A Walk with William James, Part 5: A Random Musing on Serpents, Forks, and Theology

In his book Pragmatism, James famously claimed that "The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything." What James is claiming is that there is a subjective component, a human component, to all knowing.

This observation can be trivially true or radically controversial. On the trivial end of the continuum it seems obvious that WE are the locus of all truth-adjudication. Reality only makes sense to us as it relates to us. If reality doesn't relate to us then how would we know of it or about it?

A more radical claim is that, due to our subjectivity, we can NEVER know reality independently of ourselves. That is, we can never grasp an objective truth, a truth uncontaminated by human subjectivity.

If this latter claim were the case what then could we mean by "truth"? If I cannot grasp reality objectively, how can I get outside my own skin, so to speak, to compare my picture of reality directly with reality? You can't. All you have is the picture. And pictures of pictures. But we never get to see "reality." Thus, it seems impossible to say which picture is a "true" representation of reality. As the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty (a prime example of the extreme end of James' serpent continuum) says, there is not "a way things really are," at least insofar as we can know it.

In the pragmatist literature we often see contrasts between two competing models of truth: Correspondence versus coping. The "correspondence" model of truth is your classical model of truth: I have a picture and I have reality. I can thus compare the two and see how they agree, how they correspond. If they correspond I say the picture is "true." If the picture and reality don't correspond then the picture is false. For example,

Case #1:
Picture of Reality (Belief): I believe there is a bathroom down the hall and to the left.
Reality: There is, indeed, a bathroom down the hall and to the left.
Verdict: Belief and Reality correspond. Belief is True.

Case #2:
Picture of Reality (Belief):I believe there is a bathroom down the hall and to the left.
Reality: There is not a bathroom down the hall and to the left. It is a closet.
Verdict:Belief and Reality do not correspond. Belief is False.

In our workaday lives nothing could be more obvious than the correspondence theory of truth. Questioning it seems insane. But when we start thinking about more complex issues the model quickly breaks down. For example, are the following statements true or false according to the correspondence theory?

Democracy is the best form of government.
Abortion is wrong.
God created the world in six days.

How would we set up a correspondence to assess these "truths"? Worse, we could get wildly paradoxical:

The correspondence theory of truth is true.

How would we evaluate the truth of THAT statement?

Pragmatists try to cut their way through this epistemic muddle by saying that we evaluate the truth of such claims by evaluating how these ideas WORK. This is truth as coping. Beliefs that help us cope (i.e., deal effectively with life) are adopted as "true." The "truth" is not a matter of correspondence, an unknowable issue, but a matter of pragmatic outcomes. Truth is effective. More from Rorty: Pragmatists "have no use for the reality-appearence distinction, any more than for the found and the made. We hope to replace the reality-appearance distinction with the distinction between the more useful and the less useful."

Revisiting our simplistic bathroom scenarios, we can note that the first belief might be deemed true because it helps us cope (i.e., it guides us to the bathroom successfully). The fact that the idea "corresponds" to the layout of the house really only distracts us from the true purpose of the belief: Coping. Coping is the end of all beliefs. Sometimes correspondence is the means, but correspondence is never the end. This is what James means when he says the trail of the human serpent is over everything. A pure, objective knowledge is incomprehensible outside of human goals, agendas, and interests. But note that many pragmatists part with Rorty here. Rorty denies the comprehensibility of truth-as-correspondence. But Jamesian pragmatists can grant correspondence. We only insist that correspondence is always subjugated to human coping (i.e., corresponding beliefs are very good at helping us cope). Knowledge is inherently pragmatic.

Louis Menand puts it like this in his book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America:

"An idea has no greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork. When your fork proves inadequate to the task of eating soup, it makes little sense to argue about whether there is something inherent in the nature of forks or something inherent in the nature of soup that accounts for the failure. You just reach for a spoon.''

The argument here is that we replace the idea of correspondence with notions of functionality and utility. Ideas are not "true" or "false." Ideas are forks. They are tools for coping. Some ideas work in certain situations. Others don't.

So, here's my big point: Theology is a fork.

More specifically, the trail of the human serpent is all over theology. How could we possibly disentangle theological ideas from human goals, agendas, and interests? We can't. We make God in our own image. And the minute we claim we DON'T make God in our own image, well, we can conclude that the human serpent is all over THAT statement as well. (Kind of like the epistemological equivalent of SoaP.)

Interestingly, the SoaP formulation leads us to another intersection between James and the emerging church. Again, compare James' "the trail of the human serpent is thus over everything" with another formulation from Peter Rollins in How (Not) to Speak of God: "[N]aming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind."

Given that the human serpent is deeply intertwined in all of our theological conversations, tempting us (a la Rollins) with "conceptual idolary" (i.e., the illusion that theology "corresponds" with the Divine), the only way forward is to lay all those utensils (i.e., theological ideas) on the table for pragmatic consideration. Let's say we not eating soup but eating a steak. We lay on the table a knife, a fork, and a spoon. What do we choose? We reach for the knife and fork. Because the knife and fork are truer than the spoon? No. We pick up the knife and fork because they get the job done.

Let's end by extending the metaphor. Rather than eating soup or steak, let's say the task before us is to create a community of loving people conforming to the image of Jesus?

Hmmm....

What kind of spoon or fork or knife would you need, theologically speaking, to get that work done?