The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn 0674244273, 9780674244276

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THE VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE

THE VARIETIES of

EXPERIENCE

WILLIAM JAMES AFTER THE LINGUISTIC TURN

Alexis Dianda

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England  2023

Copyright © 2023 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Jacket art: ullstein bild © Getty Images Jacket design: Annamarie McMahon Why 9780674247642 (EPUB) 9780674247659 (PDF) the library of congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Dianda, Alexis, author. Title: The varieties of experience : William James after the linguistic turn / Alexis Dianda. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022034378 | ISBN 9780674244276 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: James, William, 1842–1910. | Experience. | Pragmatism. Classification: LCC B945.J24 D53 2023 | DDC 191—dc23/eng/20221129 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034378

In memory of Eric Anthamatten, forever the better Jamesian

Contents

Introduction

1



1 Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn

21



2 Psychology and the Subject of Experience

70



3 The Willfulness of Belief



4 Radical Empiricism and the Metaphysics of Pure Experience

119

171

Conclusion: Pragmatism in a Pluralistic Universe 223 abbreviations 235 notes 237 acknowledgments 263 index 265

THE VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE

Introduction

William James relished in vagueness and indeterminacy. He approached the neatness and coherence of a philosophical system with a skepticism that insisted on those features of life that tend to escape or overflow our concepts and our philosophical systems. James oriented his philosophy around the goal of reinstating “the vague and inarticulate to its proper place.”1 And vagueness, now as in James’s day, is a difficult principle to defend. Given his antisystematic impulses and his constant reminders that our concepts never quite manage to capture the whole, it should come as no surprise that the standard by which James measured a theory or description was its ability to capture experience. In the pages that follow, I weave together an account of the meaning and intention of James’s appeals to experience, the role experience plays in his vision of the philosophical enterprise, and the value it has for philosophical thinking today. This is a task that faces a number of obstacles, chief among them is James’s own (often principled) disdain for the neatness and clarity of philosophical sys-

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tems. But perhaps the most significant challenge is found in the very term “experience.” The subject of countless arguments, it has meant such wildly different things across the history of philosophy. There is, of course, a touch of perversity in the idea of turning to a philosopher who praises the vague and inarticulate for insight into a concept that has been identified as “one of the most obscure we have.”2 However, it is precisely James’s openness, pluralism, and sensitivity to those features of mental life that often escape our notice or resist neat and orderly classification that demonstrates the value of rooting the philosophical project in experience. To see this fully, however, requires engagement not only with James’s critics but also with those who have become critics of the philosophical value of experience itself. James has been met with no shortage of critics, many of whom home in on his inconsistent, imprecise, vague, and sometimes even contradictory presentation of the meaning and role of experience. The early critic Herbert Nichols, for example, lays out a catalog of James’s inconsistent appeals to experience: From his “Psychology” we get this: “as universally understood . . . experience means experience of something foreign supposed to impress us.” Plainly “something foreign” is not solipsistic. But from this JOURNAL we get these: “The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the pure experience.” Again: “The instant field of the present is always experience in its ‘pure’ state.” The context seems to make this “experience” not solipsistic; but in any case, since by “continuous transition” one’s whole field of mind always is “the instant field of the present,” how then “is the instant field of the present always experience in its ‘pure’ state?” For again: “‘Pure experience’ is the name I give to the original flux of life before reflexion has

Introduction  3

categorized it. Only new born babes, etc. have the experience pure in the literal sense.” And again . . . And again . . . While finally “Experience,” with a capital “E” is the name he gives to the entire completed “Weltanschauung” or rational world, whose cognitive function between minds his philosophical writings are supposed to explain.3

Nichols is correct to point to the seeming incompatibility present in some of these appeals. James does refer to experience as a prereflective immersion in what he will call a “blooming confusion,” and later the “stream” of subjective thought, and a Weltanschauung. Sometimes experience is described in such a way that it entails hostility to language and concepts; sometimes it stands in for the ineffable. Experience also features in James’s later work as a metaphysical concept, a “stuff” that exists prior to any distinction between self and object, thought and thing. This is a use that famously spurred James’s friend C. S. Peirce to write the following: “What you call ‘pure experience’ is not experience at all and certainly ought to have a name. It is downright bad morals to misuse words, for it prevents philosophy from becoming a science.”4 Charles Morris, a later commentator, would make a similar observation: “If everything in and of itself is an ‘experience,’ then the term ‘experience’ has lost its ‘intellectual’ or ‘cognitive’ purport (however appealing this usage may be on other grounds). To say that X is an item of experience is no longer to say anything whatsoever about it.”5 More recently, Richard Bernstein, one of pragmatism’s most notable contemporary defenders, notes that the classical pragmatists’ frequent appeal to experience often serves as a “deus ex machina that is supposed to solve (or dissolve) all sorts of knotty philosophical problems.” He goes on to say, “It would be fruitless to try and develop an overarching theory that encompasses all the meanings

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and uses of experience by the classical American pragmatists.”6 The problem that James (and the other pragmatists) often fall into is that in their attempt to rescue experience from the waste bin of rationalism, they can often end up making it work on so many different levels that the word loses its specificity, its “cognitive purport,” and thus its real force. While it is excessive to fault James with “bad morals,” the frustration even his most attentive readers express on the question of experience is sometimes warranted. Some of James’s uses of experience are incompatible, and some of his descriptions are misleading. For example, James will occasionally discuss experience as an ineffable source of meaning that resists all conceptualization.7 At other times, however, he is more concerned with discussing the ways in which experience can thwart our efforts; surprise us; exceed our expectations; defy our conceptual grasp; and force us to reevaluate ourselves, our language, our concepts, and our descriptions. Appealing to the sense of the vague and ambiguous here is a defense not of carelessness or lack of precision but rather of what I take to rest at the heart of James’s philosophical project: openness. This openness, whether it be the openness to change, the openness to correction, or the openness to other ways of seeing and being in the world, is the great virtue of James’s thinking and is often signaled by the term “pluralism.” Experience, pluralism, the vague and inarticulate: each of these concepts functions as a bulwark against what James perceives as the excesses of the philosophical tradition’s “vicious intellectualism.” But James’s critics are not easily dismissed, and contemporary philosophers who are wary of the term “experience” are not always the intellectualists James might lead one to believe.

Introduction  5

While some of the conceptual problems associated with James’s appeals to experience are unique to his philosophical approach, many are not. Experience is fraught with difficulties even in our everyday language. “Experience” can refer to both immediate sensory events and the knowledge that results from skill or practice attained over time. The conceptual connection between, for example, the sensory experience that accompanies some taste and the expertise afforded to an experienced surgeon is hardly clear. In both ordinary and philosophical speech, we refer more routinely to experience as a more abstract undergoing of either individuals or collectives. We talk about the experiences of the oppressed or the experience of grief. When I say that the dancer’s skill is the result of experience, I mean something like practice, continued activity, habits, and routines that produce some kind of skill and art. However, when I say that I’ve experienced grief or love, no form of skill or expertise in the matter is implied. I may be more enriched or experienced for having loved or lost, but not necessarily more skilled or knowledgeable. The difference between someone who becomes more skillful or wiser in coping with arduous and complex experiences and one who does not, doesn’t seem to track to mere fact of practice having experienced. Even the clumsiest of dancers is made slightly more artful with every practiced step. This is hardly the case with love, grief, or trauma. Philosophically, the concept of experience has encompassed a wide range of meanings. As is often noted, the German language has two words that in English are collapsed into “experience”: Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung, which is etymologically linked with the verb fahren (“to travel”), often refers to experience as the accumulation of knowledge and suggests the coherence of life expe-

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rience and wisdom. Erlebnis, which comes from the verb leben (“to live”), is often translated as “lived experience” (though this should not imply that Erfahrung is not in some sense “lived”) and is primarily concerned with one’s inner, individuated life and the events that are lived but not necessarily known. Neither of these terms, Erlebnis or Erfahrung, map on in a neat or coherent way to James’s philosophical concern with experience.8 While we could quickly and crudely say that Husserl and Dilthey were concerned with Erlebnis and that Heidegger and Hegel are more concerned with developing the concept of experience along the lines of Erfahrung, no such rudimentary gloss could be made of James’s work, despite his firm place in the late nineteenth century. While it is correct to say that at times James’s characterizations of experience can bear remarkable similarities to Erlebnis, it is important to resist collapsing the two terms. Kloppenberg, for example, comes quite close to identifying them when he argues that after James “discarded the positivistic trappings lingering in the Principles of Psychology,” he moves closer to understanding experience along the lines of Dilthey’s empiricism, and with it the notion of Erlebnis.9 It would, however, be equally wrong to identify it strictly with the Hegelian Erfahrung.10 The ambiguity that is preserved in the English “experience”—that it does not in fact distinguish between these varied senses that are distinguished in German or other languages—is key for James. Consider, for example, the immediate and disastrous effects that would result from circumscribing the topic of The Varieties of Religious Experience along the lines of Erlebnis. The effect would be to ignore at least two prominent features that are given so much attention in this work. First, that religious experience is often understood precisely as a wandering journey or passage where one

Introduction  7

comes to some knowledge (i.e., the divine). This deployment of experience is most evident in the two chapters James devotes to the journeys, dangers, and narratives that detail conversion.11 Second, that religious faith is often thought to be something that connects an individual person to something other than herself, be it scripture, a tradition, a set of inherited practices, a community, or God. This latter intuition is preserved in both Wobbermin’s 1907 and Herms’s 1979 German translations of the Varieties of Religious Experience, both of which use Erfahrung in the title.12 Meanwhile, Koflibitz’s Hebrew translation uses the word ‫( חוויה‬Chavaiah), which is roughly equivalent to the German Erlebnis.13 This translation preserves what is also a basic claim of the Varieties: feelings, private episodic experiences, or lived moments give us a feeling of the divine and are the source of the religious ecstasies and accounts that provide so much of the autobiographical material cited in the Varieties. To further complicate matters, one could stress the etymological point and look to the often-synonymous Latin words experientia and experimentum, which had a more direct impact upon the development of the British empiricists and the Anglo-American tradition. Bacon, for example, will use the two terms interchangeably throughout The New Organon and other texts to stand for both the passive and uncoerced observations we identify with experience and the contrived and constructed events we call “experiments.”14 This is often the sense in which experience is invoked by the classical empiricists. When James comes to discuss the role of experience in his Pragmatism lectures, he will tell us that “man’s beliefs at any time are so much experience funded” and that “ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.”15 In such passages, James stresses the active,

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intervening, and sometimes perilous experimental qualities of experience. How James reconciles these divergent meanings into “experience” is perhaps the most remarkable feature of his work. The ambiguity contained in the English “experience” is a virtue that allows James to connect what he sees as the roots of, for example, religious life—an experience of the divine, of the terror of sin, and so on—to the journey, history, and connections that transcend the lived or private experience of any one subject. The anxiety or frustration expressed by a number of philosophers today who identify themselves within the pragmatic tradition is, for the most part, a concern or skepticism regarding the legitimacy of Erlebnis. What they typically mean when they come to criticize experience is not the Hegelian Erfahrung, construed specifically as, in Robert Brandom’s words, “something done rather than something that merely happens—a process, engaging in a practice, the exercise of abilities, rather than an episode.”16 These critics stress Erfahrung’s “decidedly non-Cartesian sense of ‘experience’ in which a want-ad can specify ‘No experience necessary,’ without intending thereby to invite applications from zombies.”17 Brandom, like Rorty before him, positions the pragmatists as having helped to rid us of our need to hold onto the idea of experience as an input (a term he seems to identify with Erlebnis). The point I wish to stress here is that not only is this an incorrect reading of the fundamental insights of James’s pragmatism, of which “experience” is the central term, but it reintroduces a series of problems (in particular the standoff that a good deal of late twentieth-­century philosophy has fallen into, e.g., the “experience vs. language” debate) that I see James’s experientially grounded pragmatism as more equipped to deal with. By privileging language and exclusively attending to the active ele-

Introduction  9

ments of Erfahrung, the argument that emerges from the neopragmatists is that, more precisely, experience is either a philosophically/ epistemologically empty reference to stimuli or a more robust reference to language use and enculturation. One cannot adopt or reconstruct experience without also addressing and remaining sensitive to certain conceptual problems that have plagued the term since the seventeenth century. These can be generally classified into two overlapping kinds: experience’s lack of conceptual specificity and its historical ties to other commitments such as foundationalism or representationalism. The history of philosophy, empiricism in particular, often invokes experience as some kind of foundation for knowledge or the link between the mind and what it represents. As both foundationalism and representationalism are called into question by the pragmatic tradition, this latter concern is particularly pressing. In proposing a way out (or perhaps simply around) the problems associated with experience, I do not mean to suggest that James solves or dissolves the debates concerning perception’s contribution to knowledge, or that James offers an epistemology that safeguards the non- or the precognitive. That the value of experience has turned on epistemological debates about objectivity, perception, and the noncognitive is, I believe, unfortunate. While such problems and concerns are certainly legitimate, they do not exhaust the meaning or value of experience, particularly as we find it in James. The narrowing of experience’s philosophical value to the field of epistemology is an unfortunate, perplexing feature of neopragmatic thought, a philosophical approach identified with James, Dewey, and others. The neopragmatic criticism of experience, most clearly located in Rorty, raises a question: How did pragmatism, a tradition that

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once ranked among the philosophy’s great defenders of experience, become nearly synonymous with the overcoming of experience? The response to this question can be briefly put: pragmatic inquiry became preoccupied with traditional epistemological inquiry. I am concerned with offering more than a way into (or out of ) a set of debates about experience. What follows is a portrait of the thought of one of America’s great philosophers, one who is often overlooked or only partially considered. “Experience” was his central term and yet the distinctiveness of this concept is often overlooked and saddled with the baggage of the criticisms of experience that are often associated with neopragmatism’s linguistic turn. James’s “experience” is not only a valuable and robust concept that calls out for defense but is also what will allow us to read James in such a way that provides concrete links between his endeavors to write America’s first psychology textbook in the 1890s, his ethics, his pragmatism, and his metaphysics. There are challenges present in reconstructing James’s thought throughout all these efforts. Many have seen James’s corpus as falling into distinct and conflicting periods: the dualistic period of the Principles, the pragmatic period, the metaphysical period.18 While James does not offer us anything like a consistent system that is executed across his writing—and surely his thought grows and shifts across his career—I argue that there is a thematic unity to his work. This unity, which hinges upon what is invested in “experience,” allows us to move between them, to see more clearly the ways in which his work in pragmatism is informed and structured by his psychology, the way his moral philosophy and metaphysics are an extension of his earliest concerns. It is central to my argument that James’s notion of experience is seen in an existential light—by existential here I mean simply that

Introduction  11

it is attuned to questions of conduct, belief, and our moral selfimages. In short, it is a concept that ties his concerns in psychology to those in moral and religious philosophy. His descriptions, metaphors, and focus on the first-person perspective serve to bring his readers into contact with the vagaries that often lie outside the scope of our more coarsely drawn conceptual distinctions and attune the reader to complexities of what he calls our “mental life.” In the final analysis, his particular method comes to reveal some of the more important aspects of our conduct, condition, and constitution. In his course notes for a 1904–1905 class in metaphysis, James gives four reasons for experience to be over any other the “ultimate term” of his philosophical project. This is what appears in his notes: I propose “Experience” as our primal term. Its advantages: 1. Neutrality: double barreled. It admits object & subject but Doesn’t prejudge “soul” “matter” etc. 2. Its concreteness. Clearness. 3. Its convenience pragmatically. 4. Its inclusiveness: matter alone or mind alone exclude. Duality precludes Idealism, etc.19

To anticipate what will be developed further throughout the chapters that follow, I will say a brief word about the advantages James claims for experience. First, we should note the polymorphous character of experience. It is at once concrete and neutral; it is inclusive and pragmatic. I’ll take these in turn. (1) Neutrality: it stands in for terms such as “soul” and “matter” indifferently. James will famously identify experience in his Essays

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in Radical Empiricism as “double barreled,” “taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context . . . plays the part of a thing known, of an objective ‘content.’”20 We should begin to suspect here that whatever James means by experience it cannot have the same meaning as it did for the classical empiricists. Experience is also (2) concrete: I do not think that James here means that it is concrete in the sense that it is a fixed or unambiguous term. Rather, he suggests that experience has the advantage of suggesting a brute and familiar intimacy, or a lived self. (3) Experience is pragmatically convenient. This particular claim will run directly counter to a claim that will be made of experience by Rorty, who relentlessly points to the inconvenience of experience. While I will have more to say on this point in Chapter 1, by “convenience,” we can understand that through experience James thinks we can appeal to the practical relations and ends that orient the pragmatic ethos. By connecting, for example, an idea or a question to some practical difficulty, to a problem within our lived experience, we are better able to deal with philosophical problems.21 The final characteristic brings us back to the first: inclusiveness. Because experience is neutral, it is also pluralistic—both, as we can see in James’s later metaphysics, in that it allows us to undermine the tradition’s dualisms and in that it points to an unfinished world, a picture of human knowledge and action that is fallible, open, and always up for further debate. Experience becomes so troublesome for James, for his readers, and for the tradition that follows him because the term is one that resists our attempts to manage it. That said, the neutrality (doublebarreled meaning), concreteness, pragmatic convenience, and inclusiveness can be laid out and made clear. I describe it through two key features: (1) experience is active, something done that in-

Introduction  13

volves both the active aspects of subjectivity (e.g., attention and selection) and the processes of experimentation or education through which we come to test, exercise, and be frustrated by our beliefs, hypothesis, and actions; (2) experience is lived, meaning that in addition to being an activity it refers to concrete and felt qualities ( passive). These preliminary features of what I am picking out as central to James’s use of experience suggest different things. This is, as we have already seen, one of the chief complaints raised against James’s usage. What I attempt to clarify is how these features are all related and, in the context of the neopragmatic turn to language, not ultimately reducible to language or stimuli. We can call experience active in the sense that it is always to some degree a result of some interest, prejudice, trial, or test and passive in the sense that we are undergoing consequences, encountering resistances, and being frustrated by our best efforts. Seen this way, then, introspection, thinking, reasoning, accounting for ourselves, and contesting knowledge claims become the means by which experiences are shared and made socially meaningful. Put simply, experience refers to the relationship between the subject and her world. It carries with it the implication of both an active, human, world-making subject and, at the same time, a subject who is passive or open to a world that can resist, confound, or silence her best efforts. To give experience this particular existential inflection and to make my broader case for why James’s thought demands our attention, I accord tremendous weight to James’s Principles of Psychology. The twentieth century has seen a number of profound engagements with James’s work. The lion’s share of these interpretations, however, see James’s thought primarily through the lens of his Pragmatism. Reading James’s pragmatic thought through his psy-

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chological and moral contributions (instead of reading his psychological and moral contributions through his pragmatism) ultimately provides a more robust picture of his thought. I am not the first reader of James to suggest this approach. Charlene Haddock Seig­ fried, to whom my thinking on James’s is profoundly indebted, suggests as much in her 1990 William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. Nor am I the first to emphasize the centrality of experience to James’s thought: this is a point stressed quite notably in the thinking of John McDermott. What is missing from these earlier efforts, however, is sustained critical engagement with the concept of experience. To do so one must, I believe, engage seriously with experience’s critics and take heed of the dangers that can be found in James’s appeals to experience. I need to convince my more skeptical reader of a few key points. First, James ultimately rejects two thoughts that have animated a wide range of philosophical thought since the twentieth century: (1) that the philosophical meaning of experience (i.e., the meaning that is not merely exhausted by epistemologically irrelevant causal happenings) is a thoroughly linguistic event or achievement; and (2) that the subject herself is discursively constituted. Second, James is innocent of both objections in their pernicious form; he neither calls upon a substantial or Cartesian subject nor makes experience play its traditional foundational role. For James, experience, though it is a “given,” need not be understood as that which Sellars diagnoses as mythical. Experience, though it involves and implies a “subject,” does not imply consciousness in the form that we might also diagnose as mythical. James, I argue, does not fall into the negative traps that some critics have argued are necessarily implied by appeals to experience. To capture both points, I will turn my attention primarily to James’s work in psychology. It

Introduction  15

is in James’s description of the subject, the will, and the relationship between belief and reality that the meaning and urgency of his appeals to experience become clear. Third, and most constructively, “experience,” James’s “ultimate term,” has the potential to reshape the trajectory of pragmatic thinking and philosophic methodology. To abandon it is to abandon one of the greatest insights of James’s pragmatism. For James, philosophy was never an exercise in solving puzzles, erecting systems, or having the final say on some truth. While striving for clarity, the philosopher is more committed to the betterment of life. A theme that is present in James’s work from the beginning to the end is the caution against what he calls “vicious intellectualism.” Vicious intellectualism is, for James, not simply the appeal to explanatory categories, to concepts, or the attempt to be clear. James defines vicious intellectualism as “the treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails positively to include.”22 In other words, intellectualism is the reduction of the complexities of our existence to excessively limiting concepts or categories; it is vicious to the extent that by focusing on our abstract conceptions we cut ourselves off from engagement with the very things we purportedly attempt to understand or engage.23 These worries about intellectualism give way to James’s appeal to the vague. When he calls on philosophers to reinstate the vague to its proper place, he is calling on us to emphasize and reckon with the varied hues and shades of our experience and the ultimately pluralistic character of the world. The pragmatist’s object is always, for James, the lived, and the lived is never a clearly defined object. The vague, the metaphorical, the engaged, that which James will argue are better suited to the complexities and ambiguities inherent in experience, are more capable of bringing

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to light and ultimately coping with the concerns that pragmatism attempts to address. Some forms of contemporary pragmatism, in attempting to clarify and bring rigor to the pragmatic method, have slid into the very intellectualism that pragmatism was intended to oppose.24 There is a great deal that philosophers today can learn from James. Much of James’s continued relevance is tied to how we understand or value experience. To show this, I move throughout James’s writings, focusing particularly on both the theme of experience and the nature of philosophical inquiry. In Chapter 1, I discuss some of the conflicts over experience that have animated much of the scholarly debate in pragmatism from the twentieth century to the present. I show how the better criticisms of experience miss their target when read back into James’s philosophical project. In fact, what should be clear from my discussion of his critical radicalization of empiricism is that James was an early critic of appeals to immediacy. Judgment, understanding, and knowledge are always, for James, the products of reflective activity. Reflective activity is, in turn, always conceptual and linguistic activity. Discrimination, conceptualization, unity, and so on are the primary means in which we come to know anything. And yet, James insists that this does not exhaust our relation to the world. Chapter 2 outlines what I refer to as a pragmatic-existential notion of experience, which first emerges in James’s psychological writings. I call this concept pragmatic-existential not only to distinguish it from the epistemic or foundational concept of experience that ought to be the specific object of pragmatic critique but also to emphasis that James’s widest philosophical concerns are the human activities that can be loosely understood as “moral.” The central task of the second chapter is to describe the subject, the “stream

Introduction  17

of experience.” The Jamesian subject is shown to be an alternative to the integrated, substantial, autonomous subject that has traditionally been associated with appeals to experience. James’s subject leads us to question, for example, the conceptual link that Lyotard draws between the marriage of the “overthrowing of experience” with the overthrowing of the subject or the ease with which appeals are seen as necessarily antipragmatic.25 James does not suppose a Cartesian subject or a deep alienation between self and world that serves as a precondition for experience. Nor does he claim for experience a form of epistemological justification. Chapter 3 then moves to a discussion of “The Will to Believe” to underscore the significance of and manner in which James draws explicit limits on the “Promethean” or active subject that has received so much critical attention. By connecting the discussion of belief with the analysis of reality and the will in the Principles and the Varieties, I show how the concern with experience is not epistemic but moral. The focus here is not, How does the mind know the world? but rather, How does the subject change the world? It is in and through the language of experience that James’s pragmatism takes on its most vital character. The world appears to us as colored in one way or another—as a place of hope and possibility or as hollow or insignificant—because we are interested in and attentive to some things and not others. In this sense, it can be said that our interests, moods, and desires are shaped by the character of the world. Throughout I point to an aspect of the Jamesian concept of experience that focuses less upon an opposition between experience and language or epistemology and psychology and more toward the sphere of the existential and phenomenological. This particular existential inflection of James’s pragmatism is something that I

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argue escapes the grasp of those who focus their analysis of pragmatism narrowly on epistemology and who consequently attempt to rid us of the explanatory force of experience. The spirit of, for example, Rorty’s pragmatism—one that keeps culture open to new, competing, and novel self-images—is a spirit better served by the methods he jettisons as not sufficiently linguistic. While Chapter 4 serves to draw out some of the more perplexing and ultimately unhelpful usages one can find in James’s later work, we are left with the thought that the neopragmatists have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. What James’s thought prepares us for, what I try to present here, is a model of experience that affords us with a rich vocabulary for understanding the relationship between the subject and her world. This understanding can and does help us to see the value and place of, for example, the irony Rorty highlights as central to the pragmatist’s commitments, and yet doesn’t commit us to the discursivity thesis. Again, in the very spirit of Rorty, this is not a question of one view better corresponding to the ultimate nature of Reality but of a choice between helpful and unhelpful self-images. When we are confronted with events, choices, and experiences for which we have no ready-made metaphor, scheme, or description, we are better served by a vision of the world that is open, plural, and underdetermined. The lesson here is illustrated in James’s telling of that fateful hike in the mountains of North Carolina found in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” Traveling through a more rugged and unforgiving America, James’s academic bourgeois life in Cambridge had done little to prepare him for what he was about to see: nothing but “hideousness,” “a sort of ulcer,” a way of life so different that it appears empty in value.26 In his description of struggling to overcome the distinctive

Introduction  19

blindness we all have to other ways of life and values not our own, James gives an account of the redescription of the contingency of our vocabularies and the posture of what Rorty will call the ironists: “the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her most central beliefs and desires—someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance.”27 But, for James, it remains impossible to describe the mind, our practical, moral, and social lives, without referring back to the contingent and ultimately ambiguous lived experiences that, for better or worse, color our perspectives. As the opening words of “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” tell us, “Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings they arouse in us.”28 The struggle to find new descriptions, to see value where we had not seen it before, to nevertheless accept a value we remain blind to, is the pluralist’s posture toward the world. The hope expressed in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” is the same hope Rorty identifies with Lessing in those final moments of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. However, we are now able to see why construing such a hope as a hope that “the culture space left by the demise of critical epistemology will not be filled” emaciates the hope and promise of James’s pragmatism.29 In Pragmatism, James reminds us that the pragmatist questions not only the intellectualist’s epistemic position but also the “structure of the universe” she presupposes.30 One way to put the problem James’s position must confront is that his rejection of the fact/value dichotomy or the rejection of foundationalism seems to preclude the possibility of a philosophically relevant role for experience. According to Rorty, to finish what

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pragmatism started in its radical critique of the epistemological and metaphysical tradition requires a deliberate and systematic linguistic turn. For Rorty, woolly language like “introspection,” “the subject,” and “experience,” ought to be replaced by terms like “vocabulary,” “sentence,” and “language.” What a position such as Rorty’s seems to be committed to is the idea that for something to be philosophically relevant it must be relevant to epistemology. On such a view, it is not surprising that all James’s talk of experience or psychology is cast aside in favor of his discussion of the pragmatic approach to truth. Behind pragmatism’s linguistic turn sits a commitment to a particular and unnecessary vision of what constitutes philosophy. James’s philosophy of experience offers us a different way to understand philosophy, one grounded in perspective. However sceptical one may be of the attainment of universal truths . . . one can never deny that philosophical study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind. In a word, it means the possession of mental perspective.31

Philosophy is no longer conceived as a love of Truth. Philosophy is grounded not in the search for Truth or Beauty or Reality, but in the quest for perspectival shifts and new postures in which the philosopher learns to imagine the alien, to see the unusual, to notice what has passed unnoticed. To see and feel differently than what we have become accustomed to is the ultimate goal of James’s philosophy. This is an individual goal as much as it is a social one. It is a goal that I argue is better served by a philosophy of experience.

CHAPTER 1

Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn

For many within the tradition of pragmatism today, the so-called dogmas of empiricism, together with the critique of immediacy, have made it seem both desirable and necessary to pursue philosophical questions regarding knowledge, belief, action, mind, and meaning without appeal to the once inescapable concept of experience. The hopes of the empiricists’ foundational project—to secure the data of experience as the ground of knowledge, to test individual propositions up against a “tribunal of experience”—­ appear to many as little more than relics of a philosophical history plagued by confusion and imprecision. Swayed by argument ranging from Sellars, Hegel, and Rorty, many have claimed that experience (in the philosophically “interesting” sense of the term) is always already mediated by language, vocabularies, culture, neurology, and so on, to the effect that anything that could have once been meaningful about the appeal to the distinct category of experience is now taken up by looking to language or other formal structures. This is the basic thought animating Richard Rorty’s claim that “the philosophically interesting sense—the only sense relevant to 21

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epistemology—of experience is the one that goes back to ta phainomena rather than to empiria.”1 The general conclusion upon which many have settled is that if experience cannot play the role of “furnishing” the mind with ideas or data, securing objectivity, then it has no valid philosophical status. We are no longer in a position to see the mind as a “mirror of nature”—a metaphor that has secured the role of experience in a modern philosophy.2 We are told that our deep-seated intuitions, such as those that tell us that there must be a substantial subject of experience or that there must be a meaningful way in which our experience connects to the world, are just that: unjustified intuitions. Consequently, some of the most profound insights of our philosophical age have ended in a stark either/or: either we abandon experience as a meaningful concept and any residue of realism, or we accept a form of foundationalism and givenism with all the paradoxes such approaches entail. There is little room for doubt that experience cannot play the role cast for it at the dawn of epistemology, nor can it live up to the hopes empiricists once invested in it. Many contemporary pragmatists have understood the arguments of structuralists, post-structuralists, or Sellarsians to be the last word on what is taken to be the pragmatic concept of experience—a concept that sits at the heart of the classical pragmatists’ endeavors. Richard Rorty plays a decisive yet curious role with respect to the status of the pragmatic tradition. He is the philosopher we credit with bringing the importance of the classical pragmatists to light for many analytic and continental philosophers in the twentieth century, and also one of the fiercest critics of the concept of experience.3 As a philosopher averse to even the mildest appeal to nonhuman authority, Rorty hears each of the differing pragmatic

Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn  23

concepts of experience as inheritances of the tradition it fought so hard to overcome, to relics of a past we would be best served by abandoning as opposed to reconstructing or reinterpreting. Thus, for Rorty, the appeals to “dumb acquaintance,” Erlebnis, or “pure experience” that are littered across James’s work are little more than appeals to the authoritative immediacy of a reality one is not entitled to claim. While there are compelling reasons as to why one ought to take this line of argument seriously, there is room for doubt about the dramatic conclusions someone like Rorty draws from them. First, I will say a word about the commitments that have shaped how pragmatism developed in the twentieth century. I will then take up a more extended discussion of the reasons for and consequences of the neopragmatic criticism of experience. The questions, concerns, and aims that have defined pragmatism from its inception in the late 1800s to the present have been farreaching and diverse. While there are common threads that run through the tradition, it can often appear as though there is more that pulls each of the self-proclaimed pragmatists apart than there are ties that bind them. James’s phrase “pragmatic temperament” is often used to speak for the general similarities between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pragmatists; I use it here with some reservation. It is hard to imagine three philosophers (not to mention those lesser discussed pragmatists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, Alain Locke, Horace Kallen, and George Herbert Mead) with more opposing temperaments than Peirce’s, James’s, and Dewey’s. What they do share is, of course, important, though perhaps little more than a family resemblance. How the tradition we call “pragmatism” will be defined, who will be included, and what will be made essential or pushed aside as accidental are all contested

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questions. As Rorty will say, “‘Pragmatism’ is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word.”4 There are numerous competing genealogies of the tradition, and the past few decades have seen a resurgence in works devoted to narrating the story of pragmatism.5 If we consider for a moment the seemingly divergent starting points offered in just two well-known attempts to refine our sense of the tradition, Cheryl Misak’s recent The American Pragmatists and Rorty’s “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” the tensions and similarities become apparent. Misak’s genealogy of pragmatism takes its central organizing theme from a rather unlikely source: Bertrand Russell. Like Russell, an early and fierce critic of the pragmatism tradition, Misak identifies pragmatism’s “theory of truth” as “the cardinal point in pragmatic philosophy.”6 Organizing pragmatism around primarily epistemological concerns, she paints the following portrait of the development of the tradition: “It is the view of truth and knowledge that is most associated with pragmatism and marks it off from other traditions. Indeed, the reader might take this book [The American Pragmatists] to have an implicit subtitle: Truth, Knowledge, Value. It may be that much that is interesting in some of the pragmatists’ work lies elsewhere. But the story I am tracing is the story of pragmatism as a recognizable tradition.”7 On Misak’s view, the essential feature of pragmatism is its view of truth and knowledge. What James or Dewey had to say about psychology, what Locke had to say about pluralism, or Kallen about culture may well be interesting, but what marks the tradition as a distinct and still-relevant contribution is its theory of truth. The “new dawn” that was claimed for pragmatism is the new dawn of an account of knowledge and value. Tracing pragmatism and countering the popular and misleading “eclipse” narrative that has pragmatism disappear in postwar

Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn  25

America through figures such as C. I. Lewis and Chauncey Wright, Misak divides pragmatism between objectivists (Peirce, Lewis) and subjectivists ( James, Dewey, Rorty). While there can be little doubt that the history of philosophy has emphasized (often to the exclusion of all else) pragmatism’s contributions to epistemology, this is not necessarily the best or only means to understand or frame the tradition.8 Rorty, who often serves as a helpful foil for Misak, also begins his reconstruction by emphasizing the epistemological strand of the tradition. Though the two thinkers end with radically different accounts of the value and purpose of pragmatism, they both take for granted that the best lens through which to see the tradition is an epistemic one. In his “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” Rorty defines pragmatism as marked by the following three features: (1) an anti-essentialism that is applied to notions like “truth,” “knowledge,” “language,” and “morality”; (2) a rejection of the fact/value dichotomy; and finally (3) the claim that there are “no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones.”9 If we are to take Rorty at his word here, pragmatism’s new dawn is better conceived as the sunset of epistemology. Casting Rorty in an epistemological light may strike some as odd given that each of these features (and indeed, the vast majority of Rorty’s work) serves to dismantle the project of epistemology as it has been traditionally understood. The epistemic lens is preserved insofar as truth and justification, however subversive they may be, remain the hallmarks of pragmatic philosophical inquiry. It is precisely this epistemic lens that will also, for example, allow Rorty to claim for figures such as Davidson, a rather unlikely pragmatist, a place within the tradition. It also helps us to see someone like Brandom as continuing on the legacy of Dewey and James.

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Each of the features that Rorty has picked out as essential serves a specifically epistemological but ultimately deflationary end. While Misak and Rorty disagree on the value of the positive epistemological contributions of the tradition (as embodied most visibly in the attention paid to Peirce10), the common thread of the tradition is its epistemology, whether epistemology is cast in the deflationary or negative spirit of Rortian neopragmatism or the positive and reconstructive Peirceian pragmatism of Misak. Where and how we begin our genealogy matters. If we take seriously a pragmatic approach to issues of classification, an approach that commits us to saying our concepts and categories are no more or no less than teleological, then the task before us becomes one of asking: What conception of the tradition and its aims offers us more? There are gains to be had by following either Misak or Rorty in taking a primarily epistemic approach to the tradition. For example, by exploring some of the connections between pragmatism and early analytic philosophy, as Misak does, we are better able to see the deep influence that pragmatic thinking about truth has had on the Anglo-American tradition more broadly. If we emphasize the moral and democratic aims of pragmatism, as Cornel West does, we are better able to see the sociopolitical underpinnings of the pragmatic tradition, themes of power and democratic struggle that are located within the context of America’s specific historical struggles.11 And Rorty’s approach allows us to, among other things, draw connections between the pragmatisms of James and Dewey and the philosophical insights of figures such as Derrida, Heidegger, and Davidson. A quick glance at these examples might have us wondering how it is that one could square these (and many more) accounts. The history of American pragmatism is as messy and contested as any other.

Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn  27

Pragmatism has been marked by these kinds of tensions and disagreements since its inception, and these tensions still animate the tradition’s self-conception.12 This contest of genealogy, this dispute over the basic meaning and significance of the tradition, is shown by the recent attempts to answer questions like, what is the real value of pragmatic thought? What do we want pragmatism to be? Faced with such questions, we would do well to recall James’s oft-repeated reminder that “there is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.”13 While each of the pragmatists had a practice-oriented approach to questions of knowledge that can be understood as rejecting the distinction between fact and value, as also rejecting traditional foundationalism and representationalism, and replacing that picture with a pluralistic and antifoundational model of truth or warranted assertibility, what gets more to the heart of pragmatism are the ends to which each of the pragmatists worked—for example, James’s psychological and religious investigations, Kallen’s cultural pluralism, and so on. The best way to understand the contributions of this tradition is, then, to see it not as distilled in a method for obtaining truth but as a way of thinking that begins with a certain attitude or orientation. In the second lecture of Pragmatism, “What Pragmatism Means,” James describes the ethos of his pragmatism in the following way: No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, “categories,” supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.14

Here pragmatism is understood neither as a result nor exclusively as a method, a theory, or a set of claims. The pragmatic orientation can express itself in the social, the political, the aesthetic, the meta-

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physical, the religious, the epistemological, the scientific, or the psychological. Conceived this way, pragmatism is an ethos (i.e., a custom or habit) of thought or, to use James’s terminology, an “orientation” (as opposed to the expression of a single doctrine or a set). The advantage of orienting oneself in this manner is famously illustrated in a rather quaint story about a squirrel at the opening of James’s Pragmatism lectures. When James comes upon a group of friends engaged in a heated debate over whether a man circling a tree in an effort to catch sight of a squirrel meant that he was “going around the squirrel” or that he was “going around the tree,” he offers his friends the following bit of pragmatic advice: it all depends on what is meant by the phrase “going around.”15 It is a story that has frustrated more than one reader, if not James’s own friends, and it is one that James himself spends the rest of his lectures trying to clarify: What exactly does pragmatism mean? One way to distill “what pragmatism means” is to say that if we no longer understand concepts as things that correspond to first principles, necessities, or things-in-themselves, or as pointing to “the way the world is,” then we have to turn our attention away from a priori disputes and turn our attention toward figuring out what we mean, how such meaning is decided, and how such concepts are enacted in the world.16 The pragmatist will claim that how these questions are decided, what they mean or entail, cannot be determined in advance. Concepts are things to be used, and how we decide to use them is a matter of contest, need, debate, and deliberation. The question of what does or does not constitute pragmatism emerges when we consider the recent skirmishes within the pragmatic tradition: those between the linguistically centered neopragmatists and the experience-centered pragmatists.17 Although classical

Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn  29

pragmatism is often used to designate the philosophies associated with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of Peirce, James, and Dewey, but also includes figures such as Du Bois, Locke, Addams, Holmes, and Mead, “neopragmatism” is typically used to designate those pragmatists who have come to the tradition through its resurfacing under the auspices of the linguistic turn, chiefly in the work of Richard Rorty. In the late twentieth century, neopragmatism becomes a way to address the set of concerns regarding justification that have preoccupied many contemporary Anglo-American philosophers. Such figures include, among others, Rorty, Brandom, and Stout. One result of this epistemic focus is that if pragmatism is conceived as a moment within the epistemological tradition, then it becomes hard to see how an experientially rooted pragmatism such as James’s is not guilty of a lapse into the epistemic foundationalism that comes hand in hand with appeals to experience, or so the story goes. It is, however, not always clear what the designations “neopragmatism” and “classical pragmatism” are intended to achieve. Is the division between classical and neopragmatism merely a question of pre- and postwar publication? Or is it a question of a more philosophical nature? For example, a matter of where one falls on questions of objectivity or truth. Is it a question of historical fidelity or allegiance? Does it signal those who have taken the linguistic turn and those who have not?18 While I do not wish to place too much emphasis on the division here, “neopragmatism” is used simply to signal those who have followed Rorty’s advice: those who take the pragmatic form of the linguistic turn have an easier time setting aside representationalism and Platonism. I give Rorty’s work pride of place not only for his pivotal role in the neopragmatic movement and the wide influence that he has

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had but also because in his reinterpretation of the pragmatic tradition he both advances and dissents from what I take to be the essential pragmatic position: namely, that it is both a call to reevaluate the appeal to “the way the world is” and that it is a philosophy of experience. There have been more careful and rigorous philosophers to take up the mantle of neopragmatism, but none have had quite the scope or influence of Rorty. It is also worth noting here that given the specific focus of my argument and engagement with James, rigorous engagement with the debates concerning objectivity, the conceptual contents of perception, or semantic inferentialism are not entirely relevant to my most central claims. These are valuable debates, but they are not the debates for which I claim James has particular relevance.19 I am certainly not the first person to take issue with Rorty’s characterization of the goals and aims of pragmatism. His work has sparked a series of debates about the very nature of pragmatic philosophy. Consider for a moment David Hildebrand’s characterization of Rortian neopragmatism: The starting point of Rorty’s linguistic pragmatism is theoretical and not practical. By “theoretical” I mean this: all Rorty’s declarations—that (1) language is ubiquitous, that (2) everything is contexts, (3) that nothing extra-linguistic can be appealed to in philosophical arguments—fail to follow as empirical generalizations from experience. Instead, their plausibility relies on their presumption in advance of inquiry. Rorty rightly calls traditional starting points “failures” but this view that language can now move “into the vacancies” reveals his tacit acceptance of a traditional, theoretical approach. In my view, the adoption of that approach, in lieu of an experimental and practical one, is the fundamental error of linguistic pragmatism.20

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Hildebrand is correct to note that Rorty’s starting point is problematically theoretical, as opposed to the practical starting point suggested by James or Dewey. Moreover, it is a starting point that can be traced to a set of academic disputes regarding the nature of verification and justification. He is also correct to note that neopragmatism suspiciously shares certain premises in common with the very philosophies it was intending to overcome (i.e., positivism). However, focusing exclusively on this theoretical starting point could lead one to miss and thus consider the most vital point, the spirit of Rorty’s pragmatism: what we might identify as the humanism that underpins such claims. Despite some crucial missteps, Rorty’s thought is deeply attuned to questions of practice and concerns about authority, praxis, and human freedom. In other words, the deeply ethical and practical focus of many of Rorty’s works can become overshadowed by his theoretical starting point. Consider the following passage from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: The danger which edifying discourse tries to avert is that some given vocabulary, some way in which people might come to think of themselves, will deceive them out of thinking that from now on all discourse could be, or should be, normal discourse. The resulting freezing-over of culture would be, or should be, in the eyes of edifying philosophers, the dehumanization of human beings. The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing with Lessing’s choice of the infinite striving for truth over “all of Truth.”21

While it is true that Rorty does not always keep his own better characterizations in mind, the above description of edifying discourses as “striving for truth over ‘all of truth’” is one that could be said to guide James as much as Rorty. In this register, what stands

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out about pragmatism is its humanism, its fallibilism, and its pluralism. Taking such an approach seriously, my claim is not that there is a fundamental, eternal, conversation-stopping Truth that escapes the grasp of the linguistic pragmatist and is better understood by the classical, experientially, or existentially grounded pragmatists but that resources for the kind of edifying philosophy that helps us to “strive for truth over ‘all of Truth’” can be found precisely where Rorty thinks we ought not to look. While this strategy may strike some as conceding too much ground, I share Rorty’s reservations about the all-too-quick return to what could block our “infinite striving for the truth over ‘all of Truth’”—namely, the turn to some nonhuman authority to which we are answerable. Once we begin to travel down the road the linguistic philosophers have barricaded, my claim is that we once again meet up with William James and are better prepared to navigate the goals the pragmatists sought to achieve: the betterment of human life.

The Ambiguous Squirrel James’s introduction to the pragmatic method by way of the story about a squirrel is, perhaps, less clear than my earlier account suggests.22 The parable’s message contains an ambiguity upon which Rorty is all too quick to capitalize. James’s squirrel could suggest an understanding of the role of philosophy that shares more with Hume’s metaphysical skepticism than that of the James I describe. One of Rorty’s most deeply held convictions is that there is no Truth at stake in philosophy. Opening with an epigraph from Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature explicitly aligns contemporary pragmatism with a therapeutic end:

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Philosophy has made no progress? If somebody scratches where it itches, does that count as progress? If not, does that mean it wasn’t an authentic scratch? Not an authentic itch? Couldn’t this response to the stimulus go on for quite a long time until a remedy for itching is found?23

For all the revisions to his method and philosophical approach, one thought that neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty ever truly abandons concerns the limitations of what Rorty calls (capital P) Philosophy. On this view, philosophy merely exposes the confusions responsible for the illusion or appearance of “Philosophical” problems, the appearance that they were ever really “deep” or of wide human significance (i.e., the mind-body problem, skepticism, etc.). Wittgenstein’s method, one that profoundly influenced Rorty’s, is not unlike a method of psychoanalytic therapy that encourages one to hear, speak, and thus understand problems or questions differently.24 Wittgenstein’s later work offers Rorty a way of hearing philosophical arguments that undermines the desire to take them seriously. It is an approach intended to persuade philosophers to no longer want to ask the kinds of questions and fuel the controversies that keep them in business, such as those between the realists and idealists. The work of philosophy is, on this view, not to “solve” a problem or settle a debate but to “dissolve” a problem, bringing the reader to a point where she no longer feels the tradition’s problems as problems.25 This is a goal that becomes more and more pronounced as Rorty’s work develops.26 A central claim of the pragmatists—a claim that will often lead people to claim for Wittgenstein a place within the pragmatic tradition—is that philosophical problems are only problems if we accept their premises. The pragmatist will claim that if we trace a problem back to its origin, the circumstance of the problem’s

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emergence, we will then better understand the problem and will thus be more likely to “solve” it. The line between the therapeutic and the pragmatic approach is not easy to draw. One place this ambiguity becomes particularly revealing is in Rorty’s essay “Dewey’s Metaphysics.” However, before considering that essay, it is worth turning back to the final moment of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the final sentence of the work, which mirrors Wittgenstein’s sentiments, but with an important and subtle caveat. “The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation.”27 To insist on the purity of “Philosophy” would be to hold the antipragmatic or “Platonic” position that accepts the problems of philosophy as given, ahistorical, and intractable. However, there are a few ways to hear this. We could hear it as a call to see pragmatism quiet the philosophical impulse and leave behind reference points such as “mind,” “subject,” “Truth,” and “experience,” terms that notoriously give rise to such problems. The consequence here is that philosophy gives way to something like “culture chat.” There is another way to hear this plea, which would be to hear it as a call to refocus our philosophical conversations. If one takes the pragmatic injunction seriously, then we should ask ourselves how we could make philosophy best serve our desired goals. Here, philosophy is not abandoned within the larger “conversation of the West,” but the status of philosophy is not assumed as given within that conversation. This is the difference between a pragmatism that leaves open the possibility of a conversation that inquires after the benefits of a vocabulary that included certain terms and one that deems certain kinds of questions “uninteresting” from the outset.

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The latter reading is consonant with James’s pragmatism, and the former reflects the pragmatism the tradition has come to identify with Rorty. Despite some important tensions, there are points upon which James and Rorty agree. Both share a critique of the correspondence theory of truth and representationalism. Both emphasize the primacy of practice. However, and perhaps more importantly, what distinguishes them is their respective answers to questions such as, what should philosophers be talking about if not correspondence? If truth is not a correspondence to (or a mirror of ) reality and nature, what does that make knowledge? What does that make philosophy? Rorty’s replies to such questions are strictly negative: knowledge is never purely theoretical; philosophy is never a disinterested view from nowhere. However, beyond these negative responses, we can, as many have noted, find a positive thrust in Rorty’s discussion of knowledge: knowledge is to be able to defend or justify a statement to others, what Rorty calls (in his early work) “epistemological behaviorism” or (in his later work) “ethnocentrism.”28 What you say is knowledge if you can satisfy others that your reasons for believing what you say are good. This is what Habermas has called Rorty’s “contextualism,” his belief that knowledge is a contextually justified assertion or belief.29 Yet, simply calling Rorty’s position “contextual” does not yet get to the heart of his position. His argument must be understood further, as Habermas does, as an attempt to complete a “not yet completed linguistic turn.”30 It is a position that is more rooted in the psychological nominalism of Sellars and the holism of Quine than in the pragmatism of James or Dewey. Rorty’s “strong reading” of the tradition is best summed up in his own words: “I linguisticize as many pre-linguistic-turn philoso-

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phers as I can, in order to read them as prophets of the utopia in which all metaphysical problems have been dissolved, and religion and science have yielded their place to poetry.”31 But what does it mean to “linguisticize” a philosopher like James who predates the linguistic turn? To answer this, we must turn to a closer analysis of said turn and its role in shaping neopragmatism.

Pragmatism as Linguistic Nominalism Briefly, to linguistify philosophers would be to reformulate their nonmetaphysical ends in a language better suited to those ends. In Rorty’s words, “to have helped shift from talk about experience as a medium of representation to talk of language as such a medium— a shift which, as it turned out, made it easier to set aside the notion of representation itself.”32 This linguistifying gesture clearly does not entail something like textual or historical fidelity nor will it even claim some greater underlying Philosophical truth. One linguistifies a philosopher as a means to some desired end. And yet, underpinning the attitude is a more robust claim than a letter opener is just as good as a knife for the purposes of opening a letter. The claim is one that is first expressed in the more austere philosophical language of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and it can be summarized by the Sellarsian claim, “All awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities— indeed, all awareness even of particulars—is a linguistic affair . . . not even the awareness of such sorts, resemblances, and facts as pertain to so-called immediate experience is presupposed by the process of acquiring language.”33 It isn’t simply that linguistifying Dewey’s Experience and Nature, reworking it to the more appropriate title Language and Culture, is simply a better way to get to the

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antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist ends Rorty desired, as if any strategy will do. Try as you may, a shoe will never do the job as well as a hammer. The more robust claim underpinning Rorty’s move is that all cognitive acts, all knowing, all perceiving, and all thinking is mediated by language. Rorty echoes Sellars when he identifies his own “crucial premise” in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: “The crucial premise of this argument is that there is no such thing as a justified belief which is non-propositional, and no such thing as justification which is not a relation between propositions.”34 Knowledge on this view, as previously noted, is contextually justified assertion or belief. It is important to highlight here that Rorty nowhere denies that we have nonlinguistic experiences, as if we are mere linguistic computers taking in nothing but propositional input, but rather that the nonlinguistic experiences have nothing to do with our practices of justification, as justification encompasses no more or less than moves within a language game. Furthermore, what follows is that philosophy, as we currently understand it, is little more than the project of foundational epistemology (i.e., Philosophy). Thus, once we have rid ourselves of our bad metaphors and epistemic preoccupations, there is nothing distinctive left of the philosophical enterprise. The conclusion that “language goes all the way down” is drawn from Sellars’s psychological nominalism. It is Rorty’s interpretation of Sellars’s nominalism that provides the sharpest point of distinction between the classical expressions of pragmatism and neopragmatism. Where James speaks of experience, the neopragmatists are nominalists—they speak of sentences and language. For Rorty, the pragmatism of James and Dewey taught us that essentialism, correspondence, and representation were all projects and ideas that

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have run their course. The project of classical epistemology is not an error on this view; it’s just not worth holding onto. Rorty’s pragmatic alternative is not positioned as truer than these others, but it has some advantages. Most importantly, it renders certain problems impossible to formulate. Without the benefit of the linguistic turn, philosophers like James and Dewey made the error of substituting experience for terms like objectivity and substance. Had they the benefits of the insights of people like Sellars, they would, instead of appealing to “experience,” substitute terms like “objectivity” with terms like “solidarity.” Rather than seeing the early pragmatists as having suggested a substantial account of meaning, truth, reality, or experience, Rorty hears James saying that it was a mistake to clarify such terms in the first place. Once we establish that “true” is but a word of praise reserved for theories and beliefs that bring about desirable results, as Rorty insists, there is little left for the philosopher to do. Rorty thinks that the best philosophy is one that refrains from all questions about a truth-making relation between sentences or beliefs and something that is radically different, something nonhuman. In Rorty’s eyes, James and people like Davidson, Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger offer a philosophy that is all the more valuable because it shows how and why we should be satisfied with much less than the tradition has expected. There are a number of reasons why Rorty takes this line of argumentation, which have been detailed at length by both Rorty’s supporters and critics. They turn on views such as the holism, historicism, and nominalism; they involve charges such as relativism, irrationalism, and idealism.35 The sharpest feature of Rorty’s position is, however, what has been identified as his nominalism or what others have identified as his brand of linguistic idealism.

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For Rorty, there is no practical difference between justification and truth. “The kinds of things pragmatists have said about truth are motivated by the thought that the difference between justification and truth makes no practical difference.”36 Elsewhere he will say that this difference “is one which makes no difference except for the reminder that justification to one audience is not justification to another.”37 When we ask after the truth of a statement, our concern is with evidence, justification, and sincerity: there is no additional quality of correspondence with which the pragmatist needs to concern herself. Thus, Rorty takes a question that first appears as an epistemic one and reinterprets it along social-political-​ cultural lines. He turns questions such as “What is truth?” and “What is reality?” into questions about social relations.

Edifying Discourse and the Quest for Commensurability Much of what is distinctive in Rorty’s pragmatic analysis, and what can help make sense of many of his more dramatic claims, can be understood by picking up on the distinction he adopts from Kuhn between normal and revolutionary discourse. Following Kuhn’s language of normal and revolutionary science, Rorty seeks to illustrate how philosophy can be thought of as a dialectic between the normal and abnormal. To make sense of this usage, however, we must first grant that philosophy is nothing more than the quest for commensurability, by which Rorty means the search for a “set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict.”38 While in many ways Rorty shares the spirit of philosophers who resist such a portrait of the philosophical enter-

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prise, he rather perplexingly insists that the moment we step outside such an epistemic project, we are no longer in the domain of Philosophy.39 One tradition that resists such a definition of philosophy is that of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, like pragmatism, shares in Lessing’s hope of infinite striving for truth over all of Truth. Rorty, however, construes such hope as realized in promise that “the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled.”40 During periods of normal discourse, philosophers share a common vocabulary that enables them to solve certain problems within a prevailing philosophical paradigm. It is in this sense that one can speak of general agreement. In other words, we would have established norms for deciding what constitutes a good argument, a good question, or a good critique. The importance of the concept of commensurability cannot be understated here, not only for philosophy but for science and rationality in general. However, there are also periods of revolutionary (or abnormal) discourse, periods when commensuration is no longer possible and dissenting voices emerge to challenge the prevailing vocabulary. Rorty’s philosophical heroes are those who have questioned the epistemic tradition and consequently distanced themselves from the image of the human being as the knower of fixed essences. Such intentionally parasitical philosophers are reactionary in the sense that they are uninterested in constructing new philosophical paradigms; their interest is in turning our gaze away from the traditions that have held us captive. Hermeneutics, like Rorty’s own philosophical project, sees the relationship between different discourses as “strands in one possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agree-

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ment is never lost so long as the conversation lasts.”41 To say that philosophy has no place of privilege within culture is to acknowledge the fact that our descriptions are subject to change, that we must listen to others instead of reaching out to grasp the eternal fundaments of reality.42 It is clear enough that the rejection of epistemic dogmatism can be extended beyond the paradigmatic philosophical discourses (i.e., epistemology, metaphysics) to the spheres of the ethical, social, and political. Instead of thinking ourselves possessors of an infinite Truth, Justice, Good, and so on, Rorty invites us to embrace our finitude, the ironic “foundation” of our claims. In the same way that there are no neutral algorithms to explain the rationality of scientific revolutions, there is no permanent set of procedures to solve our ethical or existential doubts. To think of, for example, moral action as the simple expression of one case under a universal and eternal law is, according to Rorty, just another way to avoid the complexity characteristic of human life: “Edifying philosophers want to keep space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause—wonder that there is something new under the sun, something which is not an accurate representation of what was already there, something which (at least for the moment) cannot be explained and can barely be described.”43 Santiago Zabala, for one, sees this antidogmatic stance as the common presupposition bringing both pragmatism and hermeneutics to democratic politics. “Both pragmatism and hermeneutics,” he says, “arose not merely in revolt against all authoritarian theories of truth but were also impelled by the intention to improve the way in which men understand each other.”44 The hermeneutical tone of Rorty’s pragmatism, which is expressed so eloquently in the final pages of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, quiets as his work

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progresses. The point of the appeal to hermeneutics was never to give us a new theory but to offer us a way of setting ideas of commensurability aside without also becoming “irrationalists.” Such doubts and their connection to the specific nature of Rorty’s linguistic pragmatism comes clearly into view in Consequences of Pragmatism, the collection of essays that span 1972–1980. This is the period where Rorty begins to explicitly lay out his interpretation of pragmatism through essays such as “The World Well Lost,” “Overcoming the Tradition,” “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” and “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” an essay that ends with the following: [T]he issue about the truth of pragmatism is the issue which all the most important cultural developments since Hegel have conspired to put before us. But, like its predecessor, it is not going to be resolved by any sudden new discovery of how things really are. It will be decided, if history allows us the leisure to decide such issues, only by a slow and painful choice between alternative self-images.45

In Rorty’s own terms, philosophical legitimacy stands or falls with the question, “Is this a good thing to try for?” Like Rorty, I take for granted that if one takes a pragmatic, nonrepresentational stance toward truth and objectivity, there is no fact of the matter that will tell us whether our self-images are true or false. Our self-images gain truth through practicability, by answering our needs and the questions we feel with urgency. The questions then become, What goes into the work of a self-image? Are our self-images as nonbinding as Rorty seems to suggest? Does the linguistic approach serve us best in an attempt to reckon with the images we have inherited and those that lay ahead? It is worth noting at this point that the terms “discourse,” “conversation,” and “vocabulary”—the terms that are set to replace the overburdened and ambiguous metaphysical language of experi-

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ence—do not always bear their meanings on their face. For example, what Rorty will call “conversation” is sometimes described as the poetic and private exercise of self-fashioning (that of, for example, Nietzsche or Adrienne Rich). At other times, the term is invoked to account for the wider social-cultural set of practices that bind the project of “the West.” How these two discourses meet up is not always clear, and sometimes it leads Rorty into rough waters, suggesting, for example, that we simply need new conceptual categories to reach our desired ends.46 Generalizing Kuhn, Rorty often describes such movements along the lines of normal and abnormal discourse. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he will say, Normal discourse is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it. Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside. ‘Eπιστήμη is the product of normal discourse— the sort of statement which can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as “rational.” The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable, or of “creativity.”47

Proposing new concepts, metaphors, expressions, and explanations is the work of the practitioner of revolutionary or abnormal discourse. In Rorty’s terms, it is the work of the poet. Systematically considering the classical questions of metaphysics (substance, materialism, free will, the one and the many), in Pragmatism James always aims to cut through the scholastic muddle to

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identify the real issue at stake. (He seldom fails to find one.) He deploys the pragmatic method to show that we have fallen prey to a vicious intellectualism, and that pragmatism is positioned to enter us into a “new dawn.” This idea of a “new dawn,” this forward-looking promise for philosophy, distinguishes James’s position from Rorty’s other heroes like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. For example, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously argues that the “correct method in philosophy” would be to say nothing except what can be said, namely the propositions of natural science—something that has nothing to do with philosophy. On this view, philosophy ought to be superfluous. So far, we can see that Rorty understands the work of the philosopher to be the work of extending or undermining Kant’s project (i.e., critical epistemology). If this is the role of philosophy, then the claim that “the philosophically interesting sense of experience is the one that goes back to ta phainomena rather than to empiria” seems to stand. However, we still haven’t seen why we ought to take seriously this particular history and this particular image of the philosopher. To better understand Rorty’s metaphilosophical position and the competing values he assigns to experience and language, we need to position his thought in the context of his own intellectual development and the role of what is often referred to as the linguistic turn.

The Linguistic Turn Experience’s avowal in the classical era of pragmatism turns to disavowal as the tradition moves through the early twentieth century and becomes embroiled in the terms and debates of the linguistic turn. Rorty’s 1967 introduction to the edited collection The Lin-

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guistic Turn explains the agenda of the movement in the following way: “The view that philosophical problems are problems that may be solved (or dissolved) whether by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use.”48 Ayer’s 1939 Language, Truth, and Logic echoes the aims and object of the linguistic philosopher. The philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them. In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character—that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.49

Dummett recapitulates these sentiments for a new generation when he claims the following: Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the process of thinking; and, finally, that the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis of language. . . . The acceptance of these three tenets is common to the entire analytical school.50

The accomplishments of the linguistic turn remain ambiguous, ranging from Dummett’s praise of the metaphilosophical accomplishments of the linguistic turn to Rorty’s own reflections on the turn in the essay “Twenty-Five Years Later,” where he makes his point in a characteristically stark fashion. Insofar as the linguistic turn made a distinctive contribution to philosophy I think that it was not a metaphilosophical one at

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all. Its contribution was, instead, to have helped shift from talk about experience as a medium of representation to talk of language as such a medium—a shift that, as it turned out, made it easier to set aside the notion of representation itself. Dewey’s attempt to set aside the problem of realism and idealism had involved him in an obscure and dubious attempt to see “experience” and “nature” as two descriptions of the same events and in the idea that “experience becomes true.” But philosophers like Davidson have an easier time.51

A few claims here are worthy of note. The first is that the antiCartesian aim of setting aside representation is best served by setting aside the notion of experience altogether. According to Rorty, the pragmatists were right to try and set aside the problems of realism and idealism but they were wrong to appeal to experience in order to do it. The claim is not that linguistic philosophy lays hold of a special truth but rather that the linguistic strategy best serves the desired aim. The second claim I wish to call attention to is that linguistic philosophy is better equipped to defend the central aims of pragmatism than either James’s or Dewey’s appeal to experience. This is a claim Rorty makes clear in an essay from 1985 in which he says, “By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, post-positivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition.”52 What is implied here is that someone like Davidson, armed with a postlinguistic turn epistemology, has an easier time doing what pragmatists like James and Dewey set out to do. And thus, what is essential, novel, or important about the pragmatists’ philosophical efforts can be better grasped by a deflationary epistemology.53

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Rorty’s inheritance of and place within the linguistic turn is a topic that has been covered at some length. Yet, it remains to be seen how one with broadly pragmatic sympathies and yet not adherent to the linguistic turn is to understand what role experience might have in present-day philosophical discourse. Crucially, Rorty (and many others in the twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition) understands experience as ultimately equivalent to causal stimuli or non­ inferential happenings. He takes the position that is charted by his predecessors, chiefly Quine, Sellars, and Davidson, who prepare him for a view of experience that is summed up in the following: One can restate this reinterpretation of “experience” as the claim that human beings’ only confrontation with the world is the sort that computers also have. Computers are programmed to respond to certain causal transactions with input devices by entering certain program state. . . . We humans program ourselves to respond to causal interactions between the higher brain centers and the sense organs with dispositions to make assertions. There is no epistemologically interesting difference between a machine’s program state and our dispositions, and both may equally well be called “beliefs” or “judgments.” There is no more or less intentionality, world-directedness, or rationality in the one case than in the other.54

On this view, experience is nothing more than the stimuli or input that causes changes in a “program.” Experience is a biological or neurological event that may hold value for the psychologist, the neuroscientists, or the biologist, but it has no distinctive philosophical import. While Rorty ultimately turns away from the metaphysical claims of his early essay on eliminative materialism, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories,” where he advances a “disappear-

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ance theory” that endorses the view that “sensations are nothing but brain states,” a less metaphysical version of this view persists in his work.55 As Marianne Janack will remark when commenting on Rorty’s concept of experience, since we share “experience” with computers and nonhuman animals, it has no interesting role to play in accounts of the peculiarly human enterprises with which philosophy concerns itself. Discourse is where the action is. In essence, in Rorty’s view, “if we’re talking about experience, then we aren’t really talking about experience.”56

Herein lies the problem. Rorty understands “experience” as that thing Locke and Hume appealed to when developing their empirical philosophy. Experience, conceived in the light of epistemology of the seventeenth century and up through Kant, might well be a confusion. However, as I shall argue, this is a far cry from the experience that animates James’s thought. For Rorty, the term “experience” as used by James and Dewey (no less than by Kant), was like Locke’s term “idea,” ambiguous between sensation and belief: “The term ‘sentence’ as used by philosophers in the Fregian tradition lacks this ambiguity.”57 Once the philosophy of language shed, by way of Quine, the “dogmas of empiricism” and their overzealous metaphilosophical pretentions, “sentences were no longer thought of as expressions of experience or as representations of extra-experiential reality. Rather, they were thought of as strings of marks and noises used by human beings.”58 In the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty claims that “what Gustav Bergmann called ‘the linguistic turn’ should not be seen as the logical positivists saw it—as enabling us to ask Kantian questions without having to trespass on the psychologists’ turf by talking with Kant about ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness.’”59

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What neopragmatism is now able to propose is a view of language that sees it as no more than “strings of marks and noises” used by human beings in the development and pursuit of their varied social practices—practices that don’t include anything like “representing reality.”60 While that was the intended motive for taking the linguistic turn, the work of Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and David­son enables the “turn” to complete itself. This brief gloss raises a number of further questions: Why does Rorty equate the pragmatic concept of experience with Locke’s or Kant’s? There is ample evidence to suggest that this is not the concept of experience that either James or Dewey had in mind when they placed experience at the center of their thought. What is it about the work of Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson that allows the linguistic turn to complete itself and find expression in Rorty’s own neopragmatism? Looking to some of the sources of Rorty’s pragmatism that fall outside of classical pragmatism will help bring these questions into focus. Rorty is right to call on us to abandon the concept of experience as it has been formulated throughout the empirical tradition and into the positivists of the twentieth century; he is wrong, however, to think that that argument is the final word on the pragmatic concept of experience.

Sellars and the Myth of the Given One of the most oft-cited sources in critiques of experience, and one that is highly influential within the neopragmatic thought of both Rorty and Brandom, is Sellars’s argument regarding the myth of the given, to which I have already alluded. In the debates that surround the use or misuse of experience, it is often the charge of givenness that takes center stage. It is the concern with avoiding

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givenness that prompts, for example, Koopman’s reinterpretation of Rorty’s critique of experience61 and guides John McDowell and Robert Brandom’s debate about the value of the former’s “minimal empiricism.” The notion of the “given” has a complicated history. Very simply, however, we can understand it to be the view that we enjoy a simple and direct sensory acquaintance with the world. Sensory information somehow directly impresses itself upon our minds without any interpretation (language or concepts) on our part. At some level, of course, the world is simply given to us (this nonmythic sense of the given is, in this tradition, often referred to as “non-inferential matters of fact”). What makes the idea a problem for epistemology—what makes it a “myth”—is that such an impression is supposed to provide a foundation for knowledge. The given, in the sense that it is mythological, is justified, certain, and true. Following in the footsteps of the German idealists, Sellars urged philosophers to set this view aside by reformulating Kant’s argument in the terms of the linguistic turn: nothing in experience is simple or given; knowledge, even seemingly immediate perceptual awareness, is synthetic, discursive, and linguistic. What we know is a judgment, and our knowing is our capacity for making and defending assertions. In the words of Brandom, “knowledge defines the success of assertion.”62 Rorty’s own argument in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is, he claims, merely a revised version of Sellars’s thesis. Rorty advances Sellars’s thesis as a way out of the framework of givenness when he asserts that all cognitive acts, all knowing, all perceiving, and all thinking is mediated by language. All awareness is propositional, and there is no such thing as a justification that is not a relation between propositions. The conclusion Rorty will draw is one that comes to be seen as aligned with the neopragmatic

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position: knowledge is contextually justified assertion or belief.63 Recall that this is precisely what Rorty goes on to identify in Consequences of Pragmatism as “the ubiquity of language,” “the special contribution” of both pragmatism and twentieth-century continental philosophy. What Sellars diagnosed as the given was an overworked idea. Its mythological status is secured by the dual role it was assigned: the given is called upon to be a cause, a force, or an impact and to have ideational content or determinate meaning. The difficulty with the given is that a stimulus or cause has no specific rational weight, and so it cannot play the role of helping us to justify one belief against another. Insofar as the given is significant and justifying, the sensation or intuition is already a belief. So, for example, Hume’s impressions strike the mind and provide the content of our beliefs. To do what foundational epistemology requires, the given must be an outsider to our concepts, its identity or determination being metaphysically prior to human thought and action. The avenue opened by Sellars’s critique and his alternative picture captured in the thesis of psychological nominalism will, in Rorty’s hands, resist any significant attempt to integrate experience into one’s account of knowledge, meaning, or truth—and, for Rorty, any attempt to integrate experience into philosophy. However, we needn’t read Sellars’s argument against the immediacy of experience in quite the manner Rorty proposes. The lesson of Sellars is to be critical of a certain determination of the concept of experience, but not experience tout court.64 While experience has certainly and quite often played the kind of role Sellars identifies as “the given,” the question that Rorty’s position fails to take seriously is, Do all appeals to experience play this kind of role? To be clear, on both Sellars’s and Rorty’s view, it

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is nowhere denied that stimuli are “given” in a banal or trivial sense, or that we have something like experience in the sense of bodily happenings or causal impacts. Brandom, summarizing Sellars’s contribution, puts the point this way: [E]verything turns on how one goes on to understand concept application or the conceptual articulation of responses. For Sellars, it is a linguistic affair: grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word. We must ask what makes something a use of a word, in the sense relevant to the application of concepts. Sellars’s answer is that for the response reliably differentially elicited by the visible presence of a perceptible state of affairs to count as the application of a concept, for it to be properly characterized as a reporting or coming to believe that such-andsuch is the case, is for it to be the making of a certain kind of move or the taking up of a certain kind of position in a game of giving and asking for reasons.65

What is denied is that our experiences can serve as reasons or justifications for any particular beliefs. “Pragmatists who have made the linguistic turn,” says Brandom, “take it that the most important feature of the natural history of creatures like us is that we have come . . . to engage in distinctively linguistic practices and to exercise linguistic abilities.”66 This is the case because experience appears to us as nothing more or less than causal stimuli. If experience is conceived as stimuli, then these same stimuli cannot go on to play a justificatory role in our discursive pursuits. All that is left is to say that experience is a relic of a philosophical past. As we throw away experience, we also throw away “the mind” and are left only with discourse and a realm of causal happenings. Rorty and Brandom agree that the attack on empiricism initiated by Sellars is also an attack on the very concept of mind. Rorty

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will, for example, remark of Sellars that he “may have been the first philosopher to insist that we see the ‘mind’ as a sort of hypostatization of language. He argued that the intentionality of beliefs is a reflection of the intentionality of sentences, rather than conversely.”67

Pragmatism and Coherentism Much of Rorty’s rejection of terms like mind and experience lean on a characteristically idiosyncratic reading of Davidson and the consequences he draws from his coherentism. Rorty latches on to Davidson’s claim that only beliefs can justify beliefs. The only evidence there can be for the truth of a sentence is other true sentences. Davidson rejects the distinction between observation sentences and other occasion sentences. He rejects the idea that there is a class of sentences that are justified by sensations or stimulations, as opposed to another class of sentences whose justification consists in logical relations to these primitively justified sentences. Pointing out “observation sentences are supposed, by their direct conditioning to the senses, to have a kind of extra-linguistic justification.”68 But without the direct tie to sensations or stimulation, which is what we lose when we accept the principle that only a belief can justify a belief, “the distinction between observation sentences and others can’t be drawn on epistemologically significant grounds.”69 And so, he draws from this the futility of traditional foundational epistemology (including Quine’s own naturalized epistemology): “There is no point in looking for a source of justification outside of other sentences held true.”70 It is through this intellectual influence that Rorty will come to say that experience is not philosophically interesting because it

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cannot play a role in the justificatory process. Anything that can justify a belief is already a belief. Rorty’s thought is that once experience is demystified, depsychologized, or made to play a strictly causal role, there is no philosophically meaningful role we can assign to it. From this it is a short move to his revision of Davidson’s coherentism. Rorty will claim that what Davidson is offering is not really either a correspondence theory of truth or a coherentist theory; what Davidson offers is a pragmatic theory.71 Within the coherentist picture, which was so attractive to Rorty, we are immersed in a web of belief. Rorty will claim that we need to reinterpret experience as “the ability to acquire beliefs non-inferentially, as a result of neurologically describable causal interactions with the world.”72 Experience is here conceived as a noncognitive feature that is more properly the subject of natural scientific inquiry. Mind is thus conceived as a web of beliefs and desires. Brandom carries through on Rorty’s promise by “showing that if we understand how organisms come to use a logical and semantic vocabulary, we do not need to give any further explanations of how they come to have minds.”73 To have beliefs and desires is, then, “simply to play a language game that develops such a vocabulary.”74 Wedding often highly selective aspects of Quine, Davidson, and Sellars to his own pragmatism, Rorty attempts to demonstrate the futility of any philosophical attempt to ground knowledge on a metaphysical framework. Neither a transcendental structuring of language nor sense data can do the type of work with which they have traditionally been tasked. Analyticity is nothing more than beliefs we can’t imagine not having, and sense data does not point us in the direction of a foundation for knowledge. If this is the case, then social practices of justification are all that remain of what

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we once called “experience.” If the mind is not a mirror of nature, then philosophy will no longer answer to the need for a touchstone for choice between justified and unjustified claims on our belief. Unless some other such framework can be found, the abandonment of the image of the Mirror leads us to abandon the notion of philosophy as a discipline which adjudicates the claims of science and religion, mathematics and poetry, reason and sentiment, allocating an appropriate place to each.75

A few years later, Rorty confidently asserts that no other such framework can be found.

Experience Old and New The role given to experience by the classical empiricists gave rise to a number of problems that have plagued Anglo-American philosophy’s attempts to account for the ways in which the mind can be said to “know the world.” While Sellars’s account of givenness has broad application, the most immediate target of his critique is found in sense data theories and others who take up the classical empiricist charge to derive all knowledge from experience. But neither Sellars nor Rorty are the first to criticize the empiricist picture of the relationship between mind and world. One of the most important features of James’s own psychology is his criticisms of empiricism. Like Dewey, who claimed that classical epistemology rests upon a “spectator theory of knowledge,” modern psychology, for James, rested on what we might call “a spectator theory of mind.” The positive or reconstructive aims of pragmatism generally relied upon an appeal to experience that had sharply metaphysical

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overtones. The question Rorty raises is, Does this contradict the negative project of pragmatism? This question is taken up explicitly in Rorty’s assessment of Dewey’s Experience and Nature. Experience and Nature, written in 1925, has received sharp criticisms, and Rorty’s “Dewey’s Metaphysics” is one more voice in the choir. “It is easier to think of the book [Experience and Nature] as an explanation of why nobody needs a metaphysics, rather than itself a metaphysical system.”76 Dewey came to regret using the terms “metaphysics” and “experience,” but he did add, as Thomas Alexander reminds us, that while “the words used were most unfortunate, I still believe that which they were used to name is genuine and important.”77 The suspicion that runs through these debates is that experience provides us with immediate contact with the world and can therefore correct our theories and claims about the world. This is not the sense in which James is concerned with experience. James’s concept of experience and his pragmatic understanding of metaphysics is misunderstood if experience is taken in its traditional empiricist sense. Like Hume, James will argue that experience is necessary for knowledge, judgment, and action, but James’s sharply rejects Hume’s atomistic and foundationalist account of experience. Not only does the Humean and orthodox empiricist’s model of experience fail to capture what James will claim is found in experience but it gives rise to a number of philosophical problems. The scholarly problem is clear. One can hardly read a page of James without encountering a claim about experience, perception, sensation, reality, or what in the Principles is called “knowledge by acquaintance.” James had a theory of knowledge that was quite robust in its references to the nonlinguistic. Clearly Rorty and other neopragmatists are not trying to be faithful to the letter when

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they subsume this aspect of classical pragmatism under the purview of language, or when Rorty brings James together with Derrida, Davidson, and Heidegger as each arguing variants of the claim that “there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.”78 This sounds like a staunchly anti-realist claim (one that will serve as the crux of Rorty’s debate with Hilary Putnam). Yet Rorty will deny that his pragmatism lands him in an anti-realist position. He is neither a realist nor an anti-realist because he does not ask what is common to both: What makes a true statement true? The picture of truth as a quality that a proposition is made to have by standing in an appropriate relation to something that is a fact or reality but not a proposition is, Rorty will tell us, an untenable one. He would like us to move past this picture and so remain silent on the question of epistemology, and with it the questions of experience and perception. But a question remains for us: What is the real issue at stake in this turn away from James’s pragmatism toward a linguistically oriented one? When many people first read James’s Pragmatism or “The Will to Believe,” when many read him now, they think he is arguing in a similar manner as Rorty. Peirce thought James had gone off the deep end of relativism and anti-realism, arguing for an irresponsible and unscientific wantonness of belief. Russell certainly read James this way as well. For James, much like Rorty, to say that a belief is true is not to ascribe to it a metaphysical virtue like correspondence to reality. James uses the word “true” as a term of praise for theories and beliefs that serve their function well. “The possession of true thoughts,” he will tell us, “means everywhere the

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possession of invaluable instruments of action.”79 Truth is defined in the oft-quoted passage as “the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”80 We may then return to our previous question and ask, If truth is not an inherent, unconditional, purely rational good, if it is not the culmination of intellectual virtue or logical destiny, why desire it? The answer common to both is that we desire and pursue truth much in the same way we desire and pursue any important means for ends we wish to realize. We want truth much in the same way we want money or health, because having it is the precondition for so much else we want to do. Rorty rarely discusses James’s work at any length. The arguments against his appeals to experience typically are either implicit or found in discussions such as the one presented in his essay on Dewey’s metaphysics. One of the few times Rorty does discuss James in particular is in the essay “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance.” While shot through with praise and admiration, Rorty does want to rephrase the terms of the debate between W. K. Clifford and James in a manner more amenable to his own linguistic pragmatism. He thinks James made a mistake, conceding too much ground to his opponent, and so betrayed his own better insights. Rorty, in an effort to save James from himself, recasts the conflict with Clifford as boiling down to the question, “Is evidence something that floats free of human projects, or is the demand for evidence simply a demand from other human beings for cooperation on such projects?”81 Truth is either gotten from the world, as Clifford will argue, or we make truth, as the pragmatist should argue. The realists here will argue that the only source of evidence is the world as it is in itself, where the pragmatist will argue that all thought, all mental categories have evolved because of their useful-

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ness for human life, and so “we owe their being to historical circumstances, just as much as do the nouns and verbs and adjectives in which languages clothe them.”82 If Rorty’s argument is persuasive, then the issue between the pragmatist and the realist, between Clifford and James should be “whether or not the notion of ‘the world in itself ’ can be made fruitful.”83 But James’s relationship with reality, the world in itself—in short, his relationship to truth, belief, and experience—is vastly more complicated than Rorty’s reading will accommodate. For Rorty, when philosophy goes pragmatic, questions about sources of evidence get replaced with questions about consensus and what would count as evidence. But this seems to miss something important about the stakes of James’s pragmatism. As far back as the Principles, James was arguing for a position that claimed knowledge of reality as dependent upon human activity, a position he thought was perfectly amenable to the givenness of experience he advocates in his Essays on Radical Empiricism. This position has, in recent years, been taken up and advanced by Hilary Putnam.84 Putnam understands this position to be a form of commonsense realism, where the active subject is engaged within an ultimately given world. Because knowledge of reality is constituted through such psychological functions as discrimination, reason, attention, and linguistic and conceptual thinking, because each of these activities are determined by the needs and interests of individual human beings, the species, and culture, reality can be approached and defined only through appeal to the “phenomenological”—by taking seriously experience conceived neither as ta phainomena nor empiria. The insistence that ideas become true just insofar as they help us get into satisfactory relations with other parts of experience resists

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the narrowing of truth to consensus and complicates Rorty’s either/or formulations. For James, pragmatism is not a metaphysical theory; pragmatism is nothing but a habit of thought, a loose method for determining or settling meaning. For Rorty, pragmatism is even less; it is simply a tool that helps one determine what is unhelpful, what conversations should be dropped, or what is irrelevant. He broadly agrees with Wittgenstein that there is nothing perennial or inevitable in the tradition of Philosophy, though he does not insist, as did Wittgenstein, that these problems arise from linguistic confusion. The classical formulations simply do not lead us anywhere. Rorty wants to replace James’s vague talk about experience with talk of language and belief because experiences are obscure and unverifiable except for the sentences they provoke, which makes discourse and not experience that which matters to knowledge. James would argue that some of our most valuable judgments depend on differences vaguely experienced, felt, or discriminated, experiences that do not “justify” our claims to knowledge, but experiences that orient, accent, and come to shape what we attend to. To make this point clear, I will turn my attention here briefly to James’s own considerations about language, concepts, and experience.

Language and the Perils of Intellectualism A cursory reading of James’s could (and has) left even some of his most sympathetic readers with the impression that, at best, language mattered little to his project. At its worst, language is thought to pose a deep threat to the overall coherence of James’s philosophy— in particular, his commitment to radical empiricism. By looking

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more closely at the way in which James takes up the role of language, we can better understand James’s thinking and begin to see what both, for very different reasons, strands of contemporary pragmatism find so troublesome about James’s philosophy. On one hand, James is seen as too wedded to the tradition, holding on to wooly talk of experience and radical empiricism, steeped in metaphysics. On the other hand, James is a postmodern irrationalist and relativist ushering in the post-Truth era and the “end of philosophy.” So here James comes out as guilty of both irrationalism and rationalism, too metaphysical and not metaphysical enough. It is, I think, a conclusion that would have made James smile. Any consideration of James’s views of language is met immediately with a difficulty: he speaks in at least two different voices on the question of language. One is outright hostile. In this register, language is a necessary but great impediment to truth. When James speaks in this voice, he is seemingly uncritical, naïve, carrying forward a semiotic tradition steeped in what Sellars called “givenness.” We find passages like the following in the Principles: Language works against our perception of truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its own thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with perhaps a thousand other things.85

In Meaning of Truth James describes intellectualism that has become vicious in a similar fashion: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privately; we reduce the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name ab-

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stractly taken, treating it as a case of “nothing but” that concept and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged.86

Considering passages like these, we could be left with a picture where language is the use of ready-made words that indicate, bit by bit and univocally, the phenomena of reality. This is what readers have often taken to be James’s final position regarding the relationship between language and experience. However, a closer reading of these passages, along with James’s wider philosophical concerns and questions, reveals something more nuanced. Intellectualism (even of the vicious stripe) gets something right, and some version of it is certainly necessary. The difficulty is its totalizing impulse. As Ralph Barton Perry will note, vicious intellectualism “proceeds as though a conceptual truth about a thing were the exclusive truth about the thing; whereas it is true only so far as it goes.” To heed the cautions of James is to resist identifying the world with a single conception.87 A very different picture of the relationship between language and experience begins to take shape as we consider what James has to say about language elsewhere. This is a view that emphasizes the holistic and contextual characters of language favored by Rorty, its creative capacity, and social significance and points to a reciprocal and mutually constitutive relationship between experience and language. When I use the word man in two different sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the moment of uttering the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean, two entirely different things. Thus when I say: What a wonderful man Jones is!” I am perfectly aware that I

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mean by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say: “What a wonderful thing Man is!” I am equally well aware that I mean to include not only Jones, but Napoleon and Smith as well.88

This passage sees James developing both the intentional and the contextual aspects of language that became so widely important to twentieth-century linguistic philosophy. It also has the effect of undermining the position that we sometimes see James advocating—that language is a copy of reality, a representation that has a simply stultifying or suffocating effect. Another example of this treatment can be found in Pragmatism, where James tries to articulate the meaning of the whole statement, “The world is one.” James concludes from his analysis of the varied meanings that the world is one “just so far as we experience it to be concatenated. One by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then also not one by just as many definite disjunctions.”89 Again, the meaning of “the one” is not univocal, nor is it simply equivocal, for there exists concatenated resemblances among all the meanings. The only way to ascertain the meaning of “the world is one” is contextual. What James suggests, both in his own use of language (for example, the abundance of metaphor) and through some of his considerations of language, is that reality is not an unchangeable datum, given once and for all before language. Rather, there is reciprocity in the relationship between experience and language. Language is one of the best means we have to bring order, meaning, and sense to the world. But it is also a means by which important features of our world and our experience can be concealed. In rendering substantive what is transitive, we both gain and lose. The problem is one of emphasis and attention. One can point to what is bound to remain after our conceptual analysis is through, but one can also

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celebrate what opens up before our ears and our pens. Intellectualists overemphasize the “dumb” qualities of experience; that until experience is named and classified as a “what” it is philosophically or rationally irrelevant. When James assesses language in a more hostile manner it is because he sees that it is often used to falsify or stifle the richness of experience. While intellectualism can capture important aspects of what we are as human thinkers, it can also turn vicious. However, we also see this same intellect, when tempered, creating reality by naming it, by molding it conceptually and linguistically, while also recognizing that there is a sense in which reality will escape all such efforts. Again, the meaning of “the world is one” is neither univocal nor equivocal. Yet, at the same time as championing the contextual nature of language and truth, James also argues that “namelessness is compatible with existence.”90 How then does he manage to hold these positions together? When James bemoans that language falsifies what it attempts to describe, that it ossifies experience, we can, and I do, interpret this as a complaint against the forgetfulness of the world beyond language that often goes hand in hand with “vicious intellectualism.” He tries to show us that in the world where everything falls under the purview of language, concepts, and the domain of justification would be a world that is cold and without meaning. This (as we will see again in more detail in Chapter 3) is the very criticism James launches against Clifford in his infamous “The Will to Believe.” Experience is never completely covered over by language, yet there are certainly things that James could have learned from the semiotics and structuralist studies of the linguistic turn. But when James tells us that if we “lost our stock of labels in the world, we should be lost,” he seems to recognize that language is a precondition

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for our constructions in experience which can, therefore, never be strictly linguistically neutral. While he is quite willing to ascribe a “primarily theoretical function to our intellect,” he also maintains that the intellect as such cannot deal with the whole of reality.91 In A Pluralistic Universe, James will say, [Logic] has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. . . . Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality.92

Here we find James advocating for a more radical, but not essentially different, position that he most famously argues in “The Will to Believe”: reality outstrips the conceptual and the linguistic, even the potentially conceptual. Reality cannot be completely exhausted by concepts or language. Yet language, as James himself shows, whether by doctrine or by example, is necessary to deal with reality or experience. What follows is that reality is available only through language, but the philosopher (as language user) must strive to demonstrate the insufficiency of language itself. Language, like experience, is shown to have a creative, leading, and not merely representative or negative function. Language, like experience, is vague, unfinished, and rich. All this suggests that language has different functions to perform, but that its role is limited. We might say that language enriches experience; we might equally say that it distorts, distracts, or conceals it. When it turns vicious, linguistic philosophy freezes reality and tells us that what cannot be named, what cannot be rendered propositional, either does not exist or does not matter to philosophy. Language, when used construc-

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tively, can uphold the intentional. It can reveal and conceal simultaneously. The argument against experience, as it appears in the neopragmatic tradition, rests on a number of related positions. The first could be characterized as ontological: there is no relevant difference between experience and language. On this view, “experience” is either a convoluted term for what should more properly be seen as a discursive process though which we come to construct the self and culture, or it is a philosophically uninteresting stand-in for the causal events that are more adequately treated by the sciences. This ontological claim is also bound to another important claim—namely, the epistemic claim that experience cannot be either the evidence of foundation for the claims we make. It is also bound to a particular vision of philosophical inquiry—one a pragmatist has reason to question. The desire to purge the ordinary of the metaphysical is foreign to James. In his hands, the pragmatic maxim merely assists us in attaining the highest degree of clarity of ideas—the method is not intended to dissolve, deconstruct, or quiet but to recover. There is no “going beyond metaphysics” in James, only a demand that metaphysics reconstitute itself in such a way that it deal with real and not false problems, real problems being those with implications for how we live. The pragmatic maxim is meant to work as a means for determining what those implications are. The claim the “there can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that does not express itself in a difference in concrete fact” is not the positivist demand for empirical import but the demand that our theories and concepts relate to our lives. I take the difference here to mean any practice, belief, judgment, or concept that confronts us with

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questions of how we live and are affected by our beliefs, without stipulating in advance that certain beliefs are meaningless. The consequences of the claim that experience is then reducible to either language or discourse fall into roughly two kinds: theoretical and practical. Philosophical questions arise as to how we cross the chasm that opens between discourse and stimuli. How do we account for the limits on our self-descriptions and our interaction with the world?93 Without falling back on a direct correspondence between words and objects or a referential concept of language, we cannot simply sever the relationship between experience and language in the manner proposed by Rorty. Something appears to us as some thing precisely by appealing to our linguistically mediated concepts, but our concepts do not create the world. In other words, we must be interacting with the things we talk about. What I earlier referred to as the ontological consequences of Rorty’s position are wed to the conclusions drawn by someone like Joan Scott, who claims that appeals to the “evidence of experience” or appeals to experience as a foundation upon which an analysis of social oppression could be based should be abandoned all together.94 But more than these epistemological problems, another consequence is a deep moral and political point about novelty. I discussed earlier the humanism that is identifiable in both James’s and Rorty’s pragmatisms. James’s humanism, as will become evident, is one that is concerned above all with opening possibilities of experiencing the world and the self in radically new ways. One sees this concern throughout Rorty’s work as well. And yet, for James, this pragmatic humanism must imply that we are in some sense passive and receptive to the world. While the pragmatism Rorty has provided is one that has rightfully given up correspondence, what it

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has left in its place is a pragmatism that has exhausted the mental, the intentional, and the introspective. What is implied by Rorty’s claim that “epistemology proceeds on the assumption that all contributions to a given discourse are commensurable”95 can appear as a barrier to change, and ultimately an impediment to our “existentialist intuition that redescribing ourselves is the most important thing we can do.”96 Attempting to keep open a place for the new, competing, and novel self-images Rorty cherishes, he makes such innovations appear banal, rendering them merely optional and nonbinding. In other words, we need to be able to account for the kinds of encounters with the world—those that are novel, painful, unjust, overwhelming, brute, and so on—that prompt us to seek out new descriptions, new ways of describing ourselves. Rorty’s proposal that changes in metaphor, or the description of moral and political novelty as best characterized by “new descriptions,”97 underestimates the work of what he calls a “self-image,” the real conflicts and disjunctions that arise when we attempt to account for our culture or ourselves in radically new or better ways. I said earlier that James and Rorty share in what is ultimately an ethical and humanistic goal. What I hope is now clear is that we cannot take as obvious that this is a goal best served by a strictly linguistic and negative pragmatism. This is a point that James, who argues that through our concepts, our activity, and our classification the world becomes more than a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” appreciated well and is accommodated by his pragmatic rejection of correspondence. This linguistic and conceptual activity is ever present. We are passive (though never merely passive) and receptive (though never merely receptive) to a world that is neither strictly ineffable nor strictly determined by us, and yet can impact our judgments and thwart our better efforts. I take the point against

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givenness to be crucial: perception, experience, consciousness, and knowledge are always active affairs. We never reach a point of pure receptivity or ultimate passivity. Appeals to experience need not entangle philosophers in the metaphysical debates Rorty found so fruitless. Rather, taking experience seriously gives philosophers a more nuanced understanding of both our responsiveness to the world and how we might shape our world differently. However, to make this case, we must go further into James’s thought, an exercise that will preoccupy the remainder of this book.

CHAPTER 2

Psychology and the Subject of Experience The only form of a thing that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking . . . is the category of personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of that. —James, “Address of the President before The Society for Psychical Research”

James’s Method: The Principles of Psychology in Context There are many reasons one could cite for the relative neglect of James’s Principles of Psychology. Most obviously, perhaps, is that it is a work James himself claims has little philosophical value.1 The text begins with the announcement of a natural scientific program that will uncritically assume dualism, ignore metaphysical questions, and claims originality for itself only insofar as it espouses a “strictly positivistic point of view.”2 Such claims might initially appear perplexing. James is best known as a pragmatist, a practitioner of introspection, America’s existentialist. How could he advance a dualistic and positivistic psychology? As Dewey notes in his review of the

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Principles, what James says he will accomplish and what he actually goes on to accomplish are two very different things.3 Dewey may well have had his own agenda in mind when he claims that if James’s biological work had been more fully developed, the outcome would have been to establish the first proper “biological behaviorist account of psychological phenomena.”4 Nevertheless, he is right to say that the professed dualism and positivism of James’s stated method exists in name only. It is not so surprising then that readers can often not even agree on what kind of psychology James advances (functional, evolutionary, behaviorist, phenomenological).5 Ambivalence marks the Principles, and it is an ambivalence echoed in a number of commentaries on the work. Despite James’s insistence on securing psychology from philosophical speculation through the uncritical dualism of the experimental sciences, he later admits that as soon as he begins to discuss specific topics such as the self, sensation, thought, belief, and so on, “the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint.”6 Echoing James’s self-criticism, Wittgenstein remarks on the Principles, “Psychology, he says, is a science. But he discusses almost no scientific questions. His movements are merely attempts to free himself of the cobwebs of metaphysics in which he is caught. He cannot yet walk, or fly at all, he only wriggles: not that this is not interesting.”7 We should, however, tread carefully when discussing (or dismissing) James’s positivism or his naturalism. There is an important sense in which James was a thoroughly committed naturalist, though not of the eliminative or reductive sort. James thought naturalism was the approach that best allows us to embrace a genuine (or radical) empiricism, the kind that could take topics such as religious ecstasy or existential anxiety seriously. A philosophy that could do

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this, James thinks, would be better equipped to deal with the fundamental, but perhaps not yet academic or scholastic, questions of meaning that orient our lives. If James were to have followed through on his methodological promise, what role could experience have played in the psychology? The answer is suggested in James’s boldest claim about the method of his own psychological program.8 It appears in the following chart, which shows the “irreducible data of psychology.”

1. The Psychologist

2. The Thought Studied

3. The Thought’s Object

4. The Psychologists’ Reality

He elaborates: These four squares contain the irreducible data of psychology. No. 1, the psychologist, believes Nos. 2, 3, and 4, which together form his total object, to be realities, and reports them and their mutual relations as truly as he can without troubling himself with the puzzle of how he can report them at all. About such ultimate puzzles he in the main need trouble himself no more than the geometer, the chemist, or the botanist do, who make precisely the same assumptions as he.9

Each must be an equal and independent entity, and the cognitive relationship between 1 and 2 must be treated as ultimate. Philosophical questions about the nature of thought or the proper ob-

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ject of psychology are to be utterly disregarded. The psychologist is not a philosopher: she does not concern herself with the relation between the perception of a hot stone and the existence of fire, nor does she concern herself with the questions concerning how one comes to have a thought at all. A crude approach to the question of the role of experience under such a psychological program can be surmised from these and other similar statements throughout the introductory methodological chapters of the Principles. Experience would be the term to cover the relation between “Thought Studied” and “Thought’s Object.” Thought’s object would strike the mind and form the thought or idea to be studied by the psychologist. This could include things like the sensation of blue, the idea of red, the thought of a tree, and the hallucination of an elephant. So far, there seems to be little departure in the psychology advanced by the empiricist psychologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, James reaches far outside the dualistic and antimetaphysical boundaries he draws for himself, and it is precisely in doing so that his most interesting and novel claims take place. This is where I locate James’s unique understanding of experience. The details of how and why James breaks through his self-imposed boundaries will become clear as this chapter turns its attention to the discussion of the stream of thought. The question that should be answered first, however, is why does James draw these boundaries for psychology in the first place?

Psychology in the Nineteenth Century Psychology in the nineteenth century still labored under Kant. The critique of psychology detailed in the first Critique would

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shape the discipline’s course of development until it was firmly rooted in the experimentalism of the twentieth-century laboratory. In the Critique, Kant argues that no attempt to determine the nature of the soul or the thinking subject by means of rational analysis could ever withstand criticism. All arguments about the soul begin with the empirical “I think.” This a posteriori position can never provide the necessary ground for a rational and certain proof, as required by a science worthy of the name.10 The argument is made more emphatically in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Here Kant argues that even if psychology were to abandon its pretensions to achieve the status of a natural science, it would fare no better as an empirical one. Although a pure philosophy of nature in general, namely that which investigates only what constitutes the concept of a nature in general, may indeed be possible even without mathematics, a pure doctrine of nature concerning determinate natural things (doctrine of body or doctrine of soul) is only possible by means of mathematics. And, since in any doctrine of nature there is only as much proper science as there is a priori knowledge therein, a doctrine of nature will contain only as much proper science as there is mathematics capable of application there.11

Psychology is not and could never be a rational science because the empirical data of psychology is not quantifiable. Unlike the data of chemistry (which though not a “proper” science could at least mature into one), the empirical or rational data of psychology can never be verified, measured, or controlled. Until the midnineteenth century, psychology appeared condemned to the fate cast for it by Kant: conjecture and mere description. The success of the psychology laboratories in America and Germany in the late nineteenth century would settle the philosophical

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debate concerning whether psychology could be an experimental science. However, the question of whether it could or ought to be a natural science still loomed large. James is particularly concerned with the question of psychology’s status in the early chapters of the Principles. What does psychology have to do to become well grounded, like chemistry or physiology? James’s initial answer is that psychology must divorce itself from metaphysics, assume certain data uncritically, and avoid any metaphysical or philosophical difficulties that may arise as a result of such assumptions. In this way psychology can put itself on a successful path.12 It was not until Wundt’s laboratory, established in Leipzig 1879, and new tools and instruments for psychological research were standardized that Kant’s views on the practice of psychology were met with any serious challenge.13 This challenge, as articulated by Wundt, came in the form of an Erfahrungwissenshaft (a science of experience). According to Wundt, the new psychology would bring together physiology (the study of the phenomena of life that occur in sense perception as a part of the environment) with the study of mental life (accounting for the interconnection between the processes conceived by consciousness).14 Echoes of Wundt can be heard from the outset of the Principles, when, for example, James asserts that psychology studies thoughts and things known, and it is the task of the psychologist to account for the causal link between them.15 To go beyond such suppositions is to enter into the field of metaphysics, which “fragmentary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she injects herself into natural science.”16 Against this backdrop, and to safeguard his own natural scientific program from metaphysical speculation, James sets out a method characterized by a “thoroughgoing dualism.”17 If psychology

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is ever to conform to the natural sciences, it must renounce metaphysics and assume such data as the existence of states of mind, the physical world, and the relationship called “knowing.” Questions concerning the nature of the soul, the possibility of knowledge, the transcendental ego, “mind stuff,” and other such speculative questions inherited from the empiricist and rationalistic traditions must be ignored. However, James ultimately recognizes his own failure to describe or establish fundamental laws in the manner called for by the sciences, confessing in the abridged Briefer Course that what he produced was little more than “a string of raw facts; a little classification on the mere descriptive level, and a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them.”18 Yet, he does not outright abandon the ambitions of his own program. In the same year as he reflects on the failure of his own psychology to keep close to the program of the natural sciences, he publishes “A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science.” This time, however, his argument takes a different direction. James’s proposed natural scientific program flies under the banner “Divide et impera.”19 We never ought doubt that Humanity will continue to produce all the types of thinker which she needs. I myself do not doubt of the “final perseverance” or success of the philosophers. If the hard alternative were to arise of a choice between “theories” and “facts” in psychology, between a merely rational and a merely practical science of the mind, I do not see how any man could hesitate in his decision. The kind of psychology which could cure a case of melancholy, or charm a chronic delusion away, ought to be preferred to the most seraphic insight into the nature of the soul. And that is the sort of psychology which the men who care little or nothing for ultimate

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rationality, the biologists, nerve-doctors, and psychical researchers, namely, are surely tending, whether we help them or not, to bring about.20

The passage is worth reflecting on as we turn to consider the wider role of introspection in James’s thought. The claim is that if something about reality were to force this all-or-nothing choice upon us, we would be better off with a psychology of “facts.” This is to say, we are better off with a psychology that can cure melancholy than a psychology that simply speculates about the nature of the soul. But it is also important to note that the “hard alternative” is not upon us, and it is hard to imagine what could force it upon us, let alone a pragmatist such as James, who, as I will show, fuses empiricism and experimentalism with introspection and theoretical postulates on nearly every page of the Principles.

Introspection and the Methods of Psychology When James comes to answer the methodological question, How should a psychologist obtain her data?, he answers: “Introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.”21 While never downplaying the role of experimentation, it may still surprise contemporary readers, versed in arguments against the pitfalls of introspective reports or qualitative data, that introspection is given such pride of place in a psychology that is attempting to secure itself among the natural sciences. But James is well aware of the difficulties associated with introspection. For example, he singles out Bain for damning praise, describing his introspective accomplishments as “the last monument of the youth of our science.”22 And he was well aware of the critiques of introspection advanced by, among others, Comte and Lange. The problems

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introspection brings have not entirely disappeared from our own time.23 From the rise of behaviorism to, for example, James’s contemporary Titchener, who would write a near 1,600-page training guide for psychology students in the methods of rigorous introspection, anxieties about the role of introspective knowledge were coming to the surface in the age of the laboratory.24 Whether it is because introspection seems so historically connected to the infallibility of the Cartesian “I think,” dualism, or overblown claims about the veracity of perception, introspective reports are often thought to be the least reliable and the most confused we have, and a psychology built upon them to be the infantile expression of a preexperimental age.25 A familiar retort against appeals to introspective evidence centers on the many ways in which we can, despite all effort, care, or “bracketing,” be grossly wrong about the contents of our own minds. Comte, for example, claims it “evident” that by an invincible necessity, the human mind can observe directly all phenomena except its own proper states. . . . Though we have all made such observations on ourselves, they can never have much scientific value, and the best mode of knowing the passions will always be that of observing them from without; for every strong state of passion . . . is necessarily incompatible with the state of observation.26

Watson famously reformulates Comte’s suspicion when outlining the behaviorism that was to overtake American psychology in the twentieth century. As a result of this major assumption, that there is such a thing as consciousness and that we can analyze it by introspection, we find as many analyses as there are individual psychologists. There is no way of experimentally attacking and solving the psychological problems and standardizing methods.27

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As Gerald Myers notes, the question of the value of introspection is often cast in such all-or-nothing terms. A good deal of the ink spilled over introspection has been over whether we possess infallible access to our inner states.28 The dominant understandings of introspection in James’s day derive from the British empiricists or Cartesian traditions, and he seemingly follows suit. He initially defines introspection in orthodox terms, as “looking into our own minds and reporting what we discover. Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness.”29 This could lead one to suppose that James follows Locke, who would argue that the contents of the mind (i.e., ideas) come from experience either by sensation, which yields knowledge of the external world, or by reflection, which provides knowledge of the mind’s own operations. The early empiricists never regarded sensation or reflection as processes that could themselves contain errors. It is thus inconceivable to Locke or his descendants that one could have conscious experience and not know that one has it. The facts of physical science, he thought, were always “mediated and derived by inference from immediate experience, which in and of itself is immediately given and constitute the subject matter of psychology.”30 Though James does sometimes use introspection to mean something similar to how he initially defines it, as immediate self-observation of present mental states, more often than not he uses it to mean something more akin to retrospective reporting or analysis.31 Consider the following remark: If to have feelings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones. But the psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and

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write about them, name them, classify and compare them, and trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive they are his own property; it is only post-mortem that they become his prey.32

A few points are worthy of note. First, it must be stressed that introspection is not an inborn trait. We must be educated into introspection, just as we must be educated into writing, classification, analysis, and comparison. Second, James echoes Comte’s concern that mental states are not always compatible with self-reporting. Passions such as anger or ecstasy serve as good examples. I am clearly the better observer of the qualities and causes of my passions (e.g., the particular pang of anger, my feelings of joy or desire, etc.) once they have passed.33 With Charlene Haddock Seigfried, we could say that introspection reveals not bare unmediated facts or “things in themselves” but things as they are interpreted.34 Finally, James, like Brentano before him, emphasizes the distinction between the immediate felt quality of a feeling and its subsequent perception in an act of reflection. It is the latter (our reflective acts) that James says forms the basis of introspective evidence in psychology. As Myers notes, one key argument for James’s identification of introspection with retrospection is that “one’s stream of consciousness happens so rapidly that by the time one can report it, it has already vanished.”35 Thus when we “look into the mind” we are not observing something like a Cartesian theater. Rather, we are analyzing critically what has already passed. Introspection is more like retrospection: the psychologist reflectively scrutinizes; compares; contrasts; analyzes; and names a feeling, mood, thought, or perception from memory. To be named, classified, or discussed, a subjective state must already have passed. James is clear on this point. I say, “I am angry.” While certainly anyone would know just what I mean and would take my statement to be true, more specificity is demanded upon

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the part of the psychologist. When I say, “I am angry,” the present state I voice is more exactly the state of saying “I feel anger.”36 James touches on the distinction that will become central in a number of criticisms of introspection. Having an experience is never enough for the knowledge sought by the kind of introspection demanded by the psychologists. Peirce, commenting on “The Stream of Thought,” writes, “To say that consciousness feels as if it were continuous . . . is a very different proposition from saying that it is continuous.”37 James did not think that feelings about our mental states are enough to secure knowledge of our mental states: Introspection is difficult and fallible; and that the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind. Something is before us; we do our best to tell what it is, but in spite of our goodwill we may go astray, and give a description more applicable to some other sort of thing. The only safeguard is the final consensus of our further knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until at last a harmony of a consistent system is reached.38

Introspection is prone to error and excesses, and yet the psychologist must rely upon it as telling us something significant about the character of experience. But the reach of introspection is limited. A piece of introspective evidence will not undo a body of experimental evidence. When James says we must rely “first and foremost” on introspection, he is not arguing for an “introspective psychology,” if by this we understand a psychology grounded exclusively in self-reports.39 He is making the pragmatic point that introspective data should be used and potentially confirmed by later experimental work or the consensus of a community, further experience, or a body of knowledge. Furthermore, he is arguing that our experimental facts must in some way connect with our

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values, interest, and motives, and aims that can be known, described, and reported on in the first person. Introspection will not tell us how the brain functions or reveal the physiological basis of psychology. Where behaviorism tells us that introspection can shed no light on our mental lives, James insists on the value of both firstand third-person observations and evidence. Each has a place and a contribution. It is important to be clear about the scope of introspection in James’s psychology. The domain of introspection is not an unbounded one. Introspection will not tell us how the brain functions, and it will not reveal anything about the neurophysical aspect of our thoughts and feelings (what James would consider the physiological basis of psychology). It is not so surprising that introspection would fall out of favor in the twentieth century. A powerful line of critique against introspection in general and in James specifically begins once more with Wittgenstein. When, in the Philosophical Investigations, he says of introspection, “We are not analyzing a phenomenon (e.g., thought) but a concept (e.g., that of thinking), and therefore the use of a word,”40 we can be fairly sure he has James in mind.41 But does this mean, as many have assumed, that any form of introspection is invalid or out of place in philosophy? Does it mean that James’s psychology is actually interested not in experience but in language use? One could go as far as to say that introspection has a place in folk psychology, literature, therapy, maybe even some forms of moral thought, but not philosophy. The relationship between what we experience in terms of our own mental states, attitudes, desires, pains, and wants is inseparable from the act of introspection. While we can imagine cases wherein a subject is unable to feel, and so cannot observe what may objectively or diagnostically constitute “pain” or some other feeling,

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more often than not we know our passions and volitions, though not infallibly, only by an “inward looking.” In introspective acts we inquire into the nature and contexts of the felt aspects of our mental lives,42 the cause and effects of a feeling such as love or disgust. Through introspection we ask ourselves questions such as, Am I being sincere about my own motives and desires? How can I make clear my thoughts and feelings to another? We can also seek some assistance from introspection in our more philosophical questions. For example, if we are given a theoretical account of the “chain of ideas,” we can legitimately ask ourselves, in the absence of any truly compelling evidence, Is this what it feels like to think? I will return to this question in the following section on the stream of experience. The Varieties of Religious Experience, a text James himself described as a “laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general fact which can be defined in formulas,”43 is replete with firsthand accounts of mystical revelations, conversations with the divine, and other such reports. James considers the relevance of such accounts essential to getting at the pragmatic value of religion ( just as in looking to our aesthetic, moral, and social desires leads to our being able to talk about the pragmatic value of a concept). He describes the necessity of such accounts at the end of the Varieties. The axis of reality runs solely through the egoistic places— they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description— they begin as describable as anything else—would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.44

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A point that should be familiar enough to anyone even superficially acquainted with James is that our theories, concepts, and descriptions depend not so much on the “hard facts” of the matter but those that appeal to and make sense of our sensible experience, and our moral and aesthetic needs. An earlier formulation of this general pragmatic claim can be found in James’s plea to psychologists to avoid intellectualism: “That theory will be most generally believed, which besides offering us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers those which are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and active needs.”45 How we determine what these needs are is of vital importance both to James’s psychology and to his more explicitly pragmatic work. The only plausible way of answering such questions is introspectively. This is not to say that needs are “subjective” in some derogatory, private, or relativistic sense. Our needs, along with our conversations with ourselves, do not occur in vacuo. They are “private” in the sense that in the absence of words, gestures, acts, and so on, they remain hidden from observers. But while the finest shades can remain so, self-reporting and observations can and do serve to enrich and give force to our sense of reality. The question of the value of introspection returns to one of the major themes that cuts through the debates that were addressed in Chapter 1, about the difference between what Rorty identified as “Philosophy” (conceived as a fach, an autonomous, systematic, and quasi-scientific discipline) and “philosophy” (conceived as kibitzing, a nonsystematic form of cultural conversation that is not fundamentally different from the conversations had by historians, cultural critics, or novelists). If we limit the domain of Philosophy proper to the search for foundations or the epistemological project,

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then it becomes increasingly difficult to see what the value of introspection would be. I don’t see, however, any compelling analytical or historical arguments for understanding philosophy in this way. In this argument, introspection would come into play in a deflated philosophy that is not really or specifically Philosophy. The argument would proceed from the claim that introspection is valuable in our kibitzes, in our social inquiries, and perhaps our existential ones, but these do not need or require anything like a Philosophical justification. Many understand philosophical arguments—those that do not yield some fact of the matter upon which everyone can agree, those interminable and intractable questions that admit of no experiment that may settle our questions as the kind of arguments that are to be approached with austerity—by accepting a premise and following it out to its end. One philosopher sees one set of facts and despite all sentiment will deny the freedom of the will, another philosopher, another way, wherever it may lead. Implicit in my defense and description of James’s use and privileging of introspection is the claim that the object of some forms of psychology (moral or philosophical) is human experience itself. A philosophy of mind that seeks after a material account of thought and ideas will find little assistance from introspection, or James’s psychology generally. A psychology that wants infallible and necessary truths about the fundamental structures of thought in general will probably get very little from introspection either.46 Minimally we can assert that James’s psychology is after, among other things, a description of human subjectivity, or more exactly, the subject of experience. What is required to properly describe the subject of experience is to appreciate and work with each of our methods. To bring the fruits of James’s psychology into focus,

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I will now turn to a discussion of one of James’s richest accounts of the nature of the subject of experience, “The Stream of Thought.”

James and the Legacy of British Empiricism In “The Stream of Thought” James uses introspection to make one of his most powerful arguments against the way in which experience has been conceived in the traditions of English and Herbartian psychology. Though many within these traditions were staunch defenders of introspection,47 they nevertheless propagated a picture of the human mind the least amount of introspective attention could have corrected. Myers aptly characterizes the classical empiricists’ use of introspection as akin to the natural scientists categorizing a common language constituted by discrete, substantive, and recurring units.48 We also have Hume’s famous claim that we can form no idea of a thing with either quality or quantity without representing its exact degree. This view is one James is quick to correct on introspective grounds. Strange that so patent an inward fact as the existence of “blended” images could be overlooked! Strange that the assertion could virtually be made that we cannot imagine a printed page without at the same time imagining every letter on it and made too by a school that prided itself particularly on its powers of observation!49

Hume’s argument is rejected on the very grounds he supposed he could rest it: experience. Overcoming the empiricist dependence on elementary and atomistic ideas is a vital step in James’s larger program, a program that depends upon rethinking experience at every turn.

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From Locke to Berkeley, we inherit a philosophy of mind and knowledge grounded in elementary sense data and ideas. While accounts vary from one empiricist to another, the majority of accounts we find in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century psychology and epistemology turn on the claim that the contents of one’s own mind are ideas: ideas of red, of blue, of sweet, and so on. Sensations are conceived as abstract moments of perception that result from sensory stimuli. In order to create the kind of synthesis that knowledge of the world demands, the mind or one of its faculties (however construed) is supposed to enter to create the relations that no initial sense experience could provide (continuity, equality, identity, etc.). This “idea” idea pervades seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. Locke defines an idea as “that which the mind is applied to while thinking,” and “what the mind perceives in itself or as the immediate object of perception, thought or understanding.”50 Locke finds that there are two distinct and independent sources of ideas: (1) sensation, which is the source of all our ideas of external things; and (2) reflection, from which we get our ideas about our mental operations themselves, like the idea of memory. Experience confirms that as we deliberate, reflect, daydream, and so on, the train of our ideas follows certain rules of association: one idea comes after another because the two are in some way connected or associated. Hume thinks we can be even more specific. Association follows patterns of resemblance, contiguity in place or time, and cause or effect. The point here is to show that to perceive is to be occupied with ideas, and never things or objects. Both Berkeley and Hume accept this idea implicitly, and so does Descartes. The very idea of

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ideas is the shared assumption of both the rationalist and the empiricist. The immediate objects of the mind, the first and most direct objects of understanding or intelligence, are ideas constructed as subjective determinations or states of mind. Hume relentlessly draws the furthest consequences from these assumptions in his claim that it is not possible to prove that perceptions are caused by external objects, let alone that they resemble or represent such objects. We are left in a position where there is no way to preclude the alternative explanation of perceptions arising from the mind’s own power or from causes that are utterly different from perceptions. The 1884 essay “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” heralds James’s departure from the empiricists. It is by taking the empiricists to task on what James critiques as a passive and atomistic concept of experience that his critique of empiricism first comes to light. What begins in this essay as a critique of empiricism on introspective grounds is developed in the Principles into a psychology that draws upon anatomical, introspective, experimental, and philosophical evidence. Unlike the intellectualist critiques of empiricism that focus on the necessity of introducing some a priori idea or structure onto the subject in order to account for the continuity of thought, James attempts to account for continuity while remaining firmly in the empiricist tradition. What is new in James’s approach to the reformulation of empiricism is that his attack is not based upon some notion of transcendence or an appeal to a priori structures that are able to make sense of disjointed experience but upon an appeal to experience itself. James’s critique of empirical psychology centers on the very possibility of such a thing as sense data. Consciousness and its higher functions are seen as constructions and by-products of the building up of simple impressions. These simple impressions, James argues,

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are themselves not had or found in experience; they are merely theoretical postulates. James, therefore, cannot begin as Hume or Locke did, with simple ideas or impressions, and from these build up the higher order of consciousness. Ideas, simple impressions, and sensations do not exist as real objects; they exist for the psychologist as theoretical abstractions. James describes experience “from our natal day,” as “a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations”; sensations then are not given in experience but are “a result of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.”51 While the words “sensation” and “perception” are so central to the empiricist tradition, they carry obscure and indefinite meanings. The associationists, for instance, suppose that since an object of thought contains many elements, thought itself must also be composed of such elements: one idea standing for each element combined together in appearance but really distinct. We find in James Mill’s Analysis of Human Mind the following characterization: There can be no difficulty in admitting that association does form the ideas of an indefinite number of individuals into one complex idea: because it is an acknowledged fact. Have we not the idea of an army? And is not that precisely the ideas of an indefinite number of men formed into one idea?52

Simple sensations or ideas, even the complex ideas from which they are built, cannot provide a compelling account of the relationships between ideas. The world of the empiricist is piecemeal. Thinking back to all the varied interpretations of James’s Principles, there is one feature that remains constant throughout—James, whatever else he may be, is an empiricist. However, this doesn’t yet tell us much. James’s empiricism is both radical and transformative. It is “radical” in two senses: first, it “gets to the roots” of the assumptions of the empiricist tradition, thus questioning its most basic

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assumptions; second, in accomplishing the first goal, James’s empiricism calls for a complete reformulation of the tradition and with it the concept of experience that was so central to the work of the seventeenth-century empiricists. His empiricism is transformative because in accomplishing the radical aspects of his reinterpretation of empiricism he transforms the very nature of empiricism. According to James, it makes no sense to think oneself an empiricist and yet to deprive experience of relationality, which is experience’s key characteristic—the very thing that makes experience, allows us to speak of “an experience” in a meaningful way. James’s argument is made forcefully when he sets out in the Principles to position his concept of experience as an alternative to both the intellectualist and empiricist understandings that have pervaded. But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natura, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice in human speech that does not express some shading or other relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades. We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue, a feeling of cold. Yet we do not, so inveterate

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has our habit become of recognizing the substantive parts alone that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.53

Despite the emphasis on introspection in the empiricist tradition from Bacon to Hume, what was discovered by their introspective efforts were atomized sensations: patches of red, ideas of heat, impressions of pain. Empiricism so construed leaves itself vulnerable to the critiques of the transcendentalists and the idealists who rightly see the necessity of introducing relational (and a priori) concepts to provide a compelling account of the self and the coherence of the perceived world. The error of classical empiricism points us to the claim that the waters of experience run deeper than the isolated and fragmented data the seventeenth century discovered. One of the boldest claims of the Principles is the claim that will reappear as the basic tenet of James’s “radical empiricism” in 1910: relations are a part of experience; the relations within the stream are experienced as related. We needn’t seek relations in extramental or transempirical entities or principles to account for relations; they are things that are had experientially. Whatever ideas we form or feelings we have, they are related to other feelings and ideas. The demand for atoms of feeling, which shall be real units, seems a sheer vagary, an illegitimate metaphor . . . we see what perplexities it brings in its train; and empirically, no facts suggest it, for the actual contents of our minds are always representations of some kind of ensemble.54

James follows in the footsteps of his empiricist predecessors when he claims for philosophy no more than what can be found in experience; he departs from their path when he claims for philosophy no less than what can be found in experience. Two questions emerge at this point. Once empiricism has been corrected in the manner

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James suggests, is what remains recognizable as empiricism? Does applying the term “empiricism” help or hinder our understanding of the nuances of his project? The first corrective we must make to the inherited concept of experience is to adequately express the flow of experience. This introduces one of James’s most famous discussions in the Principles, “The Stream of Thought,” and the focus of the remainder of this chapter. It also returns in Chapter 4’s discussion of the Essays in Radical Empiricism.

The Stream of Experience The chapter entitled “The Stream of Thought,” is commonly interpreted as a firsthand or phenomenological account of the nature of thinking or mental life. This interpretation is not incorrect so much as it is incomplete. The subject of the chapter is not only a description of the activity of thought but a general account of human experience. “The Stream of Thought” has a complicated history. Much of the chapter first appears in the 1884 essay “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” published in Mind. It appears again in revised and expanded form in 1890 as chapter IX of the Principles. It receives a third revision in 1893 as chapter XI of Psychology: Briefer Course, though this time it is “The Stream of Consciousness.” While the 1890 and 1893 texts diverge in some very substantial ways, many of the revisions are made for the sake of brevity and ease (they are, after all, textbooks). However, a few divergences deserve mention. The first is a revision made to what James clearly understands as the most basic fact of psychology. In the Principles this fact appears: “The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on.”55 In the Briefer James expresses this fact in a slightly different

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way: “The Fundamental Fact.—The first and foremost concrete fact which everyone will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on.”56 In the second formulation, the subject of James’s psychology is made clear: inner experience. What is inner experience? In his preparatory remarks, James seeks after a general term that will designate all inner experience. He rejects the much-used terms “mental state,” “state of consciousness,” and “conscious modification” because they imply specific and undesired theories about our inner experience. James settles on his two preferred terms, each with their own defects and advantages. The closest James comes to answering the question is with reference to a pair of terms: thoughts and feelings. “Feeling” is sometimes treated synonymously with sensation, an equivocation James wishes to avoid, and “thought,” which can sometimes suggest the omnipresence of cognition. The terms are not meant to describe two aspects of inner experience but are introduced as a complementary pair to characterize the single quality of our inner experience: “the stream.” The addition of “inner” to “experience” does two important things. First, it makes the subject of his inquiry neither thinking nor thought, but experience. Second, it shows us that the category “experience” must be wider or more inclusive than that of “thought” or our conceptual or mental arsenal. This will be fleshed out through a closer examination of the characteristics of the stream. James lists five characteristics of the stream in the Principles (the Briefer contains only four; the missing fifth characteristic is the fourth characteristic listed below). 1. Every thought tends to be a part of a personal consciousness.

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2. Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. 3. Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. 4. Human thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing. 5. It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while.

The thought expressed in the first characteristic is relatively straightforward. Thoughts belong to people. They do not float free of individuals. As James will say, “Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.”57 The next four characteristics demand further explanation. James doesn’t strictly mean “thought” when he says “thought is always changing”—especially if we take thought to be akin to ideas, concepts, or mental images—but something more like a conscious state, which includes feelings and sensations.58 We can put the claim of the second characteristic another way: No single experience ever returns in exactly the same way; it occupies the mind for some time, but not in the shape of something like a fixed mental content, concept, or idea. What recurs is the same object. We hear the same note being struck, see the same color, smell the same perfume, or experience the same species of pain or joy. [So] inveterate is our habit of simply using our sensible impressions as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. . . . We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things look

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and sound and smell at different distances and under different circumstances.59

With this single characteristic of experience, James provides us with two arguments. The first is negative, attacking in particular associationist psychology.60 “Ideas” cannot be permanent, simple, and recurring things. The second follows the physiological evidence, arguing that it is not only the ideas, thoughts, and sensations that, each time they are had, they are had differently and embedded contextually, but that we too are changing, we endure in time, have a plastic neurology, our knowledge depends on context, and so on. Experience remolds us both mentally and physically at every moment. We cannot experience the same object twice in the exact same way because we are not exactly the same from one moment to the next. James takes it as axiomatic that the immediate condition of any form of awareness or consciousness is some form of activity in the brain. The hypothesis that one and the same sensation occurs twice presupposes an unchanged brain, which for James does not exist. Change, flux, and impermanence may each be appropriate ways to characterize the stream. But if we are to understand or accept this, James must answer the same questions that have haunted philosophers since Heraclitus. If we are in a constant state of change, how is it that we derive permanence and identity? Introspectively, I know myself to be the same self over time despite all organic flux. How do we know that what is experienced is the same? James’s answer to this question begins in the third characteristic of the stream: “Thought is sensibly continuous.” Continuity is “that which is without breach, crack, or division.”61 In his discussion of the continuity of the stream, James is not concerned with the complexities of mathematical continuity.

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He is after continuity only in the sense of the feeling of continuity that may adequately characterize lived experience. James’s discussion of continuity comes to two points: first, there are third-person observable breaks in consciousness (seizures, a deep sleep, etc.) that are never felt or perceived as gaps or breaks to the subject. Conscious life or lived experience is, however, temporally continuous. The second point is that changes from one moment to the next are not sudden breaks. When one object succeeds another by sharp contrast, we tend to focus on the objective contrast, passing over continuity of perception. For example, I’m sitting quietly when I hear a sudden and unexpected clap of thunder. It startles me, and later, when I come to reflect on the moment, I interpret the experience as one of pure and distinct contrast. My conscious thought was interrupted—there was a break. For James, this is another example of how introspection can lead us astray. We do not hear “thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.”62 The idea of thunder (the concept “thunder”) is opposed to the idea or concept of “silence.” Yet, James wants to stress that feelings are never isolated. The feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before.63

The hyphens separating the phrase “thunder-breaking-upon-silenceand-contrasting-with-it” stand in for the relatedness of each term, and give voice to the transitive nature of consciousness. James brings to our attention an often-overlooked aspect of our experience—namely, that it is made up of both “flights” and “perches.” “Perches” are, as the name would imply, the resting places of thought. They are the substantive moments when one is occupied with a

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sensation, image, or thought that can be held before the mind with clarity. The substantive moments are easily suited to concepts and names, they can be “held before the mind for an indefinite time and contemplated without change.”64 The flights are more difficult to characterize but they are crucial. They are primarily feelings or thoughts of relations that obtain between the various perches of thought. The primary difficulty in discussing these transitive aspects of our conscious lives is that they tend to the substantive. When we try to lay hold of them introspectively they escape our grasp. “As a snowflake caught in the warm hand is no longer a flake but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its form we find we have caught some substantive thing.”65 The experiences of transition and relation—the flights—have been overlooked in both the empiricist and the idealistic traditions. Sensationalists tend to deny they exist at all because they do not find a name that can correspond to them. Hume even went so far as to deny not just the relations subjectively felt and experienced but also the relations between objects. Intellectualists claimed that relations were extramental. While the intellectualist and the empiricist differed in their treatment of relations, they both asserted that relations were not things that could be experienced. Like the empiricists, the intellectualists were unable to find a substantive feeling in which they were known. However, they drew the opposite conclusion: relations were not a mental state or feeling, but a product of Reason or a pure act of thought. Privileging the substantive over the transitive is inevitable. This is one of the central reasons that James will insist on the ultimately retrospective character of introspection. We do not have infallible, clear, or distinct access to the transitive aspects of our lives. We experience them as vague and passing feelings; they are

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marked with “fringes” one can retrospectively report upon with more or less precision, but never exhaustively. While it is convenient to talk about atoms of feelings and to treat higher functions and states as if they were built upon these unchanging and simple ideas, we only speak conveniently or abstractly, and the psychologist needs to do more than this. What has traditionally been understood as a discrete or substantive sensation is, in James’s psychology, replaced with the contextual flow of the ongoing stream of experience. James names these feelings of transition and relation. They are “feelings of if,” “feelings of or,” or “feelings of and.” While it is certainly awkward to talk about an “if-feeling,” James insists that to overlook the connections that escape our typical vocabulary is to give a distorted picture of both mind and world. To name such feelings is a tremendous insight that nevertheless leaves James open to a certain line of critique. The description of these transitive states comes to a head in a passage famously criticized by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s concern is worthy of note because if he is correct—both in what he takes to be the aim of James’s discussion of these feelings of if and in his critique of this aim—then the discussion would demand serious revision. William James speaks of specific feelings accompanying the use of such words as “and,” “if,” “or.” And there is no doubt that at least certain gestures are often connected with such words, as a collecting gesture with “and,” and a dismissing gesture with “not.” And there obviously are visual and muscular sensations connected with these gestures. On the other hand it is clear enough that these sensations do not accompany every use of the word “not” and “and”. . . . Ask yourself: “When I

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said ‘Give me an apple and a pear, and leave the room,’ had I the same feeling when I pronounced the two words ‘and’?”66

The criticism reoccurs in the Investigations. Are you sure there is a single if-feeling, and perhaps not several? Have you tried saying the word in a great variety of contexts? For example, when it bears the principal stress of the sentence and when the word next to it does not? 67 Does a person ever have the if-feeling when he is not uttering the word “if ”? Surely it is at least remarkable if this cause alone produces the feeling.68

If James were saying that there is or must be a “single if-feeling” caused by the presence of the word “if ” or a specific event that relates to it, one that reoccurs each time I utter the word, then something would be amiss. As Wittgenstein points out in the Brown Book, there are several different feelings that could accompany the use of a conjunction or a preposition. If James were arguing that the meaning of the word “if ” is to be located in our “if-feeling,” then again, something would be amiss. But is this what James is doing? I don’t think so. Nowhere does he suggest that there is anything like a single if-feeling.69 James explicitly states that no feeling (be it the feeling of red, the feeling of pain, or the feeling of if ) is ever had twice in the same manner. A few pages before the infamous if-feelings appear, James emphatically states, “Close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.”70 And a few pages later he stresses the point again: Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat dif-

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ferent angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared.71

Nowhere does he suggest that there is a single if-feeling that recurs and prompts words, but rather a number of unique feelings that resemble each other and are coupled with other thoughts. So, if James isn’t out to discover the meaning of words here, or to identify feelings with concepts, what is the point? The first thing to note is the negative function of the argument. James is attacking sensationalism. In order to pave the way for his own account of empiricism, he rejects what he characterizes as “atoms of feelings.” I do not have the same feeling and I am not responding to the exact same stimuli each time I utter the word “blue” or each time I utter the word “if.” The reasons for this are mental, physical, contextual, and emotional. On a physiological level, the brain is ever changing. When the same object strikes our senses, when the same sentiment affects us, when the same mood overtakes us, what is being effected, affected, or overtaken is not the same. The brain and the body are in a constant flux, affording ever so slight shifts and changes. We think of an object in one context, and then another, then another. Objects can be thought of symbolically, in definite images, and so on. “We never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to.”72 Objects that were once full of meaning and significance signify it no more; things that appeared to us as wholly insignificant bear an immense weight. The same object may appear in front of me at one time, and then at another, yet the manner in which I perceive the object changes. The sensationalist requires a fixed and permanent object, a permanent “idea,” or Vorstellung. James’s “if-feelings” are part of a larger

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negative argument about our tendency to privilege the substantive over the transitive aspects of our lives. Wedded to the discussion of the transitive and substantive aspects of our experience is a distinction that is absolutely central to James’s overall vision and to his discussion of the subject of experience—the overwrought distinction between thought and feeling. Feelings are characterized as transitive and marginal; they pertain to relations, significance, and direction; they are later characterized as unspeakable, known by acquaintance, vague, and confused.73 Conversely, thought is characterized as substantive, nameable, inferred and discursive, circumscribed, clear and distinct.74 A fair and necessary criticism of this distinction is that it is sometimes drawn too sharply. James is so concerned with overcoming the thought/ feeling distinction as it was developed in the rationalist tradition that he sometimes goes too far in the other direction, ending up with a new kind of dualism between thought and feeling. The point of focusing on the vagaries and the flight of feelings, as opposed to the clarity and the rest of thought, is to show that when our thought or experience is transitional and not easily grasped or nameable by words or concepts, we tend to pass it by. At best, James takes the benefit of the distinction between thought and feeling (or we could say the difference between the inferential and noninferential) not as pointing to an unbreachable dichotomy between the feeling and the knowing aspects of our lives but as making the argument that thoughts and feelings are not categorically distinct. The difference is one of degree, not of kind. A lengthy quote from volume one of the Principles makes the point clearly. The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between certain subjective facts called images and sensations,

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and others called acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing things, knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the later combine the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep. The contrast is really between two aspects, in which all mental facts without exception may be taken—their structural aspects, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions. In the former aspect, the highest as well as the lowest feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream. This tingeing is its sensitive body, the wie ihm zu Muthe ist, the way it feels whilst passing. In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as the highest may grasp some bit of truth as its content, even though that truth were as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalized and undated quality of pain. From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts are intellections. From the subjective point of view all are feelings.75

When not overstating the difference so as to give a place to feeling and the previously neglected transitory states, James holds that thoughts and feelings are two aspects of our experience, neither to be taken in isolation from the other. Understood this way, our introspective reporting, while surely missing and perhaps even falsifying some features of our experience, can also serve to illuminate others. Though introspection is often burdened with associations of dualism, Cartesianism, immediacy, and infallibility, James employs it in a subtle and sophisticated manner that serves ultimately to undercut such associations. Recall what may be James’s most important words regarding introspection: “If to have feelings in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists . . . the psychologist must not only have his mental states . . . he must report them, write about them, classify, and compare them.”

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The form of introspection James advocates still places first-person observation at the center of his psychology, but he ultimately rejects the ideas associated with its Cartesian or Lockean form— namely, that one has immediate and infallible access to one’s consciousness. Again, echoing what will become a familiar pragmatic retort: “The only safeguard is the final consensus of our further knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones.” Ten years after the Principles, in a letter to Münsterberg, James writes, “I still believe the immediate living moment of experience to be as ‘describable’ as any ‘scientific’ substitute therefore can be.”76 I read this comment, though informally expressed, to make an important point that is supported throughout the Principles. Both introspection and experimentation are fallible. They carry with them limitations and benefits. A psychology (or philosophy) that tries to do away with either (as Münsterberg’s did) risks cutting the human being off from herself and her environment. We hear echoes of this sentiment expressed again in the Varieties, a text James himself described as a “laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general fact which can be defined in formulas upon which everyone can agree.”77 It is a text replete with firsthand accounts of mystical revelations, conversations with the divine, and other such introspective reports. James considers the relevance of such accounts essential to getting at a “science” of religion. Yet as the science of optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience, and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its critical

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reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. . . . There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.78

We find James here again asserting the retrospective character of introspection. But we also see James returning to the critique of intellectualism. In this context, this is the warning that our academic and scientific endeavors risk operating in a conceptual vacuum if they ignore experience. It is a claim echoed in the Principles where he argues that the “theory will be most generally believed, which besides offering us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers those which are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and active needs.”79 How we determine what these needs are is of vital importance both to James’s psychology and to his more explicitly pragmatic work. We answer such needs both practically and philosophically—with the psychologist’s cures for melancholy; with the theories of philosophers; and with our own introspective questions about motives, desires, particularities of feelings, and so on. Introspection is what James relies upon “first and foremost.” This commitment does not shun experimental results. It does, however, maintain a commitment to a pragmatic science, one that respects values, facts, and the reciprocal relation between them. Introspection, as James practices it, is not a return to Cartesianism or a preexperimental psychology but an expression of a pragmatic commitment to staying focused on concrete life. What will be fleshed out in more detail in the next chapter but deserves quick mention here is that James’s concerns with the relationship between our thoughts and feelings is not for the sake of developing an empirical epistemology, wherein feelings and per-

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ceptions can play justificatory roles. Nor is he advocating a fullblown subjectivism. Rather, the aim is to expose false and ultimately harmful the description of our mental and moral lives as bereft of the active contribution of feeling or sensibility—in other words, to expose those accounts that would do away with the appeal to our lived experience. A question remains. What would be the danger of eliminating introspection or downplaying it in favor of a strict experimentalism? Why stress its importance philosophically? On this point James is clear: A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the enemy than the eternal Void! . . . Any philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by explaining away its object or translating them into terms of no emotional pertinency leaves the mind with little to care or act for.80

The charge is what James often identifies as intellectualism. The dangers in psychology are not so different from what they are in philosophy. Throughout all of James’s major works, he expresses great caution concerning the portrayal of our mental, moral, and knowing lives as fields in which our active and emotional contributions are met with hostility, explained away, dismissed, or abstracted from the realm of human knowledge, inquiry, and experience.81 In psychology, such an attitude leads to the description of the mind as passive before experience or a strictly rational entity, leading to a picture of the mind as little more than automated reactions to physical stimuli. In the moral and practical spheres this leads to a picture of our lives as little more than the

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respect of rules and principles, conceived prior (and, James will say, as hostile) to experience and our personal lives. The fourth characteristic of the stream echoes most clearly James’s intention to presuppose a dualism between thought and object and to secure a mind-independent reality. The failure to distinguish between the act of thinking and the object of thought is at the center of many of the problems James diagnoses in psychology. The refutation of absolute idealism that is introduced in the discussion of the stream leads James to some interesting and conflicting conclusions regarding his own self-professed dualism. Idealism identifies things by the fact that we think them.82 This position is untenable from the standpoint of the psychologist, as it throws into doubt the necessary presupposition that minds truly exist independently of one another. For the very same reason, we must also assent to the claim that objects of thought have a twofold existence. Objects of thought do not exist for my consciousness alone, but in the world, and for the consciousness of others. James argues that the reason we believe objects have an existence outside the mind is that they are shared. The judgment that my thought has the same object as his thought is what makes the psychologist call my thought cognitive of an outer reality. The judgment that my own past thought and my own present thought are of the same object is what makes me take the object out of either and project it by a sort of triangulation into an independent position, from which it may appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought.83

The fourth characteristic of the stream introduces us to what James will call conception, defining it as “the function by which we thus identify a numerically distinct and permanent subject of discourse.”84

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The problems related to the function of conception have been influenced by Berkeley and Mill. In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley argues that we can never frame a conception of a particular element of experience. To think any one thing is to think it in its totality. As Berkeley argues, whenever I imagine an eye, I must imagine some eye of a particular shape or size. Likewise, the abstract idea man must have particular shape, height, age, and so on. Berkeley denies that we can strip away qualities from an idea of a particular to create a new, general, and abstract idea. The assumption here is that a thought must be what it intends. James’s identification of Berkeley’s error highlights the importance of James’s own distinction between what he will call the object of thought and the topic of thought. If asked what the mind’s object is of “Columbus discovered America in 1492,” most would identify the subject as Columbus, America, or perhaps even the discovery of America. These are not, however, the precise objects of thought. They are the grammatical subjects or the topics of thought. “The Object of your thought is really its entire content or deliverance, neither more nor less.”85 If we were to speak precisely of the object of thought we would have to identify the whole sentence: “Columbus-discovered-America-​ in-​1492.” When Berkeley or Mill argued against abstract ideas, they did so because they assumed that the thought must be identical to the object of thought. James argues that meaning is found by remaining as close as possible to the significance of the whole, however obscure. The object of every thought is “neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be.”86 To speak precisely of an object, we must

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also speak of the feelings of tendency, the relations between words, and the “fringes” that convey its meaning. Conception grows and is changed by rational and inward processes as well as by empirical ones. Every one of our conceptions is “something which our attention originally tore out of the continuum of felt experience and provisionally isolated as to make of it an individual topic of discourse.”87 What we see James developing in this fourth characteristic is far more complicated than he originally leads us to believe in his chart full of the “irreducible datum of psychology.” He is beginning to paint a picture of the stream of experience as both passive toward a world that really is there but is only made meaningful by active conception. This characteristic, however, does tremendous damage to the natural scientific program James professes in the opening chapters of the Principles. The suggestion here is that the thought studied and thought’s object are known and specified only in relation to one another. This is perhaps why this characteristic is omitted from the chapter “The Stream of Experience” in James’s Briefer Course. The basic claim developed in James’s discussion of the fifth characteristic, and again in the chapter “Attention,” is perhaps the most explicit connection between the work of the Principles and works such as Pragmatism and The Will to Believe. The claim is presented in a relatively straightforward manner: The human being is always actively organizing her experience. We organize our environment, arrange phenomena, and focus on some aspects of our reality, while ignoring others, for reasons more than mere physical need. It was not so uncommon to claim for experience an active element, a moment of human contribution. In some respects, this was Kant’s claim in the first Critique. On the other side of the argument lies Spencer, who argues in his Principles of Psychology that human

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beings, just like all other organisms, passively mirror their environment for the sake of survival. For Spencer, human experience can be understood as the process of “adjustment of inner to outer relations.”88 Yet James’s discussion departs from these in several important ways to develop a distinctive account of the nature of both attention and interest in human experience. James’s disagreement with Spencer and his particular brand of newly formed “Darwinian” psychology is first articulated more than ten years prior to the publication of the Principles, in the essay “Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence.” It is in opposition to Spencer’s combination of empiricism and evolutionism that James begins to define his own, and in doing so highlights the centrality of the attending function of human consciousness, and the paramount place of subjective interest. Spencer, determined to show the empirical sources of all experience, including the “higher mental functions,” assumes that experience is simply given to a mind that mirrors it. James’s fifth characteristic (thought is always interested in some parts . . . to the exclusion of others) complicates this picture. James advances the thesis of selective attention with a bold formulation: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”89 He asks us to imagine what the reality of a mind without selective interest would look like: Without selective interest, experience is in utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent, and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground—intelligible perspective in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a grey chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us to even conceive.90

The human subject actively creates and contributes to what she takes to be reality. The point becomes more specifically James’s

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when he further argues that the means by which the human being organizes her environment are not fixed categories of reason but are empirical. James defines attention as “focalization” or “concentration.”91 Attention implies withdrawal from something in order to effectively deal with another. It can be focused on objects of sense, or on ideal objects. Interest is said to be the cause of our attending, and is derived from the realms of the aesthetic, ethical, and practical. In his discussion of the senses we learn that selection operates both physiologically and psychically. Attention is always a physiological or mechanical process involving two things: the accommodation or adjustment of the sense organs, and the anticipatory preparation from within the “ideational centers” concerned with objects.92 James argues for a thoroughly naturalistic account of attention and interest. “No object,” he says, “can catch our attention except by the neural machinery.”93 Objects neither call out for, nor hide from, the attention of conscious beings, and physiological constraints on the part of the subject work to pick out what will be perceived and experienced. Asking after the ground for such objectifications, James inquires further. The objective world is, for us, only that part of the world to which we respond. An appeal to Helmholtz’s Optiks, wherein he demonstrates that things differently attract our attention according to our predispositions, furnishes James’s argument. Attention is this explained in the following manner: If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus picked out for us by the conformation of the organ’s termination, attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as worthy of notice and suppresses all the rest. Helmholtz’s work on the optics is little more than a study of those visual sensations of which common

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men never become aware—blind spots, muscoe volitantes, after images, irradiation, chromatic fringes, marginal changes of color, double images, astigmatism, movements of accommodation and convergence, retinal rivalry, and more besides. We do not even know without special training on which of our eyes an image falls. So habitually ignorant are most men of this that one may be blind for years in a single eye and never know the fact.94

We notice only those sensations that are signs to us of things which happen to interest us either practically, aesthetically, or ethically, and to which we therefore give a substantive name and, with that, independence. But the thing-in-itself, apart from my interest, is no more than “a particular dust-wreath on a windy day.”95 There are no things apart from my interest. However, this is not the claim asserted by the idealist, who argues that consciousness makes its objects. The essential character of a thing, that which constitutes its objectivity, is as much the sensations selected out of the complex thing as it is the subjective conditions. Even rational connections are said to be the products of selective activity and are not due to any intrinsic property of mind itself. Reasoning, for example, is said to be the “ability of the mind to break up the totality of phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in our given emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion.”96 We manipulate experience to serve interests, ends, needs, wants, desires, and wishes, and our choices are not simply spontaneous reaction to stimuli. One could object, as Haddock-Seigfried has in her study of James, that there is something seemingly arbitrary about what the mind chooses as objects of experience.97 I name the tabletop “square” after one of an infinite number of retinal sensations, “but I call the latter perspective views, and the four right

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angles the true form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness to the table’s essence.”98 If any one of any number of sensations could stand in for the essence of an object, and any sensation, no matter how obtrusive, could be ignored, we are led to conclude that there is something seemingly arbitrary about James’s description. We choose to notice some sensations, then choose again from these, selecting some of our already chosen lot of sensations as definitive of objects, while at the same time dismissing others. And yet, despite our varied physiological makeups, interests, goals, and attitudes, we share a common world. People largely agree on what they will notice, what will be experienced, and what will be passed by. If we accept James’s thesis that the experience of the otherwise chaotic world is made possible by the imposition of subjectively motivated interests, and his argument against the “copy thesis” regarding the genesis of mental categories, then we must conclude that none of the “categories” (space, time, causality, etc.) could possibly mirror or be derived from experience. Selection is shown to work on both the mechanical and the conscious levels. How then does it function in the intellectual sphere? This question sets up the final chapter of the Principles, “Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience.” Here, James attempts to show how reasoning is a process that utilizes signs to pick out the essential qualities of phenomena. It extracts characters out of a phenomenal totality according to a purpose—namely, prediction. He makes two points regarding the nature of reasoning: (1) in acts of reason an “extracted character is taken as equivalent to the entire document from which it comes”; and (2) “the character, thus taken, suggests a certain consequence more obviously than was suggested by the datum as it originally came.”99 He concludes, “The only meaning of essence is teleological and . . . classification and conception

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are purely teleological weapons of the mind. The essence of a thing is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest.”100 The properties we deem important vary from person to person, from moment to moment. But many objects of daily use—as paper, ink, butter, horsecar—have properties of such constant unwavering importance, and such stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way. Those are no truer ways of conceiving them than any others; they are only more important ways, more frequently serviceable ways.101

Our way of organizing experience into real objects is revealed as a “teleological weapon of the mind.” James shows how we construct a world to suit our ends, and then by ignoring the fact of our participation in the outcome, pass it off as an independently given, objective “reality.” He cautions us not to forget that our goals, and our sense of what is important, are a small fraction of all possibilities. Our world, abstracted out of the fullness of experience, is always a “rotten and miserable substitute” for the encompassing and pluralistic reality.102 We must organize if we are to survive; yet, James cautions that we must not forget the subjective character of the world we take for granted. Such forgetfulness would likely increase the danger that we will not take responsibility for re-creating the world in new and better ways. This forgetfulness comes hand in hand with blindness to the ways in which other people value and make their world, and blindness to the power held by those in a position to enforce their views of reality under the auspices of an objective, preexistent state of affairs.

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Conceptualization always involves reducing the plenitude of reality to a limited number of aspects, chosen for some particular purpose. Though each reality has an infinite number of aspects or properties, the manner in which we can regard that reality is potentially endless. Essentiality is always an interplay between some phenomenal characteristic and an intentional point of view; given other ends in view, other characteristics of the object will acquire essential status, and an aspect essential for some other purpose will cease to matter. Since to classify an object at all means to pick out some limited number of characteristics while ignoring the rest, “I am always unjust, always partial, always exclusive.”103 The human being is finite and practice demands exclusivity and partiality. “My thinking,” says James, “is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.”104 Although reasoning discloses real aspects of objects, it can also distort them by losing the transitive and relational aspects in its grasp. It binds them according to interest that may not be a fixed or even long-lasting criteria. This necessity is not a strictly logical constraint but one that is derived from our finite and practical natures. James places rational thinking within a continuum that accounts for the organization of experience. This continuity is emphasized when James begins the final chapter of the Principles, by reminding us that Darwinian biology has shown a continuous relationship between human beings and other animals, and that human beings are not of another order of being, as philosophers and theologians have often supposed. Just as there are no sharp breaks between sensation and perception, nor between thought and feeling, there are also intermediate and related stages between perception and rational thought.

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James and “The Given” Recall Sellars’s warning against the dangers of immediacy, what went by the name “the myth of the given.” Again, the difficulty with the given is that insofar as the given is a stimulus, it has no specific rational weight, and therefore cannot justify one belief against another; insofar as it is significant and justifying, the sensation, or intuition, is already a belief. James does, on occasion, talk about experience, intuitions, and feelings like this. Sometimes he talks about feelings, stimuli, and vague impressions as if they are the grounds for justification, the ultimate reality, and the ineffable source of meaning. But ultimately, this thought gives way to a more nuanced distinction, and with that a more robust notion of experience. It is helpful to reinforce that James’s concerns at the end of the nineteenth century were not unlike Sellars’s concern with the givenness at play in the twentieth-century sense data theories. James’s concerns were (1) the foundational sensationalism of his empiricist predecessors; and (2) the absolutism and intellectualism of, for example, Josiah Royce and the Hegelians of his day. To argue that James’s thought and his concept of experience need not fall back on a pernicious form of appeal to immediacy, it is necessary to point to moments and claims that support the recognition of the difference between what could be called inferential knowledge and noninferential knowledge of matters of fact. As both Sellars and James stress, albeit in different ways, there is an important difference that must be established between experiencing in the sense of having stimuli and knowing that one is, for example, seeing a sunset or looking at a blue pen. James’s remarks are worth recalling again. “If to have feelings or thought in their

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immediacy, were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists. . . . But the psychologist must not only have his mental states . . . he must report them, write about them, name them, classify, and compare them.”105 And again, in a passage that could have been written by Sellars himself, James cautions us about the fallibility of our socalled immediate knowledge. He says, “The only safeguard is the final consensus of our further knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until a harmony of a consistent system is reached.”106 Though James does not tell us much in the way of how it is that we learn to make these reports, the suggestion seems to be that it involves inferential and linguistic processes (our ability to name, classify, write about, report, and compare our sensory and introspective knowledge). The second major point to note is that none of this information ever works as a rational justification in isolation from a body of knowledge, or what James calls the “harmony of a consistent system.” Yet James does, especially in some of his more rhetorically driven criticisms of intellectualism, collapse the distinction he is careful to draw above.107 Language and concepts are, as discussed in Chapter 1, something of a mixed blessing. Language, for example, brings about its own successes and achievements, but never without some loss.108 He laments that language is “sluggish” and “atomistic,” “work[ing] against our perception of truth” by souring its referents and turning precepts into concepts.109 This sentiment punctuates all James’s work, from the Principles to the later lectures on pluralism. What James suggests is that there is continuity between what many assume to be the strict distinctions between thought and feeling, percept and concept, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge about, language and experience. The suggestion is not that we la-

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ment the way in which language disrupts our “pure” experience but that we see language as both a means or a tool for making and organizing our experience and a means or a tool to sometimes negatively substantiate the transitive parts of our experience, to nail down flux and change with permanence. The problem is better conceived as one of emphasis and attention. Intellectualists overemphasize the “dumb” qualities of experience, claiming that until a feeling is named and classified as a “what” it is philosophically irrelevant. However, empiricists can fall victim to an equally pernicious bias: that experience can and should remain untouched by concepts, thought, and language. While James sometimes treads closely to the mystic’s position with respect to immediate experience, we can advance a claim that is both faithful to James’s own position and that recognizes the dangers and excesses of the retreat into immediate and pure experience. While we can fault James for overstating the difference, and not always keeping some of his more carefully drawn distinctions in mind, the danger today is to overstate the differences in the other direction. Rorty, for example, goes to such pains to eradicate any reference to “givenism,” that the distinction between language and stimuli, sentience and sapience, or vocabularies and casual impact, cannot but appear as an overstated dualism.

James’s Concept of Experience With the examination of the principles, we can now begin to see what experience means more specifically. So far James’s appeal to experience can be understood through the two main features of experience: (1) Experience is active. The discussion of selection and attention highlights that the subject is, in fact, never strictly

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passive before the world. This position is complemented by James’s critique of the legacy of empiricism. Moreover, because experience is active it is also conceived of as a process that is educated and formed (this point is taken up in the next chapter). Insofar as experience is conceived of as this formed process it involves capacities such as naming and classifying. (2) Experience is a lived process. In other words, the subject cannot be understood apart from the pair of terms “thought and feeling.” I understand this description of experience as pragmatic because each of these qualities of experience, the active and the lived, as ultimately justified and shown in the sphere of our practical activity. I call it existential because what constitutes “pragmatic” for James is that the sphere of our practical activity is, first and foremost, a question of how we conceive the subject of experience, others in a community, and care of the self. To get a clear sense of how this concept develops and why it is an attractive alternative to the others, requires us now to turn to some of James’s later and more explicitly moral writings: The Varieties of Religious Experience and “The Will to Believe.”

CHAPTER 3

The Willfulness of Belief Today I about touched bottom, and I perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it: I will give the latter alternative a fair trial. —James, diary entry, 1897

Non ridere, non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere! Says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as he is wont. Yet in the final analysis, what is this intelligere other than the way become sensible of the other three? —Nietzsche, The Gay Science

While the Principles remains James’s lengthiest treatment of experience and the nature of subjectivity, looking ahead to “The Will to Believe” (1896) will help to make evident the particular moral inflection of James’s concept of experience, and ultimately show how this moral-existential emphasis informs his pragmatism. I have been suggesting that what animates James’s varied appeals to experience is a moral-existential picture of human action and cognition. While previous chapters have focused on outlining the critical arguments that surround the difficulties with James’s appeals to 119

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experience and highlighting the significance of the subject of experience, the moral scope of James’s defense of experience has yet to come into full view. As James himself is not explicit about the connection between the significance of treatments of experience, psychology, and moral thought, I’ll here focus on weaving together the treatment of the subject with his discussions of belief and the will. I begin with a discussion of “The Will to Believe,” one of James’s most controversial and well-known essays. The aim here is to, first, clarify the essay against some of its standard readings and critiques, and, second, to show how the aims of “The Will to Believe” complement the wider discussion of the role James assigns to experience. Reading “The Will to Believe” in isolation from the psychology (or seeing it as a shift away from the concerns of the psychology) has led to an unfortunate characterization of James’s thought that has obscured and undermined James’s place in the history of ethics and epistemology. Readers who take such an approach often fail to see how James’s epistemological claims about belief are rooted in a wider account of the subject and are thus intimately wed to his twofold understanding of experience as both active and passive. To make this clear, I connect the terms of “The Will to Believe” to those of belief and reality in the chapter of the Principles entitled “The Perception of Reality” to show both the scope and limits of the Jamesian will. Understanding the scope of the will allows us to better appreciate the ethical concerns driving James’s discussion of belief and afford a more nuanced understanding of what is at stake when we talk about experience. It has become commonplace to see James as the representative of classical pragmatism’s most subjectivistic and relativistic leanings. Proponents of such characterizations tend to place “The Will to

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Believe” at the center of their critical arguments, diagnosing it as an endorsement of voluntarism, subjectivism, or a merely irresponsible relativism.1 However, these readings misrepresent James in two ways. First, they are ill founded with respect to that essay’s actual claims. As to the questions regarding the nature of truth that have so occupied critics, James’s essay says very little. Second, such readers tend to neglect the more specific treatments of the major concepts at play in the essay—belief, the will, and so-called “genuine options”—and consequently fail to appreciate its wider significance. If we read James as an advocate of unfettered voluntarism, or if we see his arguments in “The Will to Believe” as offering a prudential account of what he calls “living, forced, and momentous options,” then we obscure the ethical picture that sits at the core of his thought and thus fail to appreciate his distinctive pragmatism. By taking a seemingly circuitous path back through the Principles of Psychology (1890) and moving ahead to The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), I argue that James’s will-to-believe thesis is not a generalized epistemological thesis but a moral-psychological one. Considered in this light, “The Will to Believe” continues to develop the central concepts of James’s moral psychology and helps us to reconsider James’s pragmatic approach to ethics and belief more generally. Appreciating this moral register will then allow us to see the very real limitations on what could be considered “the willfulness of belief ” and will illuminate the moral and existential uptake of the discussion of belief and experience in James’s pragmatism. James’s description of the will and belief highlights both the active and passive character of experience. Beliefs, particularly those that shape our sense of reality or give character to the world, don’t arise from a state of passivity or neutrality. Put another way, the

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mind is not a mirror of nature. Recalling that, for James, experience always contains both an active and passive element, what will become clear is that the active and passive conceptions of experience come together in the discussions of belief and the will. Seen this way, belief is a mode of human activity not exhausted by the discursive alone; it is a confrontation or coalescence between our actions, desires, hopes, fears, wishes, social stations, and coercive resistance. James comes to this position through his reworking of Hume and the rejection of the characterization of belief as “content.” While certainly not untouched by epistemic concerns regarding justification and the nature of truth, James’s position is far more morally and existentially focused than interpretations that see “The Will to Believe” as James’s theory of truth in germinal form would lead us to believe. The purpose here is to spell out in more detail James’s account of the nature of the attitudes of belief, doubt, and disbelief, and link them to an account of the subject. The moral force of the argument comes to the fore by casting the question “Can we believe at will?” in a new light. Through a discussion of the firsthand descriptions of the conversion experiences detailed in the Varieties of Religious Experience and the self-transformations in which beliefs that once appeared dead become live (or vice versa) that appear throughout James’s moral, psychological, and religious writings, the moral urgency of James’s position in “The Will to Believe” is clarified. Moreover, these experiences and the practical, psychological, and epistemic obstacles they face make clear a dialectic between self and world that is central to understanding James’s overall account of experience. It is a dialectic that we would fail to appreciate if we were to construe James along the lines that he has

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historically been taken: as either construing belief along strictly voluntaristic or subjectivistic lines, or as confining the will-to-believe thesis to domains of inquiry. In contrast to these approaches, willfulness cannot be reduced to a voluntarism wherein I can believe whatever I judge to be good or prudent. The will-to-believe is operative whenever we are faced with what James calls a “live,” “forced,” and “momentous” option.

The Will to Believe “The Will to Believe” occupies a central place in James’s writings. In addition to being James’s most anthologized work, and said to mark a turning point in his thought—heralding the shift away from psychology and into philosophy, epistemology, or a germinal pragmatism. The essay was first presented as an address to the Philosophical Club of Yale and Brown in 1896. The context of the speech is significant. His audience, comprised of college-bred (upper-class Protestant) youth, were familiar with both philosophy and the science of the day. Speaking to this audience, James anticipated that his position would be a hard sell. In the introduction to the lecture he juxtaposes his interest in “vital subjects” such as faith with the “Harvard freethinking and indifference” that had come to dominate the university of the late 1800s. The thesis of James’s address pronounces on the “lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith” and contains both a descriptive and a normative claim. It runs as follows: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave

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the question open” is itself a passional decision—and is attended with the same risk of losing truth.2

A number of terminological questions arise here. Briefly, a “genuine option” is one that meets three criteria: it is “live,” “forced,” and “momentous.” Though I will have to say more about these criteria shortly, for now it suffices to say that when we are faced with a “genuine option,” James argues that we have a right to believe despite our having no intellectual or evidentiary grounds to do so. In such cases, we have the right, James says, “to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will.”3 At first blush, it is not surprising that many have taken James to task as an advocate of voluntarism or subjectivism. Such critiques are often framed in terms of the degree to which James could, in light of this thesis, be seen to advocate an irresponsible wantonness of belief that would license irresponsible or dangerous prejudices, blindnesses, or ignorance. However, cases that meet the criteria of “genuine options”—the cases James discusses with respect to the will to believe—are cases in which evidence is absent or neutral, where we have no more evidence for choosing one belief over another (and so we cannot have reasons to choose one over the other); yet they are also cases where a choice must nevertheless be made (that is, they are forced beliefs). James thus concludes that abstention in such cases is not the triumph of “intellect against all passions” but “only intellect with one passion [e.g., fear of error] laying down its law.”4 Where we do not have evidence for a belief, refraining from judgment in the face of what James calls a “live,” “forced,” and “momentous” belief is no more epistemically responsible than to believe. Moreover, some beliefs become true on the condition that we (in the absence of evidence) believe them to be true. James’s favored examples of such beliefs are those involving

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religious belief, interpersonal relationships, and those of the scientist committed to the pursuit of some unverified hypothesis. From this, James concludes that “to preach skepticism as a duty until sufficient evidence . . . [can] be found” is tantamount to telling us that we ought to obey the fear of error rather than pursue one’s hope for truth.5 Nominally, the critical target of “The Will to Believe” is W. K. Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief,” which represents a recent iteration of a philosophical position James had argued against throughout his career. In his essay, which James highlights for his audience as containing its own dangers, limits, and emotional motivations, Clifford pronounced the “sinfulness” of holding any belief in the absence of empirically verifiable evidence, claiming that it is “wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”6 James agrees that “attention to all accessible evidence [is] the only duty”7 involved in certain kinds of beliefs, but we have also seen him insist that shunning error in all possible cases leads to a perversion of the course of inquiry and frustrates our success. Clifford serves as a good foil for James because he moralizes what others might simply call “errors.” Targeting Clifford, “The Will to Believe” helps launch a much broader critique of the intellectualist tradition.8 There was a species of Cartesian rationalism that was prevalent among the protopositivists of James’s day. James here presents Clifford’s evidentialism as a reformulated Cartesianism for nineteenth-century scientific sensibilities in order to target the more general position that commands abstention in the face of uncertainty. The favored case in “The Will to Believe” is the theistic option, which James casts as a choice “we cannot escape . . . by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light [as the evidentialist would prescribe], because, al-

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though we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.”9 While we have not yet seen how this thesis evades its critical charges, being clear about James’s intentions and highlighting the conditions of “genuine options” is the first step in doing so: in the theistic case—where our own stakes are important, but where evidence is neutral—James argues that we are no less faithful to the evidence, no less responsible as epistemic agents, when we believe as when we doubt or disbelieve. Referring to his own “passional need of taking the world religiously,” James says, “I simply refuse obedience to the scientist’s command to imitate this kind of option [i.e., abstention], in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk.”10 Claims of this sort have led critics to see James as endorsing any view that appeals to one’s wants or the desire to attain some individualistic or private good, opening the door to questions regarding the extent to which one can voluntarily will a belief. Can I freely choose to believe any option? Can I believe by will what I otherwise know to be false simply because it is beneficial? As I have said, these readings strain James’s meaning, but it is useful to be clear on what such readings assume. The recurring controversies over James’s position often circle around three related concerns. The first concerns the extent to which James could be seen to endorse subjectivism. Russell, for example, diagnoses “The Will to Believe” as “subjectivistic madness”11; Dewey complains that James’s essay suggests “the fact of personal complicity involved in belief is a warrant for this or that special personal attitude instead of being a warning to locate and define it so as to accept responsibility for it.”12 Such views of “The Will to Believe” have been

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given new voice by, among others, Cheryl Misak.13 Misak sees in James a form of wishful thinking that encroaches upon standards of evidence. She interprets the will-to-believe thesis as arguing that the very concept of evidence ought to include “the satisfaction of the believer.”14 For Misak, following Peirce, the outcome of such a seemingly subjectivistic account of evidence is to “infect pragmatism with the seed of death.”15 The second concern addresses the degree to which “The Will to Believe” might advocate an improbable and irresponsible voluntarism. One commentator has gone as far as to credit James as “the only completely unqualified advocate of behavioral doxastic voluntarism”16—that is, the position that says I have voluntary control over my beliefs. The result of this approach is that I can will to believe what I otherwise know to be false. Both lines see James as promoting a questionable and even dangerous intrusion of the personal, idiosyncratic, or the “passional” into what otherwise ought to be rational and austere epistemic behaviors and practices. A common interpretive strategy that evades the more stinging critiques of “The Will to Believe” sees James as handing over epistemic rationality to the evidentialists or the positivists, arguing that another form of reasoning (i.e., prudential reasoning) is operative in other kinds of beliefs (e.g., in moral or aesthetic beliefs). In, for example, religious beliefs, these readers claim that we move beyond the evidence and weigh our options based on a rough calculation of the satisfaction of our desires and needs.17 For example, when considering options such as whether to believe in God or whether to go on an Arctic expedition, nothing like “evidence” in the standard sense of the term applies. Following this strategy, readers then see James as drawing a sharp line between reasons and justifications, on the one hand, and a prudential assessment of the

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good, on the other. Likewise, “The Will to Believe” seems to draw a line between beliefs that can be settled by social justifications and those that cannot, a move that Rorty, for example, identifies as an unfortunate and unpragmatic slip up on James’s behalf. In “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” Rorty argues that the distinction between the rational and the passional that James seems to adopt when arguing against Clifford affords precisely the kind of division that James (as a good pragmatist) ought to reject—namely, the division of beliefs that are socially justified from those that are not.18 There are moments where James does appear to adopt such strategies.19 However, I suggest that instead of arguing that there are some beliefs that we can give over to the evidentialists and others that we ought to hold to a different standard, James’s claim is that epistemic concerns and our so-called “intellectual nature” cannot be neatly divorced from our “passional natures” and practical concerns. Blurring the line between these two “natures” is precisely the aim of “The Will to Believe.” A core claim of “The Will to Believe” is that when faced with these decisions—with what James will call live, forced, and momentous decisions—we have no choice but to believe some way or other. This is not to say that in such cases our passional nature always gets the upper hand, dragging us toward the subjectivism that so concerns James’s critics; rather, the distinction between the so-called rational and the socalled passional is a practical and tentative one.

Genuine Options and Our Passional Natures To show how the supposed division between the rational and the passional collapses, and to demonstrate the limits of the prudential

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approach, I will focus on James’s descriptions of what he calls “living” and “dead” beliefs. The entry point into this discussion is the division between intellectual and passional. Recall that in the will-to-believe thesis, our passional nature is tasked with decision making when there are no intellectual or evidentiary grounds. When we see the term “passional nature” in this context, a reasonable (but I think false) assumption would be to think that “passional” is a dated term for what could be understood as the noncognitive, emotive, affective, or nonrational—in other words, a term for those things like joys, bodily dispositions, angers, desires, fears, wishes, wants, and needs that purportedly contrast to intellectual or evidentiary grounds. On that reading, when James equates our willing nature with passion, it appears as if willing nature refers to some special force or faculty that is independent of our rational nature, and that willful action is in some sense independent from or not subject to reason. While James ought to have been more attentive to these potential misunderstandings, he does signal that he means something quite different from our ordinary sense of passional or willing. Consider the following definition: When I say “willing nature,” I do not mean only such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now escape from—I mean all such factors of belief, such as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, circumpressure of our cast and set . . . all of those influences, born of the intellectual climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or dead.20

This passage suggests that under the term “willing nature,” James does not only mean to include that part of ourselves that feels anger or joy in a way that is distinctively and intimately ours; “willing nature” also takes us out of our inner life, affective states,

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or private feelings and moves us toward the realm of social impulses and practices. As evidence of our willing nature, for instance, James will say to his young Ivy League audience, “We all believe in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for ‘the immortal Monroe,’ all for no reasons worthy of the name.”21 Why believe in the superiority of democracy? Why Protestant Christianity? While the responses to such questions will likely fall back on appeals to sentiments or emotions (e.g., to have faith in my fellow citizen, my fear of punishment, or my hopes for the future), they also depend upon cultural possibilities, habits of thought, customs, and historical and material conditions—all of which James somewhat awkwardly includes under the terms “passional” or “willing” nature. It does not immediately follow that, as “passional,” such beliefs are illegitimate or epistemically irresponsible. Conversely, while ethical, moral, aesthetic, and religious beliefs are suffused with passional influences, James does not only wish to preserve the “right to believe” in these contexts. The claim is stronger than that: a passional influence can be found in all our beliefs. James stresses, for instance, that believing ahead of the evidence is integral to what we tend to think of as our most rational pursuits—namely, scientific inquiry (e.g., the belief a scientist has regarding the truth of a hypothesis that has yet to be verified).22 The point here is that James intends to avoid a sharp dualism of the passional and the rational. And once we have blurred the line between passional and rational, we must say that even those beliefs that come to be supported by evidence and experiment are not strictly independent of passional influence. Conversely, for James, our “rational beliefs” are not without the mark of the “passional.”

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If James will not avail himself of the concepts of the purely rational or the purely passional, then those beliefs subject to the thesis of “The Will to Believe” cannot be neatly divided according to clearly defined domains of inquiry (e.g., scientific or religious). James speaks instead of beliefs in terms of options that are “living,” “forced,” and “momentous.” We have already seen that a belief is forced when a choice must practically be made, when avoiding a choice is in fact itself a choice. The religious hypothesis or the choice to marry are examples of forced options. Momentous choices are also resistant to abstention. In momentous options, which occupy one end of an existential spectrum, we are confronted with choices that greatly impact our lives and for which abstention is not an option: whether one will take an umbrella on a cloudy day is a trivial option, but whether one will jump from the precipice is a momentous one.23 When faced with momentous options, to avoid or abstain from judgment is itself a choice. If I spend my days thinking through the risks and benefits of an Arctic expedition, the ship is liable to go off to sail without me. Though beliefs may be forced or momentous, we are nonetheless limited in what we can believe. We cannot, for example, believe that Abraham Lincoln is a mythological entity, nor can we believe ourselves well when we are sick in bed.24 James therefore agrees with critics of doxastic voluntarism who say that we cannot simply will ourselves into believing any proposition. So, what makes an option capable of being “willed”? Is it some independent fact about the world or an ahistorical norm? James’s response to these questions is that our willed beliefs depend not only on ourselves but on a whole set of contingent and embedded factors that shape both our personal limits on belief and those of the wider

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culture or practice.25 It is in this context that he introduces the language of “live” and “dead” options.

Living and Dead Options For James, a “live” hypothesis is one that contains real possibilities for the believer. “Real” possibilities, however, are contextually determined. For example, the doctrine of transubstantiation is, for believing Catholics, live. It coheres with their other beliefs, their history, and their cultural context, and it motivates actions such as participation in communion or confession. For atheists, however, the doctrine lacks coherence. Options are living options when each proposition makes “some appeal, however small, to our belief.”26 For a believer in the throes of a crisis of faith, the options “God is real” and “God is a myth” both present themselves as live. The argument here is not to legitimate religious belief per se but to show that when two mutually exclusive, forced, live, and momentous options are present, abstention in the manner that Clifford suggests is impossible. If, however, I were confronted with the option to believe in an Aristotelian or a Ptolemaic universe, I would be confronted with what James calls a “dead” and “avoidable” option—it is dead and avoidable because the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic pictures make no appeal, spark no interest, fail to cohere with the rest of my beliefs, and thus result in no action. Deadness and liveness are, then, as these examples should make clear, relative properties of belief that are measured by one’s willingness to act upon them, where “willingness” is conceived, not simply in terms of desire to believe but in terms of the contextual appropriateness of believing. These conditions of belief are independent of each other: a belief can be live or forced but not momentous, or any combination

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of the three. It is when we are in the presence of all three that James will say we have the “right” to choose one belief over another. Available evidence has not been tossed aside in such options; it has simply run out. This does not, however, make these beliefs immune to correction. As James will further contextualize the claim: I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experience and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude.27

The beliefs we hold on grounds identified under the will to believe are, like all other beliefs, fallible and subject to revision, regardless of how great the desire for their truth. The divisions between live and dead, forced and avoidable, momentous and trivial, lead directly to the argumentative thrust of James’s essay, and it is with these definitions in mind that he proposes his doctrine. When our options are live, forced, and momentous and the evidence is indifferent or absent, we are entitled to those beliefs. To be sure, I cannot give anything like independent evidence for the belief that God exists, that I trust my fellow citizens, that an Arctic expedition is a waste of time, or that the person I love loves me in return. The point is not that our personal desires and idiosyncratic pleasures are the evidence for our belief, but that “our faith is faith in someone else’s faith” and that our most “passionate affirmations of desire” are ones that “our social system backs up.”28 While faith in our fellow human beings and the support of our caste and set are not “reasons” in the strict sense demanded by the evidentialist or intellectualist, neither do they fit clearly within a subjective point of view.

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To sharpen the point, consider James’s treatment of Pascal’s infamous wager. James critiques Pascal in a way that neither the strict voluntarist nor the subjectivist could. Unless we are predisposed to believe in God, transubstantiation, or an afterlife, the wager Pascal offers could never be a live option. For Pascal, prior to engagement in any wager, belief in God was already a live option. To such a believer, one who is already predisposed to faith and of a mathematical temperament, the “logic of the gaming table” seems to stand on firm ground. But for James, the wager is a mere afterthought, a justification that would only ever appeal to one is, like Pascal, already predisposed to belief. While I may well want to live in a universe that contains a benevolent God or an afterlife, unless my disposition, my historical place, my temperament, and so on afford a living spark to the hypothesis, it remains dead, and no wish or calculation of benefit could resurrect it. Hypotheses that we do not find living remain dead no matter the benefit. One way to read the wager is to say that we merely weigh the costs and benefits and the resulting tally amounts to something like belief. For James, we can never neutrally weigh such options. That cluster of influences that gives rise or fails to give rise to a spark draws on sources as varied as personal temperament, capacities for individual and social action, history, private fears and pleasures, or public commitments. And if this is right, it counters one of the more tempting ways to read what James says about the difference between living and dead options: the difference cannot hinge on a calculation of cost and benefit; we cannot suppose that those beliefs that would be prudent or contribute to my sense of the good are live, and those that do not are dead.29 I have offered some preliminary arguments as to why James does not fall into outright subjectivism, and that he does not wish to

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include under the category of evidence the “satisfaction of the believer.” Satisfying but false beliefs encounter limits that James can coherently acknowledge. Even if a belief would make me happy, even if it was forced and its consequences momentous, I might not be able to believe it. To strike the spark of living belief, an option must in some way cohere with other beliefs, must appear as plausible against a background of articulated and unarticulated premises and prejudices, and must in some way cohere with the kind of person I take myself to be. Moreover—and this is perhaps the more important point—when an option is live, forced, and momentous, I am justified whether I opt to believe or to disbelieve, or choose option A or option B James nowhere says that when faced with a live, forced, or momentous option, we only have the right to choose the more satisfying, prudent, beneficial, or useful option.30 Rather, he says that either choice is a passional one. Live, forced, and momentous options are live, forced, and momentous precisely because both options are plausible; both ground action; both appeal to a background of knowledge, practices, and inclinations from which a choice emerges: marry or not; go to the Arctic or stay at home; jump from the precipice or wait for rescue; believe in God or not. In no one of James’s examples is the source of justification the more prudent or satisfying choice. We are just as entitled to flee the altar, proclaim atheism, be misanthropic, or wait on the mountain’s ledge as we are to do the opposite. We are not, then, as Richard Gale claims, “morally obligated” to believe in a manner that “maximizes desire-satisfaction.”31 The account I’ve advanced so far suggests the following crudely stated division: some experiences and choices occur as a result of “reasoned” action, in step with our so-called “logical nature”; and some occur with little or no foresight, bringing with them no ru-

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bric of choice or economy of utterances that guide us. These latter choices and questions are at the forefront of James’s analysis. With respect to the latter, consider the strikingly existential tone on which “The Will to Believe” concludes, the reference to James Fitzjames Stephen and the “riddles of the Sphinx”: What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them . . . in all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered that is a choice. If we waver in our answers, that too is a choice; but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. . . . Each must act as he thinks best, and if he is wrong so much the worse for him.32

No one can avoid living, forced, momentous options. If we do attempt to “avoid” such options, what we have found is that our indecision has itself become a decision. We are thrown into a world that requires that we live on faith—faith in our fellow human beings, our own abilities, the future—and often with no more or less reason for one decision over another. And, for James, like Stephen, it is better that we live a life of failures, where something is wagered, hoped for, or trusted in, than live a life where nothing is risked. The essay ends with these words from Stephen: “‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.”33 Considering similar themes, William Gavin has aptly summarized the point of the essay in the following way: “The will to believe,” he says, “is not a ‘problem’ to be solved . . . it is to be viewed as a stance or posture toward the universe, an admission and affirmation that the universe is ‘wild, game flavored as a hawk’s wing.’”34

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Given that our answers to the riddles of the Sphinx are as complex and varied as there are individuals living, asking and answering such questions, the specter of relativism rises once again. If, as I have been arguing, “The Will to Believe” is not primarily concerned with our justificatory practices, and in fact is much more subtle in its acknowledgement of the limits placed upon beliefs, one could ask whether I have simply shifted the focus. Have I avoided the wider charges of generic voluntarism, subjectivism, and relativism by displacing them onto ethical terrain? Given James’s cautions against waiting around for evidence, what prevents us from falling back into the “all is permissible” relativism so many see as implied in “The Will to Believe”? It is here that we must return to Clifford’s moralizing and recall the target of James’s speech. In lacking concrete evidence, neither the atheist nor the Christian have made an error. Yet for Clifford, any belief not hard-won by evidence is not only wrong but sinful. James’s point is that, whereas I have every right to run ahead of the evidence when I assert my disbelief in God, I do not have the right to prevent others the space to worship. Likewise, the scientist has every right to run ahead of the evidence when she hypothesizes some unknown principle. She does not, however, have the right (as a member of the rational community of scientists) to maintain such a belief in the face of a body of conflicting evidence. Such live, momentous, and genuine options, admitting of no Truth, are ones we must act on at our own peril. When our choices commit others, when they impede upon others’ right to do the same, James draws a line. He makes the point clearly: “No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other. . . . We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom—then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic;

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then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.”35 James’s will-to-believe thesis thus extends the limits of pluralism as far as it can go, right up to that point that our beliefs take the form of a dogmatic certainty that is parasitic upon the beliefs, choices, and well-being of others. In other words, the right to believe ends wherever my actions, my beliefs, my selffashioning, my commitments, and so on, infringe on my neighbors’ ability to exercise their right.36 It does not terminate with the evidence. Stephen’s questions, “What do you think of yourself?” and “What do you think of the world?” admit of no truth untouched by our hopes, desires, expectations, or interests. In the case of those live, momentous, and genuine options our only choice is either to wait or to act. James does not say that we are morally obligated to always act. It is not so simple. There is room enough for the cautious and the bold. The point is rather that waiting itself contains a risk when we are faced with choices where no moral calculus of benefit, categorical imperative, or evidence can tell us what to do. Putnam makes a similar point when critically discussing the more consequentialist strains of Dewey’s moral thought. Putnam draws a comparison between James’s will-to-believe thesis and the discussion of Pierre, the young student facing the conflicting options of going off to fight in the Resistance or staying at home to care for his sick mother. The point of the comparison seems to be that Pierre is faced with a forced option that imposes two rival demands. These demands are, in James’s terms, momentous in their implications, live in their possibility, and forced. In Sartre’s discus-

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sion of the student’s dilemma, he strikes a note not unfamiliar to James or Stephen: He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbor, deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular person to live? Who can give an answer to that a priori? No one.37

The comparison to Sartre here is apt but limited. For Sartre, the example seems to better serve a point that James would not be so eager to support—namely, that our actions are unconditioned. The Jamesian note that Sartre’s example does strike is that when faced with vital choices and urgent needs, we must act (knowing that failure to act is itself an act), and we must do so ahead of any evidence. In the case of the student caught between two competing and legitimate commitments, there is not some bit of philosophical machinery that can safely guide our choices. The individual caught between alternatives wants to do what he or she believes best, and the only thing that one can lean on in such a case is, in James’s language, one’s own “willingness to believe.” Discussing this example in the context of James’s and Dewey’s pragmatisms, Putnam says: Pierre is not out to “maximize” the good, however conceived, in some global sense; he is out to do what is right. Like all consequentialist views, Dewey has trouble doing justice to considerations of the right. I am not saying that Dewey’s phi-

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losophy never applies to individual existential choices. Some choices are just dumb. But Pierre is not dumb. Neither of the alternatives he is considering is any way stupid. Yet he cannot just flip a coin.38

For Putnam, what Dewey will call “consummatory experiences which are brought about and appraised” is too narrow to encompass the kinds of moral-existential questions that life often asks of us. Regardless of whether this is an adequate account of Dewey’s ethics, the point is that we often must act on beliefs that run ahead of evidence, and when we do, we go beyond what is available in guided experimentation.39 Some of the most important beliefs we have and choices we make are those for which little in our experience and little in the way of rational principle can adequately equip us to assess. These choices, while not always as dramatic as that of Sartre’s student, Pascal’s wager, or the young philosophers-in-the-making lying awake at night trying to once and for all decide if they have rational grounds for their belief in God, are often those that give meaning to our lives: Do I put faith in my ability or do I accept defeat? Do I go on an expedition or stay at home? Do I go this way or that? Do I put my faith in this person or not? James’s first point in “The Will to Believe” is a descriptive one: what we think of as “non-rational” factors do play a role in belief. The role they play, however, goes well beyond what the rationalist construes as “evidence”: our “passional” and “willing nature” actually shape our possibilities for belief and are thus inseparable from “rational” belief. To understand this latter point more clearly, I will turn to the Principles of Psychology to see what James has to say about the nature of belief. By turning to the psychology, we are better prepared to answer some of the more perplexing questions

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raised by “The Will to Believe”: What affords a living belief? What precludes it? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we move from dead to living beliefs? The answers to these questions will bring us into contact with James’s normative thesis: we ought not to foreclose options or cast as immoral beliefs not “hard-won” by evidence.

Belief and Reality Chapter 21 of The Principles of Psychology contains one of James’s most extended treatments of the psychology of belief. The aim of that chapter—entitled “The Perception of Reality”—is to bind the active experience of the subject to what we call “reality.” To do so, James attempts to answer the psychological questions that surround the nature of belief, providing an analysis of what is described as a feeling of reality or unreality that accompanies certain objects of belief. The question here is not, What is Truth? How do I justify my claim to believe x? Rather, as in “The Will to Believe,” James is here asking how the attitude of belief arises, and what conditions must be met for it to take hold. In the language I’ve been using so far, how does a belief strike a living spark?40 The focus of “The Perception of Reality” is to detail this attitude and what it implies for our general account of experience. James begins with the following definition: “Belief is . . . the mental state or function of cognizing reality . . . mean[ing] every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction.”41 Belief is a posture or attitude of acceptance or assent. The attitude of belief is therefore characterized in both “passional” and “rational” terms, such as acceptance, feeling at ease, harmony, rest, and coherence. James further describes the “function of cog-

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nizing reality” by appeal to Brentano. Brentano’s phenomenology paints a picture of the mind’s relationship to the world that rests on the distinction between (1) something thought of (vorgestellt) and (2) something either admitted or denied. Brentano concludes that “so soon as the object of a thought becomes the object of assenting or rejecting judgment, our consciousness steps into an entirely new relation toward it. It is then twice present in consciousness, as thought of and as held for real or denied.”42 James calls “belief ” what Brentano calls “judgment.” James thus characterizes belief as a twofold intentional structure: as having a thought and assenting or rejecting the thought in the attitude of belief. As James moves quite close to the classical phenomenologists in his description of intentionality as “world directed,” it is worth dwelling for a moment on the implications of this similarity. Husserl would later argue that intentionality in the minimalist sense described here leads to a fundamental law of consciousness that is not discoverable by empirical psychology because it involves an analysis of the transcendental structure of experience. But, for James, what we could call “intentionality” is an active and selective achievement, rather than a passive directedness to already constituted objects. For James, “belief ” is an active emotion—one he will argue furnishes our “sense of the real.” He identifies that emotion with conviction, the cessation of agitation, inward stability, or rest. Thus, “existence,” James will say, is “no substantive quality when we predicate it of any object; it is a relation, ultimately terminating in ourselves, and at the moment when it terminates, becoming a practical relation.”43 Belief in this sense is a basic posture that incorporates feeling, reason, and desire. It is characterized by assent, and expresses an active component of our relationship to reality. We are not led from belief to a transcendental meditation on the

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structure of reality but to a pragmatic description of human activity. This account of belief requires further conditions. James will attempt to clarify his position by way of a rather strained thought experiment: Suppose a new-born mind, entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin. Suppose that it begins in the form of a visual impression . . . of a lighted candle against a dark background, and nothing else, so that whilst this image lasts it constitutes the entire universe known to the mind in question. Suppose . . . that the candle is only imaginary, and that no “original” of it is recognized by us psychologists outside. Will this hallucinatory candle be believed in, will it have real existence for the mind?44

He goes on to suggest that there is no sense in which the newborn mind, however implausibly he describes it here, could suspect the candle to be a hallucination or disbelieve its reality. The account of acts of beliefs helps illuminate this point: having seen only the candle, however unreal, the newborn possesses no potentially contradictory beliefs that could lead to the feeling of “unrest” and no conceptual or perceptual resources on which to doubt or disbelieve. Having only the candle and no means of measuring its appearance against the appearance of anything else or no other object to select or attend to, the candle will be the newborn’s “all, its absolute.”45 By contrast, the beliefs of an onlooking psychologist would lead her to conclude that the candle is a hallucination. Its appearance would motivate doubt, inquiry, or unrest, and result in disbelief. Supposing the hallucinated candle unreal, the onlooker might then suppose “a world known to us which is real, and to which we perceive that the candle does not belong.”46

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The exaggerated thought experiment, with its supposition of a mind entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin, serves to illuminate that beliefs are held together and measured against one another in inquiry. Absent prior conditions, contradictory experience, or conflicting belief, we ipso facto posit reality. Beliefs that have no bearing on our sense of “ultimate reality” are understood as unreal; those that contradict our sense of reality are doubted. As in “The Will to Believe,” then, belief is set on a background of prior attitudes, beliefs, and circumstances that are both individual and social. The upshot of the treatment here is the emphasis on the activity of belief. There is no suggestion that our ideas are passively registered as impressions: belief is a thoroughly active relation. When beliefs cohere, when they are anchored in our practical life, they are “live”; when beliefs fail to direct our attention or lead to action, they are “dead.” Even what James will call “the world of sense and physical things”—the world comprising those things that connect most intimately to my own existence—does not stand free of our intentions and passional natures. And, like in “The Will to Believe,” pluralism underlies the discussion. This commitment to pluralism is nowhere more evident than in the discussion of the perception of reality in the Principles. There, James outlines a brief list of potential “sub-worlds,” each of which encompasses different beliefs. He lists them as follows: 1. The world of sense, or of physical “things” as we instinctively apprehend them; 2. The world of science, or of physical things as the learned conceive them; 3. The world of ideal relations, or abstract truths; 4. The world of the “idols of the tribe,” illusions or prejudice common to the race;

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5. The various supernatural worlds, faith, and fable; 6. The various worlds of individual opinion; 7. The worlds of sheer madness and vagary.

While objects of belief are each referred back to one or another of these worlds (or some other such list), James is quick to note that what he calls the “world of sense, or physical ‘things’” is primary to all others. Objects of the world of sense are those that hold an intimate and continued connection to my existence. The objects of sense and apprehension are those that ground my action in the world and shape the possibilities contained therein. Objects that belong within a particular world are woven together by relations, and in the world of sense, these relations connect “instinctively” or immediately to our actions. The claim that the world of sense is the “paramount” reality means, then, that we feel the world of practical action with a coerciveness and liveliness that is ultimately anchored in the subject. James will say, “Our own reality, that sense of our own life which we at every moment possess, is the ultimate of ultimates for our belief. ‘As sure as I exist!’—this is our uttermost warrant for the being of all other things.”47 The intertwinement of feeling, activity, belief, and emotion is explicit here. While objects in, for example, the world of sense may contradict objects in the world of science or the world of ideal relations, such a contradiction is not itself cause enough to dismiss either as false. The aim is not to validate or invalidate any particular thought but to account for the ways in which our beliefs are subjectively held together and refer to a world of practical action. And yet, even “the world of sense and physical things” is not a world that stands free of our intentions and passional nature. Beliefs that have no bearing on our sense of “ultimate reality” are those that will be understood as unreal; those that contradict our sense of reality are

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those that will be doubted. Whatever contradicts our sense of ultimate reality “must get into another world or die. The horse, e.g., may have wings to its heart’s content, so long as it does not pretend to be the real world’s horse—that horse is absolutely wingless.”48 There is no suggestion here that our idea of the horse or anything else is passively registered as an impression; rather, the thought of it is thoroughly active. James’s account of belief thus bears striking similarities to that of Hume. Nowhere is James’s indebtedness to the empirical tradition more apparent than when he argues that “sensible vividness or pungency is . . . the vital factor in reality.”49 But unlike Hume or Locke—for whom perception and experience are passive and for whom the mind is a neutral receptor—James holds that our experience is never neutral. Likewise, while Hume, Locke, and James each conceive of belief in “non-rational” terms (they call belief “vivacious,” “lively,” “pleasurable,” etc.), the fact that they have fundamentally different accounts of the role of experience and the subject in forming beliefs means that the sentiment of reality that they all emphasize—the sentiment of the degree of veracity or liveliness of the objects of our surroundings—will carry vastly different implications for how we ought to conceive of the subject and her activity. In short, objects do not come to the mind indiscriminately. Our inquiries and perceptions are never untouched by our prior beliefs, aims, or moods, but are always already meaningful in some way. Inasmuch as the passive, bare, or unmediated apprehension or appearance of an object could never be enough to constitute reality or spark belief, then, the relative degree of liveliness in an object is “proportionate to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will.”50 The senti-

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ment of reality links up directly with the discussion of the stimulus of the will in “The Will to Believe.” The dead options of “The Will to Believe” point—in the context of the Principles—to those beliefs that fail to connect with the subject, that fail to become anchored in the self. They serve to highlight the state in which things appear “hollow, unreal, dead.”51 This lack of liveliness in our “dead options” is wholly dependent upon our sentiments and comportment; it is never dictated by a neutral world. When our options are live, we are oriented toward an end—we are interested, and active. When our options are dead, we are disinterested; those options are then cast off as unreal or fail to be noticed at all. This connection helps to defang a potential objection. When James approvingly cites Bain’s seemingly voluntaristic claim that “belief is a phase of our active nature—otherwise called the ‘will,’”52 we can understand this to mean that what we take to be real and meaningful is not the passive perception of the truth or mere reaction to stimuli but a complex act involving the body, sentiments, hopes, prior beliefs, and habits. Attention points us to the selective nature of the mind, and moreover to a quality of the mind that “creates” the very realities we believe or come to know. On this view, nothing is considered as real until it is first entertained, selected, and noticed. The point is not that reality itself is relative; it is that without the active intervention of the subject, the terms “reality” or “belief ” do not have a place in our practical moral lives.53 By weaving together attention, interest, and reality, and by placing them in the wider consideration of the practical and active character of belief, James highlights a feature of our experience overlooked by the orthodox empiricists. When experience is conceived

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of as a train or chain of associations that are simply given to us, we distort the character of mind and experience, rendering it a passive and spectatorial affair. If we are to assume that experience is mere passive receptivity, then we can make no sense of the active character of the mind. Considering the alternative, James equally dismisses the idealists who would account for such activity as a faculty of mind. Attention is what “breaks through the pure receptivity which constitutes ‘experience.’”54 Once one has invoked a model of experience that is equated with something like the presence of an outward object or a set of physical happenings, both mindedness and the character of the world are rendered insufficient. The mind is purposive with respect to belief, knowledge, and reality, and thus its purposiveness is central to the very constitution of what we take to be experience. In this way, “The Perception of Reality” foreshadows “The Will to Believe” by emphasizing the active nature of belief. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind— without selective interest, experience is in utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground—intelligible perspective, in a word.55

Far from the idea that James advocates a pernicious form of givenism, we see the highly active and selective character of experience—a picture of experience that is never merely received by the mind but always in some sense constituted through a background that encompasses both prior interests, active goals, neurology, biology, culture, language, and so on.

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While we tend to think of attention as a strenuous activity, selecting the things we will find important or interesting is not always so. Attention becomes a strenuous activity when we turn to the previously unnoticed aspects of experience or when the relationship between the will, attention, and belief is somehow disrupted. Despite the sometimes strenuous and sometimes habitual character of attention, James insists on its ultimately voluntary character. As such, the very notions of autonomy and the freedom of the will are dependent on our being not merely an effect of nature but a cause.56 The thesis of “The Perception of Reality” culminates in the following claim: The mere fact of appearing as an object at all is not enough to constitute reality. That may be metaphysical reality, reality for God; but what we need is practical reality, reality for ourselves; and, to have that, an object must not only appear, but it must appear both interesting and important. . . . In the relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple unreality, and in which one thing is said to have more reality than another, and to be more believed, reality means simply a relation to our emotional and active life.57

Every option, every hypothesis, from the most abstract to the most concrete, is approached through a background of assumptions, physical and bodily capacities, moods, and desires. We can now see how the “Perception of Reality” points us back to “The Will to Believe.” Abstentious skepticism is also a passional choice, incorporating sentiments, prejudices, and desires that go well beyond what it is prepared to license. When faced with a genuine option, when two

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mutually exclusive, momentous, and live options are presented, to speak of abstention from or responsibility to neutral evidence betrays what we are as human knowers. Moreover, to insist on the strict province of the so-called rational mind is to betray not only what we know of our own experience but also what ought to be the case. Having moved further into the psychological framework of James’s discussion of belief, we can now make greater sense of the epistemological puzzles that have emerged out of “The Will to Believe” and so better see the particular connection James is attempting to forge between the subject and the world through experience. James gives expression to a concern that is evident in the Principles and “The Will to Believe”: if we accept a passive stance toward our experience, truth stagnates and ossifies. This is the crux of James’s criticisms of both Spencer and the evidentialist: we are never passive before experience; we do not simply blindly adapt to stimuli. Experience is the result of a confluence of activity through which we come to have a reality. John McDermott will rightly call belief “a wedge into the tissue of experience.”58 The description of belief and reality, what has brought us quite close to the transcendental analysis of Husserl or the early phenomenologists, does not, however, become transcendental meditation on the basic structure of mind or world. It is instead the result of a pragmatic description of our engagements in experience. What James resists when he attacks evidentialism or the intellectualism of his contemporaries is a view wherein truth is a static property of our thoughts, a property that can be used to represent a reality that stands complete and independent of our interests. As James will famously say in Pragmatism, “The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.” Truth untouched by human need and purpose means “only the dead heart of the living tree.”59

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The pragmatism offered in James’s early descriptions of the willto-believe thesis must fall back on a willingness to live without assurance, on possibility and chance. The result here is pragmatism conceived not just as a temperament with respect to truth and inquiry but also as a defense of the role of experience. The skeptic will claim that there need not be a relation between the quality of our experience and the content of our beliefs. If we are to assume that experience has nothing to do with our prior belief, if we were to assume that there is no relationship between our beliefs and the way things appear or feel to us, all of our experience could be just as it is and yet all our beliefs false. James will hold to the position that any difference between belief and truth that does not make a difference to our experience is not a real difference but an ens rationis we have confused for an intuition. There must be a practical, pragmatic difference between what we believe and what we cast off as unreal or erroneous. This difference is one that is shaped within experience and refers to the success of actions undertaken on the basis of belief. For some, the idea of God contains more truth than the idea of atheism. For them it works better, makes more sense. For them to follow their passional natures in this respect is perfectly consistent with being responsible epistemic agents. To take this point seriously, however, one must understand both God and truth pragmatically.

Limits of the Will My portrait of the Jamesian position on belief has focused on the strain of James’s thought that details what Gale refers to as “creation-through-efforts-of-attention”60 and Misak rather uncharitably captures in the slogan, “I am free to believe whatever appeals to

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me.”61 I have discussed, for example, how live options make some appeal to the subject and argued that, for James, reality is built up out of the active engagement of the subject. But there is another side to the willful creation of the world, one that James details at great length in the Principles and places under the category of “dead options” in “The Will to Believe.” The active picture of belief raises a serious moral and existential question about the character of those dead options, those that seem distant or unreal, pass unnoticed, or fail to rouse the will. As I have shown, James’s examples of dead options in “The Will to Believe” cover such options as the belief that Lincoln did not exist and believing that I am well when I am confined to bed with illness. In such cases, the Jamesian account is straightforward. In the first case, the rest of my knowledge of history and the body of beliefs that surround the proposition “Lincoln existed” all support the claim that Lincoln existed. However, not all cases of dead options are so clear. Dead options appear in the Principles’ discussion of the will and again in the Varieties with a particular moral force, especially when James comes to consider “sick souls,” those who, in the language of the Principles, have severed the relationship between their will and their ideals. In these cases, the account of dead options is more complicated, and their consideration highlights an important limit on the active “Promethean” strain of James’s will-to-believe thesis. To make sense of this moral register, I’ll turn to chapter 26 of the Principles, “The Will,” which, despite the number of pages devoted to empirical studies and psychological theories, contains some of James’s most important discussions of moral philosophy, and one of his strongest arguments for the inescapable role of experience.

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I will focus on two main features of James’s discussion of the will in the Principles: (1) the relationship between attention and the will; and (2) the failure of action typified by what James calls “the obstructed will.” James defines the will as the mind’s ability to hold an idea in view and to act in order that the idea may be realized. Sarin Marchetti describes the will as “an ability to conduct a rich practical life in which instincts, habits, and automatic responses are accompanied by . . . actions and conduct expressive of our subjectivity.”62 The will is not a faculty but an exercise or act. Unsurprisingly, the discussion of the will in the Principles is psychologically and physiologically grounded. In particular, James focuses on the feeling of effort and the voluntary acts that are generated from it. This connection, James argues, should be understood in light of the characterization of the will as the readiness of the mind to entertain an idea and a corresponding teleological action. However, while the will does not appear as a spiritualized force in James’s account, neither does it appear as an object of strictly scientific or materialistic inquiry. James is quick to criticize those psychologists who treat the question of the freedom of the will as a mere scientific problem.63 In his discussion of the will as an exercise, James follows Renouvier, Bain, and Lotze, each of whom developed a theory of ideomotor actions and argued that ideas can produce movement without introducing a mediating psychological function. Whenever movement follows unhesitatingly and immediately the notion of it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action. We are then aware of nothing between the conception and the execution. All sorts of neuro-muscular processes come between, of course, but we know absolutely nothing of them. We think

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the act, and it is done; and that is all that introspection tells us of the matter.64

Bringing thought together with action in this immediate way, James is once again breaking with those representatives of the empiricist tradition who will draw a line between beliefs that represent reality and the desires and feelings that motivate certain actions. James concludes that that the will is nothing more than the way in which we attend to certain ideas. Specifically, since nothing is knowable if the mind does not first find it interesting, the activity of the will is the exercise of attention through which we give relevance to some aspects of reality. The will is not, on this view, a mediator between impressions and actions but an expression of our point of view, a complex of passional and rational attitudes toward a situation that without the activity of attention would disappear from our experience. By attending to some ideal, the subject chooses to attune herself to some aspect of reality. This choice will determine the kind of self that the subject becomes, the experience that she will be a part of, and ultimately how she will be able to justify and enact her varied beliefs. James discusses a number of different forms of willfulness: precipitate, perverse, obstructed, and explosive. For my purposes here, James’s treatment of what he calls “the obstructed will” is most helpful for thinking about the limits James places on the willfulness of belief and the nature of our experience of reality. The obstructed will receives extended treatment in both the Principles and the Varieties, as it is the form of willfulness that has the greatest moral-existential consequences. In a passage that anticipates what will become James’s position in “The Will to Believe,” he brings to our attention those beliefs that appear dead:

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In Chapter XXI, as will be remembered, it was said that the sentiment of reality with which an object appealed to the mind is proportionate (amongst other things) to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will. Here we get the obverse side of the truth. Those ideas, objects, considerations, which (in these lethargic states) fail to get to the will, fail to draw blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal.65

While “The Will to Believe” limited its treatment to those particular beliefs that appear dead or fail as motives to action and thus cannot be entertained as live possibilities, the phenomena here is generalized and pathologized. Not only does a belief fail to light a living spark but reality itself appears snuffed out, or “fails to draw blood.” It should be noted here that this is not an account of skepticism regarding the external world. Rather, James is articulating a position in which dead options represent a form of impotence with the gravest moral consequences. Reality is snuffed out when the connection between the will and reality is severed.66 The connection of the reality of things with their effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet been fully told. The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which should normally hold between our vision of the truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain ideas.67

The condition is striking enough to bear the classification of “moral tragedy.” Never getting “its voice out of the minor into the major key, or its speech out of the subjunctive into the imperative,” one simply stands before a world hollowed of meaning.68 The result is an impotence characterized by conflicting thoughts, desires, and self-images—what James will, in the Varieties, call “a divided self.” Such a condition, while described in pathological terms here,

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sheds light on the other side of the unbounded Promethean subject often ascribed to James’s pragmatism.

The Divided Self and Conversion A divided self stands in need of transformation. One of the ways James discusses the kind of self-transformation required to unify a divided self or to get the impeded will moving again is through the religious language of conversion. While the cases discussed in the Varieties, such as those of Tolstoy or Bunyan, appear in the dramatic form of a religious awakening, James insists that such transformative experiences are a hallmark of any life. While most people do not undergo a religious conversion, James insists that the “same general psychological process” pervades our lives. For example, the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion. In all these instances we have precisely the same psychological form of event—a firmness, stability, and equilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency.69

Conversion must also be conceived holistically. Objects or ideas that once appeared hollow, cold, or unreal may later strike us as momentous, living, and significant. The consequence of the movement from living to dead, James says, is one not only of a reorientation of an individual’s habitual “center of energy” but of the very world in which we act.70 The importance of such shifts cannot be overstated. “To say that a man is ‘converted’ means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now

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take a central place, and that religious aims now form the habitual center of his energy.”71 Wittgenstein echoes this sentiment when he famously proposes that If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world; not the things that can be expressed in language. In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the world of the unhappy.72

In such transformations it is not the isolated subject that changes but the very character of the world. Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how particular experiences are able to change one’s center of energy so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystalize about it.73

As the many citations from the confessional narratives of the Varieties make clear, the difference is a difference that is felt. This practical coherence, however, cannot be brought about by pure volition. When listing the possible forms of conversion, James distinguishes between what he calls “volitional” conversion and the conversion of “self-surrender,” claiming that the difference between them is not radical, since “even in the most voluntarily built-up sort of regeneration there are passages of partial self-surrender interposed.”74 But he goes on to claim that the final step in any conversion seems to be one of self-surrender, where one is moved beyond “inner” resources and will. Before anything like conversion

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takes place, it would be idle to tell the melancholic that things will be all right or to tell the individual full of sin and torment that grace is possible. “The ‘will to believe,’” James tells us, “cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite.”75 Despite this limitation, what is practically, philosophically, and morally significant about such reorientations in and of experience is that we do have a part to play in bringing them about. But gradually our will can lead us to the same result by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.76

Combining both ideals and thought, on one hand, and bodily dispositions, on the other, conversion sees the very world of the convert change.77 Previously dead options become live, live ones shift to dead, and so one comes to see the world in radically different ways. This shift, as James stressed in “The Will to Believe,” can be effected through attention, habituation, or by creating some fact by perseverance. And yet, not every one of our beliefs can be so transformed. The struggle of conversion is not the struggle of rational self-correction: the problem of the sick soul is not that one has incorrectly perceived some fact about the world; the difficulty is that the obstructed or inhibited will manifests as the inability to turn one’s own sense of the good into action or choice. The struggle of conversion is a struggle toward some kind of practical unification, toward making experience cohere at the level of feeling, the will, and action. The process of conversion is replete

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with moral consequence, but it involves no evaluative judgment regarding better or worse courses of action. Tolstoy, one of the major sources in the Varieties, encounters two important features of conversion James wishes to highlight: (1) physical symptoms such as the passive loss of appetite for life and (2) the altered character of the world. With respect to the second feature, James asks us to imagine ourselves “suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires” and then to “try to imagine it as it exists purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment.”78 Such an exercise would be fruitless. We could not realize a world covered over in “deadness,” where things and events appear without significance or perspective. One may come to see the world in radically different ways. This can be, as James stressed in “The Will to Believe,” a matter of attention, habituation, and helping to create some fact by perseverance. However, not every one of our beliefs can be so transformed. The difficulty is one of the obstruction or inhibition of the will, what James will describe as the inability to turn one’s own sense of the good into action or choice. It is important to see that while the above is replete with moral consequences, James is not in the business of moralizing. There is no evaluative judgment regarding the better course of action. The struggle of conversion is a struggle toward some kind of practical unification, making one’s experience cohere at the level of feeling, will, and action. It is here that James’s concerns with the discussions of belief, reality, and experience meet up most explicitly with the kind of existential-pragmatic thinking that sits at the center of his philosophical, religious, and psychological concerns. Unlike the sudden and stark self-transformations that typically come to mind when

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we think about religious conversions, James spends a good deal of time in the Varieties discussing another form of conversion. This way is lengthy and gradual, and it is understood to be a transformative practice of the intellect, body, emotions, and habits. The result here is, like its sudden counterpart, not only a reorganization of the self but also an “objective” rearrangement of the world. The gradual process through which a divided self can find practical unity is an itinerary that reshapes and rebuilds bit by bit not only the self but also the world the subject inhabits. The question of how such transformations take place and what they tell us is now brought into view. While the subject is never fully unified in James’s account, the divided self is marked by a radical and felt heterogeneity—a duality that sits at the very core of one’s being, wreaking havoc on a life. This self appears in a number of different forms. Augustine’s drama of the half-pagan and halfChristian soul pushed and pulled through despair, finally reconciling in the unity of religious conversion, is one of James’s favorite examples. But the divided self is not only a self that is struggling through the drama of religious conversion; it is any self at war with itself, holding two or more distinct, competing, and hostile visions of the world, of truth, of one’s own self, or of value. The result of a divided self is, James says, no less than “two different conceptions of the universe of our experience.”79 The struggling alcoholic, the patient in the asylum, and morally inconsistent subjects are all embodiments of life characterized by the wish, knowledge, or performance of incompatibles. Such a state brings with it a life that is, in James’s words, “a long drama of repentance and of effort.”80 It is a life characterized by impotent aspirations, self-despair, and it is perceived, in the words of Paul, as a “burden to which one is mysteriously the heir” (Romans 17:15).

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Again, James is clear that religion is only one of many ways through which a person may undergo the kind of self-transformation that we identify religiously as conversion. He insists that this is a “general psychological process,” and his work in psychology can help us think through the nonreligious mode of conversion. These transformations are rooted in James’s account of habit, an account that extends well beyond habits such as smoking, nail biting, or even playing the piano. So, for example, something like the “habits of gender” allow me to see how I am habituated into a certain kind of being who behaves, acts, and moves through the world in certain gendered ways. But more than how I comport my body, such habits ground my very perception and understanding of the world. I am, on James’s account, habituated to understand, interpret, classify, or feel myself, others, or the world. Thus, as the Principles’ chapter on habit concludes, “The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells us, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.”81

Habit and the Will While we tend to think of habits in primarily bodily terms, James draws our focus to the importance of conceptual and linguistic habits: we attend to some things and not others, we associate one concept or term with another, and so on. The kind of subjects we are; the kinds of subjects we perceive others to be; and how we act, think, move, and judge are the result of so many “bundles of habits.”82 Having once described habit as “ten times nature,” with the emphasis on the plasticity of youth and the relative sedimenta-

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tion of habit in later life, James found the question of refashioning the self an urgent one. In a 1903–1904 lecture course, James asks the question, “How did a habit begin?” He replies, “If ideals start habits we have the answer. And in conflict, which ideal shall prevail? It feels like a real decision, as if we were in the workshop of being.”83 The greatest tools in “the workshop of being” are the fashioning of habit and the reciprocal relation between ideals and habits. These themes come together clearly in James’s discussion of religious conversion. While some habits are surely idiosyncrasies, some of the most important ones are not. James will say, You see the little lines of cleavage running through character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the “shop,” in a world from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds.84

From our “natal day” we begin to accumulate mannerisms, conceptual tools, and performances that cohere conservatively with the society in which we live. Such habits and beliefs are deeply conservative and can’t simply be adopted or left behind at will. It would be pointless to simply decide to, for example, become an optimist, believe in God, or think the world meaningful, just as it would be pointless, by an act of will, to execute the fouettés of Swan Lake with no prior preparation. James calls habit “the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.” It is habit, he says, that “keeps us all in the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the uprisings of the poor.”85 Habits keep us within “the bounds of ordinance” by working on every aspect of the self: they operate both consciously and unconsciously. In terms of my physical body, this is something as seemingly trivial as my posture, cigarette

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smoking, or leg crossing. But habits also work on what we might identify as the “conceptual” as well. So I come to see the world in a particular way because I identify some aspects of it and ignore others; I categorize phenomena in one way as opposed to some other way. Some beliefs will be live options for us and some seem destined to remain dead. Habits of seeing, feeling, thinking, acting, and believing ground my perception, disclose who I am, and outline the possibilities available to me. This is the argument forcefully made in the Varieties of Religious Experience’s discussion of conversion. But in the terms laid down in “The Will to Believe,” we could say that our belief is always conditioned by our passional natures. The frustrated aims and self-conceptions of the divided self, the subject torn between two worlds of experience, is a self that is still fashioned through the “fly-wheel of society.” The repetition of certain interpretations and ways of experiencing and conceptualizing leave us all the more likely to do so in the future. Our thoughts, just like our bodies, are led by our prior experience and these experiences are, in turn, contingent upon the particularity of the body.86 One’s willingness to believe cannot turn up into down or sick into well, but it can and does govern or modify conduct. This dialectical picture of the self and world is one that is morally and existentially poignant, and especially fruitful for thinking through the more pernicious habits and beliefs that surround both subjectivity and the social mechanisms that keep these going.87 Moreover, on this view, different habits give shape to different kinds of experiences and interpretations. A consequence of this view is that habits also become useful for explaining the seemingly unyielding nature of what are ultimately contingent phenomena.88

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If we take up habit in this sense, then a pressing and practical question regarding the willfulness of belief becomes immediate: If we are so habituated, if our selves extend beyond what we often call the self, if the self is so heteronomous, and we can never simply decide our behavior or how others perceive them, then how do we launch new habits and new possibilities of experience?

Becoming Other than What We Are If we can’t simply will any belief, if some bit of reality seems destined to remain outside our percepts, and if the possibilities for belief and experience cannot merely be picked up or dropped, how do we turn a dead belief into a living one, to experience the world differently than we do? As we already know, one cannot resurrect a “dead option” by fiat alone, nor can one simply take up a belief because it is to one’s benefit. What we see in this account of the connection between belief, the will, reality, and our habits is the moral urgency of the consideration of the habits of body and belief that afford the kinds of transformations of self and experience. What we are also led to appreciate is the dialectical relationship between the subject and her world that informs not only James’s account of the relative stability of our habits but also the possibility of their transformation by sustaining new “stimuli,” “excitements,” and “experience,” and thus refashioning our selves. In the terms laid down in “The Will to Believe,” we could say that our beliefs are always conditioned by our passional natures, and our passional natures are conditioned by our beliefs. In James’s discussion of the role of habit in self-transformation, some have identified an affinity with Foucault’s later ethical thought.89 This comparison can be illuminating. Consider how, for Foucault,

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the point of disciplinary practices is not to get people to do what you want but to create the kind of people you want, the kind of people who will experience the world and interpret its meaning in a particular sort of way. In other words, the point is not to see people as something to dominate but as something to remake. James was not a theorist of power. But habit—society’s conservative agent—works on us and molds us into the kinds of subjects that conserve and preserve concepts and behaviors, and who experience the world in a particular way. In other words, habit governs which set of beliefs can appear to us as live and which appear as dead. We can’t change our self-consciousness by a fiat of will because we are, in fact, dealing with far more than what we normally understand as consciousness. Unlike the rather overdetermined conclusions one can sometimes detect in Foucault, James offers a more open picture. One of James’s most extended treatments of the practical application of his philosophical and psychological study of habit comes in his work Talks to Teachers on Psychology. When James speaks to teachers on the psychological and philosophical implications of education, the majority of his lectures rightfully focus on the ways in which we are thoughtfully (or carelessly) educated into habits from a very young age, through such practical advice as his Fourth Maxim of habit formation: Don’t preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give the set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore.90

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Not unlike Aristotle, James sees education’s primary purpose as fastening behavior, which consists of bundles of habits. He sums up his view of the self and of habit’s role of fixing the self succinctly: “So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.”91 This could lead one to suppose that habit fixes us without relief. Short of the kinds of mystical conversion experiences detailed in religious literature, we are condemned to our past habits, our past selves. Habit is essentially conservative. James doesn’t rule out sudden reform and conversion, but he sees it as far more likely that the making and unmaking of habit is a slow and arduous process. And yet James assures us that “new habits can be launched . . . on the condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements.” What counts as “new stimuli and new excitements”? James insists that “life abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experiences that they change a man’s whole scale of values and system of ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed and build up in him a new or regenerate ‘nature.’”92 Our bodies, societies, concepts, the selves of others, and the technology at our disposal all play a role in fastening (and conversely, unfastening) our habits. Because habits are so entrenched, because we are the sorts of creatures that we are, because one cannot merely will oneself to conversation, the only way to undermine habit’s conservative thrust is by adopting different and contradictory habits. Not unlike what we encountered in Rorty in Chapter 1, what we see here is something like the moral urgency of a change in vocabulary, a shift in self-identity. But what I think James helps us to appreciate is that this shift can never be captured under a mere shift in our language game, the introduction of some concept, or

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the normalizing of a once-radical discourse. The binding (though not fixed) nature of our habits and, ultimately, our self-images, the manner in which the subject is in some sense bound to the “flywheel,” is an insight that leads to the existential and experiential nature of James’s pragmatism. What is also useful here is the recognition that a kind of self-care is called for by the constant cracks and divisions in selfhood. Transformation and self-care yield for us a picture of ethical thought that is rooted in what Foucault will call techniques and practices of the self. While building up what Rorty would call alternative descriptions of the self is a vital part of a Jamesian account, it does not go deeply enough into the problem at hand. Like Nietzsche, who says that we have to “learn to think differently—in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently,”93 James is pointing us beyond the rhetoric of “ironic self-descriptions,” beyond a mere voluntarism of the will, and toward a practice that encompasses more than undermining our discourse, but of “perhaps very late on, to attain even more”: to learn to experience differently and thus become different sorts of people. This language of self-care has, not unreasonably, come under critique as apolitical, especially in its Foucauldian variety. All that I have been discussing in terms of habit, self-transformation, and selfidentity might be interpreted as an exercise in what Rorty would call “private self-creating poetry.” The worry often directed at Foucault is that this self-creator is disengaged from one’s obligations to the world. But what James (not unlike more charitable readings of Foucault) identifies as ethics refers to one’s relation to self that structures the way individuals are made moral subjects. Our habits and practices of self, what we make of them, is what makes us the kinds of being that are not only, in Nietzsche’s language, “capable of

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making a promise” but the kinds of beings who (perhaps very late on) can break those promises that have worn out their usefulness. James understood, I think, the idea that the subject is never not a social construct, but also that it is never merely a social construct. Habits of belief and experience do not work on an indifferent body. So it can never be enough to say that I believe some things and not others, that I do some things and not others, because my doing particular things, my holding certain beliefs, my perception of reality is what makes me the individual person that I am. The kind of phenomenological descriptions that pervade James’s analysis and the introspective work of the psychology are a necessary condition for understanding and appreciating our beliefs. In so doing, the discussion of belief has moved far from the terrain of an epistemology concerned with justified true belief, evidence, and warrant. Highlighting this moral-psychological register by undertaking the kind of “phenomenological” descriptions that pervade James’s analysis and appreciating the introspective work of the psychology are necessary conditions for understanding and appreciating the scope and significance of “The Will to Believe.” In so doing, we see that it can never be enough to say that I believe some things and not others, that I do some things and not others, because my doing particular things, my holding certain beliefs, my perception of reality, are what make me the individual person that I am. The discussion of belief situated in these terms moves us far from the terrain of critique concerned with subjectivism or voluntarism that so frustrates many of James’s classical and contemporary critics. I have shown that what James stresses throughout his discussion of belief and the will is not that our beliefs are voluntary but that something appears to a subject as some thing because it appeals not

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only to her conceptual habits and interests but coheres within a wider set of shared and meaningful practices. Because consciousness can never be “neutral” or objective but is always an activity of selection, attention, and affirmation, playing a role in what we take to be living and dead possibilities, we must therefore approach the question of the willfulness of belief through a wider discussion of the constitution of the subject. Only in this way can we see how the will-to-believe thesis is not confined to one set of interests but colors the whole breadth of human experience. Appreciating the breadth and significance of the will-to-believe thesis then shines new light on the unity and coherence of James’s wider philosophical projects as we find them in the Principles, the Varieties, and Pragmatism. Far from seeing “The Will to Believe” as an “unpragmatic slipup,” I have shown that James’s position is more faithfully rendered as undermining the distinctions between rational and passional. Once we’ve considered James’s will-to-believe thesis as I have been suggesting, we see that James’s preoccupation is not a traditionally epistemological one but a moral-psychological one that concerns the character of our beliefs and how they color the world in which we act and lay the groundwork to answer the question of how we can begin to experience differently. While James does not advocate a direct correspondence between words and objects, we cannot simply sever the relationship between language and experience. Something appears to us as some thing because it sparks some interest or elicits our attention. And yet, such interests do not create the world. There is, and needs to be, a dialectic between the world and the possibilities for change, such changes and new modes of experience: this relationship is one that can only be captured through James’s specific treatment of experience. The moral emphasis of James’s work requires that we

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assume that our experiences of the world can be different than they are. This involves conceptual and linguistic work, to be sure, but also the acknowledgment that we can experience differently. For James, we must experience differently before we can begin to speak differently. But James’s appeals to the nature of experience are not limited to the ethical or existential. His most sustained and explicit inquiry into the meaning and significance of experience is metaphysical, methodological, and ontological. How to understand a metaphysical approach, for example, alongside what I have thus far outlined, is the subject of the next and final chapter.

CHAPTER 4

Radical Empiricism and the Metaphysics of Pure Experience The reader will in vain seek for any closed system in this book. It is mainly a mass of descriptive details, running out into the queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can hope successfully to deal with. That will perhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best mark of health that a science can show is this unfinished-seeming front. —James, The Principles of Psychology

Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism. —James, The Will to Believe

No treatment of James’s concept of experience would be complete without consideration of the essays published as Essays in Radical Empiricism. This posthumous collection of essays appeared in 1912 and, along with Some Problems of Philosophy, signifies James’s self-conscious entrance into metaphysics. Radical Empiricism is one of James’s most perplexing works, and the concept of pure experience advanced throughout the essays raises a set of troublesome questions for the thesis I have been arguing thus far. If we are to 171

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point to a place in James’s corpus where he is most vulnerable to the charges of immediacy, foundationalism, and irrationalism, it would be here. I have argued that James’s thought is oriented around the goal of bringing together the lived and sometimes ineffable qualities of Erlebins with the more cumulative, linguistic, and active notion of Erfahrung. I will now argue that this same principle is at work, though in a sometimes misguided and inconsistent form, in the Essays in Radical Empiricism. In working out the method of radical empiricism and in some of the wider concerns that pure experience was called into being to address (i.e., dualism and intellectualism), James remains committed to the same non-reductive form of experience we have seen so far. Even here, James can be read as providing a nonfoundational and yet robust notion of experience, one that enjoins us to take seriously both the active contributions of the subject as she renders the world intelligible through language, artifice, art, science, and work and at the same time the ways in which we are limited in what we may be able to create in our relationship with the world. For James, experience is always “double barreled.” On the one hand, as Dewey will often say, experience is the process wherein organisms interact with environments. On the other hand, the world is full of disjunction, missteps, inaction, and frustration, yielding to those lost souls or organisms tragically out of step with their environment. This is the side of James that took seriously the impotence of the will and “limit experiences” such as intoxication, religious ecstasies, psychosis, and melancholia. The focus on these experiences teaches not only moral or phenomenological lessons but also connects directly to his method of radical empiricism.

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The task of Radical Empiricism is immense: articulating a metaphysics capable of bridging not only the long-established dualisms of philosophy but also what has traditionally been understood as two diverging notions of experience. We have already seen James attempt this move in, for example, the discussion of conversion (e.g., the way of self-surrender and active reorientation through habits and practices). Regarding the overall strategy of bringing together what is often taken to be two distinct forms of experience, and the legacy of such incompatibility (and its iteration within the pragmatic tradition), C. I. Lewis will say, “Pragmatism has sometimes been charged with oscillating between two contrary notions; the one that experience is ‘through and through malleable to our purpose,’ the other, that facts are ‘hard’ and uncreated by the mind.”1 This is a version of the problem that I argued grounds James’s treatment of belief and his description of the active and selective qualities of consciousness. By confronting this dual characteristic and critically examining James’s radical empiricism and pure experience, we will come to see in dramatic form the particularity of James’s concept of experience, with all its strengths and weaknesses. Having come this far with James it should come as no surprise to say that the image of the world that sits at the center of his thought is an anarchic one. The subject acts in a world characterized by flux and impermanence, a world that knows no fixed center or given telos. Far from the integrated, coherent, and autonomous subject that experience is supposed to imply by some of its critics, experience in James’s hands leads us to a radically heterogeneous subject whose boundaries with the world and other selves are never so clearly drawn. As much as James insists that we act in the world that we structure to suit our aims, it is also one that exceeds, overwhelms, resists, and frustrates our intentions. The error James

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signals with respect to what he calls “intellectualism” is that we tend to forget or overlook the human origin of this order, attributing it to some fact about the world itself, rendering the world too neat, too reasonable, too forgetful of its “game flavor.” Yet, we would also err if we assumed the world is simply reducible to such activity. The problem James must now face head-on is that if the world has no given, predetermined, permanent structure, if there is no truth untouched by the human hand, if the subject has no access to a transcendent realm of truth, how do we come to know the world or act meaningfully within it? The essays that make up Radical Empiricism express most clearly the problem James sees with earlier accounts, and even some interpretations of his own pragmatism: if we do not attend to the way in which experience implicates a subject who is in some sense passive or receptive to a world that is, in Lewis’s terms, “hard,” we are advancing a notion of a completely unbounded subject who acts on a completely indeterminate reality that is fully moldable to human intentions. And if this is the case, we find ourselves once again confronted with the now-familiar epistemological and existential pitfalls of subjectivism, voluntarism, and relativism. Consistent with James’s earlier approach to this problem, the “solution” is not one of, in Lewis’s words, “oscillation,” but rather an attempt to resolve them dialectically. In the preceding chapters I have emphasized the more active elements of James’s twofold concept of experience, the way in which we individually and collectively build up meaning and shape reality through, for example, efforts of attention and selection. Though it plays a pivotal role in framing the discussions of “The Will to Believe” and the Varieties of Religious Experience by limiting the voluntaristic and subjectivistic readings, the passive element in

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experience has yet to really come to the fore. The reason for this strategy is simple enough. When focused on the role of experience in James’s philosophy, many studies give explanatory priority to James’s notion of pure experience. The result of this priority is that more often than not James’s experientially rooted philosophy becomes equated with an appeal to immediacy or a foundational empiricist philosophy, overemphasizing, for example, the relationship between the “pure experience” theories of Mach, Avenarius, and Russell. While radical empiricism is surely one of James’s most lasting and novel contributions to the history of philosophy, if we do not frame our discussion of pure experience in the context of his earlier work and the particular spirit of his pragmatism, we would only see one aspect of the role given to experience that I locate within James’s thought. Russell, for example, picks out the notion of pure experience and the neutral monism that underpins it as James’s chief contribution to the history of philosophy. Casting James’s position as realism, Russell summarizes James’s view as one wherein “the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind, but that it is arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations and that some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical.”2 In Chapter 2 I addressed some of the methodological problems that haunt the opening chapters of the Principles. There we saw that the dualism James supposes between thought and thought’s object or between mind and world are far more tenuous than many have assumed. I argued that the dualism of James’s psychology is undercut in some of the most significant moments of the text, particularly in the descriptions of the stream of thought and self-​consciousness. There is ample evidence to suggest that James finds the presuppositions of the psychologist (i.e., the sharp break between thought

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and thought’s object) highly suspect. This doubt emerges once again and far more explicitly in the essays that make up Radical Empiricism. In, for example, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” James dates his mistrust of the entity called “consciousness” back to the period in which he composed the Principles. For twenty years past I have mistrusted “consciousness” as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its nonexistence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.3

In 1904, in order to “openly and universally” discard consciousness, James is led to reformulate his philosophical method, and ultimately to introduce a metaphysics of experience, or what he calls pure experience. Despite some important insights and points of clarification, the metaphysics of pure experience James introduces in this period is one that ultimately ushers in more problems than it solves. But certain aspects of this metaphysics are indispensable for appreciating the significance of experience that I have traced so far. While I have given a number of reasons to doubt that James’s appeal to experience is analogous to the classical empiricist’s or a substitute for substance, such charges gain the most traction in his attempt to close the epistemic or ontological gap between subject and object through an appeal to what he calls pure experience. James’s critics are, I believe, right to be apprehensive about the term. Perry, for example, will note that James’s task in Radical Empiricism remains unfinished, never quite resolving the doubts, inconsistencies, and difficulties it brings into being.4 The most serious doubts and difficulties turn on the status of pure experience: “Is it a neutral stream of ‘pure’ experience, or is it the mental series which constitutes the

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metaphysical reality? . . . Does reality exist when no individual sentient being is consciously aware of it? And if so, in what sense, if any, can such existence be said to be ‘experienced’? These questions are not answered.”5 James cannot seem to make up his mind about what exactly pure experience is, how we finite linguistic creatures connect to it, and in what sense this elusive pure experience connects to much more concrete forms of experience that have played such an important role in his thinking up to this period. Sometimes James speaks as if it were a neutral stream and at other times as if it were a mental event. Despite some excesses and confusions that present themselves in this period, the metaphysics of pure experience remains one of James’s most lasting contributions to the history of philosophy and certainly deserves our attention. But more to the point, to fail to see what James with this metaphysics of experience is attempting to address would be to miss the novelty and deep significance of his philosophy of experience. By making metaphysical what has up to this point been primarily a moral-existential claim about the significance of a philosophy rooted in experience, James can now confront difficulties that have animated his thought and, in a sense, do what he has been doing all along—namely, blurring the distinction between subject and object, between the moral and the epistemic, between activity and passivity, and between language and experience.

Radical Empiricism Before proceeding, something must be clarified. The period in which James introduces his thesis of pure experience is often referred to as his period of “radical empiricism.” This is misleading for a number of reasons. It’s important that we disentangle what so

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many readers of James are tempted to bring together, namely the methodology of radical empiricism and the metaphysical thesis of pure experience. “Radical empiricism” is a term James introduces well before the series of papers posthumously collected as Essays in Radical Empiricism. The term “radical empiricism” first appears in print in the preface to his 1896 The Will to Believe. However, the term is most often associated with the more metaphysical theories advanced in the later collection of essays, which began in 1904 and introduces “pure experience.” While these later essays certainly signal a shift of emphasis in James’s thought, many of the themes that come to dominate these essays are ones we have already encountered in the Principles, the Varieties, and “The Will to Believe” (e.g., the rejection of consciousness and dualism, the affirmation of the reality of relations and transitions, and the ultimate double nature of experience). We have to tread carefully, more carefully than James himself did, in order to pull apart the theses of radical empiricism from those of pure experience. The central methodological thesis of James’s radical empiricism has been operative since the first essays in psychology.6 The thesis, as it now emerges in Radical Empiricism, reads as follows: “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its construction any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is experienced.”7 The definition is hardly satisfactory, and it does not tell us much beyond what we already knew from writings such as “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” or The Will to Believe. In the 1896 preface to The Will to Believe James outlines the three key features of radical empiricism that operate throughout his essays: radical empiricism is (1) an attitude, (2) a method, and (3) a worldview. Recall that the heart of the critique in “The Will to

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Believe” is that there are rational as well as perspectival limits on what we can know. Radical empiricism holds that the “inward clarity” of a particular point of view is always fragmentary and limited to a particular individual who has a particular set of needs and interests. “To the very last there are various ‘points of view’ which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains a bare externality and datum to another.”8 Though the perspectivism highlighted in James’s prefatory remarks is key to understanding the concerns animating radical empiricism, it is helpful to look ahead to The Meaning of Truth, where James summarizes radical empiricism in more detail. There he outlines radical empiricism in terms 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 the things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate). The statement of 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 things themselves. The generalized conclusion is that therefore 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 trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.9

Wedded to his anti-intellectualism and perspectivism, and influenced by his prior reworking of the empiricist tradition, the postu-

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late of radical empiricism serves to both widen and narrow the philosophical landscape. It is narrowed insofar as transexperiential concepts such as the “soul,” the “Ego,” or “God” (as they are traditionally understood) are excluded as objects of philosophical inquiry. At the same time, however, the postulate serves as a widening of the objects of philosophical inquiry. As we turn our attention to lived experience, whatever is found, however vague, “unphilosophical,” unscientific, or unruly becomes a legitimate source of inquiry. While this delineation of the proper objects of philosophy seems to echo the positivist’s attempt to draw strict boundaries on what we can call “philosophy,” James’s demand that our concepts be “definable in terms drawn from experience” is not motivated by the desire to set philosophy on the path of the sciences but by a concern to see philosophy return to and debate matters of wide human significance (action, ethics, religion, etc.). If we were to narrow “experience” here to the empirical sciences, sense data, or what can be rendered an object of meaningful discourse, James would be quick to charge us with intellectualism. Scientism, idealism, linguistic nominalism, and orthodox empiricism are each guilty of, in James’s mind, alienating philosophy from the concerns of value and human meaning. As already discussed, James does not mean by “experience” only what can be known by experiment, sense perception, or a causal happening, but he includes the far more ambitious and vague categories such as what can be known introspectively, what is felt, moods, and relations. Recalling the metaphor of the fringes of consciousness from the Principles, radical empiricism is also a critique of the attempt to restrict empirical “testability” solely to what is publicly observable, clear, or precise. Classical empiricists, logical positivists, and verifi-

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cationists have each, in one way or other, taken for granted that experience provides a clear and distinct foundation. James’s radical empiricism counters that the vague and relational “data” of experience is more basic and more fundamental than any particular “percept.” Jean Wahl, noting the factual thesis of radical empiricism, observes that “The reason . . . James admits relations into his universe is by no means a determination to make it more orderly, it is simply to make it more comfortable to reality, and reality is rugged and chaotic. . . . These relations and connection become involved, raveled, knotted, and then unknotted.”10 For James, the radical pragmatist is a “happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature.”11 Acknowledging that no conceptual apparatus, vocabulary, or philosophical system can fully capture experience, James’s radical empiricism attempts to approximate the fullness, depth, messiness, and richness of experience. It does so by once again focusing on the flights, transitions, and relations that hold between the substantive elements of our thought and experience. So, while James agrees with Hume that the mind is essentially a plurality, he parts ways with the orthodox empiricists when he describes experience as continuously flowing, made up of a stream of varying sensations, objects, thoughts, perceptions, intentions, and so on.12 Thus we run into the now-familiar statement of fact: “The relations that connect experience must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.” The statement of fact leads us to the general conclusion. Idealism overcompensated in its corrective to empiricism’s atomism by appealing to something underlying or unifying our ideas (Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, an absolute ego, etc.). Rejecting the factual thesis

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would have us claim for the relational, transitory, and anticipatory a merely additive and ultimately subjective role. Again, for James, the transitory is as real as anything else. In the radical empiricist’s universe, the conjunctive and disjunctive relations between things are immanent to experience.13 Recalling those infamous “if-feelings” encountered in the Principles, in “The Thing and Its Relations,” James draws our attention to the relations found within what he calls the “passing minute”: In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, “is,” “isn’t,” “then,” “before,” “in,” “on,” “beside,” “between,” “next,” “like,” “unlike,” “as,” “but,” flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.14

Prepositions, transitions, nouns, unity, and disjunction carry equal weight within lived experience, and so a philosophy that aims to return to experience must attend to the substantive and the transitive. The claim James advances throughout the Essays in Radical Empiricism is that once we have attended to the passing minute, all one needs to make sense of the continuity of experience is the immanent function of consciousness. James is committed to the view that relations such as “like” and “unlike” are themselves vaguely felt, requiring nothing like a transcendental subject to account for their real existence. The differentiations of relation are not part of the mind but the subject-plus-object. Orthodox empiricists see a world fundamentally disjointed and piecemeal. Rationalists see the

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world as a single whole. If we make empiricism radical enough, we can do away with the need to appeal to a transcendent cohesive element to hold the parts together. In order to do that, we need an empiricism capable of handling the relations that are “as real as anything else in the system.”15

Does Consciousness Exist? Armed with the method articulated by radical empiricism, James advances his thesis of pure experience in two central essays in Radical Empiricism, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.” “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” introduces pure experience as a corollary to the argument that refutes the existence of a substantive soul and to his arguments against dualism. Along with the other essays, he argues that the distinction between the mental and the physical (thought and thing, mind and world) cannot be cast as ultimate or foundational; dualism cannot be a part of James’s metaphysics of “pure experience.” Given all that James has said of the self, religious experience, ethics, habits, and so on, the rejection of transexperiential notions such as consciousness, God, or soul heralded in the essay must be heard with some care. When he answers “No” to the question “Does consciousness exist?” he is negating the existence of a specific entity we can call “consciousness,” a soul or substance. But there is, to be sure, a very real function that we have perhaps clumsily called “consciousness.” This negation is not unfamiliar to readers of the Principles. Consider this passage from the first volume: It may be truly said that, in one person at least, the ‘Self of selves,’ when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and

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throat. . . . I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most distinctly aware. If the dim portions which I cannot yet define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked.16

On radically empiricist grounds, namely what it feels like to think, James’s psychology had already cast suspicion on the substantial account of consciousness. While in the Principles he is reticent to draw the conclusion that consciousness is a fictional entity, armed with radical empiricism, and the confidence of a newly minted professorship in philosophy, he is now prepared to fully reject it. But it is not enough that James simply turns his back on Cartesian dualism and its residual notions of mind and body. At this stage, James enters the metaphysical arena with an alternative he thinks can account for both the depth of the immediate and passing experience and its incompleteness, horizons, relations, and interconnections: pure experience. James has argued from early on that both rationalism and empiricism fail to account for relations as they are experienced and so present stultifying worldviews. His lecture courses give clear expression to this view: All “classic” clean, cut & dried, “noble,” fixed, “eternal” Weltanschauungen seem to me to violate the character with which life concretely comes & 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.17

Unfinished, disorderly, and plural, James’s vision of the world lends itself to metaphors such as mosaics, streams, fields, and corridors.

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But now that he has entered the terrain of metaphysics, he has set himself the task of explaining this relational system at its most basic level. Cartesian dualism is the unambiguous target of James’s essays: there is, in the metaphysics James comes to defend, “no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made”18 and distinctions such as “knower” and “known” are blurred to the point of indistinction. James opens his essay with a bold proclamation that is intended both to set the groundwork for his rejection of a substantial account of consciousness and to introduce the concept of pure experience. My thesis 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 easily be explained as a particular sort of relation toward one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its terms becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known.19

The traditionally formulated problems of knowledge play a decisive role in the formulation of pure experience. Absent a “subject,” transcendental ego, and a dualism of thought and things, knowing is an intraexperiential relation. Here knowledge is conceived as one more activity that emerges inside experience. “It is made; and by relations that unroll themselves in time.” He adds, “Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition— the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function

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may be of two different kinds.”20 We can gather from this essay that James conceives of consciousness as a function. This function serves transition, movement from one thing to the next. Subjectivity, as far as we experience it, is a retrospective addition to our more primary experience. At its most basic level, experience is conceived as flight, motion, or a stream of sensible experiences. An immediate question arises. Why does James think that this is a viable alternative to either the neo-Kantian intellectualism or the Cartesian dualism he targets so relentlessly? First, he holds that both percepts and concepts are coordinates of the same “realm.” Consider the following description of what it means to think of an object: If at this moment I think of my hat, which I just left in the cloakroom, where is the dualism, the discontinuity, between the thought-of hat and the real hat? It is a real absent hat with which my mind is concerned. I deal with it practically as a reality. If it were present on this table, the hat would determine a movement of my hand; I would pick it up. In the same way, this thought-of hat, will soon determine the direction of my steps. I will go to get it. The idea I have of it will endure until the hat is a sensible present, and will then blend harmoniously.21

In the account provided, the idea of “a hat” and the hat we have present as a sensible object “harmoniously fuse.” In such a fusion, it is not that one is cast aside as an idea and the other as an object, the two of which remain destined to stand against one another, one standing as real and the other some kind of conscious representation. But what would license such a description as the one above? James’s answer is that only dualism could license such a description. For James, the two are not so different. They “blend harmoniously” because both the idea of the hat and the physical object orient

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some kind of action. The response James provides in these essays is not so different than what he provides in Pragmatism. Taking the ontological continuity of experience as his starting point, James thus posits the relation between knower and known as: (1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are; (2) two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive, transitional experience between them; or (3) the known as a possible experience to which conjunctive experience would lead if sufficiently prolonged.22

This relationship (between subject and object or between knower and known) can be filled out in more detail by looking at James’s example of Memorial Hall. In “A World of Pure Experience” James construes truth as the collection of ideas or judgments that are verified by conjunctive relations. If my beliefs about Memorial Hall allow me to take someone there and have, as we walk around, experiences of similarity and connection to what I imagined and remembered, then my beliefs count as verified. If this doesn’t happen, my beliefs are not “made” true. The basic idea is that my ideas can “lead to” or “terminate in” experiences such that talk of “agreement with reality” makes sense. It is because the experience is shared and public that it can refer to an intersubjective reality. David Lamberth explicitly connects James’s claims between knower and known in Radical Empiricism to what he in Pragmatism calls Denkmittel: “All our conceptions are what the Germans call Denkmittel, the means by which we handle facts by thinking them.”23 For James, an idea’s value resides in its purporting to work on the rest of experience. These imperceptible and indirectly perceived things are particular kinds of Denkmittel. They are our contributions, claims, interpretations, and constructions that either facili-

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tate our transactions in the world or hinder them. Insofar as ideas lead satisfactorily through the world of experience—for example, they help us to achieve our ends, cohere with the rest of our beliefs, and so on—then to that extent we call them true. Discussing the Principles, James says, “We read there [in the Principles] that a percept results from the fusion of an incoming impression with a mass of resident ideas that apperceive it. We read also that the fusion is so thoroughgoing that it is usually impossible to discriminate its elements.”24 To become true or false, to become knowledge, James insists that we need a context. To explain this point further we need to connect James’s metaphysics to his more general claims about the relationship between perception and knowledge. While “consciousness” is a mythological entity, things and the activity of thought are both fully real. The relationship between mind and world thus takes on a new significance. The stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly in the stream of my breathing. The “I think” which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the “I breath” which actually does accompany them.25

The recasting of consciousness in terms of a “stream” replete with relations and identifiable with a body was invoked to discredit both the classical empiricist model of mind as well as the idealist notion of the soul, ultimately making way for James’s own treatment of the body and thought in psychological terms. In Radical Empiricism this same recasting is used to reorganize our basic metaphysical categories. The contrasting terms “subject” and “object,” “percept” and “concept,” do not stand for discernable, concrete aspects of pure

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experience; they are additions that we have built into the living tissue of experience as a means to facilitate description. What determines whether we assign something to the “subjective” or to the “objective” is ultimately functionally and contextually motivated. The term “stuff of pure experience” can then be understood as James’s rather crude way of expressing that the flux of reality does not lend itself to description in either subjective or objective language. This supposition, James believes, allows for the idea that “knowing can be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.”26 James’s metaphysical efforts are oriented to overcoming dualism by a turn toward a neutral or primordial field he calls “pure experience.” On its surface, pure experience stands for an immediate, passive experience that exists prior to our attempts to linguistically shape it.27 If we take such an approach to James’s metaphysics, then one could easily conclude with Rorty that the classical pragmatists’ attempt to reconstruct metaphysics is merely a return to the foundationalism that their better efforts ought to rid us of. But this would be too quick. Experience does not refer us back to an integrated, self-​ possessed subject, nor to a soul, an ego, or a transcendental unity of apperception; experience refers us back to a pluralistic subject known to itself through a body that breathes, moves, feels, and so on. The importance of this bodily, porous, and contingent subject emerges again in the Essays in Radical Empiricism. The following passage is worth quoting at length: The individual self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the “field of consciousness”) comes at all times with our body at its center,

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center of vision, center of action, center of interest. Where the body is “here;” when the body acts is “now”; what the body touches is “this”; all other things are “there” and “then” and “that.” These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of attention and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exist for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as “thoughts” and “feelings” can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. The body is the storm center, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view. The word “I” then, is primarily a noun of position, just like “this” and “here.”28

The body is not an object in the world but an ambiguous and multifaceted center of attention and effort. The body is a “storm center,” a place from which relational and positional terms such as “now,” “here” or “there” make sense and coordinate reality. But it is also through the makeup of the body that we come to experience things in precisely the way that we do, organizing our experience through perception, attention, habit, and interests. When James says, “No developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form,” he reaffirms his own critique of the appeal to immediacy. Moreover, the “systematization of things with reference to a focus of attention and interest which lies in the body” refers us back to the analysis of sensation and perception. The actually existing human and her body is the only “foundation” operative in James’s philosophy: this is a body that is receptive and yet interpreting. Our intentions, goals, and aims play a central

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role here, and in “The Experience of Activity” James draws the connection explicitly: Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on and finally achieving our intention—this is action, is effectuation in the only shape in which, by a pure experiencephilosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality at work. To treat this offhand as the bare illusory surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of thinking, only animism in another shape.29

James explicitly combats the psychophysical dualism of modern philosophy by drawing our attention to the immediate moment, to lived experience. Radical empiricism and pure experience, like all James’s previous endeavors, are concerned not only with the nature of human action but with the nature of the world in which this activity occurs. The functional analysis James attempts to provide of consciousness and our division of the world into subject and objects will ultimately turn on whether James can identify the undifferentiated that (i.e., pure experience) which is neither subject nor object. But how do we characterize this “stuff” James calls “pure experience,” the “stuff” that “furnishes” reality and comes with the body at all times? Confronted with such a task, it is hard to escape the feeling that James has set himself out on a fool’s errand. We can see right away that terms such as “directly apprehended,” “directly experienced,” and “purity” do a suspicious amount of work for James. However, we seem to be confronting a significant meaning of the term “experience” that is, at first blush, quite far from the “lived,” “the existential,” and the “pragmatic” that I have

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stressed so much so far. The difficulty can be articulated within the terms laid down in James’s method: If we follow the method of radical empiricism—which states that the only things debatable and admitted into philosophy are those that are felt immediately— on what grounds could we justify the appeal to anything like pure experience? At first glance, the invocation of a “primal stuff” known as pure experience, a stuff James paradoxically claims may only be accessible to newly born babies and men in semicomas,30 seems in direct violation of the method that demands our concepts be rooted in what is experientially available. On what grounds could a radical empiricist justify an appeal to a form of experience that is in principle unexperienceable? If we lend to it the role James desires, have we committed ourselves to a gratuitous mysticism or fallen prey to a mythological given?

Pure Experience While there is no shortage of commentary on James’s metaphysics of pure experience, there is little consensus as to what the concept means or what its place is in James’s larger thought.31 Ayer, for example, sees radical empiricism and the thesis of pure experience as an attempt to reconstruct what is phenomenally given. Here, pure experience is taken to signal a universe built upon ontologically neutral building blocks. Bruce Wilshire will claim that James was moving toward a transcendental phenomenology. John Wild will claim that he was rejecting all transcendentalism as he turns to an existential phenomenology. Charlene Haddock Seigfried casts pure experience as a “limit concept” that can be postulated but not experienced. Russell saw in it an “important new truth” that then serves as the starting point for his own neutral monism in The

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Analysis of Mind.32 Many more radically different approaches to James’s metaphysics could be cited. Such interpretations depend largely on just how we understand what kind of “thing” pure experience is supposed to be: a realm of preconceptual knowledge by acquaintance, a functional limit concept, a mental series that constitutes metaphysical reality, or a neutral stream of “stuff.” As I noted, James offers contradictory descriptions of pure experience. I previously cited James’s opening definition of pure experience from “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” where he calls pure experience “one primal stuff or material.” A few pages later he revises: Although for fluency’s sake I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are “natures” in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: “It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not.”33

In the same essay he will say, “Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you like, for “being”) there appears no universal element of which all things are made.”34 Taken one way, we could hear James saying that pure experience is a mere tool used to help him discard a more problematic metaphysics—namely, Cartesian dualism. He says that if we provisionally understand pure experience as a “primal stuff,” then “knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation toward one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ be-

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comes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known.”35 In a later essay, James further complicates matters by calling pure experience a “methodological postulate,” equating it to radical empiricism.36 If we were to focus our attention on the merely reactionary elements of James’s metaphysics, we might think that pure experience was one potential strategy among others aimed at undercutting dualism. In this we could hear James telling his reader to “throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.”37 While this approach does seem to get at one aspect of James’s thinking—namely, that pure experience is summoned into existence to solve a set of problems the tradition has inherited from Descartes, Kant, and Hume—it seems to miss some of the more vital elements of James’s positive program. If we consider the various descriptions of pure experience in isolation, James is surely appealing to a foundational given or an ineffable source of all meaning. One definition runs as follows: “Pure experience is the name given to the immediate flux of life, which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”38 Similarly, James will say that pure experience is “another name for feeling or sensation”39 and calls it “the stream of concretes” or “the sensational stream.”40 These definitions suggest a number of problems that James wishes to avoid—for example, that reflection is something added onto experience and not a part of experience itself. Here we find ourselves knee-deep in what Nichols called “James’s hole.” Some of James’s descriptions could easily lead one to suppose that pure experience is literally a “thing” that functions as the ultimate source of reality—namely, the substantial building blocks for experience (which is what Ayer and Russell took from James as they were developing their own sense data theories). Taken

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this way, Rorty would certainly be right to say that pure experience is just another word for a foundational substance. James insists, however, that there is no “stuff” of which experience is made. Pure experience here is a “that.” As John McDermott rightly points out, James seems to be holding two positions at the same time. He does not accept the ontological status of thoughts and things, seeing them rather as operations of pure experience. . . . Pure experience is not a stuff which can be denoted as such. Nonetheless, pure experience is cited, named, retroactively as it were, in the terms which it becomes manifest, that is, as thought and thing.41

An experience is pure, James tells us, when it occurs prior to conceptualization (when it has yet to take on recognizable features). And yet, such an experience is not posited as an epistemic foundation. James likens experience here to a “field” in which contexts can develop and meaning can take shape. So, while “the instant field of the present is always experienced in its ‘pure’ state, as a plain unqualified actuality . . . only virtually classifiable” in later experience “the naïf immediacy is retrospectively split.”42 Pure experience, taken in this sense, is strictly unavailable to a conceptusing, linguistic, discriminating adult.43 Such “knowledge,” such “naïf immediacy” offers us no deliverances. James’s most helpful metaphor in this respect is to call pure experience a “field.”44 On this view, experience is taken as a given field within which functional differences (such as the difference between subject and object or between the one and the many) can be defined. By the adjective “pure” prefixed to the word “experience,” I mean to denote a form of being which is as yet neutral or ambiguous, and prior to the object and the subject distinction. I mean to show that the attribution of mental or physical being to an

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experience is due to nothing in the immediate stuff of which the experience is composed—for the same stuff will serve for either attribution—but rather to two contrasted groups of associates with either of which . . . our reflection . . . tends to connect it. Functioning in the whole context of other experience in one way, an experience figures as a mental fact. Functioning in another way, it figures as a physical object. In itself, it is actually neither, but virtually both.45

Pure experience is understood as a field that, prior to the subjectobject split, is capable of being predicated in any number of ways. This “stuff” does not tell us how to attribute it; such attributions come only with reflection, context, and purpose. The difference between consciousness and content or mental facts and objects of consciousness is, as Cobb-Stevens notes, to be analyzed in terms of relational patterns.46 A dualism certainly remains here but it is defanged by being recast in functional terms. Much earlier, when James contributed to the entry for “experience” in Baldwin’s 1901 Dictionary, he defined it as follows: (2) Psychic or mental: the entire process of phenomena, of present data considered in their raw immediacy, before reflective thought has analysed them into subjective and objective aspects or ingredients. It is the summum genus of which everything must have been a part before we can speak of it at all. In this neutrality of signification, it is exactly correlative to the word phenomenon (q.v.), meaning (4). If philosophy insists on keeping this term indeterminate, she can refer to her subject-matter without committing herself as to certain questions in dispute. But if experience be used with either an objective or a subjective shade of meaning, then question-begging occurs, and discussion grows impossible.47

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The definition provided is remarkably similar to what will only a few years later appear as “pure experience.” Absent the qualifying “pure” and drawing an explicit correlation to the term “phenomenon,” James is already blurring the line between the objective and subjective uses of the term through appeals to experience’s prereflective status. In the everyday course of life, we unproblematically divide the world into thoughts and things. Problems arise, however, when we seek more stable grounds for such a distinction. James’s alternative of pure experience is proposed to account for how it is that experience, originally undifferentiated, appears to us as discriminate. The argument is, at bottom, a functional and pragmatic one: subject and object are ways of organizing sensory experience to better serve our ends. As John E. Smith notes, “James’s proposal is not, as has sometimes been thought, to eliminate the distinction between thought and thing by returning to an undifferentiated experience or feeling, but to reinterpret the traditional subject/object distinction in terms of contexts and functions.”48 Terms such as “subject” and “object,” “thought” and “thing,” or “perception” and “conception” don’t stand for various aspects of reality. They are additions that we build into experiences as a means of explaining them. Context determines what we call subject or object. One of the most important conclusions drawn in the Essays on Radical Empiricism is that the division between thought and thing is not found in experience, as such, but emerges retrospectively. We must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. . . . Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely realized only when the experience is “taken,” i.e., talked of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a

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new retrospective experience of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content. The instant is at all times what I call “pure experience.”49

The subject-object distinction cannot arise at this level, but it can emerge or be identified retrospectively, as William Gavin will say, by “‘bracketing’ reality, defined here as the present.”50 “The instant field of the present” is the definition of pure experience that James invokes most often. While particular formulations of pure experience can be misleading, it can be best understood as a hypothetical “state” prior to the point where everything becomes loosely concatenated. This interpretation, of course, runs into difficulties when faced with such definitions as the following: “‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”51 In Gavin’s formulation, “James, having asserted the existence of something beneath these various dichotomies, is having great difficulty ‘catching it’ in language.”52 Care is required here. James struggles with multiple expressions and descriptions as he tries to articulate pure experience. As is the case with any philosopher who attempts to appeal to the prelinguistic, James will, despite all efforts, inevitably fall back into it. This is not to say, however, that because our formulations must occur within a language, they are reducible to such formulations.

Pragmatism and Pure Experience So much of what James tells us of pure experience seems to be at odds with what we know of his approach to philosophical problems, metaphysical or otherwise. The rallying call of pragmatism is, if nothing else, that concepts are teleological and that if a distinc-

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tion has no “pay off,” it cannot be a real distinction. What then could it mean for a pragmatist to call experience pure, if by pure we mean an essentially nonlinguistic mode of experience inaccessible to the language-using adult? What then is the point of a concept like pure experience? James’s pragmatism asserts itself again: if there is no primordial subject-object divide, then many of the more seemingly intractable philosophical problems concerning knowledge and representation fall by the wayside. By postulating “pure” experience as primordial, James, like Hume before him, is challenging us to approach philosophy on the grounds of experience, asking us how well our philosophical postulates and presuppositions can handle problems and possibilities that are found within everyday experience. Seen this way, pure experience is a reactionary concept summoned into existence to respond to problems that necessitate the introduction of representational knowledge and a substantial soul to bridge the gap between subject and object. However, many have assumed that James’s pragmatism bars him from discussions of metaphysics. James, like the pragmatic tradition of which he is a part, has an ambiguous relationship to metaphysics. For instance, in his day, the most widely, though mistakenly, recognized advance in the Principles was to push psychology away from metaphysics and toward the experimentalism, behaviorism, and functionalism that came to the fore in the twentieth century through schools. George Trumbull Ladd and E. B. Titchener were, for example, highly critical and narrowly focused on James’s appeals to move psychology away from metaphysics.53 In the same vein, it is often assumed that pragmatism is inherently antimetaphysical, or at least indifferent to metaphysics. While such antimetaphysical views are readily identifiable with the later pragmatism of Rorty, they also appear in varied forms

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across the pragmatic tradition.54 In a limited sense, these antimetaphysical views capture a basic thrust of James’s thought: there is no metaphysics in this later work, if by “metaphysics” we mean a selfenclosed systematic philosophy that will explain all of our ultimate terms.55 In fact, much of the interpretive frustration that one finds in the literature stems from the attempt to treat this period as James’s turn to systematic metaphysics. What is on offer throughout these essays can, I believe, be better understood, as Myers notes, as a “vague blueprint”56 of how a pluralist and a pragmatist might go about addressing metaphysical questions. In other words, what James articulates is an open and fallibilistic portrait of how one might approach questions of ontology and metaphysics while remaining pragmatically and experientially oriented. What we receive in place of a systematic metaphysics is, then, a series of analogies, suggestions, descriptions, and metaphors that are central to James’s effort to reclaim the intimacy, depth, and role of experience in philosophy—an aim he insists can never be achieved if we understand metaphysics to be the exclusive province of the rationalist or the systematist. How then does James reconcile his pragmatic temperament with his turn to a metaphysics? Pure experience is a metaphysics, but a metaphysics intended to be fallible, open, and pragmatic. The hypothesis of pure experience gives us certain resources to account for features of lived experience. Once we are able to talk about it, experience is, of course, shot through with our habits, language, and concepts. To call experience pure, then, is a bit of a misnomer. Recognizing this, James will say “its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.”57 Why then does James stress its purity? The important

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methodological point is that those elements that transcend experience in principle are excluded, while all that occurs at the level of experience (however inchoate) must in some sense be included. James does not say that pure experience can never be experienced. Under normal conditions, experience is mediated by concepts and habits, and our bodies are always conditioning our experience. But James insists on leaving the door open for experiences so radically new that we have no prior preparation to interpret them. It is central to James’s thought that the world always be understood as wider, deeper, richer than our concepts. A philosophy that does not posit an unfinished universe that is always outside of our grasp doesn’t adequately leave entry for the unknown, the yet-to-be, and is thus musty and uninhabitable. It was this vision of the world that led James’s interests in the quest for experiences and phenomena such as the paranormal, drugs, and altered states of consciousness, and also animated his interest in religious experiences. Pure experience is “a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats.”58 This is James’s resolution to the two notions of experience. To be true, to be assimilated into our self-conceptions, and to be taken up as teleological tools in the fashioning of experience, pure experience must be made experience. Language, concepts, and habits must mediate it. In other words, the trail of the human serpent must cross over it. However, what James describes as “the passing moment” remains a source of nonepistemic meaning and significance. Our concepts must enable us to move about the world, encountering things that are “thats” ready to be “whats.” While these may be only vague feelings, they are essential constituents of the word. We can see here how James’s view differs sharply from the linguistic or psychological nominalism we encountered in the neo-

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pragmatic thinkers discussed in Chapter 1. The particular, the concrete, the experienced, is the only truth to which the pragmatist can appeal. As Jean Wahl will argue in his study of James’s pluralism, “Concepts should enable us to return with fuller assurance to the stream of temporal experience, which is the only valid reality.”59 And, as James will say in the Varieties, A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude toward the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the “object” when taken all alone. It is a full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the kind to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor currents of the world run through the life of it; it is on the line connecting real events with real events.60

To see the weight of what James identifies above as a “full fact,” we need to turn back to a lengthier discussion of perception or the form of experience wedded to sensation and the relationship between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge about.”

Experience and Perception In describing the nature of pure experience, James distinguishes two aspects traditionally seen as constitutive of experience: percepts and concepts. He also insists that experience must itself contain relations. We have seen how this claim has operated through the description of the stream of thought, and how it leads James to posit the neutral “stuff” he calls “pure experience.” We can shed light on the distinctiveness of James’s concepts by fleshing them

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out in the context of his claims regarding sensation and perception. We will benefit by returning to the Principles to lend some clarity to the understanding of percepts and concepts that underscores the metaphysical account of pure experience, and the role given to the vague world of sense. The words “sensation” and “perception” are often unclear, refusing definite and clear meaning. This is as true of the psychological tradition as it is of the philosophical one. According to the Principles, “sensation” and “perception” name the processes by which we come to be acquainted with our immediate physical environment, and both perception and sensation (in normal conditions) require stimulation of the bodily organism. James distinguishes sensation from perception in the following manner: “Perception always involves Sensation as a portion of itself; and Sensation in turn never takes place in adult life without Perception also being there. They are therefore names for different cognitive functions, not for different sorts of mental facts.”61 The difference is one of degree, not of kind. Sensation differs from perception in its simplicity, and yet they are both functions of the human organism. In the empiricist tradition, sensations are abstract moments of perception that result from sensory stimuli.62 The associationists, for example, supposed that since an object of thought contained many elements, thought itself must also be made of many ideas, one standing for each and combined together in appearance, but ultimately separate.63 In line with such a model, James observes that “most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it,” and yet this separation signals a gross violation of “the empirical method of investigation.”64 Becoming radical, empiricism demands that however complex an object of thought may

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be, it is always of one undivided state of consciousness. The empiricist tradition posits sensations as appearing within consciousness as mental content—as elementary parts of more complex mental composites. The tradition of Locke and Hume is mired in what James sometimes calls “the psychologist’s fallacy,” which he defines as “the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report.”65 This fallacy can take a number of forms. The first is explained in the following manner: The psychologist . . . stands outside of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its object are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state (percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which he knows it, although this is often very far from being the case.66

We commit this version of the psychologist’s fallacy when we attribute what is available only upon reflection to our original experience, substituting our ideas of things for the experience. In other words, one reads back into the “immediate flux” (e.g., the distinction between subject and object) distinctions made from a different reflective perspective. When James highlights the psychologist’s fallacy, he notes that our reflective descriptions often falsify what is had in the instant of experience, but also notes that such a falsification is in some sense inevitable. We can see here how what James calls the psychologist’s fallacy is one iteration of his broader concern with intellectualism. We have a rich vocabulary for describing the objects of our thought. But the vocabulary available for our feelings directed to-

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ward those objects is impoverished. Qualities such as hard, blue, hot, and cold are words that can be used both subjectively and objectively. Yet it is the objective use of the word that is primary, and we are required to describe many of our sensations by the name of the object from which it was originally found (e.g., a thunderous sound, the color blue, etc.). Such a limitation gives rise to a tendency to regard thought as a replica of the object located somewhere within the mind. Our manner of speech and vocabulary can lead us to believe that any object will arouse the exact same feeling in both the subject and the psychologist. Naming our thoughts by way of objects allows one to assume that as the object exists, so too must the thought. In such instances, thoughts of identity over time, multiplicity, and succession are thought to arise only through a multiplicity of atomized perceptions and not to the stream of experience as it is lived. James often speaks as a descendant of Reid or the commonsense realist, arguing that experience doesn’t require a transexperiential additive because sensations noninferentially illicit ideas of the things that cause them. However, as James will later argue, the commonsense view fails because it leaves the gap between subject and object or sensation and its object intact. Common sense theories left the gap [between knower and known] untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the salutary act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full.67

James argues something more radical than the commonsense philosopher: there is no gap in the first place. Experience is double-

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barreled and inclusive. We see the implications of this approach clearly in the treatment of the perception of space.

The Perception of Space A paradigmatic and particularly troublesome case of sensory experience is the perception of space. As such, one of the longest and most frustrating chapters of the Principles is chapter 20, “The Perception of Space”—James himself refers to it as “tediously minute”68—the basic thesis of which is that spatial relations (like all relations) are themselves as much a part of what is experienced as the sensations that bind them. To make this argument, James must stake out a radical position in the philosophy of perception. This position once again highlights the relationship between the analysis of sensation and the method of radical empiricism. The psychology of perception in the late 1900s often centered around questions such as, How can our sensory experience provide us with knowledge of space? In this we can hear the more general epistemic question, Can our sensory experience provide us with knowledge as such? In answering that, one basic error to which we can succumb is yet another version of the psychologist’s fallacy: confusing one’s own experience of space with what one’s theoretical or retrospective understanding is. More often than not, the result of such an approach is the construal of sensations as inner states of the subjects that are in fact mere signs of objects. James’s own position, which attempts to account for sensation and perception strictly in the terms of experience, is reflected in the following example: As I look at my bookshelf . . . I cannot frame to myself an idea, however imaginary, of any feeling which I could ever possibly have got from it except the feeling of the same big ex-

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tended sort of outward fact which I now perceive. So far is it from being true that our first way of feeling things is the feeling of them as subjective or mental, that the exact opposite seems rather to be the truth. Our earliest, most instinctive, least developed kind of consciousness is the objective kind; and only as reflection becomes developed do we become aware of an inner world at all.69

James calls the theory that posits sensations as, first, internal states that, second, require projection in an external world “eccentric projection.” It is a particularly gross sense of the psychologist’s fallacy: confusing one’s own understanding of space with what knowledge might be expected of ordinary observation and experience. Those guilty of the psychologist’s fallacy were forced to hypothesize intricate interpretive processes that converted basic sensory events into complex knowledge of dimension and structure captured in the phrase “space perception.” James identifies Berkeley’s work on space perception as the “first achievement of any note” in the history of psychology.70 It was from Berkeley that psychology inherited the two great problems that framed discussion of space perception in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Berkeley’s Theory of Vision made two central points: (1) that distance is not a visual but rather a tactile perception; and (2) that there is no one “idea” or quality common to the sensations of touch and sight, such that one may, from the look of an object, deduce anything regarding its felt shape or size and conversely from its felt shape or size to its look.71 Berkeley thus formulates the problem of discerning that manner in which the various senses harmonize to form one world. The empiricist tradition, by way of the associationists, inherited many of Berkeley’s difficulties. They tried to solve the problem of

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the harmony of the senses by claiming that the senses suggest one another through the process of association. The problem that emerged was that the associationists ended up explaining the extensive quality itself by the association of feelings that possess it. Mill states, for example, that “the idea of space is, at bottom, one of time,”72 and Bain claims that “as a quality, it [space] has no other origin and no other meaning than the association of these different [nonspatial] motor and sensitive effects.”73 And yet, association itself can produce nothing original: it can only weave together ideas. What Mill and Bain ended up defending was ultimately a Kantian argument regarding space perception: “there is a quality produced out of the inward resources of the mind, to envelop sensations which, as given originally, are not spatial, but which, on being cast into the spatial form, become united and orderly.”74 Here, Kantianism simply means the doctrine of “supersensational construction.”75 What brings the rather unlikely cast of Mill, Bain, Spencer, Wundt, and Berkeley together as Kantians is the general assumption that the intellect builds experience from sensations. James insists that the Kantian view is so abstract as to be incoherent, and that to speak of space as a supersensational mental product is to mythologize it. Yet again, James’s refutation of the Kantian “machine shop” view of space perception rests primarily on introspective grounds: I have no experience of mentally producing or creating space. My space-intuitions occur not in two times but in one. There is not one moment of passive inextensive sensations, succeeded by another of active extensive perception, but the form I see is as immediately felt as the color which fills it out.76

The Kantian claim that so many empiricists ended up having to defend is that there is one infinite continuous unit of space, and our knowledge of this unit cannot be a “piecemeal sensational affair.”

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Yet this notion of a single space is precisely what James charges with piecemeal construction, claiming that most of us must drop the thought of the space in front of us when, for example, we turn our attention to the space that lies behind. And the space that is near to us is more divisible than the space farther away. For the Kantians, experience was the result of mental synthesis, and experience as such is always unstructured. Unsurprisingly (though perhaps unconvincingly to a Kantian), James’s argument emerges from and refers back to experience. The view of sensation advanced here shares deep connections to what will become pure experience. It is very unlikely that any Kantian would be convinced by James’s argument that because we have no experiential basis for the synthetic work of the categories, they are therefore mythological. In fact, a Kantian would be more than happy to admit (as Kant himself readily does) that the categories are not found in experience. The precise argument of the Kantian is that such categories lie behind experience, making order, relations, and so on possible. James knows this well. His argument is not meant to convince the Kantians on the grounds of what is found in experience, but it is meant to show that experience itself can provide all the psychologist needs to make sense of perception.77 This is the very strategy of radical empiricism. By rejecting the theory of association, which was the dominant explanatory model of the day, James was left to account for a series of problems. One such problem was the relationship between sensation and perception; another was the problem of relating sensation to the function of the senses. James’s criticism of the theories of space perception and his critiques of orthodox empiricism arise out of his own understanding of sensation and perception, which implies that all of our sensations are extensive wholes.

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A vague feeling of volume is present in every sensation, even those arising from the inner organs. For example, the whole body is spatially sensed during nausea or fatigue. “Our entire cubic content,” says James, “seems then sensibly manifest to us as such, and feelings much larger than any local pulsation, pressure, or discomfort.”78 At first, each sense has its own world of space and to a degree it retains some autonomy. But through constant dealings with a relatively stable world, one comes to correlate different spaces together.79 I can then see the coffee cup and feel my hand against it and know my tactile and visual perceptions to be of one and the same object. Through “ordering” of this kind we come to have the single space in which we move and live, oriented with respect to the different directions, “in front,” “behind,” “up,” “down,” et cetera. These spaces do not refer to an “extrinsic total space” as in the Kantian picture,80 but again to the body. Foreshadowing radical empiricism, James concludes, “Relation to our own body is enough.”81 The account of perception is derived from psychologists like Hering, Volkmann, Stumpf, Leconte, and Schön, each of whom allow “ample scope to that Experience which Berkeley’s genius saw to be a present factor in all our visual acts. But they give Experience some grist to grind, which the soi-disant ‘empiristic’ school forgets to do.”82 Anticipating the claims of pure experience, James argues that a pure sensation is an “abstraction”—though not in the sense of the abstract moments characteristic of the empiricists—because, strictly speaking, the adult never has anything like a “pure sensation.” The adult has prejudices of attention, habits of body and thought, concepts, language, and so on. In sensation we first meet with “bare immediate natures” that we later come to distinguish as objects.

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The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Universe. And the Universe which he later comes to know is nothing but an amplification and an implication of that first simple germ. . . . In his dumb awakening to the consciousness of something there, a mere this as yet (or something for which even the term this would be too discriminative, and the intellectual acknowledgement of which would be better expressed by the bare interjection “lo!”), the infant encounters an object in which (though it be given in pure sensation) all the “categories of the understanding” are contained.83

The world appears not as the discriminate “that” of knowledge about but the “bare interjection ‘lo!’” of acquaintance. Sensations for the child present a world, not a duplicate of it. Sensations are not within the mind, for sensation is shown to be the way in which the mind knows things. There are no sensations and relations that independently join them; all there is the “teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” that is the world found within experience.84 Once again, James refers to his hypothetical newborn to illustrate this argument. By his body, then, the child later means simply that place where the pain from the pin, and a lot of other sensations like it, we or are felt. It is no more true to say that he locates that pain in his body, than to say that he locates his body in that pain. Both are true: that pain is part of what he means by the word body. Just so by the outer world the child means nothing more than that place where the candle-flame and a lot of other sensations like it are felt. He no more locates the candle in the outer world than he locates the outer world in the candle. Once again, he does both; for the candle is part of what he means by “outer world.”85

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Sensation and perception are shown to be the way the self comes to know itself and the world (i.e., knowledge by acquaintance). The child’s experience is here considered “objective.” Only later with the help of reflection does the child come to be aware of itself as a self. Sensations are the least developed kind of consciousness and are in this sense objective; only through reflection do we become aware of an inner world at all. Our first way of knowing things is not subjective or mental but rather objective and intentional. The argument advanced in the Principles is, once again, a radically empiricist one. If we take experience as our guide, it follows that the relations that constitute experience are inherent in experience and not some mental additive. James concludes from his discussion of sensation, perception, and space that we select certain sensations to be the bearers of reality. We’ve encountered this conclusion already in the context of belief. In the context of sense experience, he speaks of the education of the artist as something that consists in learning “to see the object as one feels the object,” an education that is “demonstrative of this selective function at work in perception.”86 From the very beginning, the world is ordered around sensation. Sensations come to us as facts and we feel them at the center of our desires and interests. However, they are not simply given and nonmalleable. What we call “experience” in this sense is a history in which purposes and things become ordered. The unending process of sensation is constantly being revised.87 Perception is not the chaotic manifold supposed by the rationalists of his day. Perception and what James also calls “knowledge by acquaintance” already contains fringes, patterns, relations that can be further and retrospectively clarified. There is, of course, no certainty in our knowledge by acquaintance. For James, the meaning of a proposition is always found in some particular consequence in

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our future practical experience. Everything that we could call knowledge by acquaintance becomes “knowledge about,” without necessarily forfeiting its status as “immediate.” On this view, appeals to immediacy do not help us discern truth and error. Acquaintance and immediacy are dumb, but not necessarily ineffable. Such knowledge offers no deliverances. To become true or false, knowledge must be relational. To have articulation, truth needs a context.

Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge About In the Principles James picks up the distinction first established by John Grote between knowledge by acquaintance (connaître, kennen) and knowledge about (savoir, wissen), a distinction that is crucial to the development of radical empiricism. Although James insists that the distinction is ultimately a relative one, in some cases the distinction seems to be fixed (acquaintance with a color, taste, and odor). So, James will, for example, argue that it is “through feelings that we become acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we know about them.”88 Of such knowledge he will say, About the inner nature of these facts [i.e., facts of acquaintance] or what makes them what they are, I can say nothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance with them to anyone who has not already made it himself. I cannot describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation. . . . All the elementary natures of the world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matter and mind, together with the kinds of relation that sub-

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sist between them, must either not be known at all, or known in this dumb way of acquaintance without knowledge-about. In minds able to speak at all there is, it is true, some knowledge about everything. Things can at least be classed, and the times of their appearance told. But, in general, the less we analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we perceive, the less we know about it and the more our familiarity with it is of the acquaintance-type. The two kinds of knowledge are, therefore, as the human mind practically exerts them, relative terms.89

We begin with acquaintance, some fact of the matter, to which our conceptual thought can never be an equivalent. James’s antiintellectualist and quasi-mystical position is rooted in a claim about the relationship of percepts and concepts. There are certain ultimate terms in the sphere of “knowledge about” that cannot be conceptually defined. For example, all logical thought involves what we call comparison, the finding of likeness and difference. Yet we cannot define likeness in purely conceptual terms. Once an object has become familiar through perception it can be clarified through conceptual analysis. This classification also serves to bring to light aspects of the thing that acquaintance does not capture. “All the elementary natures of the world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matter and mind, together with the kinds of relation that subsist between them, must either not be known at all, or known in this dumb way of acquaintance without knowledge-about.”90 All our conceptual knowledge refers to what James calls this “dumb way of acquaintance.” The terms “thought” and “feeling” give voice to this distinction in knowledge. Feelings are the “germ and starting point of knowledge.”91 The word that says the least, the interjection “lo!,” “there!,” and “hey!,” or the demonstrative

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pronouns “the,” “it,” “this,” and “that,” are best representatives of the “feelings” that are the starting points of thoughts. And yet, unlike Russell, and those for whom the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge about will play a foundational epistemic role, James refuses to fasten the ultimately relative distinction into a foundational account.92 Like Russell and the acquaintance theorists who will follow him, such knowledge is understood as immediate and nonconceptual. To be acquainted with something doesn’t mean that we form a judgment about it. And yet, unlike Russell and other sense data theorists, James would not fasten the ultimately relative distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge about into a foundational account of knowledge. Instead, as Myers notes, “our actual experiences begin and end with gestalten or wholes from which isolated sensations are, for theoretical reasons, sometimes abstracted.”93 Moreover, and most importantly for the critics of the sense data model of experience, James refused to grant certainty to knowledge by acquaintance. It is by way of experience that we first become acquainted with objects; perception and sensation are the “germ and starting point of knowledge.” In James’s description of sensation and perception, the world of the senses contains “half-formed patterns” that take shape when expressed;94 the question of how we express them and how these expressions are truthful to the thing is of central importance to James’s philosophical vision. Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its relations, or articulating what lies on its “fringes.” Most of the relations felt in the stream of thought are not clear and defined but unarticulated. “Of most of [a thing’s] relations,” says James, “we are only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a

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‘fringe’ of unarticulated affinities about it.”95 As the earlier discussion of the function of attention made clear, all voluntary thought is engagement with some topic or subject. This topic can be a problem or “gap” we wish to fill, or it can be a “mood of interest” that functions both by inciting an active thought process and by guiding the search and accepting or rejecting trains of thought insofar as the fringe of relations contains affinities with the topic. Reasoning proceeds from definite interests and purposes, whether they are the purposes of understanding a mathematical problem or fulfilling a basic need. Other types of thinking, such as having irrational thoughts or daydreaming, are excluded from the category of rational thought because they wander incorrectly from one purpose to another. Reasoning, on the other hand, is focused on its object or purpose. It disregards any accidental attributes of a thing and focuses on its essence, “that one of its properties which is so important form my interests that, in comparison with it I may neglect the rest.”96 As early as 1879, ten years prior to the publication of the Principles of Psychology, James was working out some of his most influential philosophical ideas. The first version of “The Sentiment of Rationality,” later published as a chapter of The Will to Believe, appeared in the journal Mind. In this essay, James asks after the ground of rationality itself. He concludes that rationality, when taken to mean an understanding of the necessary or irrefutable, is grounded irrationally. He argues that no philosophical system, no set of scientific principles, or aesthetic rules, are capable of independently demonstrating their own rationality. “The Sentiment of Rationality” is not concerned with defining the concept “rationality” or “knowledge about”; for, according to James, this would not address the immediate concern. As in “The Will to Believe,” he asks after the

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psychological nature of the feeling of rationality, which is presupposed in the very definition of rationality itself. The questions that ground the inquiry of “The Sentiment of Rationality” are (like the analysis of belief ) of a psychological nature: What are the characteristics of rational thought? How do we feel when it is achieved? How do we recognize it for what it is? James’s answer to these questions is that we recognize rationality as we recognize all other phenomena, “by certain subjective marks with which it affects [us].”97 In other words, we recognize rationality by the feeling of being rational. It is only by the experience of being rational that we come to know what rationality means. What, then, are the subjective marks of rationality? “A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest . . . lively relief and pleasure.”98 The sentiment of rationality is also a feeling of sufficiency, a satisfaction in the present moment, characterized by the absence of distress or discomfort. Consequently, whatever modes of thought that contribute to the “fluency of thought” may be deemed rational. Helmholtz’s “immortal works on the eyes and ears” led James to the conclusion that practical utility wholly determines which parts of our sensations we are aware of and which parts we ignore. At the same time, Darwinian biology emphasized that practical interests govern the intellect. “The germinal question concerning things brought before the first time before consciousness,” James writes, is “not the theoretic ‘What is that?’ but the practical ‘Who goes there?’”99 The intellectualist presupposes a world wherein particulars can only be understood insofar as they are explainable aspects of a closed system, the whole always taking priority over the part. The intellectualist aims at total comprehensibility, emphasizing a subject (a transcendental ego or thinking subject) who stands outside nature because of her ability to conceptualize. Conversely, the em-

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piricist presupposes a world of mechanistic atomism about which we seek absolute clarity. Empiricists are struck by the fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their rationality, so much so that the feeling of familiarity is equated with rationality.100 Custom allows the empiricist to explain phenomena by antecedents and to know them by foreseeing their consequences. Seeking to disclose the nature of the world, the empiricist will go so far as to deny the whole, giving priority to the parts. What strikes James about these opposing strategies is that they seem to share a common assumption: that the nature of the universe can be disclosed by a rationalistic approach. James’s strategy is again to muddy the waters. It is a strategy initiated all the way back in “The Sentiment of Rationality” and continuing through the Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe. It demonstrates how the universe of the intellectualist is always less systematically related and chaotic than supposed, and the world of the empiricist is always more intimately related and coherent than supposed. We seem thus led to the conclusion that a system of categories is, on the one hand, the only possible philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable and inadequate substitute for the fullness of the truth. It is a monstrous abridgment of things which like all abridgments is got by the absolute loss and casting out of real matter. This is why so few human beings truly care for Philosophy. The particular determinations which she ignores are the real matter exciting other aesthetic and practical needs, quite as potent and authoritative as hers. What does the moral enthusiast care for philosophical ethics? Why does the Aesthetik of every German philosopher appear to the artist like the abomination of desolation? What these men need is particular counsel, and no barren, universal truism.101

Radical Empiricism and the Metaphysics of Pure Experience  219

We would misread James if we took him to be saying that we focus too much of our attention on intellect and knowledge about and not enough on feeling, action, or knowledge by acquaintance. This claim overlooks the issue that is at the heart of the matter: intellect, knowledge, feelings, emotions, and sensations are not separable things. Intellectualists overemphasize the idea that experience is a “dumb that” until it has ossified into a “what.” Although James recognizes that there are advantages to the intellectualist’s method, he sees that it can quickly become vicious. What should now be apparent is that the neopragmatic commitment to discursivity would be, for James, a rather perverse intellectualist twist on the pragmatic approach to inquiry. We can define or conceptualize the flow of experience while forgetting and falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the flux. To a neopragmatist, all of this talk of “acquaintance,” “purity,” “experience,” or “immediacy” is nothing more than a return to foundationalism. But James’s appeals to such terms are not so easily dismissed: such knowledge (i.e., acquaintance) offers no deliverance, and yet it is essential to our action in the world. The commitment here is not to the foundationalism of sense data but to the claim that we are situated in and not separate from a world that runs past the work of the intellect, and that our philosophic interpretations should reflect this. What James is after in the Principles’ talk of knowledge by acquaintance is an analogue to what becomes pure experience in the later works. However, reconciling the underlying picture of perception at play here is the subject of much dispute, and an issue that James himself takes up in what are known as the “Miller-Bode Notebooks.”

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Perception, Knowledge, and the Miller-Bode Objections Of the many difficulties raised by pure experience (e.g., its resistance to description, its status as experienced, etc.), one particularly difficult problem was that James seems to violate his own esse est sentiri doctrine that is so central to the Principles. In describing the stream, James is clear that any state of mind or idea is unique and indivisible. This was a key premise of the critique of the atomism of the orthodox empiricism. Recall that he goes so far as to argue that no “object” can ever be experienced twice in the same manner. Objects are “given,” but they are given in an underdetermined way to an ever-changing subject. However, according to the thesis of pure experience, the “that” of pure experience figures twice, standing for either subject or object. In the “MillerBode Notebooks,” James addresses his own dissatisfaction with his position in The Essays in Radical Empiricism and the conflicting models of perception across the Principles and the later works. “The concrete trouble is over the question: Can the same terminus be co [continuous with] me & ex [ejective to] me at the same time? Or can my experience be the same in me and in the world soul, when obviously the world soul’s edition of it is so different from mine?”102 In 1905, Boyd Henry Bode published “‘Pure Experience’ and the External World,” which charges that radical empiricism must be rejected because it leads to solipsism. Bode argues that radical empiricism is solipsistic because it cannot explain how “points in [a percipient’s] experience which are not simply precisely similar to, but numerically identical with, corresponding points in the experience of other percipients.”103 In “A World of Pure Experience,” James argues that radical empiricism can explain how more

Radical Empiricism and the Metaphysics of Pure Experience  221

than one person can share the same experience on account of the theory of perception that he develops in “Does Consciousness Exist?” The neutrality of experience leads James to defend something similar to a theory of direct perception.104 Such an approach is given voice in the following: A given undivided portion of experience, taken in one contexts of associates, plays the part of knower, of a state of mind, or “consciousness”; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective “content.” In a word, in one group of associates it figures as a thought, in another group of associates as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective at once.105

On this model, perception is understood as a process in which two contexts (“mental” and “physical”) intersect. It is therefore implied that when individuals perceive the same object, they share the same experience. In one and the same experience can figure twice, once in a mental and once in a physical context . . . one does not see why it might not figure thrice, four times, or any number of times, by running into as many different mental contexts, just as the same point, lying at their intersection, can be continued into many different lines.106

If our objects are, as James seems to insist, immediately given, this would imply that they are given to us in the same way. For example, we see the same shade of blue or hear the same thunderous sound. However, if our minds are as active as James insists, if experience must be more than mere passive registration of givens, then it does not seem to follow that you and I experience the same object at all. The threat here is solipsism.

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This is an objection to the metaphysics of pure experience that was first brought to light by Miller who, recalling the problem he pointed out to James in conversation, wrote the following to Ralph Barton Perry: The object O will stand in relation of appearance with my other content of the moment, but insofar as you are conscious of it, it will not stand in this relation (i.e., you are of course not conscious of my other content, my bodily sensation for instance). That is, the object O will stand in a certain relation and not stand in it at one and the same time—a self-contradiction.107

The difficulty is this: if the individual cannot be said to experience the same mental state more than once, how could we expect that two people could be said to perceive the same object in any meaningful way? Pushed far enough, such objections unearth a threat of solipsism in James’s philosophy of pure experience. When he died in 1910 James was still working through the various objections to his doctrine of pure experience. In his notebooks it is evident that the tension between the model of perception of the Principles and that of radical empiricism remains unsolved in terms of pure experience. While James’s pure experience certainly demands revision, it does not follow that the model of experience that he has developed so far (along with the critique of dualism and intellectualism that comes along with it) ought to be rejected. Although “pure” seems an unnecessary addendum to the model of experience developed in works such as the Principles and “The Will to Believe,” the method of radical empiricism and the attempt to explicitly harness experience for philosophical (or metaphysical) purposes are not in themselves mistakes.

Conclusion Pragmatism in a Pluralistic Universe The more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and . . . the things of worth are all concretes and singulars. —James, Principles of Psychology

Though pure experience is abandoned in James’s later works, the message of pure experience and the pluralism to which it is connected remain central themes. What emerges after the Essays in Radical Empiricism is James’s most extensive and explicit treatment of pluralism. As Alain Locke cautioned early on, many fail to notice how deeply pluralism runs in James’s philosophy: “When William James inaugurated his all-out campaign against intellectual absolutism, though radical empiricism and pragmatism were his shield and buckler, his trusty right-arm sword, we should remember, was pluralism.”1 At bottom, radical empiricism claims that the essential features of reality are found within experience. His final work, Some Problems of Philosophy, which James himself saw as his treatise on metaphysics, does not advance a metaphysics of pure experience (the term does not appear in the 1910 work) but maintains some of its core principles along with the method of radical empiricism. Speaking of perceptual experience, James tells us:

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Here alone do we acquaint ourselves with continuity, or the immersion of one thing in another, here alone with self, with substance, with qualities, with activity in its various modes, with time, with cause, with change, with novelty, with tendency, and with freedom. Against all such features of reality the method of conceptual translation, when candidly and critically followed out, can only raise its non possumus, and brand them as unreal or absurd.2

Experience remains the central concept, and yet the pretense to purity no longer seems necessary. The relationship between continuity and flux, between the one and the many, has played a central role in James’s philosophy, and in this later period it becomes explicit. Examining why the problem of the many and the one is so central to James’s later thought will take us to the heart of James’s anti-intellectualism and his pluralism. Thought and language are general; existence is universal. We say and think “table,” but all that exists are tables, each one being individual. The classical formulations of this problem will claim that there is one essence, one form, one thing that circumscribes all we call “table,” “horse,” “equal,” “person,” and so on. Looked at one way, there are many tables; looked at another way there is only one. Which way is true? Does our need for conceptual generality falsify the original difference of things? Answering these questions ultimately leads James to profess that he must give up logic. James credits Bergson with his abandonment of the logic of identity, but his own account of the flux of experience had suggested what is now formulized explicitly. For my own part, I have finally found myself compelled to give up logic. . . . It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the es-

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sential nature of reality. . . . Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. . . . I prefer to call reality if not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution,—and by reality here I mean reality where things happen, all temporal reality without exceptions.3

Reality is more encompassing than the knowable. While necessary, inescapable, and unavoidable, logic, concepts, and language do not exhaust what is real. This basic thought, which we have now tracked from the Principles to “The Will to Believe,” and now the metaphysics, is one of the most unique features of James’s pragmatism. James’s thought breaks with the traditional favor of unity and the truth of abstract and rational thought. Yet this break does not mean that he runs to the other extreme, making multiplicity more fundamental than oneness. Such a strategy would only reverse a hierarchy when the point is to break free of the force of the picture that reality cannot contain both one and many. “The great point to notice,” he will tell us, “is that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate. . . . Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other.”4 He will say in The Meaning of Truth: The world is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple, neither is it a universe and a multiverse at the same time, as the Hegelians say, but simply a great fact wherein manyness and oneness are set alongside and succeed each other. The world cannot be formulated in a single proposition.5

We encounter here again the familiar claim that terms like unity and plurality are different levels of descriptions that are retrospectively added onto our experience, not autonomous real qualities of being. Both ways of describing reality are valid, and the descrip-

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tions are at least plausibly true. There is no fact of the matter as to one being truer than the other. Why is this a “great fact”? This takes us back to the question of why James thought that this old problem was so pregnant with meaning, and it can help us to understand why James turned to the metaphysics of pure experience. Pragmatism emphasizes that the truth of a proposition has nothing to do with whether it adheres in things themselves. The question for us is not whether we are being true to beings in themselves but whether a given theory, concept, tool, or vocabulary has the sort of pragmatic value that James identifies with truth. Straightaway, two things follow that bear on radical empiricism: pluralism and humanism. Once we accept that the universe grows by so much every time we come up with a new way to describe it, we see that ours is not a finished but an unfinished world; its unity is not transcendental but futural. This vision of the unfinished world highlights “the most fateful point of difference” between James’s pragmatism and the rationalist tradition. For the rationalist, “reality stands complete and ready-made from all eternity.”6 James’s multiverse is just the opposite. The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is readymade and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its completion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures . . . It is impossible not to see a temperamental difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind . . . is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the phrase ‘must be’ is ever on its lips. The bellyband of its universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature.7

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The argument seems to be this: if we had to choose between a reality that is one and not many or a world that is always many and never one—if something about reality forced this decision on us, one side or the other being right and true—we are better off in a world that is many. In a world that is one, James cautions, effort and care would appear pointless, and we would not be able to take the labors and loves of life seriously. However, if reality is really many, then there is nothing that we can build that will not fly apart and ultimately disappear. If reality really is one, fixed and final, then everything is decided and there is no point trying to affect or shape the outcome of any event. This is why James said that the “great point” of the pragmatic answer to this problem is that oneness and manyness are not inherent qualities of reality but artifacts of descriptions. All determinisms and materialisms presuppose that one vocabulary is more complete and comprehensive of reality. So, if James is right, if oneness and manyness are levels of description that are retrospectively applied to a world that is neither, he rejects what the Sellarsian pragmatist often takes for granted—namely, that there is a conflict between what Sellars calls the manifest and the scientific images.8 We have to be careful here. Nowhere does James attempt to “reconcile” the scientific with the poetic, the manifest with the scientific images, because such an enterprise would only produce, in the words of Latour, “a monstrous hybrid: two artifacts brought together just makes for a third artifact, not for a solution.”9 The alternative James presents is to deny the validity of the division in the first place. As Wahl observes, “Empiricism and mysticism become fused into each other, this deepening of experience, this mystery felt in it, are still experience itself. Thus, even more than transcendentalism, the mystery that transcends facts is yet in a sense

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within the facts themselves.”10 And this gets to the heart of James’s notion of experience. At this point it is helpful to recall James’s claim from Pragmatism that “in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved.”11 The metaphysical problem of the one and the many could easily appear as a staid academic problem on which nothing really depends. But James promises that a genuine issue is at stake. From the insight that unity and plurality are “coordinate,” we reach the humanist conclusion that there is no ultimate difference between what there is in the world and what we have built or otherwise put into it. Given the emphasis on description and creative human action here, why hold on to passivity within experience? Why not conclude along with the neopragmatists that description does all of the work and that language “goes all the way down”? To hold this position is, for James, merely to succumb to “vicious intellectualism.”12 Language and concepts serve an important double function in James’s thought that we would miss if we were to commit ourselves to what I earlier called “the discursivity thesis.” On the one hand, language is a seductive force that leads us (as in the case of the psychologist’s fallacy) to mistake our experiences for realities that are expressed in words. On the other hand, language also functions creatively. Linschoten expresses the double function well: To let wordless reality speak by expressing it in words—at the risk of “falsifying it”—is one thing. But it is another thing to note that reality is enriched and developed by the process of expressing it in words, that it is, literally, first by expression in words that reality can be named and discerned as such.13

This is the tension within the Jamesian view of language.

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If we “lost our stock of labels,” we would be lost in the world.14 And yet these same labels make us prone to certain kinds of errors. One could emphasize the delusions inflicted upon us by language and say that a word functions to swallow the many into one. The position leaves us prone to suppose a substantive element exists transempirically beyond the phenomena, such as The Equal, The Beautiful, and so on. However, the lack of a word will often lead to opposite error in thought, overlooking phenomena that would be obvious if only we had a word for them. On the one hand, language can lead us astray. In the Principles, James will lament that language is “sluggish,” “atomistic,” and “works against our perception of truth” by souring referents and turning percepts into concepts.15 On the other, language serves a creative, inescapable, and ultimately enriching function. What we take to be our experience of some object (be it the sensory judgment “that is blue” or the more complex judgment “the world is hollow and meaningless”) is never identical with things. Our acts of attention, discrimination, judgments, and experience ensure that we never come to objects indiscriminately. But experience is, at the same time, nothing like a mode of spiritual substance like the soul or consciousness. James suggests a truly dialectical conception of language and experience: “Perception prompts our thought, and thought in turn enriches our perception. The more we see, the more we think; while the more we think, the more we see in our immediate experiences, and the greater grows the detail and the more significant the articulateness of our perception.”16 As our experience grows, more is anticipated, more is classified, and the world becomes more coherent. Neither perception in and of itself nor concepts in and of themselves know reality.

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James’s project is so foreign to that of the linguistic nominalism identified with neopragmatism that we don’t have to be hard pressed to imagine what James would have thought of the linguistic turn and the forms of pragmatism that have since come to dominate. We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue of truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson calls them, comes very hard. It is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason. But as difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way, I believe, to the possession of reality.17

James’s way out of the pernicious habits of the tradition is to plunge into the messiness and ambiguities inherent in experience. The advantage of this approach is clear, for the pragmatist at least. A world that is open to possibility and chance, one that knows no final explanation, and that we can transform with effort as it transforms us, is the world in which our actions make a difference. “Ever not quite!”—this seems to wring the very last panting word out of rationalistic philosophy’s mouth. It is fit to be pluralism’s heraldic device. There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says “hands off,” and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life. In every moment of immediate experience is somewhat absolutely original and novel. “We are the first that ever burst into this sea.”18

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Absolutism and intellectualism presuppose a world deprived of “the oxygen of possibility.” Any philosophy that cannot see the sense in straining at what is incomplete and uncertain, in an effort not to contemplate a finished world but to act in an unfinished one, is a world the pragmatist is bound to refuse. We condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy. These contradict the dramatic temperament of nature, as our dealings with nature and our habits of thinking have so far brought us to conceive it. . . . We turn from them to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted.19

The result of such condemnation is pragmatism. More specifically, it is the idea of experience and reality that James thinks pragmatism implies—namely, a passing from words to life. In the end, differences of experience and differences of reality come to the same thing. Experience is ultimately groundless. It is not a passive reaction to something that is a transcendent reality. “Tho one part of our experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing.”20 If we follow James in the manner I have recommended, the vague and ambiguous are proper objects of philosophy, and moreover, indispensable ingredients to understanding the vital role of experience. One danger present in the elimination of the vague and ambiguous from our understanding of experience is that it can quickly become synonymous with sensory stimuli, sense data, or some kind of causal happening. We bear witness to this reduction of experience in the development of certain strands of empiricism, up from the classical tradition to those philosophers working in and through the linguistic turn. Along with the reduction of expe-

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rience to data comes another danger present in the elimination of experience from our philosophical vocabulary—namely, “vicious intellectualism.” Staying close to what is lived, enriching our descriptive vocabulary, attending to the unfamiliar and uncomfortable are James’s safeguards against a worldview that would foreclose the new and previously unimaginable. Ever the pluralist, it is experience that gives James the resources to think and act in an unfinished world. Experience, understood as both active and passive, as mediated but not without some remainder, sits at the core of the pluralistic world of the pragmatist. This is not to say that every use of experience we find in James’s corpus is worth holding on to without critical revision. In particular, the turn to the metaphysics of pure experience that occupies James’s efforts in the early 1900s seems an unnecessary complication to the already sophisticated and novel account of experience we find in the Principles, the Varieties, and The Will to Believe. Ultimately, what we see in this period is an abandoned project that nevertheless contains the spirit of James’s earlier efforts: lived experience must remain the bedrock of our philosophical reflections. Experience does not admit of purity, and we need not claim purity for it. Experience shows its significance not in being an untouched foundation for knowledge but in the relation between self and world. James’s concerns are not those of the classical empiricist or their descendants, attempting to build a psychological or linguistic/logical foundation for all of our knowledge. In fact, what much of my analysis has shown is that James’s own criticisms of the foundationalism of the empiricists foreshadow many later critiques. And yet, James’s concern is the experience of a subject who acts in the world, whose boundaries are porous, and whose mind is never a

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theater in which the dramas of experience are played. In James’s hands, “experience” refers to the relationship between the subject and her world. The term implies both an active, human, worldmaking subject and a subject who is passive or open to a world that can resist, confound, or silence her best efforts. Such resistance does not take the form of a solid foundation, a Truth, or a thingin-itself, but it nevertheless limits our possibilities, resists our Promethean efforts, and gives shape to the world in which we act.

Abbreviations BC

William James. Psychology: Briefer Course. New York: Henry Holt, 1892.

ERE

William James. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe. Ed. Ralph Barton Perry. New York: Dutton, 1971.

MT

William James. The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909.

P

William James. Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921.

PP

William James. The Principles of Psychology. 2 Vols. New York: Henry Holt, 1890.

PU

William James. A Pluralistic Universe. Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe. Ed. Ralph Barton Perry. New York: Dutton, 1971.

TT

William James. Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt, 1899.

VRE William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. WTB William James. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1897.

235

Notes Introduction

1  BC, 165. 2  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2004), 355. 3 Herbert Nichols, “Professor James’s Hole,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 3:3, 59–60. 4  C. S. Peirce, “Letter to James, October 3, 1904,” in vol. 8 of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 206. 5 Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (New York: G. Braziller, 1970), 48. 6 Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 128. 7  See, for example, James’s discussion of the primordial experience available only to preconceptual infants in “The Thing and Its Relations” in ERE, 50. 8  This is a point that has been noted with respect to Dewey’s notion of experience. While scholars often stress Dewey’s Hegelian ancestry, this point seems to be underdeveloped in the scholarship on James, though admittedly his relationship to Hegel is far more contentious. See, for example, Paulo Ghiraldelli Jr., “Marxism and Critical Theory,” in A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 205. 9  See James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 2, §1, esp. 71. 10  James himself does, however, make this equation in a note to his Varieties titled “A propos of my reine Erfahrung!” This, as far as I know, is the only instance of the term (VRE, “Appendix IV”). 11  See “Conversion” and “Conversion Concluded,” chap. 9 and chap. 10 of VRE. 12  See Georg Wobbermin, Die religiöse Erfahrung in ihrer Mannigfaltigkeit: Materialien und Studien zu einer Psychologie und Pathologie des religiösen Lebens 237

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Notes to Pages 7–10

(Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich, 1907); Eilert Herms, Die Vielfalt religiöser Erfarung: Eine Studie über die menschliche Natur (1907). 13  See, William James, ‫ מחקר בטבע האדם‬:‫החוויה הדתית לסוגיה‬, trans. Jacob Koflibitz ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1949). I would like to thank Omri Bohem for helping with the translation and for his assistance in parsing the conceptual differences and similarities in the Hebrew and German terms. A discussion of this point can also be found in Nathan Rotenstreich, On Faith, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14  For a thorough discussion of the role of Experientia and Experimentum in early modern and renaissance natural philosophy, see Charles B. Schmitt, “Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella’s View with Galileo’s in De Motu,” Studies in the Renaissance 16:1 (1969), 80–138; the ambiguity between these two terms, and Bacon’s own lack of clarity between them, is a point that Jay’s analysis in Songs of Experience (28–35) overlooks and leads him to collapse the two notions. 15  P, 107. 16  Robert Brandom, “From German Idealism to American Pragmatism and Back,” http://lms.ff.uhk.cz/pool/download_14.pdf (accessed on January 22, 2022), 9; it is worth stressing here that Brandom’s reading of Hegel is highly idiosyncratic. Dewey’s own conception of experience, which is often quite similar to James’s, is deeply influenced by Hegel. This is most evident in works such as Art as Experience. For an alternative reading of Dewey’s conception of experience, see, for example, Joseph Margolis, “Richard Rorty Contra Rorty and John Dewey,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2 (2014), 91–108. 17 Brandom, “From German Idealism to American Pragmatism and Back,” 9. 18  Representatives of this view include, but are not limited to, the following commentators and philosophers, each of whom favors a different period at the expense of another: Richard Rorty, who prefers James’s lectures on Pragmatism and dismisses his metaphysics as a largely ill-conceived backslide into foundationalism and “betrayal of his pragmatism” (see Richard Rorty, “Religious Faith, Responsibility, and Romance” in Philosophy and Social Hope [New York: Penguin Press, 1999], 148–167); James Edie emphasizes those aspects of James’s work that tend to resonate with the thought of Husserl and has little to say for his pragmatic period (see James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Bertrand Russell was a fierce critic of pragmatism but adopts a version of James’s own “neutral monism” in The Analysis of Mind (New York: Cosimo, 2004), see esp. 22. Others who see James’s thought as being largely discontinuous

Notes to Pages 11–22  239

include Gregory A. Kimble, “A Search for Principles in the Principles of Psychology,” Psychological Science 1 (1990), 151–155; Eugene Taylor and Robert Wozniak, “Pure Experience, the Response to William James,” introduction to Pure Experience: The Response to William James, ed. Taylor and Wozniak (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), ix–xxxii. 19  William James, “Lecture 9: Metaphysics,” The Works of William James: Manuscript Lectures, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 331. 20  ERE, 9. 21  James’s parable of the squirrel in Lecture 2 of Pragmatism illustrates this method well. 22  PU, 150. 23 For one of many examples of James’s deployment of intellectualism turned “vicious,” see James’s treatment of the study of religion in VRE, 342–343. 24  One version of this complaint has been put forth by John J. McDermott in his introduction to The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 9. 25 Recall the passage cited in the introduction: “What does the overthrowing of experience consist of? A suspicion: and what if the “I” had no existence? And what if there were no temporal dialectic amassing experience? And what if the world had no need of the alienation of a subject in order to know itself ” (Lyotard, Assassination of Experience, 53). 26  TT, 232. 27 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, xv. 28  James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 229. 29  PMN, 315. 30  P, 124. 31  William James, “The Teaching of Philosophy in Our Colleges,” in Essays in Philosophy in The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burdhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). 1. Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn

1  Richard Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” in Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed., Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 6. 2  The metaphor of the mirror has a long history in discussions about perception. Bacon, for example, tells us, “Speaking generally the human mind is a mirror so uneven as to distort the rays which fall upon it by its angularities”

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Notes to Pages 22–26

(Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], §88). 3  This is most vehemently argued in Richard Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” 1–15; and “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” in Consequence of Pragmatism. I will discuss Rorty’s direct critique of James’s understanding of experience with reference to “Intellectual Responsibility, Faith, and Romance” in the next chapter. 4  Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” Proceedings and Address of the American Philosophical Association 53, no. 1 (1980): 727. 5  See, for example, Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001); Robert Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth; Michael Bacon, Pragmatism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Cheryl Misak, The American Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010); Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism’s Advantage: American and European Philosophy and the End of the Twentieth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 6  Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism,” in Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–13 (London: Routledge), 261; cited in Misak, The American Pragmatists, x. 7  Ibid. (my emphasis). 8 Stéphane Madelrieux emphasizes this point in his review of Misak’s work. See “Interfamilial Issues,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2 (2013): 113. 9  Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 160–165. 10  For instance, of Peirce, Rorty remarks, “Peirce himself remained the most Kantian of thinkers—the most convinced that philosophy gave us an all-embracing ahistorical context in which every other species of discourse could be assigned its proper place and rank. It was just this Kantian assumption that there was such a context, and that epistemology or semantics could discover it, against which James and Dewey reacted” (“Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” 161). 11 In The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), West approaches the question of pragmatism through the language of instrumentalism that is described as follows: “[Pragmatism’s] common denominator consists of a future-oriented instrumentalism that tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action. Its basic impulse is a plebian radicalism that fuels an antipatrician rebelliousness for the moral aim of enriching individuals and expanding democracy” (5).

Notes to Pages 27–33  241

12  Robert Westbrook (Democratic Hope, 1) describes the skirmishes of the classical pragmatists in the following way: Peirce “quickly denied paternity of the child James had adopted . . . Dewey, though deeply indebted to James’s thinking, nonetheless took care to distinguish his own ‘instrumentalism’ from what he took to be James’s more tender-minded efforts to use pragmatism to secure religious belief. Peirce, in turn, responded to Dewey’s praise of his essay on ‘What Pragmatism Is’ (1905) with a puzzled letter noting that Dewey’s instrumental logic ‘forbids all such researches as those which I have been absorbed in for the last eighteen years.’” 13  WTB, 191. 14  P, 27. 15  P, 43–45. 16  This is the approach elegantly advanced in the context of Du Bois’s treatment of the race concept by Paul C. Taylor in his “Context and Complaint: On Racial Dissemination,” in “Philosophy and Race,” special issue of Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, ed. Alexis Dianda and Robin M. Muller 35:1–2, 331–352. 17  See the discussion of this division in Colin Koopman, “Language Is a Form of Experience: Reconciling Classical Pragmatism and Neopragmatism,” Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society 43, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 694–727. 18 Such questions of designation and terminology have appeared in a number of recent essays and books. See, for example, Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Koopman’s terminology is contested in David L. Hildebrand and Gregory F. Pappas, “Review of Pragmatism as Transition,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (August 29, 2010); see also Cheryl Misak, introduction to New Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 19  For a recent insightful approach that does pick up on these aspects of both James’s and Dewey’s thought, see Steven Levine, Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 20  Hildebrand, “Neopragmatist Turn.” 21 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 377. 22  P, 43–45. 23  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch and ed. G. H. Von Wright and Heikki Numan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 89 (trans. mod); cited in Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 1. 24  Wittgenstein called himself a “disciple of Freud.” A sustained analysis of the encounter between Wittgenstein and Freud can be found in Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. chap. 1.

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Notes to Pages 33–40

25  Wittgenstein’s method is succinctly expressed in Philosophical Investigations where he claims that philosophical problems are not “empirical problems; they are solved, rather by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings, despite an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have already known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 109). 26 Compare the final passage of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to the quietism more characteristic of a work like Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in which we could locate a shift in Rorty’s own thinking about the role of philosophy. From the point of view of Rorty’s later works, the “epistemological behaviorism” and “psychological nominalism” that are characteristic of the Mirror of Nature are more constructive than therapeutic, and for that reason a misstep. 27 Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 394. 28  It is on the “positive” premises of Rorty’s negative program for pragmatism that Barry Allen will critique Rorty as aligned with positivism. See Barry Allen, “What Was Epistemology?” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 222–236. 29  See Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, 34. 30 Ibid. 31  Richard Rorty, “Response to Hartshorne,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, 35. 32  Richard Rorty, “Twenty-Five Years Later,” appendix to The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 373. 33  Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 63. 34 Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 183. 35  I will not wade through the intricacies of these debate here. A starting point for the interested reader would be to look to Robert Brandom’s edited collection Rorty and His Critics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), which contains a number of critical essays on Rorty’s work. 36 Richard Rorty, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?” Philosophical Quarterly 45:281. 37  Ibid., 300. 38 Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 316. 39  The strongest expression of this commitment can be found in “Keeping Philosophy Pure,” in Consequences of Pragmatism. 40 Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 315.

Notes to Pages 41–51  243

41  Ibid., 318. 42  Ibid., 377. 43  Ibid., 394. 44  Santiago Zabala, “A Religion without Theists or Atheists,” in Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. Gianni Vattimo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 9. 45  Richard Rorty, introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, xliii–xliv; my emphasis. 46  The difficulty is particularly evident when he comes to analyze feminism as the activity of proposing “new descriptions of what has been going on” (Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in The Rorty Reader, ed. Richard J. Bernstein and Chris Voparil (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 47 Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 320. 48 Rorty, Linguistic Turn, 1. 49  A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 1939), 61–62. 50  Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 458. 51  Rorty, “Twenty-Five Years Later,” appendix to Linguistic Turn, 373; my emphasis. 52  Richard Rorty, “Comments on Sleeper and Edel,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 40. 53  As will become clear, though it is perhaps worth noting explicitly now, this is a portrait of the efforts of pragmatism that is so idiosyncratic as to be properly considered fantastical. 54 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 141–142. 55  Richard Rorty, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories,” Review of Metaphysics 19 (1): 28. 56  Marianne Janack, What We Mean by Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 45. 57  Rorty, “Twenty-Five Years Later,” 373. 58 Ibid. 59  Rorty, introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, xxi. 60  Rorty, “Twenty-Five Years Later,” in Linguistic Turn, 373. 61 See Colin Koopman, “Language Is a Form of Experience: Reconciling Classical Pragmatism and Neo Pragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43 (4): 696–697. 62 Brandom, Making It Explicit, 203. 63  I am unconcerned here with whether this is an adequate interpretation of Sellars. I think there is serious room for doubt as to whether this conclu-

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Notes to Pages 51–63

sion is necessary to draw from Sellars’s account. Rather, my focus is on the effect this interpretation of Sellars and the role of the myth of the given has had upon the development of pragmatism. For a detailed discussion of these debates, see McDowell’s “Why Sellars’s Essay Is Called Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and Brandom’s “Sellars’s Two-Ply Account.” 64  There are many readers of Sellars who take this interpretation. John McDowell is among the more notable readers of Sellars on this point. 65  Brandom, “Sellars’s Two-Ply Account,” 524. 66 Brandom, “From German Idealism to American Pragmatism and Back,” 26. 67  Richard Rorty, introduction to Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 7. 68  Donald Davidson, “Coherence Theory of Truth,” 436. 69  Ibid., 434. 70  Ibid., 429. 71  See Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 72  Richard Rorty, “Robert Brandom on Social Practices and Representation,” in Truth and Progress, 141. 73  Ibid., 123. 74 Ibid. 75 Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 212. 76  Richard Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 72. 77 Dewey cited in Thomas Alexander, “Richard Rorty and Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience,” Southwest Philosophical Studies V (1980): 26. 78  Richard Rorty, introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. 79  P, 97. 80  P, 36. 81  Richard Rorty, “Intellectual Responsibility, Faith, and Romance,” in Philosophy and Social Progress (New York: Penguin, 1999), 150. 82 Ibid. 83  Ibid., 151. 84  This line of interpretation is most evident in Hilary Putnam’s The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 85  PP, 1. 241. 86  MT, 249. 87  Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies: A Critical Survey of Naturalism, Idealism, Pragmatism, and Realism Together with a Synopsis of the Philosophy of William James (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1921), 228. 88  PP, 1. 444.

Notes to Pages 63–71  245

89  P, 148. 90  PP, 1. 251. 91  PU, 249. 92  PU, 212–213. 93 This is a line of questioning that has been pursued by Ian Hacking (Historical Ontology [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002]). He will say of the nominalist’s position that “it leaves our interaction with, and the description of, the world a mystery. We can well understand why the word ‘pencil’ nicely sorts out some objects. We manufacture pencils; that is why they exist. Nominalism about human artifacts is no problem. It is nominalism about grass, trees, and stars that is the problem. How can our words fit the earth and the heavens, if they are not, prior to us, grass, trees, and stars?” 94  See Scott, “Evidence of Experience.” 95 Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 316. 96  Ibid., 359. 97  See, for example, Rorty’s “Pragmatism and Feminism.” On this point, Rorty has been critiqued by, among others, Nancy Fraser. See Nancy Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” in Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty, ed. Marianne Janack (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010). 2. Psychology and the Subject of Experience

1  PP, 1. v–vi. 2  PP, 1. vi. 3  John Dewey, “The Vanishing Subject in the Psychology of William James,” Journal of Philosophy 37, no. 22 (October 24, 1940): 589–599. 4  Ibid. For a criticism of Dewey’s reading of James’s psychology, see Richard M. Gale, “Dewey’s Naturalization of William James,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49–68. 5  Edwin Boring sees in James a protofunctionalist and at times protobehaviorist psychology (A History of Experimental Psychology [New York: Appleton, 1929], 501–502, 625); at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, James Edie will see in James a protophenomenological psychology (see William James and Phenomenology [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987] and Johannes Linschoten sees early gestures toward the Gestalt school (On the Way toward a Phenomenological Psychology: The Psychology of William James, trans. and ed. Amedeo Giorgi (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1968); and Dewey sees traces of his own naturalism (“Vanishing Subject”). 6  BC, 467.

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Notes to Pages 71–78

7  Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Manuscript 165,” in Nachlass, Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Manuscript 165, 150–151. 8  PP, 1. 184. 9  PP, 1. 184. 10  See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), B397–432. 11  Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), §470. 12  PP, 1. 219. 13  It is worthy of note that around 1876 James establishes his laboratory at Harvard. Boring (History of Experimental Psychology, 607), however, characterizes the lab as a “pedagogical device” from which “almost no research issued.” 14 See Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, trans. Charles Hubbard Judd (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1897), §§1–2. 15  PP, 1. vi; my emphasis. 16 Ibid. 17  PP, 1. 219. 18  BC, 468. 19  William James, “A Plea for Psychology as a ‘Natural Science,’” Philosophical Review 1 (March 1892): 147. 20  Ibid., 153. 21  PP, 1. 185. 22  PP, 1. 192. 23  See, for example, Rudolf Eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1910), vol. 3, 1735–1742; Friedrich Albert Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance, trans. E. C. Thomas (New York: Humanities Press, 1950 [1865]), vol. 2 §3, chap. 3. 24  Edward Bradford Titchener, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice (London: Macmillan Company, 1901), 2 vols.; contemporary, though far less lengthy analogues can be found in, for example, Francisco Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (4): 330–349. 25 On this score, see Edwin G. Boring’s “A History of Introspection,” Psychological Bulletin 50, no. 3 (May 1953). There he says, “My paper might even be called ‘What became of Introspection?’ One common answer would be that introspection was not viable and so gradually became extinct. Another answer, however, is that introspection is still with us, doing its business under various aliases” (169). 26  August Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris: J.B. Bailliere et Fils, 1869), 1. 34–38; cited in PP 1. 188.

Notes to Pages 78–83  247

27  John B. Watson, Behaviorism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 5–6. 28  Gerald E. Myers, “Pragmatism and Introspective Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15. 29  PP, 1. 185. 30  Boring, “History of Introspection,” 171. 31  This is a point that, although grasped by Myers and a few other scholars of James, is lost on a number of others. See, for example, Jesse Butler, Rethinking Introspection: A Pluralist Approach to the First-Person Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 32  PP, 1. 189. 33  For a compelling account of the variety of usages to which James employs introspection, see Myers, “Pragmatism and Introspective Psychology,” 11–24. 34  See Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 54. 35  Myers, “Pragmatism and Introspective Psychology,” 15. 36  PP, 1. 190. 37 C. S. Peirce, “Questions on William James’s Principles of Psychology,” cited in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), vol. 2, 108. 38  PP, 1. 191–192; my emphasis. 39  What is often understood as “introspective psychology” or “introspectionism” has a complex history. A useful account of that history can be found in Kurt Danziger, “The History of Introspection Reconsidered,” Journal of Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 241–262. 40 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §383. 41  Russell Goodman argues convincingly that §383 is a direct response to James in his Wittgenstein and James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 70. 42  It would be a mistake to claim that introspection, no matter how carefully it is performed, can give us insight into the biological aspect of our mental life. Some have argued that the value of introspection lay in the manner in which it can match up first- and third-person reports, the felt with the unfelt aspects of mind. While I wouldn’t dispute, nor would James, the experimental results of those endeavors that are often labeled “neurophenomenological,” I believe it would be a mistake to identify the value of either our everyday introspective acts or our more active phenomenological ones as somehow giving us insight into the physical nature of our thought. For a version of this claim,

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Notes to Pages 83–97

see Francisco Varella, “Neurophenomneology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (1996): 330–349. 43  VRE, 316. 44  VRE, 320. 45  PP, 2. 312. 46  James Edie tries to flesh out Husserlian phenomenology by looking to James’s work both in religion and select passages of the psychology. Such an interpretation, however, leads to utter perplexity as to how James, “the phenomenologist,” could have endorsed the pragmatism for which he is most well known. See James Edie, William James and Phenomenology. 47  For example, we get the following claim from Mill: “We know of our observings and our reasonings, either at the time, or by means of memory, the moment after, in either case, by direct knowledge, and not (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely by their results. This simple fact destroys the whole of M. Comte’s argument. Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe.” ( John Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (London: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 64. 48  See Myers, “Pragmatism and Introspection.” 49  William James, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” in Essays in Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 145. 50 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), viii. 51  PP, 1. 219. 52  James Mill, An Analysis of the Phenomena of Human Mind, ed. John Stuart Mill (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), vol. 1, §264. 53  PP, 1. 245. 54  James, “On Some Omissions,” 152. 55  PP, 1. 225. 56  BC, 152. 57  PP, 1. 226. 58  He makes this point clear in the Briefer: “What I wish to lay stress on is this, that no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before.” (BC, 154) 59  BC, 155. 60  See PP 1. 245–248. 61  PP, 1. 241. 62  PP, 1. 241. 63  PP, 1. 241. 64  BC, 160. 65  BC, 160.

Notes to Pages 99–110  249

66  Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Brown Book in The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), §§78–79. 67 Wittgenstein, Investigations, 2. vi. 68 Ibid. 69  Goodman’s seems to concede this point to Wittgenstein. Though the point of Goodman’s account here is to establish the influence of James upon Wittgenstein, he claims that James’s view is such that feelings constitute the meaning of words (Russell Goodman, Wittgenstein and James, 75). Henry Jackman (“Wittgenstein and James’s Stream of Thought,” presented at the Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, March 2004, http://www.yorku.ca/hjackman/papers/WittJames.pdf ) has ably criticized Goodman on this point. 70  PP, 1. 231. 71  PP, 1. 233. 72  PP, 1. 480. 73  See, for example, PP 1. 241; PU, 212–213. 74  For example, James will claim that “if we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world” (PP, 1. 444). 75  PP, 1. 476; this quotation first appears in “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology.” 76 William James to Hugo Münsterberg, cited in Perry, Thought and Character, vol. 2, 150. 77  VRE, 433. 78  VRE, 456. 79  PP, 2. 312. 80  PP, 2. 313. 81  This argument is developed by Hilary Putnam in “The Permanence of William James,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 46, no. 3 (December 1992): 173. 82  PP, 1. 271. 83  PP, 1. 272. 84  PP, 1. 461. 85  PP, 1. 275. 86  PP, 1. 276. 87  PP, 1. 465. 88  Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology (London: Longman, Brown, and Green, 1855), vol. 1, ch. VIII, §139. 89  PP, 1. 402. 90  PP, 1. 402. 91  PP, 1. 401.

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Notes to Pages 110–125

92  PP, 1. 434. 93  BC, 227. 94  PP, 1. 284. 95  PP, 1. 286. 96  PP, 1. 287. 97  See Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Chaos and Context: A Study in William James (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 16. 98  PP, 1. 284. 99  PP, 2. 340. 100  PP, 2. 335–336. 101  PP, 2. 336. 102  PP, 2. 336 n.11. 103  PP, 2. 333. 104  PP, 2. 333. 105  PP, 1. 189; my emphasis. 106  PP, 1. 191–192. 107  Nowhere does this view emerge more emphatically than in his late lectures, highly influenced by the intuitionism of Bergson, Pluralistic Universe. 108  See William Gavin, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich, “Language and Its Discontents,” Contemporary Pragmatism 7, no. 2 (2010): 105–130. 109  PP, 1. 124. 3. The Willfulness of Belief

1  Such interpretations are as prevalent within the pragmatic tradition as without. For the former, see, for example, Cheryl Misak, The American Pragmatists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. 160–162; Peirce would write to James, calling his essay “a very exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much” (C. S. Peirce to William James, March 9, 1909, vol. 12 of The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skurskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004], 171). For the latter, see, for example, Walter Kaufman, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 84–85. 2  WTB, 11. 3  WTB, 29. 4  WTB, 26–27. 5 Ibid. 6  W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999), 96. 7  Chauncey Wright is often credited with bringing James around to some of his more moderate phrasings of the will-to-believe thesis. He recounts

Notes to Pages 125–128  251

their personal interactions prior to the publication of “The Will to Believe” in a letter to Grace Norton ( July 18, 1875, in Letters of Chauncey Wright: With Some Account of His Life [Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1878], 342). 8  That James has made a “straw man” of Clifford’s argument here as Scott Aiken has recently noted in Evidentialism and the Will to Believe (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) may well be the case. However, noting the strawman made of Clifford make little difference to the broader point James is establishing. 9  WTB, 26. 10 Ibid. 11  Bertrand Russell, “William James,” in A History of Modern Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 818. 12  John Dewey (“What Pragmatism Means by Practical” in Essays in Experimental Logic [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916], 303–329) will continue, claiming that James’s position suggests “the fact of the personal complicity involved in belief is a warrant for this or that special personal attitude, instead of being a warning to locate and define it so as to accept responsibility for it.” 13  Other similar interpretative strategies can be found, among others, in Louis Pojman, The Theory of Knowledge: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1993), 534; Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 84–85. A more qualified charge of subjectivism is raised again from a Peircian perspective in Diana Heney’s recent Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 42–47. 14 Misak, American Pragmatists, 63. 15 Ibid. 16  Nikolaj Nottelmann, Blameworthy Belief: A Study in Epistemic Deontologism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 101; a moderate but still influential portrait of James as a radical or “Promethean” voluntarist is present in Richard M. Gale’s The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), see esp. chap. 4. 17 See, for example, Ralph Barton Perry, In the Spirit of William James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938), esp. ch. 5; Jeff Jordan, “Pragmatic Arguments and Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1996): 33–41. 18  Richard Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 148–167. 19  To speak, for example, about “passional” and “rational” natures could easily lead one to assume that the distinction is intended as rigid and fixed.

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Notes to Pages 129–136

One could also take the language of the will-to-believe thesis, as Rorty (“Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 155) himself does, to imply that “the mind is divided neatly down the middle into intellect and passion, and the idea that possible topics of discussion are divided neatly into the cognitive and the non-cognitive ones.” Though Rorty creatively interprets James’s essay so that the sharp line between what he calls “the cognitive” and the “non-cognitive” or between “believe” and “desire” is the target of the willto-believe thesis (ibid., 152). 20  WTB, 9; my emphasis. 21 Ibid. 22  For a treatment of this line of argument in “The Will to Believe,” see Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 191. 23  The argument of “The Will to Believe” also appears in “The Sentiment of Reality.” “He who commands himself not to be credulous of God, of duty, of freedom, or immortality, may again and again be indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Skepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about wise skepticism, we are really doing voluntary military service for one side or another” (“The Sentiment of Reality,” in WTB, 109). 24  WTB, 5. 25  This complicates a frequent understanding of the pair of terms as corresponding to what we might call voluntary or involuntary beliefs. See, for example, Alexander Klein’s “Religion and ‘The Will to Believe,’” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy and Science 5, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 72–117. 26  WTB, 17. 27  WTB, 14; my emphasis. 28  WTB, 9. 29  This is also a point emphasized by Henry Jackman in “Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the Will to Believe,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35 (1): 1–37. 30  This interpretation runs counter to what Richard M. Gale (Philosophy of William James: An Introduction, 38) has called “James’s Master Syllogism.” 31 Gale, Divided Self of William James, 122, 130. 32  WTB, 31; citing James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), 333. 33 Ibid. 34  William Gavin, William James in Focus: Willing to Believe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 15.

Notes to Pages 138–147  253

35  WTB, 33. 36 For a discussion of the quasi-liberal-utilitarian character of James’s value pluralism, see, for example, Michael Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 37  Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” trans. Philip Mairet, in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian Publishing, 1989). 38  Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 190. 39 For an apt defense of Dewey on this point, see Eddie Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 22. 40  Schiller will make this same point in the context of “The Will to Believe.” He argues, “James’s principle was being misconstrued . . . as an incitement to make-believe, instead of as an analysis of the psychological process of acquiring belief ” (F. C. S. Schiller, “William James and the Making of Pragmatism,” in Must Philosophers Disagree? (London: MacMillan, 1934), 97–98. 41  PP, 2. 283. 42 Brentano, Psychologie, vol. 1, 266; cited in PP, 2. 286. 43  PP, 2. 290. 44  PP, 2. 287. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47  PP, 2. 305. 48  PP, 2. 297. 49  See PP, 2. 301. Compare this with Locke’s claim that “among all sensations, the most belief-compelling are those productive of pleasure or pain” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) or Hume’s claim that “belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain” (Hume, Inquiry, sec. V, pt. 2). 50  PP, 2. 546. 51  PP, 2. 285. 52  PP, 1. 296; citing Alexander Bain in James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, with notes by Alexander Bain, Andrew Findlater, and George Grote, ed. John Stuart Mill (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), vol. 1, 394, n. 107. 53  This is a point James makes clear in his “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind”: “Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action which to a great extent transforms the world— help to make the truth which they declare. . . . [T]here belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments of the should be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off

254  

Notes to Pages 148–158

from the body of the cognitandum as if they were excrescences, or meant, at most, survival” (21). 54  PP, 1. 402. 55  PP, 1. 402. 56  See PP, 1. 447–448. 57  PP, 2. 295. 58  John J. McDermott, introduction to ERE, xi–xlvii. 59  P, 37. 60  Gale identifies a second strand in James’s thinking that he calls “antipromethean mysticism.” I’m not wholly convinced that this is a “divide” or that the best way to understand the other aspect of James’s thought as being “mystical.” Unlike Gale, the picture I am painting here is far more intertwined than we might suspect. For Gale’s “divided self ” account, see “Pragmatism versus Mysticism: The Divided Self of William James,” Philosophical Perspectives 5, no. 1 (1991): 241–286; The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 61 Misak, American Pragmatists, 160. 62  Sarin Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 147. 63  “Psychology will be Psychology and Science, as much as ever (as much and no more) in this world, whether free-will be true in it or not. Science, however, must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all” (PP, 2. 576). 64  PP, 2. 533–535. 65  PP, 2. 546–547. 66  This seems to be the approach taken by Stanley Cavell. See, especially, his analysis of the skepticism of Othello in “Between Acknowledgement and Avoidance,” pt. 4 §XIII of The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 329ff. 67  PP, 2. 547. 68  PP, 2. 549. 69  VRE, 175–176. 70  VRE, 162. 71 Ibid. 72 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.43. 73  VRE, 147–148. 74  VRE, 171. 75 VRE, 174; my emphasis.

Notes to Pages 158–166  255

76  PP, 1. 321. 77  James says of Tolstoy’s conversion, for example, “the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality” (VRE, 148). 78  VRE, 150. 79 VRE, 139. 80 Ibid. 81  PP, 1. 127. 82  TT, 66, 67. 83  William James, “Notes for Philosophy 20C: Metaphysical Seminary— A Pluralistic Description of the World (1903–1904),” in Manuscript Lectures, vol. 19 of The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 310. 84  PP, 1. 121. 85  PP, 1. 121. 86  A poignant application of this aspect of James’s concept of habit can be found in Erin McKenna’s feminist thinking about gender. See Erin McKenna, “Pragmatism and Feminism: Engaged Philosophy,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 24 (1): 3–21. 87  For a discussion of some of the implications of James’s views of habits for feminist thinking, see Erin C. Tarver’s “Particulars, Practices, and Pragmatic Feminism: Breaking Rules and Rulings with William James,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 21 (4): 275–290; see also the recent collection edited by Erin C. Tarver and Shannon Sullivan, Feminist Interpretations of William James (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015); Megan Craig’s contribution, “Habit, Relaxation, and the Open Mind: James and the Increments of Ethical Freedom,” addresses some of these themes in the context of “The Gospel of Relaxation” (166–188); picking up on the wider themes of “The Will to Believe,” José Medina’s contribution, “The Will Not to Believe: Pragmatism, Oppression, and Standpoint Theory” (235–260), is especially illuminating. 88  See ibid. 89 See, for example, Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition, esp. 221–230; Kenneth Stikkers, “Review of Sergio Franzese’s The Ethics of Energy: William James’s Moral Philosophy in Focus,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (May 3, 2009), https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-ethics-of-energy-william-james-s-moral​ -philosophy​-in-focus/ (accessed January 3, 2022). 90  TT, 77. 91  TT, 66.

256  

Notes to Pages 166–183

92  TT, 76. 93  Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale and ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §103. 4. Radical Empiricism and the Metaphysics of Pure Experience

1  C. I. Lewis, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” in Pragmatic Philosophy, ed. Amelie Rorty (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 361. 2  Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (New York: MacMillan, 1921), 10. While such an explanation is not wrong, it fails to see the full significance of James’s later work. To do so one must cast it in the light of the earlier work. Erik C. Bank’s The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) adopts such a reading of James and thus places his work firmly in a tradition that is ultimately an ontological theory of the empirical content of science. See also Leslie Joseph Walker, S.J., Theories of Knowledge: Absolutism, Pragmatism, Realism (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910), esp. chap. 4. 3  ERE, 2. 4  Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), vol. 2, 666. 5 Ibid. 6 “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” sees James developing his theory of relations and the general experientially grounded method of this latter period. 7  ERE, 22. 8  WTB, 6. 9  MT, 6. 10  Jean Wahl, The Pluralistic Philosophies of England and America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Open Court, 1925), 141. 11  P, 269. 12 “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits” (PP, 1. 239). See also Hume’s discussion of the principles of union of simple ideas (sec. IV, “Of the Connexion of Association of Ideas”). 13  Charlene Haddock Seigfried’s 1978 Chaos and Context remains one of the most insightful and exhaustive treatments of the theme of relations in James’s earlier and later works. It is particularly insightful on the theme of relations in the context of Radical Empiricism. 14  ERE, 51. 15  ERE, 50.

Notes to Pages 184–194  257

16  PP, 1. 301–302. 17  ML, 326. 18  ERE, 4. 19  ERE, 5. 20  ERE, 7. 21  ERE, 112–113. 22  ERE, 30. 23 P, 61; ERE, 37–41. See also David Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50–58. 24  William James, Manuscript Essays and Notes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 31. 25 Ibid. 26  ERE, 5. 27  This is the most common interpretation of James’s pure experience. Brockmeier, for one, sees pure experience as the empiricist equivalent to the pure thought that underlies classical rationalist philosophy ( Jens Brockmeir, “Ineffable Experience,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience: Centenary Essays, ed. Michael Ferrari, 85). Osbeck sees “pure experience” as closely resembling intuitive knowledge (Lisa M. Osbeck, “Direct Apprehension and Social Construction: Revisiting the Concept of ‘Intuition,’” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 21 (2): 118–131. 28  ERE, 170; my emphasis. 29  ERE, 92. 30  ERE, 51. 31 In particular, a lot of ink has been spilled debating whether radical empiricism entails or is compatible with the pragmatic method. See, for example, H. O. Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty (New York: Routledge, 1997); see also A. J. Ayer, The Origins of Pragmatism (San Francisco: Cooper & Co., 1968), 323–324. 32  See Ayer, Origins of Pragmatism, 310–317; see Bruce Wilshire, James and Phenomenology: A Study of the Principles of Psychology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), esp. 159; Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Chaos and Context: A Study in William James (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 51; Russell, Analysis of Mind, 22. 33  ERE, 14–15. 34  ERE, 17. 35  ERE, 5. 36  ERE, 84–155.

258  

Notes to Pages 194–200

37 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.54. 38  ERE, 50. 39 Ibid. 40  ERE, 51. 41  ERE, xxxi. 42  ERE, 35. 43  See RE, 50. 44 This is a metaphor that, while underdeveloped, occurs primarily in James’s notebooks. It is one that has been picked up on by a few scholars— namely, McDermott and Koopman—in their treatments of James’s pure experience. See John McDermott, “Person, Process, and the Risk of Belief,” introduction to William James, The Writings of William James, ed. John McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xlv; Colin Koopman, “Language Is a Form of Experience.” 45 James, Manuscripts and Lecture Notes, 385; my emphasis. 46  See Richard Cobb Stevens, James and Husserl: The Foundation of Meaning (The Hauge: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 16. 47  William James, s.v., “Experience,” Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed. James Mark Baldwin, 360–361. 48  John E. Smith, Themes in American Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 31. 49  ERE, 13. 50  William Gavin, William James in Focus: Willing to Believe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 46. 51  ERE, 50. 52 Gavin, William James in Focus, 48. 53  See George Trumbell Ladd, “Professor Ladd’s Criticism of James’s Philosophy,” Philosophical Review 1, no. 1 (May 1891): 299–305. More recently, Andrew Reck has argued that James’s goal in the Principles was to divide psychology from metaphysics. 54  See Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Pragmatist Metaphysics? Why Terminology Matters,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 37 (2001): 13–21; William Myers, “Pragmatist Metaphysics: A Defense,” Transactions of the Charles S. Perice Society 40 (2004): 53–81. 55  James himself sometimes negatively describes metaphysics in these terms. “Metaphysics . . . demands the ultimate and absolute reason of things” (PP, 1. 598). More often than not, however, James simply means by metaphysics, “nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly” (PP, 1. 145). 56  See Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 317. 57  ERE, 50.

Notes to Pages 201–210  259

58  ERE, 51. 59  Jean Wahl, The Pluralistic Philosophies of England and America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Open Court, 1925), 133. 60  VRE, 489. 61  PP, 2. 1. 62  James frequently characterizes the empiricist schools as having an “abstract” understanding of sensation and perception. See PP, 1. 158, 277–278; PP, 2. 3, 183. 63  Mill captures the position well: “There can be no difficulty in admitting that association does form the ideas of an indefinite number of individuals into one complex idea: because it is an acknowledged fact. Have we not the idea of an army? And is not that precisely the ideas of an indefinite number of men formed into one idea?”; James Mill, Analysis of Human Mind ( J. S. Mill’s Edition), vol. I, 264. 64  PP, 1. 224. 65  PP, 1. 196. 66  PP, 1. 196. 67  ERE, 53. 68  PP, 2. 269. 69  PP, 2. 31–32. 70  PP, 2. 271. 71  PP, 1. 271. 72  John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), vol. 1, 276. 73  Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (New York: Appleton, 1902), 372. 74  PP, 2. 272. 75  William James letter to Croom Robertson; cited in Perry, Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2, 86. 76  PP, 2. 275. 77  Martin J. Farrell detailed this argument in his “Space Perception and William James’s Metaphysical Presuppositions,” History of Psychology 14, no. 2 (2011): 158–173. Farrell there argues that James’s argument posits experience as a basic unargued presupposition. 78  PP, 2. 135. 79  PP, 2. 182–188. 80  Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), §12. 81  PP, 2. 151.

260  

Notes to Pages 210–221

82  PP, 2. 282. 83  PP, 2. 8. 84  PP, 1. 224. 85  PP, 2. 35. 86  PP, 2. 243. 87  See PP, 2. 110. 88  PP, 1. 221. 89  PP, 1. 221–222. 90  PP, 1. 221. 91  PP, 1. 222. 92  Russell defines knowledge by acquaintance as follows: “I say that I am acquainted with an object when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i.e., when I am directly aware of the object itself. When I speak of a cognitive relation here, I do not mean the sort of relation which constitutes judgment, but the sort which constitutes presentation. In fact, I think the relation of subject and object which I call acquaintance is simply the converse of the relation of object and subject which constitutes presentation. That is, to say that S has acquaintance with O is essentially the same thing as to say that O is presented to S.” Knowledge by description, on the other hand, “always involves . . . some knowledge of truths as its source and ground.” (Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11:108–128). 93 Myers, William James, 275. 94  I’m borrowing Seigfried’s terminology of “half-formed pattern,” which appears throughout her James’s Radical Reconstruction. 95  PP, 1. 259. 96  PP, 2. 335. 97  WTB, 63. 98  WTB, 64. 99  PP, 2. 314. 100  See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), bk. 1, §VII. 101  James, “Sentiment of Rationality,” 69. 102  James, “The Miller-Bode Objections,” Manuscript Essays, and Notes, 65. 103  Boyd Henry Bode, “‘Pure Experience’ and the External World,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 2 (1905): 131–132. 104  See Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 105  ERE, 7. 106  ERE, 39.

Notes to Pages 222–231  261

107  Miller to Perry, August 23, 1902; cited in Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 567–568 n.9. Conclusion: Pragmatism in a Pluralistic Universe

1  Alain Locke, “Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy,” in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 53. 2  William James, Some Problems of Philosophy: Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 97. 3  PU, 96–97. 4  P, 68. 5  MT, 91. 6  P, 101. 7  P, 115–116. 8  See Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1991), 1–40. 9 Bruno Latour, What Is the Style of Matters of Concern? Two Lectures in Empirical Philosophy (Van Gorcum: Amsterdam, 2008), 38. 10  Jean Wahl, The Pluralistic Philosophies of England and America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Open Court, 1925), 133. 11  P, 52. 12  William Gavin makes a similar point about James in his “Text Context, and the Essential Limit” (in Context over Foundation: Dewey and Marx, ed. William J. Gavin [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988], 68). However, Gavin seems more committed to describing the alternative view present in James’s metaphysics as “realism.” 13  Johannes Linschoten, On the Way toward a Phenomenological Psychology: The Psychology of William James, trans. and ed. Amedeo Giorgi (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1968), 102. 14  PP, 1. 445. 15  PP, 1. 124. 16 James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 108–109. 17  PU, 252. 18  PU, 189. 19  MT, 215. 20  MT, 72.

Acknowledgments

A great number of teachers, friends, family members, and colleagues have helped me see this work to completion. The late Richard J. Bernstein guided me through the various stages of this book. Drafts have also been generously read by Michael Bacon, Simon Critchley, Ryan Gustafson, Sarin Marchetti, Dmitri Nikullin, David Rondel, Christopher Voparil, and Cornel West. Their support has meant a great deal, and I remain in their debt. Lindsay Waters brought this book to Harvard and Joseph Pomp saw it through. Both of them have made this work better, and I thank them for their patience and generosity. I would also like to acknowledge the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the College of Arts and Sciences at Xavier University for their financial support at various stages of this book. Much of the text of “William James and the ‘Willfulness’ of Belief,” an article I published in the European Journal of Philosophy in 2018, is reprinted in Chapter 3. My most profound debts are owed to my family and friends. My parents, Jaimie Walker and Jim Dianda, and siblings, Lena and Gaven, have guided me through the long path of an education in philosophy. My friends Cinzia Arruzza, Michelle Brady, Erick Jiménez, John Milligan, Robin Muller, Benjamin Norris, Johanna Oksala, and Joseph and Linda Smith have been invaluable sources of encouragement, care, laughter, and ideas. Finally, I owe my most profound thanks to my wife, Meg Beyer, for giving me time, patience, love, conversation, a house full of dogs, and a room of my own.

263

Index Aristotle, 166 associationism, 89, 95, 148, 203, 207–209 attention, 13, 59, 89, 108–110, 117, 147–149, 151, 153–154, 158–159, 169, 174, 190–191, 210, 216, 229 Augustine, 160 Ayer, A. J., 45, 192, 194 Bacon, Francis, 4, 91 Bain, Alexander, 77, 147, 153, 208 behaviorism, 78, 71, 82, 199 belief, 7, 11, 13, 19, 21, 47–48, 51–60, 66–67, 71, 120–170, 173, 187–188, 212, 217; as active, 122, 142–143, 147–149; attitude of, 122, 141–142; dead options, 122, 129, 132–134, 141, 144, 147, 152, 154–159, 163–165, 169; and ethics, 121, 125; forced options, 121, 124, 128, 131–133, 135–136, 138; genuine options, 121, 123–124, 126, 137–138, 149; and justification, 35–38, 51–55, 106, 115, 128; live options, 121–124, 128–129, 131–141, 144–147, 150, 152, 155–158, 163–165, 169; momentous options, 121,

123–124, 128, 131–138, 150, 156; and reality, 15, 17, 120–121, 141–159, 168; and truth, 57, 168. See also will to believe Bergmann, Gustav, 48 Bergson, Henri, 224, 230 Berkeley, George, 87, 107, 207–210 Bernstein, Richard, 3 Bode, Boyd Henry, 219–220 body, 74, 100, 102, 147, 160–164, 168, 184, 188–192, 210–211 Brandom, Robert, 8, 25, 29, 49–50, 52, 54 Brentano, Franz, 80, 142 Cartesianism, 8, 14, 17, 46, 78–80, 102–104, 125, 184–186, 193. See Descartes Clifford, W. K., 58–59, 64, 125, 128, 132, 137 coherentism, 53–55 Comte, Auguste, 77–78, 80 concepts: and habit, 161–163, 165–170, 200; and language, 3, 16, 52, 61–62, 64, 67–68, 82, 116, 188, 200–201, 228–229; limited nature of, 1, 4, 15, 63, 65, 97, 101, 181, 197, 214, 225, 265

266  

Index

concepts (continued ) 229; and perception, 30, 50, 116, 186–188, 193–197, 201–204, 214; pragmatic nature of, 26, 28, 66, 83–84, 180, 187–188, 192, 198, 202, 219, 226, 230. See also conceptual thought conceptual thought, 4, 16, 59, 61, 68, 93–94, 106–108, 112, 114, 194, 187, 200–201, 217–219, 224–230. See also concepts consciousness, 12, 14, 48, 69, 75, 78–81, 88–90, 92–96, 103, 106, 109, 111, 142, 165, 169, 173, 204, 212; existence of, 176, 178, 180–196, 221. See also stream of thought continuity, 87–88, 95–96, 114, 116, 182, 187, 224 conversion, 7, 122, 156–163, 166, 173 correspondence, 18, 28, 35, 37, 39, 54, 57, 67–68, 109, 153, 169 Davidson, Donald, 25–26, 46–47, 49, 53–55, 57–58 Descartes, René, 87, 194. See also Cartesianism Dewey, John, 9, 23–26, 29, 31, 35–37, 138–140, 172; on James, 70–71, 126; Rorty’s criticism of, 38, 42, 46, 48–49, 55–56, 58 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 6 discourse, 42–43, 48, 52, 60, 67–68; as edifying, 31, 39; as

normal and revolutionary, 40, 167. See also language divided self, 155–161, 163 doubt, 122, 126, 143–144, 146 dualism, 12, 75–76, 78, 101, 106, 117, 130, 172–173, 178, 183–186, 189, 196–197, 222; Cartesian, 78, 102, 186, 191, 193–194; of the Principles of Psychology, 70–73, 75, 175 Du Bois, W. E. B., 23, 29 Dummett, Michael, 45 education, 13, 165–166, 212 emotion, 84, 100, 104, 125, 130, 142, 145, 149, 158–160, 219. See also feeling empiricism, 6, 7, 9, 21–22, 48, 50, 52; classical, 12, 48, 55–56, 59, 73, 76, 79, 86–88, 92, 97, 100, 107–109, 115, 117–118, 138, 146–147, 154, 176, 179–182, 184, 188, 202–213, 218, 220, 231–232. See also radical empiricism epistemology, 9, 19, 51, 55; and experience, 17, 48; and philosophy, 18, 20–22, 25–26, 37, 38, 40–41, 44, 46, 57, 68 evidentialism, 124–129, 133, 150 experience: active character of, 7–8, 12–13, 16, 59, 108–112, 117–118, 120–122, 141–142, 144, 147–150, 153–154, 172–175, 190, 210, 212, 216, 222, 229,

Index  267

232–233; ambiguity of, 2–9, 12, 15–16, 19, 42, 48, 195, 230; consummatory, 140; epistemological value of, 9–10, 14, 16–18, 20–22, 47–55, 66, 87, 104–105, 176, 195, 201; Erfahrung, 5–9, 172; Erlebnis, 5–9, 23, 28, 172; existential, 10–11, 13, 16–17, 118–119, 121–122, 159, 167, 170, 177, 191–192; as a field, 2, 105, 184, 189, 195–196, 198, 202; givenness of, 14, 22, 49–53, 55, 59, 61, 63, 65, 69, 102, 172, 115, 117, 172, 175, 190, 192–196, 208, 211, 213, 220–221; irreducibility of, 3, 4, 13, 15, 61, 67–68, 72, 114–115, 172, 174, 194, 198, 213, 231; lived, 6–8, 12–13, 15, 19, 96, 105, 118, 172, 180, 182, 191, 200, 205, 232; moral, 16–17, 105, 119–122, 138–141, 152, 154–164, 166–169, 172, 177; neopragmatic criticism of, 8–10, 12, 18–32, 36–39, 42–53, 55–61, 66–69, 115–117, 189, 195–196, 219; neutrality of, 11–12, 121, 146–147, 169, 175–177, 189, 192–193, 202, 221; passivity of, 13, 67–69, 88, 105, 108–109, 117–118, 120–122, 142, 144, 146–148, 150, 159, 174–175, 189, 221, 228, 231–233; as primal stuff, 185, 192–193; as primal term, 11–13; relation to

language, 3, 8–9, 17, 21, 36–37, 45, 60–69, 177, 200–201, 229; religious, 6–8, 71–72, 83, 103–104, 126–127, 130, 156–161, 172, 201; separation of, 185, 188–189, 196, 204; as stimuli, 9, 13, 47–48, 51–52, 67, 105, 112, 115–117, 147, 150, 213. See also pure experience; perception faith, 7, 58, 123, 130, 132–134, 136, 140, 145, 158 feeling, 7, 19–20, 129–130, 158–159, 197, 201, 206–207; of activity, 145, 153, 184; atoms of, 90–91, 98–100, 205; of continuity, 96, 182; and introspection, 79–83; and knowledge, 115, 151; of reality, 141; of relation, 90–91, 96–100, 108, 182; and sensation, 194, 197, 201, 204, 206–207; and thought, 93–94, 101–102, 104, 114, 116–118, 190, 213–216, 219; of volume, 210 flux, 2, 95, 100, 117, 173, 189, 194, 198, 204, 219, 224 Foucault, Michel, 164–165, 167 foundationalism: and empiricism, 21; and experience, 9; in James, 14, 16, 19, 29, 56, 115, 172, 175, 183, 194–195, 215, 219, 232; and the myth of the given, 51, 115; pragmatic critique of, 9, 22, 27; Rorty and, 36–37, 53, 189

268  

Index

freedom, 31, 85, 137, 149, 153, 156, 224 fringe of thought, 98, 108, 111, 138, 180, 212, 215–216 Gale, Richard, 135, 151 Gavin, William, 136, 198 Habermas, Jürgen, 35 habit, 5, 94, 111, 147, 153, 156–169, 173, 183, 190, 200–201, 210, 230–231; conservative function of, 162–169; of thought, 28, 60, 90–91, 129–130, 149, 163, 169, 231 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 26, 38, 44, 57 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 110–111, 217 hermeneutics, 40–42 Hildebrand, David, 30–32 humanism, 32, 67–68, 226, 228 Hume, David, 32, 48, 51, 56, 86–89, 91, 97, 122, 146, 181, 194, 199, 204 Husserl, Edmund, 6, 142, 150 idealism, 11, 33, 38, 46, 50, 91, 97, 106, 111, 148, 180–181, 188 ideas, 7, 12, 19, 22, 85, 144, 146, 186–187; and activity, 153–155, 187–189; in early modern philosophy, 48, 79, 83, 86–91, 95, 100, 107, 207–208; in the stream of thought, 73, 91–98, 220

immediacy: James’s appeal to, 59, 61, 63, 65, 69, 102, 172, 175, 190, 192–196, 208, 211, 213, 220–221; James’s criticisms of, 16, 77, 89, 109, 113, 115–117, 148, 211–213; neopragmatic criticisms of, 21–23, 49–53, 55, 115–117, 219. See also myth of the given intellectualism, 15, 104, 115–117, 133, 150, 172, 180, 214, 222; character of, 15–16, 61–62, 64, 174, 217–219, 231–232; and language, 62, 64, 115–116; and neopragmatism, 16, 228; in the philosophical tradition, 4, 88, 125, 186; and pragmatism, 16, 19, 44, 231–232; in psychology, 84, 105, 204; and radical empiricism, 179, 214, 218; and the status of relations, 90, 97 introspection: criticism of, 20, 68, 77–86, 105, 116; in James’s psychology, 13, 70, 77–88, 91, 92, 95–97, 102–105, 116, 168, 178, 180, 208; retrospective character of, 79–80, 97–98, 104, 195, 197–198 Janack, Marianne, 48 Kallen, Horace, 23–24, 27 Kant, Immanuel, 44, 48–50, 73–75, 108, 181, 188, 194 Kantianism, 48, 186, 208–210 Kloppenberg, James, 6

Index  269

knowledge. See epistemology; truth; perception knowledge about, 116, 202, 211–216, 219 knowledge by acquaintance, 56, 116, 191, 202, 212–215, 219 Koopman, Colin, 50 Kuhn, Thomas, 39, 43 Ladd, George Trumbull, 199 Lamberth, David C., 187 Lange, Carl, 77 Language: and experience, 3, 8–9, 17, 21, 36–37, 45, 60–69, 177, 200–201, 229; James’s view of, 60–67, 90–91, 116–117, 169, 172, 189, 198, 224–225, 228–229; ubiquity of, 8–9, 13, 21, 30, 37, 50–51, 219, 228. See also discourse; linguistic turn Latour, Bruno, 227 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 19, 31, 40 Lewis, C. I., 25, 173–174 linguistic turn, 44–53, 64, 230, 231; and neopragmatism, 10, 20, 29, 35–36, 38, 44–52 Linschoten, Johannes, 228 Locke, Alain, 23–24, 29, 223 Locke, John, 48–49, 79, 87, 89, 103, 146, 204 Lotze, Hermann, 153 Marchetti, Sarin, 153 McDermott, John J., 14, 150, 195

McDowell, John, 50 Mill, James, 89 Mill, John Stuart, 107, 208 Miller, Dickinson S., 219–220, 222 Misak, Cheryl, 24–26, 127, 151 Morris, Charles, 3 Münsterberg, Hugo, 103 Myers, Gerald E., 79–80, 86, 200, 215 mysticism, 83, 103, 117, 166, 192, 214, 227 myth of the given, 14, 22, 49–53, 55, 61, 115, 117, 192 naturalism, 53, 71, 110 Nichols, Herbert, 2–3, 194 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43, 119, 167 nominalism, 19, 35–39, 51, 180, 201, 230 Pascal, Blaise, 134, 140 passional nature, 123–124, 126– 131, 140–141, 144–145, 149, 151, 154, 163–164, 169 Peirce, C. S., 3, 23, 25–26, 29, 57, 81, 127 perception: active nature of, 88, 104, 188, 197; in classical empiricism, 87–89, 181; and concepts, 202–205, 214–215; continuity of, 96, 114, 223–224; contribution to knowledge, 9, 30, 50, 56–57, 78, 116, 202, 222, 229; in James’s later works, 220–222; psychological study

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Index

perception (continued ) of, 73, 75, 80; of reality, 120, 141–151, 158, 168, 188; and sensation, 189–190, 203–204, 206–213; of space, 193, 206–213 Perry, Ralph Barton, 62, 176, 222 perspectivism, 20, 111–112, 170, 179 phenomenology, 17, 59, 71, 92, 142, 150, 168, 172, 192 philosophy: character of, 15, 20, 32–34, 44, 71–72, 103–105, 180, 199–201, 218, 223; edifying, 31–32, 39, 41, 84–85, 180; as epistemology, 20, 37–39, 46; purity of, 32–34, 84–85; Rorty’s view of, 20, 31–35, 37–38, 44–46, 55, 59 pluralism, 2, 4, 32, 94, 138, 144, 202, 223, 226, 230; many worlds, 144–145 positivism, 6, 31, 46, 48, 49, 66, 70–71, 125, 127, 180 power, 165 pragmatism, 8–20, 23–44, 54–61, 66–69, 83, 91, 104, 126–127, 143, 151, 173, 226–227, 230–231; role of experience in, 3–4, 8–10, 17–18, 22–23, 29–30, 37–39, 44, 46–49, 54–60, 66, 103, 118, 150–15, 173, 1; and the good, 139–140; contrasted with neopragmatism, 8–10, 22–24, 29–30, 37–39, 42–50, 52, 54–61, 66, 128, 169, 219; as orientation, 27–28, 181; and pure

experience, 197–202; as temperament, 23, 151 psychologist’s fallacy, 204–207, 228 psychology: dualism of, 70–73, 75, 175; introspection in, 77–87; Kant’s view, of, 73–73; method of, 73, 92–93, 199; origins of, 73–77; as a science, 71–76, 78, 103–104 pure experience, 2, 3, 117, 183–198; criticism of, 3, 23, 175–177, 220–222; pragmatism and, 198–202; Russell on, 175, 192–193; stream of, 176–183, 193–194 Putnam, Hilary, 57, 59, 138–140 Quine, W. V. O., 35, 47–49, 53–54 radical empiricism, 16, 60–61, 71, 88–92, 100, 171–184, 191–192, 194, 203, 213, 223, 226–227; criticism of, 220–222 rationalism: 88, 101, 125, 140, 183–184, 200, 212, 226, 230–231 rationality, 39–42, 105, 140, 179; James’s view of, 65, 111–114, 120, 128–131, 140–141, 150, 216–218, 224–225; contrasted with passion, 128–131, 154, 169 realism: 22, 33, 46, 57–59, 106–108, 110, 113, 175–177, 205

Index  271

reality, 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 41, 48–49, 63, 77, 83–84, 106, 108–109, 113–115, 120, 168, 174–178, 181, 186–194, 197–198, 202, 212, 223–231; sentiment of, 83–84, 121, 141–155, 159; and truth, 35, 57–59, 62–65 receptivity, 69, 148; as passivity, 177, 121, 228 relations, 80, 87, 90–91, 97, 100, 101, 108, 145, 178–188, 202, 206, 209, 211–212, 214–216 relativism, 38, 57, 61, 84, 120–121, 137, 149, 174. See also subjectivism religion, 6–8, 11, 27–28, 36, 55, 83, 103–104, 126, 131, 156–162, 166, 172, 180. See also faith Renouvier, Charles, 153 representationalism: empiricism and, 88, 91; experience and, 9, 36, 37, 46, 49; pragmatic criticism of, 27, 29, 35, 41–42, 65, 150, 154, 186, 198; radical empiricism and, 186, 198–199 Rorty, Richard, 128, 167; criticisms of experience, 8–9, 12, 20–22, 29–30, 36–39, 42–49, 55–60, 67, 189, 196; and the linguistic turn, 44–53; nominalism of, 35–39; on philosophy, 32–36; pragmatism of, 9–10, 18–20, 22–26, 29–32, 35–44, 60, 67–68, 200 Royce, Josiah, 115

Russell, Bertrand, 24, 57, 126, 175, 192–194, 215 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 138–140 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 14, 80, 111, 192 selection, 13, 109–112, 117, 142–143, 147–149, 169, 173– 174, 212. See also attention self-images, 18, 42, 68, 155, 167 Sellars, Wilfrid, 14, 21–22, 35–38, 42, 47, 49–55, 61, 115–116, 227 sensation, 47–48, 52–54, 105; in classical empiricism, 48, 51, 79, 87–91, 100, 203–219; James’s view of, 73, 79, 89, 100, 111–116, 190, 203–219; and pure experience, 194, 200, 203–206 sense data, 54–55, 87–88, 115, 180, 194, 215, 219, 231 sentiment of rationality, 142–143, 216–218 sick soul, 152, 158 skepticism, 32–33, 125, 149, 155 Smith, John E., 197 Spencer, Herbert, 108–109, 150, 208 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 136–139 St. Paul, 160 stream of thought: character of, 80–81, 92–114, 175, 188, 202, 215, 220; and classical empiricism, 90–92, 205; as experience, 3, 17–18, 186; history of, 92–94; as pure experience, 176–183, 193–194

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subjectivism, 25, 105, 120–124, 126–128, 134, 137, 168, 174 thought, 142–143, 153–154, 163, 175–176, 186–190, 195–198, 202–206, 215–217, 224, 229; and feeling, 93–94, 101–102, 104, 114, 116–118, 190, 213–216, 219; in psychology, 72–73, 75, 82, 87, 93–94, 100–102; substantive thought, 96–98. See also stream of thought Titchener, E. B., 78, 199 Tolstoy, Leo, 156, 159 transcendental ego, 76, 182, 185, 217 transcendentalism, 54, 91, 142, 150, 181–182, 185, 189, 192, 205, 227 transitions, 2, 63, 96–98, 101–102, 114, 117, 178, 181–182, 186–187 truth: Davidson’s view of, 53–55; James’s view of, 20, 30, 40, 57–66, 174, 187, 202, 213, 218, 226, 230–231, 233; and philosophy, 15, 20, 32, 34, 41; in the Principles, 141, 147, 150–152, 155; Rorty’s view of, 20, 25, 31–32, 35–42, 46, 51, 53–55, 57–60; in “The Will to Believe,” 121–125, 130, 133, 137–138

vague, the, 1–4, 15, 231 voluntarism, 121, 123–124, 126, 131, 134, 137, 147, 167–168, 174 Wahl, Jean, 181, 202, 227 West, Cornel, 26 will, 17, 85, 120–122, 146–147, 149, 152–155, 158, 159; and attention, 153–154; and habit, 161–164; and freedom, 149, 153. See also will to believe will to believe, 119–170; and conversion, 156–161; criticized as subjectivism, 120–121, 123–124, 126–128, 133–135, 137, 145, 153, 168, 174; criticized as voluntarism, 121, 123–124, 127, 131, 134, 137, 167–168, 174; as a moral thesis, 119–122, 135–141, 147, 152, 154–170, 172, 177; in the Principles, 120, 141–156; and self-transformation, 164–170; thesis of, 121, 123–125, 127, 129, 132–133, 135, 138, 151–152, 158, 163–164, 169 Wilshire, Bruce, 192 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 32–34, 38, 44, 49, 60, 71, 82, 98–99, 157 Wundt, Wilhelm, 75, 208 Zabala, Santiago, 41