VOLUME 1 — NUMBER 2.5

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Ask the Philosopher

by William Cole-Kiernan

QUESTION: WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE PHILOSOPHER?

When this question was posed to me, a name came to mind, and I thought, I do have a philosopher that is sort of a favorite. I will tell you about him, but first let’s look at what we are asking when we raise the question of a favorite. The dictionary says that the word “favorite” means something that is preferred before all others of the same kind, so there are two key elements: Our first choice amidst a group of similar things, and then all the rest.

We ask about our favorite movie, book, dessert, TV program, friend, vacation, chair, sport. The list is as endless as our imaginations. However, what if some powerful deity offered us a boon for our lives? He or she would provide us with all our favorites with the condition that we should have them always to the exclusion of all else in our lives.

So, I could have my favorite dessert, but that would be the only dessert I would ever have again. I could see my favorite movie, but only that movie; have my favorite shirt but no other; spend time with my favorite friend but with him or her alone. What immediately strikes me is that I would be appalled at such a state of affairs as a way of living.

I am pressed to acknowledge that I can only have favorites if they are part of a collection of other things where the favorite can stand out in some way. Without that necessary variety, I could have no favorite. Further, the favorite can only be intermittently indulged if it is to remain a favorite. To have my favorites all the time with no other options collapses the very notion of favorite and consigns me to a nightmarish world that lacks all diversity.

I have always had trouble answering questions about my favorite things, which is why I have often answered, “I have a number of favorites. I can’t really pin it down to just one thing.”

Paradoxically, this brings me to my favorite philosopher, William James, a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American philosopher, most widely known as a pragmatist but also as a pluralist, and it is that perhaps more than any other aspect of his thought that endears him to me.

I’ll let James tell you what his claim to pluralism means. He tells us in his Pragmatism:

Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world’s unity. We never hear this challenged, and it is true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things interest in unity. But how about the variety of things? Is that such an irrelevant matter?

He says indeed it is not. He praises the value and importance of the enormous diversity and complexity of the world. He questions whether all this variety can ever be reduced to some all-encompassing oneness. He is open to the possibility of this oneness, but confesses that the world of his present experience cannot so easily be reduced to oneness. The diversity abides to the end, at least so far. In a letter to his brother Henry, the American expatriate novelist, James writes of renting a home at the New England shore for the summer for his family. He exclaims how congenial the house feels to him personally because it has fourteen doors and they all open outwards. James thrived on such openness.

His regard for all of our experience is deeply appealing to me. He never demeaned the particularity of things. He never wanted to prematurely close down inquiry into any aspect of the world. He had this deep sense of the world’s endless changing. He quotes a philosophical friend of his, relatively unknown in philosophical circles, who nevertheless offers James an insight that appeals to his pluralistic bent.

The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild-game flavored as a hawk’s wing... The same returns not save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true — ever not quite.

This is the core of James’s pluralism: ever not quite. It is a perspective that looks to the future with excitement and awe, caught in the wonder that something new is ever on the horizon. We cannot predict with complete assurance what is yet to come, and this for James as well as myself is cause for delight in the surprise of it rather than anxiety at this glaring uncertainty.

It is this orientation toward and embracing of an unknown future that beguiles James and endears his philosophy to me. James again and again, in his attempts to articulate the way of the world, reveals this basic belief about the world’s diversity. We live in a world of unending change, a world where time moves on, where we are always living on the leading edge of uncertainty and risk. To live effectively in such a world means that our lives are experiments. A colleague of James, Charles Sanders Peirce, aligns with James on this. He says, “How do we learn? We learn by experience. And how does experience take place? By a series of surprises.”

In other words, much of it we have to make up on the fly. There is no codified manual for how to do things. The world is a process — not a fixed or static universe, but one that is still in the making.

So, he is my favorite because his emphasis on the lure and appeal of diversity and variety belies favoritism. The cliché that variety is the spice of life could have been formulated by James. When I think of the way of the world, I am ever brought back to this endlessly intriguing diversity, the ever not quite of things.

In this paean to variety, I cherish James, but I also am awed by Plato’s and Aristotle’s rationality, challenged by Hume’s relentless skepticism, mesmerized by Kant’s intense questioning of how we know, intrigued by Sartre’s and Camus’ existential angst, confronted by Nietzsche’s and Russell’s iconoclasm, and this is but the barest bones of a list of the philosophers who have provoked and challenged me, nurtured and comforted me. So, I can focus on James as a kind of favorite, but all the other philosophers in the Western canon that I have journeyed with over these many years are vital and important as well.

Favorites yes, but ever not quite.

William Cole-Kiernan

Bio: William Cole-Kiernan was a full time philosophy professor at St Peter’s College in Jersey City, New Jersey for thirty-three years before he retired. Now a Professor Emeritus at the College, he continues to teach part time. The main goal in his teaching has always been to teach philosophy as a context for students to expand their consciousness and learn to think for themselves. His undergraduate work was at New York University, where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering. After college, he served three and a half years in the United States Army as an officer and a pilot flying reconnaissance and light cargo aircraft. Returning from the service, he switched directions from engineering and started his study of philosophy. He has a Master’s and a PhD from Fordham University, and specialized in American Philosophy, especially focusing on the thought of William James and John Dewey. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey with his wife Barbara, has four grown children and six grandchildren.