Re-writing the History of Pragmatism as a History of Practices: The Case of Italian “Magic Pragmatism”

This paper studies what happened to William James's pragmatism when it first crossed the Atlantic, focusing on a group of young Italian philosophers and psychologists of whom James sang the praises: Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Giovanni Amendola, and Roberto Assagioli. At the beginning of the twentieth century, I argue, these intellectuals transformed pragmatism from a set of philosophical theories into a “way of life,” a concept I borrow from Pierre Hadot. More precisely, they used pragmatism as a practical art for the cultivation of the “inner” life, one which James enthusiastically described as a “pragmatic.” This art included practices as different as Stoic philosophical exercises, psychological techniques for the cultivation of the will and of the faculty of “belief,” as well as religious disciplines, especially the imitatio Christi. Papini, Prezzolini, Amendola, and Assagioli reinterpreted those practices in light of William James's work. The result was “magic pragmatism”: a philosophical, psychological, and quasi-mystical way of life, which aimed to refashion the self, transform the political order, and even create a new universe. Although all the magic pragmatists aimed at spiritual perfection, they inflected that goal in radically different ways. Some pursued mystical union with God, while others hoped to attain divine status themselves. Some endeavored to “unify” the divided modern self; others, instead, deliberately cultivated deception, and even self-deception, making dissimulation and the segmentation of the self into philosophical virtues. I will contrast these different kinds of pragmatist lives and suggest that, in order to re-write the history of pragmatism as a history of ways of life, one needs to complicate the historiography of philosophy as a way of life articulated by Hadot and adopted by other historians, and offer a fundamentally different kind of narrative.