This essay begins a series about pragmatism a philosophy I once dismissed as a head-fuck, and have since come to think of as a survival skill. I’m not interested in its history or endless abstractions so much as what it offers us now: a method for testing what works when the world around us doesn’t.
At nineteen, on my third attempt at the first year of university, I decided to study philosophy. I was welcomed into the hallowed halls of Edinburgh University through the clearing process, which, to me, felt like sneaking into a gig through the back door when the bouncer wasn’t looking.
In cavernous auditoriums, alongside the odours of sweat and Clinique Happy for men, classic philosophical concepts floated above my head, tethered only by the echoes of words I had never heard in my life and definitely couldn’t spell. Teleological. Epistemological. Consequentialism. The starveling men around me nodded along, pens to paper, while I frantically flipped back and forth through my textbook. Confused and terrified, my brain shut down, proof that I was stupid. Two terms in, when a friend asked me to a rave in Blackford forest, I said yes. I told myself I would catch up on the required reading at the weekend. I never did. I never went back.
After that, philosophy was something I avoided. I was frightened of it (seeing “existentialism” in a Guardian article felt like a jump scare), but more than that, it seemed irrelevant. I had real problems to solve: paying for food, raising a child, making men want to fuck me. “Big questions” felt like a luxury for people who didn’t live inside urgent ones.
Twenty years later, I had developed a tough, lived philosophy and saw myself as pragmatic. Out of necessity: surviving as a sober person in a drinking culture, raising children amid an unstoppable climate crisis, being female in a world that relied entirely on women but barely acknowledged their existence. Maybe I was even a Pragmatist? It was a term I remembered from my barely used first-term university textbook.
Middle-aged, lying on the grass in my not-so-carefully-tended garden, I wondered if there was a connection between the “this works, fuck you” pragmatism of my real life and the philosophical concept.
I ordered Pragmatism and Other Writings by William James on Amazon. When it arrived, I rolled my eyes at the boring cover — a bearded Victorian, of course. Then, on the very first pages, elaborate language designed to obfuscate meaning: fourteen superfluous words for every essential one. Cue flashbacks to university rafters as old as the concepts themselves, and my friend Armand looking annoyed as I stared at him helplessly for forty minutes. But amid the circular phrasing and intellectual posturing, I found a lot that made sense.
As William put it:
“The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it… It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.”
And:
“[Philosophy] is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.”
As I read, I found myself thinking, “Goan yersel’, Big Man,” as WJ gave the purists a kicking.
And while philosophy lay, looking mighty puny, in the dirt, I caught myself nodding. The slow, certain kind that comes from something landing with such a thud that it shifts the furniture in your head.
This was the sort of thinking that could survive outside a lecture hall. My mind held it easily because it applied directly to my life. William James ushered me through a scuffed-up door into a room stacked with used cups, unsent letters, and a busted sofa covered in pet hair. I felt immediately at home.
By the time I closed the book, I was reluctantly impressed. And curious. Against my will, I had been pulled in. That left me with a problem: if I wanted to follow this thread, I was going to have to read more fucking philosophy.
And I did.
The reason pragmatism feels relevant to me, someone who still finds a lot of philosophy baffling, is because it is a different beast altogether. It doesn’t ask you to retreat from the world or interpret it through abstract systems; it begins inside the mess. On the street, not in the marble temple. It treats thought as a tool, not a refuge. It’s philosophy that earns its keep.
In periods of exhaustion, personal or collective, the question of what works becomes the only one that matters.
Not what should work, or what once worked, or what fits our preferred narratives of effort and virtue. Simply: what produces the intended result under current conditions.
When systems begin to fail, social, political, institutional, or biological, people tend to respond with more of the same: increased effort, stronger rhetoric, new frameworks that are conceptually tidy but practically inert. It is an understandable impulse. Certainty is soothing when the ground is shifting. Yet almost all progress, on any scale, depends on the capacity to tolerate ambiguity long enough to observe what is actually happening.
Pragmatism emerged from that same impulse, in a country rebuilding itself in post–Civil War, late nineteenth-century America. Philosophers such as William James, John Dewey, and Charles Peirce argued that truth is not fixed in theory but proven in action. They wanted philosophy to serve life, making thought accountable to its consequences and bridging belief with function. An idea is only “true” if it works in practice. They were not anti-idealists but realists of consequence, interested less in how we think things should be and more in how ideas perform when they meet reality.
That distinction matters now more than ever. What is needed are decisions grounded in the discipline of aligning intention with outcome.
Pragmatism offers a practical test: does this action have an effect? Does it ease the pressure? Does it move us closer to stability, even temporarily? The same logic applies whether you are building a household routine or a government policy. The scale changes, but the principle stays the same. Pragmatism is also anti-perfectionism. It does not look for the final answer, only for what works well enough to move things forward. The aim is not to solve everything, but to keep going, to stay responsive, to make small adjustments that let life continue. It measures success by movement, not completion.
Classical pragmatism gives us the foundation: test what works, get rid of what does not. But left there, it can be morally neutral, even cold, and easy for those with the worst inclinations to exploit. Principled pragmatism adds the necessary ballast. It asks not only whether something functions, but whether it functions without harm, whether that harm is personal, structural, environmental, etc.
This is not utilitarianism. It is not about maximum gain or moral equations. It is smaller, more immediate, and more honest. Pragmatism recognises that the first step in any recovery, whether of a person, a system, or a culture, is functionality. Functionality is another word for sustainability: what works must keep working, under pressure as well as in times of plenty. Applied to institutions and government, it becomes both a guardrail and a test of motive.
From school to work to politics, we learn to defend our positions rather than to test them. Over time, we lose the ability to notice what actually works, and of course, what does not. This is why institutions stagnate and individuals burn out: we operate within an economy that rewards visible effort, not effective outcome. But both are required.
To ask what works is to interrupt that economy. It asks for attention, because what works in one set of circumstances may fail in another. It asks for humility, a willingness to revise, adapt, and abandon what is not working. It is not an easier way of living; it is often the harder one. It requires confronting comfort, expectation, and ego. It means being honest. It means having courage.
I also cannot think of a more humane stance. Systems that do not work hurt people. Ideals that cannot translate to function create despair. The compassionate response is to build mechanisms, habits, structures, and ways of thinking that can survive the real conditions of life as it is lived.
And in that work is a quiet, grounded precision that resists both cynicism and idealism, the latter so often beautiful in theory but too broad and brittle in practice. It is also freedom: the freedom to act without illusion, to fail without shame, and to keep only what works.
In 2025, in this moment of undeniable collapse and fatigue, we have never been more in need of that.
In society, honesty has become a dirty word, add to that our desire for black and white analysis where we assume that we all react to cause and effect in the same manor, then a sprinkling of pigeonholes and you have a prescriptive society that believes that the process is more important than the outcome.