William James: Essays and Lectures

William James, Richard Kamber, Daniel Kolak, Richard Kamber, Daniel Kolak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315507477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Part of the "Longman Library of Primary Sources in Philosophy, " this edition of the William James' Selected Essays is framed by a pedagogical structure designed to make this important work of philosophy more accessible and meaningful for undergraduates.

CHAPTER 1

William James: An American Socrates

William James was born on January 11, 1842 into a prosperous family with high intellectual aspirations. Both his father Henry (Sr.) and his mother Mary were descendants of Irish Protestant immigrants who had flourished in America and established themselves as members of the upper middle class. William’s paternal grandfather (also named William) was a phenomenally successful Albany businessman. His hard work and shrewd decisions had made him one of the wealthiest men in the country. William’s father, on the other hand, was more interested in cultivating his mind and an agreeable lifestyle than in making money. A childhood accident had cost him the amputation of his right leg below the knee, but his cork leg and cane did not prevent him from dressing handsomely and enjoying an active social life. He contested the tight- fisted terms of the trust fund set up by his father’s will and won a court decision that gave him over $10,000 a year. This was a small fortune in the 1840s. It freed Henry (Sr.) from having to worry about earning a living and enabled his family to enjoy the advantages of travel abroad, international education, and a circle of distinguished friends. His son Henry (Jr.) was deeply impressed by his childhood exposure to European culture. The theme of Americans living in Europe figures prominently in his novels and he spent most of his adult life in England, eventually becoming a British citizen.

Despite Henry (Sr.)’s sociability, he was a restless man and sometimes given to feelings of sinfulness, self-doubt and depression. He studied the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and drew inspiration from the transcendentalism of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). He also wrote and lectured on moral and theological issues. Although his earnest quest for philosophical insight and spiritual guidance made less of an impression on his contemporaries than he had hoped, it left a deep mark on his eldest son, William.

Yet William’s first love was neither religion nor philosophy. It was art. He studied it for two years and produced some good drawings. The idea of becoming a distinguished painter appealed to him, but he was troubled by his father’s objections and doubted he had enough talent to achieve critical acclaim and financial success. He began to look at other options. In the spring of 1861 the Civil War began and President Lincoln issued a call for volunteers to join the Union Army. Like many young New Englanders, William was drawn to the cause. He enlisted as a ninety-day volunteer in the Newport Artillery Company, but when his term of duty was up he chose not to enter the regular army.

Two years later, his younger brothers Bob and Wilky enlisted in the fight against the Confederacy and served with distinction. Wilky became an adjutant to Robert Gould Shaw, Commander of the 54th regiment, the first black regiment in the Union Army. He was severely wounded in the historic attack on Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863 but returned to the regiment after months of convalescence and fought until the end of the war. The attack on Fort Wagner (powerfully portrayed in the 1989 movie Glory) was a tactical failure but a strategic triumph. It demonstrated that African-American soldiers could fight with exceptional courage, discipline, and tenacity. Lincoln had done “the awful arithmetic.” He knew that the North’s greater population made it possible to lose every battle and still win the war if enough men could be found to fight. But Lincoln couldn’t find sufficient volunteers and the draft law of 1863 provoked riots in New York City and political opposition elsewhere. The solution pressed by Frederick Douglass and eventually embraced by Lincoln was to allow blacks to fight, though many whites doubted they could be effective soldiers. The attack on Fort Wagner helped put those doubts to rest. By the end of the war, the Union Army had about 200,000 African-American soldiers. It helped tip the balance of America’s bloodiest war.

It is likely that James felt some regret or embarrassment about his decision not to fight in the Civil War. The prize for him was not physical courage but moral and civic courage. He regarded the inclination of young men to fight bravely for all sorts of causes—many of them bad—as part of our evolutionary heritage as a fighting species. What he admired was the decision of his brothers to put their lives on the line to end the enslavement of other Americans and then to farm cotton in Florida in a (sadly ill-fated) effort to provide fair employment for former slaves and contribute to the success of Reconstruction.

James probably had mixed feelings when he accepted an invitation to be the main speaker at the unveiling of the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment on Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day) in 1897. He was so nervous about giving this speech that he spent months writing the text and took two speaking lessons to improve his delivery. The memorial, which still stands in the Boston Common, is a bronze high and low relief by the celebrated American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It shows Shaw and his men marching into battle with grim determination while an angel hovers overhead; her sad expression suggests the tragic fate that awaits them at Fort Wagner. James spoke to a crowd of 3,000 people in the Boston Music Hall. He contrasted the grandeur of Saint-Gaudens’s bronze memorial with the brutal conditions under which Shaw and his men fought and died at Fort Wagner. He commended the military valor of the 54th regiment but reserved his highest praise for “the lonely courage” that Shaw demonstrated when he gave up his commission in the privileged Second Regiment to take command of “negro” recruits whose capacity to become brave and disciplined solders was widely doubted. In this act of personal sacrifice to resist “an enthroned abuse” James sees a higher lesson than the glorification of military valor:

The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them (James 1934, 58).

There is no mention in the speech of Wilky’s service as Shaw’s adjutant and no hint that James may have regretted his own lack of participation in the war and Reconstruction. Perhaps he had these regrets in mind two years earlier when he ended his lecture “Is Life Worth Living?” by suggesting that on the day of judgment “faithful fighters” may rebuke the “faint-hearted” with “words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: ‘Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there’” (James WJEL, 270).

Instead of fighting in the Civil War, James embarked on a career in science. In 1861 he enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. He began by studying chemistry but soon became bored by the long sequence of required laboratory experiments. Field biology and natural history seemed more exciting, especially since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 had begun to revolutionize these emerging fields. Darwin’s great work soon became for James a paradigm of scientific inquiry, an auspicious wedding of meticulous observation and hypothetical reasoning. Yet James still had difficulty picking a career. He enrolled in Harvard Medical School in 1864, but then took a leave of absence in 1866 to accompany the famous naturalist Louis Agassiz on an expedition up the Amazon to collect specimens of tropical flora and fauna. The trip was exotic but often unpleasant. He found the work tedious and contracted a mild form of small pox that produced temporary blindness. He admired Agassiz’s energy but was repelled by his egotism and anti-Darwinian agenda. He wrote to his brother Henry: “that scoundrel Agassiz is unworthy either intellectually or morally to wipe (Darwin’s) shoes” (Menand 2001, 142). Nevertheless, the expedition gave him practical experience in field biology and an appreciation of how scientific theories can be distorted by friends and foes alike. Throughout his career, he would find himself struggling against distortions of evolution by those who would belittle its importance for biology, invoke it to justify racism, or employ it as cosmic dogma.

James returned to medical school in 1866. Medicine at that time was largely a therapeutic enterprise that aimed at treating symptoms and making patients feel comfortable. Little was understood about the causes of diseases. James regarded much of his medical training as “humbug,” but he took a keen interest in the science of anatomy and physiology. His studies at Harvard also enabled him to acquire a brilliant circle of friends, including Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Chauncey Wright. A few years later, they would help to form an informal discussion group known as The Metaphysical Club, which James would later recall as the birthplace of pragmatism.

In May 1869, James completed his M.D. by submitting a thesis on the effects of cold on the human body and passing a ninety-minute oral examination. He never practiced medicine. Instead, he accepted an offer from his former chemistry professor Charles W. Eliot, now President of Harvard, to teach an undergraduate course in anatomy and physiology in the fall of 1873. Ultimately, this proved a happy decision for him. He enjoyed teaching and his initial success led to a full-time appointment as Assistant Professor of Physiology. Moreover, his extensive research on the brain and sensory organs paved the way for his entry into the new science of psychology.

James’s entry into philosophy had more somber origins. Between the time he finished his M.D. and the time he began teaching at Harvard, he struggled with bouts of depression and existential crises. In one instance, he walked into his dressing-room at twilight and was overtaken by “a horrible fear of (his) own existence” and the memory of an epileptic patient he had seen in an insane asylum: “a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the … shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin … like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human…. That shape am I, I felt, potentially” (James 1967, 6).

In another instance, he was uplifted by reading an essay on free will by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier (1815–1903). James’s assumption as a scientist that every event is causally determined had led him to the depressing conclusion that his own choices were the results of causal processes that stretched back long before he was born and that his sense of free will was an illusion. Renouvier’s definition of free will as “the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have had other thoughts” seemed to offer a way out. He resolved to “assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will” (James 1967, 7). He was beginning to think of psychology as his occupation and philosophy as his true vocation.

His teaching career at Harvard and his marriage to Alice Gibbens in 1878 did much to brighten his life. Legend has it that he first heard of Alice when his father returned from a refined salon known as the Radical Club and announced that he had just met his son’s future wife. Her intelligence, curiosity, and independence of mind made her a good companion for William. Although she had lived through greater hardships than William (the suicide of her father and the declining fortunes of her family), her cheerful temper and common sense balanced his moodiness. The Jameses had four sons and one daughter, and the warmth of their family life strengthened William’s self-confidence and sense of purpose.

In June of 1885 both Alice and her eighteen-month-old son Herman contracted whooping cough. Alice survived but Herman did not. The grief-stricken parents could not resign themselves to the idea that their child was lost to them forever. A few months later, they began visiting a medium named Leonora Piper who claimed to be able to communicate with the spirit world. Both parents wanted comfort, but William also wanted evidence that could stand the test of scientific scrutiny. For the rest of his life, he continued to investigate the paranormal, frequently disappointed by exposures of fraud but always hopeful that something momentous would be discovered. This enduring interest in the paranormal was embarrassing to some of his colleagues who dismissed the entire subject as a nasty mix of delusion and deceit, but James was convinced that the full range of human experience was considerably broader than the common core and margins of everyday consciousness and was eager to discover whether trans-marginal experiences provided evidence that a scientist could respect for the reality of an unseen or supernatural order.

He also experimented with drug-induced experiences. After reading a pamphlet that described the use of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as a source of philosophical revelation, he inhaled the gas and experienced a kind of Hegelian rapture in which all contradictions were overcome in a clear and unbroken unity. But as the intoxication increased, his rapture turned to repugnance and his clarity to confusion. He found that the notes he made during the experiments were gibberish and had no philosophical significance. This was his typical balance. Although sufficiently tender-minded to be hopeful about trans-marginal experience, he was sufficiently tough-minded to be critical about what could be learned from such experiences.

The 1890s were an exciting time for James. The Principles of Psychology, his two volume synthesis of research in and reflections on psychology, was published in 1890 and enjoyed great success. A shorter version published in 1892 was widely adopted as a textbook in psychology and sometimes philosophy throughout the English-speaking world. Although he lacked the patience and precision needed for experimental research, he appreciated its importance and promoted it through his writings and sponsorship. Nevertheless, he also insisted that direct introspection of mental states was indispensable to human psychology, since consciousness, though dependent on the brain, could never be adequately known by external observation. This emphasis on introspection allowed him to display his genius at describing the details and structures of his own mental life. His descriptive chapter on “The Stream of Thought” (in the shorter version “The Stream of Consciousness”) helped to create a new vocabulary for talking about the human mind that influenced revolutionary poets and novelists, like his student Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), as well as psychologists and philosophers. In a survey on eminence in psychology conducted 101 years after the publication of The Principles of Psychology, historians of psychology ranked James first among American psychologists and second only to Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) among international psychologists (Korn, Davis, and Davis, 789–92).

It was also during the 1890s that James found his voice as a philosopher and a theme that helped distinguish his personal and piecemeal approach to philosophical issues from the grand, impersonal systems then in vogue. He called this theme “pluralism” and contrasted it with the monistic thinking of Hegelians and other rationalists. One aspect of pluralism is the thesis that an individual is justified in believing in a “forced option” (“there is a supernatural order” vs. “there is no supernatural order”; “we have free will” vs. “we don’t have free will”) provided that it is not inconsistent with the requirements of rationality or the findings of science and that believing in that option enhances one’s life.

Although James crafted pluralism in response to his own needs, it proved attractive to others as well. He became a sought-after speaker, for he knew how to make his ideas clear and interesting. In 1897, the same year as his dedication speech for the Shaw memorial, he published a collection of his lectures and essays under the title The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. This collection brought together his reflections and conjectures on questions that had fascinated and in some cases tormented him since adolescence: Is life worth living? Can we improve our lives by acts of will? Is belief in a divine order justifiable? Can theistic hopes be reconciled with science? Do we have free will? What is morality? What is the importance of individuals to history? Thanks to the success of this collection and its affirmation of the intellectual legitimacy of religious faith, he was invited to give the prestigious Gifford lectures on Natural Religion in Edinburgh in 1901. This invitation provided a well-paid opportunity to focus his time and energy on a subject he found profoundly interesting, but political events in 1898 drew his attention to more worldly matters.

The Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere had once stretched from the top of California to the tip of Patagonia. All that remained in 1898 were the islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spain also retained possession of scattered islands in the Pacific, including Guam and the Philippines. For reasons as varied as economic gain, sympathy with independence movements in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the opportunity to acquire overseas territories, and eagerness to prove that the U.S. had the military might to compete as a world power, the idea of war with Spain had become increasingly popular in America. On the night of February 15, 1898, an explosion sank the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. Although the cause of the explosion was never clearly established, the U.S. went to war with Spain and won an easy victory.

One of t...