William James came into the American Philosophical tradition during a time period where it yearned
for an intellectual voice which it could call its own.
It’s not that there were no other great philosophic minds present at the time of his
ascension, but that no other carried within them, so genuinely, the American spirit.
“He spoke in a racy vernacular and with a force and directness, which made his philosophy
of “Pragmatism” and “reserve energy” the mental correlate of the “practical”
and “strenuous” Roosevelt.”
He was born in New York City on January 11th, 1842, and though his early adolescent years
were spent in American schools he, along with his brother Henry, would be sent away to study
in France.
This was a choice made by their father like secondary to the rising tensions caused by
the impending American Civil War.
While here he and Henry would eventually fall in with the works of the French Psychopathologists
such as Charcot.
Upon his return to America shortly after the end of the War, James would seek and gain
employment at Harvard in 1870; he taught many different subjects including Anatomy and physiology,
Psychology, and philosophy.
Of his many works it was “The Principles of Psychology” which he is primarily remembered
for, though in this video we will focus on the works of his later years.
These include “The Will to Believe”, “Pragmatism”, “A Pluralistic Universe”, “The Meaning
of Truth”, and “Essays in Radical Empiricism”.
It would be difficult to cover so much material in such a short time, so, I will give to the
best of my ability a comprehensible summary of these later works.
The Basic Principles of his philosophy may be most clearly uncovered in the only work
to be published after his death, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).
The development of this new Empiricism was primarily brought on by the tendency of old
empiricists to overlook connections, causality, and meaning; thus, in James’ view, missing
the mark.
What Radical Empiricism is, is defined by James in his 1909 work “The Meaning of Truth.”
It is comprised of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a generalized 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 “The relations between
things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular
experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.”
The conclusion is that “The parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations
that are themselves parts of experience.
The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous transempirical connective
support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.”
This form of empiricism is different from, but based on his metaphysical principle of
pure experience which states that the relations between distinct things are as real as the
things themselves.
It is a mistake, James thought, to suppose that there must be an underlying cause, a
guiding force, that stands outside of the natural world.
Our consciousness is but a system of relations, what we perceive in thought is reality itself,
not Kantian Phenomenon.
So for James there is no incorporeal soul lying beneath the corporeal body, the soul
in his view is simply the grand total of our experience.
It was clear that James was not so enamored as his contemporaries with the German Metaphysics
which made its way to the American philosophical scene, he would endeavor to show that these
abstractions which were espoused so irrefutably, perhaps because so unintelligibly, were but
the ramblings of madmen.
The way in which he would demonstrate this novel conclusion came to him courtesy of Charles
Peirce.
It was in his essay “How to Make our Ideas Clear,” that Peirce said that to find the
meaning of an idea we must examine the consequences to which it leads in action.
From this premise James wrote his 1907 book ‘Pragmatism’.
Among his numerous books Pragmatism is perhaps the easiest read, inside are six basic tenants
which he discusses; here we will briefly review each of them, these being; 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 arguments.
Beginning in the first chapter James looks to separate philosophers according to their
individual temperament.
He said “the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of
temperaments.
… Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing,
to sink the fact of his temperament.”
He thought that philosophers are more likely to choose their beliefs based upon this individual
temperament rather than objective truth or logical reasoning.
He classifies them either as “tough-minded” or “tender-minded” while the Pragmatist
is a sort of mediator which stands between the two.
He said that the Pragmatist will have a “Scientific loyalty to facts,” as well as “the old
confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or romantic
type.”
James Defined meaning as the “conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may
involve.”
This can be seen in an argument James brings up about whether or not a man chasing a squirrel
around a tree, going the same way, goes around the squirrel as well.
What James points out about this argument is that whether or not the man goes around
the squirrel or not there is no observable difference in their consequence and thus have
the same meaning.
We must, as James forcefully put, “make the distinction” of whether or not the outcome
is different or the same; if we can do this then “there is no occasion for any further
dispute.”
In chapter 6 James uncovers his “Theory of Truth.”
In this theory he asks the question of whether truth comes in the form of objective relations
or whether it may be relative to human judgement and need.
It was his thought that Truth was the “Cash Value” of an Idea, or rather the truth of
an idea is strongly correlated with its practical value in the lives of men.
He puts it clearly here, “Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed,
a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.
The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”
James’ view on Epistemology does not fall far from what has been traditionally accepted
by most of the western philosophers of history.
He believed that there could only be three conclusions to any particular investigation;
either it must conclude in belief, disbelief, or doubt.
He classifies disbelief as negative belief and doubt as the opposite of both belief and
disbelief.
In the process of our investigation if we come about something which contradicts what
we believe to be real it is constituted as disbelief.
Though if something comes about which, though fundamental and valuable, does not meet the
requirements to be justified as known, we categorize this as doubt.
These unknowable beliefs, thought James, were God, immortality, freedom, and moral duty.
In his essay “The Will to Believe” James expounds upon what he calls a “genuine option,”
this being a choice between hypotheses.
We can categorize this “genuine option” as “living” (personally meaningful), “forced”
(mutually exclusive or involving social relations), and “momentous” (involving potentially
important consequences).
A genuine option cannot be known by factual inquiry, and he states that we can, and do
believe things that are devoid of objective justification, take political and moral judgements
for instance.
The evidence in these situations will likely be perpetually lacking, and though this be
the case, we nevertheless find it difficult to refuse to believe what seems natural and
good to us.
If we were to refuse these beliefs the consequences to our life would be of the negative sort.
In turn James’ thought was that “When our intellect cannot solve a genuine option,
emotionally we much decide.”
When applied to something like, say religious conviction, we can say that “if the hypothesis
of God works satisfactory in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”
This is important because the simple belief in a fact can help that fact come true; if
we remain passive then the fact in question does not even become possible.
Let us view Pluralism in terms of how it contrasts with Monism and why James believed it to be,
regardless of a lack in objective evidence, the obvious pragmatic choice between the two.
To begin James abhorred a deterministic universe which is the typical corollary of Monism taken
to its extreme.
Everything here is fixed and individuality an illusion, there is no human element, there
is no “freedom” in the sense that what we choose can change what has already been
set.
While in Pluralism, on the other hand, “in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions
and developments, is everywhere alive and conscious.”
Nothing is irrevocably settled and what we choose may help to decide the course of our
own fate.
He said that “if there be any life that it is really better that we should lead, and
if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would
be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally
clashed with other greater vital benefits.”
Put simply when we can find no conclusive evidence of a thing we should side with what
we find to be good and practically useful in our lives; in this case Pluralism.
The God of James was finite in nature “one helper, primus inter pares (first among equals),
in the midst of all the shapers of the great world’s fate.”
He thought that there lies beyond human experience a “spiritual-world”, a world which when
thought of in relation to our own personal consciousness is not so different from how
our world must seem to the lesser animals.
In general, he thought that religious experience “Points with reasonable probability to the
continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from which the ordinary
prudential man is shut off.”
James has been perhaps America’s greatest, or at least, objectively speaking, it’s
most influential philosopher.
The sheer number of works that he produced in his 68 years and the artfulness by which
he weaved them together like a heraldic tapestry is enough to earn him a place among America’s
heroes.
He was a man who came back from crippling depression and near insanity, a man who believed
that humanity, though flawed, has the capacity for greatness.
He saw in every individual what he called “reserve energies” and often extended
his hand in an effort for the betterment of all.
“He was always helping somebody, lifting men up with the contagion of his courage.”
His influence extends into not only into the field of philosophy, but also psychology and
religious studies.
Among his admirers stands immensely influential names as Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell,
John Dewey, and even Wittgenstein.
If you too have found something admirable in the philosophy of William James then let
me know in the comments below, and as I know this was not an in-depth view, I have left
the various books and sites that I utilized in the making of this video down in the description
box.
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videos covering various topics related to eastern and western philosophy.
As always thank you for talking philosophy with me, until next time.