Floop2

Floop 2: Pragmatism: a Glossary. An annotation.

Premise: The pragmatist approach acknowledges “minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react […] "it takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations” Floop 2 aims to thicken the relation between the classic pragmatism of James and Dewey and the classic cybernetics of Wiener and Bateson (see ). These converging epistemologies set a trail toward our own moment of ecological disaster, but they also lead to a common ground on which our own agency can be understood and asserted. On this terrain, the subject need not retreat into the idealism which James warned against, which “treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties.” In Floop 2 the radical empiricism and materialism of Pragmatism meets the post-humanism of cybernetics to propose an aesthetic of experience for our own devastated era.

Floop 2 is a glossary of terms:

[these words arranged in a loop de loop]

Experience

Esthetic

Adaptation

Consciousness

Drift

Movement

Rhythm

Undergoing

Unity

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Ruth Anna Pulman’s essay makes a useful distinction between the Pragmaticism of C. S. Pierce (which emphasises a semiotic) and the Pragmatism of William James and John Dewey (which emphasises psychology, ethics, aesthetics (esthetics) and pedagogy). Floop 2: Pragmatism: a Glossary, will address the second, which will go under the shorthand of the Pragmatism of experience.

William James’ Principles of Psychology (1890) contains a sustained reply to Herbert Spencer’s own Principles of Psychology (1855). To contemporary readers Herbert Spencer is remembered for establishing two grave epistemological misnomers which plague us to this day. Firstly Spencer, an enthusiastic champion of Darwin's theory of evolution, popularised the notion of “the survival of the fittest”. This opposed the more scientifically precise idea that those best adapted to their environment are best equipped to survive within it. The second of Spencer's epistemological disasters was the idea of “social Darwinism”, which has had a profound influence on the politics of self-interest since the middle of the nineteenth century.

But William James, in his own Principles of Psychology(1890), finds a lot of Pragmatism in Spencer’s approach to psychology. Principally, Spencer’s definition of experience as 'the adjustment of inner to outer relations'. James is quick to clarify the importance of this “adjustment” to Pragmatism, acknowledging its value as an idea that can be built upon […] “because it takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile than the old-fashioned 'rational psychology,' which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties.” An epistemology which “takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react” serves as a prelude to the theory of purpose outlined by cybernetician Norbert Wiener and the ecologically orientated “second order cybernetics” ushered in by Gregory Bateson . James follows Spencer further still in citing Spencer’s observation that there is no “break” between the “phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life."

Note: The relation between James’ practice of experimental psychology and that of cyberneticians Grey Walters, Ross Ashby, Kenneth Craik, Lawrence S. Kubie and Warren McCulloch is touched upon in Fabulous Loop de Loop (Floop). When Kenneth Craik claims “[...] our brains and minds are part of a continuous causal chain” he is in the same epistemological territory as the pragmatists of experience. The epistemology of the cyberneticians who were also world leaders is the field of experimentalpsychology, attempted to make material models of the activities of the human brain (Ashby, Walters, Craik) which was derived from the radical empirical practice of William James. The work of Gregory Bateson which applies cybernetic ideas to psychology, anthropology, ecology and aesthetics, also acknowledges that there is no “break” between the “phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life." And that the interaction with the environment… The cyberneticians’ antipathy to Freudian psychoanalysis (McCulloch and Bateson particularly), follows the same logic of embodiment and experience as James.