Late Writings
Pragmatism (1907)
James first announced his commitment to pragmatism in a lecture at Berkeley in
1898, entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” Later sources
for Pragmatism were lectures at Wellesley College in 1905, and at the Lowell
Institute and Columbia University in 1906 and 1907. Pragmatism emerges in
James's book as six things: a philosophical temperament, a theory of truth, a
theory of meaning, a holistic account of knowledge, a metaphysical view, and a
method of resolving philosophical disputes.
The pragmatic temperament appears in the book's opening chapter, where
(following a method he first set out in “Remarks on Spencer's Definition of
Mind as Correspondence”) James classifies philosophers according to their
temperaments: in this case “tough-minded” or “tender-minded.” The pragmatist is
the mediator between these extremes, someone, like James himself, with
“scientific loyalty to facts,” but also “the old confidence in human values and
the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or romantic type” (P, 17).
The method of resolving disputes and the theory of meaning are on display in
James's discussion of an argument about whether a man chasing a squirrel around
a tree goes around the squirrel too. Taking meaning as the “conceivable
effects of a practical kind the object may involve,” the pragmatist philosopher
finds that two “practical” meanings of “go around” are in play: either the man
goes North, East, South, and West of the squirrel, or he faces first the
squirrel's head, then one of his sides, then his tail, then his other side.
“Make the distinction,” James writes, “and there is no occasion for any further
dispute.”
The pragmatic theory of truth is the subject of the book's sixth (and to some
degree its second) chapter. Truth, James holds, is “a species of the good,”
like health. Truths are goods because we can “ride” on them into the future
without being unpleasantly surprised. They “lead us into useful verbal and
conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They
lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away
from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking” (103).
Although James holds that truths are “made” (104) in the course of human
experience, and that for the most part they live “on a credit system” in that
they are not currently being verified, he also holds the empiricistic view that
“beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole
superstructure” (P, 100).
James's chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” sets out his voluntaristic
epistemology. “We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out
constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he
recognizes “resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117),
including not only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of
our prior beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of
nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the
humanistic principle: you can't weed out the human contribution” (P, 122). He
also embraces a metaphysics of process in the claim that “for pragmatism
[reality] is still in the making,” whereas for “rationalism reality is
ready-made and complete from all eternity” (P 123). Pragmatism's final chapter
on “Pragmatism and Religion” follows James's line in Varieties in attacking
“transcendental absolutism” for its unverifiable account of God, and in
defending a “pluralistic and moralistic religion” (144)based on human
experience. “On pragmatistic principles,” James writes, “if the hypothesis of
God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (143).
A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
Originally delivered in Oxford as a set of lectures “On the Present Situation
in Philosophy,” James begins his book, as he had begun Pragmatism, with a
discussion of the temperamental determination of philosophical theories, which,
James states, “are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push …
forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the whole
preferred — there is no other truthful word — as one's best working attitude”
(PU 15). Maintaining that a philosopher's “vision” is “the important thing”
about him (PU 3), James condemns the “over-technicality and consequent
dreariness of the younger disciples at our American universities…” (PU 13).
James passes from critical discussions of Josiah Royce's idealism and the
“vicious intellectualism” of Hegel to philosophers whose visions he admires:
Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson. He praises Fechner for holding that “the
whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and
developments, is everywhere alive and conscious” (PU, 70), and he seeks to
refine and justify Fechner's idea that separate human, animal and vegetable
consciousnesses meet or merge in a “consciousness of still wider scope” (72).
James employs Henri Bergson's critique of “intellectualism” to argue that the
“concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our
conceptual substitutes are confined by. They run into one another continuously
and seem to interpenetrate” (PU 127). James concludes by embracing a position
that he had more tentatively set forth in The Varieties of Religious
Experience: that religious experiences “point with reasonable probability to
the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from
which the ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientific
psychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off” (PU, 135). Whereas in
Pragmatism James subsumes the religious within the pragmatic (as yet another
way of successfully making one's way through the world), in A Pluralistic
Universe he suggests that the religious offers a superior relation to the
universe.
Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)
This posthumous collection includes James's groundbreaking essays on “pure
experience,” originally published in 1904–5. James's fundamental idea is that
mind and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more
fundamental stuff — pure experience — that (despite being called “experience”)
is neither mental nor physical. Pure experience, James explains, is “the
immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection
with its conceptual categories… a that which is not yet any definite what, tho'
ready to be all sorts of whats…” (ERE, 46). That “whats” pure experience may be
are minds and bodies, people and material objects, but this depends not on a
fundamental ontological difference among these “pure experiences,” but on the
relations into which they enter. Certain sequences of pure experiences
constitute physical objects, and others constitute persons; but one pure
experience (say the perception of a chair) may be part both of the sequence
constituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person. Indeed, one
pure experience might be part of two distinct minds, as James explains in a
chapter entitled “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing.”
James's “radical empiricism” is distinct from his “pure experience”
metaphysics. It is never precisely defined in the Essays, and is best
explicated by a passage from The Meaning of Truth where James states that
radical empiricism consists of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a
conclusion. The postulate is that “the only things that shall be debatable
among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience,”
the fact is that relations are just as directly experienced as the things they
relate, and the conclusion is that “the parts of experience hold together from
next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience” (MT, 6–7).
James was still working on objections to his “pure experience” doctrine,
replying to critics of Pragmatism, and writing an introduction to philosophical
problems when he died in 1910. His legacy extends into psychology and the study
of religion, and in philosophy not only throughout the pragmatist tradition
that he founded (along with Charles Peirce), but into phenomenology and
analytic philosophy. Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Mind is indebted to
James's doctrine of “pure experience,” Ludwig Wittgenstein learned about “the
absence of the will act” from James's Psychology (Goodman, Wittgenstein and
William James, p. 81)), and the versions of “neopragmatism” set out by Nelson
Goodman, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam are saturated with James's ideas.
James is one of the most attractive and endearing of philosophers: for his
vision of a “wild,” “open” universe that is nevertheless shaped by our human
powers and that answers to some of our deepest needs, but also, as Russell
observed in his obituary, because of the “large tolerance and … humanity” with
which he sets that vision out. (The Nation (3 September 1910: 793–4).
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