THE MODERN WORLD, THE INTELLECTUAL, AND WILLIAM JAMES
In: The Western political quarterly: official journal of Western Political Science Association, Band 13, Heft 4, S. 863-879
ISSN: 0043-4078
We are asked to envisage William James as an intellectual, playing a role in the modern world. The modern regions of today's world owe their distinctive character to democracy, sci & industry. In such regions, the classical intellectual swordmen exercising their skills with words, segregated from workmen & tradesmen-found themselves released from the ivory tower into the hurly-burly of pol'al economy, journalism, applied psychol, etc. Intellectual & intelligent are no longer synonymous. The first continues to connote the superiorities of the authoritarian wordman in the platonic tradition. The second tends to connote the wordman whose res is action-res in an open world, & not appraised by first principles. Thus the initial ambiguity of the intellectual's role is clarified. In this sense, William James & his 'will-to-believe' are a model of the modern intellectual: thinking not deductively, but inductively; committing himself not only to the how of the sci'ific enterprise, but to its whats & what-fors; an individualist judging all isms by their consequences to other individualities in a world where rationality must be incidental, not central. IPSA.