Experiencing William James

Belief in a Pluralistic World

James Campbell, James T. Campbell

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780813940496
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed.

Commentators typically address only pieces of James's thought or aspects of his vision, often in an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James's own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man's thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual.

CHAPTER 1

Preliminary Considerations

This chapter undertakes three tasks. The first is to take an initial look at the importance of James’s thought, and to lay out a general overview of his place in the American philosophical tradition through a brief survey of the secondary literature. Next is a biographical sketch that grounds his ideas in the particulars of his experience. In this way, the James who grew up in a nineteenth-century world of wealth and comfort and travel, and who flourished during a Harvard teaching career of nearly thirty-five years, will be matched up with the author of such timeless volumes as The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907). Finally, I explore his general vision of the contemporary intellectual world to get a sense of his understanding of the crisis that developments in nineteenth-century science had brought to Western thought, especially with regard to the meaning of human existence. This crisis will serve as a backdrop for the rest of this study.

The Importance of James’s Thought

William James became a major figure in American intellectual history, especially in philosophy and psychology, in the 1880s and continues to be one to the present day. To get an initial sense of who he was, and of what his ideas were, we can consider a series of five appreciations. We can begin with Josiah Royce, who writes that James was one of only three “representative American philosophers”—the other two being Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82). What makes each of these American thinkers “representative,” Royce continues, was that each “thinks for himself, fruitfully, with true independence, and with successful inventiveness, about problems of philosophy,” and “gives utterance to philosophical ideas which are characteristic of some stage and of some aspect of the spiritual life of his own people.” In describing James, John Dewey remarks that “long after ‘pragmatism’ in any sense save as a application of his Welt-Anschauung [way of looking at the world] shall have passed into a not unhappy oblivion, the fundamental idea of an open universe in which uncertainty, choice, hypotheses, novelties and possibilities are naturalized” will continue to be associated with his name. Dewey continues that the more we study James “in his historic setting,” the more “original and daring” we will see his understanding of the open universe. For Alfred North Whitehead, James, along with Plato, Aristotle, and Leibniz, was one of the four great philosophical assemblers whose work must precede systematization. He saw the essence of James’s greatness to be “his marvellous sensitivity to the ideas of the present. He knew the world in which he lived, by travel, by personal relations with its leading men, by the variety of his own studies.” Of course James systematized, “but above all he assembled,” and “his intellectual life was one protest against the dismissal of experience in the interest of system.” Next, Robert C. Pollock writes that we must expect that original philosophers like James, who challenge the familiar and seek “to situate knowledge in the wider context of actual existence,” will of necessity throw “well-tested concepts out of alignment” and create “new difficulties.” As a result, there will emerge a host of inconsistencies, ambiguities, and fallacies that will take time to sort out. As Pollock reminds us, however, “the warrant for his thought does not lie in its ability to defend itself against all comers, but rather in its power to enlighten us regarding something of importance to all who care to see life in the round.”¹

Finally, John J. McDermott writes that James’s relevance “lies in his ability to offer philosophical insight of the kind which refuses to be localized by any strictly circumscribed method or doctrine.” McDermott continues that “James’s thought is the vestibule to the thought and values of the twentieth century.” Among the many breakthroughs to which James provides entry, McDermott lists “the directions of modern physics, psychoanalysis and depth psychology, modern art, and the emphasis on relations rather than on objects or substances.” Perhaps most central for McDermott is that “James is a process philosopher, by which we mean that he assesses the journey, the flow, to be more important than the outcome or the product.” He further notes that the golden age of American philosophy would be “inconceivable without James as an originating force.” McDermott notes, moreover, that there is much more to James than what might appear in any narrow presentation of the author of Pragmatism. It is inadequate to speak of James as a pragmatist—or any other “-ist”—McDermott writes at one point: “He was a genius of his own kind, who gave to philosophy, largely by virtue of his personal qualities, a perspective and a context wholly novel in implication.” In a similar fashion, he rejects a slightly broader version of this attempt to box James in. He writes: “Unfortunately, James has been approached, in the main, from primarily two vantage points: his doctrine of the ‘Will to Believe’ and his ‘Pragmatism.’ While both of these concerns in James are intriguing and carry important philosophical implications, they are subject to grave distortions if seen apart from his insight into the meaning of relations as formulated in his psychology and metaphysics.” McDermott indicates that “although a pragmatic epistemology is an important strand in James’s philosophy, it does not occupy the center of his vision.” At the center of James’s vision—his “most important philosophical contention”—is his analysis of “the status of relations and the philosophical implications of that contention, which he subsequently referred to as radical empiricism.” Looking out from this relational core, Pragmatism is most accurately understood as “a methodological application of his radical empiricism.”²

Regardless of tributes like these, for some James was simply too catholic or liberal a thinker to be properly characterized a philosopher. Clearly, he did not fit well into any traditional philosophic harness. At his death in 1910 the Philosophical Review offered this backhanded compliment: “No philosopher of the English speaking world has been more widely read by persons not interested in technical philosophy.”³ James’s friend Charles Sanders Peirce noted “his almost unexampled incapacity for mathematical thought, combined with intense hatred for logic—probably for its pedantry, its insistence on minute exactitude.”⁴ Another friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., saw in James a shortage of “continuously sustained logical thought.” For Holmes, James demonstrated the mind of “the Irishman . . . great keenness in seeing into the corners of the human heart but impatience of and incapacity for the sustained continuous thinking that makes a philosopher.” James was to his mind “a great psychologist—not a great philosopher.”⁵ For James Seth, William James represented “a confusion of the functions of philosophy and poetry or religion,” because he demands that “philosophy shall match the concreteness and livingness of life or experience, shall reproduce reality in all its concrete ‘thickness.’” For Seth, however, philosophy should be more concerned with reasons and more aligned with science. He continues that James “would assimilate philosophy rather to the intuitional and emotional apprehension of poetry and religion than to the conceptual apprehension of science.” Seth further found in James over time “a growing and almost morbid dread of the ‘academic,’ the ‘pedantic,’ . . . a supreme contempt for the professorial tribe as such.” He thus characterized James as a “popular essayist in philosophy” who aims at “interest and surprise” and “picturesque effect,” and whose writings produce “a brilliant literary effort rather than a substantial contribution to philosophical discussion.”⁶ Finally, to round out this initial survey of some of James’s contemporaries on the question of whether he should be considered a philosopher, we can note Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller’s description of him as “not, strictly speaking, a professional philosopher at all.” James was, for Schiller, one of a long stream of glorious amateurs—a stream that included Descartes, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Mill, and Spencer—“who have stirred philosophy and stimulated thought.” James became a philosopher “from the love of it, from personal interest in its problems, and not because he thought he could make a living by cataloguing the varieties of philosophic opinion, and speculating about the sense of the abstruse abstractions in which defunct philosophers have hidden away their esoteric doctrines.” Schiller sees in James’s amateur status further value: freed from “the dull mechanical routine of academic philosophy,” he could approach philosophic problems freshly and personally, unhampered by “the nerveless and half-hearted efforts of ‘dispassionate’ research.”⁷

Over the last century, during which philosophy has become ever more narrow and professionalized, some later commentators have continued to question James’s status as a philosopher. Boyd Henry Bode, for example, notes that “to his contemporaries, he was a personality that did not seem to fit into any of the existing classifications.” Among professional philosophers “it was the fashion to say that he was not really a philosopher at all, but a brilliant psychologist with an unfortunate habit of going on philosophic binges.”⁸ For others, the question of whether James was a philosopher is less important than whether he offered a philosophical system. Donald Cary Williams writes that in terms of theory, “it is vain to look to him for a girdered system, engineered to the last rivet,” because his “mind was like a studio crammed with raw materials and debris, many half-hewn blocks of exciting design, and a dozen unmistakable masterpieces.” Instead of an ordered philosophy, we find philosophical pluralism, or as Williams puts it, “the intensity, the incessancy, the plethora of his thought were enough to make three or four philosophies—and they did.” William Ernest Hocking also rejects the idea that James offered a unified philosophical system, suggesting rather that “in him idealism, realism, pragmatism and mysticism coexisted without achieving a final consistency.”⁹

Still, these questionings of James as a philosopher must be read in the context of a rethinking—strongly influenced by James himself—of the nature of philosophy. Max Carl Otto describes him as “a seasoned scholar, not an amateur, in philosophy,” who hated the inherited “mustiness” of the discipline and “preferred his butterflies flying.” If we follow James and take as our subject matter “the fullness of experience in all its wealth of detail and complexity of interrelation,” and pursue it to “the remotest crannies and the widest vistas” that it reveals, Otto believes that we will recognize that his goal was “to feel and know and chronicle each particular in its sovereign singularity and all the particulars in their lawful togetherness.”¹⁰ For his part, Horace Meyer Kallen points to James’s great influence “as the initiator of a sort of sanitary engineering of the philosophic discipline, an opening up of the sealed chambers of the mind which rest upon the dominant logic of illation [inference] to the cleansing and the health-restoring fresh air of perceptual experience, scientific method, and practical action.” By opening up philosophy, John Evan Turner writes, “James has effectually destroyed the pestilent tradition that Philosophy is a specialised culture wholly aloof from the interests and concerns of everyday life. . . . James, once for all, has unlocked the study door and thrown away the key.” Or, as Lewis Mumford puts it, James “divested philosophy of its high hat and its painful white collar, and by the mere force of his presence made it human again.” For Wendell T. Bush, James’s “ ‘real’ message” was that “a fact can not be extinguished by an argument, and that no argument can create a single fact, though its toil be distributed through two semesters and many syllogisms.” Since these facts belong to everyone, not just to academics, William James Earle indicates that “James addresses himself to the people, not especially to other philosophers.”¹¹

Continuing on with the theme that James was a different kind of philosopher, we can consider the position of his student and later colleague at Harvard, George Santayana. Santayana writes that “there is a sense in which James was not a philosopher at all,” if we are thinking of philosophy as “a consolation and sanctuary in a life which would have been unsatisfying without it . . . an edifice to go and live in for good.” Santayana continues that philosophy for James was “rather like a maze in which he happened to find himself wandering, and what he was looking for was the way out.” He remained wary of theories and abstractions, yet open to particulars and especially to individuals. Perhaps because he began his teaching career feeling “a little in the professor’s chair as a military man might feel when obliged to read the prayers at a funeral,” James “kept his mind and heart wide open to all that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in religion and philosophy.” Santayana writes further of James’s openness to “sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters—for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing to draw it prematurely.” It was important to him that “the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not . . . be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play. Who could tell what heavenly influences might not pierce to these sensitive half-flayed creatures, which are lost on the thick-skinned, the sane, and the duly goggled?” As a result, James “became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous, half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full.” In the process, he became “their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he made it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world has to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and interests of these people.”¹²

In commentaries on American thought, there are frequent references to James—as there are to Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Dewey—as “America’s philosopher.” Royce presents James as “our national philosopher” and “a prophet of the nation that is to be,” in whom “certain characteristic aspects of our national civilization have found their voice.” Henry Bamford Parkes notes that “no other thinker has been so deeply or so characteristically American in his intellectual preconceptions and habits of thought, or has reflected so clearly both the virtues and the deficiencies of the American mind.” Parkes is especially keen to emphasize James’s connection with the American past, from which he acquired his “distrust of abstract theory . . . partly from the suspicion of dogmas and intellectual absolutes that had always been characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon mentality, and partly from the added emphasis on practical utility the Americans had acquired during the pioneering experience.” For Parkes, however, James’s value also transcends the past. He points to James’s “faith in individualism and in freedom, and the realization that every person and every event were in some way unique and could never be wholly explained by general laws,” and h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations for Works by William James
• 1. Preliminary Considerations
• 2. Psychology and Philosophy
• 3. Rationality and Belief
• 4. Pragmatism
• 5. Radical Empiricism and Pluralism
• 6. Ethics and Social Thought
• 7. Religion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index