Excerpt
The Writings of William James
Introduction
PERSON, PROCESS AND THE RISK OF BELIEF
In his poem “Our Country,” Thoreau wrote the lines that well suggest the philosophical vision of William James.
All things invite this earth’s inhabitants
To rear their lives to an unheard of height
And meet the expectation of the land:…
James himself had said in his essay on “The Sentiment of Rationality” that “the inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess” (W.B. 86). In many ways, it was the attempt to structure the powers or “energies of men” which most occupied him. This concern found its most explicit statement in the essays collected in his Will to Believe. Further supporting evidence of the promethean quality of his thought is found throughout the Pragmatism. At one place he tells us that:
In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hand. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it. [Pragm. 256–257.]
As rich as is this direction of James’s thought, it is unfortunate that the pragmatic attitude, so readily identified as Jamesian, often overshadows two other major aspects of his total work. First, James spent a good part of his life rationalizing his decision not to commit suicide. As late as 1896, in a letter to Benjamin Paul Blood, he wrote: “I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide” (L.W.J., II, 39). Second, he believed in the empirical reality of “conjunctive relations,” which enabled him to develop a version of the world that was capable of supporting the pragmatic attitude. John Dewey, still the most incisive commentator on the thought of James, saw this “more expansive view, when he wrote
Long after “pragmatism” in any sense save as an application of his Weltanschauung* 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 remain associated with the name of James; the more he is studied in his historic setting the more original and daring will the idea appear.
And Ralph Barton Perry offers of James that “It was a metaphysics of vision and insight, rather than either activism or positivism that sprung from the ancient roots of his thought” (T.C., II, 582).
Although James’s views are disparate and primarily found in volumes of loosely connected essays (with the exception of the Principles of Psychology), he returns again and again to several major themes. His work can best be approached in terms of his personal confrontation with nihilism; his belief in a continuous, intelligible, but unfinished universe; and his attempt to develop a method of inquiry which does justice to the processive quality of both nature and man while providing for the fruitful realization of human “interest.” James’s preoccupation with individualized energies, psychic states, religious experience, extrasensory perception and the problem of truth, should be viewed as a function of these larger concerns.
In addition to these philosophical problems, James has to be set within the complex and turbulent life of his family. Relevant also is his relationship to the revolutionary intellectual forces at work in the late nineteenth century, particularly in their American setting. In an incisive text, Robert C. Pollock evaluates the historical context in which James matured.
As the point of convergence of a potentially infinite number of perspectives, the human mind’s interest in itself was enormously intensified, with the result that experience in its widest range assumed a commanding position.… With the maturation of the historical sense and the genetic point of view ushered in by evolutionary theories, a respect for the temporal and becoming aspect of things took a firm hold of men’s minds. And it became imperative to examine the problem of knowledge afresh, once human experience was viewed in the more all-inclusive relationships of history, and on the developmental plane.
In writing of James, Gardner Murphy gives us a more specific historical setting. “Of all the nineteenth century currents most fundamentally congenial to him, because so closely related to such [personal] needs, the most important was evolutionism; an evolutionism which meant creativeness through struggle, the primacy of the immediate task to be done over any abstraction which is removed from life.”
With the exception of The Thought and Character of William James, the massive intellectual biography by R. B. Perry, deservedly famed for its wealth of detail, clarity and philosophical acumen, the literature about James has been disappointing. Perhaps Perry’s work has been too successful, reducing much of the rest of the James scholarship to pale imitations characterized by the repetition of what are by now clichés about James’s mobility, openness to experience, Americanism, and philosophical profundity malgré lui. As with all clichés, they have considerable truth at their core. But they have also obscured the technical and unfinished side of James’s thought. They have led us into reading his popular works without benefit of the complex reasoning process that enabled him to offer such imaginative and relevant philosophical hints. Writers on James have constantly to avoid the temptation simply to join together a series of brilliant asides and avoid commenting at all. We should pay special heed to the warning of Julius Bixler: “the isolated reference from James is always unreliable.”5 Much of the problem in assessing James, stems from his predilection for publishing, as such, what originally were public lectures. He was unhappy about this “popular lecture style” and wanted to do something more technically rigorous, in the German manner, more strengwissenschaftlich (T.C. II, 583). Yet the combined factors of his generosity, his superb skill in the presentation of ideas, and his deep sense of responsibility to the immediate community, forced James again and again into the lecture hall. In these lectures, his lucidity, charm and ever-present philosophical commonsense pervade what is often the most difficult of undertakings. The richly metaphorical style of the lectures as published have often been the recipient of heady praise. Such encomiums, however, have rendered James more beloved than analyzed. This situation is to be lamented, for in our time the viability of philosophical vision depends largely on the ability to sustain a dialectic between the increased understanding of man’s inner life and the ever-widening cosmological setting in which we find ourselves. Such a dialectic was an integral aspect of James’s philosophical insight.
James does not belong to a single generation or to a specific philosophical movement, although his qualities and cast of mind are unintelligible if he is not seen in his historical and sociological context. We should take seriously the seemingly extravagant claim of Whitehead, that the four great philosophical “assemblers” are Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and William James. His choice of James was based on the judgment that James “had discovered intuitively the great truth with which modern logic is now wrestling,” namely, “that every finite set of premises must indicate notions which are excluded from its direct purview.” Whitehead arrives at this judgment because he reads James, as we should, with an eye to the implications and as yet unrealized dimensions of his foresightful and trenchant viewpoint. Indeed, we should follow the advice of James himself, who warns a student that, in analyzing another’s thought, the stringing out of texts leads nowhere “unless you have first grasped his centre of vision, by an act of imagination” (L.W.J. II, 355).
In addition to Whitehead, other formulators of major contemporary philosophical traditions have expressed a similar debt to the originating qualities of James. Thinkers as diverse as Unamuno,7 Wittgenstein8 and Husserl,9 highly original thinkers in their own right, trace decisive insights to the work of James. And while Edward Moore, in his recent work on James, tends to deny to James any necessarily historical influence, he does comment that “the turn of the wheel is almost complete, so that the student of William James seems to feel that in reading many contemporary philosophers he is rereading William James.”
And of course we can but mention here the critical influence of James on the American philosophical tradition. Certainly the “Golden Age” of American philosophy, which gave us the work of Royce, Santayana, Peirce, Dewey and Mead, is inconceivable without James as an originating force. In a remarkable address, given less than a year after the death of James, Josiah Royce sees him as the third representative American philosopher. James, like Jonathan Edwards and Emerson before him, has “thought for himself, fruitfully, with true independence, and with successful inventiveness. And he has given utterance to ideas which are characteristic of a stage and an aspect of the spiritual life of this people.”11 As Royce indicates, the realization of national self-consciousness was not a planned effort of James. In the words of one commentator, M. Le Breton, “Il a pu passer en Amérique pour le plus cosmopolite et en Europe pour le plus américain des philosophes”* (T.C. I, 383). But by the nature of his genius and the press of his situation, he had also realized inadvertently or no, what Emerson in his essay on “Nature” had seen as our need for “an original relation to the universe.” If James’s originality constituted a stage of the national self-consciousness in his time, his vision now replies to the needs of man today, who confronts an endless but increasingly controllable cosmos. An analysis of the life history and thought of William James involves us in the three great mooring points of human experience: self-consciousness, national culture and cosmic setting. By virtue of his spirit, his concerns, and even the direction of his unfinished technical thought, William James places us at a vantage point, from which we can attempt to reconstitute the human endeavor in a way that is creative and honest.
