what they take to be its consequences for pedagogy.

So Thayer-Bacon and Pope both want to think about the vague within the parameters

of the classroom indeed, about vagueness in the classroom but each seems to conflate the

experience of vagueness in the classroom with pedagogical implications of the vague both in

and out of the institutional confines of the school. Put another way, by eliding the educative

structure of experience in general, Pope and Thayer-Bacon unduly restrict their conceptions

of the pedagogical implications of the vague. I want to suggest that the questions with which

31

Nakia S. Pope, Toward a Pedagogy of Vagueness, 422.32

Ibid., 42033

Ibid.34

Ibid., 421.35 Barbara Thayer-Bacon., More Thoughts on a Pedagogy of the Vague, 426.36Ibid.


10/20

10

they conclude evidence a certain misunderstanding of the role of the vague within

experience. A teacher does not need to cultivate the vague in the classroom precisely

because the vague always already looms so large in such a circumscribed environment.

Neither does the vague need to be incorporated into the curriculum, a prospect they both

recognize as problematic. Nevertheless, it can be pointed to in the course of school

experience, and the standardization and institutionalization of education itself can be the foil

against which teachers highlight the vague. Such a pedagogy would be critical of the

selective emphases embedded within the institutional framework of the school so as to

employ them as means of cultivating in students an appreciation of those vital aspects of

experience that fall outside of those scope of emphases prized in the classroom. In this

explicit way of teaching against the curricula, the teacher can indeed model a way of

experiencing the world that is open-ended, curious, and guided by genuine interest. But this

modeling must show the ways in which the vague itself compels a genuine interest. That is,

such a strategy, if it is to be successful, must facilitate students actual experience of the rich

consequences of accounting for vagueness, and not just gesturing to it in the course of the

classroom.

In this way, to teach vagueness is require more than modeling the type of

experience James advocates in his radical empiricism; it is to actually cultivate those habits

of attention that are conducive to experiencing and accounting for the vagueness that is

present in every experience. So to ask questions about ways to encourage the vague in the

classroom is to miss the fundamental point that the vague is already there. To take seriously

the pedagogical implications of the vague, then, requires the teacher to thicken the experience

of their students by actually cultivating those experiential habits of radical empiricism. To

put this a bit more forcefully, if the vague is to be the subject of pedagogy or a pedagogical

style if it is to serve as a means of guidance or method of instruction then it must be

presented within the larger context of a world of pure experience.

One of the most ready to hand ways to do this, perhaps, is to use the curricula and

environment of the school as a spur to critical analysis about the processes and consequences

of the habituation they are simultaneously undergoing.37

But a potentially broader option

involves cultivating habits of attention, or ways of experiencing particular parts of the world,

that adequately account for the relational nature of experience, especially as it bears on

37 Cf. Gavins concluding chapter in William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague.


11/20

11

relations between human beings. When so considered, vagueness takes on an ethical

dimension and has specifically ethical consequences. In essays such as On a Certain

Blindness in Human Beings and The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, James

outlines some of the ethical consequence of his radical empiricism. And while Gavin is no

doubt correct to point out that [e]thics as a separate study never loomed large in Jamesian

writingsbecause in his philosophy knowing has a moral dimension built in, in terms of

choice, we must consider just these writings if we are to understand fully the pedagogical

implications of vagueness rather than just some vague implications for pedagogy. 38 In what

remains, I want to show how these consequences highlight the crucial connections between

vagueness and tragedy, and how such connections point toward a more robust incorporation

of James metaphysics of experience in considering the pedagogical implication of

vagueness.

* * *

For the radical empiricist, ethics is the activity of valuing in the course of living experience.

Ethics, then, is not a predetermined calculus of rights and wrongs to be applied to things

within experience indeed, for James there is no such thing possible as an ethical

philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.39 but rather is inextricably bound up with

experience unfurling in an ongoing nexus of relations. The moment one sentient beingis

made a part of the universe, James says, there is a chance for goods and evils really to

exist. Moral relations now have their status, in that beings consciousness.40

The result of

values made in the course of experience, [g]oodness, badness, and obligation must be

realizedsomewhere in order really to exist.Neither moral relations nor the moral law can

swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them.41 In this way, ethics is

ecological and values are realized in the course of life; ethics exists in the habitat of

experience and value is made in the relations obtaining therein.

Thus, good, bad, and obligation severally mean no absolute nature, independent of

personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or

anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds. 42 Wherever such

38

William Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague, 37.39

William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, in McDermott, Writings of William James,

610.40

Ibid., 614.41Ibid., my emphasis.42Ibid., 618.


12/20

12

minds exist, James continues, there is an ethical world in its essential features.43

Wherever there is such an ethical world that is, wherever there is experience it is ideals

that order, direct, and condition the goods that livings minds seek. These ideals, like the

goods themselves, are not absolutely ideal because, for James, ideals themselves are relative

to the lives that entertain them.44 But even as ideals are particular to the purposes of

concrete lives, they are nevertheless inherited from the stock of ideals and practices that

constitute the world into which we are born. And because ethics must wait on facts that

is, because ethics always enters our experience already underway we must take up those

ideals that order our good anew at every moment in the course of experience so as to evaluate

their efficacy according to their consequences.45

To the extent that James philosophy of experience has a moral dimension built into it

in terms of choice, then, James conceives of ethical life as the struggle to attain a sense of

widening vision.46

The strenuous nature of ethical life, that is, always involves a form of

resistance, for [w]e have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weighing

down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful revelations of the truth. 47 This

cloud-bank is the weight of tradition and habit that we inherit by the very fact of being born

into a particular part of the world, at a particular time, and habituated into experiencing that

world in particular ways. By actively accounting for this cloud-bank of tradition, we strive to

widen and enrich our experience so as to overcome what James calls the blindness and

deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance.48

It is this blindness to each otherthat is the ethical upshot of vagueness: by failing to account positively for the vague in our

dealings and judgments of each other, we take up and extend into the future our inheritance

that consists largely of an ignorance to the experience of others. He says:

We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors

and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice

determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from

one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what

43

Ibid.44

William James, What Makes a Life Significant, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 656.45

Ibid., The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 625.46

Ibid., What Makes a Life Significant, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 650.47Ibid., 646.48Ibid., 656.


13/20

13

is true of itseems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation. We

build the flux out inevitably.49

In this way, the beliefs we inherit are comprised of habits of attention and action that

determine how the world is experienced. The flux is built out of this inherited world through

the selective emphases that always already shape the world we are born into. These selective

emphases determine the possible array of choices available at the cusp of fresh experience.

The flux of the world, in other words, is built out through choice.

In characterizing experience as a flux burgeoning out of an inheritance, then, James

emphasizes the way in which past modes of belief and action always already precede

experience and shape it in determinate ways. Indeed, James says, [w]e can hardly take in an

impression at all in the absence of a preconception of what impressions there may possibly

be.50

These purposes direct or guide experience in particular ways that are constitutive of

the selective emphases at work in every experience.

What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it.

The thatof it is its own; but the whatdepends on the which; and the which depends

on us. Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary

choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the fields extent; by our emphasis

we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction

or in that. We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue

ourselves.51

By circumscribing activity, selective interests pick out the most salient and important features

of experience so as to furnish the means by which various ends are realized. Human

motives sharpen all our questions, James says, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers,

all our formulas have a human twist.52 For James, though, the selective emphases operative

within experience are habits of attention that are both personal and social. That is, selective

emphasis is at work both within the personal consciousness of the individual in its

environment, as well as among collections or pools of individuals in relation to each other

and their particular environments. The emphases of the latter are just those sets of cultural

habits of attention transmitted across generations, a type of collective memory that is

49

Ibid., Pragmatism and Humanism, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 455.50

Ibid., 453.51Ibid., 452.52Ibid., 451.


14/20

14

corporeal and organismal, as well as collective and social. Such social habits of attention

constitute a natal inheritance whose inertia inexorably figures the future shape of experience;

past experience builds into the present the very forms by which future will be conceived.

Unlike traditional, universalizing philosophies of experience, then, James radical

empiricism holds that the essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a legitimate

part of the game, - that it is our plain business as men [and women] to try one of the keys,

and the one in which we most confide.53 We must try, decide, and choose one course rather

than another, for [t]here is no more miserable a human being than one in whom nothing is

habitual but indecision.54 We are always thrown into particular situations that demand

particular responses. But because of the necessity of selective interest, things go unnoticed.

We are always looking here rather than there, always making a choice to attend to one salient

feature within experience rather than another. This cutting off of the world is a discernment

of salient characters so as to incorporate and make use of those characters within a limited

field of experience for particular purposes.

It is significant in this regard, however, that Gavin reminds us about the critical role

that possibility plays in James philosophy.55 Possibility, for James, is not merely logical

that is, it is not simply a modal notion of conceivability or the like but rather, like all

relations within a world of pure experience, possibility is an existential relation of actual

possibility. Following Aristotle in important ways, James conceives of possibility in terms of

actuality, that is, of the possibilities available within a given nexus of actual, determinate

relations. In this sense, then, potentiality may in fact be a more appropriate word for

Jamesian possibility, but this distinction in nomenclature should not conceal the way in

which the flux of experience is actuality in motion, which contains real possibilities lying

pregnant in every present. Real choice exists only among actual possibilities, thus making

choice the exclusion of certain possibilities so as to realize particular ends through selective

emphasis. Real possibilities, for James, are live options and the deadness and liveness in

an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are

measured by his [or her] willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis

means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some

53

Ibid., The Sentiment of Rationality, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 344.54Ibid., Habit, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 17.55 William Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague, 35-55.


15/20

15

believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.56 For James, then, choices are

specific, particular, and always arranged within a matrix of actual possibilities, i.e., live

options.

It is precisely here that tragedy appears, between the actual possibilities of the present

and the necessity of choice. The tragic sense that accompanies choice just is the inexorable

loss that is the consequence of making any decision large or small, dramatic or banal. Just

as choice varies along a continuum of matters large and small, the tragic significance of

choice, too, varies along a continuum; just as decisions inevitably press themselves upon us

by the flux and movement of experience, demanding responses to every now, tragedy silently

accompanies the necessary exclusion of certain possibilities over others that could have been

realized in the future. In walking through a quiet grove of hardwoods on a sunny Sunday

afternoon, for example, I am overcome by the mourning I must perform for not being able to

stand witness to these trees all day every day. I must pay attention to other parts of the

world. They do not cease to exist, but exist at the periphery of my experience. I can think of

them while at home, yearning to be back amid their silent confessions of time. Or, more

commonly still, they exit my attention and fade from my experience. They haunt the corners

of my memory, standing as vague specters of a past come and gone. They do not need me,

but I need them, for they are in a sense my history, my past rolled up in the corporeal

memory of my experience. In short, and in time, these trees become vague to me, their

tragedy commensurate with their loss, which is compelled by the ongoing flux of experience

that is always outrunning the proportion of the world gained.

In one sense, then, vagueness is the tragic loss involved in every experience. It is the

absolute passing of certain determinate possibilities through the existential predicament of

the inescapability of choice. It is the world well lost so as to gain access to a small slice of

the sumptuous minutiae of worldly experience. But tragedy is not just this irredeemable loss,

for, like vagueness, tragedy also concerns the profligacy nature of the world that must go

unattended to in the course of experience. In this way, Jamesian tragedy is inextricably

linked to Jamesian vagueness. If the vague is both that ever-more and that ever-not-quite of

experience, then the tragic is both that excess that outruns every experience and that

inexorable loss involved in every choice. The excess of experience is vague, existing

unattended to if but for now, and more than likely forever while its remainder occupies

56 William James, The Will to Believe, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 718.


16/20

16

our immediate attention. Thought deals, James says, solely with surfaces. It can name

the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is essential and

permanent, not temporary.57 This insufficiency of thought is necessary and tragic. The

amount of the world that overflows our possible attention at any given moment, then, is both

vague and tragic; it is the loss that outruns the capacity of present experience.

Put differently and to return to the metaphors James deploys so effectively the

blindness and deadness to each other that we inherit, transmitted across generations as the

necessary lack of certain habits of attention, actually shape the possible contours of present

vagueness. And to the extent that these habitual failures of attention condition our relations

with other centers of experience, vagueness becomes an issue of ethical significance. By

actively accounting for the vague in our interactions with others, the vague has the potential

to transform the values experienced and thus open up wider vistas for ethical life. The ocular

metaphor of blindness becomes all the more apt when vagueness is seen in its close affinity

with tragedy. For James, this certain blindness in human beings is one with which we are

all afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves. 58

Thus, we are in a sense habituated into a blindness to the vague; we are educated into a moral

atomism that neglects the profligate particularity comprising the world outside our limited

experience. James says:

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform.

Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his [or her] 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.59

The limits of our experience necessarily exclude others and this fact is made all the more

tragic by its utter necessity. Within the scope of our selective attention, then, we must order

57

William James,A Pluralistic Universe, 250.58

William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, in McDermott, Writings of William James,

629.59Ibid., 629-30.


17/20

17

ideals in ways that facilitate meaningful choices between courses of action so as to fulfill

those ideals most fully.

But because the very best of men [and women] must not only be insensible, but be

ludicrously and peculiarly insensible, to many goods, we must develop efficacious ways to

order those goods so as to choose among the many possibilities open to us at any given

moment.60

And this demand for the the right scale of subordination in ideals, James says,

is no mere theoretical demand, but is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of

the ideal must be butchered, and [the ethical individual] needs to know which part. It is a

tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he [or she] has to deal.61

Again, it is the loss involved in every choice that is tragic, and the scale of ethical ideals that

we employ to order our choices is meant to mitigate though not eliminate that tragedy.

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic

question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly

narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always apinch between the ideal and

the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is

hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the

same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that

presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire.62

Here again the exclusionary nature of desire and choice points to the loss involved at every

moment. Every choice, or end of desire, is the elimination of certain possibilities so that

others may be realized. Choice, in this way, is the simultaneous opening up and closing

down of determinate possibilities. Indeed, life itself has this structure, for, as James says,

with each new ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal will

vanish.63 But this loss, again, is not simply a negative loss. Rather, through alternative

means of habituation we can attune our experience to accounting for the way in which every

end of desire is exclusive of some other end, so that we may take this consequence into

account in the future. And to accomplish such an accounting is to open a new set of

determinate possibilities in the present.

60Ibid.,, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 622.

61Ibid.

62Ibid.63 William James, What Makes a Life Significant, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 660.


18/20

18

One way to understand James ethics, then, is to see it as an ethics of infinite

obligation. But this obligation, importantly, is not an obligation to do any particular thing,

come what may. Again, obligation is no one thing, but rather is an ideal realized in the

course of the concrete experience of a particular individual. Rather, the obligation James

gestures toward is a comportment to and the activity of experience itself; it is a commitment

to the reality of relations as they are experienced and to account for the vague and tragic

aspects of those relations at any and every moment. To be sure, this ideal qua idealis itself

certainly unattainable, but that is not the point, and radical empiricism cannot even conceive

of such a creature anyway. James is not, in other words, suggesting that it is actually possible

to account for every relation in the course of experience, and that this is thus the goal of

ethics.

As we have seen, in fact, he is suggesting just the opposite, namely, that there are

always aspects of experience that go unaccounted for, that are lost through the cracks of

experience never to be felt at all. These are just the vague and tragic aspect of experience,

which, when positively integrated into experience, transform the structure of experience more

generally. Vagueness and tragedy, in other words, work to make experience more open-

ended. Now, James says, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere

ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or

general, sound or mistaken, low or highEducation, enlarging as it does our horizon and

perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view.64

By

pointing to the profoundly intimate and limited character of experience, vagueness and

tragedy function constructively to build into experience itself a more educative structure. In

the end, the consequence of radical empiricism just is to affect experience such that it

acquires increasingly comprehensive views of the world. This is the educative capacity of

experience, which must be attended to and cultivated if it is to realize its full potential, and

which is the goal of education to pursue.

We are now in a position to understand fully the pedagogical implications of

vagueness. Moreover, I have attempted to show that to such a consideration we must add the

sense of tragedy that accompanies the forms of experience that are transmitted as habits of

attention across generations. So often, these forms have tended to occlude the vague from its

proper place in our mental landscape and thus have also worked to make us blind the limits

64Ibid., 657.


19/20

19

of our own experience and dead to the tragedy involved in every choice. In this way, any

education that merely habituates individuals into the established order of ideals is no

education at all. In fact, when education is taken in its preponderant institutional context

namely, the school it becomes clear that to a great extent the experience of schooling today

consists largely of a reinscription that blinds and deadens us to the vagueness and tragedy

that permeate our experience of other human beings. By repeating and therefore reinforcing

the selective emphases and ideals that order goods in the course of life, schools constantly

contain the real possibility of working against the very expansive tendencies of experience

that James highlights in his discussions of vagueness and tragedy. But while schools verge

on becoming the sole place of education in our environment, the environment continues to

educate by means of experience. The vague and tragic facets of experience operate

inexorably within experience, and the extent to which they are positively incorporated into

experience and accounted for is the extent to which they can function pedagogically.

In this way, then, Pope, Thayer-Bacon, and others who are concerned to develop a

pedagogy of the vague could do no better than to reconstruct the classroom in ways that are

more conducive to actually having vague and tragic experiences. While it may be necessary,

it is insufficient to merely gesture at the vague in the course of teaching or to simply point out

to students the ways in which there is loss involved in every choice. Neither is it sufficient

just to work toward the vague using the curriculum and classroom experience as a critical

spur. Rather, the entire environment of the classroom the ecology of educational space, if

you will must be reconstructed so that the students actually experience the vague and the

tragic in real relationships. In teaching, the pedagogue who wishes to cultivate in their

students a more robust appreciation of the vague must create opportunities that are conducive

to having such experiences. They must, in other words, recommit themselves to cultivating

in their students the robust commitments of radical empiricism. Thus, modeling such

experiences is no doubt important, but focusing on this alone neglects the way in which

experiences of vagueness and tragedy are themselves educative: they teach as they point,

silently gesturing to world lost, unseen, and unsaid. Moreover, teaching students about the

excesses and losses of experience, especially as it relates to being in relation to others, is to

try to teach these concepts in the abstract, when these are the very features of experience that

must be taken in the course of experience, in concrete and actual ways, before they begin to

transform experience in intelligent ways.


20/20

20

In a discussion about how to read and understand other philosophers, James wonders

about what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for than when thinkers are forgotten

to be the one-sided champions of special ideals that they are and taken, rather, as

schoolmasters deciding what all must think.65

In fact, James shudders at this thought,

which is an important one to end this essay. If experience is to acquire the capacity to more

effectively integrate wider and more expansive views of the world, then the experience of

schooling must be dramatically transformed so as to bring about the kinds of experiences that

are truly educative. To do this would require finding ways of incorporating experiences that

are motivated by genuine interest and contain the means by which inherited forms of

attention can be reconstructed along new and fruitful paths. Indeed, as James says, although

all men [and women] will insist on being spoken to by the universe in some way, few will

insist on being spoken to in just the same way.66

Thus, if the vague and tragic are to actually

be reinstated to their proper place, schools must find ways of allowing the world to speak in

voices that range across the vast terrain of experience, and teachers must find ways to make

themselves less central to the educational experience. To do this would be to create a space

of genuine interest and lively activity; it would be to create an educational ecology that works

to transmit across generations ways of experiencing the world that are open-ended, vague,

and tragic. The classroom would become, in short, the laboratory of radical empiricism.

65Ibid., The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 622.66Ibid., The Sentiment of Rationality, in McDermott, Writings of William James, 322.

Vagueness and Tragedy

Documents

Transcript of Vagueness and Tragedy