Darwinism and Pragmatism

William James on Evolution and Self-Transformation

Lucas McGranahan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351975810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection challenges our very sense of belonging in the world. Unlike prior evolutionary theories, Darwinism construes species as mutable historical products of a blind process that serves no inherent purpose. It also represents a distinctly modern kind of fallible science that relies on statistical evidence and is not verifiable by simple laboratory experiments. What are human purpose and knowledge if humanity has no pre-given essence and science itself is our finite and fallible product?

According to the Received Image of Darwinism, Darwin's theory signals the triumph of mechanism and reductionism in all science. On this view, the individual virtually disappears at the intersection of (internal) genes and (external) environment. In contrast, William James creatively employs Darwinian concepts to support his core conviction that both knowledge and reality are in the making, with individuals as active participants. In promoting this Pragmatic Image of Darwinism, McGranahan provides a novel reading of James as a philosopher of self-transformation. Like his contemporary Nietzsche, James is concerned first and foremost with the structure and dynamics of the finite purposive individual.

This timely volume is suitable for advanced undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers interested in the fields of history of philosophy, history and philosophy of science, history of psychology, American pragmatism and Darwinism.

1 Individuals in evolution

James’s Darwinian psychology

The rise of scientific psychology coincided with the acceptance of evolutionary theories into mainstream science. Just as sensation, cognition and behaviour came to be studied as organic functions, the very concept of an organic function took on a radically historical dimension. As a result, evolutionists were now claiming that mental processes derive from a nervous system that had developed over millennia to manage the concrete exigencies of life. Mind was no longer an exalted faculty of knowledge but a set of instrumental functions tethered to an environment that had slowly ground them out.

Nineteenth-century evolutionism does not speak with one voice, however. The competing mechanisms of natural selection and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, for instance, suggest different relationships between ontogeny and phylogeny – individual development and the history of species – and each mechanism has been subject to competing interpretations that emphasize different internal and environmental factors. Tracing the influence of evolutionism in psychology therefore requires attending to the specific logics of particular evolutionary theories.

The present chapter does not attempt to map out this entire territory but instead traces one instructive path: that of William James. James was among the most influential psychologists in the decades following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), especially in the US. Known as the Father of American Psychology, James is credited with founding the first psychology laboratory in the US in 1875;¹ teaching the first physiological psychology course in the US in the same year; supervising the country’s first PhD in psychology in 1878; and publishing the seminal text of early US psychology, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890. An examination of James’s scientific education and early writings show how he understood Darwinism to be emblematic of the uncertainty of science. James nevertheless embraced Darwin’s theory, not just in explaining mental evolution, but also in modelling individual cognition and behaviour. James thus employs selectionist logics at both phylogenetic and ontogenetic levels, making him the first double-barrelled Darwinian psychologist.

This chapter outlines the sources of James’s Darwinism in his education and early publications, before investigating his shift to an overtly Darwinian and anti-Lamarckian position in The Principles of Psychology. This investigation unearths an interesting interpretive tension. On the one hand, James presages neo-Darwinism in his physiological approach to mental life, his early repudiation of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and his creative extensions of Darwinian logic to non-biological domains. On the other hand, the twin lessons of Darwinian psychology for James are, first, that both science and philosophy are open-ended processes of fallible, inductive guesswork; and second, that the individual as such is a real locus of agency in the world. Darwinism for James signals a world that is both theoretically and actually in the making, with the individual as an active participant.

Uncertain science

Darwinism represents a distinctively modern kind of uncertain science. James learned this lesson from his teachers and intellectual companions at Harvard and expressed it in his very earliest publications.

An education in Darwinism

James matriculated at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in 1861, fast on the heels of the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin. At Harvard James had contact with a series of luminaries who helped to define modern scientific education and research, all in a context where Darwinism was the defining issue of the time.² James first enrolled as a student of chemistry under Charles Eliot, a Darwinian who would oversee Harvard’s transformation into a world-class research institution during his epic 40-year tenure as the university’s president. Eliot instituted Harvard’s elective system and heavily promoted the study of empirical science – two factors that worked in James’s favour when Eliot eventually hired back his former student to teach niche courses on physiological psychology and evolution in the 1870s. The young James did not study with Eliot long, however, and quickly turned his attention from chemistry to anatomy. Here James studied under Jeffries Wyman. Although Wyman could not reconcile blind natural selection with his Unitarian theism, he accepted a form of spiritually guided evolution and provided James with formal training in Darwinism. James considered Wyman his exemplar of humble and disinterested scientific inquiry. This approach to science was shared by the great Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who did much to unify the taxonomy of plants in North America. Gray considered blind selection to be compatible with his theism, but he allowed a role for divine agency in the generation of variation.³ James did not study with Gray directly, but he was aware of his presence and witnessed him speaking publicly in favour of Darwinism. These figures were more than just teachers. They were active researchers who were grappling with Darwin’s new theory when its implications were just beginning to be understood. Indeed, both Wyman and Gray were personal correspondents of Darwin’s, with whom they shared the details of their research.

The dominant scientist at Harvard when James arrived there was no Darwinian at all, however. On the contrary, it was stalwart anti-evolutionist Louis Agassiz. The addition of Agassiz to the faculty at Lawrence had been instrumental in the legitimization of the school as an institution and in the professionalization of the sciences more broadly in the US. Agassiz hailed from Switzerland and had studied with master French anatomist Georges Cuvier. He also had the distinction of being the first to propose a past global ‘ice age’ in his geological theory. From his authoritative post, Agassiz inveighed against evolutionism – and especially Darwinism – to the best of his ability. Agassiz and Gray were openly antagonistic on this question, and James witnessed one of Agassiz’s lectures against Darwinism within months of beginning his studies.⁴ James also got to know Agassiz better by joining him on an expedition to South America in 1865. One motivation for this trip for Agassiz and his financial backers was to find evidence undermining natural selection. James was taking Darwin’s theory seriously by this point, however, and his opinions of Agassiz were decidedly mixed. As James writes to his father from the Amazon,

I have profited a great deal by hearing Agassiz talk, not so much by what he says, for never did a man utter a greater amount of humbug, but by learning the way of feeling of such a vast practical engine as he is. No one sees farther into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends, and you have a greater feeling of weight and solidity about the movement of Agassiz’s mind, owing to the continual presence of this great background of special facts, than about the mind of any other man I know.⁵

James would remain convinced that generalizations are worth no more than the concrete experiences on which they are based, which is ultimately what ‘cashes them out’. This is one sense in which James remained a lifelong empiricist. The irony of Agassiz is that, while he was oriented toward facts and taught in an aggressively hands-on manner, he did not really respect the right of facts to undermine his procrustean worldview. Species for Agassiz were static and ideal reflections of divine will. No amount of observation could have changed that axiom. Agassiz was thus a transitional figure in the history of biology who sided with the outgoing generation. If Gray and Wyman represented to James a cautiously modern approach to knowledge, then Agassiz represented an outmoded faith in idealized form. Wyman is ‘the paragon . . . of goodness, disinterestedness, and the single-minded love of truth’,⁶ while Agassiz’s ‘charlatanerie is almost as great as his solid worth. . . . He wishes to be too omniscient’.⁷

Despite his contact with these towering figures, James’s education meandered uncertainly. Indeed, James was a chronic vacillator who was often unsure about major life decisions. By the time of his South America trip, James had enrolled in Harvard Medical School under the supervision of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. In this context, his South American excursion with Agassiz could be interpreted as an escape from uncertainties about his prospects as a physiologist or doctor. The same could be said of James’s 1867/1868 trip to Germany, where he travelled to study the new field of experimental psychology in its homeland. James finally earned his medical degree after returning to Harvard in 1869. This was James’s only earned degree, although he would never practice medicine. Instead, he took various appointments at Harvard in physiology, psychology and (eventually) philosophy. In James’s words,

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.⁸

The Metaphysical Club

James’s education in evolutionary theory did not come only from his teachers. He also found an enviable cadre of intellectual companions. Of particular relevance is the Metaphysical Club, a discussion group that seems to have centred on Harvard in the 1870s.⁹ In addition to James, this group included Charles Sanders Peirce, Chauncey Wright, John Fiske and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., among others. The Metaphysical Club was a major incubator of American pragmatism, especially insofar as this school may be traced to Peirce and to James’s adaptation and popularization of certain of his key ideas. The role of evolutionary theory in this group was pronounced. John Fiske was America’s foremost promulgator of the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer, which he combined with his own optimistic brand of theism. Peirce was so taken by the notion of randomness begetting order that he generalized it into a cosmic principle of absolute chance or tychism. Chance for Peirce – unlike for Darwin – refers not to our ignorance but to an objective feature of the world. James would follow Peirce in this view and make it a cornerstone of his metaphysics of indeterminism.

By all accounts, however, the dominant member of the Metaphysical Club was Chauncey Wright. Wright wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: a pragmatic image of Darwinism
• 1 Individuals in evolution: James’s Darwinian psychology
• 2 Individuals in history: social evolution without social Darwinism
• 3 Self-transformation: habit, will and selection
• 4 Character ideals and evolutionary logics in James and Nietzsche
• 5 Higher-order individuals: truth and reality as organic systems
• Conclusion: divided selves and dialectical selves
• Index