Young William James Thinking
Page 42
able him to continue researching and teaching in physiology without being
subject to its materialistic limitations. He would work in science but be not
of its professional norms. Instead, he was making use of physiology for his
interests in psy chol ogy; he could not know that this immediate goal would
shape what would become his philosophy.
Crises and Construction 239
James’s philosophical questions pulled him through physiology toward
his emerging psy chol ogy. In retrospect, his path looks circuitous if not tor-
tured, but at the time his impulse was simple curiosity: “[O]f course, my
deepest interest will as ever lie with the most general prob lems.” Philoso-
phizing that could actually support willful action was an attractive but elu-
sive prospect. He made his declaration supporting depth of philosophical
inquiry while he was starting to teach courses first in physiology and then
in anatomy as well. Despite this apparent inconsistency, he did not set phi-
losophy and science in contrast with each other. To maintain this path,
James relied not only on his theoretical reflections but also on the lessons of
his personal trou bles. He was optimistic that he could sustain such reflec-
tive inquiries as long as he remained in a “gallant mood” (when he felt ready
to strug gle); these would “tide over times of weakness & depression” (when
he felt resigned). These stances then would allow him, while working in the
natu ral facts of science, to “trust . . . all the while blindly in the beneficence
of nature’s forces,” a trust nurtured by the ancients that could feed his
fledgling faith in free will. His tentative resolution was a simple practical
one: avoid “attack[ing] the universal prob lems directly, and as such in their
abstract form,” but instead “work at their solution in every way by living
and by solving minor concrete questions.” In other words, teaching physiol-
ogy as he did from 1873 to 1880 would serve as scientific means toward ad-
dressing his philosophical questions.76 James was finding a practical plan—
in his language of these years, an “order”— for finding his personal direction.
The practice of science offered the possibility for integrating theory and ac-
tion for use in coping with his trou bles; he would then pursue science to
find a practical basis for sustaining the seemingly immaterial parts of life,
including free will. He was putting his program of future science to work; at
this point, doing science was his way to philosophize.
The fine grains of young James’s shuttling positions on belief, will, and
action show not only the intensity of his troubled inquiries but also the way
his development led him to integrate both his repulsion from and attraction
to philosophy. By choosing to philosophize, but indirectly, through the tan-
gible questions of his scientific work, he avoided the disconcerting, will-
draining aspects of reflection, but at the same time he was applying his fully
philosophical speculations for personal direction and practical purposes.
James needed to fight fire with fire, so to speak, to find an effective philoso-
phy as a guide to life as a counterweight to the reflective grubbing after sub-
tleties, which he found so grim that they left him in an “abyss of horrors.” He
240 Young William James Thinking
would continue to pursue philosophy but, paradoxically, by often stepping
away from philosophy in favor of physiological science for its capacity to
shed psychological light on philosophical questions. James’s mixed feeling
about philosophy parallel his positions on free will, and also on teleology; in
each case he approached contrasting positions, without blinking out either
side, used their respective contentions, and formed a third way. He turned
away from both idealistic transcendent purpose and materialist claims of
purposelessness in his formulation of a future- oriented teleology based on
immediate, tangible purposes. Similarly, his ac cep tance of natu ral facts
chastened his enthusiasm for free will with a belief that each “finite free
agent” is constrained by the probabilities that the material precursors to
events set down before “fate’s scales seem to quiver” with each “palpitat-
ing” choice.77 His philosophical orientation was toward integration of con-
trasting human commitments.
Years of hard- won personal experience provided James with crucial pre-
liminary steps on his way to becoming a phi los o pher. He faced choices and
wrestled with ambivalence in his personal life; the theories of Renouvier
and Bain and probing discussions in the Metaphysical Club offered steady
doses of theorizing about belief and action; and his study of psy chol ogy
pointed to the physiological aspects of mental action. Together, they pro-
vided the raw material that would propel his philosophy into formation
even before he became a phi los o pher. More immediately, his April 1870 res-
olution asserting free will provided guidance for his personal efforts to es-
tablish a healthier posture in life. While still identifying as a scientist, he
was already tacitly becoming a phi los o pher. Despite vivid memories of his
prob lems with philosophy, James was working his way toward a philosophy
that would be useful as a way to address those prob lems. But this was also a
way that would keep him from fully embracing the field of philosophy—
throughout his career, he remained almost a phi los o pher.
Forging the Will in the Teeth of Re sis tance
James’s assertions of will, which would become so impor tant within his
mature philosophy, were ways to cope with his trou bles, which emerged
largely as weakness of his own will in vocational direction, awkwardness
with women, and search for a philosophical orientation. Before his first
brief theoretical expressions about the will in the early 1870s, uncertainty
and depression often engulfed any initiative he considered, but James had
already experienced the power of will in moments of self- governing re sis-
Crises and Construction 241
tance to these dark moods. He found his volitional strength when he grew
determined to persist, despite discouragements, on his expeditions to Bra-
zil and Germany. He had to rouse his will still more during his long, often
failed attempts to take up the laboratory study of physiology. He found sup-
port for his volitional commitment through the model of patient responsi-
bility in clinical and sectarian medicine, and through the examples of the
ancients, especially the ethics of the Stoics. And he reinforced his incipient
theory when giving advice to others and to himself to persist in pursuit of
careers without being too anxious about achieving results. He really needed
that patience himself, as he grew repeatedly discouraged but kept returning
willfully to physiological study to prepare for work in the new field of psy-
chol ogy. And even as he doubted the virtues of repeated deep reflections,
discussions in the Metaphysical Club boosted his interest in philosophy and
fostered his initial work in the psychological aspects of philosophy. James
cultivated his will to begin his career, paraphrasing a comment in “The Will
to Believe,” by flying directly “in the teeth of” re sis tance from con temporary
science, medicine, and psy chol ogy with their very diff er ent messages about
the human will.78
Even before entering the field of philosophy with this outsider stance,
James’s hopes for a more forceful will had likewise placed him on the pe-
riphery of mainstream science. In 1863 Forbes Winslow’s warnings about
early stages of insanity included the very thing James was struggling to re-
verse, “an enfeeblement of will.” Winslow added sternly that it is “illusory
for the patient to imagine that he is able . . . by repeated and persevering ef-
forts to resuscitate the lost power.” This message seemed to condemn James
to his palsied state. Winslow was operating from within authoritative sci-
ence, which was increasingly undercutting the significance of the immate-
rial mind for impacting the natu ral world, including human be hav ior. After
reading Winslow, James learned still more materialist interpretations dur-
ing his scientific and medical training, including from the Berlin lectures of
Emil du Bois- Reymond, who vowed to find materialist answers even prior to
supporting evidence. Many scientific advocates, following the most materi-
alist aspects of the Enlightenment and the most reductionist implications of
new laboratory research since the 1840s, associated the assumption of a
free will with traditional, prescientific attitudes that simply were not capa-
ble of reckoning with the power of impersonal natu ral law. Even Thomas
Huxley, who did not explic itly identify with materialist outlooks, argued
for the “Physical Basis of Life,” which included the “automaton theory,” his
242 Young William James Thinking
proposition for the shaping influence of the body on the mind through the
action of the ner vous system. As science increased its authoritative influ-
ence, many religious believers turned to equivalent endorsements of belief
based on material evidence, with natu ral theologies displacing the religion
of assumed faith or intangible feelings. And physiology came to dominate
the new scientific psy chol ogy from the 1870s when James began his career
in psy chol ogy.79
Before James directly challenged these physical explanations of mind
with his 1879 essay “Are We Automata?,” he was working up the will to do
steady work in a field that had tendencies to deny the significance of his
own will. This was what attracted him to the work of pioneering psycholo-
gist Wilhelm Wundt who used scientific psy chol ogy to investigate the will;
in 1875 James found scientific support from the German psychologist in
his recent observation that experience was built upon willful choice: expe-
rience is what we “agree to attend to.” Wundt pursued psy chol ogy with
philosophical motivations, for support of philosophical theories of empiri-
cism with empirical facts. He accepted the reports of inner experience, but
he wanted to move beyond idealistic psy chol ogy through evaluation of
mental activity in terms of bodily pro cesses, so, like James, he emphasized
the relation of mind and body. Wundt used laboratory methods for scientific
mea sure ment of mental states, saying he considered “physiology only as a
preparatory stage, in order to make vari ous bridges out of corporeal life, to
reach the side of mental life.” By providing an empirical basis to under-
standing, science could provide a modern version of the Stoic call for knowl-
edge free of prejudices and speculation; Wundt called his research path
“philosophical realism” because he believed a “theory of knowledge should
not invent, but instead discover the princi ples of knowledge.” Despite his
philosophical interests and intentions, Wundt’s methods of mea sure ment
turned his work in nonphilosophical and even reductionist directions. The
laboratory means colored his philosophical ends. James soon became impa-
tient with Wundt’s detailed focus on “fact . . . mea sured . . . by machinery,”
especially when the founder of German physiological psy chol ogy and his
followers directed their psychological research toward specialized struc-
tural issues rather than functional applications. He likewise distanced him-
self from James, even as he remained charmed, almost despite himself, by
the American’s work: The future journalist, Lincoln Steffens, studying ex-
perimental psy chol ogy at the Leipzig laboratory, gave Wundt his copy of
James’s Princi ples of Psy chol ogy (1890); Wundt declared, “It is lit er a ture, it
Crises and Construction 243
is beautiful, but it is not psy chol ogy. ”80 Wundt and James each drew upon
both philosophy and physiology; the way they mingled these fields would
shape their respective impacts on psy chol ogy in scientific and humanist
directions.
James himself was swept up in the shift toward specialization and scien-
tific rigor. In the early 1860s, he studied chemistry and physics with an em-
phasis on strict accounting for material facts. He read Ludwig Büchner’s
materialist arguments dismissing the “activities of psyche,” and he agreed
that “we should not attempt to go farther back than the physical Universe.”
He learned natu ral history with Agassiz, but came to associate the idealistic
naturalist with the prescientific assumptions he was hoping to move be-
yond. He was eager to study with du Bois- Reymond and other German sci-
entists who were ready to explain consciousness and be hav ior in terms of
chemical and physical causes. He read Jacques- Joseph Moreau’s pioneering
studies of drug impacts on consciousness, and he read and taught Herbert
Spencer’s naturalistic psy chol ogy; despite their differences, both Moreau
and Spencer provided materialist readings of mental action, including en-
dorsement of the prevalent model of hierarchical levels of the mind’s opera-
tion, with the state of the nerves controlling higher consciousness, most
notably the will. John Hughlings Jackson spelled out the implications of
this perspective: “[S]ensori- motor pro cesses . . . form the anatomical sub-
strata of mental states,” with those higher states explainable and reducible
to the material traits of body. And Jackson and Spencer relied heavi ly on
Thomas Laycock’s materialist reading of consciousness. The implication
for theories of mental illness was that these troubled physical conditions
brought a loss of higher mental functions, such as the will, just as Dr. Win-
slow had warned. Winslow would become notorious as an early advocate of
the insanity legal defense, which promised to displace readings of evil in-
tent with physiological explanations for criminal be hav ior; and in the late
1880s, he applied his theories, in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur
Conan Doyle’s fictional sleuth, whose published appearance began in 1887), for
the psychological assessment of criminals, including Jack the Ripper, who
murdered at least five London women in 1888. In addition, neurasthenia,
whose symptoms
James saw in himself, also left little room for an active
will; it offered a materialist diagnosis by explaining a host of physical and
mental symptoms based on the physical health of the nerves. With nerve
exhaustion, the will would be drained of its ability to motivate and energize
the stricken person. 81 In short, James was nearly surrounded by theories
244 Young William James Thinking
that warned about a weakened will in relation to insanity, dismissed the
power of the will, or identified the feebleness of will that would come with
ner vous prob lems.
By the spring of 1873, however, James was ready to reject the science-
inspired perspective, as he declared that “the mind does act irrespectively
of material coercion, and could be dealt with therefore at first hand.” Such a
psy chol ogy would be a way to sustain his April 1870 endorsement of free
will; those were brave words with a worthy goal, and his new insight would
remove a major scientific obstacle to his pledge. By dealing with “the mind . . .
at first hand,” in direct experience, he was proposing that the will could
have a positive role in coping with insanity, even for preventing it. James
also fully believed that epilepsy is “largely a matter of habit,” even though
medical research since his time has shown its physiological basis; his type
of attention to habitual be hav iors, however, would continue to be useful for
mitigating the disease’s effects. 82 His scientific studies were teaching him
that the will and mental speculations were things weak or irrelevant, but he
proposed their strength, with vital importance in both his personal life and
his studies.
James’s brought his concerns and speculations about volition to the
Metaphysical Club discussions. In 1872 Charles Peirce shared with his club
friends what James called the “admirable introductory chapter to his book
on logic,” the draft of Peirce’s first “Logic of Science” essays, which would
become his “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” (1877–78). These would,
along with James’s “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind” (1878) and “The
Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), form the initial statements of pragmatist
philosophy. Peirce provided a framework for thinking of doubt, not in op-