Pollock’s Relevance to Living Philosophy
”...we should more openly admit that vision is most creative when it acknowledges an interaction within the actual limitations of our situation,” writes John J. McDermott in The Drama of Possibility (Fordham 2007). “In writing of James, Robert Pollock clarifies this problem:
“James was endeavoring to take seriously the fact that reality does not address itself to abstract minds but to living persons inhabiting a real world, to whom it makes known something of its essential quality only as they go out to meet it through action. It is this concrete relation of man and his world, realized in action, which accounts for the fact that our power of affirmation outruns our knowledge, as when we feel or sense the truth before we know it.
"The work of analysis in American life has to take into account the powerful assumption about experience as self-revealing as well as the living inseparability of world and action.”
Notes:
John J. McDermott. The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture (Fordham University Press, 2007), 85.
Robert C. Pollock. “James: Pragmatism,” in The Great Books, ed. Harold Gardiner (New York, 1953), 191.