Pragmatic Famous Quotes

Ayer may be considered a practical atheist: one who sees no reason to worship an invisible deity.

At twenty-one, Richard Wright was not the world-famous author he would eventually be. But poor and black, he decided he would read and no one could stop him. Did he storm the library and make a scene? No, not in the Jim Crow South he didn’t. Instead, he forged a note that said, “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by HL Mencken?” (because no one would write that about themselves, right?), and checked them out with a stolen library card, pretending they were for someone else. With the stakes this high, you better be willing to bend the rules or do something desperate or crazy. To thumb your nose at the authorities and say: What? This is not a bridge. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or, in some cases, giving the middle finger to the people trying to hold you down and blowing right through their evil, disgusting rules. Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility.

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up. Deng made the decision on pragmatic grounds. And the opening up worked: China’s economy soared. Yet, do the Chinese view this opening up as a temporary measure until China becomes strong again? Do they have a desire to return eventually to their Middle Kingdom mentality, trading with the world while remaining culturally detached from it? When China built walls and cut off communication with the rest of the world, it fell behind. When China opened up to the world, it thrived. To guarantee its continued long-term success, China should completely abandon its two-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom mentality and decide to become the most open society in terms of economic engagement with the rest of the world. Only such a major change of mind would enable the Chinese officials to lay out the red carpet for foreign businesses, including American businesses.

Putnam finds in American pragmatism “a certain group of theses which can and indeed were argued differently by different philosophers with different concerns, and which became the basis of the philosophies of Peirce, and above all James and Dewey” (Putnam 1994, p. 152). Cursorily summarized, those theses are (1) antiskepticism: pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief (recall Peirce’s famous distinction between “real” and “philosophical” doubt); (2) fallibilism: pragmatists hold that there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had that such-and-such a belief will never need revision (that one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism); (3) the thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between “facts” and “values”; and (4) the thesis that, in a certain sense, practice is primary in philosophy. (Ibid.)

Ancient Rome began as a small city-state. Its citizens were tough and stoic. They were famous for their pragmatism. But as they moved from being a republic to an empire and their power expanded, everything reversed itself. Their citizens’ minds hungered for newer and newer forms of escape. They lost all sense of proportion—petty political battles consumed their attention more than much larger dangers on the outskirts of the empire. The empire fell well before the invasion of the barbarians. It collapsed from the collective softness of its citizens’ minds and the turning of their back on reality.

Torkie Macleod has always regarded himself as a realist. He doesn’t believe in life after death or divine reward or resurrection. He doesn’t even believe in leaving a legacy, insofar as anything of that nature, good or bad, is completely insignificant to the one who is dead. Torkie’s pragmatic philosophy has always been to make the most of his limited time alive, which for him means not striving for fame or riches, not ticking off a list of famous destinations, not indulging in any death-defying feats, and certainly not raising a family to “carry on his name.” to Torkie Macleod, realist, life means making decent money with limited effort, hanging around with cool people, not being bossed around by anyone, and ingesting any mind-altering substance he chooses without a scintilla of shame or regret.

Vestiges of this kind of crude learning mechanism in the human brain may incline people to see objects or places as inhabited by evil, a perception that figures in various religions. Hence, perhaps, the sense of dread that has been associated by some anthropologists with primitive religious experience. And what of the sense of awe that has also been identified with religious experience—most famously by the German theologian Rudolf Otto (who saw primordial religious awe as often intermingled with dread)? Was awe originally “designed” by natural selection for some nonreligious purpose? Certainly feelings of that general type sometimes overtake people confronted by other people who are overwhelmingly powerful. They crouch abjectly, beg desperately for mercy. (In the Persian Gulf War of 1991, after weeks of American bombing, Iraqi soldiers were so shaken that they knelt and kissed the hands of the first Americans they saw even when those Americans were journalists.) On the one hand, this is a pragmatic move—the smartest thing to do under the circumstances. But it seems fueled at least as much by instinctive emotion as by conscious strategy. Indeed, chimpanzees do roughly the same thing. Faced with a formidable foe, they either confront it with a “threat display” or, if it’s too formidable, crouch in submission. There’s no telling what chimps feel in these instances, but in the case of humans there have been reports of something like awe. That this feeling is naturally directed toward other living beings would seem to lubricate theological interpretations of nature; if a severe thunderstorm summons the same emotion as an ill-tempered and potent foe, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine an ill-tempered foe behind the thunderstorm.

Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 1830s and famously proclaimed the emergence of Homo democraticus, a cheeky creature whose passion for equality and self-interest was tempered only by his ability to join fellow citizens in all manner of mutual associations for pragmatic benefit.

Richard N. Gardner, The Hard Road to World Order, Foreign Affairs, Volume 52 No. 3, pg. 558. If instant world government, Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis … In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.

The historical changes in American marriage—from the pragmatic to the love-based to the self-expressive eras—exhibit striking parallels to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.