Is it “Tender” or is it “Open”?

One of my habits is to re-read an old textbook of mine, Thomism and Modern Thought by Harry R. Klocker, S.J. This tends to be good-weather, outdoor reading. Last summer I left the book outdoors, forgot that it was there, and a downpour damaged it. All of my copious marginal notes, made (foolishly) in ink were obliterated in the process. But then I found another copy on the Internet… Anyway, trying to tease Spring into action, I took the new copy out the other day and came across this interesting classification:

The Tender-Minded	The Tough-Minded
Rationalistic (going by principles)	Empiricist (going by facts)
Intellectualistic	Sensationalistic
Idealistic	Materialistic
Optimistic	Pessimistic
Religious	Irreligious
Free-Willist	Fatalistic
Monistic	Pluralistic
Dogmatical	Skeptical

Those familiar with William James, particularly his The Varieties of Religious Experience, will have heard the phrases used in the title. But this side-by-side characterization of these two psychological types, as viewed by James, appeared in Pragmatism (New York, Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., 1908) in a chapter titled “The Dilemma in Philosophy.”

The scheme is reproduced in Klocker’s segment on Pragmatism on page 127 of his book. Pragmatism, of course, falls decided under the tough-minded category. This time around, I got to thinking about the words James had used to classify these two opposing tendencies. Why “tender”? What really underlies these two classifications? Other words he might have chosen are “sensitive/insensitive,”  “inner-oriented/outer-oriented,” and from that last, echoing Jung, why not “introvert/extrovert”?

Now pragmatism, logical positivism, and other related philosophical positions are absolutely anchored in the assertion that all knowledge reaches us by the senses (hence the tough-minded are sensationalistic). And, furthermore, there is absolutely no way that sensory experience can give us proof of the metaphysical. But there are those tender-minded people who, perversely, assert the opposite. Should the pairing therefore include “stupid/bright” and “deluded/realistic”?

My simple solution here is to borrow from pragmatism its emphasis on “experience”—experience as the crucial and sole source of knowledge—but modifying that by asserting, based on experience itself, that some people do obtain additional knowledge that comes from a source beyond the senses. Call in inspiration. But if that is so (and I certainly think it is), then the tender-minded have greater access to reality than the tough. They are more “open” to ranges of reality than the tough-minded. The tough-minded feel it too—but at so marginal a level that they do not notice these ranges.

The “tender” classification used by James signals awareness of the tougher job the tender-minded have of dealing with reality. There is much more there. The tender are over-stimulated. They turn inward. And the tough, to be sure, have an easier time of coping with the world. Why then are they “pessimistic”? Could it be that, having nothing beyond the sensorium on which to build their world-view, they tend, ultimately, to despair? While the long-suffering tender-minded are “optimistic”?

The classification also shows that we are really mixtures of these two. It is very “tough” to choose but one.  My guess is that most people would rather pick and choose. But a forced choice will produce the actual leaning of the individual; it will mean, however, letting go of quite useful or inspiring products on the shelf of philosophy.