For anyone who's genuinely interested in a Jamesian analysis of free will...
"...The pragmatic method includes directives for validating a belief, whereas
the principle of pure experience includes directives for formulating the belief
in experiential terms...He [James] calls on the principle of pure experience,
for instance, to demonstrate that if activity is to have any meaning at all, it
must be derived from 'some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely
pointed out' (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 81). The first step in the
investigation must be to seek 'the original type and model of what it means' in
the stream of experience." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical
Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 318)
"James then develops his concrete description of human activity; 'But in this
actual world or ours, as it is given, a part at least of activity comes with
definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes
complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the
efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex
experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as
opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal activity comes to
birth. (ERE, 81-2) James culls from experience original models for
understanding not only action, but causality and freedom. ..."The experience
of activity is then described as it is 'lived through or authentically known'
(ERE, 84-5). What activity is 'known-as' is taken from this 'complete activity
in its original and first intention.' H goes into detail about the 'ultimate
Qualiia' of 'these experiences of process, obstruction,, striving, strai
n, or release' and concludes that we cannot conceive of it as lived through
except 'in the dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against
felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome'." (Charlene Seigfried in
"William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 319.)
"...We want to know whether we are responsible for our activities or are
determined by events outside of our knowledge and control. The phenomenal level
cannot be superseded if we are even to ask the right questions or frame the
experiments correctly. The issue is precisely whether events which we
experience as ours are in fact so, or whether they should be reductively
attributed to brain cells. In returning to the metaphysical question James
defends the position that the nature, meaning and location of causality can be
determined only at the phenomenal level of concrete experience (Essays in
Radical Empiricism, 91). It it thus not a metaphysical question at all, but a
concrete one, or one answerable within the parameters of radical empiricism.
Not only does he show that the metaphysical question must be dropped as
unanswerable on its own terms, but taking activity at its face-value, or as we
experience it, we also discover 'the very power that makes facts come and be'. I
n arguing that facts are interactively constituted by us, he has finally
explicitly drawn the consequences of his break with the empiricist assumption
that our percepts passively mirror reality as it is in itself." (Charlene
Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 322.)
"To the objection that our felt activity is only an impression and the facts
are to be found elsewhere he responds with the principle of the radically
empiricist philosophy according to which anything, to be considered real, must
be located within experience. If creative activities are to be found anywhere,
'they must be immediately lived' (ERE, 92). ...What we mean by causing, even if
we mislocate it, are activities of 'sustaining, persevering, striving, paying
with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intentions'. For
anything to be called a cause, it must be of the sort of activity that
resembles this 'creation in its first intention,' this 'causality at work.' To
call this phenomenal experience of activity a mere illusion is to prefer a
hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never
verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation. James,
therefore, concludes that 'real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, a
s a 'category', if you like, of reality is JUST WHAT WE FEEL IT TO BE, just
that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal."
"...Therefore, the nature of causality is not to be found in searching for such
a transcendental cause of causes, if this means a non-experiential source of
what is experienced or some 'more' real, 'unimaginable ontological principle'
mysteriously hidden from our investigations. Furthermore, the worth or interest
of our investigations of activity does not even consist in discerning the
elements of conjunctions of things empirically but 'in the dramatic outcome of
the whole process' (ERE, 94). The only reason for investigating activity and
causality is to help us understand the course and meaning of life. The
pragmatic stance is that we seek to know, not for its own sake, but to enable
us to live better." (Seigfried in "James's Rad Recon", page 323. Emphasis is
James's in the original.)
"It has been the traditional interpretive distinction between a world of
subjective experience and the world of objective reality that has generated
contemporary attacks on objectivity and verifiability. Such REIFIED
distinctions can be dissolved by drawing out the implications of the
perspective that 'The world is surely the TOTAL world, including our mental
reaction." (Seigfried, 356.)
"James appeals to pure experience to keep us from REIFYING these categories:
'We may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of pure experience before the
hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux has been framed; and we can
play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a different
hypothesis' (James, Meaning of Truth, 43). Imagining a state of pure
experience reminds us that the way the world appears to us, the self-evidenct
objectivity of objects, is actually the result of inventive categories by our
ancestors that have been found to be useful and therefore preserved and passed
on to us through our culture and language. However, we cannot remake the world
at our will. As a result of past choices, some possibilities cannot be realized
anymore..." (Seigfried, 358.)
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