During the last quarter of the nineteenth century in post-Civil War America, pragmatism presents a typical American spirit of adaptability into the world of uncertainty. As a growing alternative to both optimism and pessimism, pragmatism advocates people’s adaptability to exist and thrive in a changing aleatory world, rather than their mastery of unchanging universal principles. After William James proposed pragmatism as a philosophical response to the inevitable uncertainty and contingency of life, pragmatism has not entirely disappeared from various synthetic writings about people’s experience. More than a hundred years later than the publication of James’s Pragmatism in 1907, a memoir of a 35-year-old American neurosurgeon with a glittering future is published posthumously. A New York Times best seller, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is a wrenching delineation of a patient who lives with terminal illness and an uncertain prognosis. In When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanithi delineates his own pragmatic adaptability in a lived experience. As a surgeon, patient and writer, he abides by the will to turn toward pragmatic values. Pragmatic temperament is basically pluralistic, which leads pragmatists to hold experiences to reconcile, seek after cash-valued experience, and sustain melioristic life attitude. Specifically, American pragmatism is unique on account of its reconciliatory impetus, will to Jamesian cash-value, and meliorism among other pragmatic methods. The pragmatic value of Kalanithi’s memoir is also verified by the truth values that his pragmatic adaptability eventually brings in. This paper examines pragmatism as a typical American spirit and mainly concentrates on reading Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air in light of the principles of pragmatism.
Jungmyung Lim (Sun,) studied this question.