Young William James Thinking
Page 46
with a lecture about ideas and the actual physical experiences of those sitting
to listen. Surmising the thoughts in his audience, he used a meta phor drawn
from news of the time about surging immigration into industrial Amer i ca;
he portrayed an “Italian woman” who had arrived not to stay but who “had
come to Amer i ca in order to raise funds to carry her back to Italy again.” In the
same way, he proposed that his listeners were likely most at home not in his
words but in their own thoughts. So he imagined applause at the end from
“joy . . . when it is all over,” when they are “at last free to escape from the sound
of the lecturer’s voice,” free to carry its intellectual sparks back to their own
experiences. This disarmingly direct and tangible example displays an embodied
version of his commitment to “ human trust in a future yet unrealized,” even as
he recognized potential enrichment from new and even contrasting ideas. 2 For young James, however, this reliance on immediate experience and trust in the
future, would be a long time in coming.
Q
Throughout a young adulthood of personal trou bles and wide- ranging
education, William James was unmoored by the very abundance of his
choices. Caught in a swirl of difficulties, diff er ent days—or even hours—
brought whole new expectations about his prospects. He took a long time to
grow up, even as that moratorium period until he was in his early thirties
would add to the depths of his development. During his years of indecision
and depression, he never stopped learning, and he constantly reflected on
events of his life and even small shifts in his philosophical outlook, his vo-
cational direction, and his health and social relations. For all the prob lems
he experienced, he generally addressed them “by [him]self with pen in
hand.” Writing was a way to unload the burden of the trou bles themselves,
to capture thoughts from introspection and from discussion with friends,
and to reflect on prob lems for pos si ble solutions. James’s philosophical
commitment to the significance of experience started with his own. As his
colleague George Herbert Palmer noted about his way of philosophizing,
“using his own eyes and ears,” he offered “pungent statement[s] of just how
things looked to him.” He looked at experience without blinking, even when
those sources were none too august or professionally sanctioned, since after
all, James observed, “augustness” is hardly a “decisive mark . . . of truth. ”3
The very range of his youthful experiences, and the depth of their chal-
lenges, would become creative resources for his mature work.
264 Young William James Thinking
Between Science and Philosophy
In the 1870s James began his professional career by making use of both sci-
ence and philosophy. The very pro cess of working in scientific fields while
cultivating his own philosophy encouraged his challenges to scientific as-
sumptions; however, he developed his philosophical theories not in defi-
ance of science, but by working through science, with scientific work and its
fidelity to natu ral facts serving first as ways to manage his wariness about
philosophical speculation and then as a method for further philosophical
inquiry. He would find meaning and animating power within the facts of
natu ral experience using materialist science as a first step, not the last word.
He worked in science until his reflections on its implications generated his
philosophizing; and he transformed his issues of personal concern into pro-
fessional discourse as he gained academic stature and a public hearing. The
combination of training in his scientific disciplines, religious interest, and
cultivation of humanistic artistry from his outside reading and reflections
provided him with approaches for expressing his philosophical views in
ways that would be new and inviting rather than just eccentric, a leap his
father never could make. This is the birth of the best- known James. Because
he built his theories from an eclectic combination of fields, his ideas would
invite charges of inconsistency or indecisiveness; witness the paradoxical
combination of words in the title of one of his philosophical essays “The
Sentiment of Rationality” and the range within that text which begins with
“recent psychological speculation” and ends with “mysteriousness . . . [in]
the nature of things. ”4 But to the author, both paths were plausible applica-
tions of fidelity to natu ral experience.
This late-1870s vocational birth was long in gestation through his scien-
tific education and avocational learning, with private and public writing
galvanizing the insights of his youth and serving as dress rehearsals for
later work. His first extensive essays were written in such rapid succession
starting in 1878 that they were surely built upon the immediately preceding
work and speculations, even as they laid the groundwork for his more elab-
orated theories. At the time, however, his main task was to bridge his cur-
rent scientific training with his philosophical speculation. Thinking of his
essays as chapters in a planned “psychological work on the motives which
lead men to philosophize,” he made use of his youthful drive to find imma-
terial and humanistic ele ments, along with the physical facts, within the
nature he was studying. He contrasted his views with “[Herbert] Spencer’s
An Earnestly Inquiring State 265
Definition of Mind” (January 1878), detecting adaptive purpose in the
spontaneity of human consciousness; he supported “The Subjective Method”
(January 1878) within scientific psy chol ogy, for its ability to spur energy,
effort, and action; he assessed the ability to free from routine as the value
added from human mental evolution, compared to nonhuman minds, his
comparison of “Brute and Human Intellect” (July 1878); he responded to
the con temporary question, “Are We Automata?” (January 1879), with a sharp
critique of this reduction of mind exclusively to its physical factors; and he
explored “The Sentiment of Rationality” (July 1879) on the role of physio-
logical frameworks and psychological temperaments in shaping philosophical
commitments. These works catapulted James to fame. For example, Ernst
Mach, the influential Austrian phi los o pher and physicist, in presenting his
“idea of concepts as labor- saving devices” in the 1880s praised the “refreshing
vigor” of “The Sentiment of Rationality” and found “points of agreement,”
especially because they both perceived “the constantly augmenting sweep
of experience,” with enormity of facts “simplified by the action of con-
cepts.” 5 In less than two years, James both applied his scientific education
and critiqued it, enabling his ideas to circulate with cutting- edge science,
even as he also found a place for the role of life and mind, with their myster-
ies and direction- giving power.
While James never wrote his planned psy chol ogy for philosophizing,
these essays would become first drafts of his Princi ples of Psy chol ogy, which
would brew for more than a
nother de cade before publication, almost as
long as his own prior varied education. James’s major psy chol ogy book
served as a summary of the state of the field in 1890; and yet, despite his
thorough coverage of empirical facts of mind and be hav ior, and his vow to
adhere to a “strictly positivistic point of view,” he kept turning to philo-
sophical questions. At this point, he expressed the unorthodox dimensions
of his leanings more through critique of scientific certainty than with the
pre sen ta tion of alternatives—in effect, he applied the skeptical scrutiny of
positivism to science itself. James’s ready mingling of psy chol ogy and phi-
losophy has added to his reputation for indecision, or for professional cau-
tion in his willingness to adopt what Gerald Myers has called a “provisional
dualism” in his psy chol ogy text before the explicit nondualism of his later
writings. However, viewing the arc of his career beginning with his young
adulthood shows that James was consistently nondualist throughout; in
this commitment, however, he did not oppose dualism but encompassed it
as an intellectual tool useful for some purposes. In par tic u lar, he readily
266 Young William James Thinking
worked within the reigning dualist methodology that dominated scientific
psy chol ogy, limiting his philosophical thought to commentary on the limits
of this method and on issues left unresolved. These philosophical com-
ments can look like reflective intrusions on his science in the immediate
work of midcareer, when he was establishing his reputation in psy chol ogy. 6
However, to James they were naturally interwoven with that work, and
they show that, as with his view of materialism, he would regard dualism as
a useful way to illuminate some portions of natu ral experience.
James continued to apply his psy chol ogy to his philosophizing, and he
continued his youthful mingling of material and immaterial realms of life, in
addressing frequently contested dualities of body and mind and related con-
trasts in other fields. In “The Will to Believe” (1897), immediately next to his
insistence on the fixity of fact for the empirically explicit, he argued for the
justification of belief when faced with genuinely ambiguous options, espe-
cially in religion— action steps without tangible guarantee, just as he had al-
ready resolved at the end of his youth. He brought together his re spect for
mainstream science and for the Va ri e ties of Religious Experience (1902) in his
“science of religions” framework, which allowed him to see each spiritual ex-
perience and each religious tradition as a varied expression of the subliminal
realm within the depths of human psy chol ogy— the objectivity embedded
within the subjectivity as he had proposed to Chauncey Wright in the early
1870s. In his essays in “radical empiricism” (from 1904), he placed the conven-
tionally dualist “subject or . . . knower” and “the object known” as features of
the same “pure experience,” simultaneous and in intimate relation; they
“coexist, . . . with no separateness needing to be overcome”— a refinement of
what he had observed in 1862 about the discrimination of separate things
when “nature only offers Thing,” and akin to what he had witnessed among
sectarian medical prac ti tion ers and the ancients. In Pragmatism (1907), he
acknowledged “the good things on both sides of the line” of philosophical
debates between empiricists and rationalists by incorporating both “tough-
minded” facts and theories about “tender- minded” experiences, while avoid-
ing the abstractions on either side— similar to the impatience with absolutist
claims he was already registering during his education in science and reli-
gion. He explained the continuous and contingent qualities of experience
with its parts in weblike relation in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), in contrast
with the familiar human simplifications that emerge when mental repre sen-
ta tions carve artificially definite answers out of portions of experience; in the
same way, since his youth, he had been noticing the teeming and chance- filled
An Earnestly Inquiring State 267
William James’s Ledge in the Adirondacks.
Photo by Paul Croce, Shanty, Keene Valley, NY, June 2011.
In 1875, James and three Harvard scientist friends, James Jackson Putnam,
Charles Pickering Putnam, and Henry Pickering Bowditch, bought what they called
their “Shanty,” deep in New York’s Adirondacks, where they would spend many
summers. For James, the shanty offered a getaway from detailed work and a setting
for thinking more deeply about the work of his deepest commitments. One favorite
spot where he went to read and write became known as “Wm. James Ledge,” and the
simple wooden sign still directs hikers to the spot.
dimensions of experience in the making. And he investigated depth psy chol-
ogy and psychical phenomena throughout his career, maintaining a spirit of
scientific inquiry by following the leads presented by human experience; he
scrutinized these extranatural claims, just as he had been ready since his
youth to hear out but evaluate the claims of alternative medicine. Throughout
this work, he maintained an active commitment, as he was already insisting
in 1875, both to scientific inquiry and to novelties of all kinds, including
“ great . . . religious promise.” 7
These mature works emerged with variations on James’s youthful themes,
as he comprehended the objective, physiological, and empirical (with all
268 Young William James Thinking
their complexities), along with the subjective, volitional, and mysterious
(as humans have access), all as parts of abundant experience. The whole
array was an opportunity to consider the natu ral settings, the intimate re-
lations, the similar questions, and even the common under lying sources of
these material and immaterial ingredients of life, even as each conven-
tional distinction would operate in diff er ent fields, and circulate in people
with diff er ent social habits, diverging temperaments, and contrasting con-
victions. Later in life, he chose a meta phor from a literal natu ral setting to
summarize his whole life work: we live in a “trackless forest of human
experience,” with science, religion, philosophy, and more fruits of human
creativity providing “spots, or blazes” to trails through the complexity and
mystery. Each approach is potentially valuable, but these trails “leave . . .
unexpressed almost every thing” in the whole forest. The mysterious whole
maintained its allure as the “secret spring of all my poor life’s philosophic
effort,” as he remained per sis tently interested in the interrelations of the
trails. He spoke calmly about the trackless forest toward the end of his
career, but early on he was still considering many trails and burdened by
doubt: in his young adulthood, he felt ambitions to be a scientist, so he could
“go out . . . into the dear old woods and fields” to make discoveries; but in
the thick of his scientific education, he developed reflective worries about
“the woods in which
the young mind grows up.” 8 He resolved his dilemmas
not by getting out of the woods but by steering through them; and that
would involve frank recognition of the whole forest, the whole intercon-
nected range of experiences, even as he contributed to several disciplinary
trails. His general posture on mystery, however, serves as his most pro-
found contribution.
Recognition of mystery offers a potent way to reconcile conflicting views,
starting with science and religion, and not just based on his deflation of
absolutist claims from all sides. In addition, acknowledging the mysterious
grandeur of the whole cosmos can appeal to religious and idealist sensibili-
ties; and attention to uncertainty can appeal to scientific skepticism—
unknowing is, after all, an ingredient of positivist philosophy and an honest
upshot of inductive reasoning, even with accumulation of numerous facts.
Still, James welcomed naturalistic inquiries to reduce the mysteries. That
scientific impulse has thrived from his teacher Emil du Bois- Reymond’s
dedication to finding “physical- chemical . . . forces” to explain physiology, to
con temporary neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s eagerness to “understand
how . . . physical cells . . . develop . . . a conscious mind.” James maintained
An Earnestly Inquiring State 269
The Writer’s Corner.
Photo by Paul Croce, Shanty, Keene Valley, NY, June 2011.
James’s favorite ledge provided a welcoming nook at a crease in the rock with pine
needles for a seat and some sturdy pines for footrests. In the summer of 1898, he
divided his time between hiking in the dense forests of the Adirondacks and sitting at
his ledge, likely the spot where he wrote “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical
Results,” the lecture in which he offered the first public statement of pragmatism.
He used his hiking experiences, including times when he got so severely lost in the
woods that he strained his heart, to introduce his listeners to the “trackless forest of
human experience” (PRG, 258).
that such scientific banishing of mystery would not always be pos si ble. And
when scientific understanding could be achieved, it could be useful, but not
for every human purpose; the methods needed to reduce mystery were not