Skip to content
- Author: Robert D. Richardson
- Full Title: William James
- Category: #books
- Much of James’s best work is a protest not only against dualism but against what Ian Hacking calls “dynamic nominalism”; that is, our habit of creating and naming categories into which we then sort ourselves. Once ADHD had been described, suddenly we saw it in every other child. James’s strength of mind, his resistance to easy labeling, and his focus on experience itself rather than words for experience give his work its continuing explanatory power.
- radical empiricism (which could have been called phenomenology); that is, his belief that reality is confined to what we experience, with the crucial proviso that nothing we experience can be excluded.
- James’s understanding of how each of us operates in the world is like George Eliot’s description of the pier glass and the candle in Middlemarch. “Your pier glass or extensive surface of polished steel,” Eliot writes, “rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination and lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable,” she concludes. “The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person.” For William James, too, the world as a whole is random, and each person makes a pattern, a different pattern, by a power and a focus of his own. There is no single overarching or connecting pattern, hidden or revealed. “We carve out order,” James wrote, “by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.”14
- James is famous as one of the great figures in the movement called pragmatism, which is the belief that truth is something that happens to an idea, that the truth of something is the sum of all its actual results. It is not, as some cynics would have it, the mere belief that truth is whatever works for you. It must work for you and it must not contravene any known facts.
- James’s point in this book is that religious authority resides not in books, bibles, buildings, inherited creeds, or historical prophets, not in authoritative figures—whether parish ministers, popes, or saints—but in the actual religious experiences of individuals. Such experiences have some features in common; they also vary from person to person and from culture to culture. The Varieties of Religious Experience is also, and not least, the acknowledged inspiration for the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is James’s understanding of conversion that AA has found especially helpful.16
- And like Edwards, James came to prefer the concrete example; the soil bearing weeds despite all our care is the kind of illustration that Edwards was good at, and that James was becoming good at.
- James turned next to Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose crucial initial teaching in his Encheiridion urges us to give our attention and energy to those things within our control and to let the rest go. From his opening sentence—“Some things are under our control, some things are not”—Epictetus wants us to take as our starting point not Adam’s fall but our own situation. James’s summary of section 20 of the Encheiridion: “I am in his power who can gratify my wishes and inflict my fears. Not to be a slave, then, I must have neither desire nor aversion for anything in the power of others.”
- James saw Stoicism as a way to freedom. In this he differed sharply from his brother Henry, who dismissed Stoicism in an early review as a philosophy fit only for slaves, since it taught men to embrace the given.
- Epictetus’s insistence that the first care of a philosopher “should be the ease and quiet of his own breast.” It is “a less evil for you that your servant or child should be vicious than that yourself should be perpetually unhappy with an anxious care to prevent it.”14
- William James’s working philosophy this summer of 1866, his actual beliefs (taking “belief” to mean what Alexander Bain said it meant, “that upon which a man is prepared to act”), was still that of the classical Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.
- He wrote later that a person “has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.”
- The subject with Father had been creation; now the subject with Harry was evil. William suddenly found himself open to a whole new view of the world, a view that constellated for him around the question of evil. He admired “the health! the brightness, and the freshness!” of the Greeks, and marveled at the “total absence of almost all that we consider peculiarly valuable in ourselves.” What most struck him was “the cool acceptance by the bloody old heathens of everything that happened around them, their indifference to evil in the abstract, their want of what we call sympathy, the essentially definite character of their joys, or at any rate of their sorrows (for their joy was perhaps coextensive with life itself).” What James was finding and working out for himself was that the Greeks simply didn’t have the sense of the world as pervaded by evil that, say, Father had. “The Homeric Greeks ‘accepted the universe,’ their only notion of evil was its [the universe’s] perishability—we say the world in its very existence is evil—they say the only evil is that everything in it in turn ceases to exist.”
- “To the Greek a thing was evil only transiently and accidentally and with respect to those particular unfortunates whose bad luck happened to bring them under it.” In other words, evil was not a deliberate and inevitable condition of life, willed or sanctioned by an all-powerful and inscrutable force or deity. “Bystanders could remain careless and untouched—no after brooding, no disinterested hatred of it in se, and questioning of its right to darken the world, such as now prevail … Are you free?—exult! Are you fettered or have you lost anything?—Lament your impediment or your loss and that alone.” This is not a Pollyanna move: to deny evil is not to deny suffering; all it does is remove the comfort—or the utter horror—of there being a cosmic or providential reason for the suffering.
- Tags: #favorite
- Note: cf. Attitude of Waorani
- Minnie was now very thin, terribly weak, and no longer able to sleep. Her fate seemed to make nonsense of William’s belief that people can control their lives, and he collapsed in on himself in yet another crisis, writing in his diary for February 1, 1870, “Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard … or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?” By “moral business” William meant the view that, after all, we are able to will and to choose our path in life, that we are not powerless pawns in an all-determined universe. It is not what fate does to us that matters; what matters is what we do with what fate does to us.
- Renouvier is elegant and urbane, has a highly developed sense of irony and a wry appreciation of how proponents of one kind of belief can end up adopting the views of opponents—a sort of Stockholm syndrome for intellectuals. “The same persons,” he writes, “who valiantly won religious liberty for themselves in the sixteenth century became the ardent proponents of an omnipotent deity and absolute predestination, and those who defended ecclesiastical government and constraint of conscience acknowledged a certain moral freedom for humans in their dealings with God. The Protestants and the Jansenists [predestinarian Roman Catholics] fought against free will, and the Jesuits defended it. In freeing oneself from one authority, it is natural to look, by way of compensation, for support and certitude from another; in putting up with one aspect of authority, it is natural to seek emancipation—even if only the shadow of it—from another.”
- “Let us not pretend,” he once said, “to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”13
- Describing what would later be called pragmatism, he said, “The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.”
- Pragmatism was born and formed in Cambridge in the early 1870s, in the Metaphysical Club, though we must wait until 1878 for Peirce’s “pragmatic maxim”: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we might conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”18 Peirce firmly believed that “a prerequisite for successful experimentation is an external world resistant to actions arising from misconceptions of it.”
- James’s expression of belief is thoughtfully and typically conditional: any triumph of good depends on the cooperation of each of us. The idea that God needs man is not argued for, but simply stated as a fact of personal experience. A specific belief is not a refuge or a rock or a thing to cling to, but a matter of certain possibilities being open to one, and of assent to those possibilities.
- Note: The new insight of how we all continually make the world through what we do, the world is good to the extent that we make it good, vicious to the extent that we make it vicious. Ole Munch’s conversion!
- Consistency, for James, was not in itself a virtue. Vacillation was now a fixed habit. He was so open to almost any kind of experience that he was apt to change his mind repeatedly about any single piece of it, from a career plan to a recent book.
- The Emerson James needed and found in these years is the Emerson of “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar.” In his copy of the latter James marked the passage that says, “Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth … Only so much do I know as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life and whose not.”6 By 1873 James found himself not only accepting Emerson’s outlook but, to some extent, living it himself.
- And in one crucial way, Emerson’s great central doctrine was already James’s as well. This is the doctrine that, says Van Wyck Brooks—paraphrasing James’s “Rationality, Activity, and Faith”—“has marked all the periods of revival, the early Christian age and Luther’s age, Rousseau’s, Kant’s and Goethe’s, namely, that the innermost nature of things is congenial to the powers that men possess.”
- By then James did not believe in the existence of ideas apart from the men and women who held them. His interest in autobiography was not casual; it was a crucial aspect of his whole approach to ideas.
- Renouvier goes further yet, claiming, with his Emerson-like flair for phrasing, “Properly speaking there is no certitude; all there is is men who are certain.”2 Rather than see doubt and uncertainty as troublesome or negative, Renouvier, with James right behind, recognizes that what we call freedom in human affairs rests on and grows out of what in physics is called chance—that is, not determinism. Just as the possibility of there being such a thing as a chance occurrence is what we mean by the word “freedom,” so doubt, instead of meaning a lamentable loss of certainty, meant, for James, the positive possibility of certainty.
- James’s conclusion, from which he never retreated, is that mind or consciousness is fundamentally active. “The knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foothold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create … In other words, there belongs to mind from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker on.”
- It is Spencer, not Darwin, whom James has in mind when he says, “The ignoring of data is, in fact, the easiest and most popular mode of obtaining unity in one’s thought.”
- “To me such decisions”—probably about whether to marry and have children—“seem acts by which we are voting what sort of a universe this shall intimately be, and by our vote creating or helping to create ‘behind the veil’ the order we desire.”10 This is a modern, democratic version of Pascal’s wager. Since there is no certain way to prove or disprove the existence of God, it makes sense to put one’s money on the existence of God and behave accordingly. James drops the principle and the language of gambling in favor of the idea of voting. The decisions we make about how to live are not bets but ballots for a particular kind of world.
- Noting that “consciousness is presumably at its minimum in creatures whose nervous system is simple,” James suggests that consciousness “is most needed where the nervous system is highly evolved,” and he asks what defects exist in highly evolved nervous systems for which consciousness might be the remedy. “Whoever studies consciousness, from any point of view whatever, is ultimately brought up against the mystery of interest and selective attention.” James concludes that the function of consciousness is to enable us to select, to give us the ability “always to choose out of the manifold experiences present to it [consciousness] at a given time some one for particular accentuation, and to ignore the rest.” The passenger may, if it interests him, and if he selects it for attention, take hold of the helm and raise, lower, or reef the sail, and so, in small but meaningful ways, direct the voyage. Such a person, taking such actions, cannot fairly be called an automaton.
- The boldness and novelty of this approach can hardly be overstated. James seemed and can still seem to have abandoned the centuries-old notion that philosophy is the search for the truth. He already doubted that either “the search” or “the truth” existed or could exist. He was trying to turn the river of thought into a new channel. To be successful, to be generally accepted, a philosophy must be able, he felt, “to define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers.” No philosophy that “baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers can succeed.”
- “the element of Faith,” which he adroitly defines as “belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible: and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.” Faith, says James, is an essential function; it is “the power to trust, to risk a little beyond the literal evidence … Any mode of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.”
- In fact, he maintains, “we cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.”
- the part of wisdom is clearly to believe what one desires, for the belief is one of the indispensable conditions for the realization of its object.” Faith here “creates its own verification.” “Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. Doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.”9 This is not a leap to faith but a leap resulting from faith.
- James’s search for the precise mechanism of volition leads him through many pages of physiological experiments to suggest, finally, that we are able to take an action only when the reasons for not taking it disappear. The more we struggle and debate, the more we reconsider and delay, the less likely we are to act. Don’t wait until you feel better to go the gym; go to the gym and you will feel better. The physiology lab provided fresh, detailed scientific backing for what Goethe’s Faust had found earlier. To begin anything, it is not word or thought or power that matters; it is the act that matters.
- The “action of the will,” he concludes, “is the reality of consent to a fact of any sort whatever, a fact in which we ourselves may play either an active or a suffering part. The fact always appears to us in an idea: and it is willed by its idea becoming victorious over inhibiting [and competing] ideas, banishing negations, and remaining affirmed.” In a terse ten-point summary, James throws out this astonishing line: “Attention, belief, affirmation and motor volition are thus four names for an identical process, incidental to the conflict of ideas alone, the survival of one in spite of the opposition of others. The surviving idea is invested with a sense of reality which cannot at present be further analysed.”
- William couldn’t quite let it go. It seems uncharacteristic of him to contend for principle over particular human experience, and it cost him something. William may have been correct, but Harry was right. A balance shifted, and now it was Harry who was functioning as the moral center of what remained of the old James family.
- The title does, however, remind us that once again James moved toward a major idea by starting out in opposition or resistance to received ideas. He sweepingly notes, “What immense tracts of our inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities.”
- As for the actual quality of mental life, he wrote that it, “like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.” The resting places are the substantive parts, the flights are the transitive parts. The difficulty here is “seeing the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them.” On the other hand, “if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it [the conclusion] so exceeds them [the flights] in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare.”12
- Arguing, for example, for the existence of “a feeling of if,” James says, “Language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.” Our common use of language imposes a mythological, nonlegitimate uniformity on shifting fields and running streams of impressions (how many separate personal variations are hidden from sight under a blanket term like “depression”?). “We are so befogged by the suggestions of speech that we think a constant thing, known under a constant name, ought to be known by means of a constant mental affection.”
- James’s proposals were new in that they were post-Enlightenment. In another sense, he was going all the way back to Heraclitus in his argument that consciousness consists at bottom of nothing more fixed than a stream, a flow of impressions. We should have our eye on the process as well as—perhaps more than—the product, on the path as well as the goal. This is a view of mental life Emerson had grasped (in such sentences as “Art is the path of the creator to his work”), though by means of quite different tools and training.
- Spending his life caught inside this gorgeous, always shifting labyrinth of ever-flowing perceptions, ever-shifting mental states, and ever-fluid temperament, James seized on habit formation as the thread to guide him. James on habit, then, is not the smug advice of some martinet, but the too-late-learned, too-little-self-knowing, pathetically earnest, hard-won crumbs of practical advice offered by a man who really had no habits—or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits—and whose life was itself a “buzzing blooming confusion” that was never really under control.
- In December 1883 he sent off to Mind for publication a short but revolutionary piece called “What Is an Emotion?” Citing the bodily changes that are often considered to be produced by emotion, James argues that such changes are the emotion.
- This is a physical—a physiological—understanding of emotion; it is revolutionary because it was generally assumed before James that an emotion—say fear—was a cognitive response to a situation, and that the brain or higher nerve centers then sent messages out to the body to bristle, tremble, and run. James’s reversal of this has been questioned. Some modern psychologists argue for at least a cognitive component in the process, but as late as 1984 James’s theory (which was independently brought forward by the Danish psychologist Carl Lange the following year and which has since been known as the James-Lange theory) was regarded as “the starting point for most contemporary theories of emotion.”8
- But whether or not we can satisfactorily identify a sequential chain of causes, it remains a fact that James’s characteristic approach to knowledge lies through experience. He could write about emotion as he did because he was not asking what causes an emotion or what emotion means, but what is the actual experience to which we give the name of this or that emotion.
- Samuel Johnson once noted that he could be sunk in a mire of lethargy and immobility so deep he could stare for hours at the village clock and not know the time of day. He was unable to think his way out of this condition, but sometimes if he just heaved himself out of his chair, the mere physical movement was enough to get him started. Act first; the emotion will follow. In the beginning was the deed.
- Free will versus determinism is of course a very old problem, appearing frequently as a sort of game of capture the flag, with freedom flying over one goal and determinism over the other, despite the fact that chance and habit seem to occupy most of the ground between.
- James starts out with an adroit, happy protest that he has no wish to erect a coercive argument for the existence of freedom. This is in the same spirit in which Isaac Bashevis Singer once answered the question “Do you believe in free will?” “Of course I believe in free will,” Singer is supposed to have replied. “Do I have a choice?”
- With a shrewd sense of where his opposition lay, James observes, “The stronghold of the determinist sentiment is the antipathy to the idea of chance.”
- This is a first formulation of what William would later say were the two fundamental teachings of all religions: first, that something is wrong, and second, that it can be set right.11
- Most of what we call will is really just consent, James says. In this case, the contrasting, inhibiting, blocking impulses simply disappear for a moment and bingo, we have acted on the original impulse to get up because suddenly nothing impeded that impulse.
- The philosopher, at the end of his furrow, has only reasons to believe, but the artist—and James was always half an artist, as his son has reminded us—the artist believes.
- James’s rejection of a plan (and a Planner) is like Ivan Karamazov’s. James declares it impossible to accept “a world in which Messrs Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’ utopias should all be outdone and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture.”
- James struck people as generous, and he was, but his generosity and openness served him well. He was convinced that others had things to teach him and that the way to increase one’s resources is to spend them down all the way, again and again. The well that is used most refills quickest.
- I instantly felt,” James’s account goes on, “that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory.” It was not just other people who were blind; it was not only students to whom James was open.
- meditating on the idea his wife had picked up from Kipling that our whole social order and civil life “had for their ultimate sanction nothing but force,” however we might disguise it,
- James almost never speaks about the content of education. He has nothing to say about the value of the classics or the need for more science or languages, no expressed opinion on the value of any one subject over another. His emphasis is on how most effectively to teach whatever it is you wish to teach. What he has to say about education in Talks to Teachers could also be described as “Practical Hints on Teaching and Learning, Suggested by Modern Physiology and Physiological Psychology.”
- James’s overriding interest is not, of course, in consciousness as such, but in consciousness as it practically, tangibly affects our conduct and lives. This emphasis he modestly ascribes to Darwin’s discovery: “Consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of superadded biological perfection—useless unless it prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration.” The function of the teacher is to enable the student to take advantage of what evolution has dropped in his lap, “training the pupil to behaviour.”
- James argues that human beings are, most simply, organisms “for reacting on impressions.” What is true at the physiological level has major implications for the teaching process. “No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression.” We cannot be said truly to receive something unless we actively react to it; we do not really have a solid impression of anything until we express it. Everything begins with our basic or native reactions. “The first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the native reactive tendencies—the impulses and instincts of childhood—so as to be able to substitute one for another and turn them on to artificial objects.”
- The first time we react to a given stimulus is an act. The second and all subsequent times are habit. “We are subject to the laws of habit in consequence of the fact that we have bodies.” James is always superb on habit; it is one of his great subjects. He likens habit to a sheet of paper that has been folded. “Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington said it is ‘ten times nature’…The great thing in all education,” James insists, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” The force of this is only increased when we remember that James was always fighting with his own nervous system.
- Within the stream of consciousness, that “ever-flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies,” we are able to think and feel by associating things with one another. “Your pupils, whatever else they are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machinery,” he says. “The ‘nature,’ the ‘character’ of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form of his associations.”
- What a teacher needs to know is how to use inhibition by substitution. In the brilliant and moving coda of the final talk, and indeed of the whole series of talks, James invokes this inhibition by substitution, which he says he learned from Spinoza, but which also has a marked resemblance to Emerson’s doctrine of compensation. “Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza” (for example, “I have to go to school today”). “To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman” (“I get to go to school today”).
- The “friars of the Inquisition and other judges were the most conscientious of men, the puritans of their day,” he wrote. But their good intentions went for nothing. “To diminish the power of the Prince of hell, a hell wantonly and of whole cloth was manufactured upon earth. There is no worse enemy of God and Man than zeal armed with power and guided by a feeble intellect … The great lesson of history,” he concluded somberly, “is to keep power of life and death away from that kind of mind, the mind that sees things in the light of evil and dread and mistrust rather than in that of hope.”
- The talk was not just vague uplift or well-intentioned generalities. It was a careful application of the James-Lange theory of emotion, recommending that the individual “pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel.” “To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind; whereas if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab and silently steals away.”8 “Act as if”; this is the essence of James’s advice.
- Tags: #favorite
- Note: cf. dharma
- The secret of the self-help movement, whether it is exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Ralph Waldo Trine, Annie Payson Call or Alcoholics Anonymous, is that effective self-help can be entered into only through the door of a kind of belief that we might as well admit is religious, though not necessarily orthodox, in nature. When AA invokes a “higher power,” it does not mean Jehovah; it means a power higher than oneself. A small community of two or three will do nicely. Successful reliance on an even slightly higher power requires a religious act of belief. Toward the end of “Psychology and Relaxation” James drops this comment: “Of course the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith.”
- Note: Get out of your head.
- What drives and validates self-help is a belief, a religious conviction, that our energies and abilities are finally congruent with the universe; that our minds—as Francis Bacon had proposed and hoped back in the Renaissance—are at bottom a match for the nature of things; that we are not fallen, incapable, helpless, doomed, or damned.
- Pragmatism is the philosophical notion, which quickly spread from its academic birthplace to the wider American culture, that the meaning of anything is to be found in its fruits, not its roots. It is results, not origins, that matter.
- James proceeded to explain that principle in several different forms. “To develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance.” Then James expands it, trying for maximum clarity. “To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our conception of the object.”
- “There can be no difference which doesn’t make a difference,” James says grandly, “no difference in abstract truth which does not express itself in a difference of concrete fact, and of conduct consequent upon the fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen.”
- With unusual pointedness, James turns on this kind of talk: “Now in which one of us practical Americans here assembled does this conglomeration of attributes awaken any sense of reality? And if in no one, then why not?” This is the exasperated tone of a person for whom religion is real, and James moves out briskly, burning his theological bridges. Just as he was opposed to theories without facts in psychology, and opposed to metaphysical system-building and definitional branding in philosophy, so he was opposed to dogmatic theology in religion. In each case he wanted something closer to our actual experience. The “orthodox deduction of God’s attributes is nothing but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word ‘God’ by a logical machine of wood and brass as well as by a man of flesh and blood … The attributes which I have quoted,” he explains, “have absolutely nothing to do with religion, for religion is a living practical affair.”
- But the western trip had a curious effect, calling James’s attention not to himself but to something else, something quite different and outside himself. To his brother Henry, off in London (Henry who had no concept of the Adirondacks, of Chautauqua, let alone of California), William wrote, “When one sees the great West one also feels how insignificant in the great mass of manually working humanity the handful of people are who live for the refinements.” A month later he wrote Henry again: “These magnificent railroads and new settlements bring home to one the fact that all life rests so on the physical courage of the common man.”
- In late October he presented “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.”2 This talk, with its strong central image from Stevenson’s “The Lantern Bearers,” became for James a central statement. The blindness he means is “the truth … that we are doomed, by the fact that we are practical beings with very limited tasks to attend to, and special ideas to look after, to be absolutely blind and insensible to the inner feelings, and the whole inner significance of lives that are different from our own. Our opinion of the worth of such lives is absolutely wide of the mark, and unfit to be counted at all.”3
- Royce’s thought had, from start to finish, a strong community focus. In an early work, California: A Study of American Character, he wrote, “It is the State, the Social Order, that is divine. We are all dust, save as the social order gives us life.”3 At a gala dinner in his honor in 1915, Royce said, “I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the idea of the Community.” He went further, maintaining that “we are saved through the community.”4 He believed we ought not to seek to be happy as individuals, that individualism is “the sin against the holy ghost,” that “nothing practical can be final.”5
- second, to make the hearer or reader believe what I myself invincibly do believe, that although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories) yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function.
- James is intrigued, as always, with religious experience itself, religion as people feel it to exist, and he insists that he is after “existential facts” and “the purely existential point of view.”
- We think of William James as an affirmer, like Emerson or Whitman, so it is sobering to note just how much of what one usually thinks of as religion James rejects at the start. He has no interest, he claims, in “your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation and retained by habit.” James was drawn to original or personal religious—or what is now called spiritual—feeling, not to the sociology of religious groups or institutions. “It would profit us little,” he says, “to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.”7
- Religion, like medicine or chemistry or anything else, must be evaluated by its results or outcomes, its effect on people’s lives. James shrewdly points out that this may be pragmatism, but it is not just modern psychological sleight of mind; it is the preferred yardstick of no less a figure than Jonathan Edwards, whom James now quotes. “There is not one grace of the Spirit of God,” Edwards wrote, “of the existence of which, in any [believer], Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.”
- James is careful—as his father was—to separate religious feeling from matters of morality.13 He takes pains to distinguish between the essentially moral teachings of classical Stoicism—compatible as it may be with Christianity, and with which he had long had some sympathy—and something different that the religious person alone possesses. “There is a state of mind,” says James, “known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.”14
- For James, the era of dogmatic theology is over; he boldly and perhaps mischievously announces the closing of the era of natural theology, “that vast literature of proofs of God’s existence drawn from the order of nature,” which relied on reason for its persuasiveness. “The truth is,” James says, “that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.”
- For James it was another point in favor of mind cure that it “has made … an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life,” and he argued that whatever one thought of mind cure, its results were incontrovertible. “It makes no difference,” he says provocatively, “whether you consider the patients to be deluded victims of their imaginations or not. That they seemed to themselves to have been cured by the experiments tried was enough to make them converts to the system.”9 When a person feels better because he thinks he has been given a cure, we call it, with complacent condescension, the placebo effect. For James, however, that same effect is simply a cure. You may still have a fatal disease, but if you feel better, you are better, if only by that feeling. It helps no one to underestimate the power of such feelings.
- Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is of ten cited as the most successful alcohol treatment program ever designed, once wrote a letter to Carl Jung explaining his indebtedness to James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and saying that in founding AA he had done little more than make “conversion experiences—nearly every variety reported by James—available on an almost wholesale basis.”
- what James means by saintliness is how religious experience affects practical everyday life.
- Of course his friends admired the book; some even agreed with parts of it.
- What James had seen in Bergson’s work in December 1902 was “a conclusive demolition of the dualism of object and subject in perception.” What he recognized in Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics in February 1903 was “a philosophy of pure experience,” which strongly resembled what he himself was just then struggling to think through.
- William wrote Henry that his rereading of Emerson had “thrown a strong practical light on my own path … I see now with absolute clearness, that greatly as I have been helped by my University business hitherto, the time has come when the remnant of my life must be passed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to report in one book, at least, such impressions as my own intellect has received from the universe.”8
- Chance does not simply reveal an underlying order that was there all along; chance actually creates order. Or, we could say, thinking of James’s own life, that chance creates and habit retains many of those elements of our life that, as time passes, we are pleased to think of as orderly and meaningful.
- “Once we grasp the idealistic notion that inner experience is the reality,” James wrote, “and that matter is but a form in which inner experiences may appear to one another when they affect each other from outside, it is easy to believe that consciousness or inner experience never originated, or developed, out of the unconscious, but that it and the physical universe are co-eternal aspects of one self-same reality, much as concave and convex are aspects of one curve.” This is, incidentally, as good a statement of the one and the many as James ever achieved.
- This mandatory—almost military—openness to experience, even to disastrous experience, is the key to the temperament that was now driving James’s interest in radical empiricism, panpsychism, pluralism, and pragmatism. We may ignore no experience. As Joseph Conrad put it, “The unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness maybe our appointed task on this earth.”
- He prepared elaborate outlines for the lectures, but except for the opening lecture he did not write them out fully until after they were delivered, because he was trying to preserve as much spontaneity and directness as was consistent with intellectual clarity. “The whole lecture-business now-a-days,” he had recently explained to Henry, “save where there is a stereopticon or exhibition of facts not presentable as ‘reading-matter,’ or where the lecturer is an artist in his line and speaks without notes, is doomed to second-rateness … A read lecture is doomed to inferiority—to really succeed the lecturer must speak and command his audience.”
- Philosophy for James is always ad hominem. This grounding of philosophy not just in feeling but in temperament enrages certain readers, but it seems to others the long-overdue light of common sense. Whether you are a rationalist, “meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles,” or an empiricist, “meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety,” depends, says James, on your temperament, not your logical reasoning.
- “To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object.” Put more simply, “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere.”
- In another context James said, “People’s sense of dramatic reality is what they will certainly obey, no matter how much they pretend to follow nothing but points of evidence.”
- James understands his basic task of explaining how things are as in part a literary enterprise. Writing a friend, he said, “You bring vividly home to me the literary need of reconciling and mediating forms of expression.” For James, writing was fundamentally about “taking it out of technical into real regions of persuasion.” So James loved it when Walt Whitman said, “Who touches this book touches a man.” He quotes these words, then adds, “The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them … is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education.” For James as for Whitman, real literature ran way deeper than fashionable literary language. “No one,” said Whitman, “will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance.” And James wrote, “I don’t care how incorrect language may be if it only has fitness of epithet, energy, and clearness.” Neither do most readers.
- Over and over in the eight lectures that comprise Pragmatism, James comes down firmly for philosophy as a guide to action. He believed now, as he always had, that any philosophy is good in vain if the reader tosses it aside, as Samuel Johnson had observed of certain works of literature. “True ideas,” James says in lecture six, “are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.” He took it a step further: “Verifiability … is as good as verification … Beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure.” Truth, which James says “is simply a collective name for the verification-processes,” is one of the “th” words. “Truth is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”
- This is, when you get right down to it, a religious attitude, a way of facing final things, pragmatism’s eschatology. “No fact in human nature,” James had said in his Edinburgh lectures, “is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.” Now he said that the genuine pragmatist is one who “is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities.”11
- There is something to be said for protective obfuscation, for the squid’s squirting ink to hide behind. One problem with writing as clearly as James does is that people may understand you and decide they really don’t approve of what you are up to.
- George Santayana would invoke William James as “representing the genuine long silent American mind,” and would credit James (and Walt Whitman) with overcoming what Santayana called the genteel tradition in American philosophy. That tradition, said Santayana, “forbids people to confess that they are unhappy,” and therefore “serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by that.” James liberated himself from gentility.
- Fechner has a way of making the counterintuitive seem natural. James’s account in the Oxford lecture is graphic: “The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule, but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only.”
- It has been remarked that the person with a literal mind lives in a perpetual comedy of errors. William James escaped this fate. In his Fechner piece, James leaps to embrace what he calls Bain’s definition of genius: “the power of seeing analogies.” Analogies are to thinking what metaphor is to poetry—its inner life—but one must respect differences as much as samenesses. “Through his writing, Fechner makes difference and analogy walk abreast,” says James, “and by his extraordinary power of noticing both, he converts what would ordinarily pass for objections to his conclusions into factors of their support.”
- The reader toils up the mountain after James, who toils after Fechner. The view from the top is “that the constitution of the world is identical throughout … The whole human and animal kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider scope … The more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part constituted by the more limited forms … We are closed against its [the earth soul’s] world, but that world is not closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner life had a sort of grain or direction.”
- Finally, “Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many sense-organs of the earth’s soul. We add to its perceptive life so long as our own life lasts.” When we die, “it’s as if an eye of the world were closed.”14 Perceptions from that eye may cease, but “the memories and conceptual relations that have spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the larger earth-life as distinct as ever.”
- Tags: #favorite
- Note: cf Thich Nhat Hanh on self
- For the relationship between HJ and Constance Woolson, see Lyndall Gordon’s excellent and suggestive book, The Private Life of Henry James (New York: Norton, 1998).
- Alice’s diary was not properly published until Leon Edel’s edition in 1964. The best edition is that reissued by Northeastern University Press in 1999, with a fine introduction by Linda Simon. For an account of the long, slow process by which Alice’s work became known, see Strouse, 319–26.