When will we find that which is true? We await its arrival as though its time has long since passed. No longer does it lure our thoughts forward. No longer does it rest solidly at the centre of our lives. It hangs instead like a leaf in the wind floating upon each moment as it processes from all that is past to that which is yet to be. The true may thus be deferred from one moment to the next as we always wait upon a time that is ever yet to come. It may then be released from the certainty of the present into an open futurity, always after, and yet never here and now as it may be felt and known. It is not drawn from the present, nor deferred to the future, but, before time, is announced as it ever is, and ever again may be. After its arrival has been suspended, it can only be spoken of as that which is yet to come. And its practice then appears as but an idle gesture in the dark – both near and far from thought.
With the waning of this last light of thought’s long day, it seems we may only hope to receive that which is true from amongst the symbols of theory, and from the effects of practice. Analytic Philosophy emerged in Cambridge England alongside Pragmatism in Cambridge Massachusetts as a sibling response to the epochal scission of theory from practice that had first been inaugurated in the second half of the 19th Century by George Boole, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Gottlob Frege’s invention of a fully algebraic and mathematical logic. Once logic had been formalized in a symbolic algebra, theory could come to be regimented by the syntax of logic and simulated in complete independence from any social practice. Theory could then be dirempted from practice, even as practice could again be pursued in the satisfaction of its truth absent of the authorization of any guiding theory. Theories of logic and language thereafter appear to float in the air of pure thought over any regimen of discursive practice. Yet since all assumptions of any theory can only be confirmed in and by a surrounding social practice, Analytic Philosophy also tends to conceal its collusion with a whole ensemble of accompanying social activities of practical reason – a sociality of reason that is orchestrated by Pragmatism.
Pragmatism can for this reason be regarded as a rival practical supplement to the theoretical engines of formal logic in Analytic Philosophy. Pragmatics renounces the truth of theory, while Analytics renounces the truth of practice. And each defers the truth of its judgment, whether theoretically to a symbolic algebra, or practically to the effects of practice. Yet where analytics withholds its pure symbolic notation apart from time, pragmatics releases thought into time as it defers the truth of its judgments to be discovered in and by the future consequences of some further practice. We may observe evidence of this temporal deferral of truth among the early American Pragmatists. Peirce had, in his essay “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), suggested how a formal theory of mathematical logic may be supplemented with a psychological theory of how beliefs are formed by habits: the meaning of a judgment is, as he describes, determined in its truth by the “habits it produces”, its “sensible effects”, and the “practical bearing” of “our conception of these effects” on the “conception of the object.” Thereafter, William James had recommended, in his brilliant essay “The Will to Believe” (1896), that when we are confronted with a live, forced, and momentous choice between two or more options, for which there is no reliable evidence or certain demonstration, we should evaluate claims to truth with our “passional and volitional nature” so far as it serves our interests of setting our beliefs into practice. The aporetic impasses that arrest the inferential movements of pure theoretical reason can thus be arbitrarily decided by a sheer will to believe whatever proves to be most beneficial in and for our future practices.
Pragmatism thus appears in its strongest formulation to mark such a momentous suspension of theory from practice; an un-theoretical practice; and what seems a pure practice allied to an equally perfect voluntarism. For if, as in James, the aporetic indeterminacy of theory can only be decided in and by some further practice, then it seems that this sheer will-to-believe may be elevated as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Bertrand Russell could thus not illegitimately associate Pragmatism with the precedents of Fascism in Bismark’s Prussia. Yet as Peirce had protested, Pragmatism is nothing if not a theory – the very theory of the ‘practical side’ of logic. Hence, as soon as Pragmatism suspends theory from practice, it is also no less liable to suspend any theoretical articulation of Pragmatism itself – except perhaps, in an infinite repetition of the same problematic, as such a theory can ever again be set into motion as a practice without a theory. Moreover, in its suspension of theory, Pragmatism also unwittingly suspends any theoretical account of its immanent practical progress from its means to its ends in and for the finality of its theoretically impoverished practices. Its means can then be withheld from the assumptive finality of its ends, even as its means may be pursued in simple isolation; as pure means without ends; and equally so as ends in themselves. And, in what appears as the most perfect Machiavellianism, its means can thereafter be freely convertible in and for its own ends, in an automatic circuit of self-warranted certainty with which it may capriciously justify any conceivable practice.
After W.V.O. Quine’s critique of analytics and Richard Rorty’s revival of pragmatics, Neo-Pragmatism has suspended any theory as true in and for such a deferral of theory in practice, even as it can only be thought again through the adventitious vocabulary of a further practice. The truth of judgment can, accordingly, be deferred from its theory to its practice, and from one practice to the next; in an infinite dispersal of locally restricted practices, and an equally infinite deferral of any practice as true. Pragmatism has, in this way, tended to evacuate the interior coherence of its isolated theoretical contemplations, even as it has equally tended to subsume its very interiority into the exterior verification of an infinitely dispersed and deferred regime of practice. Yet in evacuating theory into practice, it also unwittingly externalizes all of its inward thought into outward action, where none of its action can be thought, except as its actions are individually re-enacted in an infinite repetition of actions absent of thoughts. And in this negative infinity of its identical repetition, it ultimately annuls its own internal standards for the theoretical verification of the truth of any conceivable practice, and any conceivable theory. No appeal can then be made to verify the truth of its theory in and by the efficacy of its practice. For in its infinite dispersal and deferral, Pragmatism not only suspends the truth of any theory, but even arrests the efficacy of any practice. It thus proves to be as evanescent in its theory as it is impotent in its practice. And all of its claims to realism can consequently be exposed as a more rarefied idealism – a violent practice of voluntary thinking that has no hands to act and no head to think.
With this criticism of Pragmatism, we may decisively intervene to initiate an alternative account of Christian praxis that does not depend for its truth upon any temporal deferral of thought to action. Christian pragmatics is the social practice of the Church, which has – much more radically because much more pragmatically – reaffirmed a practice in imitation of Christ in the theoretical formation of Christian doctrine. For Christianity, the world was created by Christ the Word (logos) in a saturated concentration of theory in and for Christian praxis. When in the fullness of time Christ was ‘made flesh’ in the man Jesus, the logos enters in and among the practices of its own making, and – in imitation of Christ – can be practiced in the love of God and neighbor as an expression of its highest theory, as of its inmost truth. The Cross is thus the immortal symbol of the ultimate folly of any theory, and of the futility of any practice absent of an awareness of this singular personal unity of theory and practice. We can, in remembrance of this story of our salvation, only be reasonably assured of the efficacy of our practices as we renounce any pretension to the self-warranted certainty of Pragmatism; expose our hands to lay hold of the real; and, as with the Israelites wandering in the desert, open our hearts and minds to the present and plentiful gratuity of divine love.
The time of truth is now. Each day it calls to us, and each day we listen again. Its promise awaits only this acknowledgement that it has once in time and forever in eternity been fulfilled. To think is to act, and to act is to think, in remembrance of that which is true.
