Pragmatic Constructivism: Revisiting William James's Critique of Herbert Spencer

Emst von Glasersfeld's ''radical constructivism'' in the educational arena.This investigation will, therefore, be a strategic re-enactment of James's critique of Spencer, one that will be used to insert James's voice into the constructivist controversy. An Overview of the CritiflueAlthough the ideas of Spencer were just appearing on the American horizon in the early 1860s, his evolutionary theories soon enveloped the landscape, drawing the attention and enthusiasm of many American intellectuals, businessmen, and social leaders.William James was an early member of this awe-struck crowd.Spencer's First Principles fell into his hands during his late adolescence and, like so many others, he fawned over Spencer's work.In the space of little more than a decade, however, James's opinion of this British theorist turned increasingly sour.The aura that once surrounded Spencer grew dim and his ideas appeared stultifying to James.The evolutionary principles that could once wrap the entire universe together into a neat package now appeared to be squeezing the life right out of it, eliminating all the complexity, dynamism, and richness.Not only were the holes in his theoretical net too big, ignoring too much for the sake of too little, but his claims to exclusivity annoyed James.For James, no single conceptual framework could ever exhaust, once and for all, the entire range of human experience.If anything bothered James more than Spencer's pretension to have fmally "got it," it was the deterministic implications of his ideas.He attacked Spencer's determinism into whatever area it crept.In the realm of psychology, James attacked Spencer's claim that the function of consciousness was one of mere "correspondence" to the environment.Socially, James defended agency against Spencer's position that individuals did not really have a significant hand in social transformation.Spencer saw individuals as passive agents, akin to what Garfinkel called "social dopes" (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970), like dead wood tossed back and forth on the surface of a vast ocean over which they had no control.Spencer's universe, unlike James's, was already "finished" from the standpoint of humans.It was pre-programmed for evolutionary progress, and one's task, therefore, was to adjust to its unfolding patterns.Even Spencer's idea of science seemed hopelessly deterministic to James.He wrote as if the Universe itself whispered its eternal laws into one's ears with little or no feedback from people.By contrast, James argued that humans used scientific investigation and theorizing as tools to get things done in certain situations."Theories," James later wrote, "thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest" (James 1955, 46). 4 The Critiflues of Herbert Spencer Having abandoned the idea of becoming a painter in the summer of 1861, James began studying chemistry at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School (James 1990, 474).The following year, the first volume of Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy, The First Principles of a New System of Philosophy, found its way onto the bookshelves of America.This was the text that the young James picked up and adored.It was in the First Principles that Spencer gave his oft-cited defmition of evolution as "a change from a state of relatively indefinite, in-34 Paideusis

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