Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)
STUDIES - Zsolt Virágos: Some Observations on Myth and Practical' Pragmatism in American Culture
of a given community, it is essential that "the will to believe" or "the willing suspension of disbelief" should be part of the operative mechanism because these tend to reinforce, sometimes even replace the so-called "rooted in reality" aspect of myth while the latter is still in its vital cycle. If we bear in mind, as suggested in the title of my paper, that we are concerned here with the possible connection between aspects of the mythmaking urge in American culture and the philosophy of pragmatism, even this sketchy outline of the relevant conceptual framework is likely to suggest a few obvious analogies. On the face of it, even conceptual fragments like "pragmatic utility," "the will to believe," the apparently utilitarian drive towards a special kind of truth-seeking, the relativistic conception of truth, or the American pragmatists', especially William James's, voluntaristic ethics of belief may suggest that we are dealing with issues where at least a formal kinship is likely to exist between a special philosophical concentration on the need for pragmatic clarification of ideas and the relative prominence of cultural myths in the American social consciousness. Indeed, what I am going to show is that these powerful lines of force in the culture somehow intersect and that pragmatism reinforced certain deep-rooted tendencies of thinking that had been there from the very birth of the republic. In doing so, the pragmatists, themselves historically situated, ostensibly made order of historically conditioned perceptual chaos and liberated or at least sanctioned voluntaristic habits of reasoning by providing blueprints for what I would describe as "expedient" selection and arbitrary combinatory operations of reasoning. Both, let me add, are staple modes of myth-making. It requires no special demonstration to realize that like any other nation's, the social consciousness of the United States bears out the diagnosis that the affinity for a particular kind of truth-seeking, legitimization and self-justification has not been alien to the American cultural climate. Indeed, any student of American culture will soon realize the apparent contradiction that in spite of the unprecedented accumulation of objectively verifiable knowledge in this century —the result of the dramatic expansion of education, the rapid progress of scientific research and technological advance in general —in some loosely related special areas the 139
