There are no foundations. Affirming action and denying foundations, pragmatism is necessarily averse to contemplation. Not that it is necessarily atheistic. But a follower of James, or Peirce, or Dewey could scarcely be an orthodox Christian and carry on a life devoted to participating eternally in the beatific vision. The disenchanted former graduate student may even find himself wondering whether there is something more sinister in pragmatism than an overly casual attitude toward such lasting human concerns as truth and the natural grounds of human liberty.
Contemplation is a form of concentration on values such as beauty and truth.
When action is set above contemplation, it loses its proper subordination to values. It is deprived of moral purpose and becomes an end in itself. And those pursuing it are apt to discover that the grandest forms of action are domination and destruction on a wide, or political, scale. They are apt to become committed to tyranny, imperialism, and war. John Patrick Diggins is concerned, in The Promise of Pragmatism , with the present-day repudiation of foundations and with the problems that repudiation creates.