Young William James Thinking
Page 48
more seriously. The exertions and exhaustion aggravated his angina, which
did indeed bring death in 1910. 16 But James did not go quietly into this last
chapter of his life.
For the next five years after the summer of James’s first cardiac injury,
per sis tent “ner vous prostration,” which he had strug gled with since young
adulthood, would amplify the burdens of poor physical health. In 1899 he
even had to postpone pre sen ta tion of the Gifford Lectures that would be-
come Va ri e ties of Religious Experience (1902), which he fi nally delivered in
1901–2. He strug gled through those years, feeling grateful just to be “above
ground,” as he said with deadpan humor. Then with the lectures over, and
while enlisting a whole array of mainstream and alternative medical treat-
ments and supplements, he felt a surge of health and vitality. By 1904, he
even joked that he was feeling so strong that he was not aware that “I have
a heart at all,” as he launched on the most productive phase of his career.
276 Young William James Thinking
A Ledge with a View.
Photo by Paul Croce, Shanty, Keene Valley, NY, June 2011.
James felt “a curious organic- feeling need” for time in the Adirondacks. The wild
natu ral setting offered a tangible expression of his commitment to natu ral facts in his
philosophy, empirically robust for scientific study but also with complexities worthy
of further reflections. Nature had its dangers, as he knew from personal experience,
but it also offered stunning beauty, such as the view from his ledge at the shanty.
He felt he had to hurry since, with his health worries, “the rest of life is get-
ting short.” 17 He still suffered occasional chest pains from the angina, but as
with earlier health prob lems, he had learned to cope with them.
James’s mature intellectual ambition was to explain the relation of parts
of our world that seem so sharply contrasting: mind and body, thoughts and
things, conceptual thoughts and the diverse particulars of perceptual facts.
The works of his last few years on radical empiricism, pragmatism, and plu-
ralism revolve around this issue of potential continuity in experience, as he
argued that the relations identified by conjunctions such as “and,” “with,”
“near,” or “ toward” are as real as the things “nouns and adjectives” point to.
This was the stuff of his philosophical ambitions in his last years. And yet
his motivation to turn in this intellectual direction had already taken root
An Earnestly Inquiring State 277
years earlier. James had developed his intellectual appetite for understanding
contrasts in relation during his young adulthood when he had first experi-
enced profound trou bles and labored toward ways to cope. He developed
patterns about his constitutional weaknesses and his own “reparative ca-
pacities,” in response to tensions between religion and science, idealism
and empiricism, free will and determinism, and immaterial and material
parts of life in general, with his experiences encouraging attention to their
interrelation. His portrait painter Sarah Whitman expressed the reach of
his mind poetically as James’s “tonic humor that keeps the level of the ex-
cellent earth— and yet imaginatively discloses the sky. ”18 So many disparate
parts; such ambitious hopes to explain their relations.
Even in the surge of his final goals, those heights reminded the James of
later years about his per sis tent awareness of human limits first planted by
the burdens of his youth. To paraphrase from his psychological evaluation
of the “specious pres ent,” about the utterly fleeting quality of any one
moment, James also maintained that any single theory about the universe
would be a virtually specious philosophy— useful, but not the last word—
compared to the world of experience: that, more than any formula, he em-
phasized, is the “ really real.” James was at once driven to deep reflections
and also keenly aware that every philosophical effort was doomed to such
limitation. His drive for philosophic inquiry ran deep. Beginning in his
young adulthood, when his limitations loomed even larger, he would set out
to comprehend the architecture of the world. The breadth of his curiosity
took him to a range of views that at first left him confused and ambivalent,
but he would become like a judge, weighing claims and reckoning with
clashes of contrasting insights. Pursuit of elusiveness was more compelling
than ambition. Whitman’s 1903 portrait displays James with serious ex-
pression and searching eyes clutching a book representing his life work; for
its cover, she displayed none of his actual book titles, but one of his favorite
phrases that he had been using even in younger years with humility about
human abilities, about his own abilities, and about any theoretical compre-
hensiveness. She reported William James’s words, “ever not quite,” with
traditional and capital spelling to amplify their timeless dignity: EVER
NOT QVITE. 19
Ever Not Quite.
Sarah Whitman, William James, 1903, HNA29, Harvard University Portrait
Collection, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Sarah Wyman Whitman was a prominent Boston artist and intellectual. Like
James, she studied painting with William Morris Hunt; she designed the stained-
glass win dows and carpets in many churches; and she was an avid supporter of
Phillips Brooks’s ecumenical Broad Church movement—as was James, who found in
Brooks what he “mean[t] by ‘spirituality’ ” (response to James Pratt Questionnaire,
1904). Whitman knew James’s works well, having read many of them in manuscript
before publication; in her painting, she provided an artist’s distillation of James’s
central insight.
Notes
Abbreviations
CWJ
William James. The Correspondence of William James, 12 vols.
Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, et al.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004.
Eclipse
Paul J. Croce. Science and Religion in the Era of William James,
Volume One: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1995.
ECR
Essays, Comments, and Reviews, WWJ, 1987.
EPH
Essays in Philosophy, WWJ, 1978.
EPR
Essays in Psychical Research, WWJ, 1986.
EPS
Essays in Psy chol ogy, WWJ, 1983.
EPY
Essays in Philosophy, WWJ, 1978.
ERE
Essays in Radical Empiricism, WWJ, 1976 [1912].
ERM
Essays in Religion and Morality, WWJ, 1982.
LWJ
Henry James III [son of William James], editor. The Letters of
William James, 2 vols. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920.
MEN
Manuscript Essays and Notes, WWJ, 1988.
ML
Manuscript Lectures, WWJ, 1988.
MT
The Meaning of Truth, WWJ, 1975 [1909].
PBC
Psy chol ogy: Briefer Course, WWJ, 1984 [1892].
PPS
The P
rinci ples of Psy chol ogy, WWJ, 3 vols., 1981 [2 vols., 1890]
PRG
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, WWJ,
1975 [1907].
PU
A Pluralistic Universe [Hibbert Lectures on the Pres ent Situation
in Philosophy, WWJ, 1908], 1977 [1909].
SPP
Some Prob lems of Philosophy, WWJ, 1979 [1911].
TCJ
Ralph Barton Perry. The Thought and Character of William James,
2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935.
TT
Talks to Teachers on Psy chol ogy, and to Students on Some of Life’s
Ideals, WWJ, 1983 [1899].
VRE
The Va ri e ties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
[Gifford Lectures on Natu ral Religion, 1901–2], WWJ, 1985 [1902].
280 Notes to Pages 3–16
WB
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popu lar Philosophy, WWJ,
1979 [1897].
WWJ
The Works of William James. 19 vols. Edited by Frederick H.
Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1975–88.
Introduction • Almost a Phi los o pher
Epigraph. “The Sentiment of Rationality,” EPH, 55, 56.
1. James to Catherine Havens, Aug[ust] 29, [18]68, CWJ, 4:334–35.
2. James to his parents, May 27, [18]67; to Henry James, Se nior, Oct[ober] 5, [18]68; and to Catherine Walsh, Sept[ember] 13, [1868], CWJ, 4:161, 342, 336.
3. William James to Henry James, Se nior, Oct[ober] 5, [18]68; to Thomas Ward,
Oct[ober] 9, [1868]; to Henry Bowditch, Sept[ember 20, 18]68; Bowditch to James,
Sept[ember 18], [1868]; and to Catherine Havens, Aug[ust] 29, [18]68, CWJ, 341, 346,
339, 337, 347, 334; and “Entertaining Women at the Water Cure,” 1868, William James
papers, bMS Am 1092.2 (28).
4. WB, 5; ERE, 100, also see 74, 4, 69; and PPS, 234.
5. “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), EPH, 55.
6. Henry James, Se nior, to Edmund and Mary Tweedy, [c. Spring 1855], TCJ, 1:181;
Habegger, The Father, 179; Henry James, Se nior, Literary Remains, 178; and Henry
James, Se nior, Chris tian ity the Logic of Creation, 182n.
7. Henry James, Ju nior, Autobiography, 68; William James to Alice Gibbens James, Dec[ember] 20, [1882], CWJ, 5:342; Eclipse, 39–48, 62–65.
8. Habegger, The Father, 377; Henry James, Se nior, to Edmund Tweedy, July 18,
[1860], TCJ, 1:191; and William James to George Howison, July 17, 1895; and to Edgar
Van Winkle, March 1, 1858, CWJ, 8:57, 4:14.
9. [Diary 1], April 10, [1873], [83, 88]; also see TCJ, 1:343. James continued to
picture himself drawn to compelling but challenging settings as a “moth into flame”;
James to Francis Boott, Aug[ust] 9, 1900; and to Sarah Whitman, Dec[ember] 7, 1902,
CWJ, 9:264, 10:163.
10. James, [Notebook 3], [2] and 59; SPP, 33; to Thomas Ward, March [18]69, CWJ,
4:370–71; PU, 62; and to Alice James, Oct[ober] 29, [1873], CWJ, 4:450.
11. Santayana, Character and Opinion, 92; Bakewell, “The Philosophy of George Herbert Palmer,” 9; [Diary 1], April 10, [1873], [87]; James to George Holmes Howison,
July 17, 1895; and to Alice Gibbens James, Aug[ust] 11, 1898, CWJ, 8:57, 408; and Seth,
“Review of James, A Pluralistic Universe,” 539, 536.
12. “The Sentiment of Rationality,” EPH, 63; SPP, 29; Peirce, “Fixation of Belief,”
in Writings, 3:247.
13. William James to William James, Ju nior, June 28, 1908, CWJ, 12:37; PRG, 9;
[Diary 1], April 10, [1873]; and James to Thomas Ward, March [18]69, CWJ, 4:371.
Robert Richardson, in William James, artfully shows his kinship with Emerson, in
accounts that fill out John McDermott’s insight that Emerson was James’s “master”;
introduction to ERM, xxii.
14. William James to Augustus Lowell, May 19, 1878, CWJ, 5:12.
15. William James to Alice Howe Gibbens, June 7, [18]77, CWJ, 5:12, 4:571; Eclipse, 95–96, 195–98; Armstrong, The Case for God; and Peirce, “The Doctrine of Necessity
Notes to Pages 17–18 281
Examined” (1892), “The Law of Mind” (1892), and “Man’s Glassy Essence” (1892),
Collected Papers, 6:28–65, 6:102–163, 6:238–271; PU, 153; PRG, 135.
16. LWJ 1:29, 292; William to Henry James, Ju nior, Ap[ri]l 5, [18]68; and to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ju nior, Sept[ember] 17, [18]67, CWJ, 1:45, 4:199; Du Bois, Autobiography, 90; “The Sentiment of Rationality,” EPY, 32–33. On James’s social thought
including his turn toward more forceful defiance of injustices, see Coon, “ ‘One
Moment in the World’s Salvation’ ”; Cotkin, William James, Public Phi los o pher, 95–151;
and Barker, William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti- Imperialist Discourse, 294.
Eddie Glaude, in A Shade of Blue, draws upon pragmatism, especially as rendered by
Cornel West, for responding to the “risk- ridden future” in striving for social pro gress.
The classic pragmatists took some steps to challenge racism, even as they missed
opportunities for more, but they also have provided a framework built on awareness
of both tragedy and hope for understanding the American possibilities for improved
race relations to be deliberately if contingently achieved despite the nation’s past
“butchering of precious ideals,” as Glaude, In a Shade of Blue, says, paraphrasing
James (34, 46); West, “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic,” in Keeping Faith, 113.
Also see Ross Posnock, “The Influence of William James,” 322–42, in Ruth Anna
Putnam, The Cambridge Companion to William James, especially on James and the
cultural pluralism of Horace Kallen and Alain Locke; Schrager, “Both Sides of the
Veil,” on James’s challenge to the “paradigm of nineteenth- century scientific
pro gress that [was] also . . . an intrinsic part of the transnational history of gender and
racial domination” (555); and Rath whose “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric
Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois” identifies the spur for the African American civil
rights pioneer in his approach to the “agency” of souls (which James’s research in
depth psy chol ogy provided), along with African philosophy, in Du Bois’s Souls of
Black Folks, which in turn James praised empathetically for being a work “as
mournful as it is remarkable” (Rath, 476, 482, 487–88; CWJ, 10:261). Also see
chapter 1, notes 48–49, and chapter 4, note 21.
17. William James to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ju nior, Sept[ember] 17, [18]67; and to Henry Bowditch, Aug[ust] 12, [18]69, CWJ, 4:199, 385; [Notebook 2], 1862, 22; “The
Hidden Self” (1890), EPS, 248–49; and PRG, 60–61, 137, 299. Habegger, Henry James
and the “ Woman Business,” argues that James adopted the sexist views of his father,
while Judith Butler, in “Encountering the Smashing Projectile,” in Halliwell and
Rasmussen, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation, identifies James’s
actions as following conservative Bushnell even as his ideas show endorsement for
reformer Mill. Livingston, “Hamlet, James, and the Woman Question,” suggests that
James’s views of women reinforced the antiabsolutist character of his mature
theories; and Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins, sees pragmatism’s “boundary
crossing to disrupt rigid compartmentalization” as a resource for feminist thinking<
br />
(7). Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, offers the most comprehensive evaluation of
James in relation to gender: she both recognizes the depths of his misogyny and
portrays his theories as doors he opened for challenges to hierarchy; in par tic u lar, his
openness to spiritual and other alternative theories serve as a “Feminine- Mystical
Threat to Masculine- Scientific Order,” as she argues with use of his own words
(Tarver and Sullivan, William James and Feminism, chap. 1, from Seigfried, Pragma-
tism and Feminism, quoting James, EPS, 248–49). Seigfried concludes that James’s
282 Notes to Pages 19–20
moral failings were those of his society and his times, and yet she urges readers of his
works to remain aware that gender assumptions permeated his mind and his works.
As a result, James’s comments and be hav iors contained at once crude artifacts of
nineteenth- century assumptions (which, in her rendering, even he could not avoid),
along with his “rebellious exceptions” to the norms around him. He could not know
the theories and practices of the twenty- first century, but in always welcoming “the
science of the future,” he would likely also welcome the con temporary embrace of
difference, just as his ideas will surely also be of ser vice to the theories and practices
of our future (EPR, 375). Also see Cynthia Schrager, “Pauline Hopkins and William
James,” in Gruesser, The Unruly Voice, who argues that James’s theories provide a
“legitimate epistemological domain” for reclaiming the “discredited knowledge” that
can be found in “Western science’s racial and sexual Other” (200–201); Tarver,
“Particulars, Practices, and Pragmatic Feminism,” who argues that James’s psy chol-
ogy of habit formation, the pluralism of experience, and pragmatic attention to
consequences can be of great use for feminism; and other essays in Tarver and
Sullivan, William James and Feminism, especially chap. 3 by Erin McKenna, “ Women
and William James,” who critiques his ste reo typed perceptions and his often
flirtatious relations with women outside his marriage. Also see chapter 1, note 32, and
chapter 4, notes 34–36.
18. James to Thomas Ward, March [18]69, CWJ, 4:370; see James Moore, The
Post- Darwinian Controversies; Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature; Eclipse,