2

CONCEPTION
OF
PHILOSOPHY

Despite his cultural advantages and his individual talent, William James succumbed in his youth to anxieties concerning his fitness for any public career. Like his sister, Alice, he was susceptible to long periods of psychological depression which distracted him from work. Rare is the kind of fame James eventually won; rarer still is the winning of this fame by one whose life is marred by the false starts, fitful efforts, painful halts, and uncertain beginnings of James’s own youth and early manhood. After his polyglot education, James decided to be a painter, and the family, to accommodate its eldest son, settled in Newport, Rhode Island, so that he could study with the distinguished portraitist, William H. Hunt. When the enthusiasm for art wore off, James carried with him into later life some excellent portraits, including a pencil-sketch of himself. Above all, he retained a heightened sensitivity to figure and color, which subsequently found expression not only in the sketches profusely scrawled over his notebooks and letters, but also in the vivid imagery which enlivened his prose.

Abiding by the parental admonition to seek a career in the sciences instead of in the arts, James enrolled in 1861 in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and in 1863 in the Medical School. While at Harvard he fell under the influence of Louis Agassiz, the Swiss scientist who was the most acclaimed scientist then working in America. James even joined the Thayer expedition to Brazil led by Agassiz. But once again enthusiasm melted away. No sooner had James reached Brazil than physical illness, attended by change of mood, dampened his scientific inclinations. Return to Medical School seemed the rational choice, but once back at Harvard, James felt the lure of scientific study abroad, this time in the field of physiology then advancing rapidly in Germany. So in 1867-68 James attended lectures at the University of Berlin. The letters he wrote home are not the letters of an ambitious student with a well-thought out program of study, rather they reveal a voracious reader who sticks to no special field, an aspirant book reviewer for the leading American periodicals, a neurotic personality, and a sick youth with a mysterious back ailment whom numerous visits to doctors, clinics, health spas could not cure. Then, stiffened by resolution, he returned to Harvard to earn his medical degree in 1869.

Sometime during his Berlin winter or as late perhaps as 1870 William James suffered a nervous breakdown, the experience of which he recorded in his Varieties of Religious Experience, to be discussed later. Resolution of will, sustained by religious feeling and conviction, contributed to his cure. But here another element deserves mention—contact with the thought of Charles Renouvier. In a letter to his father, dated October 5, 1868, James mentions having read Charles Renouvier’s introduction to L’Année 186j Philosophique and praises the French philosopher “for vigor of style and compression.”¹ In one of James’s notebooks, an entry dated April 30, 1870, reads:

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second “Essais” and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—”the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.²

In a mood redolent with self-admonition James continued:

“For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the form of my action.... I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power.... Life shall (be built in) doing and suffering and creating.³

The usual picture of William James as a scientist who turned to philosophy after establishing a reputation by his scientific work is entirely mistaken. True, James began his career at Harvard as an instructor of physiology in 1872, moved to anatomy the next year, then to psychology in 1875, and not until 1879 did he offer his first course in philosophy, a course titled, “Philosophy of Evolution,” the text of which was Herbert Spencer’s First Principles. Fom the beginning, however, philosophy drew his attention. Too much speculation, he felt, had produced crippling melancholy and indecisiveness, for which the panacea seemed to be the regimen of science. Nevertheless, it was in fact a type of philosophy which had wrought his cure. Many of the early articles later incorporated in his Will to Believe articulate this philosophy.

The crucial role of Renouvier in the formation of James’s thought, though recognized, is not widely known. James wrote reviews of Renouvier’s books for American journals, and he even used Renouvier’s Premier Essai for a reading course he taught at Harvard in 1879-80. Renouvier on his part published some of James’s articles in his Critique philosophique and, though the older and more famous figure, he acted as James’s translator. James never forgot his debt to Renouvier. He dedicated his Principles of Psychology to François Pillon, Renouvier’s leading disciple and then editor of the Critique philosophique. And to Charles Renouvier he dedicated the systematic work on philosophy; he died before finishing it, and it appeared posthumously as Some Problems of Philosophy. The currents of French philosophy run so deeply in James’s own thought that A. O. Lovejoy has perceptively placed him in the history of French temporalism,⁴ and the first course on James’s philosophy was taught by M. Bovet in 1903 at the Academy de Neuchatel. It may seem paradoxical to count the same man twice, once as an American, and next as a French thinker, but James bridged two worlds, for a while making them one.

What attracted James to Renouvier’s thought was its critical idealism, strikingly different from the positivisms, materialisms, and evolutionary naturalisms that flourished in the wake of science. Renouvier seemed able to take the measure of science without losing human freedom and spiritual values. By means of firm rational control and a logical categorial scheme Renouvier, as James read him, had succeeded in erecting a philosophy of spirit.

In his early essays, sprinkled with citations of Renouvier, James subscribed to a philosophy of spirit in line with the findings of science. Speaking as a physiologist to the Unitarian Ministers’ Institute at Princeton in 1881, James maintained that, if minds are framed as science conceives our own to be,

... some outward reality of a nature defined as God’s nature must be defined, is the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible for the human mind’s contemplation. Anything short of God is not rational, anything more than God is not possible, if the human mind be in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and action....⁵

On the basis of scientific findings James therefore rejected agnosticism and positivism, and argued for the existence of God. His specific arguments, grounded on the theory that thought is teleological and translates itself into conduct, draw upon a conception of consciousness more completely elucidated in his Principles of Psychology, while they explicitly appeal also to a metaphysics of voluntarism which he neither deepened nor expanded in his later writings. James’s reconciliation of the concerns of science with the demands of the human spirit is sharply focused in the title of this address, “Reflex Action and Theism.”

As crucial to the philosophy of spirit as the concept of God is the doctrine of human freedom. In “The Dilemma of Determinism” (1884), James made his case for freedom. He cleared the ground for freedom by arguing that determinism produces a dilemma which men, by their native feelings and their propensities to act, must reject. In substance, determinism teaches that whatever occurs could not have been otherwise; everything, including every evil, is unavoidable. Hence, only two positions, the horns of the dilemma, are open for reflective men—pessimism and subjectivism. According to pessimism the world is thoroughly evil, particular evils are symptomatic of the deeper evil within, and whatever we do is fated to augment the evil. According to subjectivism, the evil is not objective but subjective. Evil is apparent only, and if we could apprehend the universe in its totality, we could comprehend how the particular evils, apparent only to partial views, are overcome. Subjectivism escapes pessimism, but at the cost of glossing over the evils men suffer, for it holds that, in the ultimate accounting, everything is good no matter how bad it may seem. One horn of the dilemma, pessimism, conflicts with man’s natural proclivities to act, to engage persistently in individual and common efforts to make—by the exercise of the human will on the human situation—a better place of the world in which he lives. The other horn of the dilemma, subjectivism, denies that the distinction between good and evil is real, and so clashes with those fundamental human feelings which arouse men to action. Hence James condemned determinism and offered in its stead the doctrine of indeterminism, which, by positing some uncaused events, allows an area in which the agency of free will may play.

James’s treatment of the traditional issues of God and of human freedom manifests his developing conception of philosophy. In the late 1870’s he had intended to write a book on the nature of philosophy from the standpoint of psychology. However, he never finished the book, having published instead a series of articles on the topic, some of which appeared in Renouvier’s Critique philosophique and were subsequently woven together in the longer essay, “The Sentiment of Rationality.” By elucidating the motives of philosophizing, James sought to define the role of philosophy in human life. Anticipating later pronouncements on the teleological and practical character of thought, he signalized rationality as a sentiment, which, furthermore, demands, on the one hand, a simple, universal unity of system and, on the other hand, a sharp clarity of analytic distinctions pertinent to the plurality of factors embraced. At once rationality is integrative and dispersive. How a philosophy realizes or combines these rival tendencies depends, James taught, on the temperament of the philosopher. Philosophy itself springs from man’s fundamental concern over an uncertain future. Philosophy’s role in life is to banish uncertainty from man’s future, or at least to represent the future as congruous with human powers and aspirations. The philosopher, then, must take a moral view of the universe in which man lives. Since every advance in civilization is due to man’s employment of his own powers, the ultimate moral commandment is active self-reliance. Since reality itself is affected, even in part created, by human belief, a philosophy which sustains creative belief and encourages active self-reliance contributes to human progress. Implicit here is a standard for the evaluation of rival philosophies—namely, their effectiveness in stimulating the energies of men to improve the world in which they live.

James worked out his own philosophy in consonance with his conceptions of how philosophies are expressions of personal temperament and of how they function in the broader life of man and society. In the opening lecture of Pragmatism he sketched his well-known table of traits distinguishing tender-minded and tough-minded philos ophies:

The tender-minded philosophies respond to the spiritual yearnings of man; the tough-minded to the necessity to face the facts of the human situation. Since James him-self was tough-minded in some respects, tender-minded in others, he fashioned his own philosophy to embrace the values of both temperaments.

In the course of its development James’s philosophy has gone by different names, of which the most famous are pragmatism, radical empiricism, and pluralism. His vacillating terminologies, his shifting and often untenable arguments, his vigorous popular style, bristling with polemic and ambiguity, have often irritated the philosophical critics. By temperament James was impatient with those dialectical niceties that would win the plaudits of professionals but lose the wider audience beyond the halls of academe. In an appreciative lecture on Hegel in A Pluralistic Universe, James denounced the German philosopher for his method but praised him for his vision. Understandably, James’s own philosophical work, sometimes lacking the finesse of professional technique, has slighted method for vision. Yet it would be mistaken to suppose that James was wholly without method. Rather James’s method, which puts little stock in the rigors of logic and dialectic, prescribes constant attention to concrete experience. In a sense James and Descartes are similar as opposites are similar. Whereas Descartes ushered in modern philosophy, James took part in the inauguration of post-modern philosophy. Descartes held mathematics to be the model science; James, by contrast, pinned his hope on psychology. It is imperative, then, that, before we discuss James’s philosophy as pragmatism, radical empiricism, and pluralism, we consider his work in psychology, including the psychology of religion.