William
James was interested in ideas. When a man’s ideas interested him, he wanted to
get acquainted with him personally to get to the bottom of what they were
about. Similarly, William James’ ideas come to life as we come to know the flow
of his life. As William James would say, we may know about his ideas--
“pragmatism”, “the will to believe,”
“radical empiricism,” “the pluralistic universe,” “varieties of religious experience,”-- but
they mean nothing unless they are alive and making a difference. The question I
try to answer is: How did William James’ ideas come alive from the flow of his life?
First, a
word must be said about Williams and Henrys.
For our purposes there are two William James and two Henry James. William James of Harvard, the subject of this
essay, is the grandson of William James of
William
James of Harvard came from a family of money and privilege. His paternal
grandfather, William James of
He had
three wives and thirteen children. Henry, who would later be the father of
William James of Harvard, was his fifth child and the second by his third wife,
Catherine Barber. She was a shy woman who had a certain warmth and kept an orderly house.
Henry was a
rambunctious child, in fact, wild and unruly. The strictures of the Sabbath
were strictly enforced on him on that day, but for the rest he was left to his
own devises. His mother had so many children, his father was busy building an
empire, so he went fishing and hunting, hung out with older boys at the
cobbler’s shop, enjoying whiskey and truancy.
He was
sometimes conscientious, sometimes reckless, impulsively taking risks. In his
early teens he rushed to stamp out flames in a haystack. His leg was burned so
badly it had to be amputated. He became more introspective in his
convalescence, but when he went to college
he began where he had left off--overspending, drinking, carousing, so he
had a wardrobe made, charged it to his father and ran off to Boston to work for
a printer. After a year, he returned to finish college. He failed at law, then
bookkeeping. Finally, he followed his older brother to Princeton Seminary a
conservative Calvinist school, which he hated, but which his father would
subsidize. While at the seminary, his father died and he was disinherited
because his father disapproved of him. He and others in the family, including
his mother, contested the will successfully, so he quit the seminary, not God,
and moved with his friend, Hugh Walsh, into the Walsh home on
Gay Wilson
Allen describes Mary, the mother of William James of Harvard. “She was an
Irishwoman with rather plain features, a firm mouth and unaffected manners…She
was the dependable, practical, resolute person she appeared to be, and Henry
James needed just such a wife to guard him against the excesses of his own
imaginative, introspective, impatient temperament. But instead of becoming
irritated by him, she tactfully calmed and humored him, because she really
loved him and sympathized with his ambitions.”(2)
On January
ll, l842, William James of Harvard was born in the Astor Hotel in
It was at
this time, when William was two years old, that Father Henry learned that his
father’s estate had finally been settled in his favor. In this pastoral place offering a sense of
quietude, at the age of thirty-three Father Henry experienced an acute anxiety
attack. He was confronting his own
separate life. What he found was a raging storm. He was desperate. He could not tolerate his
continuing anxiety, consulted eminent physicians, and eventually became
convinced that he needed a spiritual solution. He found it in his own version
of Swedenborg’s theology. He latched on desperately to these ideas and they
gave him solace. He spent his life writing them, arguing them among the
brightest men of his time, publishing them mostly at his own expense. He never
had a job and bragged that he emulated Jesus of Nazareth in this respect.
With these
ideas Father Henry challenged conventional ideas with great vigor. He embraced
a gracious God who loved unconditionally. With this God he could thunder
against the severe God of the Calvinists and the distant God of the
deists. Divine creation confirmed that
every creature was good. He railed against those who believed in original sin
asserting that children should be indulged and encouraged and not
censured. Institutions and social
conventions, which hemmed men in as he had been hemmed in on Sundays were
corrupt and had to be challenged. All institutions had to be challenged whether
family, church or state. Men must be saved from the corroding influences of
capitalism, churchism, dogmatism of all kinds. The other evil was adult man’s
pride which would lead to a terrible fall as had happened when he had lost his
leg. Ideals were the important thing, especially a socialist, utopian ideal
wherein everyone spontaneously does the right thing without police or external
force to control them. Criminals can often be praised for seeking a higher
justice. Marriage should be given up in favor of free love. His wife seemed to admire even these ideas,
though not the practice.
Imagine
what it was like for William, Henry’s favorite son, whom he loved dearly.
William had to define himself with and against this forceful father who was
around the house all the time, and was devoted to doing what was best for his
gifted son, filling his ears with ideas which he needs to hold himself
together.
Brother
Henry describes what William was like as a child. “He was quick, restless,
egotistical, short-tempered, clamorous for attention and praise, and openly curious.
The whole family saw William as occupying a special place among the children.
Family decisions were made in terms of what would be best for William. He was
the first-born, precociously intelligent, willful, a leader among his siblings
and friends. At a very young age he mounted theatrical productions, conceived,
directed and took the lead as constant comic star, seeking primarily the
admiration of his father.”(3)
He took to
emulating his father’s public personality: fearless, voluble, even terrifying.
Argument was what the family ate and drank with dinner guests like Horace
Greeley, owner of the Tribune, and other followers of the French Socialist,
Charles Fourier, who thought that men could return to their original divine
nature by breaking into small autonomous communities. William Cullen Bryant,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Thoreau came to dine with the family. Henry’s
charming personality facilitated by Mary, and the excitement generated in this
family which engaged all the children in interaction was appealing. Often
guests were anxiously alarmed, fearing that the ferocity of argument, often
demonstrated physically, would lead to violence. Mary would have to reassure
them. It was in this tempestuous family that William learned the style of
thinking sharply at the same time that he could maintain loving, respectful
connections with those with whom he disagreed. The interaction around that
dinner table was the paradigm of his way of thinking. But in all the happy
freedom, it was still risky to challenge Papa.
William
persisted with his voluble ferocity. His father would try to contain him with
cautionary tales; reminding him that when he was his age every exciting
adventure ended badly, very badly, and he had his cork leg to prove it. This
did not restrain William, who later wrote: “I never suffered more pain since
Father used to spank me with a paper cutter in
Between the
ages of five and eleven William and Harry had good times on their own, roaming far
beyond
No
conventional educational experience was acceptable, so there was a succession
of classes and tutors about which Father James would become first enthusiastic
and then disillusioned, leading to abrupt terminations. William, feeling the
need for some conventional life made good friends with Edgar VanWinkle and his
family, a conventional aristocratic family that lived nearby.
When
William was eleven he showed a sustained interest in drawing, and with an
excellent teacher, Mr. Coe, was able to grow as an artist. Hour after hour he
would draw. It was also respite from his parents. His father terminated Mr. Coe
because he was becoming too important to his son.
When William was thirteen, and began showing
more adolescent behavior, Father Henry was even more alarmed. He did not want
the American spirit of rebellion and dissent to stimulate his son. He was
rebellious enough. In
When
William was sixteen the family moved back to
His friends
went away to school in the fall, and William began painting under the tutelage
of a local artist, William Morris Hunt, again making progress, until his father
fearing he was too quickly making a decision about his direction, insisted he take up scientific
studies in Geneva where the whole family went again. There William excelled in science and
mathematics, received honors and was invited into an elite social, rowdy club..
The
following summer, while Father James was out scouting for the right place to
move next, William and Harry joined a small group of students trekking through
the
His
drawings, many of which were on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
Father
James again strenuously objected because it was a school accepted by society.
It was during this time that the Civil War broke out. William, now nineteen
years old, made moves to join the army, so his father agreed to his choice of
school if only he would not go to war.
The whole family thought William was too sickly for soldiering. Of
course, Father Henry had given William a microscope at the same time that he
denounced science as nothing more than a “subordinate power of the mind.”
Harry wrote
of how he remembered this chaotic time: “We wholesomely breathed inconsistency
and ate and drank contradictions…The presence of Paradox was so bright among
us…that we fairly grew used to…happily discounting them…” (5) With so many
mixed messages William vacillated between challenging them, being enraged by
them and ignoring them. Mixed messages
powerfully delivered make for madness, and it was madness in himself that
William was to worry about all his life. It also made for a rich range of
experience within himself.
At
As his second year of medical school began he
couldn’t resist the chance to join Louis Agassiz on an expedition to
He became
more and more depressed when he got home. The best he could do was to permit himself
to serve as an escort for his cousins Kitty and
A doctor
recommended the German baths. William
was taken with the idea, besides he wished to improve his German and perhaps
after a summer of spas he could be stimulated by lectures in the famous German
universities. He set off, as he was to do many times, for some provincial city,
this time Dresden; staying at a boarding house run by a grandmotherly sort who
attracted international travelers with whom he would socialize and engage in
serious discussion. He read for hours—Shakespeare, Homer, Kant, Janet, Lessing,
Goethe, Schiller and Darwin among others. He wrote letters to friends and
family. Then his stomach and back pain
would propel him to the spa at Teplitz, where he would drink mineral water,
take thermal baths, walk a few miles, take a ride in the country, but his back
and stomach got worse.
He chose to
go to
After
another illness, another trip to Teplitz, Goethe became more important to
him. Through Goethe he found a way more
akin to appreciating his way of experiencing himself in the world, realizing he
could no longer try to follow his father’s way of giving himself over to God.
Goethe’s naturalism seemed to be a way out. With the strength and vitality of
feeling himself confirming his own experience, he began to feel more vibrantly
engaged with pleasure in life generally, but especially in the company of women
with some vague recognition that some of them liked him. Yet, he sought to deal
with his nagging, restless unhappiness by traveling to
But when he
got home he found everyone was miserable. His sister Alice agitated the whole
family as she recovered from a nervous breakdown. Harry was suffering
constipation, back pain and low spirits, and after a few months took off for
He spent
hours and hours with Minnie Temple, spontaneous, brilliant, charming,
impractical, flighty, restless Minnie Temple. This made him feel good. They
fell deeply in love. She wrote a description of him, seeing in him what he had
such trouble seeing in himself.: “He is a rare creature, and one in whom my
intellect…takes more solid satisfaction than in almost anybody…He has the
largest head and the largest heart…He is generous and affectionate and full of
sympathy and humanity.”(8) Then the bad news came. She was dying of a “deposit in her
lung.” They spent hours talking of life
and death, and when she died William hit bottom, finally checking himself into
He found
that in order to survive he had to trust in something good in himself. He had
to believe in himself as Minnie had believed in him, as his father could not.
Up until this time heroic suicide had seemed the only way to take meaningful
action. Now he will not only believe in free will, but “I will believe in my
individual reality and creative power. My belief can’t be optimistic—but I will
posit life, (the real, the good) in the self…”(10) He rationalizes this move
with Renouvier’s notion of free will, and later elaborates this existential
move in his essay, “The Will to Believe,” with a quote from Fitz James Stephen:
“We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist,
through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If
we stand still we will be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall
be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one.
What must we do? ‘Be strong and of good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for
the best, and take what comes…If death ends all, we cannot meet death
better.”(ll)
The step
William took with his newfound freedom was to take a job. Maybe it was taking a
job that made him aware of his freedom. Who can say? At the age of thirty he
got his first job. An old classmate and friend, Henry Pickering Bowdich, had
returned from his studies with Karl Ludwig a physiology researcher in
After the
academic year, he fell into a deep depression again, and everyone in the family
told him that teaching was no good for him. He sought relief in another
European trip which Aunt Kate financed. There he found his brother Harry
beginning a successful career and that depressed him more. He returned to take
up his teaching.
In
preparation he began reading manuals of mental hygiene and studies in mental
physiology, taking especial interest in supernatural phenomena, ghost-rapping,
occult, psychic experiences. He was
“fascinated by the possibility that he, too, might experience a realm in which
‘pianos float, soft warm hands bud forth from vacant space and lead pencils
write alone.’”(12) He was also interested in the effects of mind-altering drugs
and how they might be helpful in understanding human personality. He tried many
such chemicals himself—chloral, amyl nitrite, hashish and others, sometimes
making himself ill for days.
His life
was full. He wrote several reviews a
month, and enjoyed the company of his colleagues. His social life was filled
with the cultural elite—Sedgwicks, Gurneys, Emersons, Lowells and Longfellows.
He joined a dinner club named The Radical Club where he met the woman who was
to become his wife—Miss Alice Howe Gibbens.
She is described
by Allen as a “twenty-seven year old woman, short, stocky, with soft brown hair
and luminous dark eyes…an unaffected manner, unabashedly candid, with a
beautiful voice. William was taken with
her at once. She challenged his spontaneous wit.”(13)
Her beloved
father was a physician who failed at each business he tried, was a convivial
drinker who finally, after a particularly bitter failure slit his own throat,
leaving his wife and two daughters to fend for themselves with a small
inheritance. At sixteen, because of her mother’s inadequacy, it was left to
Alice to lead the family to Europe, where she got a musical education (taking
voice lessons from Clara Schumann, the widow of the composer). Finally, the
money ran out and she and her sister returned to Boston to teach at Miss
Sanger’s school.
There was a
twenty-month courtship. William believed he was too physically frail and
mentally unstable to afflict himself on such a normal, healthy woman. After
hearing all these agonizing expressions of doubt expressed so convincingly,
Alice began to give up, so she distanced herself with a trip, which prompted
William to pursue her passionately. They
both feared that they were acting on emotion rather than reason but decided to
trust their “deeper instincts.” Trusting his instincts became the basis of his
evolving way of thinking. They were married on July l0, l878. William was
thirty-six years old.
Throughout
their marriage he would dictate his thoughts to her, she would discuss them
with him and would write them down. Both were strong and moody, and had many
stormy moments. On one occasion he came home with a painting which suited his
fancy. She was enraged by the unnecessary expense. He promptly took up a knife
and ripped it to shreds. This dynamic relationship becalmed and stormed as long
as William would live.
One of the
very first articles William dictated to Alice, was a review of Herbert
Spencer’s Principles of Psychology. In it Spencer had applied Darwin’s
theory of evolution to the human mind, positing that for humans survival was
the only goal of life. James retorted that the goal of human life could not be
reduced in this way. It had to include many interests—love, art, philosophy,
religious emotion, the joy of moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of
wit. Many idiosyncratic, sensuous, inexplicable interests could not be
neglected.
These ideas
which came from belief in his own experience he brought into the intensely
focussed discussion with members of the Metaphysical Club, a group which
emerged in the early seventies. The history of The Metaphysical Club is
eloquently elaborated in Louis Menand’s Pulitzer Prize winning book entitled The
Metaphysical Club.(14) Chauncey Wright was the man who took the initiative
to gather this group together. Wright was a genius, also a depressed alcoholic
who lived his life alone and couldn’t tolerate solitude, so would form
intellectual clubs for company. He was a mathematician and astronomer. He
worked for the Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, a federally financed
publication, for which he prepared tables giving the future positions of the
sun, moon, planets and principle fixed stars for use in navigation. He had a
knack for assimilating ideas and became a sort of local Socrates. He is
described as “large, homely, unkempt, and socially inept, and a positivist
through and through…The tangible world of daily experience was for him the only
reality.”(15)
The Club,
which included lawyers like Wendell Holmes and Nicholas St. John Green, and
historian (John Fiske), and scientists, including James, Wright and Charles
Sanders Pierce, (all men in their thirties), were agitated and fascinated by
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
They were a group of rebels, fighting the establishment of German
Idealism, English Rationalism, and Unitarianism. The stuff of experience, as Darwin’s
perspective suggested, is all we have to deal with. There was general agreement in the group about
that. All the principles of the Union and the Confederacy, all the religious
views of the abolitionists, and the academic consensus of those like Agasizz
that the negro race was fundamentally inferior—all these ideas had led to
horrible, extended bloodshed and strife. This group was going to start over
again with the common experience of the beautiful and variegated land and its
flora and fauna in its wondrous development which Darwin and all mankind
enjoys.
All of
these men, like James, were comfortable with vicious verbal battle, indeed,
they thrived on it. The sharpness of the exchanges led to honing their views.
James was the most capable of listening to others, respecting their views and
carrying on a dialogue within himself over time to reach his own perspective.
From Pierce, who was also a mathematician, he learned the laws of
probability. In willing to believe,
there is a bet involved. There is more or less degree of certainty in every
decision in life. In exploring the vast
sea of experience with all its particulars and making choices in this sea it is
not a matter of being entirely lost as Chauncey Wright claimed. There is some
dim recognition of what might be better. James came to differ with Pierce who
thought that the validity of these decisions rested on a social consensus.
James thought that the validity rested within the individual and within the
results of the decision. His emancipation from his father and the results of
that had convinced him of that. In this
exchange, within the Metaphysical Club he was moving into his own grand and
amorphous perspective which got to be called pragmatism.
Wendell
Holmes applied his ideas to the law. He was the most socially ept in the group,
looked down on anyone who had not done something great by the age of forty (and
James was slow), so Wendell moved away from the group. Chauncey Wright followed
the Peter Principle, took a job teaching at Harvard and cultivated such a
monotone, consistent with his views, that no one signed up for his classes and
he promptly died of a stroke. Charles Pierce was so tempestuous and sometimes
violent, attacking people physically, running up debts he couldn’t pay,
exploring sexual indiscretions, so that he could no longer find work. James
found resources for him when Pirce come to the end of his rope. The
Metaphysical Club was intense and short-lived.
William
James’ great-published work was his two thousand and some page Principles of
Psychology. In June of l878, one month before his wedding, James signed a
contract with Henry Holt. John Fiske, a
member of the Metaphysical Club, recommended James to Holt. Fiske saw how
James’ familiarity with the European experts in physiology and psychology, his
fluency in French and German, his psychological perspective growing from his
respect for individual freedom—these qualities could enable him to write a much-needed
text in psychology. The Principles of
Psychology were to be written in three years according to the contract. It
took James twelve. He wanted to write it
because he needed the money and the stature that it would give him, since he
had no academic credentials in the field, and couldn’t see how he could get
ahead without them. This book is a large
sprawling, cumbersome work, which draws from his own life in dialogue with the
intellectual world of his time.
These
twelve years gave him many additional experiences to draw from. Marriage did not revolutionize his life as he
had hoped, but it did settle him down some. He delighted in the five children
that came along yet often felt that they got in the way of his creativity. Shortly after the birth of each child he had
to get away or his wife would have to move to live with her mother. She
couldn’t bear his moodiness and he couldn’t tolerate her lack of attention.
In l882,
William’s mother died suddenly after a brief bout with bronchitis. He had always
resented her practical demands and had looked down on her benign and centered
personality. Upon her death he appreciated her much more. In fact, in his
popular essay, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” he decries the restlessness and
jerkiness of American life and commends the benign, centered spiritual way,
which was his mother’s way.
Later in
l882, Father James became depressed. He missed his wife so much-- the only
person who had unconditional regard for him and his ideas. In November of l882,
he wasn’t feeling well, thought he was dying, though his doctors didn’t think
so. He found so much pleasure in looking forward to the glories of the next
life that he gave up eating and died. William was at first in shock and grief
and then felt a new sense of personal power. In honor of his father he gathered
a collection of his father’s work for publication, all exalting God and
negating self. The book got only
negative reviews and after a year had sold only one copy.
After his
parent’s died, Sister Alice had to be admitted to an asylum for a time. Brother
Wilkey finally died after suffering for years from Civil War wounds. Brother
Bob, a depressed alcoholic was dissipated, overweight, unemployed, left his
wife and children. As the elder brother William assumed much supportive
responsibility in these situations.
The worst
was between March and June of l885, when wife Alice suffered from scarlet fever
and had to be in isolation. Then Alice, and son Herman, came down with whooping
cough. Then Herman contracted bronchial pneumonia. His mother took him to her
bed nursing him night and day for a month until he died. In his Psychology
William wrote: “The passionate devotion of a mother—ill, herself, perhaps—to a
sick or dying child is perhaps the most simply beautiful moral spectacle that
human life affords. Contemning every danger, triumphing over every difficulty,
outlasting all fatigue, woman’s love is here invincibly superior to anything
that man can show.” (16)
Belief in a
spiritual world felt more necessary for Wm. and Alice after Herman’s death. He,
with eminent scientists, literary people and leading citizens founded the
American Society for Psychical Research, with 250 members. They conducted research on thought
transference, mesmerism, apparitions, divining rods, mediums—in the search for
new and undiscovered reality. Wm. attended twelve sittings with Ms. Piper, the
psychic who seemed most promising, after his son died, interviewed her,
hypnotized her, took copious notes on her trances, supported by Alice’s unwavering
belief in psychic phenomena.
William
made moves to enrich his life. He bought a farm at the base of Mount Chocorua,
New Hampshire, with a farmhouse with fourteen rooms, eleven doors and
magnificent views. He remodeled his Cambridge home to provide a capacious study
and library steps away from the living room. These projects were left in
Alice’s hands while he went off to Europe. She would not suffer in silence. His
flow of letters would gush with adoration and apologies.
As he
approached his fifties Wm. leveled off emotionally, was more often exuberant
about life than depressed. His friend John Chapman wrote, “He looked freshly at
life, and read books freshly…The last book he had read was always a great book,
the last person he talked with, a wonderful being.” His sister Alice said it
was as though he was born anew every morning. (17) Rollo Brown said, “To see
him was never to forget what it means to be alive.”(18)
This live,
fresh constantly changing experience exuberantly finds its way into his Psychology,
and makes it an astonishing success. The work, published in l890, when William
was forty-eight years old, was like a live being coming out of his intellectual
camaraderie and fierce academic battles, his personal depth of depression and
exotic passionate loves, his losses and his successes. One of its best-known
chapters is on how habit develops character.
He knows what it is to hammer some lively regularity out of a tumultuous
emotional and intellectual life.
An idea,
which dominates his Psychology, is “the stream of consciousness.” He
experiences his own life as a stream. In
his life the range of feeling, constantly varied, and yet he was the same
continuous person. He did not see the digital findings of the laboratory
sufficient. Though valuable, they left
out the stream-like quality of consciousness. Nor did he think much of the
pronouncements of the principles of human nature, the Christian view of the
nature of man, or the metaphysicians’ views of man’s essence. They left out too
much of the nuances and range of what he actually experienced in his life and
the life of others. He came to believe his own experience and found it
exciting, varied, ever-changing, always moving—like a stream.
It was
infectious. Student after student exclaimed about how much it meant to be
permitted to believe his or her own experience. Gertrude Stein thanked James
for reviving her spirit: “to find faith in a truer, more eternal world, in her
own abilities, in her future accomplishments, and to believe what is in the
line of my needs, for only by such belief is a need fulfilled.” (19) James even
listened to young Teddy Roosevelt pontificate in class. He was the first to
request student evaluations. He wanted to know how the students experienced his
class. He took a special interest in
brilliant oddballs, nourished and helped launch dozens of careers. His hours
for being available to students were during the evening dinner hour at home.
William
instinctively moved toward enlivening relationship. He enjoyed a number of
intense, personal relationships with intelligent, attractive, lively women with
whom he met and corresponded regularly. Sarah Whitman, a tall, graceful,
expensively dressed, socially gracious woman ran a salon, a philosophical club
where he was a frequent guest. They admired each other, shared confidences, his
dreams, his sister’s diaries—which no one outside the family would know about
for years. Rosina Emmet, lived with William’s family for a time to go to
Radcliffe, a flirtatious, bright, lively one who reminded him of Minnie Temple.
But Pauline
Goldmark made him feel young again. Her father owned the company that made
munitions for the Union army. Her brother supervised the building of the Panama
Canal. Her sister married Louis Brandeis. They lived near Putnam Camp in the
Adirondacks, a frequent get-away for William throughout his life. In June of
l898, William was excited about meeting Pauline and her friends. He set off by
himself early in the day for a hike up Mt. Marcy, the highest point in the region,
descending to Panther Lodge, where he met Pauline and her friends. Filled with
intense feeling they socialized around the fire through the evening, long into
the night. He was so restless and excited he couldn’t sleep. They got up early,
left at 6 a.m. to climb Mt. Marcy, and down, then scrambled up scenic
Basin Mountain, then up to the Gothics. His heart started giving him trouble,
which it would do more and more for his last years. He wrote: “My heart has
been kicking about terribly of late, stopping and hurrying, and aching and so
forth…but I’m not giving up to it too much.”(20) It took twelve years for it to
give out.
During that
time he didn’t give in to it too much. His Psychology and its Briefer
Version from which most of the good stuff was taken, nevertheless, sold one
edition after another. It became the standard text in college psychology
courses for a generation. But he was moving on as he always moved on, now to
think of himself as a philosopher. To him philosophy had to do with what is basic
in life, not a musty academic specialty. Because of his popularity, which
improved his mental health markedly, he was in demand as a lecturer, a major
form of popular entertainment before radio and television.
He was
selective about invitations to speak, wanting to have an impact for the good
and get paid well. He gave a series of lectures at Stanford, making sure he
took the only train into San Francisco the day after the l906 earthquake to be
where the action was. He gave many talks to teachers. He thought it worthwhile
to challenge teachers, challenge them to appeal to student’s fighting impulse
to tackle aggressively subject matter, however distasteful, which gets them
ready for professional competence, as, indeed, he had been challenged.
He loved to
deliver popular lectures to women’s colleges in New England. He often describes
these women as being filled with “bottled lightening.” In his lectures to them he articulates most
of the ideas which he expounds in detail
in his later books. In his essay, “Is
life worth living?” he describes his struggle against his black depressions. He
knows the territory. He takes his listeners through the journey against
depression, to finally reach the point where it is better to act as though life
is worth living because the outcomes are so much more congenial than if one
does not. Only a depressed person can recognize the profundity of that journey.
In his
essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” he recognizes that each person
has his own stream of consciousness which has its own direction, shape and
perspective. One person can only dimly appreciate the stream of consciousness
of another, indeed, is blind to much if not most of what is going on in another
person. So respectful curiosity about another would seem to be in order, with a
sense that the vast sea of ignorance inherent in each meeting must be
acknowledged.
This
perspective has profound consequences. If each person has his own constellation
of meaning, there must be many meanings. Indeed, we must live in a pluralistic
universe. This leads to a volume on the wonder and complexity of things,
entitled, of course, A Pluralistic Universe. His openness to so many
meanings led James to episodes on the verge of personal fragmentation. Alice was the only one who could settle him
down.
In his
essay on “What makes Life Significant?” After many pages he finds the answer
easily, as he has found it for himself. It is having a life in which one’s
passions propel one’s talents to make a difference, with all the vitality of
the struggle experienced fully.
William
James lives in his stream of consciousness and it keeps moving. He writes: “I
live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and
thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true.
But to hold any one of them-—and I absolutely do not care which—as if it never
could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken
attitude, and I think that the whole of philosophy will bear me out.”(21) Truth
is also in the stream. This perspective got to be named radical empiricism.
His stream
of consciousness begins with an overstimulating, constantly moving childhood,
growing in the give and take around the family table presided by a dominating,
outrageously idealistic, childlike father and a practical mother. The stream continues by bouncing from one
school to another, from one subject to another, from classroom to mountain
climbing to spa. It moves to getting a job, getting married, having a family,
enjoying personal relationships and intellectual dialogue. It moves from
plugging away at anatomy, to elaborating his range of feeling life in dialogue
with the best minds in his Psychology. It moves to explore what his
confidence in his own experience might mean as a way to proceed in life—his
philosophy.
But he does
not stop moving. As a dog cannot comprehend a higher consciousness, so a man
might be open to spiritual experience. He sets out to explore the “Varieties of
Religious Experience,” the subject of the Gifford Lectures which he presents in
England to much acclaim. He examines
with his characteristic objective curiosity a wide range of spiritual
experiences, though he himself has only some few moments of large feeling that
may or may not be joined with a higher consciousness. When he died he wanted his brother, Harry, to
hang around his house for a few weeks to see if he could send him some
message. Harry did so, and there was
none.
William
James has a number of modern admirers. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the Leopold
Lecture at Northwestern University last fall, referred to William James as
“America’s greatest philosopher.” Bernard Meland said that if he could have a
library of only one book it would be James’ Psychology. Robert Coles
thinks that modern psychology could profit from more of James’ openness to the
stream of experience.
There are
admirers, but William James doesn’t have any followers. He was at his best as a
teacher, teaching students to believe in, to explore intelligently their own
experience whereever their passions took them to make a difference. So each person goes his own way…not William
James’ way.
It does
seem to me, however, that he articulates an American style of thinking, as Mark
Twain expresses a distinctive American literary style. I think we’ve forgotten
William James because we’ve internalized him.
It’s in the fabric of the American psyche: His spirited individualism,
his capacity for give and take, his belief in the freshness and meaning of
experience which makes things happen, his skepticism about historical,
philosophical, theological and psychological systems, his optimism through
great struggle, his joy in a pluralistic universe, his respect for a variety of
religious experience and even respect for his own lack of it.
It’s a
certain take on life.
Footnotes:
1.
A Genealogical Table of the James Family is on pp.
520-1, in Gay Wilson Allen’s William James, Viking Press, l967.
2.
GWA, l0.
3.
Linda Simon, Genuine Reality, A Life of William
James, Harcourt, Brace and Company, l998, 39.
4.
WJ to AJ, 31 August (l865) Correspondence 4:ll6.
5.
Henry James’ Autobiography, New York,
Criterion, l956, 124.
6.
GWA 96.
7.
LS 96.
8.
In letters of Mary Temple to John Gray 7,27 January
l869, Houghton.
9.
From WJ, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and
VII.
10. WJ, diary,
30 April l870, Houghton.
11. WJ, “The
Will to Believe,” in Essays on Faith and Morals, Meridian l962, p. 62.
12. WJ,
3/10/1869 in Essays in Psychical Research , 1-4, 1986.
13. GWA 215.
14. Louis
Menand, The Metaphysical Club, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2001.
15. LM 206-7.
16. WJ, Principles
of Psychology, 1055-56.
17. LS 213.
18. GWA 301.
19. LS 245.
20. LS 282-3.
21. WJ, The
Will to Believe, Meridian, l962, 45.