The Morning of Painful Hypotheses

Five, you’re late.

Five, you’re late!

A racing shell seats eight oarsmen front-to-back. In the flurry of practice, in the dash of the race, the names of the crewmen are lost and replaced by their respective seat numbers - one through eight. The coxswain, the navigator of the boat, shouts direction not by name, but by number. The terms “early” and “late” refer to the tempo and timing of the rowers’ sweep. "Early" means that you are ahead of the collective stroke. “Late” means that you are falling behind. I was a novice crewman. I was fifth-seat. I did not know it yet, but I was “late.”

Five, you’re late!

Six-seat’s oar handle struck my spine with a solid thump and quickly gave meaning to the coxswain’s direction: I was really behind the stroke and needed to pick it up. I came to know my rowing self as I have come to know most things - through a painful process of trial and error.

Any seasoned athlete and most unseasoned novices would agree: there is no substitute for practice, for that awkward soreness of practice. No amount of yelling could have imparted the lesson of tempo and pacing. My back had to feel the lesson. Athletics are only, and always, learned by heart, by the muscles. Coaches and coxswains seem to recognize this fact. They unstiffen our bodies, limber them up and set them to work. It is in the bodily work of sport that we learn the technique and jargon of the game: I have never forgotten the meaning of being “late.”

In an age characterized by its easy way of life, sport remains one of the few strongholds for the tough-minded. Tough, in this sense, does not necessarily refer to the machismo that is so often associated with “jock-culture,” rather it describes a particular philosophic “temperament”, a certain approach to inquiry that situates experience at the heart of any higher forms of understanding. In his lecture, the “Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” William James uses the term tough-minded to describe an aspect of American pragmatism, and contrasts it to the tender-minded attitude that dominated many philosophic circles of the time.[1] He writes the traits of the two “mental make-ups” in separate columns:

THE TENDER-MINDED THE TOUGH-MINDED

Rationalistic (going by the principles) Empiricist (going by the facts)

Intellectualistic Sensationalistic

Idealistic Materialistic

Optimistic Pessimistic

Monistic ` Pluralistic

Dogmatical Skeptical

According to James, “most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line.”[2] Unlike “most of us,” however, the pragmatists “are more than mere laymen in philosophy” and refuse to randomly attend to the best of both worlds.[3] Instead, a cohesive philosophy is sought to unify aspects of the rationalist and empiricist tendencies. James is not careless in his word choice on this topic: “We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibilities from opposite sides of the line. (The Dilemma of Philosophy, 14)[4] The project of pragmatism is to illustrate how these tendencies or temperaments are not necessarily “incompatible.” James himself provides the hint that athletics might provide an illustrative example of pragmatic inquiry.

James maintains that inquiry must begin on the ground of experience, with an intimacy with the “facts” of the world. He parts company with the traditional empiricist, however, in his insistence that the experience of these facts is, in some way, continuous. James does not simply dismiss the notion of cohesive principles, but rather, proposes a kind of principled process that is both driven and contained by experience. According to James, “The world of concrete personal experiences …is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed,” and, just like the first painful day of practice, is inseparable from a more cohesive understanding or athletic mastery.[5] He would agree with the sportsman that a youngster cannot learn the principles of rowing, throwing or jumping without rowing, throwing or jumping, without a sore back, shoulder or leg.

Pragmatism assumes the sportsman’s common sense by insisting that the truths of philosophy be “world-ready.” Truth, is exposed to the elements of nature, put through the practice of the real world, and bumped and bruised into adaptation. In this sense, the pragmatist is simply a coach. As James writes in “What Pragmatism Means,” “Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one to work.”[6] One can “unstiffen” theories and “limber them up” insofar as the theory takes some living, breathing form in the organic world. In the real labor of the everyday, in all of its discontinuities and obstacles, we come to see from what sort of stuff our theories are made. James’ comment that the ideas are in the muscle is regarded as another of James’ anti-intellectualist jabs, as a demand for ideas that have experiential cash value. In this article, I hope to take this interpretation a bit further, or at the very least, a bit more literally. A description of rowing musculature, muscular development in the activity of sport, will at once be a description of the pragmatic theory of ideas. Learning to row is simply learning: a mode of inquiry. Indeed the rower’s experience of muscular fitness, with its initial ache and subsequent growth, exemplifies a moment of James’ epistemological approach. The bodily character of this example is in no way accidental. For American pragmatists, such as Peirce, James, and Dewey the connection between the physical construction of the human organism and the structure of human reasoning goes far deeper than simple analogy. Pragmatically speaking, the structure and expression of thought are shot through, and in many respects, determined by, bodily affects, drives and emotions.

Many scholars object to the conflation of philosophy and athletics. Athletic skill should never be confused with mental understanding. Surprisingly, this objection is not completely grounded in the elitism of academia; in part, it reflects a commitment to a certain dualism that has driven the Western intellectual tradition. For these scholars, the relation between body and mind can be no more than metaphorical; for the sake of ideological comfort, a real divide must separate the two. For these scholars, a hundred years of pragmatic scholarship has failed to weaken their commitment to the divided self. For these scholars, my description of rowing will remain merely analogical. In this case, may such an analogy inspire. May it deepen our understanding of and zest for sport and broaden the often-narrow confines of philosophic scholarship. May it force us to revise our idea of physical activity and, indeed, our idea of ideas. If nothing else, this chapter, in keeping with the theme of the book as a whole, encourages coaches and players to recognize their athletic practice as being commensurate with aspects of American thought. Very simply, it is a direction to round out the experience of sport.

For those of you, however, who have left the hypothesis of dualism on the table, this discussion of sport may serve a different purpose. It is another pragmatic attempt to describe the physical habit of thought, the reforming embodiment of ideas. It has been intimated that a Jamesian approach to knowledge, and to philosophy itself, must, at points, embrace the coach’s timeworn motto: “No pain, no gain.” This being said, it seems reasonable to open with a reflection on the suffering and adaptation required in sport, highlighting the family resemblance it shares with philosophic tough-mindedness. Suffering and sacrifice, however, are only one side of inquiry. The painful lessons that perception teaches give rise at precious moments to a cohesive understanding of this experience, gives rise to a passing sense of oneness with the world. Inquiry is not always characterized by brutal lessons imparted by the facts of experience; at times, habits of thought seem to coincide with empirical evidence. An intellectual and bodily flow is experienced – at least for the time being.[7] It seems right to close with a description of these flow states, often mythologized and misconstrued in rowing literature, and do my best to return them to the experiential aches and pains that mark a novice season. In truth, the “hard knocks” of the experienced world engenders habits of thought. These habits of thought, in their attempt to re-address experience opens a space for continual revision. Endurance athletes are quick to identify the inextricable connection between the pain of trial and error, the habits of action and thought, and the almost mystical flow that can accompany physical activity. They succeed where generations of epistemologists have failed; they reconnect the empirical and the rationalistic approach to knowledge. This reconnection seems in line with the work of James, but challenges at least a section of secondary scholarship. The synthesis of the tough and tender-minded tendencies runs in the face of commentators who insist that James maintained alternative and contrary theories of truth – according to these scholars, James is either tough or tender, but not both. In recent years, this odd either-or has been construed in many ways: the Promethean or the mystical, the individual or the communal, the active or the passive.[8] In the end, however, these dueling couplets reveal themselves as iterations of the tough and tender, empirical and rationalistic, experiential and transcendent, pairing. With a hand from the experience of rowing, I hope to flesh out this pairing as being complimentary rather than disjunctive. Henry Bugbee, a pragmatist and rower, addresses the odd communion between experience and transcendence in the tradition of American thought; he too employs the experience of the early morning sport to illustrate this connection. I will occasionally use certain comments made in his Inward Morning to supplement the discussion at hand.[9]

Novice Seasons and Novel Ideas

A very early riser might catch a glimpse of a fall-time rowing ritual: the first day of novice practice. In the inky blue of pre-dawn, a ragtag band of underclassmen can be seen sitting on a row of benches on a hill just south of campus.

“Where is the river?”

“Are we going to practice here?”

“Do we get to row today?”

“Is this the crew team?”

The murmured questions swirl and expose the collective character of the group – confused and a bit naïve. These are novices. They have rallied themselves and come to practice at the suggestion of others and, despite the chill of early morning, still believe that “this might be fun.” They have the idea that “this might still work out.” In this respect, a novice stands as a type of walking hypothesis, not yet validated, not yet disproved. After a brief pep talk, the testing begins and the band of young rowers is sent for a thirty-minute jog, a preamble of things to come. The sun meets them on their return to the hill and exposes another common trait. What the murky darkness once masked now becomes painfully apparent: all novices are, by definition, scrawny. In some cases scrawny can mean thin and agile. Let me assure you, in this case, it is just another word for bony and awkward. A physiologist would insist that these youngsters do have muscles, but their young tissues have, to this point, been inactive and neither function as, nor appear to be, muscle as such. The physiologist and the coach would agree that these muscles could not yet “pull their own weight.” These bodies are not ready for the water, but they have survived the warm-up. Only a few youngsters do not make it back from the jog. The sheer enthusiasm of the rowing “hypothesis” can get most novices through the first thirty minutes of practice.

The first day of practice is also known as “weed out day.” The next hour-and-a-half separates the novices who will “make it” from those who will not; it remains the most jarring period of an oarsman’s athletic career. Forty-five minutes of wind sprints – now they understand the reason for the hill. Forty-five minutes of step-ups and incline push-ups – now they understand the reason for the row of benches that line the hill. Young muscles scream with this understanding, and drown out the idea of heroic oarsmen that brought them to practice. This hurts, plain and simple. They will never forget this experience nor the lesson embedded in the empirical discomfort. Exposure to the experiential trials and tribulations “weed out” the less fit, or much more accurately, the less determined. The hypotheses that these novices embodied, the ideas of rowing grandeur, are slowly adjusted under the pressures of bodily practice. Adaptation to these strenuous conditions takes time, too much time for the muscles of many first-year rowers. The number of drop-outs after the first day often outnumbers the returning novices.

In the introduction to The Will to Believe, James suggests:

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed

to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires,

let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live possibility

is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. [10]

For James, inquiry begins as a “good guess,” as the idea that “this might work out.” Such initial hypotheses emerge from the darkness of confusion somewhat randomly – they simply show up. The life of most hypotheses, however, like the tenure of many rowers, is relatively short. Neither the idealistic thoughts of shells and oars nor the muscles that person-ify these naïve thoughts have been tested out. Their ill-preparedness is quickly translated into the pain and suffering of the coming practical test. In the essay, “What Pragmatism Means,” James restates Charles Peirce’s initial explanation of ideas as rules for action. Here, I must risk restating the obvious. James believes that these “rules” are followed or enacted by organisms that face the real-world consequences of these hypotheses: “Ideas (which are themselves but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.”[11] Rather than bringing us into “satisfactory relations” with other parts of our experience, many hypotheses lead us astray, alienating us from the experiential world and, in some cases, harming our physical bodies. When exposed to the experiential test of trial and error, some of these fledgling ideas find themselves in error more often than not and break under the pressure of the empiricists’ examination.

More accurately put, these “rules for action” are found to be misguided, out of synch with the preexisting body of experience.[12] Indeed these unfortunate casualties of the philosophic “weed-out day” may simply disappear, never to be seen again on the field of ideas. It is true that a few ideas remain on this field despite their inability cut the experiential muster. These chronically weak ideas, unable to “pull their own weight” in the demanding real world, are typically relegated to the upper echelons of the academy, the proverbial “junk boat” of thoughts. It is also true that these rarified ideas may reemerge on the practical scene, just as the muscles of the “junk boat” might be promoted to the B boat or even to the A shell. This promotion, however, occurs only after a great amount of time and after an even greater amount of adaptation.

The Growth of Habits of Thought

This brings us to the crux of the Jamesian theory of ideas: adaptation. Just because an idea survives its initial trial by fire does not mean that it has acquired the needed muscle and coordination for the task at hand; no hypothesis comes fully equipped to deal with the problems of the everyday. According to the pragmatist and the coach, the young ideas of young muscles have a long way to go and may still prove unfit for the challenges of life and the more particular challenge of rowing. In the Principles of Psychology, James sheds light on certain forms of muscular evolution that mesh nicely with the experience of those sore oarsmen that return from “weed-out day” and endure their novice season. He uses the section entitled “Habit” to explain how tissue, the embodied form of ideas, is transformed in active practice. James writes that:

The habits of an elementary particle of matter cannot change…

Because the particle is itself an unchangeable thing; but those

of a compound mass of matter can change…either outward forces

or inward tensions can, from one hour to another, turn that structure

into something different from what it was. That is, they can do so if

the body be plastic enough to maintain its integrity, and be not

disrupted when its structure yields…All these changes are rather slow;

the material in question opposes a certain resistance to the modifying

cause, which it takes time to overcome, but the gradual yielding whereof

often saves the material from being disintegrated altogether. [13]

The “structure” in this particular case is the muscle of the athlete. In this sense, the rigorous demands of practice, the variable and unforeseen obstacles of the empirical world, might be considered the “modifying effects.” The “resistance” to which James refers is embodied in the tightness of the unused muscle and is immediately reflected in the pain felt by all novices as their tissues stretch and work for the first time. The novice must be “weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.” [14] The investigation of rowing, the search for the principles of a complex process, will be cut short if the empirical facts reject rather than reform the body of inquiry. James explains that it is the plasticity of structures, and in this instance, the plasticity of bodies, that provides the possibility for change and subsequent selection.

James exposes a basic understanding of physiology by noting that repeated bodily activity leaves and “organic impression” on the structure and arrangement of tissue. For example, “our nervous system grows to the modes in which it has been exercised.”[15] It physically adjusts to novel impulses; over time, such readjustments streamline these impulses and create a new set of nerve-nets. The stress of a novice season leaves its impression on the bony awkwardness of the novice and by mid-March, or in some unfortunate cases, by mid-May, a kind of muscular and ideological transformation occurs. These young oarsmen begin, ever so slowly, to pull their own weight. Their ideas of rowing shift with their muscles; “this might work” becomes “this is work.” They slowly develop an understanding of rowing as a mode of work best executed in compliance with certain rules and principles. From moment to moment, however, this shifting of structures through exercise is traumatic and exhausting. James describes the experience of exercise: “Thus we notice after exercising our muscles or our brain in a new way, that we can do so no longer at that time; but a day or two of rest, when we resume the discipline, our increase in skill not seldom surprises us.”[16] James characterizes the body as “regenerative,” “reproductive,” “rebuilding,” and “reparative,” emphasizing an organism’s capacity to recover from trauma.[17] In truth, he presents the friction between the shifting experiential world and embodied thoughts as the necessary condition of physical growth and rebirth. In a twist of irony, it is worth noting that it is the resiliency of young bodies and the ideas they personify that provides an opportunity for greater tests and evermore-strenuous practices. Before describing this physical growth and rebirth in any great detail, let us return to James’ theory of ideas, to the initial practice of thought.

The fate of a live hypothesis is a grueling one. The pragmatic method insists that our “theories become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”[18] A well-equipped hypothesis, like a natural-born athlete, “appears less a solution, then, than as a program for more work.” [19] Philosophic tough-mindedness, also known as empiricism, sheds light on ideas often shrouded in the inky blue of intellectualism. It exposes these thoughts to a variety of concrete conditions, and allows the experiential world to define the limits of their meaning and influence. Certain theories will warrant lengthier examinations than others, but eventually every good guess shows its “Achilles heel;” it is at this particular weak spot or pressure point that revision takes place. The good coach is slow to praise his players for fear of instilling a sense of complacency. He has been around the experiential block and knows just how hard to push on certain athletes, challenging their skills without breaking their spirit.

The good pragmatist, playing with all of his empirical equipment, is slow to praise his “truths” for fear that they will fail to shoulder the complexity of the living world. He comments that, “conceptual knowledge is forever inadequate to the fullness of the reality to be known.”[20] James has been around the experiential block and knows that the twists and turns of experience inevitably cast doubt on working concepts. Accordingly, most ideas are behind the experiential times. They are horribly “late.” These thoughts, however, are never seated in the “boat” of experience and have yet to receive a solid “thump” to instill the lesson of their lateness. In “The Notion of Truth,” he criticizes the rationalistic tendency to view truth as an “inert static relation.” According to the Absolutist, “when you’ve got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the matter.” [21] The pragmatist, on the other hand, has experienced the sore back of epistemology and is more careful when handling “truth.” As opposed to the inertia that has dominated most of traditional epistemology, James comments that, “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, it is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.” [22] Interestingly, this “verification” is never finished; it outlines truth, it delimits by recognizing what is not possible and what is not in synch with the situation at hand.

James goes so far as to say that, “new truths are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another.” [23] The flux of experience, the wetness of the backsplash, the “creak” of the gunnel, the “click” of the oarlock, affects the rower in a certain fashion. If one is attentive to this affective quality, a bodily revision occurs that, at once, reinvents the idea of successful rowing. After the fact, an observer can comment on the exact position of the wrist, the back, the leg and the arm, constructing a more detailed concept that squares with the spectacle that has just unfolded. Indeed, this articulated concept may help the athlete “handle” and anticipate tomorrow’s experience in more fluid form. On the other hand, it is just as probable that this concept will lead some-body astray in the midst of unforeseen events.

Unforeseen Events and Conceptual Disasters

Henry Bugbee rightly comments that, “You might have thought that races were the moments of definitive rowing, and there is no doubt that we used to enter upon them with a special sense of being called upon.”[24] There are times in this life when such a call remains unanswered or simply drowned out in the quite sinking of a capsized boat. I cannot remember if it took place in Pittsburgh or in Boston; in truth, I have done my best to forget the event. I do remember that it was my first race.

“Ready all, row.”

A head-race begins in a moving start. The shells are taken one-by-one in time trial form. The stopwatch starts as the shells round the first bend in the river and, at least in most cases, stops six kilometers later.

“Thunk.”

One – two – three.

“Thunk.”

One – two – three.

“Thunk.”

A “thunk” and a “thump” mean two very different things. A “thump” is the sound of being speared in the back with another rower’s oar. A solid “thunk,” on the other hand, is the sound of unison, the sound of eight oars flipping into place at the same time. I knew we were together - it sounded good and felt alright. In retrospect, one might say that I let the concept of timing and pacing, the three-count that kept me on the stroke, guide my movements. As long as I felt an even run, as long as I heard the oars in the oarlocks, I thought I was doing pretty well. This thought maintained my position, my pace, my state in the boat – at least for a time. As James notes in the “Stream of Thought,” “If a new state comes, the inertia of the old state will still be there and modify the result accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our ignorance, what in each instance the modification ought to be.” [25] In other words, one does not know when the wind is going to pick up, when the percepts of the empirical world are going to impinge on the habits of thought, on the concepts that habitually guide our action. They do impinge, forcing themselves into concepts that, by all rights, cannot accommodate them.

The six-kilometer race is a long one. You have done fairly well if you are back at the boathouse in a half-an-hour. The opening thousand and the closing thousand demand complete attention. During the middle four kilometers, however, you set yourself on a kind of cruise control. No coach would describe this middle section quite so loosely, but many second-year oarsmen, if pressed on the issue, would agree with the description of the experience. They have practiced for several months and, with considerable pain and frustration, have developed a habit, a concept, of rowing. They employ this concept whenever they step into the boat and often employ it without regard to unexpected circumstances. James writes:

Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed…

our lower (thought) centres know the order of these movements, and

show their knowledge by their ‘surprise’ if the objects are altered so as to

oblige the movement to be made in a different way. But our higher thought-

centres know hardly anything about the matter. [26]

Indeed our “higher thought-centres” may attend, not to rowing itself, but to the riverfront shops, the birds on the shore, the crowd on the bank, the wind in the trees.

Those trees were really blowing. In hindsight, I am sure my oar had been catching water for some time. The waves had picked up with the wind and were hitting port side with a battering regularity. The three other ports – a shell has four oars on each side – had been sharing in my inattention and were equally surprised when we caught simultaneous “crabs.” A rower “catches a crab” when the back sweep of the stroke never clears the water. In this case, the momentum of the boat drives the paddle or “spoon” of the oar, down along the side of the shell, which in turn throws the handle of the oar up, into the face of the unfortunate athlete. As the oarsman attempts to regain control of his handle he invariably shifts his weight in the shell which in most cases temporarily “throws the set” of the boat. In this instance, the “set was thrown” and so were we - into the water. It is hard to swamp an eight-man shell. It is even harder to live it down when you do.

Throughout the novice season, the rower receives the hard-knocks of experience and from these experiential cues begins to construct and embody a concept of rowing. He knows how to get in the boat. He knows how to hold his arm. He knows the terminology of pacing and timing. He knows how to adjust his footpad and slide to accommodate the other tenants of his practice. He “knows’ these things before he gets to the river, before he ever gets in his shell. Without a single cue from the empirical world, the athlete can, by imagination alone, reconstruct the logic of sport. This articulation, seemingly logical and abstract, does not seem to arise in bodily habit and activity

The example at hand seems to reflect James’ suspicion that these habits of thought, these concepts, these ideas, these principles for action, are brought to bear on perception as a way of making sense of the jumbling, buzzing confusion of experience.[27] Habits of thought arise from, and are molded by, experiential situations. James writes that, “you can see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ‘shop,’ in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds.”[28] These cleavages of thought, the remnants of its experiential origins, are systematically overlooked in the treatment of concepts as things rather than as instruments to be used. According to James, despite their apparent seamlessness, even the pure forms of mathematics, and logic are all “abstracted and generalized from long forgotten perceptual instances.” [29]

In the pragmatic use of concepts, these generalized forms return to the particulars of the world as tentative ways of understanding the experiential state of affairs. The pragmatic use of ideas is tentative insofar as the seasoned pragmatist, unlike the second-year oarsman is attentive to the way in which conceptual schemas might fall short in making sense of the flux of life. The partly seasoned rower applies concepts as if these abstractions could double for the continuity of experience. Such a mistake will eventually “tip the boat” of intellectual life such that it reveals itself as incongruous with the purposes of the present moment. James describes the inability of the conceptual realm to take account of the superfluity of the empirical world. He writes that, “Since the relations of a concept are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled…[concepts] can only cover the perceptual flux in spots and incompletely.[30] The anecdote of the first race seems to restate another Jamesian sentiment expressed in “Percepts and Concepts” – namely, that concepts cannot revise themselves to anticipate future conditions.[31] It is always the case that percepts, given immediately to the senses, revise, discard, or embrace the abstractions that one seeks to employ. In the Principles of Psychology, he writes that, “[n]ew conceptions come from new sensations, new movements, new associations, new acts of attention, and new comparisons of old conceptions and not in other ways. Endogenous proliferation is not a mode of growth to which concepts can lay claim.” [32] The evolution of organisms and the concepts they personify hinge on their interactions with, and in, a particular environment. Evolution and revision never occur without the external pressure of novel conditions.

In as much as habits of thought, or concepts can mislead one in the midst of novel conditions, James suggests that concepts be employed “only when they help.” One ought to “drop them when they hinder understanding; and take reality bodily and integrally up into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape in which it comes”.[33] Notice the move to take up reality in “the perceptual shape in which it comes” does not herald the death of philosophy, but rather encourages its enlivenment - or more accurately - its enlivening. This openness to felt experience does not compromise the value of abstract knowledge; indeed, it is this openness that grants the very possibility of a falsifiable thought.

The evolution of concepts, the life and death and rebirth of thoughts and the individuals who embody them, is taken up in Bugbee’s description of “immersion.” He writes that, “There is a continuing passage from thing to thing in which a kind of sameness or continuity of meaning deepens – ever confirming and ever relevant.”[34] This “sameness” of the perceptual world, however, cannot be unified and expressed in its unbroken continuity as conceptual knowledge. The moments of the perceptual flux are the “same,” but are the same only insofar as each arises in relation to our concepts independently, unexpected, differently from the previous moment. In other words, these instances are the “same” precisely to the extent that they are always different from our understanding of them. Any reflection on the moments of experience, falls short of perfect description, and, in turn, begs its own revision. We may, at any moment, find ourselves radically out of place. As James highlights in the “Stream of Thought,” during certain intervals, concepts seem to find rest in the experiential world; they are stirred only so slightly by the “truth” of the felt moment.[35] However, these brief intervals in which static generalization seemingly holds sway are just that: brief. Bugbee echos this sentiment, noting that “[i]t is not by generalization that omnirelevant, universal meaning dawns…there is this bathing in the fluent reality which resolves mental fixations and suggests that our manner of taking things has been staggeringly a matter of habituation.”[36] The “dawning of things themselves” revises the fixation of thoughts. Interestingly, it is also in this dawn when partly seasoned rowers return to the site of conceptual disaster, to the memory of capsized boats and overturned “habits of thought.” They return to the water, to the sound, to the feeling, to the experience of practice, and begin to re-turn their concept of rowing again - for the first time.

Rowing, Witnessing, and the Returning of an Oarsman

An oarsman’s understanding of sport might be compared to the Zen practitioner’s understanding of a koan, such as “a single hand clapping:” It appears. It disappears. It appears again.[37] The koan is a Zen master’s response to a student’s question. This answer is invariably, and ambiguously, a type of logical contradiction – like the idea of “a single hand clapping.” The student is then forced to explain the teacher’s answer through a long series of examinations and reflections. In receiving a new koan, the Zen practitioner receives a sense of confusion, undergoes the pain of the novel experience. In working through this discomfort, a habit of thought slowly develops – the “meaning” of the koan. The “clapping of the hand,” for the first time, appears. The practitioner happily, and arrogantly, applies this meaning to the koan; he attempts to explain the koan once and for all. The koan, however, like experience itself, is too slippery for such careless handling; it slips through the cracks of any meaning that seeks to contain it. Some students ignore this slipping and continue to flaunt what they feign to “understand.” The role of the teacher is to show the student that he understands only to the extent that he ignores experience. The young understanding is, very literally, ignorance. The student, like the second-year oarsmen, wants no part of the teacher’s lesson; he is very content to embody his current habit of thought and tries to avoid any force that might sway him from his conviction. It may take many sessions for the teacher to overturn the student’s habituation. It may take many jarring comments and more drastic measures to capsize the boat of conceptual complacency. Indeed, the extremes to which a teacher will take a lesson have become legendary. Teachers have been known to strike, stab, break, and bruise the bodies of their students in an effort to dislodge them from their ingrained knowledge of experience. This rigorous practice inevitably decenters the concept of the koan; the practitioner finds his concept out of joint with the flow of experience. Certain students will merely repeat the process of conceptualization and, unfortunately, merely repeat the excruciating examination of the master. They will formulate another determinate answer for the master’s question. Granted, the answer will be expressed in a slightly different form, but the determined and unreflective character of the answer will remain the same and will again butt into the indeterminacy of the koan. For others, however, this process of conceptual decentering goes far deeper; in these cases, what appears again is not simply another determinate thought, concept, or meaning. What is decentered is not their concept per se - but rather - themselves.

James often comments on the way in which abstract knowing is distanced from the knower. It is overlooked, or consciously forgotten, that abstract concepts are embodied, developed and expressed in the body of inquiry, that is to say, in the flesh and blood of the knower. It is forgotten that we, as human beings, are questioning. For these forgetful individuals, the revision of concepts rarely translate into the revision of lives. Insofar as concepts are always embodied, the possibility of this type of personal revision always underpins the transaction of inquiry. It is, however, only in rare cases that this possibility is actualized.

To this point in the discussion, the account of rowing has been a description of what James calls in the Varieties of Religious Experience, “the negative and tragic principle” of life.[38] It has been framed as the strenuous, and even brutal, play between perceptual realities and the body of the rower. From this play, a concept is ingrained in the body of thought. For a time, this thoughtful body serves as the effective mediator between raw facticity and situation of rowing. At unexpected moments, however, this embodied mediation falls short of its task and is, itself, laid low by the bare fact of reality. This is, to clarify, the moment in which partly seasoned oarsmen are overturned. In my framing of the subject, I have also attempted to highlight the attitudinal shifts that can accompany the undergoing and doing of pragmatic investigation.

The novice, by definition, knows nothing of rowing and feels the aching immanence of experience, the uncomfortable disjunction between initial hypothesis and empirical fact. During this first movement, the novice is painfully aware of his body in the undergoing of experience. The partly seasoned athlete uses the painful lessons of empirical testing to reconstruct the idea of his rowing situation. Through this process of undergoing, of being affected, habits are ingrained by experience and, ever so slowly, begin to “talk back” to the perceptual world. For the first time, the rower attends to the “doing” rather than the simple undergoing of the situation. Evermore abstract in their conceptualization and increasingly unconscious in their utilization, these habits interpret experience haphazardly, leading the knower astray at the most inopportune of moments. While the perceptual pain of the novice season is continual and chronic, the trauma of the conceptual disaster is acute and wholly unexpected. Once again, the knower is thrown into the icy waters of confusion and loses, at least for a time, his once-cherished concept. Bugbee describes this process of inquiry: “One moment we understand, the next we may be lost. One moment we are lifted gratefully along with the gentle stream, another we are stranded, gasping and writhing, estranged from the element in which it is given to us to live.” [39]

The third metamorphosis of the knower arises slowly and in parts – that is to say, if it arises at all. Many a rower, like many a knower, simply ignores this conceptual capsizing and preserves their abstract knowledge of the world. Others will suffer the swamping of thought only to lay out another reified habit on the chopping block of existence. Despite the continual mitering of their reified concepts by the perceptual world, they continue to develop and carelessly apply habits of thought wholly incongruous with the shaping force of experience. In other cases, however, a novel way of understanding begins to unfold. Just as habits of thought were molded from the bumps and bruises of the empirical world, this new understanding, according to the pragmatists such as James and Bugbee, grows from the painful inadequacy of objective conceptualization.

Experience creates habits of thought in the rower who, in turn, uses the concepts to readdress experience. It might be said that experience tries to talk about itself through this conceptualization. In a concept’s attempt to reinterpret experience, a space opens between perception and abstraction. In certain cases, a proverbial chasm separates the two; the rower finds himself radically out of time, out of synch, out of place. He is forced to revise not only the working concept of rowing, but the very way in which conceptualization is approached.

The third moment is a shift in disposition and outlook - a shift in personal attitude. What changes is not simply the way in which the rower approaches the water on any given morning, but also the way in which the person approaches morning, dawning, rowing, itself. This shift in the nature of inquiry does not only yeild new and more suited answers, but issues in a mode of inquiry that has been hitherto overlooked. For some rowers, the space exposed between the empirical and the rational, between the passive and the active, between the “undergone” and the “done,” between the interogative and the assertive, is discovered as a space to be quietly occupied.[40]

It is worth noting that this shift in understanding is rarely accompanied by the fanfare or braggadocio of partly seasoned rowers. Indeed, it is almost always a quiet shift preceded by some first-race “crab” or other conceptual mishap in which habitual understanding is unreflectively applied to the novel flux of experience. Indeed, the athlete may seem sullen, despondent, reclusive – embarrassed by the unsuited idea that he once embodied. In most cases, however, this attitudinal shift is not simply a shift to despondence, but rather the assuming of a quiet attentiveness that characterizes a new way of thought. Note, that this assumption is not a thought, but rather a way of thought.

There is a way in which the second-year rower flaunts his habits of thought and drives them noisily into the river of experience. His arrogant manipulations drown out the directions of the perceptual world, the conditions of the moment. This oarsman and his concepts will eventually be overturned, but, with any luck, will emerge from the water and the accident with quieter concepts. In quieting the absoluteness of his rowing ideas, he is able to hear the wind pick up, feel the waves hit the boat, think, and act accordingly. This oarsman rows between the first two moments of his sport and, in so doing, embodies a third that continually mediates between the dejected undergoing of the novice and the arrogant manipulating of the partly seasoned athlete.

Bugbee emphasizes that what the knower knows is not some objective thing; one never possesses experience in its rawness as he might possess a specific thing. Instead, he writes that, “a philosophic interest in knowing, in action, and in reality might be served by thinking of these matters we wish to understand, as matters about which our position is less akin to that of knowers’ and more akin to that of testifiers, witnesses.” [41] Bugbee’s notion of witnessing speaks to the foundation of pragmatic understanding, for it is the witness who stands at that precarious junction between perceptual appearance and conceptual articulation. This junction, this unstable middle ground, is no place for the traditional philosopher, yet it is, by definition, the locus of the witness. It is the witness who stands open to the wonder of experience. It is the witness who may, for the time being, provide articulation of this endless stream. It is the witness who reopens this articulation to the reforming power of the empirical world. Witnessing is open to, and an opening for, the way meaning unfolds. He is aware, in a certain sense, of the way experience flows in its flowing. Less cryptically put, the witness not only experiences the “tragedy” of life, but comes to embrace its tragic play, comes to anticipate the overcoming of certain concepts.

This open anticipation is a far cry from traditional and determinate modes of knowing. Bugbee concludes: “We must learn to bear witness to the meanings that dawn on us with respect to them, and this may be quite different from advancing propositions which we can claim to demonstrate.” [42] Beneath the poeticism of Bugbee’s comment lies the kernel of pragmatic inquiry. The witness is a witness only insofar as his conceptualization always attends to the experienced reality. It is necessary that he, himself, does the witnessing, but also that he reflects what is witnessed. His account is faithful only to the extent that it is open to the site, and the sight, of the witnessing. More simply, the witness’ account is “objective” only to the extent that the “subjective” character is there, in its situated embodiment. James reframes a similar point in slightly different language, writing, “Experience is remolding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date.”[43] This sentiment seems appropriate in the description of the novice and in the description of the second-year oarsman. The younger oarsmen, however, fail to recognize the import and bearing of this statement on their own experience.

It seems patently obvious to say that a rower rows, yet it seems odd to suggest that the rower is also rowed. The seasoned oarsman is precisely the conscious embodiment of this odd contradiction. Just as the witness is and is not what is witnessed, the mature oarsmen rows only to the extent that he is rowed by the stream of experience. The traditional notions of self and other, of activity and passivity are compressed, and dilate, and co-terminate in those quiet mornings of experience.

In the midst of sport, in an investigation of physical embodiment and practice, we sweep, and have been swept, into a rather unexpected crosscurrent. We maintain our course and maintain the attention paid to embodied inquiry, yet another aspect of this course has emerged – another current so to speak. In our reading of James’ physiological approach, we have been led to his metaphysics, or, at the very least, to a description remarkably akin to his account of mysticism. The assuming of this crosscurrent is unexpected, but should be in no way surprising. James explains in the Varieties of Religious Experience that the enchantment of the mystic can be described by the theologian as “a gift of God’s grace,” but can simultaneously be explained by the physiologist as “a gift of our organism.” [44]

It is a statement that is often glossed or simply attributed to “the sentimental James,” but here, in the midst of the physical, biological, and experiential, a mystical suggestion rings true:

There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no

others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own

has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and

be as nothing in the floods and water-spouts of God. [45]

I have often heard - and sometimes said - that rowing is a religion. This “willingness” to “be as nothing” is precisely (or imprecisely) the stance of the seasoned rower. In his notes on mysticism, James observes that most mystical experiences are brought on by going through “certain bodily performances,” but when a certain consciousness sets in, “the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”[46] The passivity that claims the mystic, however, is always of the active variety, always strangely attentive, always oddly purposive. Bugbee, in his quiet account of rowing, underscores this understated mysticism. After a session in the boat, the kind of session that “rounds out in an incorruptible song,” the young Bugbee returns to the dock. Upon his return, he passes his coach, John, in the boathouse. John’s remark is simple, almost koan-like: “You was moving.”[47] In the dusk of a career, some athletes come to understand that what moves – is moved. Its simplicity is rivaled only by its complexity: one is simply moving. It is in this twilight when the “dawning of things themselves” shows itself again, for the first time. Things are witnessed not only as a particular immanence, but also as immanent repetition – a sort of transcendence that never leaves the ground of experience.

“What” this individual understands, however, is far from typical. After all, we have already seen how typical understanding is doused and set adrift by experience. James makes certain gestures toward this experience, writing: “[It] is the feeling of an enlargement of perception that seems immanent but which never completes itself.” [48] A contradiction of sorts again rears its thorny head, and James’ explanation remains merely gestured. In truth, this understanding is only effective, appropriate, suited, when it remains silent. Here, I have given it definitive voice at its own expense. This feeling of perception never completes itself, but is always a way of completing.