Back when I used to teach philosophy, one of my maxims was, “The purpose of a philosophy class is to convert confusion into perplexity.” (This may have something to do with why I’m no longer a teacher.)
It turns out that John Dewey said something similar:
An indeterminate situation becomes a “problematic” one through the process of inquiry. “It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.” Inquiry for Dewey is the transformation of a uniquely qualified indeterminate situation into a problematic one, i.e., one capable of being solved. To his credit, Dewey does realize what would happen if the situation at hand were not uniquely qualified. He tells us that “unless a situation is uniquely qualified in its very indeterminateness there is a condition of complete panic.” And again, “no situation which is completely indeterminate can possibly be converted into a problem having definite constituents.”
I’ve quoted this passage from a paper by William Gavin called “‘Problem’ Vs. ‘Trouble’: James, Kafka, Dostoevsky and ‘The Will to Believe.’” The internal quotations come from Dewey’s “The Pattern of Inquiry.” One of the purposes of Gavin’s paper is to make distinctions among pragmatisms, in particular between James’s and Dewey’s. According to Gavin, James believed that some life situations resist being converted into “problems with definite constituents”, those we might characterize as tragic conflicts. It’s these kinds of situations to which James’s “will to believe” is meant to offer a solution.
Of course, as the title suggests, Gavin has interesting things to say about Kafka and Dostoevsky too. It’s worth a read.
And, for what it’s worth, I’ve discovered something in writing this post: The spell-checker included in WordPress recognizes “Dostoevsky”, but not any other spelling of the name. And in writing the previous sentence, I discovered a fact of self-reference: The spell-checker insists that its name be written with a hyphen.
Post a Comment