"...As he faced up to the criticism of two philosophical colleagues, ..and to
perceived inconsistencies between his own work and that of Lotze, Royce,
Fechner, Woodbridge, Dewey and Bergson, James began, in late November and early
December of 1905, to fill a pair of notebooks with his thoughts on the
problem.The dilemma involved a serious discrepancy between his account of
experience in THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY and his current understanding of
experience, his new doctrine of 'pure experience'. In the PRINCIPLES James had
argued that every part of our experience is a unique and unrepeatable bit of
the ceaseless flow of the river of consciousness. He could say this because he
then believed that there was an objective world 'out there' that we as
individuals could never know. Now, however, James had dropped the old dualism
of subject and object and was arguing that experience is all there is."
(Robert Richardson in WILLIAM JAMES, PP. 465-6.)
"In 'Does Consciousness Exist?', which Bertrand Russell claimed 'startled the
world', James says the answer is no. 'Consciousness is the name of a
non-entity'. As we generally conceive of it, consciousness is the 'faint rumor
left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy'. If we were
to speak precisely, James says, consciousness is 'only a name for the fact that
the 'content' of experiences IS KNOWN'. The reason James makes this explicit
break is because he has in his sights the old and comfortable dualisms of
subject and object, spirit and nature, mind and matter. James argues that
instead of dueling entities there is only process. 'I mean only to deny that
the word (consciousness) stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically
that it does stand for a function'.this was not a wholly new idea for James.
Indeed, he specifically refers back to his PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY, published
14 years earlier, in which, he reminds his readers, 'I have tried to
show that we need no knower other than the 'passing thought'.' His thesis now
is that 'if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff
or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we
call that stuff 'pure experience' then knowing can be explained as a particular
sort of relation toward on another which portions of pure experience may
enter'.As Russell would later summarize it, James held that 'there are
'thoughts' which preform the function of 'knowing', but these thoughts are not
made of any different 'stuff' from that of which material objects are made'.
James's own conclusion is that 'consciousness' is fictitious while thoughts in
the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same
stuff as things are.' ...The result of James's radical empiricism is to move
the modern mind away from seventeenth-century Cartesian dualism and toward what
we might call process philosophy; to wean us away from falli
ng back on conceptions and to encourage us to trust our perceptions; to admit
feelings to full standing, along with ideas, as aspects of rationality. It does
not seem too much to call this a revolution - not a Copernican kind of
revolution, but a modernist revolution. And if the exact steps by which radical
empiricism emerged for James are not fully clear, it is clear that it happened
during the first half of 1904. Sometime after the first of December 1903, James
wrote in his notes for his seminar: "All 'classic', cut and dried, 'noble',
'fixed', 'eternal' WELTANSHAUUNGEN (worldviews) seem to me to violate the
character with which life concretely comes and the expression which it bears of
being, or at least of involving a muddle and a struggle, with an 'ever not
quite' to all our formulas, and novelty and possibility forever leaking in'."
(Richardson, pp 448-51)
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