
A Man Must Do What He Must: Hammett's Pragmatism (2009) - trouble
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/non_fiction/e011.html
======
trouble
Some context on this essay - I've been making my way through Bret Victor's
collection of links [0] and started reading diSesssa's Knowledge in Pieces,
which opens with this quote:

"Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy
business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and
fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to
their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which
they arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and
self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive
back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”

I didn't recognise the quote, but the author seemed familiar (Dashiell
Hammett), so I looked it up and found this fascinating essay on the
relationship between how Hammett's detectives thought, how Hammett himself
thought, and what changed over the course of his career as his philosophical
views shifted from pragmatism to Marxism.

[0] [http://worrydream.com/refs/](http://worrydream.com/refs/)

~~~
keiferski
A similar notion, in more elegant language (in my opinion) by Herman Melville
in _Moby Dick_ :

 _Here 's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he
only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's
audacity;_

 _God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a
coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat
too much for that._

------
HNLurker2
How come I've never heard of him during my logic classes in college and in the
textbooks?

------
Iwan-Zotow
You gotta do what you gotta do

------
valgor
> Hammett, a pragmatist? Wasn't he a Marxist?

Because you cannot be both?

~~~
stockcar9
Philosophically, you cannot be both. At best, you might come to accept the
shortcomings of the pragmatic critique, for pragmatic reasons. This would be a
very Marxian conclusion.

Marxism is a tradition of thought associated with left Hegelianism, which was
an opposition to right Hegelianism. Without the latter, there might not be a
basis for the former.

Right Hegelianism might be weighed as a pre-condition for Pragmatism, because
it reasons that contradictions will negate themselves if sufficiently pursued,
whereas Left Hegelianism reasons that the pursuit is unavoidable.

