The intellectual swagger of pragmatism comes from its claim to be able to get at truth from considering what works, without having to lug around all the heavy baggage typical of correspondence theories. Why insist on all the metaphysical machinery typical of other forms of realism when a focus on “what works” is sufficient? The appeal of the principle of parsimony is undeniable.
But there is a risk of question-begging latent in pragmatism in general, let alone on theological questions. To say that some explanation counts as “true” because “it works” risks foreclosing our intellectual labours too soon. Just as deterrence theories of punishment could indeed “work” as effective measures for crime-reduction even if the one being punished were not truly “guilty” but merely someone thought to be guilty, so too accounts that “work” without getting to the real forms and causes of things risk justifying the theological equivalent of a Ptolemaic astronomy. That astronomy, after all, “works.” But its success as a model for calculation disguises rather than discloses the real structure of things.
The root of the problem may be a failure to appreciate that the principle of parsimony is a double-edged sword – shaving away unnecessary hypotheses but requiring the postulation of those entities without which the phenomenon in question goes unexplained. Unless there is something in reality sufficient to explain why what works does in fact work, we risk being superficial or being arbitrary – in either case, counting an analysis as sufficient that hasn't really given an explanation. Even in the highly sympathetic account of neopragmatism in this book, one sees the problem that always nags philosophical pragmatism, and one that does so in particularly egregious ways when applied to theological questions.
The first half of this slender volume does valuable service in the history of philosophy by recounting the emergence of neopragmatism out of classical pragmatism, with special emphasis on a certain theological vision that Emerson's Transcendentalism and British Romanticism provided for Peirce, James, and Dewey. The second half analyzes the somewhat unexpected return of these same religious themes in the thought of Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty while criticizing the neopragmatic theologies of Cornel West, Sallie McFague, and Gordon Kaufman.
Dissatisfied by the standard accounts of the history of pragmatism for paying insufficient attention to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kimura devotes two chapters to the exposition of Emerson's Transcendentalism and his influence on the founders of pragmatism, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce. By exhibiting the various components of Emerson's religion of nature as an American form of British Romanticism, Kimura sets the stage for separate chapters on the similar forms of religiosity in James, Peirce, and later John Dewey.
The section on James in particular is revealing. Sympathetic as James is to religious experience, his constant focus is on the satisfaction that being religious brings and on the varieties of religious fulfilment that are possible. He manifests in these books his characteristically pragmatic attention to “what works” as if that constituted “truth” rather than with worry about inconvenient “truths” that are typical of exclusivist religious claims. Likewise, Kimura emphasizes Dewey's stress on what faith-communities and religious narratives can do for their larger communities and his disinterest in resolving questions about the mutually irreconcilable truth-claims of the various religions. In somewhat more popular terms, the theological views of these pragmatist philosophers anticipate the phenomenon prevalent in contemporary culture of respecting spiritualities so long as they are not too tightly bound to historical religions.
In the second half of the book Kimura traces the rise of neopragmatism and exposes the internal incoherence of the positions called by that name today. By comparing the epistemological vacuity of such leading neopragmatists as Cornel West and Richard Rorty with the more epistemologically responsible thought of such other neopragmatists as Nicholas Rescher and Hilary Putnam, Kimura lays out what he calls the “crisis of neopragmatism.” To this reviewer, the author would do well to extend his thesis even a bit further, so as to appreciate that the current crisis is really a crisis endemic to philosophies that are insufficiently attentive to form, structure, and other indispensable aspects of metaphysics.
The criticism that Kimura offers to the theological constructions of West, McFague, and Gordon as constructions out of whole cloth is telling. What is arbitrarily asserted may be arbitrarily denied. The only justifications that they offer (and can offer, given their form of neopragmatist commitments) are the hopes of their proponents for some form of social reconstruction. The result, however, is that the emptiness of their claims to be “true” (whatever their utility for the social purposes they are designed to serve) stands out clearly.
Where this otherwise interesting volume most stands in need of improvement is in the development of a metaphysical critique of even the more conservative neopragmatists. The grounds for such a critique have already been prepared in the forceful exposure of the emptiness of the radical positions. The problem is not simply, as Kimura proposes, that there is epistemological inconsistency within the neopragmatic camp and that the more unrestrained social activists have devised theological novelties that they hope will be useful for their political agendas. The problem is in not considering that the deepest reason that “what works” about explanations that do really work is that they are true, that they express thoughts that really disclose the causal structures of reality.
Seen in this way, even the restrained neopragmatists like Rescher and Putnam are all the more praiseworthy because they are fundamentally alert to the need for epistemology to privilege the mind's receptivity to reality in its knowledge, both the reality of the mundane world and the reality of the divine. Putnam is, after all, a practicing Jew and Rescher a practicing Catholic. Their philosophical adoption of some of the categories and practices of pragmatism strikes me as part of a larger philosophical realism that understands that explanations that “work” do so because of the causal structures of reality that these explanations describe.
Just as the metaphysically-friendly pragmatism of Peirce is so different from the metaphysically-hostile pragmatism of Dewey, so too the self-described neopragmatism of Putnam or Rescher is worlds apart from the self-described neopragmatism of West or Gordon. Likewise, their humble admission of religious reverence is not the cosmic pantheism of Emerson nor the utilitarian fictions of social radicals but an admirable wonder over the irreducibly divine for which they need to find a place in their philosophies if those philosophies are really to “work” as explanations for what transcends human control.
