NONFICTION - April 24, 1994

THE PROMISE OF PRAGMATISM: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority by John Patrick Diggins (University of Chicago Press: $29.95; 529 pp.). Pragmatism, the one branch of philosophy native to the U.S., has never been easy to define; it was born with an emphasis on scientific positivism, remained skeptical of objective truth in the realm of ideas, and after dwindling away following World War II has recently been revived through the “neo-pragmatism” of Richard Rorty and his followers. In “The Promise of Pragmatism,” City University of New York professor John Patrick Diggins gives us pragmatism in all its permutations and conflicts, as seen through the work of its principal exponents, among them Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and of course Rorty. The book tends to be heavy sledding, despite the clarity of Diggins’ prose, for although the author teaches history, his emphasis is on philosophy and the often specialized disagreements among its practitioners. It’s a welcome relief, consequently, whenever Henry Adams appears on the scene, for Diggins uses the intellectual frustrations of this turn-of-the-century writer (and self-described “conservative Christian anarchist”) to voice the sort of philosophical and spiritual problems pragmatism hoped to solve. Diggins knows his material backward and forwards, and productively pits dissimilar philosophers against one another in a form of historical “hopscotch,” but the lay reader will appreciate this book mostly for what he can pick up by osmosis. Case in point: Santayana’s thumbnail description of pragmatism, which Diggins paraphrases as bearing the message that it’s “better to pursue truth than to possess it.”