Understanding James, Understanding Modernism 9781501302749, 9781501302756, 9781501302763, 1501302744

Citation preview

i

Understanding James, Understanding Modernism

ii

Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and, consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination. Series Editors: Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison Volumes in the Series: Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism edited by Anat Matar Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism edited by David Scott Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism edited by Patrick M. Bray Understanding James, Understanding Modernism edited by David H. Evans Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Paola Marrati Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Christopher Langlois Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Ariane Mildenberg Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

iii

Understanding James, Understanding Modernism Edited by David H. Evans

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

iv

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © David H. Evans and Contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editor. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0274-9 ePub: 978-1-5013-0275-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0276-3 Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Cover image © Getty/​View Pictures Typeset by  Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

v

Contents Series Preface List of Abbreviations Introduction: Unstiffening All Our Theories: William James and the Culture of Modernism  David H. Evans

vii viii

1

Part 1  Conceptualizing James 1 The Character of Consciousness  Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

17

2 Redeeming the Wild Universe: William James’s Will to Believe John J. Stuhr

31

3 The Psychology of Religion: William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience  Michael Bacon

51

4 The Human Contribution: James and Modernity in Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth  Alan Malachowski

63

5 “Ever Not Quite!”: William James’s A Pluralistic Universe  Barry Allen

75

6 James’s Radical Empiricism  James Campbell

93

Part 2  James and Modernist Culture 7 James and Bergson: Fighting the Beast Intellectualism with Metaphors  Rosa Slegers

105

8 William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism Jill Kress Karn

121

9 “Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved”: William James and Gertrude Stein on Time and Language  David H. Evans

141

10 The Varieties of Robert Frost’s Religious Experience  Mark Richardson

159

11 Notes toward the Specious Present: James and Stevens  Kristen Case

177

vi

vi

Contents

12 Modernist Figures and James’s Pluralistic Universe  Patricia Rae

193

13 William James’s Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious in Joyce and Proust  Gian Balsamo

215

14 “That Skilful but Slow-​Moving Arranger”: Habit in James and Proust  Lisi Schoenbach

235

15 William James and Italian Pragmatism  Giovanni Maddalena and Michela Bella

249

16 James’s Pluralism and the Problems of Modern Political and Social Thought  Robert Danisch

259

Part 3 Glossary 17 James on Chance and Indeterminacy  Kyle Bromhall

277

18 James on Habit  Lisi Schoenbach

279

19 James on Morality  David Rondel

281

20 James on Philosophical Temperaments  Tom Donaldson

283

21 James on Pluralism  Susan Dieleman

285

22 James on Pragmatism  Colin Koopman

287

23 James on Psychical Phenomena  Ermine L. Algaier IV

289

24 James on Pure Experience  Joel Krueger

291

25 James on Radical Empiricism  Loren Goldman

293

26 James on the Reinstatement of the Vague  Rosa Slegers

295

27 James on Religious Experience  Michael Bacon

297

28 James on the Stream of Thought  Alexis Dianda

299

29 James on Time and the Specious Present  David H. Evans

301

30 James on the Will to Believe  Mark Richardson

303

Notes on Contributors

305

Index

309

vii

Series Preface Sometime in the late twentieth century, modernism, like philosophy itself, underwent something of an unmooring from (at least) linear literary history, in favor of the multi-​perspectival history implicit in “new historicism” or varieties of “presentism,” say. Amid current reassessments of modernism and modernity, critics have posited various “new” or alternative modernisms—​postcolonial, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism, or even “bad” modernisms. In doing so, they have not only reassessed modernism as a category, but also, more broadly, rethought epistemology and ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, materialism, history, and being itself, opening possibilities of rethinking not only which texts we read as modernist, but also how we read those texts. Much of this new conversation constitutes something of a critique of the periodization of modernism or modernist studies in favor of modernism as a mode (or mode of production) or a concept. Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism situates itself amid the plurality of discourses, offering collections focused on single key philosophical thinkers significant both to the moment of modernism and to our current understanding of that moment’s genealogy, archaeology, and becomings. Such critiques of modernism(s) and modernity afford opportunities to rethink and reassess the overlaps, folds, interrelationships, interleavings, or cross-​ pollinations of modernism and philosophy. Our goals in each volume of the series are to understand literary modernism better through philosophy as we also better understand a philosopher through literary modernism. The first two volumes of the series, those on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, have established a tripartite structure that serves to offer both accessibility to the philosopher’s principal texts and to current new research. Each volume opens with a section focused on “conceptualizing” the philosopher through close readings of seminal texts in the thinker’s oeuvre. A second section, on aesthetics, maps connections between modernist works and the philosophical figure, often surveying key modernist trends and shedding new light on authors and texts. The final section of each volume serves as an extended glossary of principal terms in the philosopher’s work, each treated at length, allowing a fuller engagement with and examination of the many, sometimes contradictory, ways terms are deployed. The series is thus designed both to introduce philosophers and to rethink their relationship to modernist studies, revising our understandings of both modernism and philosophy, and offering resources that will be of use across disciplines, from philosophy, theory, and literature, to religion, the visual and performing arts, and often to the sciences as well.

newgenprepdf viii

List of Abbreviations All references to William James’s published texts are to the Harvard University Press edition of The Works of William James, edited by Frederick H.  Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. References to James’s letters are to the University Press of Virginia edition of The Correspondence of William James, edited by Ignas K.  Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. CWJ EP Ephil EPR ERE MT PU P PP PBC SPP TT VRE WB

The Correspondence of William James Essays in Psychology Essays in Philosophy Essays in Psychical Research Essays in Radical Empiricism The Meaning of Truth A Pluralistic Universe Pragmatism The Principles of Psychology Psychology (Briefer Course) Some Problems of Philosophy Talks to Teachers The Varieties of Religious Experience The Will to Believe

1

Introduction

Unstiffening All Our Theories: William James and the Culture of Modernism David H. Evans

Pragmat’ical, a, meddling, very busy, impertinent When William James introduced “the principle of pragmatism” to the larger intellectual world in his 1898 address “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” he was probably unfamiliar with Noah Webster’s definition, in the first edition of his celebrated dictionary (1806) of “pragmaticat’icalness” as “a disposition to meddle,” but there can be little doubt that he would have approved wholeheartedly. For one of the things that distinguished the new doctrine from traditional philosophies and their desire to observe the world from a safe distance was its meddlesomeness, its impatience to intervene, its conviction that it had something to say to everyone, its eagerness to—​borrowing a contemporary idiom James would have appreciated—​get up in everyone’s business. From its beginnings, philosophy had aspired to a position of dispassionate contemplation from which to render neutral and universal judgment on the heated opinions of the secular world. James, throughout his career, was skeptical that such a position was either accessible or meaningful. However, that was not, as far as he was concerned, a counsel of despair, but rather a call to action, an encouragement to vigorous engagement with the contemporary intellectual world. Jamesian pragmatism, according to its naturally active predisposition, sought out an eager interaction with numerous aspects of modernist culture, and writers, artists, and thinkers of every sort began to feel that pragmatism had something to tell them, and whether it was encouraging or threatening, a response of some sort was demanded. Its inherently interdisciplinary disposition is nicely captured by a vivid metaphor that James, who liked to think in architectural terms, borrowed from his young Italian disciple Giovanni Papini: [Pragmatism] lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.1

2

2

David H. Evans

A corridor in a hotel, then, where unexpected encounters and impromptu conversations take place, and sometimes, energetic disputes. But it connects everyone, despite their varied interests and agendas, providing a common ground for dialogue and debate. Looking back from the present moment, it is easy to feel that the name of that hotel could be “Modernism.” Pragmatism, however, was only one of the intellectual provocations that James’s extraordinarily fertile mind set loose on the world. Revolutionary psychologist, pathbreaking philosopher, original religious thinker, teacher of genius, memorable writer—​the very breadth of James’s creativity and the numerous areas affected by his thought placed him closer perhaps than any other single figure to the center of the confluence of intellectual currents that defined the culture of modernism. As Ross Posnock has somewhat plaintively noted, “the problem in assessing James’s impact is where to draw the line, since his influence is felt in modern literature, sociology, political theory, psychology (including the experimental and behaviourist), philosophy (not only pragmatism but also phenomenology), and theology.”2 His magisterial monograph The Principles of Psychology (PP) was an instant success, receiving, as the author noted with an irony that does not conceal his real delight, the “unrestricted and unqualified praise [which] is after all the real thing which authors crave.”3 Contemporary readers were instantly taken by the stylistic vigor for which James would become renowned; according to one, the book was like “rare, pungent mountain air, vital, bracing and almost intoxicating.”4 The originality of its claims was equally bracing. Most revolutionary was James’s overturning of the traditional Lockean notion of consciousness as a series of discrete states or static ideas. For James, on the contrary, time suffused consciousness through and through. On one hand, no moment was static; each included both a fading retention of some past and a vital prehension of some futurity; on the other, no moment was discrete or atomistic, a point that James illustrated with his famous metaphor of the “stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.”5 These reflections on the nature of time and consciousness would feed into and provide support for the kinds of experiments that modernist artists, and especially novelists, would soon be undertaking in their efforts to find a more adequate representation of the diffuse motility of the human mind. If James’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and the meaning of truth seemed to speak powerfully to his contemporaries, another dimension of his thought, represented by the writings collected in A Pluralistic Universal and Essays in Radical Empiricism, points rather more suggestively in the direction of the future. As he strove to develop a conception of the structure of the universe that would justify the necessity of the pragmatic method, he rejected the epistemological dualism that he still retained in The Principles of Psychology in favor of a “world of pure experience” in which subjectivity and objectivity, idea and reality are redefined as a single portion of experience taken in “different context[s]‌of associates.”6 It was the audacious originality of this proposal that led Alfred North Whitehead to accord to James the same revolutionary significance as to René Descartes, insofar as both had opened “an epoch by their clear formulation of terms by which thought could profitably express itself at particular stages of knowledge, one for the seventeenth century, the other for

3

Introduction

3

the twentieth century.”7 Considered from our present perspective, one could argue that James’s attack on dualisms of every variety represents the first efforts in what we might call the defenestration of metaphysics that would become the central philosophical project of the twentieth century, undertaken in various ways by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, and later by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Richard Rorty. Some of these thinkers would acknowledge James as an intellectual predecessor; others would not. But it cannot be denied that he was on the road first. One of the things that made James unique as an intellectual figure was the transatlantic range of his influence. In America, it seems safe to say, James was the most prominent and influential intellectual of his time; in fact he was responsible for introducing the word “intellectual” in its modern sense to the English-​speaking world, translating the French term first made popular during the Dreyfus affair. A significant part of his impact came from the fact that, as a professor at Harvard, he taught a large number of individuals who would themselves go on to become major cultural influences. A  list of his students, official or unofficial, contains some of the most significant American thinkers and writers of the first half of the twentieth century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, Robert Frost, Robert Park, and Learned Hand—​many of whom left eloquent testimony to the excitement of studying with James. Du Bois, for example, recorded his appreciation that his pursuit of philosophy “landed [him] squarely in the arms of William James of Harvard for which God be praised.”8 We have a more immediate and extravagant tribute from Stein who, in an 1895 student composition, asked the question “Is life worth living?” and immediately answered:  “Yes, a thousand times yes when the world still holds such spirits as Prof. James.”9 Robert Frost, more dryly, limited himself to describing James as “the most valuable teacher I had at Harvard” despite the fact that he missed the opportunity to attend his classes.10 Many of those who were drawn into James’s gravitational field at Harvard would go on to provide perspectives deeply informed by pragmatism on American social and political questions. Lippmann considered James one of his three central mentors, and as Posnock remarks, the “exciting sense of possibility that Jamesian pragmatism offered helped ignite the vaulting ambition of [his] first two books,” including his influential 1914 work Drift and Mastery.11 Kallen would give a particular social inflection to James’s pluralistic sense of the universe in his celebrated 1915 essay “Democracy versus the Melting-​Pot” and his subsequent book, Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924), where the term “cultural pluralism” appeared in print for the first time.12 For their part, Locke and Du Bois would pursue the social implications of a Jamesian commitment to pluralism to still profounder levels, questioning the concept of racial identity that was still the fundamental structuring principle of American society.13 James never wanted his thought to be imprisoned by the academy, and his opinions and ideas provoked many who had not encountered him directly—​in particular, the so-​called young intellectuals headquartered in Greenwich Village, including Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and Harold Stearns. Their response was not necessarily positive: in their collective effort to attack the materialism that they saw coarsening American culture in the prewar years, pragmatism was sometimes reduced

4

4

David H. Evans

to a parody, an amoral apology for capitalist instrumentalism, as in Mumford’s The Golden Day (1926). Bourne, on the other hand, in his well-​known critique of John Dewey’s version of pragmatism “Twilight of Idols” (1917), looked back wistfully to the very different “spirit of William James, with its gay passion for ideas, and its freedom of speculation.”14 Great as James’s authority in America might be, however, his prestige in Europe was perhaps even more considerable. No other American of the time commanded such widespread old world attention; according to Kallen, writing in 1917, “Europe knows but one American philosopher. This is William James.”15 James’s works were read across the continent, but they were received with particular enthusiasm in France, Italy, and Great Britain.

France James’s connections with French thought went back to the beginning of his intellectual development; indeed he claimed that it was his encounter with Charles Renouvier’s Essais that brought him out of his devastating depression of 1870. James would return the favor by adapting Renouvier’s arguments in one of his very first professional publications, “Quelques Considérations sur la méthode subjective,” printed in January 1878 in Critique Philosophique, a journal edited by Renouvier, who attached to the article a very favorable note. The magazine would continue publishing translations of James’s work through the next two decades. But by far his most important French ally was Henri Bergson, the philosophical superstar of his era. Bergson, in a letter of January 1903, claimed to have been “one of [James’s] earliest admirers,” and that he “had never passed up an opportunity to express the great sympathy that [he had] for [James’s] ideas to [his] listeners.” After reading Pragmatism a few years later, he exclaimed to James that it was “the admirably drawn programme of the philosophy of the future.”16 James had read Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire when it appeared in 1896, but it was only when he returned to it in 1902, after, perhaps, his own thought had developed sufficiently for him to recognize the affinities with the themes of the French philosopher, that he responded with enthusiasm. Bergson, he wrote to him, had written “a work of exquisite genius” that represented “a sort of Copernican revolution” promising “a new era of philosophical discussion” (The Correspondence of William James [CWJ], 10.167). Bergson was seventeen years James’s junior, but the nature of their affiliation makes questions of seniority or priority irrelevant. Each had arrived at, to borrow a phrase of which James was fond, the center of his vision independently, but as their friendship grew, each thinker’s insights stimulated and reinforced the other’s, until their individual philosophies seemed to merge in a single torrent that swept over the French intellectual landscape. By 1913, Emile Durkheim was complaining that “pragmatism is almost the only current theory of truth”—​a crisis of truly national consequence, since, as he explained, “our whole French culture is basically an essentially rationalistic one,” a culture that the new philosophy threatened “to overthrow.”17 For Durkheim, at any rate, pragmatism was proving “impertinent” is the worst possible way.

5

Introduction

5

James’s influence in France likely benefitted from another, less scholarly, champion as well. Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who had both studied with James, made their home in Paris from 1903 to 1914, and her celebrated salon brought together many of those who were defining modernism in the arts. Stein remained a fervent admirer of her former teacher, whose books were prominently displayed on her shelves, and she often lent them to guests.18 One of her most frequent visitors was Pablo Picasso, particularly during the crucial period when he was developing the principles and practice of cubism. There is no evidence that the painter ever read The Principles of Psychology, but several scholars have made a persuasive argument that Picasso’s manipulation of perspective in his cubist work has a striking affinity with James’s reflections on the subjective component of how we interpret the visible world in the important chapter “The Perception of Space.” Of especial interest in this regard is James’s discussion of the ways in which our experience of the spatial world is shaped by our intellectual assumptions about what we are perceiving. Among the examples he offers is that of a bent visiting card that can be made to “appear either as if opened towards you or away from you,” depending on the viewer’s presuppositions (PP, 2.886). Such reversibility of orientation is a defining feature of Picasso’s cubism; it may not be entirely coincidental that Picasso included Stein’s own visiting card in his 1914 collage, Still Life with Visiting Card. As Robert M. Crunden says, it seems at least arguable that James was, in some significant sense, “present at the creation of modern painting.”19

Italy In no nation did James’s impact take a more dramatic form than in Italy, which, despite the fact that there was no native champion of the stature of Bergson, would prove a fruitful ground for his ideas. One of his letters offers vivid testimony to the widespread popularity of The Principles of Psychology; visiting Rome in 1905 to attend the Fifth International Congress of Psychology, he wrote to his wife of his unanticipated reception:  “This morning I  went to the meeting place of the Congress to inscribe myself definitely, and when I  gave my name, the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me, or words to that effect” (CWJ, 11.17). James the psychologist may have been loved by all Italy, but James the philosopher was rapturously adored, at least by an energetic group of young thinkers based in Florence. On the same visit to Rome he records having had a very good and rather intimate talk with the little band of “pragmatists,” Papini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, etc., most of whom inhabit Florence, publish the monthly journal “Leonardo” at their own expense, and carry on a very serious philosophic movement, apparently really inspired by [F. C. S.] Schiller and myself . . . and show an enthusiasm, and also a literary swing and activity that I know nothing of in our own land. (CWJ, 11.26)

6

6

David H. Evans

Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini were the most important and most reverential of these Florentine pragmatists. Papini, “the most enthusiastic pragmatist of them all,”20 addressed James as his “Dear Master,” and, as Gerald H. Myers suggests, his response was as at least as much emotional as intellectual: he “vibrated to James’s themes for the same reasons that thousands attended his lectures.”21 In turn, James was struck, in the writings of his Italian champions, by an intellectual energy and literary gusto akin to his own. His 1906 essay “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy” praises their “lightness, clearness and brevity,” as well as their “frolicsomeness and impertinence that wear the charm of youth and freedom” (Essays in Philosophy [EPhil], 145). In Pragmatism, James, himself a master of metaphors, would offer Papini the ultimate compliment, adopting and making famous his “corridor theory” concept. The significance of Papini to Italian modernism is not limited to his role as an interpreter of pragmatism; he also helped provide a kind of bridge between the latter and Italian futurism. As Claudio Gorlier notes, while “he never actually joined the futurist movement, Papini ranks among its forefathers and among its fellow travellers.”22 He would later become a principal contributor to the journal Lacerba (1913–​15), where the central propagandist of futurism, F. T. Marinetti also published, and which represented, if only temporarily, a “union of the most adventurous spirits of the Florentine movement and the Milanese Futurists.”23 Papini would eventually go his own more intellectually problematic way, and even a brief discussion of James’s influence in Italy requires a disturbing footnote, since the celebration of action that pragmatism’s young Italian champions saw as its central message would eventually be taken in dangerously antidemocratic directions. In 1922, shortly after Mussolini took control in Italy, Prezzolini would reflect that “fascism has destroyed nothing but what we had destroyed with our thought in twenty years of criticizing: Italian democracy.”24 The final outrage would be Mussolini’s own (very dubious) claim, in a 1926 interview, to have himself been a student of Jamesian pragmatism: “I learnt of William James that faith in action, that ardent will to live and fight to which Fascism owes a great part of its success.”25 It is, to put it mildly, painful to imagine what James’s own reaction would have been to this particular evidence of his influence.

Britain James’s ideas had been in circulation in Britain from an early date, mostly by way of the widely read journal Mind, where James published a number of articles that represented the first trying-​out of ideas that would be central to The Principles of Psychology and Pragmatism. In the years of his mature fame, James became a sought-​after speaker in Britain, and would present the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–​ 2 and the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, in 1908, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and A Pluralistic Universe (1909), respectively. James found his most energetic British philosophical champion in the figure of F. C. S. Schiller, whose version of pragmatism, which he named “humanism,” James discussed favorably in Pragmatism. Schiller was something of an intellectual energumen; in an

7

Introduction

7

1897 review of The Will to Believe, he applauded James for throwing “his bomb shells into the stifling aura which surrounds many a hoary prejudice of the philosophical world,”26 and James himself felt it advisable to recommend that his admirer “tone down a little the exuberance of his polemic wit.”27 But Schiller was a vigorous and highly visible presence in the world of British philosophy, and Bertrand Russell would accord him equal status with James and John Dewey as a founder of pragmatism.28 James’s own relations with Russell, on the other hand, were more adversarial. Russell had limited sympathy for pragmatism’s conception of truth, while James in his published response accused Russell of “diseased abstractionism.”29 Privately, he was more blunt, writing to C. S. Peirce in 1909: “I am a-​logical, if not illogical, and glad to be so when I find Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known.” Appropriately, James’s pungent conclusion brings us abruptly back to the concrete universe:  “Ass!” (CWJ, 12.397). James’s presence on the British intellectual landscape extended beyond the university lecture auditorium and common room. One of his more controversial sidelines was his fascination with spiritualism, and when in London, he was known to attend the meetings of the Quest Society, founded by his friend G. R. S. Meade to promote research into psychic phenomena; also, James’s opinions were regularly discussed in the pages of The Quest, the group’s journal. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme all attended Quest Society meetings, and Pound published his “Psychology and Troubadours” in The Quest.30 It is impossible to talk about James’s influence on British, and Irish, modernism without referring to the concept of the “stream of consciousness.” “Stream of consciousness” has, of course, long been part of the standard critical vocabulary, an indispensible way of describing modernist experimentation in prose. It cannot be demonstrated unequivocally that James was the source of the term as a narrative strategy or that the most prominent practitioners of the technique—​including Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce—​were inspired directly by a reading of The Principles. But it was James who crystallized the memorable metaphor and who succeeded in popularizing, in his famous chapter, the compelling image of mental life as an indivisible onrushing torrent rather than a series of clear and distinct ideas, and there seems little reason to question Melvin Friedman’s assertion that James was “one of the initiators of this new practice in the novel.”31 This brief survey offers a skeletal view of the vectors of James’s influence among major modernist figures, but it only dimly suggests the broad and diffuse resonance of his thought in his time. In A Pluralistic Universe, James asserts that “a man’s vision is the central fact about him,”32 and as much as his particular ideas, it was James’s vision that put him in touch with the vital energies of his era. Two particular elements of that vision are particularly relevant, one negative and one positive. To begin with the first: James may have had little tolerance for Friedrich Nietzsche’s tone of, to him, melodramatic despair,33 but the two were in fact closely allied in their sustained assault on the “prejudices of philosophers,” to quote the title of the first section of Beyond Good and Evil. The great error in the history of Western philosophy for James was

8

8

David H. Evans

its “vicious intellectualism,” its imposition of a set of transcendental categories and fixed principles that provided the ultimate definition and foundation of reality. Such an approach inevitably sacrifices lived experience to the predetermined limitations of concepts. In a memorable metaphor, James compared the image of the world offered by traditional philosophers to “a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.” It is “simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses” (Pragmatism [P], 18). Faced with such a shining temple, James, like Nietzsche, felt the necessity of philosophizing with a hammer, dismantling this “monument of artificiality” and restoring to view “the street” and the “world of concrete experiences,” a world that is “multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed . . . intolerably confused and gothic” (P, 17–​18). A  central impetus of his intellectual revolution was the desire to call thinking back from the heavens to the earth—​and the dirt—​of experience. Like James, modernist artists and writers were impatient with “purity and dignity,” the romantic abstractions and earnest idealizations that had dominated Victorian conceptions of the purpose of art, and were eager to turn their attention to the “tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed” universe of life as it is actually lived, rather than how it has been revised, categorized, and clearly labeled by the imperious intellect. Repeatedly, they focused on the detritus of the world—​what has been left out, rejected, ignored, forgotten,—​in short, the garbage best not noticed. The early poems of T. S. Eliot, for example, turn their gaze relentlessly toward the sordid refuse of “the street”: “The grimy scraps/​Of withered leaves about your feet/​And newspapers from vacant lots” (“Preludes,” 6–​8). James Joyce’s Ulysses, in so many regards the exemplary modernist novel, is a stupendous monument to the patient registration of the messily unmemorable, the tangled and muddy debris of dailiness, as in this passage from Stephen Dedalus’s mid-​morning stroll on Sandymount Strand: The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man’s ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A  porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend:  wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.34

A Jamesian desire to recover contact with the untidy world of real concrete experience, a preference for things over ideas, manifests itself repeatedly in modernist writing, even in that of writers who might seem, in many respects, to have very little in common. It would be difficult, for example, to confuse a poem by William Carlos Williams with one by Wallace Stevens, but the former’s famous affirmation, “No ideas but in things,” has

9

Introduction

9

its affinitive counterpart in the title of the latter’s late poem, “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” which concludes with the lines, “It was like/​A new knowledge of reality.” As Sanford Schwartz has observed, “the opposition between abstraction and sensation, rational formulation and direct intuition, plays a central role in the works of virtually every figure associated with Modernist . . . poetics.”35 If the attack on abstraction constitutes one of James’s most important negative contributions to the culture of modernism, a necessary clearing away of the intellectual obstacles to the possibility of fresh perceptions, perhaps the most important positive contribution is his insistence on the irreducibly temporal nature of experience. The two themes are, in fact, fundamentally connected, since vicious intellectualism is founded on the principle that “fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change” (A Pluralistic Universe [PU], 106). The conviction that change rather than fixity is the fundamental characteristic of experience is central to James’s thinking. His first article on psychological questions, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (1884), for example, already denounces the “great fallacy” of neglecting the “transitive parts of thought’s stream” in favor of stable images,36 an idea that would inspire “The Stream of Thought” chapter of The Principles of Psychology. After his thinking turned in the direction of philosophy, his vision became more all-​inclusive. Radical empiricism rejected dualism, replacing it with a conception of “experience” that is simultaneously subjective and objective, depending on the context in which it is taken. One consequence is the enlargement of the significance of temporality; now it is no longer simply consciousness that is in perpetual transition and flux; unceasing dynamism is the fundamental condition of the universe as such. This insistence on time and change not only brought James closest to the crucial themes of Bergson, but also positioned him at the center of the intellectual ambit of the modernists, for whom a heightened sense of the rapid rush of time had become perhaps the defining aspect of the contemporary situation. The world seemed to have accelerated, materially and mentally: as the historian Philipp Blom notes, in the first two decades of the twentieth century “an increasing sense of speed was a major preoccupation, a public love affair, a deep fear, and the pulse driving millions of lives.”37 One consequence was that the depiction of the passage of time became a central concern for modernist artists. I have already mentioned the widespread experimentation with stream of consciousness techniques by writers; Frederick R. Karl has argued that it is also an equally useful concept for analyzing developments in other arts, asserting that “the stream is the epitome of Modernism,” and citing the musical innovations of Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg as prominent examples.38 The visual arts might seem more recalcitrant, but modernist artists repeatedly set themselves the challenge of incorporating a sense of the temporal in their works. Early cubism, for example, was interpreted by observers like Leo Werth as an attempt “to transfer on to a plane of a picture the sensations and reflections which we experience with the passage of time,”39 and the cubist artist Jean Metzinger asserted that the peculiarity of his colleagues’s style arose from the fact that they “have allowed themselves to move round the object, in order to give a concrete representation of it, made up of several successive aspects.”40 Marcel Duchamp wrestled with the problem of reproducing

10

10

David H. Evans

the flow of time on a static surface still more directly in his famous 1912 work Nude Descending a Staircase Number 2, as did the Italian Futurist painters Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrá, as well as the photographer Anton Bragaglia, who devised a method he called “Photodynamism.” Umberto Boccioni extended the effort to depict time to the medium of sculpture in his masterpiece, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). The moment of modernism was a time when, as Duchamp observed, “the whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air,”41 and the thought of James, with its dynamic conception of consciousness and the universe, resonated deeply with that “whole idea.” The influence of James was at its height in the heroic period of modernism; inevitably a decline set in. Appropriately, Jamesian ideas (as well as pragmatism more broadly) and the urge to formal experimentation that drove the modernists had a somewhat similar fate. Both came under sustained criticism in the decade of the 1930s, in large part as a result of the economic disaster of the Depression and the rise of fascism that was one of its consequences.42 After the Second World War, pragmatism found itself confronting a different world and a new philosophical rival, especially in America, where Bertrand Russell was to have his delayed revenge by way of the rise of analytic philosophy, fueled in particular by the influx of European intellectuals fleeing the Nazi regime. In this newly astringent intellectual atmosphere, with its emphasis on rigor and scientificity, James’s plea for the “re-​instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life” (PP, 1.246) came to seem hopelessly old-​fashioned, a part of the genially muzzy-​headed thinking of a bygone age. It would require another cultural shift for pragmatism, and James, to recapture widespread attention, a shift that took the form of a resurgence of modernism’s explosively inventive energies in the 1960s and 1970s. It is revealing that the name eventually given to this new constellation of artistic impulses—​postmodernism—​ simultaneously marks its difference from, but at least equally important its continuity with, its predecessor. And it is yet another indication of the connections between modernism and pragmatism that the latter would experience a revival around the same time, initiated largely by the work of Richard Rorty, and in particular his highly influential 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.43 The decades on both sides of the turn of the century have seen a revived interest not just in James’s philosophical contributions, but even more so in his cultural significance more broadly conceived, in a wide range of studies including George Cotkin’s William James, Public Philosopher (1989), Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity:  Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991), Richard Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), Anne Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995), Jonathan Levin’s The Poetics of Transition (1999), Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism (2007), Kristen Case’s American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice (2011), Lisi Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism (2012), and Deborah Whitehead’s William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture (2015). In the early years of the current century, as he was in those of the preceding one, James has become once more a compelling and provoking intellectual presence, whose significance has not yet been fully measured, and we are at a propitious moment for an anthology that is a contribution to that effort.

11

Introduction

11

This book, like its predecessors, has a bifocal structure and dual purpose. The chapters in the first section are intended to provide concentrated examinations of James’s most important works, from the book that first brought him world-​renown, The Principles of Psychology (1890), to the posthumous Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). Starting at the beginning, Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace focus on James’s pathbreaking reconceptualizing of consciousness, in perhaps the most famous chapter of Principles, “The Stream of Thought.” One of James’s less technical, but highly popular collections, The Will to Believe (1897), is discussed by John J. Stuhr, who argues that it contains what may be the most vivid and effective presentation of his “own personal point of view and vision.” Michael Bacon examines another of James’s diverse intellectual interests in his discussion of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the philosopher’s attempt to understand the phenomena of religious faith in purely psychological terms. Alan Malachowski reconsiders James’s most controversial contribution to the philosophical debates of his time, the new conception of truth offered in Pragmatism (1907), as well as his response to its critics in The Meaning of Truth (1909). James’s most sustained attack on totalizing philosophical thinking, A Pluralistic Universe (1909), is the subject of the chapter by Barry Allen, who draws a connection between James, with his vision of a “strung-​along world,” and a more recent philosophical proponent of pluralism, Gilles Deleuze. Finally, James Campbell discusses James’s last effort to “clarify his position for a broader audience,” the pieces posthumously collected in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). The second section of this book is devoted to studies of James’s influence on leading modernist writers and thinkers. Rosa Slegers’s chapter deals with the most powerful intellectual affiliation in his life, that with his French friend and admirer Henri Bergson, focusing in particular on their common struggle against “vicious intellectualism.” A much more long-​term relationship, that between James and his brother Henry, is the subject of Jill Kress Karn’s contribution, which demonstrates the brothers’ shared “understanding of consciousness as a function of experienced relations, their desire to constitute inwardness or subjectivity as ongoing, in-​the-​ making, a happening, [and] their commitment to revising and re-​seeing what they have invented.” In my chapter on Gertrude Stein, I  look at one of James’s most enthusiastic students and readers, focusing in particular on their thinking about questions of time and language. Mark Richardson provides a reading of James’s impact on another American writer, Robert Frost, offering the provocative suggestion that there is a parallel between the former’s contention, in “The Will to Believe,” that faith can play a role in creating its object and Frost’s conception of poem-​making as an active process involving willful belief and unexpected revelation. Kristen Case addresses another poet often associated with James, Wallace Stevens; but where most studies have concerned themselves with reading Stevens’s work as “demonstrating or explicating particular [Jamesian] philosophical positions,” Case directs our attention to the parallel between James’s pragmatic contention that “truth happens to an idea” and the way in which the words of Stevens’s poems enact a temporal process that leads the reader into what the poet calls “agreement with reality”: “the effect of words is their meaning.”

12

12

David H. Evans

In a wide-​ranging chapter, Patricia Rae explores how James’s hostility to “vicious intellectualism” and vision of a pluralistic, complexly interconnected universe can be seen as a vital inspiration for a number of “the linguistic ‘figures’ modernist writers devise[d]‌to function in the world,” including the disruptive practices of the imagists and surrealists, Stevens’s deployment of imaginative “hypotheses,” and even George Orwell’s strategic use of politically subversive analogies. Gian Balsamo’s chapter considers the use of stream of consciousness by two modernist novelists, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, demonstrating that there is an important distinction between the way in which each author develops the method. On one hand, Joyce’s writing is closer to James’s psychology, to the extent that it more adequately depicts the vague “fringes” that constitute so much of conscious experience; on the other, Joyce may be said to go beyond James in the way that he offers glimpses of the operation of the “cognitive unconscious,” a notion that has become increasingly prominent in contemporary neuroscientific research. Lisi Schoenbach’s chapter also discusses Proust, focusing on habit, a central concern of James in The Principles of Psychology, and arguing that there is an important convergence with the treatment of habit in Remembrance of Things Past. Giovanni Maddalena and Michaela Bella provide a useful history of the Italian pragmatists, considering what they shared with James as well as how they adapted his ideas to reflect their own particular concerns. In the last chapter in this section, Robert Danisch looks at a different dimension of James’s intellectual impact, considering how his pragmatic and pluralistic vision helped to shape the ideas of some of the most influential American social thinkers of the twentieth century. The book concludes with a glossary of James’s key concepts. James was a writer acutely aware of words, and of their limitations, especially the dangers of what he calls a “misuse of the function of naming,” which carried to an extreme results in “the denial of the possibility of change, and the consequent branding of the world of change as unreal” (PU, 32, 100). It is a consequence of his pragmatic conception of truth as a provisional and revisional process in time that there must be an element of instability and incompleteness in all discourse. In keeping with this attitude, the glossary entries are therefore intended to be less simple definitions than short essays that attempt to do justice to the anti-​definitional, shifting and unfinished, partial and perspectival—​the “ever not quite”—​nature of James’s style of thinking.

Notes 1  William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 32. 2 Ross Posnock, “The Influence of William James on American Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 322–​3. 3 William James, The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992–​2004), 7.164. 4 Quoted in Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 232.

13

Introduction

13

5 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.233. 6 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 7. 7 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 211–​12. 8 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), 33. 9 Rosalind S. Miller, Gertrude Stein: Form and Intelligibility (New York: Exposition Press, 1949), 146. 10  Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–​1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 643n. 19. 11 Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1969), 13; Posnock, “The Influence of William James,” 330. 12 Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 43. 13 For excellent discussions of how these figures variously applied Jamesian inspirations, see Ross Posnock and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), 377–​408. 14 Randolph Silliman Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911–​1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 336. 15 Horace Kallen, “William James,” The Dial, 63 (August 30, 1917): 142. 16 Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 357, 361. 17 Emile Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, trans. J. C. Whitehouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. 18 Arthur J. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books: 2001), 122. 19 Robert M. Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–​ 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 302. Both Miller and Crunden were preceded in this argument by the pioneering work of Marianne Teuber, “Formvorstellung und Kubismus oder Pablo Picasso und William James,” in Kubismus, ed. S. Gohr (Koln: Josef-​Haubrich Kunstalle, 1982), 9–​57. 20 William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 145. 21 Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1935), 2.572; Gerald E. Myers, “The Influence of William James’s Pragmatism in Italy,” in The Sweetest Impression of Life: The James Family and Italy, ed. James Tuttleton and Agostino Lombardo (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 173. 22 Claudio Gorlier, “Listening to the Master: William James and the ‘Making of the New’ in Italian Culture,” in The Sweetest Impression of Life, 187. 23 Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 1909–​15 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 26. 24 Gorlier, “Listening to the Master,” 194. 25 Quoted in Perry, Thought and Character, 2.575. 26  Ibid., 2.495. 27 Ibid., 2.503.

14

14

David H. Evans

28 Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (London: Unwin Press, 1960), 42. 29 William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975),152. 30 Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s Press, 1993), 132. 31 Melvin J. Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 2. 32 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 14. 33 With a distinct lack of sympathy, James publically compared the “sallies” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to “the sick shrieking of two dying rats.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 39. 34 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 34. 35 Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early 20th-​Century Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 6. 36 William James, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” Mind 9, no. 33 (1884): 3. 37 Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–​1914 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), 252. 38 Frederick R. Karl, Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885–​1925 (New York: Antheneum, 1985), 239. 39 Quoted in Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature Music and Painting in Europe, 1900–​1916 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 69. 40 Quoted in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–​1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 22. 41 Ibid., 117. 42 See John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 10. 43 Surprisingly, Rorty has little to say about James in the book: “surprisingly,” because it can be argued that the themes of Rorty’s individualistic, narratival, and “poetic” version of pragmatism would seem to have much more in common with James’s way of thinking than with Dewey’s more socially oriented and scientific orientation. David L. Hall has suggested that it is in fact Rorty’s “closeness to James that precludes [his] appealing to his thought.” David L. Hall, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 70.

15

Part One

Conceptualizing James

16

17

1

The Character of Consciousness Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

Literary flow There are, to put matters somewhat simplistically, literary works that are behavioristic. The reader is invited to speculate about the inner lives of the characters, but the focus is on the public events and public places where the action occurs—​where marital or heroic fates are sealed, where fortunes rise and fall, and where adventures of multifarious sorts happen. Other literary works invite depth psychological theorizing about unconscious sources that might explain why a character thinks or acts as he or she does. Modernist stream of consciousness literature does not simply invite the reader to go into the character’s mind if he or she wishes, or if it is deemed necessary to get the plot. Stream of consciousness literature depicts interiority, specifically the way consciousness unfolds in the person whose consciousness it is. Consider the crescendoing final passage of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book ends: And Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.1

Molly Bloom’s thoughts tumble by in a rush of prose. Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway also achieves this quick-​paced, chaotic effect: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”2 Joyce and Woolf portray features of the familiar stream of consciousness. It is sometimes simple, sometimes complex; sometimes polyphonous, often cacophonous; sometimes reflective, memorial, accompanied by a foreboding sense of being watched; other times, simply a flow of first-​order experience, a mostly perceptual phenomenal

18

18

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

flow. Images pile on images, while the grammar falls apart in fragmented or run-​on sentences. In Joyce there is no punctuation at all, in Woolf a few semicolons. This makes things difficult for the reader who likes images right-​sized, but it is perhaps more realistic, more representative of the way inner life is. Just as we might connect psychological behaviorism and literary style, we can consider the relation of stream of consciousness narration and psychological theory. William James’s famous chapter “The Stream of Thought” from The Principles of Psychology (PP; 1890) is often cited in introductions to modernist literature.3 Here we provide a reading of James’s famous chapter. At the end we reconnect his analysis of the stream with its literary doppelganger.

The stream of consciousness The Principles of Psychology is a two-​volume work intended to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the state of the new science of the mind, which some date to 1879 and the work of pioneers like Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig. James reports, in the 1892 condensation of the book, that the new science consists mostly of “a string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions . . . but not a single law”4 and that it drips—​perhaps it always will—​with philosophical assumptions. James’s chapter on the stream is a masterpiece of phenomenology. In chapter VII, “The Methods and Snares of Psychology,” James says, “Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.”5 “The Stream of Thought,” chapter VIII, opens: “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” (PP, 1.219). James presents a phenomenology that is true to the way mental experience actually seems. He writes, “No one ever had a simple sensation by itself ” (PP, 1.219). Experience does not appear as ideas built on simple components. Even in a flash, I do not see red and a roundish shape. I see a red apple. James was worried that the brass instrument psychologists assumed a view of mind where experience breaks down into and is built from component sensations. James notes that attention to components is a deliberate action: “What we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention pushed often to a very high degree” (PP, 1.219). Instead, ordinary experience appears to us as “a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” (PP, 1.219). Phenomenology, for James, reveals five characteristics of the stream of consciousness: 1. Every state is part of a personal consciousness. 2. Consciousness is in constant change. 3. Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous. 4. Consciousness deals with objects independent of itself. 5. Consciousness is selective, attentive, and interested. (PP, 1.220) James’s famous master metaphor is the stream. A metaphor cannot confirm itself, and it inevitably has features that limit it. Yet the metaphor, ‘a stream of thought,’ stands up to quite a bit of extension. A stream is not merely its waters or its banks; both, as

19

The Character of Consciousness

19

well as the flora and fauna in and around the stream, constitute it. The metaphor of the stream helps shift our focus from the way the stream looks from a certain perspective on the shore (although it allows that—​it is after all only a metaphor). It directs our awareness to the water itself, its texture, contour, froth, foam, shallows and depths, and its inner shores, to what and how it is contained. Streams might be slow and calm, filled with eddies and ripples, or tumble over waterfalls. This variability is one of the key strengths of the metaphor. In his chapter on the stream he repeatedly refers to the individuality of each unique flow, but overall James focuses on identifying the universal features of all streams. The universal phenomenal stream is the shared experiential scaffold inside which what it is like to be a particular individual or type of individual—​first-​generation immigrant or transgender teenager or cognitive scientist—​appears. Our streams of thought can differ in pace, volume, clarity, direction, and so on. But if we are conscious, we have a stream.

Mental states are irreducibly first personal According to James, introspection is not merely a reflective pose. It involves directed attention as a participant observer to the way things seem for you. If you do this, you should notice that your consciousness appears to you in an intimate, personal way. James conjoins this observation with a non-​phenomenological one. We do not have each other’s experiences in the same ways we have our own. He writes: In this room—​this lecture-​room say—​there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not . . . no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others and none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody’s thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s. (PP, 1.220–​1)

James begins with the simple observation that all thoughts are owned by particular organisms. They do not hang about disembodied, and they are grouped by belonging to the same personal consciousness. James continues, “No thought ever comes into the direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.” Another person cannot have my thoughts in the same first personal way I  have them. Only I  am hooked up to myself in the right way to directly experience my own mental states. The separation is not one of distance or time, or even of the content of the thought. We can both see and experience the same red apple in essentially the same way. But the experience is had separately by each of us. James notes that neither “similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thought together” (221). Rather the “barrier [is] of belonging to different personal minds” (221).

20

20

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

James describes our basic situation as individual minds among other minds. We each think only our own thoughts. For James, the barrier between thoughts describes our ordinary separateness. It is not a reason for skepticism or despair. The barrier is a condition of multiple minds existing; some thoughts belong to one and other thoughts to another in an “irreducible pluralism.”

Consciousness is in constant change The second feature of the conscious stream is this: Within each personal consciousness, states are always changing. To make this point James appeals to both the way things seem to the individual and theoretical considerations. First, a moment’s attention reveals that consciousness is constantly in flux. James observes, “Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged” (PP, 1.225). Any individual can confirm this by reflecting on his or her own conscious processes, noticing the succession of mental states, some more stable and some very transitory. He or she also might read some stream of consciousness writing and consider whether it strikes home. Joyce and Woolf ’s examples move at a pace where the succession of thoughts is quite rapid. They leave behind complete sentences as units of meaning. Their words flit by just as our quicker, unarticulated thoughts might. Molly Bloom thinks, “shall I wear a red yes . . . he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower . . . yes I said yes I will Yes.” Her questions do not complete themselves as her thoughts move forward faster than the questions can be formed. Her refrain “yes” adds layers of emotional reaction to her thoughts. James seems confident that his readers will agree consciousness is characterized by many changes of state. What readers may not recognize, he thinks, is that every state is a totally new one. Suppose we have a recurring dream image or a recurring desire for chocolate, or a recurring thought that 2+2 = 4. James does not accept people’s introspective judgments that a current state is the same as one they experienced in the past, at least not the exact same one. He discusses the greenness of grass. While one might think the greenness of the lawn that one sees is the same as the green that was observed a few minutes ago, one would be mistaken (PP, 1.223). Though James values introspection as a crucial psychological method, he overrides it in this case with considerations about the effects of context and daily life.6 James explains, “When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of it-​in-​those relations, a thought suffered with the consciousness of all that dim context” (PP, 1.227). James’s notices the effects of context on the stream. With these observations, James captures the ordinary truth that we bring previously acquired experience as background to each new experience. Literature is uniquely suited to provide evidence for James’s position. The same image used again in a narrative gets its force from the context in which it appears.

21

The Character of Consciousness

21

Further repetitions transform the image. The new contexts update the impact. Joyce’s short example achieves this effect with its variations on mountain flower: “Flower of the mountain yes,” “rose in my hair,” “yes my mountain flower.” In the pages leading up to the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, she thinks of roses, flowers in nature, the effect of having a roomful of roses, how nature is refreshing. Her thoughts flow, “flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning.” The flower imagery returns, “he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life.” By the end of the paragraph, the image of Molly herself as a mountain flower has a particular impact following these other flower images. The penumbra of surrounding images gives “a mountain flower” connotations that are specific to its appearance here. The effect of repetition and transformation of images increases when they reappear over the course of an entire work instead of a few pages. Though we judge recurring states to be the same, James argues that the states are constituted in part by their distinct contexts and so cannot be absolutely the same. He marshals general considerations about physiology to illustrate the point. He writes, “Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For an identical state to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain” (PP, 1.227). James tells us that this is a “physiological impossibility” (PP, 1.227). Small physiological changes occur in the brain over even very short intervals of time, and they rapidly accrue to add up to systematic change. In one way or another our systematic networks constitute thought and feeling, and the baseline states of the network affect how incoming signals are experienced. As systematic changes take place, present states vary, and new impressions (even if they could in some way be identical to previous impressions) enter and interact with the current states in different ways. Literature and physiology show us that analysis of consciousness does not rest simply on how things seem on first pass. How things seem bears reflective scrutiny. Sometimes reflection will shift the seemings, so we will admit that indeed what first seemed like an identical perception of a red apple or green grass is at most similar in certain, but not all respects. At other times the seeming will not shift, but we will have powerful theoretical reason to judge that the experiences are not exactly the same.

Sensible continuity The third feature of the stream, the one that makes it especially streamy, is that “within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous (PP, 1.231). This claim that thought feels continuous raises the question of whether consciousness is continuous. Many circumstances provide counterexamples to the objective continuity of consciousness, from anesthetics to fainting to sleep. James explains what is meant by continuity and how it persists despite all of the relevant objections. James takes the subjective continuity of consciousness to mean two things: “That even where there is a time-​gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together

22

22

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self ” and “that the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt” (PP, 1.231). Both aspects of continuity of consciousness are subjectively experienced within a consciousness. The first claim considers the ways that a personal consciousness experiences time gaps. The most common of these gaps is sleep. James considers the example of two people who wake up together in bed: “Each one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of thought which were broken by the sleeping hours” (PP, 1.232). Each consciousness reconnects to its own past and “never by mistake knits itself ” onto that of another. James notes, “He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives [another person’s states]” (PP, 1.232). Remembrance is a special state of direct feeling that we can only have in relation to our own thoughts. It comes with a sort of warmth and immediacy that is unmistakable, a quality that never appears in our relationship to other people’s thoughts. James writes, “This community of self is what the time-​gap cannot break in twain, and is why present thought, although not ignorant of the time-​gap can still regard itself as continuous with certain portions of the past (PP, 1.232). If there are periods in the mental life of true nonconsciousness, they are not accompanied by any phenomenological experience—​that is of course what makes them nonconscious. Even if we believe there are gaps in consciousness, this belief does not provide a subjective sense of gap. From a third-​person point of view, gaps in consciousness may be apparent, but a first-​person point of view does not sense them. The fact remains that “whatever it be for the onlooking psychologist, [consciousness] is for itself unbroken. It feels unbroken” (PP, 1.231). The continuity of consciousness is the feature of thought that most firmly expresses James’s metaphor of a stream. Flowing continuity is a process, reflecting James’s view that consciousness likewise is a process, not a substance.7 The river is not the empty riverbed, but the flow of water between the banks. The flow’s characteristics are dependent on the presence and the properties of the banks, but the river, like consciousness, is the flow. One of the important features of James’s metaphor is the lack of discrete components: “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ and ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is more naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (PP, 1.233). We might get confused and think that consciousness has joints. James diagnoses this confusion as a mix-​up between consciousness and the things consciousness thinks about. The things of which we are aware “are discrete and discontinuous; they do pass before us in a train or chain. But their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of thought that thinks them than they break the time and space in which they lie . . . The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood” (PP, 1.233). There are certainly cases where we experience drastic contrasts in the quality of consciousness from one moment to the next—​say a sudden thunderclap, a fire

23

The Character of Consciousness

23

alarm, or a startling explosion. These do not count as breaks in the stream, however. James writes, “Even into our awareness of the thunder the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-​breaking-​upon-​silence-​and-​contrasting-​with it” (PP, 1.234). Another reason we are inclined to think there are natural breaks in consciousness is that we attend to the states of consciousness with longer duration or more relevance to our primary concerns. We take notice of the states that concern such things as resume entries, baptisms, confirmations, graduations, and marriages. In another apt metaphor, James suggests, “Like a bird’s life, [consciousness] seems to be an alternation of flights and perchings” (236). We have a tendency to focus on the substantive perches of particular thoughts instead of on the transitory states that flow between them. These transitory flights are more evident in some moods—​of being spaced out or daydreaming—​but we still often miss their importance. James asks us to consider this thought: “We ought to say of 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 or a feeling of cold” (238). The feelings of and, but, and by emphasize the “penumbra,” the “fringe,” or the “halo of relations” that is carried in the flow and is partly constitutive of the substantive states. This halo of relations permeates the contents of consciousness. James introduces the idea of the fringe of consciousness in this way: The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and pots actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it. (PP, 1.246)

The fringe of consciousness echoes several of the themes that are pervasive throughout James’s characterization of thought. The fringe emphasizes the importance of context and history. It is a name for the ways our past states affect our present states, as we saw in the discussion of constant change. This includes a sort of residual feel of past thoughts, memories, and expectations for the future. The fringe also helps to explain individual differences in experience. Though you and I  may enter the same situation, we each have unique fringes, penumbras born of our distinctive histories, which determine in part the ways we will experience that situation. For example, it is not quite right to think that two people can have the same thought of a house, one suffused with nostalgia and one with annoyance. Two people can think of the same house, but their thoughts are different. We sometimes say that two people think the same thing when they reach the same conclusion. The conclusion is a “halting place,” but we have seen that a shared halting place can be accompanied

24

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

24

Z A

FIG. 28. Figure 1  William James, Figure 28, Principles of Psychology, Volume I

with different haloes. It is possible that two persons who assent to the same sentence or judgment may have reached the thought in such different ways that they really do not share exactly the same conclusion. This might be evident if one person suggests the natural next thought, what he thinks follows from the accepted conclusion, and the other person balks. James illustrates this with a doodle, shown in Figure 1 (his Figure 28 [PP, 1.260]): James explains the doodle this way: Let A be some experience from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, verbal images predominate, with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic, and rapid; others hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se, finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say, and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be led into his neighbor’s mind and to find out how different the scenery there was from that in his own. (PP, 1.260)

The fringe of consciousness plays a big part in conscious life, though both psychologists and individuals reflecting on their own experience often overlook it. It can also play an explanatory role in a number of other mental events. James explains, the idea of a penumbra or a halo can reinstate “the vague to its proper place in our mental life” (PP, 1.246). He mentions a selection of cases where the fringe is especially relevant:  the

25

The Character of Consciousness

25

tip-​of-​the-​tongue phenomena, anticipating the next word in a passage we are reading, and sensing or intuiting that some conclusion is rational and fitting (or misplaced). Without concepts to capture the transitory aspects of consciousness, these events are too subtle to catch. They are not substantive conscious states, but more complex, ephemeral ones. Even the substantive thoughts carry the effects of the fringe and are distinguishable from one another because the halo of relations around them makes them distinct.

Intentionality The fourth feature of the conscious stream is this: most mental states deal with objects independent of themselves. Perceptions, desires, hopes, and thoughts (even the inchoate ones) have contents; they are about something. I perceive that it is raining, wish the sun would return, I am scared that I’ll skid on the ice, I wonder whether I will have children, and if I do how they will fare. Aboutness or content is a marker of mental life. Humans can even go meta-​conscious and make first-​order thoughts or emotions the content of second-​order thoughts and emotions. I wonder whether my fear of public speaking is showing during this lecture. I am anxious about my fear of public speaking. The property of a mental state’s being about something, or having content, is called intentionality. This use of the word dates to medieval writing, with philosophical roots in Aristotle. It came back into circulation in the work of Franz Brentano, James’s contemporary. Brentano suggested that intentionality is the ineliminable mark of the mental. This is commonly referred to as “Brentano’s thesis.” We can take belief as a prime example of intentionality. Belief involves a distinction between mental action and mental contents. One component of believing is the action of my believing; this is what is in common whenever I believe, whether my belief is that today is Friday or that pink is unbecoming on redheads or that activity in the brain stem regulates the beating of the heart. The other component of these beliefs is their content, which can of course be radically diverse, as is apparent in these examples. Beliefs are not alone in having meaningful intentional content—​desires, hopes, expectations, memories, loves, hates, and even perceptions have intentional content. James embraces Brentano’s analysis of mental content and accepts that intentionality is a more-​or-​less essential feature of mentality. Exceptions to the universality of aboutness, and they are important, are tonal aspects of the stream, such as moods. Moods are often not about anything, such as when one’s consciousness is suffused with a dark or foreboding feeling or when everything seems brighter. James and Brentano agree that the feature of intentionality demarcates the difference between mental and nonmental phenomena; mental phenomena have content, or “aboutness” in a way that pots and pans (and the other parts of the nonmental world) lack. Thoughts have what some call intrinsic intentionality, whereas words and such have derived intentionality. Words are about what they are about because human practices make them so.

26

26

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

Consciousness is selective, attentive, and interested In his search for the universal features of normal adult consciousness, James contrasts an infant’s experience and an adult’s experience. He proposes that for a newborn the perceptual world is all noise and chaos—​what he called a “great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP, 1.462). This is not quite right according to contemporary developmental and child psychology, but James develops it this way:  “Infants must go through a long education of the eye and ear before they can perceive the realties which adults perceive. Every perception is an acquired perception” (PP, 2.724). When adults experience an orderly, comprehensive universe, they have developed selective attention. They have learned to move some of the world to figure and leave the rest as ground. As James describes this essential feature, consciousness “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” (PP, 1.220). James notes that our selective capacities begin with the ranges of our sense organs. Our eyes pick up a certain range of electromagnetic radiation that we experience as light, though the range of radiation waves extend above and below what we can sense. Kestrels hunt voles at night by seeing trails of vole urine thanks to their sensitivity to ultraviolet light. From all the signals that our sense organs process, selective attention “picks out certain ones as worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest” (PP, 1.274). Selective attention can be paid both consciously and unconsciously. James’s chapter “Habit” considers this at length. Sometimes effort and concentration is required to direct attention, as when I strain to hear only the conversation of my dinner partner at a crowded, noisy restaurant. At other times, the tuning out of concurrent stimuli is habitual, as I read on the bus and do not notice the beeping of the doors, the rumble of the motor, or the sound of passing trucks. I may be surprised when my own stop arrives. An individual’s selective attention is determined by his or her interests and habits, which are a dynamic outcome of socialization, history, and culture, as shaped by individual temperamental and personality dispositions and actions. Some of these interests are shared among humanity as a whole. Selective attention has been shaped by the experiences of our ancestors, attuned to threatening predators or oriented toward rewards. James suggests that, “in my mind and your mind the rejected portions and the selected portions of the original world-​stuff are to a great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not” (PP, 1.277). James seems to have in mind our shared sensory ranges and our shared language for ordinary objects in the realm of our actions. He also considers the great diversity of experience between species; he wonders, “How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-​fish, or crab!” (277) Nonetheless, James makes provision for the dramatic differences between individual experiences. He considers the contrast in experiences between four people who take the same tour through Europe: One will bring home only picturesque impressions—​costumes and color, parks and views and works of architecture, picture and statues. To another all this will

27

The Character of Consciousness

27

be non-​existent; and distances and prices, populations and drainage-​arrangement, door-​and window-​fastening, and other useful statistics will take their place A  third will give rich account of the theatres, restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective brooding as to tell little more than a few names of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience thereby. (PP, 1.275)

Though James seeks the universal features of normal, adult consciousness, he captures the very features that underpin the huge variety of human experiences. Our mental life is not a simple reaction to the world, as reflex theories suggest, in a causal chain of first experiencing the world, thinking about it, then acting towards it. (James discusses this in more detail in his underestimated paper, “Reflex Action and Theism”8). Rather we experience the world in accordance with our personal aims, interests, and expectations. We, in some sense, have chosen our experience by our history of selective habits.

Self, self consciousness, and literary connections James’s phenomenology describes five universal features of the stream of thought as it is experienced in the first person; these features make the incredible variety of individual experiences possible. Each personal consciousness experiences its own varying pace of constant change. Each has its own strong or weak sense of continuity, its own contents, its unique fringes and penumbras, and its own patterns of selective attention. James’s analysis of the character of consciousness has important implications for philosophy and literature. One philosophical implication is ethical:  James depicts a pluralistic universe of human thought and action. A psychology that promotes the view that every person experiences everything differently supports a social philosophy that takes individuality seriously and treats it respectfully.9 James’s phenomenology also undermines the standard Lockean view of the nature of persons.10 The Lockean view says that a person is constituted by his or her doings, his or her deeds, the motives and intentions from which these emanate, and the more-​ or-​less accurate memory of these resume entries. The view is forensic: according to Locke, a “person” is a legal and social concept crucial to the ways we assign praise and blame. In contrast, the Jamesian stream entails that even if the resume record is how others, including God, typically assess you, it is not all that makes you you. Your person includes the entire experienced stream—​the transitory states, the moods, the haloes, the penumbras, and the fringes. The phenomenology of the stream does not have any direct implications about the expressibility of the stream. Nonhuman animals may have some sort of streamy experience. But it is a great puzzle whether, and if so, how cats, dogs, and elephants, can or do represent their streams in the first person without language. Though an

28

28

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

individual’s unique stream makes that individual who he or she is, communicating the experience of the entire stream is more challenging than telling your Lockean story. James does not claim that each and every person will be able to narrate or describe his or her own stream. This raises interesting questions about stream of consciousness literature. How much of the conscious stream can be depicted in language? There are at least three ways that we might be limited in expressing the stream of thought in narration. First, we might prefer streams to be private. The contents of the stream may not be suitable for audience consumption, since an audience might find certain contents irrelevant. Second, there might be features of the stream that are ineffable. James gestures at this when he suggests that 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 or a feeling of cold” (PP, 1.238). He thinks we can expand our vocabulary to discuss transitory, relational states better. Even so, there might be some states that we do not have words for. Finally, an individual might be unable to find the words to describe what he or she is experiencing in some segment of the stream. States pass quickly, and the haloes of relations that connect them to previous states are numerous and complex. Some people are surely more talented than others at capturing the features of the stream in language. A gifted memoirist might find an audience because he or she has a good way of telling his or her Lockean story, the story of doing and deeds. Other talented authors find an audience for their compelling ways of depicting stream of consciousness. David Foster Wallace often describes his own cacophonous stream in quasi-​fictional memorial writing, as in Infinite Jest. We have contrasted Lockean and Jamesean styles of narration, but literary works combine techniques across a spectrum of narrative styles. The contrast does bring an interesting philosophical question to the fore:  is the stream of consciousness a purely first-​person phenomenon, or can we think about streams from a third-​person perspective? The question of perspective is less puzzling in the case of Lockean narration. We can imagine an autobiography and a biography that both emphasize doings and intentions. Though there would probably be interesting differences between them, both could coherently report a life in terms of actions, events, and motivations. Locke draws out this distinction when he considers the Judgment Day scenario; it is possible that a person’s account of him-​or herself and God’s account might diverge. Maybe it is possible to reconcile them or maybe God’s account is the authoritative one.11 In contrast with Locke, James focuses entirely on first-​person phenomenology. Yet some great stream of consciousness authors use a third-​person perspective. Consider this passage from Mrs. Dalloway, noticing the third-​person feature of the narration: Such fools we all are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. (4, my italics)

29

The Character of Consciousness

29

The rushing thoughts are Mrs. Dalloway’s very thoughts, even as the narration preserves some distance as an observer of Mrs. Dalloway. Literary narrative may have potential to cross the barrier between streams. Are Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts brought “into the direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than [her] own” (PP, 1.221)? George Saunders, a contemporary author who uses stream of consciousness techniques, discussed his use of shifting perspectives in a 2013 National Public Radio interview: “I do this thing that I call third-​person ventriloquist. It’s kind of a standard third-​person voice at first, and then, as quickly as I can, I try to get into the person’s thoughts, but then with the extra kicker of trying to use [or] restrict myself to his or her diction. When you’re thinking in somebody else’s voice, you sort of do become them . . . It gets really psychologically complex.”12 Saunders speaks of the perspective shifts in his writing just as if he crosses the barrier of personal minds. The image of ventriloquism suggests that he is the puppet; his characters throw their voices (their thoughts) and Saunders speaks them. Then the reader encounters those thoughts, and in the act of reading, the character’s voices are his or her own thoughts. The reader thinks, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.” James writes that “the breaches between [my thought and your thoughts] are the most absolute breaches in nature” (PP, 1.221). Yet he is confident that his description of consciousness will resonate with others; he thinks that when others introspect they will find the same features of the stream underlying their unique experiences. In what ways might we play in the waters of other people’s streams of thoughts? Joyce, Woolf, and Saunders, just to name a few, present compelling portraits of others’ streams of thoughts. What are the possible postures for us to have in relation to others, given that other people are streamy beings? The great stream of consciousness writers raise questions about whether those streams can ever converge. The stream of consciousness narrative mode explores the boundaries of mind and experiments in such a possible confluence.

Notes 1 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 643–​4. 2 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, 1925), 4. 3 See, e.g., Peter Childs, Modern Literature (London: Continuum, 2011), 75; Julian Hanna, Key Concepts in Modernist Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 77–​80. 4 William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 401. 5 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: 1981), 1.185. 6 See Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 155. 7 Owen Flanagan, “Consciousness as a Pragmatist Views It,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45. 8 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1979), 90–​112.

30

30

Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace

9 Owen Flanagan, Science of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 35. 10 See Owen Flanagan, “My Non-​narrative, Non-​forensic Dasein: The First and Second Self,” in Consciousness and the Self, ed. Jee Loo Liu and John Perry (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1.214–​40; Owen Flanagan, “Phenomenal and Historical Selves,” Grazer Philosophische Studien, 84 (2012): 217–​40; Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 11 Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, 134–​7. 12 George Saunders, “George Saunders on Absurdism and Ventriloquism in ‘Tenth of December,’ ” http://​www.npr.org/​2013/​01/​20/​169507764/​george-​saunders-​on-​ absurdism-​and-​ventriloquism-​in-​tenth-​of-​december (accessed September 1, 2015).

31

2

Redeeming the Wild Universe: William James’s Will to Believe John J. Stuhr

In 1897, William James published his first book of philosophy, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (WB).1 This collection of ten essays written between 1879 and 1896 followed two earlier volumes in psychology, The Principles of Psychology (PP)2 in 1890 and Psychology (Briefer Course) (PBC)3 in 1892. In his “Preface,” James expressed a theme and mood, a passion and attunement, which run through all his writings in philosophy. He asserted that no philosophy is more than a particular personal point of view, and that no point of view can fully illuminate or rationally explain our existence or render it a single fact: After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the 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 the other. The negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished. Something—​call it “fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will”—​is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded in your point of view, even though you be the greatest of philosophers. Something is always mere fact and givenness; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of view extant from which this would not be found to be the case. (WB, 6)

For those who recognize this multiplicity of points of view—​“pluralists”—​and those who take for their hypothesis that this multiplicity and partiality constitute “the permanent form of the world”—​“radical empiricists”—​James continued: There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. Real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real moral life, just as common-​sense conceives these things, may remain in empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt either to “overcome” or to reinterpret in monistic form. (WB, 6–​7)

32

32

John J. Stuhr

Unfortunately, it frequently has proven tempting to try to understand James’s philosophy from a supposedly single point of view for which his philosophy is rendered a single fact. It has proven tempting to try to understand James’s philosophy in terms of intellectual doctrines and shorthand labels for them. James may seem to have invited exactly this sort of project. He frequently developed his own philosophy in relation to his classification or typology of philosophies according to their claims—​often contrasting the doctrines within pairs of philosophies like that of empiricism and rationalism and of “tender-​minded” vs. “tough-​minded” thought in Pragmatism (P)4 or that of dualistic theism and pantheism and of monism and pluralism in A Pluralistic Universe (PU).5 Yet he also frustrated this effort to understand his philosophy by applying so many different, loose labels to it: “pragmatism,” “humanism,” “radical empiricism,” “neutral monism,” “pluralism,” “common sense,” “pantheism,” and “supernaturalism.” In this context, intellectualist friends of James have argued that all the various doctrines are sound and either cohere or amount to the same thing. Meanwhile, intellectualist enemies have attempted to demonstrate that James’s many supposed doctrines and isms are not sound or that they do not cohere and that, for example, to maintain James’s pragmatism (and his admiration for Charles Peirce and John Dewey) one must abandon radical empiricism or that to hold on to humanism one must reject faith in an unseen world (and James’s admiration of Benjamin Blood and his criticism of Walt Whitman). Let us proceed in a more Jamesian manner, understanding, as James put it, that even if we insist on classifying every thinker and labeling every worldview, still “individuality outruns all classification” (PU, 7)  and so all intellectualist efforts at capturing a philosopher’s vision are bound to fail. This insight in mind, my thesis is simple: To understand James’s philosophy, it is crucial to understand James’s general account of philosophies as personal points of view. And, it is crucial to understand James’s own personal point of view and vision—​a vision presented nowhere more vividly, fully, and effectively than in The Will to Believe. For James, a philosophy is not the result of supposedly pure reason directed at supposedly absolute, universal, and experience-​independent facts. Instead, philosophies are reflections of personal characters and personal decisions—​local decisions in which reasoning is irreducibly volitional and passional and gives rise to worldviews that are constituted and permeated by preference and desires, feelings and moods, affinities and attunements. To view a philosophy as the product of a reason separated from will and emotion is to take leave of our actual lives and world. It is make-​believe. This view of the nature of philosophy is manifest through all of James’s writings.6 In Pragmatism, for example, he described philosophy in terms of “attitudes,” “temperament,” a personal “feeling” of the universe and a “total push and pressure of the cosmos,” and as “our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means” (P, 31, 11–​15, 24, 9). And he claimed that philosophers frequently try to hide from others and from themselves the fact that this is so: Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no

33

Redeeming the Wild Universe

33

conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises . . . There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned . . . What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is—​and oh so flagrantly—​is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. (P, 11, 24)

Philosophies irreducibly have intensely “personal flavor” and “temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies and always will” (P, 24). Similarly, in A Pluralistic Universe, James described a philosophy as a “vision” and “expression” of one’s “intimate character,” as an individual “loyalty” to one’s own world, and as a personal mode “of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one’s total character and experience, and on the whole preferred—​there is no other truthful word—​as one’s best working attitude (PU, 14, 10, 14–​15). Calling different philosophies “accidents of personal vision,” James asked each philosopher to avow this fact and to stop claiming that his or her “conclusions are the only logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason” (PU, 10). He stressed what he took to be a shared hope: “We crave alike to feel more truly at home with it [the universe], and to contribute our mite to its amelioration. It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest men asunder” (PU, 11). James movingly set forth this view of philosophy throughout The Will to Believe. In the first essay, “The Will to Believe,” James considered “the actual psychology of human opinion” and the bases of belief. He observed that “when we look at certain facts it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions” while “when we look at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say”—​and so, from this perspective it may “seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will” (WB, 15). And from this perspective, it will seem “wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” no matter what one may desire or feel (WB, 18). I cannot justifiably believe, for example, that I am the world’s greatest basketball player simply because I strongly desire to be the world’s greatest basketball player. You cannot justifiably believe that Santa Claus really exists just because you would be very happy if you lived in a world that included Santa Claus. We cannot justifiably believe that our parents will never age or die merely because we love them and love having them in our lives. In such cases, as James acknowledged, our desires and our passions do not constitute sufficient rational basis for beliefs we may will or want to believe. However, what does constitute sufficient evidence, James argued, is anything but reason pure and independent of will and sentiment. What we count as evidence and justification, what right we have to believe when we lack sufficient evidence for justification of belief, and what makes hypotheses living or dead for us, James continued, is our “willing nature.” Our willing nature, for James, meant “all such factors of belief as fear and hope,

34

34

John J. Stuhr

prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set” (WB, 18). We believe, James wrote, on the basis of some “authority” and the “prestige” of opinions that flow from it, on the basis of “faith in someone else’s faith”: Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other—​what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! Certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another. (WB, 19)

As a result, James concluded, “pure insight and logic are not the only things that produce our beliefs” and that “our non-​intellectual nature does influence our convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions that run before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the previous passional work has been already in their own direction” (WB, 19–​20). James’s point here was not that our desires and our feelings simply trump our reason. It was not that volitions and passions produce beliefs and theories but that reason does not. It was not that we should accept some sharp dualism between reason and the passions and then come down wholly on the side of the passions against a philosophical tradition that largely has sided with reason. James’s point here was not irrationalist or dualist; it was not an attack on reason and a defense of cravings and sentiments. Instead, it was a denial of all reason/​passion dualisms and a rejection of the understanding of reason—​pure reason, reason independent of experience, reason universal and complete rather than perspectival—​that results from this dualism. It was the assertion that rationality itself is a sentiment. In “The Sentiment of Rationality,” James claimed that rationality is recognized by its “subjective marks”: “A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest . . . lively relief and pleasure . . . This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness—​this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it—​is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality.” Modes of reasoning and “conceiving the cosmos” that are marked by this fluency and sufficiency “produce the sentiment of rationality” (WB, 57–​58). This sentiment of rationality can be produced theoretically or practically. Theoretically, it is produced in large part by simplification and generalization—​the reduction of manifoldness to simplicity and the grouping of diversity into “monotony.” James called this a passion for parsimony, a labor-​saving economy of means in thought, named it “the philosophic passion par excellence,” and gave many everyday examples of it at work (WB, 58–​59). But, James continued, the sentiment of rationality is also produced theoretically by a “sister passion” for distinguishing and differentiating—​a passion “to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.” This passion for particularity and difference, James continued, constitutes a preference for “any amount of incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal

35

Redeeming the Wild Universe

35

details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of conceiving things” that dissolves, obscures, or overlooks full concreteness (WB, 59). James recognized that these two theoretical passions—​clearness and simplicity, particularity and generalization—​set up rival claims on all thinkers—​the philosophic attitude of each thinker determined by the relative balance of these two passions. All philosophies are compromises of one sort or another between these two passions. And each of these compromises proceeds by classifying diverse items under a single heading in virtue of some common essence. All these compromises, however, are marked by two failings. First, they are always incomplete: When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained the connection of the facts A and B by classing both under their common attribute x, it is obvious that we have really explained only so much of these items as is x . . . so far as A and B contain l, m, n, and o, p, q, respectively, in addition to x, they are not explained by x . . . All those data [l, m, n and o, p, q] that cannot be analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal principle [x], remain as independent kinds or natures, associated with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship with it. (WB, 60–​61)

“Hence,” James concluded, ‘the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations.” They are not only always incomplete, but also “a most miserable and inadequate substitute for the fullness of the truth,” a “monstrous abridgment of life,” an “absolute loss and casting out of the real.” And this is why, he proclaimed, “so few human beings truly care for philosophy” (WB, 61). Nothing is the equivalent of life but full, lived life—​life as actually lived and not merely thought. If philosophers honestly recognized this point, James suggested, they would understand that “the bottom of being is left logically opaque to us”—​whether we be “boors” who immediately admit this fact or philosophers who construct systems of classification and unification that, nevertheless, are not “secure from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why?” (WB, 64). Philosophers would also understand that their theories are not universal claims to grasp reality as a single fact (devoid of otherness), but, instead, particular ways of classifying things for particular purposes. They would become instrumentalists or pragmatists filled with “ontologic wonder”: Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose. Conceptions, “kinds,” are teleological instruments. No abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. The interest of a theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but one of a thousand human purposes. (WB, 62)

The sentiment of rationality can also be produced in a second way—​a practical rather than a theoretical way. To produce in practice the fluency and sufficiency of the sentiment of rationality, James asserted, a philosophy first and foremost must “banish uncertainty from the future” (WB, 67). If it is to produce strong feelings of ease, peace,

36

36

John J. Stuhr

relief, and being accounted for, a philosophy cannot leave us with a “haunting sense of futurity” that makes us uneasy in the present. But this is the nature of our practical lives: We do not know what will come next, but we know it will be novel and we also know that we have not classified the novel, the strange, circumstances fraught with peril or advantage. Novelty, James observed, becomes an irritant and custom functions as a sedative. And this holds for philosophy too: “An ultimate datum, even though it be logically unrationalized, will, if its quality is such as to define expectancy, be peacefully accepted by the mind; whilst if it leave the least opportunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extent cause mental uneasiness if not distress” and fail to produce the sentiment of rationality (WB, 68). James cited many, many examples: Take again the notion of immortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone of every philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of saying that the determination of expectancy is the essential factor in rationality? The wrath of science against miracles, of certain philosophers against the doctrine of free-​will, has precisely the same root—​dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may rout our prevision or upset the stability of our outlook . . . In spite of the acutest nihilistic criticism, men will therefore always have a liking for any philosophy which explains things per substantiam. (WB, 69)

No philosophy, James concluded, can triumph—​can be viewed as rational—​if it emphatically denies the possibility of gratifying the desire of having expectancy defined (WB, 70). If defining expectancy is a necessary condition for a philosophy’s rationality in practice, it is not a sufficient condition of that rationality. To produce in practice the sentiment of rationality, a philosophy must not simply provide an account of the real future, but also define that future in a manner congenial to and congruous with our powers and aims. In a passage that may be considered a kind of key to his entire philosophy, James wrote that “the intellect is built up of practical interests” and that cognition “is incomplete until discharged in act” (WB, 72): For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it must define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers. A  philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its ultimate principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers . . . Incompatibility of the future with their desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself . . . But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object whatever to press against. 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 . . . This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely brought home to consciousness, it produces a kindred horror. In nightmare we have motives to

37

Redeeming the Wild Universe

37

act but no power; here we have powers, but no motives. A nameless unheimlichkeit comes over us at the thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies. The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its knower, which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the doer. We demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. (WB, 70–​71)

All great periods of expansion and revival, James summarized, have said to us: “The inmost nature of reality is congenial to powers which you possess” (WB, 73). We cannot specify in advance for all persons just what constitutes this congeniality because “we” may, and frequently do, differ from one another in our hopes, powers, undertakings, and views about what kind of reality sustains and is congenial to them. As soon as we make clear the nature of the sentiment of rationality in practice, then personal temperament—​the multiple, different personal temperaments of different persons—​takes center stage. As James observed, although all men and women “will insist on being spoken to by the universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the same way” (WB, 75). Rather than insisting there is simply one rational, correct philosophy, we should insist that in practice there legitimately might be as many different rational philosophies as there are different personal temperaments. The result is “eternal variation”—​philosophical pluralism. Because in practice (despite the “pretension” of philosophers with “systems of absolute certainty”) no single philosophy can fully and finally and for all establish itself, it remains theoretically possible to doubt any one of them. This means, James crucially realized, no one holds a philosophy on the basis that it alone has been proven theoretically possible. Instead, everyone holds a philosophy on the basis of faith: “Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance” (WB, 76). Against critics who view faith as unscientific or “illogical” or “shameful,” James argued that in practice it is not only legitimate but also unavoidable. It is unavoidable because we must act prior to and without full knowledge of the consequences of our action. It is unavoidable because we live forward and know only backward. “The only escape from faith,” James wrote with some exasperation, “is mental nullity . . . We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypotheses.” He added: “The only difference is that while some hypothesis can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages . . . The longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows” our faith in that hypothesis (WB, 78, 79). James held this view whether the hypothesis in question concerned engineering, chemistry, biology, and physics; or God, immortality, morality, and freedom. Even though doubt is theoretically possible, we believe; we put our working hypotheses to use; we act on, and in, faith. This, then, is James’s general account of philosophies: a philosophy is an expression of some personal temperament and it constitutes some particular working hypotheses or worldview. To the extent that this philosophy is marked by feelings of ease, peace,

38

38

John J. Stuhr

fluency, and sufficiency, it produces the sentiment of rationality. These feelings and this rationality exist not so much in, and for, theory—​life is irreducibly opaque to our thought and logic—​as in, and for, practice—​when expectancy congruous with, and congenial to, our powers is defined and provided. Different philosophies will seem congenial and succeed in this for different persons—​philosophy is forever a site of variation and pluralism. In practice, however, all successful philosophies are irreducibly matters of faith—​matters of actions undertaken and lives lived without advance guarantee or advance confirmation. In this light, what is James’s own philosophy? What philosophy did he believe defined expectancy in a manner congruous with his powers and congenial to his aims and demands? In the face of theoretically possible doubt, in what did he have faith? The Will to Believe makes evident four central articles of faith, commitments that appear again and again in James’s later philosophical writings. 1. Something really must be at stake in this struggle. There must be real goods and real bads, there must be real ideals and real butchering of ideals, there must be real triumphs and real tragedies, and there must be moments temporarily seized and opportunities permanently lost. There must be real possibilities, including possibilities for amelioration. This must be an open, in-​the-​making universe, and we must have a future not yet determined or complete. We must be free—​freedom being the most basic precondition for the real possibility of our exercise of genuine powers, the very condition of our really having powers at all. 2. Life is a genuine struggle and strenuous engagement that demands our creative and transformative energies and powers for its improvement and redemption. The world by itself is without moral value, without goods, bads, and obligations. The exercise of our powers brings into being new and real values, new and real truths, and new and real worlds; the good, the true, and the real are not ready-​made awaiting our discovery and gaze, but, instead, are matters of our ongoing creation and recreation if only we take up this challenge. 3. The universe must support the free exercise of our powers in our life struggles. For James, this support is supplied sufficiently fully only in a universe with a divine thinker, only in a universe with a God, only in a universe that includes an unseen spiritual world, a supernatural order, a world with infinite perspective. Faith in the existence of this universe is, for those who have this faith, wholly rational and fully justified in practice (and the pretend logic of atheistic, agnostic, and positivistic philosophers never proves otherwise). 4. So that this faith in an unseen, supernatural, spiritual, infinite order of the universe does not stand at odds with faith in the creative efficacy of our individual powers, James believed that in some cases our faith brings this universe into being, that there are truths and facts made true and factual only by, and after, our faith. These four themes run through all the essays in The Will to Believe. “The Dilemma of Determinism” makes strikingly evident the first theme. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” richly illustrates the second theme. “Is Life Worth Living?” clearly

39

Redeeming the Wild Universe

39

develops the third theme. And, both “The Sentiment of Rationality” and “The Will to Believe” centrally express the fourth theme. James began “The Dilemma of Determinism” by disclaiming “all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true,” and instead announcing that he hopes to lead others “to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true” (WB, 115). In this context, James characterized determinism as the view that “those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what other parts shall be” (WB, 117) and, thus, the rejection of the reality of possibilities. By contrast, indeterminism “denies the world to be one unbending fact” and admits possibilities in excess of actualities (WB, 118). Because the supposed debate between determinists and indeterminists is thus about the reality of possibilities rather than actual facts—​ and, indeed, the determinist and indeterminist do not disagree about actual facts—​and because James held that science draws conclusions based only on facts, he concluded that no amount of factual knowledge that something actually happened gives “us the least grain of information as to whether another thing might or might not have happened in its place or facts”: “If we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the possibility-​question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up” (WB, 119). In this light, James recast the issue as a practical one and, thus, as a difference in temperament and faith. Determinists—​that is, those with deterministic sentiments—​he suggested, feel antipathetic toward the notion of chance—​crazy unreason, the rejection of intelligible laws, something that is not the unconditional property of the whole, and ambiguity and uncertainty rather than expectancy about the future. Indeterminists—​ that is, those with indeterminist sentiments—​feel antipathetic toward the notion of a universe in which some part “can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the whole” (WB, 124). And they feel no intimacy with both the possible consequences of determinism. The first possible consequence is pessimism. In the face of problems, loss, suffering, abuse, deprivation, intolerance, injustice, war, and horrific and frightful atrocities, determinists must conclude that these things could not have been different, but that it would have been better if they had been different. James explained, “Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place in which what ought to be is impossible—​in other words, as an organism whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw.” James referred to a murder: Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and wise, into a larger regret. It is absurd to regret the murder alone. Other things being what they are, it could not be different. What we should regret is the whole frame of things of which the murder is one member. I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if, being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at all. (WB, 126)

This suggests a second possible consequence of determinism:  an escape from pessimism by forsaking judgments of regret and all other moral judgments. For a determinist who takes this path, the universe is not good, bad, or some mixture of both.

40

40

John J. Stuhr

Instead, the universe, indifferent in itself, simply is; it is not good, bad, or less good than it should be or a site of moral progress or regress; it just is. Of this view, James wrote: The world must not be regarded as a machine whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are. Not the doing either of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them . . . For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary notion of external things being good or bad in themselves? Can murders and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of matter, be bad without anyone to feel their badness? And could paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by which goodness was perceived. Outward goods and evils seem practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in getting moral judgments made about them. (WB, 129–​30)

This subjectivism in theory fosters fatalism in practice. Persons who lack energy and disposition to strive become wholly passive—​there is no reason to strive when there is no possibility of making better. And persons with energies and will to act become wholly reckless—​there is no reason to refrain from doing anything when there is no possibility that doing something else is better. For subjectivism in practice, nothing can be bettered; everything is permitted. As James noted, this does not disprove determinism at the theoretical level—​or prove it at the theoretical level. Because it is not possible to theoretically prove either position, we must recognize limits “foreign and opaque to our understanding” and thus recognize “the only escape is by the practical way” (WB, 134). For persons with pluralistic temperaments and worldviews, James stressed, indeterminism stands as the only way of representing them: For in the view of that philosophy the universe belongs to a plurality of semi-​ independent forces, each one of which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations of the rest . . . What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way—​nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot understand the belief than an act is bad, without regret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world. Only then is it other than a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it must forever after mourn. (WB, 135)

Indeterminism and a “pluralistic, restless universe” will not be acceptable, James realized, “to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost,” to an absolutist mind, to

41

Redeeming the Wild Universe

41

persons who are at home only after the “tragic reality” of the world is transformed into “an insincere melodramatic exhibition” (WB, 136). For a pluralist, on the other hand, it is indeterminism that in practice is marked by the sentiment of rationality—​and there is no theory or fact that compels pluralists to deny indeterminism and its world of real possibilities, real values, and real desires and strivings. As James put it in his 1882 “On Some Hegelianisms”: “In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable hypothesis”—​“Hegel’s own logic, with all the senseless hocus-​pocus of its triads”: notwithstanding” (WB, 216). In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James set forth (seven years after “The Dilemma of Determinism”) a radically empirical, radically relational account of these values, desires, and strivings. After claiming that our values originate in many sources, both our nurture and our nature, he asserted the terms central to morality—​ such as “good,” “bad,” and “obligation”—​“mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support.” Rather, “they are objects of feeling and desire which have no foothold or anchorage in Being apart from the existence of actually living minds” (WB, 150). This means that values—​goods and bads—​are not properties of things that exist independently of us. Rather, goods and bads are relations between things and the interests or demands of sentient beings. Values are made, not simply found. There was, for James, no need for Ezra Pound’s 1934 modernist advice, “make it new”; there is no other alternative to remaking and making anew; the only questions is which new to make. To say, for example, that a sailboat is good is not to assert the sailboat in itself possesses some property. Instead, it is to say the sailboat satisfies someone’s interest. For one concerned with purchase price, to say that the sailboat is good is to say that it is not too expensive. For one concerned with competition, to say that the sailboat is good is to say that it is very fast on open water. And for one concerned with environmental sustainability, to say that the sailboat is good is to say it was manufactured in nonpolluting ways using renewable materials. There is, James wrote, “no single point of view . . . from which the values of things can be unequivocally judged” (WB, 146). In addition, it is important to understand that James viewed truth as just “one species of good” and so his pragmatic theory of truth is simply one species or application of his more general account of values: “The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief” and it is “only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving” (P, 42, 106). Just as these interests may conflict for, or within, a given individual—​the very same person might want a sailboat that is both inexpensive and fast (even if fast sailboats are expensive)—​so too interests may conflict among different individuals—​one person may want to build a marina while another may want to ban waterfront development while a third may approve of a new marina but only if it is open to a certain class of people. In the face of competing claims and obligations, plural and often opposed demands, and the necessity of “butchering” “some part of the ideal” (WB, 154), James observed: Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of the ethical system . . . No one of the measures . . . has, however, given general satisfaction

42

John J. Stuhr

42

. . . so that after all, in seeking for a universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most universal principle—​that the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand. The demand may be for anything under the sun. There is really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single law. The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those of physics are . . . Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can? (WB, 152–​3, 155)

And he added: The course of history is nothing but the story of men’s struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive order. Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands—​that and that only is the path of peace! . . . [And yet] there is nothing final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without producing others louder still. . . On the whole, then, we must conclude then that no philosophy of ethics is possible in the old-​fashioned absolute sense of the term. Everywhere the ethical philosopher must wait on facts. (WB, 155–​7)

If the moral philosopher, the theorist, must wait, one who would live a moral life, the practitioner, cannot wait. He or she must act (and, as James often pointed out, not to act is also to act). From this practical standpoint, James characteristically focused on temperament and mood rather than doctrine. Calling the difference between them the “deepest difference practically, in the moral life of man,” James described and differentiated the “easy-​going” mood—​a “shrinking from present ill” and the “strenuous” mood—​an indifference to present ill in order to pursue a greater, more distant ideal (WB, 159–​60). Precisely because satisfying as many demands as possible and inventing some manner to realize a more and more inclusive order are hard work with no guarantee of success in one’s lifetime—​because this hard work will be undertaken only by persons in the strenuous mood rather than the easy-​going mood—​ James realized that the moral life demands a philosophy that effectively calls forth the strenuous mood. How is it possible in practice to look past present ills and to call forth or energize the strenuous mood? For James, this was the fundamental, most pressing practical moral question. In answering this question, James passed from what I have identified as his second major article of faith—​that our lives create values and that these values have no independent or advance existence—​to his third—​that there is an unseen and infinite perspective, a God. James replied that the strenuous mood “needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, and indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal

43

Redeeming the Wild Universe

43

of some one of the higher fidelities like justice, truth, or freedom” (WB, 160). And he added: This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite scale of values fails to open up. Many of us . . . would openly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened in us by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal of the religion of humanity . . . This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the vacuum beyond . . . When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of the claimants the infinite perspective opens up. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now being to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance . . . Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character will on the battlefield of human history always outwear the easy-​going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall. (WB, 160–​1)

For James, this is the pragmatic, practical meaning of belief in God: the fullest arousal of the strenuous mood. As he put it in his 1881 “Relex Action and Theism”: “Infra-​theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man’s practical action” (WB, 106). And when each of us is challenged to take up the strenuous mood, “it is simply our total character and personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-​called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life.” “From this unsparing practical ordeal,” he concluded, “no professor’s lectures and no array of books can save us” (WB, 162). In “Is Life Worth Living,” James placed related but different emphasis on this practical reasonableness of belief in the reality of infinite perspective and God. Rather than arguing that belief in God supports directly the strenuous mood necessary for moral life, he argued that it constitutes a remedy to pessimism, melancholy, and contemplation of suicide—​and in this way sustains a strenuous mood in life.7 After noting that some full-​fledged temperamental optimists—​James thought Walt Whitman was one—​simply never feel this pessimism and never seriously consider that life is not worth living, James sought to sweep away “certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith compressed” in the lives of many people “pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals them” (WB, 40). This pessimism—​James called it “the nightmare view of life” (WB, 41)—​has its reflective source in “the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is” (WB, 40–​1). A mind pent in by the hard facts of science but at the same time “craving for communion” while nonetheless realizing “how desperately difficult it is to construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or poetically”—​is

44

44

John J. Stuhr

a mind marked by “inner discord and contradiction” (WB, 41). It may be possible to resolve this inner discord by holding on to the hard fact of science and giving up the desire to read nature religiously. But is it possible, James asked, to discover and believe in “supplementary facts” about nature “which permit the religious reading to go on” (WB, 41)? James thought there were two ways to do this: a naturalistic way and a supernatural way. The first way, naturalistic, and only partly successful—​James realized it might seem “a poor half-​way stage”—​is “instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor” (WB, 48) where the loving and admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses still respond to fit appeals . . . It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us. (WB, 45)

To the suicidal person, James advised, one can appeal not in the name of the universe’s general and abstract evil, but in the name of the particular, individual, local evils that are one’s own business. To the suicidal, pessimistic, melancholic person, “you can appeal—​and appeal in the name of the very evils that make his heart sick there—​to wait and see his part of the battle out.” If one has “a normally constituted heart,” you can appeal, he wrote in overtly sexist language, to “manliness and pride” (WB, 48, 47). For James, there is a second, fuller, more successful way to resolve the contradiction between the human demand for meaning and value and the seemingly value-​ free scientific account of nature devoid of “harmonious spiritual intent” and “mere weather” (WB, 49). At its core, this way is religious belief in “supplementary facts” about the universe—​facts that supplement our scientific account of nature. It is belief in the supernatural, belief that “the so-​called order of nature, which constitutes this world’s experience, is only one portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists.” He called this belief “religious faith” and added that “one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal” (WB, 48). Is belief in the supernatural rational? Do we—​do persons temperamentally so inclined—​have a right to believe that there is a supernatural order of this sort? James answered:  “I wish to make you feel . . . that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again” (WB, 49). On what basis did James think we have a right to believe in this supernatural order? How would belief in this order be any more justified than a child’s belief in the existence of unicorns, Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy—​or, in less happy moments, orcs, dementors, or monsters under the bed or in the closet? Belief in the supernatural will not seem rational, James realized, to persons who idolize science, equate rationality as such with science, affirm not simply scientific method but full-​blown scientism, and fail to realize that “our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea” (WB, 50). Such persons will advise that we hold no beliefs and take no action

45

Redeeming the Wild Universe

45

without sensible, scientific evidence. This may sound fine in theory, but it is not even possible in practice in all cases that demand our action. James wrote that neutrality—​ withholding belief—​is “outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital”: Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not . . . And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. (WB 50, 51)

And so James called the scientistic duty to remain neutral when neutrality is not possible in practice “the most ridiculous of commands” and one that scientific practice itself constantly violates (WB, 51). Scientific practice is also a kind of faith; it is not the triumph of the intellect over the passions, but merely the triumph of one sort of passion over other sorts (WB, 30). James stressed: But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic “thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence” is simply an expression (free to anyone to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind. (WB, 51)

This passage and line of thought raise two questions. First, if one accepts James’s argument, how is belief in a supernatural order different from a child’s belief in the Easter bunny or an adult’s license to conceive of the world in whatever way leads to happiness? Second, granting that some people do have needs to believe in a reality beyond the visible, natural world, how is this need a sign that there is an invisible universe? James directly addressed these two questions both in the final pages of “Is Life Worth Living?” and, a year later in 1896, in his well-​known “The Will to Believe.” In response to the first question, James limited “the right to believe” in two ways. First, he confined it to particular practical situations in which we are confronted with a “genuine” option—​an option that has two “live” hypotheses; a “forced” character—​ because one or the other of its alternatives are not avoidable; and a “momentous quality”—​an irreversibility, uniqueness, and large significance (WB, 14–​15). Second,

46

46

John J. Stuhr

he restricted his thesis to cases in which the issue cannot be resolved on intellectual grounds—​ that is, “passional tendencies and volitions which run before” belief, rationality itself being a sentiment (WB, 19–​20): 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 the question open,” is itself a passional decision—​just like deciding yes or no—​and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. (WB, 20)

Just as James claimed that our different values are linked to our different feelings and strivings, so too he asserted that our different accounts of reality—​for example, a naturalistic account or a supernatural account—​are linked to our passions and wills and that “no concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon” (WB, 22). Each person’s conviction that his or her evidence is really objective “is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot”: There is this—​there is that; there is indeed nothing which someone has not thought absolutely true whilst his neighbor deemed it absolutely false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or no. (WB, 23)

And, as a result, James argued that we must judge truth claims not on the basis of their origins but on the basis of their results, of where belief in them leads, and of the extent to which they issue in experiences that continue to confirm them. James thus argued that his thesis about “the right to believe” extends to all moral questions. In all such cases, he contended, we must act on the basis of faith in what might or could happen with our action. And although we have no advance guarantee or the sort of certainty that some skeptics demand, it is only the faith that leads to our action that makes possible success. So too James argued that his “right to believe” thesis extends to religious questions. When religious issues present themselves as genuine options, James argues that we have no advance knowledge of truth and certainty, and so must decide on the basis of our passions and wills. If these decisions are confirmed in an individual’s experience, they are in consequence true. And he added that we thus must reject as irrational any “rule of thinking” that prevents us “from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there” (WB, 31–​32). James did not argue that religious belief—​belief in the supernatural—​is theoretically true; rather, he argued that there can be no theoretical objection to those who adopt in practice religious beliefs that continue to be confirmed in their experience and that continue to produce feelings of fluency and sufficiency—​the sentiment of rationality. This at last brings into sharp relief the fourth major theme that runs through James’s philosophy: The view, beyond the claim of a “right to believe,” that sometimes faith in a fact helps create that fact, that belief plays a part in bringing into being its own

47

Redeeming the Wild Universe

47

object, and that in practice our faith, like any other action, is an efficacious force in this in-​the-​making universe. James gave everyday examples of this phenomenon in our personal actions: the mountain climber who successfully crosses a crevasse in part because he believes he can do so, the friend whose belief that another person will be his friend helps bring about a deep friendship, the man who has faith that he will receive a promotion at work and thus strenuously and at some risk sacrifices in ways that verify his faith and produce his promotion. (Yes, in James’s examples, the striving, strenuous agents are always men.) James summarized:  “The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence” (WB 28); “our faith beforehand is an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true” (WB, 53). Moreover, James argued that this—​faith in a fact helping to create the fact—​takes place “in great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith” (WB, 29). He began with what he called a “trivial example”: Just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn—​so, here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-​nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance. (WB, 31)

Trust and action, like distrust and inaction (which are simply trust in other things and action in other ways), turn one possible universe—​one of multiple “maybes”—​ into an actual universe (WB, 54). From the moral point of view, James wrote, life is what we make of it: “Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition” (WB, 54). Will a faith in an unseen, supernatural world verify itself? James’s answer was straightforward:  maybe. Our lives through and through are maybes. There is no theoretical, abstract, or non-​passional basis—​even if that basis “disguises” itself “in scientific plumes,” as James observed in “Great Men and Their Environment” (WB, 189)—​to conclude that life is irrational or unjustified; there is every reason to conclude that this life is rational and valuable for those persons for whom this belief works, for whom it issues in the sentiment of rationality. James declared himself one of those persons: For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight—​as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem. (WB, 55)

48

48

John J. Stuhr

This faithfulness, as James pointed out in his “Preface” to The Will to Believe, is anything but reckless. It is the open-​eyed, self-​aware right of individuals to employ personal faiths at personal risks, risks that no one fully escapes (WB, 8). This, then, is James’s universe and his philosophy: 1. life with real possibilities, an open universe, a site for melioristic action for those who have faith and exercise their powers in action; 2. a radically empirical moral universe with relational goods and bads and obligations, goods created rather than ready-​made in our lives, and creation that is strenuous and demands a universe congenial to our strivings; 3. faith in a universe with infinite perspective and a spiritual, supernatural dimension, a faith that is not irrational in theory, a faith that works in practice; and 4. faith that is itself creative, transformative, and productive in part of its own facts, a faith that is a cocreator of the universe. At infrequent times James may seem to have laid down the law for others. His claim, for example, that a universe without God is a symphony played on a few poor octaves and one that cannot sufficiently motivate the strenuous mood can sound too sweeping and not sufficiently attuned to the different temperaments of more secular folks whom he labels instinctive optimists or this-​worldly naturalists. But, unlike most philosophers, James did not claim that his philosophy was the one right or one true philosophy. And he did not claim that philosophical theorizing proves anything by itself. Instead, he claimed his philosophy was his personal philosophy—​an invitation to his readers to find resonance with their own lives and worldviews. Seen from one perspective, this is a thoroughgoing pluralism that invites all persons to develop their own, always-​personal philosophies. Seen from a different perspective, this is an empiricism and individualism that denies that one’s experience can be trumped by other people’s theories. This is a message that very much needs to be heard and acted on today, and, in the spirit of this message, it is appropriate to put it in James’s words—​ his own words but never concluding, final words: We act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom—​then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; 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. (WB, 33)

Notes 1 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 2 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

49

Redeeming the Wild Universe

49

3 William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 4 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 11–​15. 5 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 14–​23. 6 See John J. Stuhr, “Looking Toward Last Things: James’s Pragmatism beyond Its First Century,” in 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy, ed. John J. Stuhr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 197–​8. And see John J. Stuhr, Pragmatic Fashions: Pluralism, Democracy, Relativism and the Absurd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 30–​59. 7 See Stuhr, Pragmatic Fashions, 206–​21.

50

51

3

The Psychology of Religion: William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience Michael Bacon

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE), William James takes as his subject neither theology nor ecclesiastical institutions but the experiences of individual men and women. James draws on a rich variety of personal testimony taken from journal entries and autobiographies, which he intertwines with commentary. The book began as a series of twenty Gifford Lectures that James gave in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, with the text published at the time the series was being completed. The Gifford Lectures were established in the late nineteenth century with the aim of fostering conversation about natural theology at a time when scientific discoveries, most significantly Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as a general increase in awareness of a diversity of cultural beliefs and practices, had led many people to question their faith in Christianity. This background quite clearly informed James’s thinking as he prepared his lectures. James closes the first lecture with the thought that “the only novelty that I can imagine this course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving mass”1 (29). However, this modest claim understates the originality of James’s project and the approach he takes to it. This lies in his combination of insights from his work in psychology and philosophy. The lectures that constitute Varieties were originally conceived as two halves, the first ten providing descriptions of religious experiences grouped around the categories conversion, saintliness, and mysticism; and the second offering philosophical reflection on them. As James came to write the lectures, the intended first half expanded to take up the majority. In them he explains religious experiences as resulting from particular mental states, and his training as a psychologist clearly influenced his decision to focus on personal and individual religious experiences. Philosophically, Varieties contains a formulation of James’s pragmatism, in which the value of religious experiences is viewed in terms of the positive consequences they have on individual lives.

Individual religious experiences Before James turns to the descriptions of the experiences that constitute the larger part of Varieties, he sets out his understanding of religion. In lecture 3 he offers the

52

52

Michael Bacon

following characterization: “Were one to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude of the soul” (VRE, 51). Three ideas contained in this passage are important for the many first-​personal accounts James examines:  (1)  that religion is a matter of belief in an unseen, or supernatural, order; (2) that religion entails a relationship with that order; and (3) that this relationship is of the highest value for human beings. This definition captures in outline what many people associate with religion, but as James notes it is extremely broad. His interests are in a particular aspect of religion, and this leads him to offer a further definition. In one of the book’s best-​known passages, he writes: Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal experience will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all. (VRE, 34)

This passage highlights James’s focus on individuals, whose religious experiences he sees as the product of a relationship with their conception of the divine. In his presentation, religion begins in powerful and ultimately transformative existential moments in the lives of individuals. The majority of people are said not to have such experiences, but rather inherit the religious beliefs of whichever community they belong to and retain them merely by habit. These people are described as living a religious life that is “secondhand.” Those on whom James focuses are individuals who have intense personal experiences, and as such set the patterns that sometimes come to be followed by others. Such people are the makers of religion, and for James are appropriately described as “geniuses.” The rich experiences of religious geniuses are sometimes taken up by others, written down as dogma and cemented in institutions, but James suggests that once they are adopted in this way they become less authentic. Powerfully original religious experiences are typically greeted with derision, and labeled heresy in the event that they are taken up by some. However, if they continue to grow and overcome the persecution inevitably directed at all heresies, they are established as a creed, and at this point something is lost: When a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous

53

The Psychology of Religion

53

religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the foundation from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. (VRE, 270)

James’s focus on individuals and on their peculiar religious experience has often been criticized. As a study of religion, it has been objected that this approach fails to take account of the meaning that people find in collective forms of religious expression, for example, when believers come together to celebrate festivals. This neglect is often coupled with the observation that Varieties betrays a distinctly Protestant sensibility.2 There is certainly truth to these claims, but it should be recalled that James is clear that he is electing to focus on the experiences of individuals in order to study religion at what he thinks is its purest. He argues that if we examine such experiences, it will be seen that religion has no essence, and that it can only be understood by appreciating it in all its diversity. He writes: If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. (VRE, 384)

Spelling out the meaning of religion requires looking at a great many individual experiences, and this is the task James sets himself in Varieties.

The origin and value of religious experience James approaches religious experience as an empirical inquirer. In lecture 1 of Varieties he distinguishes between two forms of judgment that might be made about religion, which he calls existential and spiritual. Existential judgments concern the origin and history of religious experiences, whereas spiritual judgments have to do with their meaning. James takes these to be two separate matters, and sets out to investigate them independently of one another. As is signaled in James’s subtitle A Study in Human Nature, the book seeks to explain religion in terms of psychology. Philosophy is of course interested in the mind, but James thinks that it has often mistakenly concentrated solely on the conscious mind; this focus is important, but it leads philosophers to neglect other aspects. He writes: “The subconscious self is nowadays a well-​accredited psychological entity . . . Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of ” (VRE, 402). Our conscious awareness is only part of our selves, and James argues that subconscious states (half-​forgotten memories, bodily dispositions, habits, and so on) are extremely important, though often hidden from us. James proposes that religious experiences result from the ways in which subconscious mental states impinge on the conscious mind. In his analysis of religious geniuses he

54

54

Michael Bacon

finds that such people are “subject to abnormal psychical visitations . . . They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sort of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological” (VRE, 15). These peculiarities give rise to episodes in which typically an individual experiences him or herself to stand in relation to a supernatural being. For James, this relationship should be understood in terms of mental states: “It is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearance and to suggest to the Subject an external control . . . [But] it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling” (VRE, 403). Religious experiences emanate from the subconscious rather than an “external control” (although as we will see James does not rule the latter out). The way in which the subconscious interacts with the conscious mind determines conceptions of the divine; as he remarks, “The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another” (VRE, 266). The suggestion that an individual’s conception of the divine reflects their particular psychological disposition differs radically from that of traditional theology, which takes god to possess essences such as omniscience and immateriality entirely independently of human attitudes or concerns. James, however, is clear that religious experiences should be explained in psychological terms, which he takes to account for both conceptions of god and why they change throughout history. By way of illustration, he suggests that the explanation of authoritarian visions of gods who demand absolute obedience is their origins in a time in which monarchy was so fixed in the minds of many people that it naturally carried over into their conceptions of the divine: Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty “retributive justice,” and a God without it would certainty have struck them as not “sovereign” enough. (VRE, 265)

The temperaments that gave rise to such beliefs have, happily, changed considerably: “To-​day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously” (VRE, 264). James’s most evocative account of the different ways in which subconscious episodes impact on the conscious mind to produce religious experiences is his discussion of what he calls “the religion of healthy-​mindedness” and that of the contrasting “sick souls.” The healthy-​minded (or, as he also calls them, “the once-​born”) have an optimistic temperament; they are “born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regret” (VRE, 140–​1). For those among them who possess a sense of evil, it is viewed akin to an affliction that a patient seeks

55

The Psychology of Religion

55

to overcome rather than something central to their identity. James provides a range of late nineteenth-​century accounts of healthy-​mindedness, from the Emersonian transcendentalists to the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy, noting too that they are to be found throughout history. “We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine” (VRE, 72). The religion of the healthy-​minded contrasts with that of people of an altogether different temperament. “Sick souls” (who James also describes as “the twice-​born”) are characterized by a sense that their lives revolve around a confrontation with evil. The sick soul is “based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart” (VRE, 112). For some sick souls, evil is a result of external influences that might, with considerable effort, be overcome. For others, evil is not external but is experienced as something wrong with their own nature. James discusses the religious experiences of both once-​and twice-​born individuals and how they are to be found in different religious traditions. His analysis of the nature of the twice-​born leads to his account of what he calls the “divided self.” Divided selves are characterized by conflicts about the values and ideals they hold, and while that conflict persists they cannot secure peace of mind. “The psychological basis of the twice-​born character seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution” (VRE, 140). A  divided self can, however, become unified. Unification need not take a religious form, but when it does it is called conversion. James outlines various ways in which unity might be attained through conversion, and if successful the result is a sense of relief from the evils suffered. This transformation is one that James takes to constitute a radical alteration in the life of the convert: “The sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvellous and jubilant as well as to warrant one’s belief in a radically new substantial nature” (VRE, 187). In their encounters with what they experience as the divine, the convert undergoes a transformation in which they come to exhibit a new kind of exuberance. The result is the life of saintliness, “the collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character” (VRE, 219). James identifies four ways in which the saintly life represents a fundamental change in a person: (1) being able to see life as wider than the narrow interests that are usually pursued; (2) gaining a sense of continuity with and willing surrender of control to a higher power; (3) having an intense feeling of elation and freedom experienced as a result of moving beyond oneself; and (4) feeling a love for the world. It should be noted that of these four points, only (2)—​the connection to the absolute and the everlasting—​is religious in any specific sense of the term. Varieties provides many accounts of people’s lives being changed, for example, by overcoming addiction and depression. But in moments such as these, James is more concerned with the content of the experiences he describes rather than their distinctively religious quality. This is the result of his reframing of religious experience as the outcome not of a relationship with a supernatural being, but of the playing out of different mental states.

56

56

Michael Bacon

James argues that religious experiences should be understood in psychological terms. But he also emphasizes that the psychological account of religion he offers is separate from the issue of the value of religious experiences. We all, religious or not, have significant moments in our lives that are open to being explained in terms of some natural cause, but we tend to resist viewing them in this way. James argues that this resistance is not a reflection of an inability or unwillingness on our part to confront the reality of those moments, but rather that such explanations do not adequately account for them. He accepts that it is possible to provide a naturalistic explanation of a phenomenon such as conversion. For example, he considers psychologist George A. Coe’s argument that conversion results from the combination of high emotional sensibility, a tendency to automatisms such as automatic writing, and suggestibility. As a causal explanation of conversion, James finds Coe’s results persuasive: if these factors are present, “you might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden conversion, a transformation of the striking kind” (VRE, 196). And yet James argues that such explanations have no bearing on what that result means or signifies for the individual who is converted: “how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance?” (VRE, 20). James proposes that the significance or value of religion is determined in two ways: “by spiritual judgements directly passed upon them, judgements based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true” (VRE, 23). There are several ideas here. James reiterates his view that the cause of religious experiences is a separate matter to their value. Value is a matter to be judged primarily by the individual who has the experience in question. And this passage also indicates that James is not, contrary to the claims of some readers of his essay “The Will to Believe,” arguing that one can irresponsibly believe whatever one wishes, for religious feelings must make contact with one’s broader beliefs and concerns. James’s argument that the value of religious experience is a matter of the practical consequences they have in an individual’s life develops a line of thought outlined in “The Will to Believe.”3 The aim in “The Will to Believe” is to show that there are some circumstances in which one has the right to believe even if there is insufficient evidence to do so. Its target is W. K. Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief,” which argues that, in the name of identifying truth, one has a duty never to assent to a proposition without evidence. James accepts that Clifford is correct in many instances; in the case of natural science, for example, we should not make up our minds on its subject matter until we have sufficient evidence to do so. However, he disagrees with Clifford that it is always wrong to believe on that basis, arguing that on occasion it is neither possible nor desirable to postpone belief in this way. “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 the question open,’ is itself a passional decision—​just like deciding yes or no—​and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.”4 This thought is also important for Varieties. An individual’s understanding of the divine is what James calls there an “over-​belief,” an orientation that results from

57

The Psychology of Religion

57

their particular temperament and convictions. He argues that we should respect one another’s over-​beliefs, recognizing that they are of great importance to us all; as he remarks, “over-​beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and . . . we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves” (VRE, 405).

The reality of religious experience One question likely to occur to readers of James’s writings on religion is whether he thinks the divine is an entity that humans construct, or something whose existence is independent of our conceptions of it. For much of Varieties, James is uninterested in this question; as he remarks of religion in the first lecture, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots” (VRE, 25). However, in the conclusion, James takes up the question of the truth of religion. And in doing so, he makes it clear that he takes truth to be something distinct from value. He asks: “What is the objective ‘truth’ of their [religious experiences’s] content?”, and in a footnote he explains, “The word ‘truth’ is here taken to mean something additional to bare value for life” (VRE, 401). What then does James take the truth of religion to be, and how might it be established? Before James presents his own answer to these questions, he takes up and rejects two options: mysticism and philosophy. The principal marks of mysticism are (1) ineffability, in which the religious state of mind defies clear expression; and (2) what he calls “noetic quality,” in which mystical states seem to those who have them to be states of knowledge (although such knowledge is different from that achieved by the intellect) (VRE, 302). These claims appear to be in tension: how can something be ineffable and yet constitute knowledge? James’s answer is that mystical experiences are authoritative for the individual who has them, but make no legitimate claim on anyone else. For this reason, he argues that mysticism does not succeed as a means to demonstrate the reality of religion. A second attempt at such a demonstration is what James calls the philosophical or intellectualist, which examines religion in terms of its rationality. He criticizes this approach for neglecting nonrational feelings, which for him are central to religious experience. He is also dismissive of efforts to demonstrate the existence of god proposed by theologians such as Cardinal Newman and metaphysicians like Josiah Royce, arguing that these attempts do nothing more than reflect whatever beliefs about the divine a person already has (VRE, 346–​7). After objecting to both mysticism and rationalism, James turns to pragmatism. What he calls the “thoroughly ‘pragmatic’ view of religion” explains the truth or reality of religion in terms of its capacity to recognize and account for elements in experience that naturalism is unable to do. Religion is, as he puts it, “a postulator of new facts . . . The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expression, a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have” (VRE, 407–​8). On this view, evidence for the reality of a world beyond the materialistic is provided by the variety of experiences James has recorded.

58

58

Michael Bacon

In the postscript to Varieties, James makes especially clear his view of the limits of natural understandings of the world by defending a form of supernaturalism. This he calls “crass” or “piecemeal” supernaturalism, which “admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal religion among the forces that causally determine the real world’s details” (VRE, 409–​ 10). Crass or piecemeal supernaturalism is offered against two, for him equally mistaken, alternatives. One is the kind of reductive naturalism criticized throughout the book. James, as we have seen, rejects reductive naturalism, but is equally opposed to what he terms “refined” or “universalistic” supernaturalism. The latter accepts the existence of an unseen order, but thinks it inaccessible to physical creatures such as ourselves. As such, James takes it to concede too much to naturalism because it entails that the supernatural cannot play a role in our lives. In his conclusion, James indicates that the experiences gathered in Varieties provide evidence for supernaturalism. In response, it can be objected that the fact that a person feels they have experienced a relationship with the supernatural in no way demonstrates that such a thing actually exists. James argues that it is important to keep existential and spiritual judgments apart, but when he seeks to demonstrate the truth of religion (when this is taken to be “something additional to bare value for life”), that distinction cannot be sustained. For citing experiences of the divine as evidence of its existence leaves open questions about the cause of those experiences. This is a point seen very clearly by John Dewey. In A Common Faith, Dewey writes that: The experience is a fact to be inquired into. The theory, like any theory, is an interpretation of the fact. The idea that by its very nature the experience is a veridical realization of the direct presence of God does not rest so much upon examination of the facts as it does upon importing into their interpretation a concept that is informed outside them. In its dependence upon a prior conception of the supernatural, which is the thing to be proved, it begs the question.5

Religious experiences are not immediate, but rather products of a particular interpretation. Further, Dewey joins writers such as Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud in arguing that interpretations are arrived at in the light of one’s upbringing and socialization: “The particular interpretation given to this complex of conditions is not inherent in the experience itself. It is derived from the culture with which a particular person has been imbued” (Dewey, 13). These are issues that James misses when seeking to demonstrate the truth or reality of religion, and his attempt must be counted a failure. However, they are issues he acknowledges in his own life: The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep

59

The Psychology of Religion

59

discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-​belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. (VRE, 408)

James is firm in his conviction that desire for the meaning and consolation met by religion is not something felt simply by some people, but is one that, in the end, we must all experience. It is a point he makes vividly when he writes: For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. (VRE, 120)

James’s view of the inadequacies of naturalism can be explained if we return to his account of the healthy-​minded and sick souls. It might be anticipated that these labels indicate where his sympathies lie, but this is not the case and in fact he identifies more closely with the latter. Commentators have speculated that a likely reason for this is the connection to James’s own periods of depression, but the one he provides in Varieties is that the experiences of sick souls capture our situation more fully than those of the healthy-​minded. Sick souls are said to have a clearer image of the existential reality that we confront:  “There is no doubt that healthy-​mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best keys to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth” (VRE, 136). One of James’s illustrations of a sick soul is Leo Tolstoy, whose considerable material success did not stop him from falling into a depression in which he professed to find life wholly without meaning. The details of Tolstoy’s struggles with his depression and gradual emergence from it fascinate James, and in his telling, the lives of such twice-​born individuals are considerably more profound than the superficial healthy-​mindedness of movements such as Christian Science. However, despite his sympathy for the manner in which sick souls face up to the reality of their situation in a way that the healthy-​minded fail to do, in James’s view both are to be preferred to people who view the world exclusively in naturalistic terms. He claims that if we are being honest with ourselves we must find this worldview to be incomplete, and that even those who seem to look with equanimity on the world described by natural science must ultimately feel that something very important is missing. “Old age has the last word:  the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness” (VRE, 119). In passages such as this, James goes beyond his argument that religious people have a right to their beliefs to claim that the most fulfilling kind of human life requires having

60

60

Michael Bacon

such beliefs. This latter claim is certainly false, as evidenced by those who cheerfully embrace naturalistic descriptions of themselves and the world around them. James’s mistake stems from his association of naturalism with reductive scientific materialism; Dewey provides one illustration of how this might be avoided. Moreover, many of those who would agree with James about the inadequacies of naturalism might well stop short of accepting his analysis of religion. In his account, religion provides meaning in individual lives through a relationship with an unseen order. This is true as far as it goes, but it pays no attention to the fact that for large numbers of people, that relationship entails adherence to theological creeds and doctrines. In Varieties what are traditionally seen as the central attributes of religion have been set aside, and the account presented there sits very comfortably with a nonreligious or secular worldview. As Philip Kitcher remarks, James’s religious believer “[to] almost all intents and purposes . . . is the model of modern secular humanist, differing only in the fact that his strictly leashed religious beliefs are allowed to fill him with hope and serenity” (Kitcher, 255). Those who adhere to traditional forms of religion are likely to be troubled further by James’s proposals for what he calls a “science of religions.” The aim of the science of religions is to test religious beliefs through the experimental methods of the natural sciences through clarifying them by separating what is essential from accidental accumulations, and in so doing “eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous” (VRE, 359). James hopes that the science of religion might enable believers to identify such commonality, helping to overcome differences by “offer[ing] mediation between different believers, and help[ing] to bring about consensus of opinion.” It might, however, be questioned whether religion ought to be guided by the methods of science in this way. For it seems to have the effect of subordinating religion to science by requiring that the former be answerable to the latter. This becomes evident if we consider what the findings of such a science might be. James does not say so, but it would surely have significant implications for beliefs such as transubstantiation and the virgin birth.6 James’s science of religion brings to a head several of the tensions and ambiguities present in Varieties. It aims to identify a core of belief in the hope of overcoming religious extremism and bring about consensus among believers. However, the very idea of a core and what is merely an accumulation smacks of the metaphysical distinction between essence and contingency for which, as a pragmatist, James ought to have no time; the rich detail of different religious experiences provided in Varieties suggests that there is no ready way to make that distinction. Underlying this point is James’s lack of interest in the historical context of the religious experiences he recounts. In a sympathetic study of Varieties, Charles Taylor sketches the historical path that led to the kind of experiences James records, noting that “from the high Middle Ages, we can see a steadily increasing emphasis on a religion of personal commitment and devotion over forms centered on collective ritual” (Taylor, 9). Taylor helpfully locates the context of the distinctively individualistic understanding of religion adopted in Varieties, and had James himself paid attention to it he might have appreciated more fully than he sometimes does that religion is historically contingent, and that in the eyes of many the application of the methods of science are unsuited to it.7

61

The Psychology of Religion

61

Conclusion Varieties combines a rich attention to the details of religious experience with James’s sympathetic analysis. It is also marked by his own convictions. James does more than chronicle accounts of religious experience, for he structures his lectures around an understanding of how mental states give rise to those experiences. He is clear that it is impossible for anyone to leave all their convictions to one side, and that inquiry (into religion or into any other matter) is inherently value-​laden. What matters for the success of Varieties is whether his approach does justice to the religious experiences he examines. For many readers, what makes Varieties of lasting value is the way in which the experiences James describes resonate with their own sense of the natural and the divine, and of the relation between them. Taylor writes: People go on feeling a sense of unease at the world of unbelief: some sense that something big, something important has been left out, some level of profound desire has been ignored, some greater reality outside us has been closed off. The articulations given to this unease are very varied, but it persists, and they recur in ever more ramified forms. But at the same time, the sense of dignity, control, adulthood, autonomy, connected to unbelief go on attracting people, and seem set to do so into an indefinite future. (Taylor, 56–​7)

Taylor goes on to say that many people experience something of both: “a close attention to the debate seems to indicate that most people feel both pulls. They have to go one way, but they never fully shake off the call of the other” (Taylor, 57). Richard Rorty makes a similar suggestion, writing, “All of us, I think, fluctuate between [two] moods. We fluctuate between God as a perhaps obsolete name for a possible human future and God as an external guarantor of some such future” (Rorty, 163). How successfully James managed to address these different pulls and fluctuations in Varieties (and indeed in his life) is an open question, but the pressures that gave rise to them and that he captures there continue to capture many of us, and explains why his book continues to be read with appreciation.

Notes I am grateful to Alexis Dianda, Neil Gascoigne, James Lewis, and Cheryl Misak for very helpful comments. 1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 29. 2 Both points are raised by Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23. A different and I think more interesting suggestion has been made by Harold Bloom, who claims that what is distinctive about James’s understanding of religion is not that it is Protestant, but that it is American (which he takes to be Gnostic).

62

62

Michael Bacon

According to Bloom, James identifies “crucial elements that mark the American difference: solitude, individuality and the pragmatism of feelings, acts, and experiences rather than thoughts, desires, and memories. The ‘personal’ modifies ‘experiences’ and prepares for the American Christ of the twentieth century, who has become a personal experience for the American Christian.” Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-​Christian Nation (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 25. 3 Here I follow writers such as Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, and Philip Kitcher who each explore how Varieties can usefully be understood in the light of the argument presented in “The Will to Believe.” See Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today; Richard Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999); Philip Kitcher, “A Pragmatist’s Progress: The Varieties of James’s Strategies for Defending Religion,” Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4 William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 20. 5 John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 35. 6 In terms of James’s argument in the earlier lectures of Varieties, this point does not arise, for there religion is a matter of the feelings religious experiences evoke. On this view, James would be committed to saying that what matters is the difference belief in transubstantiation makes to individual believers, not its physical reality. This is the line that James was later to take in Pragmatism, where he suggests that transubstantiation is meaningful should people find it makes a difference in their lives. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 46–​7. 7 This holds not only for many believers, but also for some non-​believers. In “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” Rorty argues that natural science and religion address different needs, and that the methods of the one are of no relevance to the other. This is a point that James himself sees in earlier parts of Varieties, most notably when he writes, “Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-​house to him who can use either one of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use” (VRE, 105).

63

4

The Human Contribution: James and Modernity in Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth Alan Malachowski

The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants in our life, if this world-​formula or that world-​formula be the true one.1 In the opening chapter of Pragmatism (P), William James makes his famous controversial claim that “the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments” (P, 11). He recognizes that philosophers generally want to avoid invoking reasons of temperament and prefer, instead, to give “impersonal reasons only for [their] conclusions” (ibid.). But he claims they are unable to do so. For a philosopher’s temperament “really gives [him or her] a stronger bias than any . . . more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence . . . one way or the other” (ibid.). Failure to recognize this has led, or so James insists, to “insincerity” in philosophical discussions where “the potentest of our premises is never mentioned” (ibid.). James then tells us that he intends to “break this rule.” So far, this fits the antitraditionalist spirit of modernism. There is, so to speak, a “temperamental affinity.” But the cursory nature of the accord becomes clear soon after James moves on to list the respective characteristics of rationalists and empiricists under his “temperamental division” between the “tender-​minded” and the “tough-​ minded.” The former are “Rationalistic (going by ‘principles’), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-​willist, Monistic, [and] Dogmatical,” whereas the latter, the tough-​ minded, are “Empiricist (going by ‘facts’), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, [and] Sceptical” (P, 13). James’s main purpose here is to prepare the ground for his forward-​looking version of pragmatism. He points out that as far as this kind of distinction goes, “most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line” (P, 14). And, he insists, “Never were so many [people] of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific” (ibid.). The pragmatism he introduces is designed to both take us past the dichotomous state of affairs depicted by “the temperamental division” and avoid the restrictive dominance of the empiricism that James refers to. But, it also points us beyond the modernist ethos

64

64

Alan Malachowski

within which the state of play James describes arose. This pragmatism is supposed to satisfy legitimate demands from “both sides of the line,” where the acid test is to be able to stick close to the facts while still treating “positive religious constructions . . . cordially” (P, 26). In short, it must find a way to avoid “an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough” (P, 15). When James starts to reveal what shape his pragmatism takes in the second chapter of Pragmatism (aptly titled “What Pragmatism Means”), it is plain that, unlike the idealism and rationalism so vigorously opposed by James because they revel in abstraction,2 pragmatism is expressly designed to remain in immediate “sympathy with the facts” (P, 39). James’s explanation as to how it achieves this is complex and important in ways that have commonly been overlooked, oversimplified, or otherwise misconstrued. There are three main components to this explanation. They provide the keys to understanding much of the wider significance of Pragmatism as well as the motivation for The Meaning of Truth. The components are interconnected, but can best be discussed under three separate headings:  (1)  practical consequences, (2)  holistic confirmation, and (3) truth. We deal with each of these in turn.

Practical consequences For pragmatists, the practical consequences of a philosophy constitute the meaning of that philosophy. John Stuhr3

James eases us into his explanation of pragmatism’s close relationship to the “facts,” by recounting an anecdote about a dispute within a camping party over a squirrel that avoids the sight of a man by moving around a tree trunk in such a way that the trunk always obstructs his view of its body. The question at issue here is: “Does the man go round the squirrel or not?” (P, 27). James resolves things by introducing a distinction between different senses of the phrase “going round”: “Which party is right,” I  said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean first being in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him.” (P, 27–​8)

At first blush, this looks like a trivial verbal solution, but the words James has so fittingly emphasized for us (“practically mean”) show us there is more to it than that. For it also provides an elementary example of what James calls the pragmatic method: “Try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion

65

The Human Contribution

65

rather than that notion were true?” (P, 28). According to James, this method can settle otherwise intractable disputes. And, it is able to do so by concentrating on practical outcomes. If there are no differences in that respect, then, says James, “all dispute is idle” (ibid.). If there are such differences, then disputes can be resolved in favor of the most useful practical consequences.4 As he explains, James derives this creed of “practical concomitants” from his friend Charles Sanders Peirce’s principle of pragmatism or what Peirce himself called “the maxim of pragmatism”: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”5 Here is James’s own gloss on this: “To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve” (P, 29). By tying itself to consequences that show up in practice, pragmatism avoids abstraction and overgeneralization, while never wandering far from facts. And, by staying in their vicinity, James claims, it is much easier to straighten out even long-​standing philosophical difficulties: It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference elsewhere—​ no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. (P, 30)

Later, in The Meaning of Truth (MT), James puts this more bluntly: “Strive to bring all debated conceptions to [this] ‘pragmatic’ test, and you will escape vain wrangling” (MT, 37). James devotes substantial sections of Pragmatism to showing how philosophical perennials such as the “problem of Substance,” the “question of design in nature,” and the “free-​will problem” can be rescued from such wrangling.

Holistic confirmation On first sighting, dependence on brute facts looks anti-​modernist, or at least pre-​ modernist, because the very idea that there are isolatable, culturally independent phenomena of that kind seems naively old-​fashioned through modernist eyes (think of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “there are no facts, only interpretations”). James proposes a conception of factuality that does not assume any such independence and yet can still do the philosophical work he wants it to. This conception does not affiliate him to modernism, however, but rather insulates him above and beyond it. What makes a claim factually correct for James is not direct alignment with the contents of the world as such. For, as we will shortly see, James was inveterately opposed to traditional correspondence or “copy” accounts of correctness. The deciding factors instead are (a) the claim’s place within whole networks of beliefs and (b) what it

66

66

Alan Malachowski

is able to achieve therein by way of harmonizing our experiences and satisfying related interests. To be acceptable, a claim “must run the gauntlet of all [our] other beliefs” (P, 43) while not disturbing them too much. The hallmarks of factual correctness are then coherence and conservatism. Coherence comes in the shape of holistic confirmation. In this matter, James was well ahead of his time. The eminent American philosopher and logician Willard Van Orman Quine, influenced no doubt by James, once contended that the unit of confirmation for an empirical claim is not some quasi-​sentence shaped bit, or bits, of evidence, but rather the whole of science.6 However, James had earlier gone much further than this. For James, confirmation of a factual claim is holistic in the wider sense that it involves the whole of life: our experience, social practices, and beliefs.7 Consider the thought that something is thus and so, then for confirmation, James avers “we may simply add our thought to it; and if it suffers the addition, and the whole situation harmoniously prolongs and enriches itself, the thought will pass for true” (MT, 45). The view that a factual claim is acceptable only if it blends in with beliefs and practices of life, as it is lived, is already conservative, but James has more to say on this point: he explains in some detail how “in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives” (P, 35). The acquisition of beliefs always involves a process of fitting them into existing networks of belief with the least disruption. Each acceptable new idea preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outrée explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric . . . New truth is always a go-​between, a smoother-​over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. (P, 35)

We suggested, although we have not argued the case, that James’s philosophical outlook outstrips modernity. This might seem hard to square with the rather conservative picture just conveyed. For in it, James insists on the importance of “the part played by the older truths.” Indeed for him, their “influence is absolutely controlling” and loyalty “to them is the first principle—​in most cases it is the only principle” (P, 35). But, there are two important mitigating factors. First, we need to distinguish between the content, as it were, of the putatively conservative element in James’s account of belief acquisition and the theoretical status of that account. Then we need to look more closely at the “general attitude” involved. Before we do that, however, we should consider the nature of James’s approach to truth.

Truth Most of the pragmatist and anti-​pragmatist warfare is over what the word “truth” shall be held to signify (MT, 6)

67

The Human Contribution

67

James insisted . . . that our grasp of the notion of truth must not be represented as simply a mystery mental act by which we relate ourselves to a relation called “correspondence” totally independent of the practices by which we decide what is and is not true. Hilary Putnam8

James informs us that the “scope of pragmatism” is “first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth” (P, 37). So truth is clearly an important topic in James’s own view of Pragmatism. But, it is also important for an external reason. The book’s account of truth soon provoked an avalanche of hostile criticisms: the kind of criticisms that came to assume an almost mythical status in the dominant historical narrative as to how, in the hands of such stalwarts as Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, analytic philosophy supposedly kicked pragmatism into touch.9 The Meaning of Truth was, in the main, a spirited response to this sort of criticism.10 James’s account of truth is complex and intimately connected with his views on “practical consequences” and “holistic confirmation,” as these have just been outlined. But the criticisms referred to tend to ignore these features, and focus, instead, on a narrower version: one that is immediately vulnerable to rather obvious objections. In this version, James claims truth is to be explained away just in terms of expediency: a belief is true if and only if the consequences of believing it are in some significant way beneficial. Hence, as critics were only too keen to point out, “x exists” will be true if it is beneficial to believe it is true, regardless of whether x actually exists. The textual support for this interpretation invariably comes from passages such as the following:  “ ‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only expedient in the way of our behaving” and “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief” (P, 106, 42). But these are treated as definitions rather than handy thematic slogans that seek to do no more than sum up a more complex approach. And then the supposed definitions are attacked head-​on after being taken wildly out of context. In an instructive account of why James’s theory of truth has been misconstrued by so many of its critics,11 Hilary Putnam makes the very same point. He shows how Bertrand Russell quotes, “The true is only expedient in the way of our thinking,” but omits the important qualifiers “to put it very briefly” and “in almost any fashion,” which should clearly indicate “that what we have is a thematic statement, and not an attempt to formulate a definition of ‘true.’ ”12 John Wisdom partly anticipated this point as early as 1934 when he claimed “many of the statements made by pragmatists seem very foolish when interpreted as statements about the definition of ‘true’ [rather than] statements about the circumstances which tend to make us believe that a statement is true or tend to justify our belief that a statement is true.”13 Russell compounds his mistake, Putnam tells us, by substituting “his own notion of what ‘expediency’ is for James’s,” so that he ends up proclaiming “James proposed the theory that ‘true’ means ‘has good effects.’ ”14 This carelessly overlooks the complexity of James’s approach where expediency is liable to differ from case to case:

68

68

Alan Malachowski It emerges that different types of statements correspond to different types of “expediency”; there is no suggestion that an arbitrary statement is true if it is expedient in any way at all (even “in the long run”). For example, the view often attributed to James—​that a statement is true if it will make people subjectively happy to believe it—​is explicitly rejected by him. In the case of paradigm “factual” statements, including scientific ones, a sort of expediency that James repeatedly mentions is usefulness for prediction, while other desiderata—​conservation of past doctrine; simplicity, and coherence (“what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted”. . .)—​are said to apply to statements of all types. Quine’s claim that success in satisfying these desiderata simultaneously is a matter of trade-​offs is also a Jamesean idea.15

Putnam makes other penetrating points about the blindness of James’s critics that we should mention, even though there is no space to discuss them in detail. He explains how James’s conception of truth contains an often neglected Peircean element: For both Peirce and James, truth is a property of beliefs or judgments, and without thinkers there are no beliefs to be true or false. In that sense, both Peirce and James can agree that being interested in having true beliefs determines whether there will be truth. Moreover, our various interests determine what inquiries we shall pursue, what concepts we will find useful, and so on; that is, they determine which truths there will be.16

The upshot of requiring this measure of agreement is that, in the end, James concurs with Peirce’s well-​known “ideal consensus” view of truth: p is true if and only if its truth would be agreed on at the terminus of investigation by efficient, rational enquirers. In fact, James even makes room for “absolute truth” as an idealization that should be understood on these terms. But, this conception of the role of agreement should not be confused with the rather cranky idea that truth is somehow a product of the collective will, as it often is by critics who ignore the constraints imposed by notions like “investigation,” “efficient,” and “rational.” For, another Peircean element in James’s thinking is highly resistant to the invidious assumption we can believe whatever we collectively want to, and what we then believe will be true because we believe it. Humans play a part in the shaping of truths. But, for James, the relation of belief is itself constrained by the state of the world: how things are exerts a coercive effect on the mind.17 This adds an ingredient of realism to James’s overall picture, again moving it closer to Peirce’s outlook than is commonly accepted. At times, James even called himself “an epistemological realist” (MT, 106). Alert readers will no doubt notice that there seems to be an unhealthy tension between attributing realism in this way to James’s account of truth while also asserting, as we did earlier, that the decisive factors in assessing the factual correctness of a claim are (a) its place within a whole network of beliefs and (b) what it is able to achieve therein by way of harmonizing our experience and satisfying related interests. We will presently return to these considerations.

69

The Human Contribution

69

A further important misreading of Pragmatism, also keenly noted by Putnam,18 takes James to be advocating blanket disposal of any notion of correspondence as between statements and the world. This leads critics to submit that he makes the mistake of substituting agreement between people for agreement with reality. However, James does not deny the practical role that states of affairs are supposed to play when sincere attributions of truth are made. He accepts the dictionary definition of “truth” as a property of ideas: “It means their ‘agreement,’ as falsity means their disagreement, with ‘reality’ ” (P, 96), but he objects fiercely to the tendency to make heavy philosophical work of it by constructing a correspondence theory of truth. For James, “agreement” is a richer concept with much practical value. The idea of “correspondence” would be acceptable to James, if it were just another name for agreement in this practically well-​provided sense. But in the hands of the abstractionist, intellectualist, and rationalist philosophers he opposes, it is not. On James’s understanding, when such thinkers invoke “correspondence” they are conjuring up something that is as elusive as it is abstract. There is very little we can do, practically speaking, with claims like “p is true if and only if it bears a correspondence relation to reality.”19 When truth is explained along these lines or paraded in such formulations, “it remains a pure abstraction” (P, 38), and “correspondence” is just a vacuous placeholder. For, as Putnam rightly reminds us in his discussion of James’s rejection of correspondence theories: “To say that truth is ‘correspondence to reality’ is not false but empty, as long as nothing is said about what the ‘correspondence’ is.”20 And James despairs of our ever receiving an adequate explanation to fill the vacancy here. He makes short shrift of perhaps the most common attempt that invokes “the popular notion . . . that a true idea must copy its reality” (P, 96). It may make sense for some cases, but for a great many it does not: Like other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual experience. Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial. But your idea of its “works” (unless you are a clock-​maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no way clashes with the reality. Even tho it should shrink to the mere word “works”, that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of the “time-​keeping function” of the clock or the spring’s “elasticity,” it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy. (ibid.)

In contrast to the abstract account of “correspondence,” which James finds so hard to pin down given its remoteness from our interests and practices, his own approach takes the idea of “agreement with reality” in a shopworn, down-​to-​earth sense for granted, and then, just as with “expediency,” shows that there are different kinds of agreement. In adopting this approach, James insists that “pragmatists are more analytic and painstaking, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective” (ibid.). He avers that we should treat different cases separately, but that all cases involve a practical element of some kind. In summary: “To ‘agree’ in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such

70

70

Alan Malachowski

working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we had disagreed” (P, 102). James’s explanations of “agreement” help smooth over the tension we alluded to earlier between his commitment to the coercive nature of reality and his view that the factual correctness of a claim is sufficiently ensured if it fits a network of preexisting beliefs, harmonizes relevant aspects of our experience, and satisfies related interests. For, agreement embraces, and interacts with, these factors rather than hovering above them as “correspondence” traditionally does.

Beyond conservatism and modernity It is time to return to the issue of whether James’s pragmatism is too weighed down by its apparently deep attachment to existing beliefs and practices—​in other words, by what we called its “conservatism.” This charge tends to be leveled whenever a great thinker embeds philosophical explanations within a sociohistorical context, while making that context play a constitutive part. It is often aimed, for example, at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the elucidatory role of “language games,” “forms of life,” and the practical ways in which words are used. We broached the idea that a distinction between the content of James’s account of truth and the theoretical status of that account might let him off the hook of excessive conservatism. The phenomena that James’s conception of truth refers to are, as it were, tied to particular social practices. But, this does not mean the conception is itself conservative when viewed from a theoretical perspective. Indeed, James’s views were ahead of their time, and influenced or even anticipated some of the groundbreaking work of later thinkers other than Wittgenstein. These include the distinguished trio of Quine, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. It is the rationalist attempt to explain truth independently of any social grounding that is conservative, for in the end, this harks back to Plato. By breaking free of that endeavor, James provoked the fierce criticisms that he felt so compelled to counter in The Meaning of Truth. James has generally been thought to be unsuccessful in fending off such criticisms in that book. This is because his replies mainly consist in repeating his earlier claims with even greater rhetorical insistence. In his exasperation over what he regarded as the astigmatism of his critics, he failed to recognize what it was that they had failed to see. They were unable to accept the basic principles outlined in Pragmatism, so repetition of these could be of little avail. In many cases, critics did not accept these principles because they engaged with them solely at the level of thematic slogans, as discussed earlier, and then did not understand the complexity of the thinking behind these. For the most part, The Meaning of Truth did nothing to help on that score. If the distinction we have invoked is to completely exempt James from the charge of conservatism, we need to shed a bit more light on why nonconservative “theoretical status” is consistent with “conservative content.” The reasons are overdetermining. First, to repeat, an account that identifies conformity to prevailing social practices as the basis for explanation of the relation between, say, “belief ” and “truth” can be fairly deemed conservative only relative to the relevant rival explanations. But, when

71

The Human Contribution

71

judged against its competitors at the time, James’s account of truth was radical in scope and intent, and hence far from conservative. Second, we need to acknowledge that James’s picture in which truth claims must have practical consequences, merge with existing beliefs, agree with reality (in James’s extended sense of “agree”), and enhance our experience in some way is not a picture that rules out innovation. There is room in it for experimentation and enough shuffling of accepted views to create fresh ideas. James’s own philosophical thinking is a shining example of this.21 If the charge of conservatism fails to stick, this still leaves open the question as to why we have suggested that James’s pragmatism outstrips modernity. But, James’s attitude toward the world, one that supplements everything we have said about his views so far, is what enables us to shut that question down. Both Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth can be read as concerted attempts to both show what is wrong with rationalism and offer an alternative.22 And, it is in James’s exposition of his attitude to the world that the differences here are most clearly discernible. James allows that the world has independence in the sense that it manifests coercive powers and provides the basis for the relations of agreement that are necessary for attaining truth: “‘Reality’ is in general what truths have to take account of” (P, 117). But his overall view of the world entails that it cannot be usefully (and hence, on pragmatist grounds, meaningfully) described as totally independent in the sense of being free of all human concerns. A world imagined in isolation is no world at all. We should not succumb to the fantasy that we can “get at it in its independent nature, by peeling off the successive man-​made wrappings” (P, 120). For, it is impossible “to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience” (ibid.). Hence perhaps his most famous quote: “The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything” (P, 37). James illustrates the plausible force of this view, or rather “attitude,” by citing a number of familiar examples where something in the world—​“the sensible that”—​can be truly described in a variety of ways: We conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the number 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 plus 1, or 100 minus 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as another. You can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground, or as white squares on a black ground, and neither conception is a false one . . . All these treatments are true treatments—​the sensible that upon the paper resists no one of them . . . In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. (P, 121)

James attributes world-​completing powers to humans, thereby implying the existence of truth-​creating powers. At times he only claims that these powers add something to the world, but at others, he goes further: “We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions . . . altho the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation” (P, 122). Moreover, the language in which we describe the world also embodies human concerns: “We create

72

72

Alan Malachowski

the predicates also . . . Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms” (ibid.). Rationalists, by contrast, consider the world to be “eternally complete” (P, 124), and language to be something of a humanly untainted, objective vehicle for mirroring its features. We can see in the fundamental differences here that James was putting forward a profound view of the world, one that goes beyond modernism in its sophistication and in its anticipation of postmodernist skepticism about foundations, intellectual or otherwise, for such views. But, it also goes beyond postmodernism in its cheerfully frank acceptance of the situation in which all experience of the world is “homeless”: “All ‘homes’ are in finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it” (P, 125). James’s general attitude to the world is then an attitude that expresses this very sentiment, and it therefore finds no home in either modernism or postmodernism.23 When James pins down what he regards to be the essential difference between rationalism and pragmatism—​“for rationalism reality is ready-​made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future” (P, 123)—​he ends by striking a hopeful note, one that is foreign to the anti-​utopian spirit of both modernism and postmodernism. He tells us that on “the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures” (ibid.). In virtue of their lively ability to still engage us, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth remain part of, and can inspire, such adventures. The final chapter of the former, fittingly titled “Pragmatism and Religion,” makes it clear that James considers it still an open question as to whether religion should figure in those adventures. This chapter contains some splendid digressions on the nature of possibility. However, it needs to be read in the constraining context of the rest of the book. When James reminds us that on “pragmatist principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (P, 143), then to that extent his philosophy keeps the world safe for religion. But this does not leave him open to the kind of crude objections we mentioned earlier. He expects us to also remember that a pragmatist’s adventure is not epistemologically reckless, and does not play fast and loose with the notion of truth going forward: “Pent in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations?” (P, 111–​12).

Notes 1 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 30. 2 By contrast, the Jamesian pragmatist “clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases” (P, 38). James’s objection to idealism was, as we indicated, mainly moral. His complaint against rationalism was that in its obsession with abstractions and generalizations, it fails to allow for the complexities of life. Here, James foreshadows Lionel Trilling’s later assessment: “When we say of a thinker that he is committed to rationalism, we mean to convey a pejorative judgment. It expresses our sense that he conceives of the universe and man in a simplistic way,” Lionel Trilling,

73

The Human Contribution

73

The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 482. 3 John Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 68. 4 James’s definition of “practical” is wider than generally recognized. He is careful to point out that it can include intellectual and theoretical concerns and even those that fall under the rubric of “rationalistic.” Such concerns are included if, and only if, they have a useful connection with how we live our lives. James resists those he calls intellectualists and rationalists to the extent that they are inclined to ignore or even sever such connections through excessive abstraction, as we have already pointed out. 5 Charles Saunders Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed. M. Fisch et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 3.266. See also Christopher Hookway, “‘The Principle of Peirce’ and the Origins of Pragmatism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, ed. Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17–​35. 6 Quine backtracked on this, but still made individual empirical claims answerable to a wider, organized body of claims. The more direct influence on Quine’s confirmation holism was probably Duhem’s thesis that physical theories can only have experimental consequences on the basis of certain background assumptions. See Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uinviersity Press, 1954). But it is difficult to believe that Quine did not also have James in mind. The key references for Quine’s holism are “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-​Philosophical Essays, 2nd Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 20–​46; and “Epistemology Naturalised,” Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 69–​90. For an insightful discussion of the respective holisms of James and Quine, see Isaac Nevo, “James, Quine, and Analytic Pragmatism,” in Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, ed. Robert Hollinger and David Depew (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 153–​69. 7 For more on this point, and on James’s holism in general, see Alan Malachowski, “James’s Holism: The Human Continuum,” The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, 36–​54. 8 Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 1995), 11. 9 For an examination of the defects in the “dominant historical narrative,” see the editorial introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, 1–​13. More detail on this front can be found in Robert Talisse, “Pragmatism and The Cold War,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, ed. Cheryl Misak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 254–​68. A useful account of the early criticisms of James’s version of pragmatism can be found in Cheryl Misak, “The Reception of Early American Pragmatism,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, 197–​222. 10 See Alan Malachowski, “Pragmatism in Its Own Right,” in Pragmatism, Volume II: The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. Alan Malachowski (London: Sage, 2004), 337–​42, in which I briefly argue that the early criticisms of pragmatism diverted resources from further development of its main ideas. On that understanding, James’s time would have been better spent on the latter task rather than on writing much of The Meaning of Truth. 11 Hilary Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166–​85.

74

74

Alan Malachowski

12 Ibid., 180. 13 I say “partly” because Wisdom goes on to claim that James used language that indicated he was “concerned with the definition of ‘true.’ ” John Wisdom, Problems of Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 188. 14 Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 180. 15 Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question, 9–​10. 16 Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 169. 17 In Essays on Philosophy, James makes this explicit: “The only objective criterion of reality is coerciveness in the long run, over thought . . . the reality of a thought is proportionate to the way it grasps us.” William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 21. The shaping process we allude to can also exert a “coercive effect.” 18 Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 171–​7. 19 Though the same sort of formulation has created much useful theoretical toil for logicians, following Tarski’s pioneering “The Concept of Truth in Formalised Languages,” in Alfred Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, Papers from 1923–​ 1938 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 152–​278. For redundancy theorists of truth, of course, “correspondence” can be dispensed with. The formulations it inhabits can be adequately expressed without invoking it (e.g., “p is true if and only if p corresponds to reality” reduces to “ ‘p’ is true if and only p”). 20 Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question, 10. 21 It may be worth pointing out that the charge of “conservatism” discussed in the main text is not a political charge. 22 This oversimplifies a bit. James was not opposed to rationalism as such, but only to its tendency to ignore practical concerns. The same can be said for “abstraction” and “intellectualism,” both of which James find acceptable when they yield useful results. 23 This is presumably one reason why Rorty claims that James is “waiting at the end of the road which Foucault and Deleuze are travelling.” Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xviii.

75

5

“Ever Not Quite!”: William James’s A Pluralistic Universe Barry Allen

“Ever not quite!”—​this seems to wring the very last panting word out of the rationalistic philosophy’s mouth. It is fit to be pluralism’s heraldic device.

William James, “A Pluralistic Mystic” A Pluralistic Universe (PU) began as William James’s Hibbert Lectures, delivered at Manchester College, Oxford, over three weeks in March 1908.1 The lectures drew the largest audience ever assembled at Oxford and when they were over James received an honorary DSc from Oxford University. While in England he met Lord Bertrand Russell, G. K. Chesterton, and H. G. Wells, and received another honorary degree from Durham University. Back home, he repeated the lectures at Harvard and they were published the following year, 1909, in New York and London, with a second printing before the end of the year. Writing from Cambridge to his friend, Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, in January 1908, James announced that he had accepted the invitation and had begun writing the lectures. His title then was “The Present Situation in Philosophy.” Alluding to his last experiment with public lectures, recently published as Pragmatism (P; 1907), he told his friend that the new commission “doom[s]‌me to relapse into the ‘popular lecture’ form just as I thought I had done with it forever . . . I find that my free and easy & personal way of writing, especially in ‘Pragmatism’ has made me an object of loathing to many respectable academic minds, and I  am rather tired of awakening that feeling, which more popular lecturing on my part will probably destine me to increase.”2

First lecture Types of philosophic thinking The lectures began by discussing different types of philosophic thinking, types that recall those James diagnosed in current philosophy three years earlier, when he began the Pragmatism lectures by depicting what he called “the present dilemma

76

76

Barry Allen

in philosophy.” Some philosophers were tough-​minded, empirical, taking science seriously, and not at all religious. Others were tender-​minded, idealistic, religious, but not empirical, and indifferent to scientific advance. Having philosophy polarized in this way produced a frustrating dilemma—​less for the professors, who had slipped comfortably into the role of tough-​or tender-​minded as suited. The one who suffered from this sterile disagreement was the “seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy.” This individual wanted something each side denied, and was averse to something each affirmed. This serious, inquiring amateur wanted to acknowledge scientific advances but eschew materialism. The tough-​minded philosophy was therefore no good. He also wanted religion, but not on terms that require treason to his scientific side. So the tender-​minded philosophy was no good. Its metaphysical comfort was “airy and shallow,” maintained only through dogmatic indifference to science. In those recent lectures James explained pragmatism as “a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand.” It remained religious like the rationalisms, but it preserved rich intimacy with facts, which empiricists expect. James had none of Plato’s disdain for the ordinary man. He believed in and respected that seriously inquiring amateur, partly because he thought of himself that way—​a medical doctor without a proper university degree and so, technically, an amateur in philosophy. “The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds.”3 Lines of academic specialization, which insulate philosophy from the larger public, when exposed to the democratic sun, look pale and ossified. George Santayana congratulated James’s pragmatism for getting “rid of the undemocratic notion that by being very reflective, circumspect and subtle you might discover something that most people do not see.”4 The most likely thing to be discovered by introspective supersubtlety is a mare’s nest. Speaking later at Oxford, James still felt stymied by current options in philosophy. As “pragmatism” was in the earlier lectures, a theory of a “pluralistic universe” was a response to the impasse in philosophy. His later explanation of the problem was more complicated than the simple opposition of tough-​and tender-​minded. He divided philosophical thought between sympathetic and cynical emotional types, which found expression in a spiritual or materialist philosophy, respectively. The cynical materialists were the former tough-​minded, and the sympathetic spiritualists were the tender-​ minded. To James, the interesting difference between them was not theoretical but psychological, even emotional. Whereas materialists were “cautious, tense, on guard,” spiritualists “give way, embrace, and keep no ultimate fear” (PU, 19). The credo of the spiritual philosophy affirmed that “the inner life of things must be substantially akin . . . to the tenderer parts of man’s nature” (ibid.). James excused himself from addressing the godless materialists. He formerly thought he could reconcile the tough-​minded to pragmatism; now his pluralism would not even address them. He proposed that we “place ourselves straightaway upon a more spiritualistic platform” (PU, 25). He gave up on materialism but not on empiricism. He renewed pragmatism’s vow to maintain the intimacy with facts. “Am anfang war die tat,” he says in lecture six, quoting Goethe. “Fact is first; to which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second, never its full equivalent” (PU,

77

"Ever Not Quite!"

77

118). James pleaded for greater openness to empirical evidence in philosophy. In his conclusion to the lectures he said that if he could have made just one point it would be this: “It is high time for the basis of our discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened up” (PU, 149). Hence the place of Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson in these lectures; hence his references to descriptive psychology, religious experience, psychical research, “and other wild beasts of the philosophic desert” (ibid.). Philosophy should abandon the search for conclusions valid in any possible world, or even one whose empirical constitution was entirely different from ours. It amazed James to see philosophers blandly assume that “the actual peculiarities of the world that is [are] entirely irrelevant to the context of truth” (ibid.). They cannot be irrelevant, he insisted, and the more we know about them—​the more empirical our philosophy—​the more relevant they became. The spiritual philosophy of the day was dominated by the opposition between monistic pantheism and dualistic theism. This “dualism” was not the Cartesian one between body and mind; it was the orthodox theological dualism of creature and supernatural creator. James criticized this teaching for exaggerating everything that isolated and separated God, and for instituting a legalistic conception that “leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe” (PU, 16). Fortunately, this theology was now unsupportable even by religious thinkers. It “sounds as old to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion,” an effect James credited to the synergy of Darwinism and democracy. That left the field of spiritual philosophy to monism. A  philosophy was defined as spiritual when it regarded humanity and the divine as continuous. However, this thesis could be variously inflected, leading to significant differences in philosophy. The “monist” variety was the theory that only the All, the Absolute, an unconditioned totality, was finally, fully real, and was the Divine Being itself. We were literally parts of God, as were all finite things, absorbed in an absolute that infinitely transcended human conscious. Difference, multiplicity, and change were appearances only, artifacts of finitude. In reality, in the absolute, there was no difference, no pluralism, no development, or change. The universe was finally fully real only in its all-​form, the unconditioned totality. Anything less was a mere abstraction without truth in reality. This all-​form of the universe was not merely a sum total. The unity was more original than the parts, which were defective finite expressions of its infinity. The absolute, the all-​form of the universe, was the sole unqualified reality. It was Being. It was God. It was Nature, and spiritualistic monism was also panpsychism. God was everywhere, everything was God, everything was alive, everything ensouled. The philosophers of the monist absolute were legion:  Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, and Georg W.  F. Hegel among the greats; Hermann Lotze, F.  H. Bradley, J.  M. E.  McTaggert, T.  H. Green, and Bernard Bosanquet among James’s European contemporaries; and R.  W. Emerson, the New England Transcendentalists, the St. Louis Hegelians, and James’s Harvard colleague Josiah Royce in America. Pluralism, the alternative James came to Oxford to explain, was a greater novelty. James was not the first or only pluralist (as he was not the first pragmatist). Others included Wilhelm Wundt and Friedrich Paulsen in Germany, Wincenty Lutoslawski in Poland, J. S. Mill

78

78

Barry Allen

in England, and Charles Bernard Renouvier in France. Indeed, Jean Wahl locates the roots of James’s pluralism in republican and socialist struggles in France, finding first expression in the works of Charles Fourier, Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon, Pierre Ménard, and Renouvier. Ever since then, pluralists everywhere tend to be democrats and republicans, as was James.5 The most important contemporary pluralist was Henri Bergson, to whom James devoted an admiring lecture. It was no mere elegant homage to Bergson when James explained pluralism with the observation that “we humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view” (PU, 23), and that time is “as real as anything” (PU, 28). This view of time compels a pluralistic ontology because time was nothing if not differences, many, infinitely many, infinitely different differences. The reality of time implied the reality of change and development. They were not flickering shadows distorting eternal forms. They were the real creation of really novel differences, whose multiplicity or plurality could not be reduced to unity, proving instead an original pluralism of being. The connection may not be apparent, but ontological pluralism and metaphysical temporalism—​the reality of time and the priority of becoming—​are only verbally different terms of the same argument. “The very center of pluralism,” Jean Wahl observed, “is just where these two ideas meet in the idea of a world completing itself here and there.”6 Pluralism dropped monism’s condition of totality on the real. James did not dogmatically assert that there is no all-​form of reality. He suspects that “there may ultimately never be an all-​form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally connected” (PU, 20). But he does not claim to prove that or to refute monism. Philosophy was always finally a matter of temperament. “I am finite once and for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history” (PU, 27). James supplemented this hunch or intuition with a philosophical thesis he proposed to explain and defend, namely, that “a distributive form of reality, the each-​form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-​form” (PU, 20). This plural ontology is a second take on what he elsewhere called radical empiricism:  “radical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-​total of things may never actually be experienced or realized in any shape at all, and that a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified [hence pluralistic] appearance is the only form that reality may yet have achieved” (PU, 25). James’s argument was that radical empiricism or pluralism was not just logical or probable, but also reasonable and satisfactory. That was the promise of these lectures. “Think of the universe as existing solely in the each-​ form and you will have on the whole a more reasonable and satisfactory idea of it than if you insist on the all-​form being necessary” (PU, 26). The attraction of this experiment in philosophy derives from the sorry state of contemporary philosophy, incapable of moving past a monism that has lost inspirational value and become a malignant, devitalizing abstraction. By doing away with the absolute, pluralism eliminated what James called “the great de-​realizer of the only life we are at home in,” and thus redeeming reality “from essential foreignness” (PU, 28). That was the goal he set for his lectures: to establish the empirical continuity

79

"Ever Not Quite!"

79

of humanity and the divine without compromising either the love of inquiry or the seriousness of life with the anodyne abstractions of the absolute.

Second lecture Monistic idealism (arguments for the absolute) Ever since Parmenides in the sixth century BCE, monism presented itself as a rigorously rational philosophy, the universe deduced more geometrico. Hegel was still following this tradition in his Science of Logic, deducing reality by his dialectical method. Among James’s contemporary monists the preferred approach was to demonstrate the monistic character of the absolute through alleged proofs of the irreality of relations. If it could be proved that relations were impossible, then the ubiquitous appearance of relations convicted the sense perception of deceit and revealed the true nature of reality to be a seamless, unified One—​ the All-​One, the Absolute, the only thing that unconditionally, finally, really is. Such monism has fallen so far from current sympathy in philosophy that it takes imagination to appreciate how seriously James’s generation took the idea. James was not good at predicting philosophy’s future. He was sure that Bergson would be the next big thing, and apparently did not see analytic philosophy coming. Analytic philosophy started in Britain with a criticism of idealism inspired by a new logic and the ideas it suggested about language and truth. Even though James was a more profound critic of the monist absolute than G.  E. Moore in his “Refutation of Idealism” or Russell in his argument against Bradley, the line of what he called spiritual philosophy, monist or pluralist, had no future. Word was spreading that God was dead, and the market collapsed for philosophy dedicated to the continuity of humanity with the divine. James’s Pragmatism still attracts enthusiastic readers in philosophy. Not so A Pluralistic Universe. James respected philosophical argument even if he was also sensitive to its limits. He took seriously the monists’ claim to have proofs. He wrote several times about relations, picking up one or another side of the monist argument against them and exploring his pluralistic alternative of real relations.7 In A Pluralistic Universe he rehearsed versions of the argument for the absolute from Lotze and Royce, two contemporary monists James respected most. One thing could act on another and change it in some way only if they touch, which was easy to say but hard to understand. If space remained between them, they did not touch, and if no space separated them, they were not two in a relation but only one and self-​identical. For Lotze, everything that seemed separate in experience was in reality part of a single being. Royce developed a similar argument in terms of knowledge. If A knows B, then A must be true, meaning true to B; it must be adequate and correspond to the nature of B. Now, if A and B are truly distinct, truly different, two mutually exclusive realities, then A’s identity passing over to B is impossible. It would be possible, however, if A  and B are two mental objects belonging to a higher conscious mind that thinks them. The same argument can be repeated for this higher consciousness, until we finally reach an absolute consciousness for which to be is to be its object, its thought.

80

80

Barry Allen

James dismissed these arguments as merely verbal. Call two things “distinct” and they could not interact; call them one and suddenly they could. We learn nothing about how interaction really happens, how knowledge really works, or the value of truth. This well-​hidden triviality ran throughout the monist position. Jean Wahl understood James’s criticism when he commented, “Of the absolute we can say nothing except that it is each thing we know, mysteriously transformed into a totally different thing and united to all other realities, however contradictory to it they may seem.”8 The arguments for monism suffered from a syndrome James named “vicious intellectualism.” The philosophers who fell into this rut were terribly serious about logical definition and believed that the highest rigor was to make such definitions explicit and stick to them. If someone is—​truly is—​an equestrian, then he cannot walk on his feet. “Intellectualism in the vicious sense,” James explained, “began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its definition. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are known whenever we know their definitions” (PU, 99). Behind this intellectualism was the fond conviction that the power of concepts (logos) was humanity’s distinction, and rationality our divine prerogative. The assumption was difficult to square with a Darwinist explanation of cognition. Cognitive powers were adaptations, which made them tools but no more. James, an early, ardent Darwinist, said we must not forget, though we easily do, “that concepts are only man-​made extracts from the temporal flux,” and not “a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world” (ibid.). Darwinism had already commended this instrumental view of concepts and cognition to James in the Pragmatism lectures, where he referred to “the pragmatistic view that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-​ enigma” (P, 94). Darwinism made the monistic approach seem like willful indifference to the best science of the latter nineteenth century. The arguments by which monists triumphantly vanquished alternatives were a fallacious intellectualism condemned by the evolutionary understanding of cognition. And Darwinism, because it took time seriously, must also take multiplicity and contingent, external relation seriously, as James’s pluralist ontology will show.

Third lecture Hegel James devoted one lecture to the most creative and influential philosopher of the absolute, “that strange and powerful genius” Hegel (PU, 43). It had been less than eighty years since Hegel died at the height of his power in 1831, and he was still something of a contemporary for James and his audience, especially at Oxford, where an englished Hegelism was the house philosophy. James saw Hegel as divided between a sound and creative vision and an alternately appalling and ridiculous fixation on logical method. James had a history of struggle with Hegel and he indulged in some exasperation

81

"Ever Not Quite!"

81

at Hegel’s atrocious writing. “His passion for the slip-​shod in the way of sentences . . . makes his present-​day readers wish to tear their hair” (PU, 44). The “intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness” of Hegel’s dialectical deductions provided James with his best examples of vicious intellectualism (PU, 52). The method was a joke, the vision something else, and unscathed by Hegel’s absurd logic and hankering for absolute truth. The vision was of things bound with each other in hidden, ironic, enigmatic, dialectical ways. Any equilibrium was partial, a balance regained at the cost of loss elsewhere. James’s admired a “hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite” (PU, 45). This much Hegel, the dialectical vison of the empirical, historical world, was “not only harmless but accurate” (ibid.). Experience was rife with what James nicely calls “contradictions held in solution” (PU, 49), and Hegel’s “dialectical” approach offered “a fair account of a good deal of the world” (ibid.). Unfortunately Hegel was besotted with a compulsion to make this point look as if nothing depended on the contingent way history turned out. It had to be like that, everything had to be as it was, and was completely rational considered from the perspective of absolute knowledge. At this point Hegel had turned away from history and experience to look to timeless concepts endowed with a reality that made them and their “logic” the teleological rationality behind the ironic play of historical appearances. For James, as for Søren Kierkegaard, Hegel’s thought was vitiated by his claim for the incontrovertible finality of the system, “the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation” (PU, 50). Hegel’s loathsome technicalities “attempt to make us believe that he was working by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in reality sensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with all his results” (PU, 68). What becomes of Hegel’s dialectical vision if we drop the risible “logic”? We might dismiss the vision too with the same derision. Alternatively, we could try approaching the question of monism and the absolute hypothetically, experimentally. Russell and Moore took the former tack, James the latter. The problem with the hypothesis of the absolute, frankly regarded as a hypothesis, was the old problem of evil. Why did the perfection of the absolute require all those hideous forms of life? This absolute was without environment, acted on by nothing alien. Why then such cruelty? And why actual creation at all? Why not the even more perfect world of sheer possibility? A properly absolute absolute should be one in which not just the whole but also the parts are perfect. Why introduce finite minds to spoil the rationality with our errors? To persist in the conviction of the absolute in the face of all this irrationality betrayed the faith, the temperament, the will to believe on which this philosophy of the absolute ultimately rests.

Fourth lecture Fechner Perhaps the most surprising topic for an entire lecture is the German experimental psychologist and polymath Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–​87). Fechner was an

82

82

Barry Allen

amateur philosopher and called himself a monist, but James suggested that he misunderstood himself or his terminology. In truth Fechner was a brilliant pluralist. His appearance in this work provided an occasion for James to discuss the style in which pluralism should advance. If not more geometrico as the monists do, how should pluralists argue? Fechner was the model. His thought was drenched in empirical detail. His hypothetical, experimental, analogical argumentation eschewed a geometrical method of putatively compulsive logic. James ascribed to Fechner what he might have hoped for himself. He praised “the cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the ingenuity of his detail,” even “his admirably homely style,” and the “sincerity with which his pages glow,” giving the impression “of a man who doesn’t live at second-​ hand, but who sees, who in fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the common herd of professorial philosophic scribes” (PU, 72). In The Principles of Psychology (PP), James had a professional obligation to discuss Fechner, who practically founded the field of experimental psychology. His remarks primarily concerned Fechner’s so-​called Psychophysical Law, a formula connecting the qualitative intensity of sensation to the quantity of external cause. When we pass from one sensation to a stronger one of the same kind (brighter light, say), the intensity of the sensation increases in proportion to the logarithm of the exciting cause.9 James discussed the claim in detail and ended with a dismissive evaluation: “In the humble opinion of the present writer, the proper psychological outcome is just nothing . . . it would be terrible if even such a dear old man as this could saddle our Science forever with his patient whimsies.”10 Twenty years later Fechner’s whimsies were more appealing. James now adjudged pantheism to be Fechner’s great thought. It was a mistake to regard life and soul as anomalous in the universe. “The whole universe in its different spans and wave-​ lengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious” (PU, 70). He devotes several pages of this lecture to an appreciation of Fechner’s thesis that the earth is conscious. Our human consciousness, like that of everything else on the planet, all things being ensouled, is a limited part of earth’s inclusive consciousness, on the analogy of the senses to the individual mind. Each of us is a sense organ of the earth’s soul. Fechner’s planetary consciousness was for James no patient whimsy. Fechner’s admirably empirical argumentation became James’s model for the claim that human consciousness is part of a greater mind in nature. Of course, that was what the monists said too. But James introduced two conditions that made the problem of explaining compounded consciousness harder. First, we are these parts without compromising our finite selfhood as no more than a dream. Personal existence is real and strenuous. Second, this greater consciousness is not absolute, not infinite, not finally finished, fully present, or identical with itself. Like us it is growing, developing, swept up in its own unimaginable history. This most inclusive consciousness was James’s finite God. “The only God worthy of the name must be finite” (PU, 60). “We are indeed internal parts of God,” said James, “and not external creations . . . Yet because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be

83

"Ever Not Quite!"

83

taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts—​as similar to our functions consequently” (PU, 143–​4). We are continuous with the divine not because we are assimilated to its absolute unity, but because the divine is assimilated to our finite, strung-​along, historically contingent form of life. James wants his audience to understand that his criticism of monism was not covert atheism. He assured them that pluralism contained an authentically religious dimension. “God” named the ideal tendency in things, not the actual whole, which does not exist in an unfinished universe. This ideal tendency worked in an actual environment and had limits. Whether it would ultimately triumph and make the world really as it ideally ought to be was an open question whose answer partly depended on us. As James said in Pragmatism, ours was a world “growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contribution of its several parts.” The salvation of such a world was unwarranted, indeterminate, and a “co-​operative work genuinely to be done,” a “real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through” (P, 139). James’s name for this condition of merely possible salvation was “meliorism,” which he explained (in Pragmatism) as the idea that the salvation of the world was neither inevitable nor impossible, but up for grabs and depending on what we do. Evil, which discredits rationalism and the monist absolute, was for pluralism not a speculative but a practical problem. The problem was not to rationalize the sad existence of evil but to do something to change it. “The way of escape from evil on this system,” he said of pragmatism, “is not by getting it ‘aufgehoben’, or preserved in the whole as an element essential but ‘overcome.’ It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name” (P, 142).

Fifth lecture The compounding of consciousness In the fifth lecture James’s argument takes a more technical turn. He explained a logical problem that had long troubled him and how reading Bergson showed him the way past it. The problem arose in the context of the absolute monism James opposed, but it was a problem for pluralism too. It concerned the relation between our separate consciousnesses and the absolute. My consciousness, with its limitations and perspective, was supposedly a part or moment of the inclusive consciousness of the absolute. Now that was easy to say, but became increasingly mysterious as James tried to understand it. Ever since Descartes philosophers tended to agree that a mental state was no more than it appeared to be for consciousness. My consciousness is as I am consciously aware of it. The appearance-​reality distinction falls away from conscious states. They are precisely as they appear to be. But if that were true of me, and true too of the absolute, then how could my consciousness, with all its limitations, be any part of the consciousness of the absolute, which was beyond such limitations? How can our mental states be “severally alive on their own accounts, and think themselves quite otherwise than as he [the absolute] thinks them?” (PU, 88).

84

84

Barry Allen

It was a conundrum for monism, but it was also a problem for James’s idea of the finite God. It was a problem of compounding consciousness, whether absolutely in monism, or finitely in pluralism. How can the same consciousness keep its identity as I know it and still belong to a wider experience vastly beyond my consciousness? Mental states do not combine like chemical atoms. The chemical analogy was all wrong, as James knew. When hydrogen combines with oxygen to make water, nothing really new comes into the world. True, there is a new potential for response. The oxygen that once inflamed fire now belongs to an assemblage that dampens it. But the hydrogen remains hydrogen and the oxygen remains oxygen. Consciousness was not like that. When consciousness A  combined with consciousness B, a new consciousness AB appeared, a new and qualitatively different consciousness, and not a chemical compound leaving A and B as they were in themselves. Ten thoughts of ten words were not the thought of one sentence. If consciousness essentially was as it was known to be by some wider consciousness, how can our more limited consciousness be other than as known by this more comprehensive consciousness? Yet this more comprehensive awareness was unknown to us. We are aware of ignorance and uncertainty, our experience is restricted to an arbitrary perspective, and we make many errors. How can absolute thoughts be ours, or ours be its? “It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with our being only the absolute’s mental objects” (PU, 88). James thought this was a serious problem, a “vital knot of the present philosophic situation,” arising from assumptions about consciousness that most philosophers share (PU, 84). Having long struggled with it, he found his answer in the work of “a comparatively young and very original french [sic] writer, Professor Henri Bergson” (PU, 97).

Sixth lecture Bergson and his critique of intellectualism James made clear his frustration with the philosophical scene of his day, in Germany and France no less than Britain and America. Over and again he felt coerced into choices between repellant alternatives. He judged his age to be a period of philosophical amateurishness, with “small subtlety” and “widespread ignorance” (PU, 8). Recent philosophical literature conveyed to him “nothing but a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground, and resetting into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall with an empty manger.” Uninspired academics “[turn] over the same few threadbare categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers and solutions, with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into sight” (PU, 118). All was not hopeless. Change was in the air. The time grew philosophical again. There was something new at Oxford (probably an allusion to F. C. S. Schiller, the Oxford pragmatist). Also a renewal of “ancient english empiricism,” so long out of fashion (thinking perhaps of Russell), and wide, even popular interest in “a controversy over

85

"Ever Not Quite!"

85

what is known as pluralism or humanism” (PU, 7), alluding to academic exchanges provoked by James’s recently published Pragmatism and the professional papers he would republish the next year in The Meaning of Truth (1909). However, nothing gave James so strong an impression of the way forward in philosophy than the work of Bergson. “New horizons loom on every page.” Reading his work was like feeling “the breath of morning and the song of birds.” The work “tells of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-​minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought. Nothing in Bergson is shop-​worn or at second hand” (PU, 118). “He is a real magician” (PU, 102). Bergson’s work was not just eloquent and original. It tended in the direction James himself tried to articulate with words like “pragmatism,” “humanism,” “meliorism,” “radical empiricism,” and now “pluralism.” Less than a year earlier, in June 1907, he read Bergson’s then new book, L’Evolution créatrice (1907). Writing to the author James could not praise it extravagantly enough. Referring to his own recently published Pragmatism, which he inscribed and included with the letter, he said, “How jejune and inconsiderable it seems in comparison with your great system! But it is so congruent with parts of your system, fits so well into the interstices thereof, that you will easily understand why I am so enthusiastic. I feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you as commander, I in the ranks” (The Correspondence of William James [CWJ], 11.377).11 James was neither fawning nor facetious. Arthur O.  Lovejoy confirmed pragmatism’s French connection. “Though his personality and his style were singularly American, [James] none the less truly belongs, as a technical metaphysician, to the apostolic succession of French temporalism.”12 Temporalism was Lovejoy’s word for a doctrine of real futurity, the openness of the future, the creative efficacy of each present moment. Bergson was practically the inventor of this point of view in philosophy. On the same day as he wrote to Bergson, James also wrote of Bergson’s new book to F. C .S. Schiller in Oxford: “It seems to me that nothing is important in comparison with that divine apparition. All our positions, real time, a growing world, asserted magisterially, and the beast intellectualism killed absolutely dead!” (CWJ, 11.378). To place the lecture on Bergson in the unfolding argument, remember that for James a spiritual philosophy was the only choice. He was a Darwinist, but knew, as T.  H. Huxley knew, that Darwinism did not depend on or confirm a materialist philosophy of nature.13 Spiritual philosophy for James was still a scientifically respectable option, or at least his pluralism would be. The problem with spiritual philosophy was the prevalence of absolute monism. James quarreled with leading thinkers of the absolute and offered Fechner’s robustly empirical spiritualism as an example of scientifically respectable spiritual philosophy. We were promised a pluralist ontology, and expect it to solve the problem of compound consciousness, though James has not explained how. It is at this point that he begins his lecture on Bergson. He singles out Bergson’s critique of intellectualism as his greatest contribution to philosophy. “In my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing rôle of claiming to be the most authentic, intimate and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality” (PU, 98). Philosophy had been stuck in this intellectualism (or rationalism)

86

86

Barry Allen

for a long time, practically since its inception with the Greeks. Pluralism, pragmatism, radical empiricism, and humanism had an uphill battle against this entrenched image of what it was to think like a philosopher. “We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to 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” (PU, 121). As James read him, Bergson’s principal argument against intellectualism was that concepts have practical value only. “The concepts we talk with are made for purposes of practice and not for purposes of insight” (PU, 131), a pragmatic implication of Darwinism that James had already independently reached. Concepts did not reveal the inner essence of things. Being discrete, defined, and discontinuous, concepts were multiply ill-​suited to elucidate the continuity of things. Conceptualization is “a transformation which the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice” (PU, 109). “In the deeper sense of giving insight [concepts] have no theoretic value” (PU, 110). James thought that Bergson was “absolutely right” to argue “that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling” (PU, 123n.). “When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness” (PU, 116). “Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—​it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates” (PU, 117–​18).14 James had been trying to say that since his chapter on conception in The Principles of Psychology. “The psychology of conception is not the place,” he said there, “in which to treat of . . . continuity and change. Conceptions form the one class of entities that cannot under any circumstances change. They can cease to be, altogether; or they can stay, as what they severally are; but there is for them no middle way. They form an essentially discontinuous system, and translate the process of our perceptual experience, which is naturally a flux, into a set of stagnant and petrified terms.” A few pages later he writes his famous sentence about how, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails all at once, the infant “feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP, 1.467–​8, 488). In the Pluralistic Universe lectures he said, “in its sensational immediacy everything is all at once whatever different things it is at once at all” (PU, 120). Same and different interpenetrated every level and not exclusively for the absolute. No part was too small not to be a confluence of many. “No part goes exactly so far and no farther . . . no part absolutely excluded another.” Only concepts are discontinuous in that way. Experience, sensation, consciousness, even thinking, “compenetrate and are cohesive” (PU, 121). In a supplementary essay James appended to the published lectures, titled “On the Notion of Reality as Changing,” he said that C. S. Peirce and Bergson were developing congruous philosophies in their thought of novelty as an inherent quality of reality. “Novelty, as empirically found, doesn’t arrive by jumps and jolts.” It comes instead through what Peirce called an infinitesimal tendency to diversification. Newness “leaks in insensibly, for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datum being both a coming and a going” (PU, 153).

87

"Ever Not Quite!"

87

This philosophy of concepts did better than solve the problem of compound consciousness; it made the problem go away. Conscious moments did not have the clear-​cut self-​identity of concepts. They were always already other, interpenetrated, variably contracted and dilated. “All real units of experience overlap” (PU, 130). “My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more” (ibid.). That makes the logic of concepts “inapplicable to our inner life” (PU, 131–​2). All consciousness was always already compounded. Consciousness could not fail to be a manyness, and it was this multiplicity and qualitative difference endlessly, all the way down. Our personal consciousness was already no less compounded than the most inclusive consciousness, James’s finite God. “And just as we are co-​conscious with our own momentary margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really central self in things which is co-​ conscious with the whole of us?” (PU, 131). Compounded consciousness was an experiential fact. Once we had the right view of concepts and saw them as pragmatic tools with no “truth” beyond their adaptive utility, then we understood that the “problem” of compound consciousness arose from the discontinuous concepts with which we were intellectualizing experience. All experience, all consciousness, indeed all time, all duration, was completely continuous and interpenetrating. That made a maximally inclusive consciousness a legitimate hypothesis, and “not the impossible being I once thought it. Mental facts do function both singly and together, at once, and we finite minds may simultaneously be co-​ conscious with one another in a superhuman intelligence” (PU, 132). Fechner believed in a maximally comprehensive absolute soul, an all-​enveloper. James found this supposition hasty and poorly thought out. It was disproportionate to the evidence and brought back the problem of evil. But Fechner was easily scaled down. You could not scale down Spinoza or Hegel. With them the stakes were all or nothing. But Fechner was an empiricist. His argument was easily adjusted to a maximally inclusive consciousness that was vast yet finite and growing. That was James’s finite god, empirically confirmed by such evidence as we have. Speaking as a president emeritus of the Society for Psychical Research, James adjudged certain facts of paranormal psychology to attest to a superhuman consciousness. Additionally, religious and mystical experience pointed “with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment” (PU, 135). A pluralist philosophy of coconsciousness was the best explanation of such phenomena. “The drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly toward the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-​conscious” (PU, 140). This superhuman consciousness was not the monist absolute. James said we must be “frankly pluralistic and assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has itself an external environment, and consequently is finite” (ibid.). But that is how ordinary people have always thought of God, not as the all-​too-​infinite absolute of Spinoza or Hegel. The dualist theologians and the monist metaphysicians had ruined our understanding of divinity by confusing it with a concept. It was a fallacious intellectualism to suppose that God could be adequately expressed with a concept

88

88

Barry Allen

or set of predicates—​omnipotent, benevolent, and so on. This approach had never overcome the problem evil poses for a God of Concepts. “The monistic perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds operating in distans upon conceptual substitutes for him alone” (PU, 141). We can appreciate why James loved Bergson, who seemed to confirm that the oppressive opposition between religious emotion and empirical knowledge was coming to an end and a new era of spiritual philosophy commencing.

Seventh lecture The continuity of experience In this lecture James introduced his most original thesis, which concerned the reality of relations. The thesis was more complicated and subtle than James’s easy manner suggested. For James, relations were given, they were data, empirical facts, and not mere abstractions of the mind without a reality of their own:  “Relations of every sort, of space, time, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are” (PU, 126). Not only were relations empirically real; more specifically so were conjunctive relations, real connections. Now, a thesis of real relations was usually associated with rationalism, for instance, in Spinoza. Real relations were what real definitions—​the proper object of scientific knowledge—​disclosed. Know the real definition and you could unfold all the real relations of the reality it comprehended, including its causes and effects. A real definition of anything was the entire world in nuce. James envisioned something more original:  real relations that really connected things in an enduring assemblage, but that were also external relations uncomprehended by any definition. These relations were not all folded up inside a concept, as Spinoza, and especially Gottfried Leibniz, thought. Instead, the relations that really connect things were becoming, historical, evolving phases of an interpenetrating universe that is itself a work in progress. A thesis derived from English nominalism in Ockham, which passed into modern thought with Thomas Hobbes, and was canonized by David Hume, held that only the individual was real. Relations are not individuals; rather, they relate individuals. This relating or connecting could not be real, a real relation. The only reality was individual. Relation had therefore to be our contribution, a connection mind added to make sense of the given. Relations were fanciful, fictitious, therefore factitious and falsifying. Concepts of relation could be useful, but they could not be true. Naturally, originally, the given was disjointed and separate, one thing after another, all things external to every other, like Hobbes’s war of all against all. In Hume’s classic formulation, “All our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences.” Any connection, any synthesis, was artificial, fictive, never given or empirically real. “When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with another, we mean only, that they have acquired a connection in our thought.”15

89

"Ever Not Quite!"

89

Everything was dis-​junct. James was exploring the opposite idea, that conjunctive relations, con-​juncts, real connections, “are just as true members of the flux as disjunctive relations are” (PU, 126). In one of the Radical Empiricism essays he argued that “the conjunctive relations found in experience are “faultlessy real,” and “as primordial elements of ‘fact’ as are the distinctions and disjunctions.”16 Earlier thinking tended not to distinguish between arguing that relations are real and arguing that relations are internal. Internal relations were the mainstay of rationalism, most flamboyantly in Spinoza and Leibniz. For James, the contention that we could deduce knowledge of real existence from the real definitions that real internal relations guarantee was vicious intellectualism in person. Before James, no one wanted relations, both real and external. Logically speaking, the terms of all relations were external to each other. No purely formal deduction from a scientific definition of the honeybee would get you to the flowers by which it lives. The connection is real, but completely external, being the way evolution happened to turn out, and not a matter of logic. Such relations are real and factual, provided that we understand “real” and “fact” as pragmatists do, and eschew vicious intellectualism. Pluralism meant there were many, of course, but it also meant that these many were externally related; for if their relations were internal, they could all be deduced from a real definition, proving the multiplicity superficial, a mere appearance, whereas really all was one. For James, the reality and externality of relations were complementary theses, two sides of the same argument. “Pragmatically interpreted,” he said, “pluralism, or the doctrine that [the universe] is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related. Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely ‘external’ environment of some sort or amount” (PU, 145). Indeed, “nothing real escapes from having an environment” (PU, 144), nothing was so “great or static or eternal enough not to have some history” (PU, 28). Having an environment, having some history, meant having some contingency, some external relations, some accidents on which it depended as conditions of existence. Reality “in itself ” was flow, flux, duration, interval, becoming. James described a “distributed and strung-​along and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in” (PU, 97). That meant real relations had to be relations in advance of conceptually determinate terms. James made a major departure from nominalism. Not only were relations, which were not individual, real; but also relations were more real than individuals, preceding the terms they related. A kind of pure relation was older than individuality, which was a fruit of relation’s way of bursting apart the present, stretching it into the past, and endowing it with futurity. Really external relations did not have conceptualized objects as their terms. They could only relate the given, which meant to stretch and divide it, extending it in space and time, making the opening required for the wedges against change that concepts were. The becoming of relations was the becoming of time itself—​original, primordial becoming. The becoming of terms was the anthropocentric interruption of humanity’s concept-​laden consciousness. Ontological pluralism means original multiplicity, a multiplicity that was not merely the multiplication of a monad, but an aboriginal many of relations antecedent to countable units. Nothing overcomes the world’s manyness. As James explained,

90

90

Barry Allen

though things “are ‘with’ one another” in many ways, “nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along, after every sentence. Something always escapes” (PU, 145). James dramatized pragmatism’s newness by contrasting it with the “rationalism” of European metaphysics:  “The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-​made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future” (P, 123). Almost proudly, James declares “the alternative between pragmatism and rationalism . . . concerns the structure of the universe itself” (P, 124). On one hand, “the universe is absolutely secure,” and on the other, “it is still pursuing its adventures.” “It stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands” (P, 123). In what seems to have been the last work James prepared for publication, his admiring précis of the poet philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, titled “A Pluralistic Mystic,” James cited an apothegm from his author and commented: “Ever not quite!”—​this seems to wring the very last panting word out of the 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, and discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger.17

In closing, James cited Maurice Blondel, the French Neoplatonic Catholic pragmatist who also impressed Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida: “We use what we are and have, to know; and what we know, to be and have still more.” So it was, James said, that “philosophy and reality, theory and action, work in the same circle indefinitely” (PU, 148–​9). After Bergson and Blondel, this pluralist ontology continued to enjoy an impressive showing of champions in French philosophy, including Jean Wahl, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour. In terms both recalling James and pointing beyond him, Latour said, “Reality grows to precisely the same extent as the work done to become sensitive to differences. The more instruments proliferate, the more the arrangement is artificial, the more capable we become of registering worlds. Artifice and reality are in the same positive column.”18 This was James’s strung-​along world, an Epicurean conjunction without totality, a nature of external relations constructed and extended every minute of every day. If nature were already done we would be done for. Nothing would be worse than a finished world, which is merely a euphemism for death. Deleuze inherited Bergson’s stature as France’s best reader of James. “I have always felt that I  was an empiricist,” he said, explaining that “the essential thing, from the point of view of empiricism, is the noun multiplicity.” “In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is between . . . every multiplicity grows from the middle.” The growth is truly growth, that is, novel, epigenetic, and not preformationist. We cannot fail to hear James’s radical empiricism in Deleuze’s epitome of this rhizomatic pluralism. “A multiplicity is only in the and, which does not have the same nature as the elements, the sets, or even their relations.” This and is not a specific relation, but rather “that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which

91

"Ever Not Quite!"

91

makes relations shoot out their terms.” “A quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life.”19 I think James would have liked that.

Notes 1 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 2 William James, The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville: University of Virgnia Press, 1992–​2004), 11.502. Théodore Flournoy (1854–​1920), professor of psychology at the University of Geneva, reviewed James’s The Principles of Psychology when it first appeared. They met and became friends in 1892. After James died (1909), Flournoy published La Philosophie de William James (Saint-​Blaise: Foyer Solidariste, 1911). 3 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 25. 4 George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition, ed. D. L. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 108. 5 Jean Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Open Court, 1925), 63. 6 Ibid., 169. 7 See, e.g., “The Thing and Its Relations,” which is included in The Meaning of Truth and also published as Appendix A in the first edition (1909) of A Pluralistic Universe. 8 Wahl, Pluralist Philosophies, 307. 9 Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig, 1860). 10 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1:504, 518. This was also Bergson’s conclusion in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Éditions F. Alcan, 1889). 11 Bergson made a few references to James’s The Principles of Psychology in Matière et Mémoire (1896), and appreciative references to his work on the feeling of effort in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889). His single sustained discussion of James’s work in philosophy was a preface to the posthumous French translation of Pragmatism (Paris: Flammarion, 1911), which Bergson later included in his collection La Pensée et le Mouvant (Paris: Éditions F. Alcan, 1941) under the title “On the Pragmatism of William James: Truth and Reality.” 12 Arthur O. Lovejoy, cited in Wahl, Pluralist Philosophies, 88. 13 “I repudiate, as philosophical error, the doctrine of Materialism . . . I understand the main tenet of Materialism to be that there is nothing in the universe but matter and force; and that all the phenomena of nature are explicable by deduction from the properties assignable to these two primitive factors . . . But all this I heartily disbelieve.” T. H. Huxley, “Agnosticism” (1889), Agnosticism and Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1992), 162–​3. 14 On the limitations of Bergson’s “pragmatism,” see my “The Use of Useless Knowledge: Bergson against the Pragmatists,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42, no. 1 (2013): 37–​59. 15 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-​Bigge, 2nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 636; Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 50–​51.

92

92

Barry Allen

16 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 99, 46. 17 William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 189–​90. 18 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 85. 19 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), vii, viii, 57. Jean Wahl is key to Deleuze’s interest in American thought including James. He wrote of Wahl, “He not only introduced us to an encounter with English and American thought, but he had the ability to make us think, in French, things that were very new.” Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 57–​58. Wahl’s Pluralist Philosophies of England and America offers a detailed, appreciative reading of James’s pluralism. On Deleuze and James, see Deleuze and Pragmatism, ed. Sean Bowden, Simone Bignall, and Paul Patton (New York: Routledge, 2015).

93

6

James’s Radical Empiricism James Campbell

In volumes like The Will to Believe (WB), The Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE), and Pragmatism (P), William James was able to display his vision, but it did not win over the majority of other philosophers. Phrased differently, while he had a feel for his own vision from the inside, he could not sway others. Over the years, he came increasingly to recognize how novel his philosophical approach—​pure experience, pragmatism, radical experience, and pluralism—​was. Late in his life, he attempted to clarify his position for a broader audience. One part of this project was to present an integrated volume, with the working title of The Many and the One, on the theme of radical empiricism; and between late 1904 and mid-​1905 he published a set of eight preliminary articles, some of which are considered in this chapter. The eight articles, all reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism,1 are “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” “A World of Pure Experience,” “The Thing and Its Relations,” “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience,” “The Experience of Activity,” “The Essence of Humanism,” and “La Notion de Conscience” (in French).2 All these pieces are tentative, and they should be approached collectively as a cluster of hypotheses rather than as an articulated cartesian argument. James never did manage to reformulate these essays into the intended book. Perhaps the task was impossible, or at least beyond him,3 or perhaps he was simply too distracted as he dealt with the continuing fallout from the controversy over Pragmatism.4 Some of the radical empiricist material found its way into A Pluralistic Universe (PU) in 1909 and the posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy (SPP); and the eight essays and other related materials were published as the volume Essays in Radical Empiricism (ERE) in 1912. In the discussion of radical empiricism that follows, I  integrate occasional material from beyond these volumes to indicate the range of James’s thinking on this topic. The first of the Essays in Radical Empiricism, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” is largely duplicated by the eighth, “La Notion de Conscience,” and these two should be considered in tandem. The theme being considered is the nature of experience. The topic is not, as it is elsewhere in James’s writings, the content of experience, for example, its religious aspects or its focus and fringe, although some content aspects remain always nearby. His topic here is knowing or cognition as a fundamental human activity. He had written in The Principles of Psychology of 1890 that “the relation of

94

94

James Campbell

knowing is the most mysterious thing in the world.”5 Now he wants to try to make it a bit less mysterious. To use the familiar commonsense dualistic framework, he wants to consider what experience tells us about the world. In an attempt to answer this question, we can begin with the understanding of “average persons on the street”—​ the so-​called naive realists—​for whom knowledge is not in any way mysterious. Such individuals believe that the world is outside them, has preceded them, and will continue on after they die. They believe that automobiles have color and make noise and sometimes crash. They believe that there are billions of other people in the world whose experiences—​of illness and exhaustion, of elation and love—​are similar to their own. They also believe that most of what occurs in the world bears no significant relation to their lives. This position is called “realism” because it posits an ongoing material world as the locus of human activities. Our experiences in this real world are not delusions or empty ideas or some sort of divine theater; our experiences are veridical.6 This realism is called “naive” because it fails to take any account of numerous, fundamental problems in experiencing with which humans have long been familiar. One such problem is the nonsolidity of matter proposed by the atomic theory, with its implications for our understanding of heat and color. A second problem is the often erratic operations of the human organism. Exhaustion and drugs and illness affect our senses; in addition, we fall victim to all sorts of optical and aural illusions. Any good psychologist—​and James was a very good psychologist—​could point to dozens of ways in which the body is a machine that is prone to report falsely on the world. Thus, naive realism is suspect. James recognizes that there is a certain natural inclination toward dualism, fostered perhaps by this naive realism, and by the psychology of the outside observer who has access to our actions but not to our thoughts. “Common sense and popular philosophy,” he writes, “are as dualistic as it is possible to be.” We naturally think that thoughts are “made of one kind of substance, and things of another” (ERE, 69; cf. 3). This dualism is often exacerbated by academic philosophy (see ERE, 261–​2) that assumes this dualism as a given, and offers us explanations of it using, for example, the power of platonic ideas; but in the process sophisticated philosophy gives rise to even worse problems, like the problem of skepticism vs. knowledge. Some familiar philosophical answers to the problems that result from naive realism are Lockean phenomenalism, which maintains that we have access to our experiences but not to the world; Berkeleyan idealism, which maintains that there is no longer a need for the world; Humean skepticism, a more extreme and consistent version of Lockeanism; Kantian Transcendentalism, which repairs Humean skepticism by attributing the ordering of experience to the workings of our minds; Common Sense Realism, which rejects the initial Lockean phenomenalism; Roycean or Bradleyan Idealism, which modify the Kantian solution; and after James, New Realism and Critical Realism, which paved the way for philosophy as a professional endeavor attempting to solve “the problem of knowledge.”7 James believes that the traditional philosophical solutions to the problem of the dualism of thought and thing are of no use. Fortunately, however, they are

95

James's Radical Empiricism

95

also unnecessary, because the problem to which they offer solutions is one that we have created for ourselves. The problem of dualism, as it is usually presented to us, results from a mis-​taking of experience that has been perpetuated by philosophical malpractice. So, when James says that he mistrusts consciousness “as an entity,” he is not denying that we are conscious beings. He is simply rejecting consciousness as some sort of thing. Thus, when he denies that consciousness exists, he means “only to deny that the word stands for an entity,” although he insists “most emphatically that it does stand for a function” (ERE, 4). He writes that there is “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” (ibid.). There is, however, “a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being in invoked,” and this function is “knowing” (ibid.). James summarizes that “consciousness (as it is commonly represented, either as an entity, or as a pure activity, but in any case as being fluid, inextended, diaphanous, devoid of content of its own, but directly self-​ knowing—​spiritual, in short) . . . is pure fancy” (ERE, 267). On the contrary, what does exist is “the susceptibility possessed by the parts of experience to be reported or known” (ERE, 271). It might thus be better to eliminate as best we can the noun from this discussion: we are individuals who are conscious of many things, but there is no such thing as consciousness. To begin to think in this functional rather than substantial way, we must move away from our familiar dualistic understanding that bifurcates experience, and begin with “pure” experience. James writes 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 towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter” (ERE, 4). As later events have proven, his use of “easily” was certainly hasty, and he is closer to the mark when he writes that clarifying this relation in which “one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known . . . will need much explanation before it can be understood” (ERE, 4–​5). “Pure experience” is what James calls “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.” He notes further: Only new-​born babes, or men in semi-​coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be brought. (ERE, 46)8

Experience in this pure or raw state is “but another name for feeling or sensation” (ERE, 46). Perhaps it would be better to discuss its relatively pure or raw state because, in the process of living, experience “no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted”; and

96

96

James Campbell

as a result “experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions” (ibid.). From that point on, only “the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies” can still be characterized as “pure” experience (ibid.). Pure experience can become either subjective or objective; we make the stuff of pure experience into either thoughts or things. James writes that “pure experience” or the “instant field of the present” is “only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet” (ERE, 13). Until we have converted it into a what, pure experience is “plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that” (ibid.). Thus, he continues, the distinction between “thing” and “thought” is both “a practical distinction of the utmost importance” and “a distinction which is of a functional order only, and not at all ontological as understood by classical dualism” (ERE, 271). Things and thoughts are “made of one and the same stuff, which as such cannot be defined but only experienced; and which, if one wishes, one can call the stuff of experience in general” (ibid.). In our direct acquaintance with an object, such as a sheet of white paper, “the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience.”9 At one and the same time, the “paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper,” he continues; and this is so “because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions” (Essays in Philosophy [EPhil], 75). Experience is thus unlike paint, which James maintains is dualistic by its very nature. “Paint has a dual constitution,” he writes, that involves both “a menstruum (oil, size or what not) and a mass of content in the form of pigment suspended therein” (ERE, 6). Each part can be separated from the other: “We can get the pure menstruum by letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment by pouring off the size or oil” (ibid.). He believes that this process of “physical subtraction” is not analogous to a process of “mental subtraction” by means of which we separate aspects of experience into thoughts and things, because the latter process does not involve “isolating them entirely, but distinguishing them enough to know that they are two” (ibid.; cf. 268). He rejects this paint analogy because experience is not a duality that can be separated into component parts, although such separation often is attempted. When properly understood, the distinction within experience of what we call consciousness and content comes, James writes, “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 may be of two different kinds” (ERE, 6–​7; cf. 270). Using paint in a better analogy, James suggests that in “a pot in a paint-​shop, along with other paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function” (ERE, 7). He then develops this analogy: Just so . . . does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of “consciousness”; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing

97

James's Radical Empiricism

97

known, of an objective “content.” . . . In one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. (ibid.)

He notes that we should be more comfortable with “such double-​barrelled terms as ‘experience,’ ‘phenomenon,’ ‘datum,’ ‘Vorfindung,’ ” in place of “the single-​barrelled terms of ‘thought’ and ‘thing,’ ” because the former words reinterpret the apparent dualism in such a way that “instead of being mysterious and elusive, it becomes verifiable and concrete.” For him, consciousness is “an affair of relations” falling “outside, not inside, the single experience considered,” although it is always open to being “particularized and defined” (ibid.). So, for example, to the degree that our experiences “extend in time, enter into relations of physical influence, reciprocally split, warm, illuminate, etc., each other,” we consider them to be “a field apart which we call the physical world” (ERE, 270). But to the degree that “they are transitory, physically inert, with a succession which does not follow a determined order but seems rather to obey emotive fancies,” we consider them to be “another field which we call the psychical world” (ibid.). James then begins a three-​point discussion of perception and conception, beginning with the former. He suggests that perceptions, events of seeing, hearing, and smelling, are better understood as relations, not between two things—​for example, between the candle or flower and my brain, as naive realism would have it—​but between two pieces of experience. He grants that the commonsense approach to the experience of a person sitting in a room is that the person is experiencing “a collection of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical things with which these physical things have actual or potential relations” (ERE, 7–​8). He notes the familiar dualism here, and indicates that philosophers have long puzzled over how “what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind” (ERE, 8). For him, however, this approach misrepresents the situation. “The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places,” he writes, is no more than “the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines” (ibid.). Just as a single point can be at the intersection of two lines, a pulse of pure experience can be at the “intersection of two processes.” As such “it could be counted twice over, as belonging to either group, and spoken of loosely as existing in two places, although it would remain all the time a numerically single thing” (ibid.). James’s emphasis is, of course, on the processes. One of these processes is “the reader’s personal biography” and the other is “the history of the house of which the room is part” (ibid.), and he believes that these physical and mental processes are not completely compatible. He writes: As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had that environment for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never have existed until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new details in it. As your mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under attention’s eye. As a room, it will take an earthquake, or a gang of men, and in any case a certain amount of time, to destroy it. As your subjective state, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous

98

98

James Campbell play of your fancy will suffice. In the real world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire play over it without effect. As an outer object, you must pay so much a month to inhabit it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any length of time rent-​free (ERE, 9; cf. 269).10

Thus, from the side of personal biography, much is true of the room that is not true when the room is considered as part of the history of the house, and vice versa. Still, we cannot say that “the psychical and the physical” processes are “absolutely heterogeneous.” (ERE, 263). They are, rather, “so little heterogeneous that if we adopt the common-​sense point of view . . . this sensible reality and the sensation which we have of it are absolutely identical with the other at the time the sensation occurs” (ibid.). Thus, he continues, far from being “small inner duplicates of things,” our sensations are “the things themselves in so far as the things are presented to us” (ibid.). Thus, if we set aside what he calls the “private life of things,” and concentrate on their “public life”—​ that is, on the “present actuality with which things confront us, from which all our theoretical constructions are derived and to which they must all return and be linked under penalty of floating in the air and in the unreal”—​we will recognize that this actuality is “homogeneous—​nay, more than homogeneous, but numerically one—​with a certain part of our inner life” (ibid.). A second central consideration in his glance into epistemology is conception—​ imagination, memory, and so on—​which, while more complex than perception, reveals “the same essential homogeneity” (ibid.). If we consider a case of “pure thought, as it occurs in dreams or reveries, or in remembrance of the past,” James writes, we will recognize that “the stuff of experience” performs “a double duty,” with the physical and the psychical intermingling and fusing (ERE, 263–​4). “If I  dream of a golden mountain,” he continues, “doubtless it does not exist outside of the dream; but in the dream the mountain is of a perfectly physical nature or stuff, it is as physical that it appears to me” (ERE, 264). Similarly, he notes that if “at this moment I think of my hat which a while ago I left in the cloak-​room, where is the dualism, the discontinuity between the hat of my thoughts and the real hat?” How different is the real hat that I can hold in my hand and the “idea-​hat” that I can go and retrieve? (ERE, 264–​5; cf. 28). Elsewhere, he argues: If we take conceptual manifolds, or memories, or fancies, they also are in their first intention mere bits of pure experience, and, as such, are single thats which act in one context as objects, and in another context figure as mental states . . . Any single non-​perceptual experience tends to get counted twice over, just as a perceptual experience does, figuring in one context as an object or field of objects, in another as a state of mind. (ERE, 9–​10)

In each case, the single experience serves double duty: the seen room is also a field of consciousness; and the conceived or recollected room, a state of mind. “It plays two different roles, being Gedanke and Gedachtes, the thought-​of-​an-​object, and the object-​thought-​of, both in one” (ERE, 12–​13). So, for example, the room that was thought of may have a longer existence than the thought of it. “In the reader’s personal

99

James's Radical Empiricism

99

history the room occupies a single date—​he saw it only once perhaps, a year ago,” he continues. “Of the house’s history, on the other hand, it forms a permanent ingredient” (ERE, 12). Of course, it is also possible that the house may live on in a person’s memory long after the structure is destroyed. A third central epistemological consideration—​perhaps the most significant—​is the knowing of perceptual by conceptual experience. Here again, James sees “an affair of external relations.” By this he means that “one experience would be the knower, the other the reality known,” and that the knowing of percepts by concepts could be “perfectly well” defined without any use of “consciousness” if it were seen as “leading-​ towards . . . and terminating-​in percepts, through a series of transitional experiences which the world supplies” (ERE, 14).11 As an example he offers an encounter with Harvard’s Memorial Hall. How could we know, he wonders, that we were “thinking truly” of this building? “My mind may have before it only the name, or it may have a clear image, or it may have a very dim image of the hall,” he writes, “but such an intrinsic difference in the image make no difference in its cognitive function” (ERE, 28). He continues: “If you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can tell you nothing; or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind or not; you would rightly deny that I had ‘meant’ that particular hall at all, even tho my mental image might to some degree have resembled it” (ibid.). In contrast, he notes, should he be able to take you to Memorial Hall “and tell you of its history and present uses,” or should he when arrived there feel that his idea, “however imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now terminated,” then he maintains that his idea “must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of reality” (ERE, 28–​9). James begins the essay “A World of Pure Experience” with a further consideration of radical empiricism, especially its difference from traditional Empiricism that he sees as a philosophy of parts in search of wholeness. “Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as that of being,” he writes (ERE, 22). In contrast, empiricism “lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction” (ibid.). For him, the proper description “starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order” (ibid.). It is thus a sort of “mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts” (ibid.). He admits that his view resembles the ideas of David Hume and his followers “who refer these facts neither to substances in which they inhere nor to an absolute mind that creates them as its objects” (ibid.), but James emphasizes that his empiricism is radical because it also incorporates all that is experienced. He continues that “in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully coordinate parts of experience” (ERE, 22–​3), traditional empiricism has been inclined to downplay the former and emphasize the latter. As a result of this assumed fragmentation, rationalism has introduced an attempted repair “by the addition of trans-​experiential agents of unification, substances, intellectual categories and powers, or selves” (ERE, 23). He maintains, however, that if empiricism had been thoroughly radical and treated conjunction and disjunction equally then no “artificial correction” would have had to be imported (ibid.).12

100

100

James Campbell

“Radical empiricism,” James writes, “does full justice to conjunctive relations, without, however, ever treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them, as being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether” (ibid.). Although he had just referred to his philosophy of plural facts as a “mosaic” philosophy, he steps back from that metaphor because in “actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding,” and rationalism was only too happy to portray its role as providing the necessary bedding—​“substances, transcendental egos, or absolutes”—​to turn the pieces into a world. He writes, however, that for radical empiricism “there is no bedding; it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement” (ERE, 42). As a result, he continues, “experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges” (ibid.), with its various moments merging into others. “Life is in the transitions,” James writes, “as much as in the terms connected” (ibid.). Consequently, conjunctive relations and disjunctive relations are both central to experience. Neither is primary; both are real and coequal. Experience seeps and drifts and flows because of these relations.

Notes 1 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 2 As James wrote at the time to F. J. E. Woodbridge, the editor of The Journal of Philosophy where six of the articles appeared, “I appear to be growing into a graphomaniac. Truth boils over from my organism as muddy water from a yellowstone geyser” (Correspondence of William James [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–​ 2004], 10.542). John J. McDermott continues that “these essays formulate the long-​ simmering speculations of almost thirty years” (ERE, xii; cf. xxv–​xxx). 3 Ignas K. Skrupskelis notes that “James never worked out his version of radical empiricism systematically, and it still remains to be understood whether the failure is simply one of James’s personality or is due to some fundamental flaw in his philosophical views. Whatever the reasons, James’s radical empiricism never had an opportunity to prove its fruitfulness in philosophy. One can only speculate what American philosophy would have been like had James completed ‘The Many and the One’ ” (William James, Manuscript Essays and Notes [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988], xx; cf. 330–​1); see also William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), xxvii. 4 James thought that he had had his say in Pragmatism, and he hoped to return to more “metaphysical” writings. He retired from Harvard at the end of the fall semester, 1906–​ 07; and, knowing that his heart was failing, he wanted to dedicate his remaining time to serious “scientific” work. Instead, he continued to be distracted by his felt need to revisit pragmatic themes, eventually resulting in the 1909 volume The Meaning of Truth. 5 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1890], 1981), 1.212. 6 Joseph Leon Blau presents this view as follows: “The plain man, whose thought has not been touched by philosophic considerations, is a realist. The world is there, outside himself. It contains physical things in a definite order of both space and time. He sees,

101

James's Radical Empiricism

101

hears, or otherwise perceives these physical things; he approaches them or retreats from them, manipulates them, uses them in whatever fashion he can. By and large, except for an occasional moment of wonder about the relation to things of men who lack one or more of the senses, he is convinced that the way in which he experiences things is typical, and that it is the normal human experience. He believes that the physical things were there before he perceived them and that they remain there afterwards. Their existence does not depend on him, nor have their properties any unique relation to his mind. When he calls something to the attention of another human being, that other perceives and handles the same thing. Things are both independent of men and common to men. Physical objects are considered as permanent and unchanging. Apparent variations in the object are explained as changes in the relation of the perceiver to the object, not changes in the object itself. Nor is there on this view anything special about the perceiver. He is a concrete individual, a particular kind of thing, as real as the things he perceives. Part of his nature as the kind of thing he is, is that he can perceive and be aware of other things as well as of himself. Knowledge is not a problem but a fact.” See Joseph Leon Blau, Men and Movements in American Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1952), 293–​4. 7 For the final two, see Edwin Bissell Holt et al., eds., The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1912); and Durant Drake et al., eds., Essays in Critical Realism: A Co-​operative Study of the Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1920). 8 Frank Thilly presents James’s view as follows: “We must take experience as it exists before it has been manipulated by conceptual thinking,—​experience in its purity and primitive innocence,—​if we would reach reality. We must go behind the conceptual function altogether and look to the more primitive flux of the sensational life for reality’s true shape . . . Reality is pure experience independent of human thinking; it is something very hard to find; it is what is just entering into experience and yet to be named, or else it is some imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence has arisen, before any human conception has been applied. It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption.” Frank Thilly, A History of Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 1914), 568; cf. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Image, 1967), 8.2.89. 9 William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 75. 10 For George Herbert Mead, James is discussing “a cross-​section of two histories. And the cross-​section is identical. The room belongs to the history of the house. It has been there since the house was built. It is in that particular history. When the person comes into the room, that particular room with its furnishings becomes a fact of his history. He had been elsewhere yesterday. He comes into that particular room, and that room is now part of his experience; he goes out, and it is related to his former experiences. He had been in other houses, seen other furniture. He compares pictures. Each is related, you see, to his history. On the other hand, this room also belongs to the history of the house, of the architect, of the carpenter” (Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Merritt H. Moore, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936], 394).

102

102

James Campbell

11 Edward Carter Moore discusses these two types of relations as follows: “The doctrine of internal relations” maintains that “everything is related by its nature to everything else to form a unity such that any change in one part would mean a change in the other parts . . . The opposite of this view was the doctrine of external relations. According to this view, some things may be related in such ways that they are—​so to speak—​not related, i.e., a change in one of them does not affect the others . . . The monistic position is that everything is related to everything else by internal relations. Thus all in one—​we have a genuine universe. Where we find only external relations we have not looked closely enough. Further examination will reveal internal relations.” Edward Carter Moore, American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 130–​1. 12 Elsewhere, James writes: “Rationalism in philosophy proceeds from the whole to its parts, and maintains that the connection between facts must at bottom be intimate and not external: the universal is a Unit, and the parts of Being must be interlocked continuously. Empiricism, on the other hand, goes from parts to whole, and is willing to allow that in the end some parts may be merely added to others, and that what the word ‘and’ stands for may be a part of real Being as well as of speech. For radical rationalism, Reality in itself is eternally complete, and the confusions of experience are our illusion. For radical empiricism, confusion may be a category of the Real itself, and ‘ever not quite’ a permanent result of our attempts at thinking it out straighter” (EPhil, 140–​1).

103

Part Two

James and Modernist Culture

104

105

7

James and Bergson: Fighting the Beast Intellectualism with Metaphors Rosa Slegers

Introduction: Silk underclothing and myopic ants On July 20, 1905, Henri Bergson writes to William James and compares the latter’s pragmatism to his own “French new philosophy,” remarking that the two “were established independently of each other, with different points of departure and different methods. When, in such conditions, two doctrines tend to agree, there is every chance that they are both in the vicinity of the truth.”1 In a letter from June 27, 1907, Bergson describes James’s pragmatism as a “supple and flexible philosophy,” suited to replace the “intellectualism” that both thinkers opposed (KW, 443). James reciprocates Bergson’s praise in one of his more surprising metaphors from A Pluralistic Universe (PU) where he writes about Bergson’s “flexibility of verbal resources that follows the thought without a crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements of one’s body.”2 Fluidity, flexibility, change, and suppleness are at the heart of both James’s and Bergson’s philosophies. In Bergson’s words, both seek to dive into “mobile reality . . . to attain to fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of adopting the very movement of the inward life of things.”3 This chapter focuses on the philosophical affinity between James and Bergson.4 Instead of aspiring to a complete summing up of the relationship between the two thinkers in an exhaustive “all-​form,” it tries to evoke the élan vital of their friendship through “living sympathy,” using Jamesian and Bergsonian metaphors that place the reader at the center of the philosophers’s shared visions (PU, 20, 117). Allowing these metaphors to set the tone and indicate the direction, we avoid the intellectualist pitfall of becoming “myopic ants,” crawling over James’s and Bergson’s philosophies as over a building, “tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists” (PU, 117). James experienced Bergson’s work not as a series of cracks and fissures, but as a flow of a “rich river.” In his characteristically generous style he writes to Bergson: “You may be amused at the comparison, but in finishing it I found the same after-​taste remaining as after finishing Madame Bovary, such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to

106

106

Rosa Slegers

the brim.”5 James and Bergson both invite us to dive into their works rather than “crawl over” them like myopic ants. This means that we have to resist another intellectualist temptation to clean up “the litter with which the world apparently is filled” (PU, 26). In fancying ourselves architects with a vision of things from above, we miss out on the “euphony” of the flux and, if James’s response to Bergson’s Creative Evolution (CE) is any indication, the chance to be “rejuvenated” (The Correspondence of William James [CWJ], 11.376).

The vicious intellectualist’s logical herbarium In his introduction to the French translation of James’s Pragmatism (P), Bergson states that to endure, truth needs roots in realities, “but these realities are only the ground in which that truth grows, and other flowers could just as well have grown there if the wind had brought other seeds.”6 In James’s own words, “Reality is in general what truths have to take account of; and the first part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations.”7 The flux of our sensations is not under our control and is “forced upon us”; like the ground in Bergson’s metaphor, this flux is a given and (to stretch the metaphor a bit) over the “nature, order, and quantity” of this soil we have “as good as no control” (P, 117). Our beliefs about reality must also take into account the relations between the sensations that constitute the flux, and the previous truths we hold already. But, writes James, “the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation” (P, 122). In The Creative Mind (CM), Bergson summarizes what he takes to be the most important thesis of James’s pragmatism: “The structure of our mind is to a great extent our work” (184). The mind-​set corresponding to what James calls “intellectualism” is marked by the belief that “our mind comes upon a world complete in itself.”8 For James, “the actual universe is a thing wide open” and the philosophical attitude he promotes is accordingly open and pluralistic (P, 20). The intellectualist, by contrast, believes that the world is a complete and closed system in which everything is given and hence refuses “to believe anything concerning which ‘evidence’ has not yet come in” (Some Problems of Philosophy, 222). James recognizes that our power to translate “the crude flux of our merely feeling-​experience into a conceptual order” is useful and indispensable, but warns that in intellectualism the conceptual order has come to dominate lived experience (PU, 98). “Vicious” intellectualism in particular prefers concepts to “facts” and treats definitions as superior to and more “true” than the vagueness of reality as we experience it (PU, 32). Intellectualism is rationalism taken to the extreme in that it “makes systems, and systems must be closed” (P, 20). It insists on a reality that “stands complete and ready-​made from all eternity” and that can be captured in fixed, immutable concepts (P, 108). These abstract concepts are like cut flowers, no longer rooted in the ground from which they sprang. They are “discontinuous” and we study them “post mortem” (PU, 106, 109). Starting from these cut-​up “dried specimens” it is impossible to learn “how

107

James and Bergson

107

life made itself go” (PU, 109). In its desire to conceptualize everything and reduce the flux of our sensations to a series of fixed dots, intellectualism “does not stop till sensible reality lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of ‘reason’ ” (PU, 110). Concepts are “what the Germans call Denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking them,” and as such have great practical value. These Denkmittel have been so “uniformly victorious” that they now constitute the “natural mother-​tongue of thought” (P, 88). Studying the contents of our “logical herbarium” we forget that what we are looking at are cut and “dried specimens,” plucked from the flux of sensations and immobilized (PU, 109). James points out that no matter how many bits we gather from the flux, no collection of concepts can place us back into flux where we might see things in the making. As a result of its concept-​based postmortem approach, “intellectualism makes experience less instead of more intelligible,” even though our common sense tells us that we have understood a thing when we have labeled it with a concept (PU, 105). “Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its definition” (PU, 99). The vicious intellectualist holds that “fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change,” and that reality consists of stable essences, not of appearances (PU, 106). From this perspective, we know the essence of a thing when we know its definition, and definitions provide us with a sense of “ease, peace, [and rest]” because they allow us to believe that we have neatly categorized and classified reality and are “done.”9 But on this secure, comforting view, change is hard to understand even though it normally is an unproblematic part of our experience. If a thing really is its definition, and if definitions are fixed and absolute, how could A ever become B? In James’s words: “Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung to even when they make them unintelligible” (PU, 99). The intellectualist does not recognize that “the word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence” and that something always escapes our concepts and categories (PU, 145). In Creative Evolution, Bergson argues that matter tends to constitute isolable systems, but there are always “certain external influences” preventing this isolation from being complete.10 Employing another plant metaphor to describe “the stream of sensible continuity,” James writes, “No element there cuts itself off from any other element, as concepts cut themselves from concepts . . . if you tear out one, its roots bring out more with them” (PU, 121). Cutting and drying flowers and studying the results in the intellectualist’s logical herbarium, we can pretend that reality is made up of separate, steady concepts, while in fact none of the concrete pulses of experience are “pent in.” Every plant pulled up brings some clumps of earth with it, “external influences” that show that the plant is not an isolable system. As James observes in A Pluralistic Universe, “you cannot separate the same from its other, except by abandoning the real altogether and taking to the conceptual system” (128). Names cut sensational experiences into separate entities, but in the original continuum “all real units of experience overlap” (PU, 130) like the root systems of the flowers mentioned by Bergson. “Nature is but a name for excess,” says James (ibid.). Everything has an external environment of some sort and nothing includes everything. This is why, according to Bergson, “individuality admits of any number of degrees, and . . . is not fully realized anywhere, even in man” (CE, 12). “Certain external influences” prevent complete isolation of the individual

108

108

Rosa Slegers

even if our concepts suggest that reality is discontinuous. James and Bergson write about each other as artists in this sense, evoking the freshness of experience through their works and inducing others to make the same effort.

The (violent) philosopher-​artist In a letter to Bergson, James writes about the former’s Creative Evolution: “To me at present the vital achievement of the book is that it inflicts an irrecoverable death-​ wound upon Intellectualism. It can never resuscitate!” (CWJ, 11.376). In A Pluralistic Universe, James writes that Bergson’s philosophy encouraged him to “renounce the intellectualistic method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be” (101). Even the “best possible theoretic philosophy,” he writes in The Will to Believe (WB), is still “a monstrous abridgment of life” (33). Vicious intellectualism is something monstrous that needs to be renounced, or, as he puts it in a letter to F. C. S. Schiller, a “beast” to be “killed:” “the beast intellectualism killed absolutely dead!” (CWJ, 11.378). James’s mention of beasts and death-​wounds makes clear that the struggle against vicious intellectualism is a violent one. To follow Bergson and James in their thinking, we need to suffer an “inner catastrophe” in order to subdue our own intellectualist tendencies (PU, 118). Only then will we recognize that “an intellectualist answer to the intellectualist difficulties will never come” (PU, 131). We are called on to radically disrupt our usual, utilitarian ways of thinking to make room for an intuitive grasp of reality. James’s beast and its violent death and many other metaphors found in his writings show that he himself is subject to what he mentions as the tendency to use “physical metaphors” to “deal with moral facts” (PU, 111). Central though these metaphors may be to James’s thought, he warns us about a particular subset of physical metaphors that reduce the flux of experience to spatial terms. When, for example, we think about time as the movements of the hands of the clock, we are prone to regard time as infinitely divisible and susceptible to a common, objective measure. In Time and Free Will (TFW), Bergson explains, “When we speak of time, we generally think of a homogeneous medium in which our conscious states are ranged alongside one another as in space, so as to form a discrete multiplicity.”11 But, in James’s words, “in the experience of living subjects” time comes in “drops.” When we pour out the last bit of liquid from a bottle, the contents come out in drops or not at all—​it is like this with time as well. We experience time in “definite increments” and though we can theoretically divide up time just like we can divide up drops into their component parts, the experienced increments are wholes (PU, 104). Experienced increments of time are felt to “coexist and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely,” but this experience is lost when we “project time into space” and plot it out on a clock face (PU, 104; TFW, 85). In his explanation of Bergson’s notion of time, James uses a physical metaphor to warn us about our tendency to use physical metaphors. James provides the idea that time comes in drops as an alternative to the notion of time as measured by the hands of a clock. The killing of the beast Intellectualism is a victory

109

James and Bergson

109

of the right kind of physical metaphor over the reductive, spatial metaphors that guide our everyday thoughts. It takes a killing and an “inner catastrophe” for us to begin to live “in sympathetic acquaintance” with things and do justice to reality as experienced rather than reality as conceptualized by the intellect. Intellectualist thought, writes James, “deals . . . solely with surfaces” and can name but not fathom the thickness of reality (PU, 112). This thickness is fathomed only in direct experience or when someone evokes it for us in the imagination. James describes Bergson as an artist and “magician” who “evokes and invites” (PU, 102, 119)  us to fathom the thickness of reality—​and James himself is no less evocative and inviting in his own writing. James shows himself to be acutely aware of the irony of his anti-​intellectualist lectures: “As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field” (PU, 131). “I must deafen you to talk,” he writes, and the only way he has at his disposal is to talk more (ibid.). But James’s “talk” can bring about what Bergson calls “saving experiences” because it differs from the everyday “commonplace” language that shields us from reality. In his particular choice of words and metaphors, James is like the artist as Bergson describes him. Bergson’s artist brushes aside “utilitarian symbols” and reveals to us the “rhythms of life.”12 Art has a revelatory quality, even if the revelation does not last: the artist gives us a glimpse of the flux of reality through his or her work, but to truly understand it we would have to experience it.13 When we engage with a work of art, Bergson writes in Laughter, we are “like passers-​by who join in a dance,” impelled “to set in motion, in the depths of our being, some secret chord which was only waiting to thrill” (74). In his usual generous fashion, James writes that Bergson’s disciples understand Bergson’s work “in the fashion in which one loves,” by placing themselves at the center of Bergson’s thought rather than crawling over it like the previously mentioned myopic ant (PU, 119). But the same applies to James’s own work, and James’s compliments to Bergson are equally applicable to James and his own disciples. “Reading [Bergson’s] works is what has made me bold,” writes James, because Bergson is the only one to ever seriously question rationalism and intellectualism in the vicious sense: “Bergson alone has been radical” (97, 106). Since James’s and Bergson’s are converging theories with different, independent starting points, Bergson might as well have said that James’s radical empiricism made him bold. In The Creative Mind Bergson recommends “a certain manner of thinking which courts difficulty” and this is what we find in James. “I value effort above everything,” Bergson continues, “for each new problem, a completely new effort” (103, 105). More “physical metaphors” of the anti-​intellectualist type will illustrate this effort and the “contagious sincerity” that Bergson remarks on in his description of the artist.

Fluidity, duration, and conceptual nets In An Introduction to Metaphysics (IM), Bergson writes, “The lead-​line sunk to the sea bottom brings up a fluid mass which the sun’s heat quickly dries into solid and discontinuous grains of sand” (76). Under intellectual scrutiny, living reality dries up

110

110

Rosa Slegers

into discrete, immobile concepts. Our sensations meanwhile are never simple and discontinuous; in James’s words, “No one ever had a simple sensation by itself . . . what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.”14 Similarly, consciousness “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described” (PP, 1.233). Looking at our selves from the intellectualist perspective, we imagine what Bergson in Creative Evolution calls a “formless ego,” indifferent and unchangeable, on which we thread the “psychic states” as if they were “independent entities” (3). But where the discriminative attention sees solid colors, “like beads on a necklace,” there is in lived experience a “flux of fleeting shades merging into each other” (ibid.). In Time and Free Will, Bergson calls this flux “pure duration” and explains that it refers to “the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states” (84). Here we find “succession without distinction, . . . an interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought” (TFW, 85). We can only truly understand James’s stream or river and Bergson’s “flux of fleeting shades” from the inside, placing ourselves in the current. Our intellectual habits make us believe that we can recreate living reality from concepts, just as we might create a curve through a number of dots plotted on a graph (PU, 109). But as Bergson observes, “You will never get out of an idea which you have formed anything which you have not put into it,” and this holds for concepts as well (TFW, 74). We use concepts as “solid bases of operation” by means of which our intelligence “tries to catch . . ., as in a net, something of the passing reality” (CM, 159). James uses the same image in A Pluralistic Universe where he compares the working of the intellect to the attempt to scoop up water with a net: “These concepts are not parts of reality, not real positions taken by it, but suppositions rather, notes taken by ourselves, and you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you can dip up water with a net, however finely meshed” (PU, 113). And in another watery metaphor: “As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relations moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated” (PP, 1.237). Starting from our “solid bases of operation” we fail to capture the “essence of the real” (CM, 159). Bergson comments on the long tradition of this approach, summarizing it as the principle that “all knowledge must necessarily start from rigidly defined concepts in order to grasp by their means the flowing reality” (CM, 160). This ancient principle still dominates our thinking and leaves no room for duration or what Bergson elsewhere calls “real time” (e.g., CE, 17, 21, 26). We have already touched on the tendency to “spatialize” time, to represent time (e.g., on a clock face) as infinitely divisible, while in our experience time comes in drops. Starting from spatial concepts and trying to grasp time from these “solid bases,” we capture time as we think it but not as we live it. Similarly, once we regard conscious

111

James and Bergson

111

states as discrete and “spatially” separated, lived experience escapes us. In James’s words, “out of no amount of discreteness can you manufacture the concrete” (PU, 116). Recalling the image of the beaded necklace, Bergson writes: “We express duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another” (TFW, 86). While we are waiting for sugar to dissolve in a liquid, time is not experienced as divided up into equal bits, but as the very particular time of our impatience (CE, 9–​10). Time for living beings is thus clearly something else entirely from time as measured by an hourglass (CE, 15–​16). The distinct grains of sand from the dried sample brought up from the seafloor and those running through an hourglass are what remain of the flux and fluidity of lived experience when it is reduced to concepts. James invites us to dive “back into the flux . . . if you wish to know reality” in “living sympathy,” which alone allows us access to the “moving, active thickness of the real” (PU, 113, 117, 116). Similarly, we are urged to put ourselves “in the making” by a “stroke” of intuitive sympathy (PU, 117). The language of dives and strokes suggests a suddenness and directness very different from the apparently more cautious approach of intellectualism, which stays at the surface and regards things from above rather than risk the plunge into a flux “too concrete” to be managed abstractly. Try to “harness up” reality in conceptual systems “in order to drive it the better” (PU, 111)  and you will find yourself always on the surface, never immersed. The Bergsonian artist and the Jamesian philosopher reveal “the deep current” described by Bergson in Time and Free Will. In and through his or her work the artist manages to bring samples from within the flux to the surface without destroying their essential fluidity (TFW, 133).

Correcting intellectualism through laughter James mentions Bergson’s book Laughter:  An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic in a letter to John Jay Chapman:  “As for Bergson, I  think your change of the word “comic” into the word “tragic” throughout his book is impayable, and I have no doubt it is true. I have only read half of him, so don’t know how he is coming out” (CWJ, 12.425). In contrast with his high praise of Creative Evolution, it would appear that James did not think much of Bergson’s treatise on the comic, at least not of the first half. Bergson’s account of funny situations and funny characters read as “reductive and socially conservative” even to many of his contemporaries.15 It is therefore surprising that Bergson makes some of his most interesting claims about art in general toward the end of his treatise—​the part that James may never have read. Perhaps ironically, given James’s disdain for the work, Bergson’s remarks about the role of the artist dovetail with James’s reflections on the role of the philosopher. The Bergsonian artist recognizes that living reality does not resemble anything like a jointed chain and cannot be reduced to discrete concepts. A work of art is not pieced together “out of fragments filched from right and left” as if it were “a harlequin’s motley. Nothing living would result from that” (Laughter, 79). Bergson’s reference

112

112

Rosa Slegers

to a harlequin’s motley moves us into the sphere of the comical where, according to Bergson, we find the kind of approximations of life that characterize the works of the discriminative attention. It is instructive to look at Bergson’s “theory of the comic” because it reveals the absurd results of “vicious” intellectualism if it goes unchecked. The “inner catastrophe” (PU, 118) mentioned by James and the “violence to the mind” promoted by Bergson both involve a disruption of the intellectual tendency to think about reality in terms of machinery, mechanism, and manufacturing. This mind-​set leaves no room for the “irreducible and irreversible,” but is concerned solely with the repetition and reproduction of the past. What is funny in slapstick comedy, with its endless repetitions and predictable incidents, is sad, frightening, or simply boring in real life: in lived experience no two sensations are the same. But the mechanistic instinct of the mind is stronger than reason and stronger than immediate experience. It regards “the future and the past as calculable functions of the present” and has as its central claim “all is given” (CE, 38). The irreversibility of time, so vivid to our immediate experience, is “mere appearance” from the mechanistic, intellectualist perspective. The intellect studies the flux of experience from the outside, ready to catch the stream in its net of concepts. It is concerned primarily with repetition and repeatability, and from lived reality it selects what is already known. The principle at the center of the intellectualist approach is that “the same causes produce the same effects” (CE, 57). The corresponding tendency is to think about the world in terms of manufacturing, because organization can “only be studied scientifically if the organized body has first been likened to a machine” (CE, 70). Bergson holds that the mechanical perspective on reality is at the center of light comedy, but becomes problematic when it is no longer “corrected” by laughter (Laughter, 80). In Laughter, Bergson states that comedy is “the only one of all the arts that aims at the general” because it deals with types (71). Types are superficial and correspond to intellectualist thought that, according to Bergson, deals only with surfaces. In comedy as in intellectualism we do not find full, living characters and lived experiences, but a world reduced to a few salient features. What we find funny in comedy is an exaggeration of what we take for granted in our everyday lives because of our intellectual habits. Individuality is largely hidden to most of us because we see only a “practical simplification of reality” (Laughter, 72). It is as if, rather than discerning the world in its richness, we only read the labels affixed to things, ignoring their individuality and seeing only categories and classifications. This perspective has great practical value, for example, when we are counting. In order to count, we need to assume that the units counted are identical with one another: “No doubt we can count the sheep in a flock and say that there are fifty, although they are different from one another and are easily recognized by the shepherd: but the reason is that we agree in that case to neglect their individual differences and to take into account only what they have in common” (TFW, 75). Each “unit” in this case bears the label “sheep,” and it is only because of this labeling that we can count the members of the flock. As Bergson puts it in The Creative Mind: “Our normal faculty of knowing is then essentially a power of extracting what stability and regularity there is in the flow of reality” (76). The intellect labels the world with concepts depending on a thing’s use

113

James and Bergson

113

because “nature destined us to master and utilize matter” (CM, 26). This approach obviously has great practical value, but the tendency to ignore individuality for the sake of categorization encourages us to look at the world as a collection of concepts. The intellect is prone to “spatialize” everything because, though it is designed by nature “to study a part,” that is, the material world, “we use it to study the whole; contradictions and obscurities necessarily arise” (CM, 55). Bergson argues that while comedy makes fun of our intellectual and mechanical habits, other (non-​comedic) artists go further and help us to remove our utilitarian blinders.

Individuality beyond the veil In a letter to James from 1903, Bergson compliments him on his Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE) and its “novel procedure,” which “consists in giving the reader an alternating series of overall impressions which play against each other and at the same time fuse together in his mind” (KW, 437). In the Varieties James aims at the individual and through the particular evokes the “flow of reality” described by Bergson. James, in short, is a Bergsonian artist. According to Bergson, nonartists are separated from reality by a “veil” through which we perceive only classifications. This veil consists of our utilitarian interests and filters out everything that is of no clear practical use to us:  “Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,—​thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet” (Laughter, 151). Artists have souls that are “more detached from life” because nature has “forgotten to rivet the perception to the need.” As opposed to science and other intellectualist pursuits, artists aim “at what is individual . . . something which has once happened and can never be repeated” (Laughter, 161). Most of us need artists to lift this utilitarian veil for us and allow us a glimpse of the rich individuality that usually eludes us.16 James, like the Bergsonian artist, lifts the veil for his readers because he does not try to “straighten out the aboriginal privacy and vagueness” of the experiences he describes (PU, 104). Instead, he presents these experiences in a way that goes beyond types and places his readers in the middle of the flux. In Essays in Radical Empiricism, James observes that “only new-​born babes, or men in semi-​coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what.”17 But pure experience can be evoked (if only partially) through the detailed description of what Bergson called an “alternating series of overall impressions” in his letter to James. “Pure experience” in its full sense is out of reach for most of us, but we can sense “the immediate flux of life” in James’s unhurried and detailed examples. In the Varieties in particular James is concerned with “immediate personal experiences” as the “exclusive subject” of his study.18 James and Bergson are in agreement about the great value of the scientific attitude in certain areas exactly because of its impersonality. When it comes to lived experience, however, the appeal of this attitude is “shallow.” Vicious intellectualism brings the scientific attitude to bear all parts of experience and so

114

114

Rosa Slegers

oversteps its bounds. The scientific attitude can appropriately treat “the cosmic and the general” because there we “deal only with the symbols of reality.” But when we “deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term” (VRE, 393). The Varieties are full of these “private and personal phenomena” that “fuse together in our mind” and allow us a glimpse at the “realities in the completest sense of the term” behind the utilitarian veil described by Bergson. Here again the intellectualist’s world turns out to be lifeless like the logical herbarium described above: Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. Compared with this world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect contemplates is without solidity or life. (VRE, 395)

Experience reduced to vicious intellectualism is no longer alive. The veil that Bergson suggests is interposed between nonartists and reality filters out more individuality, richness, and life the more our utilitarian, intellectualist concerns dominate our ways of thinking and being in the world. Ultimately this veil can become opaque to the extent that we are altogether removed from lived experience. In the words of an anhedonic asylum patient quoted in the Varieties: “I see, . . . I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of everything.” Deprived of individuality, “the world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny” (VRE, 127). Pure experience “furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories,” and in James the latter never blots out the former. James compares what he calls pure experience and what Bergson refers to as the artist’s privileged access to reality to our everyday perspective on reality as “labeled.” Just like Bergson, he holds that “experience merely as such doesn’t come ticketed and labeled” (P, 84). This explains James’s “suspicion about common sense” that “its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypotheses” (P, 94). Vicious intellectualism elevates and fixes these categories and does not recognize that “individuality outruns all classification” (PU, 7). They have great theoretic value, but fail to “connect us to the inner life of the flux . . . Instead of being interpreters of reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality altogether” (PU, 110). This brings to mind the image of the architect, looking at the world from the vantage point of his or her “solid bases of operation.” The inner life of the flux escapes the architect as much as it escapes the “myopic ant” crawling over the surface of a structure. Bergson’s comments about literary composition in The Creative Mind are instructive if we want to complement the architect’s and the ant’s perspective with an understanding of the flux from within. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson observes that it is not enough to study and gather documents, experiences, and observations. To write a literary composition, one must “place oneself in the very heart of the subject to seek the impulsion which carries it forward.” Only a “long comradeship with superficial

115

James and Bergson

115

manifestations” will ultimately lead to a “spiritual harmony” with the subject’s “innermost quality” (IM, 169). Bergson’s observations here mirror the remarks about the Varieties in his letter to James: James’s “novel procedure” accomplishes the “spiritual harmony” held up as the goal of literary composition in An Introduction to Metaphysics. This procedure appeals to the reader’s intuition, described by Bergson as “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible” (IM, 22–​ 23). Bergson uses the example of a Homeric passage that makes an impression on us that cannot be captured in “commonplace” language, just as no description of a poem can convey the meaning of the original. Description leaves us in the “relative,” while an intuitive grasp from within makes us understand the thing “perfectly”: not because we have exhaustively analyzed and conceptualized our experience, but because we are part of it. In the Varieties and elsewhere, James shows that we need not give in to the mind’s “disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black or white.” He instead turns to the particular and so overcomes the intellectualist’s “incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades.” (PU, 40)

Conclusion: Reality flows, and we flow with it In Talks to Teachers (TT) James states his intention of making us “feel how soaked and shot-​through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view.”19 The vicious intellectualist is condemned to this point of view, stuck behind Bergson’s veil in a world marked by “irremediable flatness.” Art and philosophy can provide remedies by breaking through or reversing the intellectualist direction of thought, granting us “a certain consoling emotion drawn from the very heart of reality” (KW, 447). James recognizes that these consoling emotions are forces we did not ourselves create and this is why “everywhere the ethical philosopher must wait on facts” (WB, 158). The philosopher’s work in ethics must more and more ally itself “with literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic,” that is, “novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform” (WB, 159). He calls for philosophers to abandon the “old-​fashioned, clear-​cut, and would-​ be ‘scientific’ form” (ibid.), and instead turn to sources closer to “the flux of sensible experience” that may “itself contain a rationality that has been overlooked” (PU, 38). Bergson, for his part, states that “art brings us face to face with reality itself ” and lays bare “a secret portion of ourselves” (Laughter, 74). The artist reveals “a deeper reality,” a flux of fleeting shades in which the past and the present form an organic whole (Laughter, 76). Clinging to the intellectualist, would-​be scientific attitude we risk closing ourselves off from this deeper reality, changing “a growing, elastic, and continuous life into a superstitious system of relics and dead bones” (WB, 158). For James, Bergson writes, “the whole man counts” and the “truths of feeling . . . push their roots deepest into reality” (CM, 180, 185). Between these truths of feeling and scientific truths Bergson establishes

116

116

Rosa Slegers

the same kind of difference as there is . . . between the sail-​boat and the steamer: both are human inventions, but the first makes only slight use of artificial means—​it takes the direction of the wind and makes the natural force it utilizes perceptible to the eye; on the contrary, in the second the artificial mechanism holds the most important place; it covers the force it puts into play and assigns to it a direction which we ourselves have chosen. (CM, 185)

Even if we cannot perceive the currents themselves, the feeling of the breeze on our cheek and the sight of the sailboats reveal their direction.20 Similarly, the “inner movements of our spirit [are known] only perceptually” (PU, 111), but “mystical souls” are open to these “spiritual currents” as to a “beneficent breeze” (CM, 180). Intellectual truth allows us to utilize reality, but not to access it, while the kind of truth that is “felt before being conceived is more capable of seizing and storing up reality than truth merely thought” (CM, 185). In Talks to Teachers James writes about these currents: “The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-​currents absorbed by what is given” (TT, 146). The philosopher “waiting on facts” is open to “raw unverbalized life” and recognizes that this life is not conceptually neat but “turbid, muddled, gothic” (PU, 121, 26). In The Creative Mind, Bergson claims that for James reality “flows without our being able to say whether it is in a single direction, or even whether it is always and throughout the same river flowing” (179). For James reality is indefinite, and he finds this refreshing indefiniteness expressed in Bergson as well: “Open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read. It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds” (PU, 118). Because of our intellectual habits, “the individuality of things escapes us.” According to Bergson this tendency is the result of need and further enforced by the sort of speech that deals in generalities and symbols. This presents to philosophers a challenge of which James is well aware: Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher, He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. (VRE, 360)

When we sense the “inner significance” of the flux of experience and are struck by a “mystic sense of hidden meaning,” we realize that this sense cannot be explained “logically or in articulate conceptions” (TT, 138–​9). In the Varieties James evokes this “mystic sense,” using what Bergson refers to as James’s novel method involving many particular examples that fuse together in the reader’s mind. James states that he will keep talking in order to deafen us to the talk of intellectualism, making room instead for “living sympathy” that will help us catch the “hidden meaning” that escapes conceptualization. For Bergson this is the role of the intuition, which he regards as analogous to the “art of

117

James and Bergson

117

reading.” Bergson recommends that philosophers use their intuition as they would read a book: “On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and the rhythm of the composition, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in sympathy” (CM, 69). On June 27, 1907, Bergson writes to James about Pragmatism and remarks that the “analogy between our points of view” is nowhere clearer. He describes James’s work as a “supple and flexible philosophy which is destined to take the place of intellectualism” because in it, we find “reality in the making” (KW, 443). Bergson’s praise contrasts with the characteristically humble letter that James wrote to accompany his gift to Bergson: You will be receiving my own little “pragmatism” book simultaneously with this letter. How jejune and inconsiderable it seems in comparison with your great system! But it is so congruent with parts of your system, fits so well into interstices thereof, that you will easily understand why I  am so enthusiastic. I  feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks. (CWJ, 11.376–​7)

Leaving aside the issue of whether it is Bergson or James leading the charge, the two philosophers clearly regarded each other as engaged in the same fight against their common enemy intellectualism. Bergson found James’s Pragmatism “fascinating and delightful” (CM, 177). In a letter to Schiller, James called Bergson’s Creative Evolution a “divine apparition” (CWJ, 11.378). In Pragmatism, James writes, “The most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them” (35). Bergson and James both bore witness for an unusual way of handling phenomena that led them to rearrange their own intellectualist preconceptions, each in their own way, but with great sympathy for the methods and approaches they found in each other’s work. The language of streams, currents, fluidity, and rivers runs throughout the work of both philosophers and conveys to their readers the conviction that “reality flows” and “we flow with it” (CM, 182). James and Bergson save us from living as myopic ants in a logical herbarium and plunge us into the flux of experience where “truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely” (P, 108).

Notes 1 Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 442. Hereafter cited parenthetically as KW. 2 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 102. 3 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), 70. Hereafter cited parenthetically as IM. 4 The parallels between the philosophical themes and ideas of James and Bergson were clear both to each other and to their contemporaries; see Ralph Barton Perry, The

118

118

Rosa Slegers

Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), chs. 86 and 87. Indeed, so congruent had their arguments come to appear that later commentators, while acknowledging the many similarities, felt the need to distinguish between their respective philosophies; see Walter Houghton Pitkin, “James and Bergson, Or, Who Is against Intellect,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method 7, no. 9 (1910): 225–​31; Emile Boutroux, William James (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1911); A. W. Moore, “Bergson and Pragmatism,” Philosophical Review, 21 (1912): 397–​ 414; Horace Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1914); Milič Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1971), ch. 13; and more recently Barry Allen, “The Use of Useless Knowledge: Bergson against the Pragmatists,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43, no. 1 (2013): 37–​58. Kennan Ferguson, on the other hand, has reemphasized the affiliations between the two philosophers, describing the denigration of those connections by later interpreters as the result of “a nationalist project on the part of the United States and a conscious historical amnesia on the part of French thinkers” (Kennan Ferguson, “La Philosophie Americaine: James, Bergson, and the Century of Intercontinental Pluralism,” Theory & Event 9, no. 1 [2006], https://​muse.jhu.edu/​article/​195384, accessed August 17, 2016). An insightful and balanced discussion of the complicated relationship between the two is offered by Frédéric Worms, who argues that “it is necessary to pass through the essential difference that separates them, in order to understand the more profound common point which in fact connects them” (Frédéric Worms, “James et Bergson: Lectures Croisées,” Philosophie 64 [1999]: 54 [my translation]). 5 William James, The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–​2004), 11.376. 6 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 183. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CM. 7 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 117. 8 William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 221. 9 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 57. 10 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 10. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CE. 11 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 79. Hereafter cited parenthetically as TFW. 12 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 74. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Laughter. 13 Paul Douglas, “Bergson, Vitalism, and Modernist Literature,” in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, ed. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 111. 14 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.219. 15 Jan Walsh Hokenson suggests that this is a misreading of Bergson’s text and that “Bergson’s own . . . concept is conventionally Aristotelian in its formulation but Nietzschean in its thetic value.” This misreading is inspired at least in part by the

119

James and Bergson

119

stodgy translation by Brereton and Rothwell, because of which “Bergson sounds more like a straitlaced Victorian pater familias than a Belle Époque Frenchman.” Jan Walsh Hokenson, “Comedies of Errors: Bergson’s Laughter in Modernist Contexts,” in Understanding Bergson, 48. 16 The “lifting of the veil” is here presented as a good. For a discussion of the “dangers of lifting the veil,” see Paul Ardoin, “Perception Sickness: Bergsonian Sensitivity and Modernist Paralysis,” in Understanding Bergson, 131–​7. 17 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 46. 18 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 34, 301. 19 William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 150. 20 For a discussion of the context of this metaphor in The Creative Mind, see Paul Atkinson, “The Inclination of Philosophy,” in Understanding Bergson, 100–​1.

120

121

8

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism Jill Kress Karn

William James’s influence on his brother Henry, and Henry’s influence on William, throughout the course of their varied and prolific careers, moved back and forth between resistance, admiration, criticism, imitation, veneration, and irritation, as if these two writers knew that every word they wrote and every thought they expressed owed something to the other, and would, in some way, meet their match in the other. Perhaps most remarkable in light of the study of modernism were both Henry’s and William’s unwavering commitment to experiment and their willingness to question, search, and even undo the careful systems of thought and technique they had erected in order to explore new territory in fiction and philosophy. In his desire to move toward the open-​ended, his belief in reality as fluid, and his awareness of the inadequacy of language for the task of recording conscious life, William James anticipated modernist thinking. William’s essays in radical empiricism (1904–​5), in particular, allow for the reassessment and rigorous questioning of his earlier findings in psychology. Henry’s desire to revisit his own work, the examination of his theory and method for fiction, which resulted in the massive undertaking of the New York Edition (1907–​9), reveals a similar desire to reread or remake his own thought. Likewise, the transformations in style characteristic of Henry’s late phase provide a much-​discussed, provocative transition from realist to modernist preoccupations in art. Both William and Henry approached the latter end of their writing lives with epic attempts to release and restart. Richard Hocks provides the first comprehensive study of William and Henry, arguing not influence, per se, but suggesting that Henry “embodies” William’s thought.1 Often, critics reading Henry James’s fiction resort to William’s writings as a way to understand the novelist’s attention to concepts like consciousness, the notion of the self, and the representation of inner life. Sharon Cameron’s study of thinking in Henry James attends briefly to William’s late essays on radical empiricism; she maintains that Henry framed consciousness in the novels in terms similar to William’s conception of it, as external to the self and dependent on relations.2 Gestures toward Henry’s work as a way to understand the philosophy of William are less frequent and often less productive.3 When scholars attempt to make connections between the brothers, they often resort to biographical details or letters, making an argument based on

122

122

Jill Kress Karn

personalities rather than a study of the language of each writer. This chapter considers closely works by William and Henry in relation to each other, in relation to modernism, and especially in light of their preoccupation with language as the register with which to compose and record conscious life. Reading William and Henry alongside each other provides us with a vivid sense of modernism as dialogue, as relationship; indeed, close attention to the language of William and Henry James enhances our sense that modernism can be read as a story of exchange more than influence, correspondence and continuation as much as renovation. In the writings of both William and Henry James, especially toward the latter end of their careers, we see an emphasis on process, a mind thinking, a system developing:  Henry famously reenvisioning novels he had already written in the space of his later prefaces; William going back to passages from his massive psychology to rethink, correct, and confess to errors in earlier beliefs. The sense that their ideas are always unfolding, that there is value in revisiting and reworking them, spilt over into the method of narrative Henry employed and the particular questions William took up in his philosophy.4 Moreover, their eventual (and mutual) understanding of consciousness as a function of experienced relations, their desire to constitute inwardness or subjectivity as ongoing, in-​the-​making, a happening, and their commitment to revising and re-​seeing what they have invented show their influence in the making of modernism. In the late writings of William and Henry James, we can trace a language, often exquisitely rendered in metaphor, which composes a self that is open, illimitable, and relational. There is a difference, however, in the consequences for such a self as we move from philosophy to fiction. William launched his experiment in the remaking of consciousness, opening what appeared to be a closed system, showing transitions and continuity where he once saw margins. For though the early psychology shows William’s fascination with the blurriness of language—​gaps between words, shadows, “echoes,” and “halo[es]”5—​his attempt to define consciousness often means maintaining boundaries around the self. As we move toward his late work, William pushes outward, prompting figures that insist on overflow. In the abstract, this version of self, defined by its extensions, sounds exhilarating; certainly William’s arguments, in stressing the potential for such a self, entice us. Yet as Henry’s fiction shows, the moment we see these radiating selves in action, when imagined as persons in relationship, in life, we see complexities and brokenness. If modernism burst open all manner of things that had seemed closed (the mind, the universe, the body, and social systems), and if the James brothers responded to those ruptures, then they also found that fluidity presented other problems. Examining the work of William and Henry side by side, I  argue, exposes a profound ambivalence about the sustainability of the relational self: William’s philosophy strains against the language that he uses to shape it; Henry’s late fiction overworks language to the point of obscurity, revealing disquietude about the relational self he creates. Ultimately, both writers make consciousness a system of alliances and relations, revealing the ways in which the self, a product of ongoing experience, carries with it connections that challenge, as much as they shape, identity. William James wrote his essays in radical empiricism (1904–​5) as a direct response to his earlier work, as if to suggest his continued engagement, or argument, with the

123

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

123

findings from The Principles of Psychology (PP). It is not simply that the old principles had limitations, but also that he senses the new age calls for something more, something that reflects uncertainty and rearranges former assumptions. He begins the essay “A World of Pure Experience” (1904) with the following observation: It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-​solutions.6

His attention to “systems anciently closed” and his call for something new echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose cry for “an original relation to the universe” fits James’s adoption of relations in these essays as the defining aspect of consciousness and self-​ identity. The “unrest” of which William James makes note, certainly a reflection of his own unrest, and his tendency to fluctuate inside the pages of Principles and elsewhere, here invite a “loosening” and make explicit the need for more openness even at the risk of vagueness. Many readers of these essays find the “new” way of radical empiricism too muddled to trace, calling attention to contradictions and entanglements that James, certainly, must have sensed.7 James’s interest in creating a “world-​picture,” as he frequently calls it, true to the superabundance and messiness of life, corresponds well with the hesitations and circumlocution that he himself lamented in Henry’s writing. As William’s foray into pure experience continues, he prepares us for something disruptive; indeed, his language leans toward the apocalyptic: “I seem to read the signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval of more real conceptions and more fruitful methods were imminent, as if a true landscape might result, less clipped, straight-​edged and artificial” (Essays in Radical Empiricism [ERE], 21). In some respects, this language sounds paradoxical; it implies clear boundaries at the same time it asks for something less orderly. Radical empiricism is, after all, exclusive: “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” (ERE, 22). Yet James insists on locating or creating a landscape that is not tidy, not “artificial” or “clipped,” not even “straight.” His emphasis on relations, in this view, becomes a guarantee for deviation. Ironically, some of the loveliest, most lucid moments in William’s prose emerge out of his acknowledgment of the confusion and profusion of life; moments when he skirts systematic philosophy so as to express something broader about experience:  “We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-​crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path” (ERE, 34). This astonishing picture of not knowing, of forward motion toward the uncertain future, aligns with James’s desire to represent, often in beautiful, figurative language, the experiences of the human mind. What he describes elsewhere, famously, as a “stream” of consciousness here becomes almost a tidal wave. The language, particularly the shift in intensity of James’s favored water metaphor, suggests the original image is

124

124

Jill Kress Karn

inadequate. The stream becomes a falling wave that we ride. This moment represents William James’s continued investment in metaphor to convey his theories. Sarah Blackwood reminds us that this is precisely the point for both brothers: “Consciousness, they declared repeatedly, requires representation (in language, gesture, art) in order for us to grasp its existence,” even a consciousness of what we do not know.8 William’s essays in radical empiricism, published separately yet written in correspondence with and continued reference to each other, provide compelling companion pieces to Henry’s novel, The Wings of the Dove (1902). Though the essays were published after the novel, we see hints of William’s radical empiricism even in his earliest attempts to discuss consciousness, suggesting that the essays are a continuation of, as much as they are a confrontation with, prior principles. Whatever social or cultural stimulation animated the reenvisioning of their ideas, we can at least imagine that for these brothers, reading each other provided some inspiration. Indeed, William’s remaking of consciousness corresponds with a similar remaking on Henry’s part. The language of subjectivity, the way into a character’s mind in The Wings of the Dove, takes a deeply circuitous route, unsettling traditional notions of narrative and point of view. Perhaps more than any other novel, this work puts on exhibit its opaque language, its indirectness and hesitations, and its sense of itself as an oblique path. The Wings of the Dove anticipates and demonstrates what will be recurrent elements of modernism:  newness, experimentation, fragmentation, and disquietude. Yet it also persists in its engagement with consciousness, painstakingly configuring the interior life of its characters—​an unbroken practice in Jamesian fiction. In his discussion of the modern novel, David Trotter writes, “Whatever is described in the most innovative fiction of the period is described in relation to, and only in relation to, a perceiving mind,” and immediately turns to Henry James and the notion of the center of consciousness that many readers have come to see as the Jamesian trademark.9 Similarly, Perry Meisel sees the work of Henry James as a turning point in modernism: “In fiction before James, the world predominates; in fiction after James, the mind predominates.”10 The discourse of consciousness, as we shall see, bridges the fields of philosophy and fiction. Indeed, for both William and Henry, the ultimate question is that of consciousness: how to imagine it, how to represent it, and, ultimately, how to dismantle and remake it. This question would remain central to their writing throughout the course of their lives.11 Beginning with “A World of Pure Experience,” the second radical empiricism essay, James underscores a new terminology for consciousness in terms of a psychology of experience. James seems fascinated, in particular, by the idea that consciousness and the self amount to a network of relations. He writes, “Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be ‘with’ one another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that terms can have” (ERE, 23). Despite the abstract language, William James is, of course, speaking of persons and the experiences they seem to have inside their minds, though the notion of the mind’s interior will come into question in these essays. This peculiar sentence about being “ ‘with’ one another in a universe of discourse” might be an apt description of a Henry James novel. The Wings of the Dove complicates intimacy and sometimes reads as if language, especially dialogue,

125

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

125

instead of offering possibilities for communion, alienates and estranges. The focus on relations in William’s work configures and sometimes prefigures in philosophy what Henry explores in fiction:  the untidy territory of relationships. The essays, just the same, become remarkable for the meticulous ways in which they attempt to chart relations in the abstract. William James painstakingly crafts his prose; indeed, he is remarkably attuned to language as an instrument that scientists and philosophers must use, and he repeatedly suggests that language or grammar might help us to understand philosophy better: “Philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles. With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my—​these words designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in a roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness” (ERE, 24). All these words, mostly prepositions, express some sort of relation, spatial, temporal, or causal, except for the possessive pronoun, “my”—​the ultimate in James’s hierarchy of intimacy. There is no escaping the “I” or the “my” in philosophy no matter how abstracted James’s arguments may be.12 James continues, “The organization of the Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfillments or disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each other’s being” (ERE, 23–​4). It is telling that William must invent a new word in order to explain this process: “compenetrate.” Indeed, James sometimes gets carried away with a string of linguistic possibilities. His playfulness, which extends to his willingness to make up new words (“with-​ness,” “next-​ness,” “and-​ness”), alternates with frustration over the difficulty of being tied to words as the only way to express his theories. For relations cannot be captured, they are forever multiplying, and the task of the philosopher is not simply to trace them but also to name them. In a 1907 lecture titled “The Continuity of Experience” that eventually formed part of the book, A Pluralistic Universe (PU), James writes, “The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its life. We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled.”13 This stunning image of thought shooting out of darkness into dawn suggests movement, progression; yet the thought goes forward “through its fringes,” implying that relations complicate its passage. The “fringe” may become a hindrance even if it is, in fact, tied to the thought. Characteristically, James names “life” as something tumultuous, wakeful, something always in “transition.” He continues, “The gist of the matter is always the same—​something ever goes indissolubly with something else” (PU, 128). James expresses his keen awareness of relations eloquently, his sense that something “ever goes” with something else; and here his prose is graceful, imagistic, lyrical. Nonetheless, untangling those relations so as to examine them proves to be an intricate process, for if experience is indissoluble, if its bonds cannot be broken, then how do we examine it? How do we understand our part in it? Where does it begin, and where does it end? In rehearsing his preferred water image here, and naming experience “indissoluble,” James intensifies his claim that, in the world of pure experience, things do not come apart.

126

126

Jill Kress Karn

Though James suggests the impossibility of capturing consciousness—​from its earliest manifestations in Principles through the Essays in Radical Empiricism and into A Pluralistic Universe—​his language often betrays anxiety and inconsistency regarding this question. Consciousness and thoughts, it seems, are forever emanating. But even that word implies that there is a source from which the thoughts flow, which is precisely the sticking point for James. The near impossibility of talking about thinking as spilling over, issuing forth, without imagining an origin for those thoughts makes James’s language sometimes strained. For James to say, as he does in “The Continuity of Experience,” that “every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition” (PU, 129)  we must imagine simultaneously the part and the whole, a concrete state and an overflow. Here James implies that words are the containers, and the culprits, since consciousness moves beyond “definition.” The scheme of radical empiricism, however, pushes James toward statements that aim to get a handle on language, to force it into submission. Returning to the Essays in Radical Empiricism and James’s discussion of relations, we find James speaks of “holding fast” to the conjunctive relation of all others as the “strategic point”: The holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more; and to take it at its face value means first of all to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again seem rationally possible. (ERE, 25)

Taking a relation “at its face value” means taking it as we feel it, which apparently happens without words. Words breed “suggestions” that must be “neutralized.” James hints here at the idea that a relation might be somehow measurable when he says “neither less nor more,” though elsewhere, as we have seen, he remains committed to the looseness and intractability of relations. After all, how can we “hold fast” to a relation? By its very definition, relation implies juncture, connection—​between-​ness or among-​ness, as James himself might say. What is ironic is James’s certainty that such a transaction is possible, though we get the sense that his tendency to blame words stems from his certain knowledge of their proliferation. Indeed, the ultimate irony is that language, to which James almost begrudgingly resorts, mimics the behavior of “relations” in a world of pure experience—​or relations mimic the behavior of words. Words always exceed their containers. Words always point to something beyond themselves. Words multiply and enhance our sense that understanding and knowledge are infinite processes. I have suggested that William James seems both fascinated by and wary of what he can make with words. This conflicted attitude results in a clashing of images that nevertheless reveals a great deal about his imagination of the conscious life. A Pluralistic Universe reads, at times, like the culmination of many Jamesian figures, as if James must compulsively rework his language even when he questions it. Late in his lecture, “The Continuity of Experience,” he states:

127

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

127

My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more. I use three separate terms here to describe this fact; but I might as well use three hundred, for the fact is all shades and no boundaries. Which part of it is in my consciousness, which out? If I name what is out it already has come in. The centre works in one way while the margins work in another, and presently overpower the centre and are central themselves. What we conceptually identify ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any time is the centre; but our full self is the whole field. (PU, 130)14

There is something almost maddening in this passage, and James knows it. The “field” is a “centre” with a “fringe,” which “shades” into “more.” Just as the image gets fixed in our minds, it shifts and reveals something beyond itself. That first sentence proves deeply revealing:  the metaphors move from concrete figures to abstract ideas. Once James switches from nouns to verbs to adjectives, we begin to feel disoriented. We might be able to envision “shading,” but feel bewildered with that obscure “subconscious more.” James admits that he is approaching the unfathomable, an admission that specifically targets something unmanageable about words. The “three terms” might easily be three hundred. Moreover, the sense that his figures compete with each other compels us to see something imperative behind the picture: at stake is the issue of how we identify ourselves and what ultimately we call the self. For James, the “full self ” is the whole field. The full self involves reciprocity; it is a kind of association. James paints a series of images, somewhat muddy, overlapping, yet indicative of the revised version of self in his late writings. A self is a “quasi-​chaos”—​a term James uses to define our experiences, “taken all together” (ERE, 33n.). James must defend this stance, in part, because he is aware of the slipperiness of language. The moment he admits to “margins,” he hints at something bounded; a “centre” implies a point at which things converge. James writes, “On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions” (ERE, 39). Self-​consciously remedial here, James takes the once sacrosanct terms, “mind” and “consciousness,” and demystifies them, even undermines them by his use of quotation marks. Mind becomes less personal; it is now the name for “a series of experiences run together.” But he does not trouble over the loss of the old terms; on the contrary, James appears exhilarated by the idea of consciousness as extricated from the physical or spiritual self and located instead in relations. Consciousness, which William once called “this palpitating inward life,” “that central nucleus” (PP, 1.287), now flows outward into connections between persons, thoughts, and experiences. His metaphors, consequently, quicken and enliven what essentially becomes a dynamic, fluid self. “Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the wind-​rose on a compass, and the actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight” (PU, 131). The image of the wind-​rose on the compass turns the self into an instrument capable of finding its own direction; at the same time, the implication that the self might be subject to outside forces seems unavoidable. James’s sense that “every bit”

128

128

Jill Kress Karn

of us participates in a wider circumference of experience, that we continue toward “possibles” we cannot see, seems simultaneously mathematical and mystical. The overwhelming sense in his late writings, both the Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, that the self reaches out, that there is more to us than we can measure or guess, makes for captivating reading. Perhaps the most astute rendering of this notion comes in a lecture from A Pluralistic Universe where James states, “What really exists is not things made but things in the making” (PU, 117). A similar commitment to “things in the making” as well as a resistance to closure could be one way to read the provocation behind Henry James’s prefaces to the New York Edition. Henry’s meticulous ponderings over his own artistic process allow him to rekindle former associations. Kenneth Graham reads the prefaces as the beginning of modernist critical awareness; and Michael Levenson links Henry to modernism when he claims that modernism brought about a more self-​conscious understanding of art and theory, partly due to Henry James’s interest in asserting a theory of the novel.15 Beyond the wish to reflect on his works, however, Henry’s approach in the prefaces reveals a wish to remake the work. But “remaking,” oddly enough, comes in the form, simply, of rereading, a process that James takes great pains to draw out.16 What reading becomes for those approaching late Henry James remains, nonetheless, a daunting question. The layering effect of the narrative, the overlapping sense of time and events, the back and forth motion of the action, and the competing centers of consciousness that we find in a late novel such as The Wings of the Dove mean that reading requires intense participation, even complicity. The Wings of the Dove employs some intriguing and baffling techniques, which make moving through the narrative a thorny experience. Among other things, the novels of Henry’s major phase put on display experimentation, fragmentation, and disillusionment; they amount to what we might consider his deepest engagement with modernism. The sense of dislocation, shifting perspectives, and especially the obsession over reliving and rehearsing experience, thus circumventing traditional chronology, make reading The Wings of the Dove only a preliminary experience, and rereading it an all but necessary one. Henry James’s identification of himself in his prefaces as a reader as well as a writer underscores the significance of rereading. Implicit in these revisitations are questions about memory, about how to record experience, and about what language can and cannot capture, as well as an attempt to represent the ways that the mind works and is continually working. Conventional readings of modernism point to a breakdown in the notion of character, which in late James sometimes appears to be an extension or expansion of self into relations—​consciousness shuttles back and forth between minds, introspection provides no refuge, and yet at bottom is the suspicion that we cannot read others and we cannot read ourselves. Though the novel turns on moments where characters attempt to understand experiences as they are happening, Henry James suggests that a fuller understanding of experience requires a return. Moreover, the obsessive desire to recall on the part of the characters in Wings seems linked to a desire for restitution, a possibility that the novel denies. Characters in The Wings of the Dove revisit scenes in their minds, while the narrative reverberates continually with references to what will come “afterwards”:  “he afterwards felt”;17 “it was one of the

129

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

129

things she afterwards saw—​Milly was for ever seeing things afterwards” (WD, 1.155); “what happened was that afterwards, on separation, she wondered” (WD, 1.210); “one of the last things she was afterwards to recall” (WD, 1.216); “it was a wonder, she afterwards thought” (WD, 1.264); “he wondered afterwards” (WD, 2.46); “he was afterwards to say to himself ” (WD, 2.93); “the odd thing, as she was afterwards to recall” (WD, 2.158); “an answer of which he was to measure afterwards” (WD, 2.205); “it was not till afterwards that Densher thought” (WD, 2.239) are just some of the examples of this gesture. In this sense, Wings keeps pointing beyond itself, stretching its frame, as if to suggest that the story, the characters, and the mind cannot be contained; experience lives on, beyond any ability to record it. Or, rather, experience must be revisited, and we cannot take the measure of it without that “aftersense” (WD, 2.365), a word that Henry James apparently coins for this novel. As we will see, The Wings of the Dove presents a self identified, and sometimes burdened by, relations. Vision is incomplete or ongoing; language, especially speech, opaque and ambiguous, even purposely misleading. All these strategies on the part of Henry James bring to mind William’s understanding of the radiating self, of consciousness as something wider, something beyond words, something “ever going with” something else. Though Henry James’s novels often dramatize consciousness by tracking the evolution of a single character’s inward life, The Wings of the Dove stands apart as a novel with multiple or, as James names them in his preface, “successive” centers. In order to examine consciousness in this novel, we must attend, therefore, to what happens between characters over and above what happens inside them. Though James will not eschew entirely his sense of a personal consciousness for each character, the multiplication of perspectives makes clear that these characters cannot be understood apart from each other. Though James does present them at times unaccompanied, they seem to exist as extensions of each other, and rarely contemplate anything beyond their strange confederacy. We begin the novel with Kate Croy only to enter Susan Stringham’s perspective, then Milly Theale’s, and finally Merton Densher’s. The effect of these shifts is to call attention to relations, as well as the flights and transitions in between. Henry James’s famous, and oft-​quoted statement about relations from his preface to Roderick Hudson provides for many scholars an obvious link to his brother William’s investment in a relational model for the self: Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it.18

Though this statement beautifully brings together some shared preoccupations of the James brothers, it also carries with it Henry’s sense of the artist’s role in creating and shaping reality. We are drawn to the emphatic statement about the perpetual

130

130

Jill Kress Karn

and unbounded nature of relations: “Really, universally” they “stop nowhere.” James’s sweeping gesture reaches as far as it can with those adverbs; relations go on and on. Wonderfully, James turns the sentence with “and” rather than “but,” suggesting his desire to maintain, as his final phrase makes clear, two things at once. Relations may be indeterminate and illimitable; still the artist must draw the circle that makes them seem contained. Continuity, Henry assures us, is never broken, and one honors and ignores it to compose a work of art, necessarily a representation and also a foreshortening of “the whole.” In his astute reading of relations in Henry James, Brad Evans writes, “The relation in late James is a constant. It becomes visible thematically by being broken and stylistically by being opaque.”19 Broken relations remain central to late James, inspiring some of his most elaborate and precarious figures for their expression. The figure of the circle, though James means for it to be simple, instructs our reading of the intricate web of relations in The Wings of the Dove, but with a twist: for the circle, drawn round relations, might also be seen as cramping; relations become oppressive. James works, undeniably, toward a new way of telling a story in his late period, especially in the continual rearrangement of experience, and his sense that consciousness is about interconnections, a patchwork of thoughts assembled over time.20 As an orphan with “no relations at all . . . not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin or an aunt” (WD, 1.264), Milly appears to be a character for whom relations do not signify; yet, as the novel’s heroine, she has a strange pull, she draws others in like a whirlpool, she “stir[s]‌ the stream like a leviathan” (WD, 1.126). But the novel does not begin with Milly; it begins with Kate and does not mention or acknowledge Milly’s existence until book three, over a hundred pages in. Formally speaking, the choice is odd, which James admits (somewhat defensively) in his preface. However, it may be one way that the novel exhibits its peculiar appreciation of time. We enter it already deep in, just as Kate and Densher seem already beyond when they meet, “ever so much further on”: “That had been the real beginning—​the beginning of everything else; the other time, the time at the party, had been but the beginning of that” (WD, 1.62–​3). This reevaluation of time, of beginnings, creates a necessary link between experience in the moment and experience projected as memory. Pointing forward to a time when one will look back, James calls attention not only to relations among characters, but also to relations between selves. The self becomes a being comprised of these transitions and passages. Through Susan Stringham, Milly’s companion, we learn the importance of staving off, the sense that the self unfolds gradually, and the disruption, which is sometimes a pleasure, of waiting.21 Susan’s faith in Milly promises that at some point everything about her friend will be clear; she believes in “some deeper depth than she had touched—​though into two or three such depths, it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself suddenly draw back” (WD, 1.129). In a rare narrative aside, James includes the reader in the general bewilderment that comes from attempts to measure the immeasurable self: [Milly] worked—​and seemingly quite without design—​upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her associates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise

131

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

131

come closer to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their confusion. (WD, 1.130)

James brings the reader (and himself) into the mesh; as she does for her “associates,” Milly engages our sympathy. Still, we come close to her only through “their impression,” “their confusion,” which James presents as the only way in. There are times in the novel when we do enter more fully into Milly’s consciousness, though it seems knotted to other minds. And though the narrator here pokes through the otherwise seamless third-​person narration, it is not to reveal something beyond the reach of the characters, but rather to share in the obscurity.22 Though Milly enters the novel in book three, the third-​person narration remains somewhat removed from her, occupied as it is with Susan Stringham’s perceptions. We get an amplified view of Milly in this portion of the novel: she is a “striking apparition” (WD, 1.118), “the girl with the background, the girl with the crown of old gold” (WD, 1.121), she sits at the “dizzy edge” on the great side of a mountain, “looking down on the kingdoms of the earth” (WD, 1.139)—​all descriptions that distance her from the reader.23 We watch Susan watch Milly. We do not have access to Milly in any direct way; instead the book centers on Susan’s attempts to “read” her. When we enter book four, however, we enter Milly’s consciousness, and stay there almost exclusively; and though we dip into Milly’s thoughts elsewhere in the text, here she directs our vision. We follow her eye while she sits at the dinner party at Lancaster Gate. While the episode for Milly at the start is “really romantic” (WD, 1.161), she confesses to herself that “she had never, she might well believe, been in such a state of vibration; her sensibility was almost too sharp for her comfort” (WD, 1.165). Milly is too receptive, the disturbing “vibration” that comes to her turns to “sharpness,” which warns her. As she speaks to Lord Mark, James records her also speaking to herself. The effect of these interchanges—​Milly with Lord Mark, Milly with herself, James with the reader—​contributes to the sense that Milly occupies the center of the novel as “our young lady, made all for mere seeing and taking” (WD, 1.175). And yet, Milly cannot provide the whole picture not simply because she is bewildered at times by what she sees, but also because the novel boasts “multiplicity,” as Nicola Bradbury argues, rather than an individual center.24 Though Milly here “sees everything” (ibid.), she loses her privileged viewpoint. James does not, or cannot, sustain the singular perception that marks so many of his novels. Milly works to understand the “connexions” all around her, and the word is a favorite of James in this book. For the whole of this chapter, we get Milly, and it is telling that she comes to consciousness, as it were, in the midst of a grand dinner party—​a world apart from the solitary vigil that Isabel Archer famously experiences in James’s earlier novel, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Though Isabel’s mind is full, revealing an inner vision of the circuitry of relationships she encounters, for Milly, both eye and mind are full. She must take in the social world and relate with others, while simultaneously consulting herself. At one point, during this scene at the London dinner party, Milly wonders if there is something that Kate and Lord Mark share, and her wondering leads her to reflect on the ways in which she herself is pulled into their relation:

132

132

Jill Kress Karn

Yet how indeed could one tell, what did one understand, and of what was one, for that matter, provisionally conscious but of their being somehow together in what they represented? Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess at Lord Mark’s effect on her. If she could guess this effect what then did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? Did that represent, as between them, anything in particular, and should she have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying by a mutual intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking? (WD, 1.177)

Milly sees these two characters “together in what they represented,” even though she is unsure of how to judge what she thinks she sees. Milly looks at Kate who looks at her; but the “look” seems less a moment of communication than an opportunity to read yet another exchange. Something is “between” Kate and Lord Mark, perhaps the very thing that is between him and Milly. Milly imagines that she might be “duplicating” it almost unconsciously. The narrator tells us that she is “provisionally conscious” here, which resembles the way that knowledge gets delayed in this novel. There is something magnetic in this exchange that Milly believes she sees and that she certainly feels. James represents Milly as passive, “sinking” into a relation, though responsive to its allure and intensity. Milly’s “immense excursion” at a “mere dinner party” culminates in her awareness of what James calls “the crowded consciousness” (WD, 1.177). The image is striking. As a figure for consciousness in late James, the “crowded consciousness” makes clear that we cannot divide our understanding of consciousness, the mind, the self, from our discussion of social relations. What Henry James does in this novel, among other things, is to take the idea of the self-​in-​the-​making, the self, defined by its relations, an idea that corresponds closely with the transitional self in William James, and see what happens to it in something like the real world. Of course, The Wings of the Dove presents its rarefied atmosphere as the farthest thing from the “real world.” On the other hand, there is something trenchant and penetrating in Milly’s story. Certainly, Milly’s approach is to pack in as much as she can before an early death, which—​it is sometimes hard to tell—​may or may not be avoidable. But she begins to discover that she moves in a “packed society” (WD, 1.190), and the relationships that surround her, those she slowly pieces together and those that remain cryptic, shape her in ways that she cannot control. James’s novel begs the question: if the self reaches outward, is fluid, open, relational, then what happens when those relations are compromised? Is the self compromised? Can you actually die if a relation snaps? Is that what happens to Milly? Indeed, it is one way to understand the novel’s end, not as an example of late Victorian melodrama, but as an engagement with modernism that represents the logical extension of a self no longer protected, no longer contained, but rather formed through relations. Another result of her maneuvers in the “packed” society is that Milly learns to read those around her both as they appear to her and as she imagines they appear to others. The most potent and poignant example of this is Milly’s seeing Kate as Densher, her secret lover, sees her. “Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her in the light of the

133

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

133

knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher’s eyes had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had looked, rather more beautifully than less, into his own” (WD, 1.209). Milly sees, as it were, overlapping images of Kate—​the Kate that Densher knows and loves and the Kate that belongs to the rest of the world. In bringing Densher into the relation between herself and Kate, Milly reveals not simply her own desire (to be the beloved), but also her awareness that relations multiply. She cannot see Kate without seeing Densher, or rather the Kate that Densher sees. This moment, moreover, repeats itself. Milly sees Kate “in the light of her other identity, the identity she would have for Mr. Densher” (WD, 1.255). At one point, stunned by Kate’s appearance, she asks: “Is it the way she looks to him?” (WD, 1.247). Milly places herself in Densher’s position and experiences what she imagines he feels for Kate. Milly’s acute awareness of relationships, her ability to step into the place of the lover and the beloved, complicates the question of possession: whose “property” might this vision be? Though Milly seems dazzled by Kate’s extraordinary ability “to cut her connexions and lose her identity” (WD, 1.232), the transaction buried in that turn of phrase is chilling. Milly inadvertently reveals the ways that connections are bound up in identity. Kate’s efforts to sever her connections, to separate out different versions of self, fitting them to the occasion or keeping them apart, prove destructive. The Wings of the Dove does not allow for a sequestered self, nor does experience come in discrete units, but washes over characters without discrimination. Milly’s growing awareness of the continuity of experience comes as an awakening to crisis. And unlike the culmination and animation of William James’s texts, where continuity and fluidity often carry with them great possibility and promise, Henry James’s novels show continuity and relations to create a muddle that troubles the waters of consciousness. When Milly sees herself—​as so many of the characters are determined she must—​ in the Bronzino portrait at Lord Mark’s estate, she seems to sink into this relation in the same way that she does into others. In fact, Milly’s encounter with the portrait connects with other experiences or, more precisely, overlays them: “A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions were not to be fully present to the girl until later on was that they yielded at this stage, with an effect of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of an hour—​her only one—​with Lord Mark” (WD, 1.238). Readers know, only on rereading, and register with an ominous reverberation, that this will not be Milly’s only “detached quarter of an hour” with Lord Mark, and that the other moment will answer this one in strange ways. Viewing the painting, Milly, who is “the image of the wonderful Bronzino” (ibid.), must suspend one set of impressions to make way for another. James’s word, “supersession,” seems to suggest that one impression sits atop the other, the effect of which is to overwhelm Milly and dissolve all distinctions: “Once more things melted together—​the beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer glow” (WD, 1.241).25 Milly’s experience in front of the portrait, a scene scholars invariably discuss, appears to be central to the novel. The trouble is, the form this novel takes suggests that the center cannot hold. James does not keep Milly or Milly’s consciousness as the focal point, but doubles back in the second volume, giving us the events of the first through the perspective of other characters. When we return to Milly, it is after a tremendous

134

134

Jill Kress Karn

suspension: we are awaiting news of her illness, carried over the gap of unknowing, which takes up over fifty pages of the book. James’s strategy tells us something about the reformation of consciousness enacted in this and the late novels. Though James transforms consciousness in The Wings of the Dove, I  would argue that he does so haltingly: if James must imagine consciousness as reaching outward, ferrying back and forth between characters rather than ensconced within them, and if such an imagining makes the self correspondingly relational, then he will also, relentlessly, show that such a consciousness comes at one’s expense. The novels of Henry’s major phase continue to challenge notions of inwardness, ideas of privacy, and selfhood—​all subjects that James raises in his early novels. What is new, it seems to me, is the degree to which he makes the reader participate in the uncertainty that accompanies this new version of subjectivity.26 When we read Wings, we struggle to identify a single character’s thoughts and motivations. We must consider them together more than separately; we must learn to read in reverse; listen for what does not get spoken, but nonetheless resounds. The episode at the National Gallery, which we learn about through Milly as it is happening and through Densher on reflection, mimics the episode with the Bronzino portrait. This time, Milly goes to the gallery to lose herself; she expects to escape “the personal” (WD, 1.313) only to run into Densher and Kate. While the experience of seeing the Bronzino allows for an intense encounter with the self as something both highly identifiable and intensely separate or other, the encounter with Densher and Kate among the gallery’s paintings provides a lesson in reading the self as a relational being. Milly understands who she is by seeing how Densher sees her; yet Densher’s sense of her cannot be separated from, and indeed incorporates, Kate’s. Milly resorts to a stroll through the gallery as a way to avoid the encounter with her doctor, Sir Luke Strett; her indirection leads to a direct confrontation with Densher and Kate who are also, presumably, seeking to avoid detection. The scene where Milly suddenly sees Densher precipitates a curious reworking of recognition that relies on a model of outwardly concentric circles—​one consciousness linked to another linked to another. As Milly looks at the gentleman who is being looked at by the group of Americans, she realizes she too is being looked at before she sees it is Densher and before Densher acknowledges her. Milly’s consciousness moves from awareness in a “detached” way to a fuller acknowledgment of its radiating force:  “This arresting power, at the same time—​and that was the marvel—​had already sharpened almost to pain, for in the very act of judging the bared head with detachment she felt herself shaken by a knowledge of it” (WD, 1.319). James represents his heroine “arrested,” though also “shaken,” by the knowledge that is recognition or memory. Later, Milly contemplates this scene in which she is both participant and object: “She was unable to think afterwards how long she had looked at him before knowing herself as otherwise looked at” (ibid.); thus she experiences a vision of herself that reveals how identity fluctuates, depending on who is doing the looking. James’s shift in the second volume to Densher’s consciousness, the jolt of dialogue that comes with Densher’s “I say, you know, Kate—​you did stay!” a remark he makes after they’ve “rounded together a dangerous corner” (WD, 2.3), surprises the reader into awareness of the multiple perspectives on which the novel insists. This repetition

135

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

135

or doubling—​the sense that one version of the scene gets superimposed on another—​ accounts for the slippage between perspectives as well as the instability that marks reading throughout this text. The scene does not entirely repeat itself, but gives the impression that there was more to the moment, an impression James enhances, ironically, not through any explicit recounting of the scene, but through Densher’s and Kate’s silent exchange, their relief at having pulled off a deception. “The fact of their adventure was flagrant between them” (ibid.). Their shared awareness fills the air “between” them, even though they do not discuss it. These silences or gaps are characteristic of the exchanges between characters in The Wings of the Dove. As the novel progresses, we have to learn how to read it; that is, we must learn to read differently because James’s language invites reversals, becomes open to the point of vagueness, eludes comprehension. A characteristic example of this occurs as Kate and Densher consider their own and Milly’s prospects; their speech reveals how they learn to manipulate relationships, counting on Milly’s attachment to each of them to secure their futures: “You accused me just now of saying that Milly’s in love with you. Well, if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. That’s the good she’ll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you—​so that she’ll help us go on.” Densher stared—​she was wondrous all round. “And what sort of basis does it make for my seeing her?” “Oh, I don’t mind!” Kate smiled. “Don’t mind my leading her on?” She put it differently. “Don’t mind her leading you.” “Well, she won’t—​so it’s nothing not to mind. But how can that ‘help,’ he pursued, ‘with what she knows?” “What she knows? That needn’t prevent.” He wondered. “Prevent her loving us?” “Prevent her helping you. She’s like that,” Kate Croy explained. It took indeed some understanding. “Making nothing of the fact that I  love another?” “Making everything,” said Kate. “To console you.” (WD, 2.24–​5)

Though Densher expresses wonder at Kate’s ability to read Milly, here he almost matches Kate’s shrewdness with language:  they complete each other’s sentences, extend one another’s thoughts. Densher remains one step behind Kate—​a phenomenon to which James wryly refers: “It took indeed some understanding.” Kate turns his apprehensions about “leading Milly on” into “her [Milly] leading you,” a switch in agency that makes Densher the one manipulated. Just so, Densher’s imagination of Milly’s “loving” gets transformed more pragmatically into Kate’s idea of Milly “helping.” Densher’s participation in these conversations is crucial; his expressions make way for Kate’s revolutions, so that together they make meaning. Language in The Wings of the Dove

136

136

Jill Kress Karn

often makes sense only in tandem; every statement requires a rejoinder, something Kate herself acknowledges when she tells Densher: “It’s you who draw me out” (WD, 2.62). And as readers, we are drawn in to conversations like these, bewildered at times, struggling to make sense of baffling exchanges. The pleasure we might get from figuring out a difficult text like The Wings of the Dove becomes shadowed by the knowledge that when we do piece it together, we participate in plotting against Milly. Kate and Densher’s intense “association” (ibid.) nevertheless begins to break down as Densher spends more and more time alone with his thoughts. When Kate leaves him in Venice with Milly, and returns to England with her aunt, Densher more vividly faces the interconnectedness of the lives around him, his place inside the “circle of petticoats” (WD, 2.212; 2.289), an awareness that, in turn, shapes his understanding of himself. Yet Densher’s encounter with a self shaped by relations moves him farther away from himself. Consciousness is no longer synonymous with self-​awareness; consciousness distances and alienates the self, makes the self unrecognizable. At one point, restlessly awaiting news of Milly’s death, Densher imagines himself as if in “the page of a book” (WD, 2.342) and seems to recede from the scene, to fade from the text: He saw a young man, far off, in a relation inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding himself, not to lose it, painfully together. The young man, at these moments, so seen, was too distant and strange for the right identity; and yet outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. (WD, 2.342)

Densher’s ability to see himself “far off,” deferred, “staying his breath,” suggests a degree of detachment that seems not only disturbing, but also disorienting. He understands, subsequently, that what seemed “distant and strange” is “his own face.” James indicates that this happens “outside,” “afterwards,” language that seems to imply a division; but Densher’s attempts to separate out before and after, inside and outside, look like profound loss. Here, Densher craves the opportunity to reread and reenter experience regardless of his distance from it. He struggles to gather something of which he is only “dimly conscious,” and in a story that obsessively works and reworks relations, ultimately revealing not their promise, but their brokenness, Densher’s vision of himself “in a relation inconceivable” becomes a conspicuous illustration that points to the difficulty he has grasping who it is he has become. Kate’s existence, likewise, becomes tenuous in the latter half of the book. Though her charged, lingering presence after their one sexual encounter makes Densher claim possessively that “Kate was all in his poor rooms” (WD, 2.238), eventually Kate, too, begins to vanish. When Densher starts to realize that he feels fear, a fear associated with the pressure from Susan Stringham to speak words that are straight, not evasive, unsure of what he is afraid, he thinks: “It wasn’t, strange to say, of Kate either, for Kate’s presence affected him suddenly as having swooned or trembled away” (WD, 2.282). Later, as Kate continues to deceive her aunt by inventing an awkwardness between herself and Densher, James gives Densher a vision of Kate surrounded “as the fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic . . . she had, for consideration, melted into

137

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

137

it and out of sight” (WD, 2.335). Kate’s “swooning” and “melting” out of sight suggest a strange attenuation of the self that distances her from communal experience. All of this, of course, parallels the actual disappearance of Milly Theale, an end that occurs even before her death. Milly drops out of the text, but remains crucial to the relations that continue to swarm around her. She is more talked about than talking. Attempts to understand her, to decipher her silence when she “turns her face to the wall” (WD, 2.270), preoccupy the characters for the rest of the book. The image of Milly turned toward the wall, which Susan twice gives Densher and Densher repeats to Kate, might suggest Milly’s attempts to establish a barrier between her own consciousness and others’. Except Milly has mastered the art of relations; she understands with agonizing clarity that her consciousness is entirely bound up in relationships, that her experience cannot be divided from Kate’s or Densher’s or Susan’s or anyone’s. What is disturbing about Milly’s end is not so much Kate’s or Densher’s role in conspiring to turn love into money, but our own collusion as readers who, working to understand the complexities of James’s language, become complicit in pronouncing Milly’s end. And as much as the text drives toward that close, it also resists such a pronouncement. Densher’s choice not to read Milly’s letter, Kate’s attempts to suppress Milly’s voice by burning her final communication, Aunt Maud’s sentimentalized picture of Milly’s death—​“our dear dove . . . has folded her wonderful wings” (WD, 2.356), and of course James’s decision to keep Milly’s death unrepresented in the pages of the novel—​all show the author’s refusal to finalize or, rather, his attempts to keep open, experience as a shared entity. Milly’s death is not her own; it is not anyone’s, it is everyone’s. In this light, we might read the final scene more expansively, not for what it can tell us about Densher or Kate or Milly per se, but for what it tells us about Henry James’s continued engagement with the question of consciousness. For Densher and Kate reveal the ways in which consciousness, with its outward reach, has left them exposed. Their alliances have shaped them, and they cannot go back. What Densher and Kate know, what they cannot deny, is that the knowledge they have of each other—​knowledge that leaves Densher with a “strange consciousness of exposure” (WD, 2.391), knowledge that, even buried in a blind embrace, they cannot “undo” (WD, 2.392)—​flows forward with them and through them, and alters their reality. Alters the reality of everyone around them. So that the final words of the novel, Kate’s “We shall never be again as we were!” (WD, 2.405), encompass more than these two lovers for whom memory, union, is now only disillusionment and loss. Kate’s “we” is all of the characters in The Wings of the Dove and perhaps, too, we readers whose experience with the Jamesian text discomforts us, challenges our dependence on language, our understanding of relationship, and our sense of ourselves. What William James and Henry James contribute to modernism, what they anticipate and help define, still holds us and shapes us as readers, disturbs us and startles us into a fuller awareness of subjectivity, and of our place in the world as relational beings. And though we feel sometimes bewildered by the sense that William’s theories and Henry’s narratives seem inconclusive, or still unfolding, that seems to be precisely the point. In their late writings, both Henry and William create a consciousness that is open, expanding, incomplete, and such a consciousness necessarily engenders a self that is

138

138

Jill Kress Karn

entangled in the social world. This self, as we have seen, fluid, relational, unbounded, and defined through transition and flight rather than stasis, corresponds with what we have come to expect from modernism—​a fracturing of identity that challenges our notions of privacy, and leaves us open to experience, but likewise vulnerable to pain. For William James, keeping consciousness unlimited and experience continuous are worth the risk of this exposure, though his sense of the inadequacy of language, at times, reveals the tenuousness of his position. Henry James works through the anxiety that emerges as he too overburdens language in his attempts to sustain a self in-​the-​ making. In his intricate explorations of the mind, Henry engages the conflict between our private lives and our connections with others, and ultimately, leaves us unsettled. We continue to read the works of William and Henry James, we return to them again and again for the same reasons that they themselves continuously and sometimes obsessively reworked their writings, because their searching invites and corresponds with our own, because we remain, in many ways still, in their moment, because we have inherited from them an awareness of ourselves as both isolated selves and relational beings, and this vision, complex and equivocal—​a bridge upon which the James brothers meet—​remains something we are unwilling to forsake.

Notes 1 The question of influence has inspired some of the most provocative work on William and Henry James. Richard Hocks (Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974]) states: “Where William is the pragmatist, Henry is, so to speak, the pragmatism” (4). Hocks explains, however, that he is not arguing “influence,” but rather claiming that one writer (Henry) “personifies” the other’s (William’s) thought (18). His book anticipates such work as that of John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Paul Armstrong, The Phenomenology of Henry James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Susan M. Griffin, The Historical Eye (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991); and Merle Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Some writers like Jaques Barzun (A Stroll with William James [New York: Harper and Row, 1983]) have remarked that William and Henry understood each other better than their biographers have. J. C. Hallman provides a delightful account of the relationship between the brothers as well as his impressions of their impact on each other’s writing, using their letters to tell their story. See J. C. Hallman, Wm and H’nry: Literature, Love and the Letters between William and Henry James (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013). For a range of early studies that link the James brothers, see Eliseo Vivas, “Henry and William (Two Notes),” Kenyon Review 5 (1943): 580–​7; F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947); H. B. Parkes, “The James Brothers,” Sewanee Review 56 (1948): 323–​8; Joseph Firebaugh, “The Pragmatism of Henry James,” Virginia Quarterly Review 27 (1951): 419–​35 and

139

William James, Henry James, and the Turn toward Modernism

139

“The Ververs,” Essays in Criticism 4 (1954): 400–​10; William McMurray, “Pragmatic Realism in The Bostonians,” in Henry James: Modern Judgments, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan, 1968), 160–​5; Ellwood Johnson, “William James and the Art of Fiction,” Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (1972). More recently, Brad Evans, “Relating in Henry James (The Artwork of Network),” Henry James Review 36, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 1–​23; Myra Jehlen, “On How, to Become Knowledge, Cognition Needs Beauty, no. 2: On How Philosophers Tend Not to Recognize This Condition,” Raritan 30, no. 4 (2011): 47–​65; Philip S. Francis, “The Haunting Quest for What Is Lost: Aesthetics and Ethics in William and Henry James,” Philosophy and Literature 38, no. 1 (2014): 74–​ 89. Particularly insightful is an essay by Hannah Wells that sees Henry’s prose and William’s philosophy “in contemporaneous and generative relation to one another” rather than using one writer to account for the other. See Hannah Wells, “What Henry Gave to William,” Henry James Review 35, no. 1 (2014): 34–​47. 2 Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 3 Ross Posnock’s book marks an exception; he considers both brothers on par with each other, reading their work as mutually enlightening cultural criticism. See Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 4 John Xiros Cooper suggests that for William James, “Consciousness is always unfinished potentiality, a set of changing relationships that were never completed in and of themselves.” John Xiros Cooper, “Modernism in the Age of Mass Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 306. 5 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 246. 6 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 21. 7 Gerald Myers expresses this frustration: “James wanted to hold that in one way consciousness does not exist, but that in another way it does; yet he was never able, even to his own satisfaction, to define the two ways clearly enough to show that they are consistent rather than contradictory” (64). Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 8 See Sarah Blackwood, “Psychology,” in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirtier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 271. 9 David Trotter, “The Modernist Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 70. 10 Perry Meisel, “Psychology,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2006), 79. 11 I have discussed elsewhere at length the metaphorical language that the Jameses, along with scientists and social scientists of the nineteenth century, use to explore, describe, and define consciousness. See Jill M. Kress, The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton (New York: Routledge, 2002). 12 In his chapter “The Stream of Thought” in The Principles of Psychology, James writes, “It seems as if the elemental psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, by my thought, every thought being owned” (PP, 1.221). 13 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 128.

140

140

Jill Kress Karn

14 James employs the metaphor of the “fringe” in “A World of Pure Experience” as well: “Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more than continuously develops and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds” (ERE, 35). 15 Kenneth Graham, Henry James: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 177; Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 55. 16 In his final preface to the New York Edition, Henry James writes: “To revise is to see, or to look over, again—​which means in the case of a written thing neither more nor less than to re-​read it.” Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 338–​9. 17 Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 1.84. Hereafter cited parenthetically as WD. 18 James, The Art of the Novel, 5. 19 See Brad Evans, “Relating in Henry James (The Artwork of Network),” Henry James Review 36, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 4. My understanding of the significance of relations for both William and Henry James owes a great deal to Evans’s excellent assessment. 20 Jacek Guturow asserts, “The writer seems to be interested in presenting the process of his own thinking, too, so that we are faced with layers of meaning” (291). Jacek Gutorow, “Toward the Incalculable: A Note on Henry James and Organic Form,” Henry James Review 35, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 285–​94. 21 According to Angus Brown, “waiting twists the erotics of Jamesian style as much as it constructs the novel’s plot” (64). Angus Brown, “Wait for It: The Pleasures of Jamesian Style in The Wings of the Dove and Italian Hours,” Henry James Review 35, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 60–​7. 22 As Bill Brown puts it, Jamesian obscurity “can characterize the theme or plot of a whole work or the semantics of a sentence” (13). Bill Brown, “Now Advertising: Late James,” Henry James Review 30, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 10–​21. 23 Millicent Bell notes this distancing: “Milly’s own reticence as well as James’s technique of scenic effacement contribute to the curious sense of absence and distance which surrounds her.” Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 313. 24 Nicola Bradbury writes: “Wings has multiplicity, contraries which are not reconciled, but challenge and supersede each other; different approaches are tried and abandoned, both in the narrative, for the reader, and in the characters’ understanding of their own story.” Nicola Bradbury, Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 73. 25 Sharon Cameron reads this scene and the recurring references to “blurring” and “melting” as an example of how James fuses thinking and looking, ultimately arguing that James makes thinking “unrecognizable” in this novel. See Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, especially chapter four. 26 Kristin King writes: “James’s style increasingly demands participation and acts of mutual construction from readers and characters alike” (4). Kristin King, “Ethereal Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove: The Transparent Heart of James’s Opaque Style,” Henry James Review 21, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1–​13.

141

9

“Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved”: William James and Gertrude

Stein on Time and Language David H. Evans

In no conceivable future will Gertrude Stein come to be renowned as a writer notable for clarity, but her fervent endorsement of her mentor and friend William James, in a theme written toward the end of her second year at Radcliffe, could hardly be more clear: Is life worth living? Yes, a thousand times yes when the world still holds such spirits as Professor James. He is truly a man among men; a scientist of force and originality embodying all that is strongest and worthiest in the scientific spirit; a metaphysician skilled in abstract thought, clear and vigorous and yet too great to worship logic as his God, and narrow himself to a belief merely in the reason of man . . . What can one say more? His is a strong sane noble personality reacting truly on all experience that life has given him. He is a man take him for all in all.1

Stein’s passionate prose not only indicates her intellectual excitement, but also registers a response that goes far beyond a purely philosophical interest in James’s ideas. To a modern reader, Stein’s effusive assessment probably sounds more like the hyperbolic product of a girlish crush than a carefully considered judgment. But if we can overlook the emotional tone for a moment, it becomes possible to see something more important: the way she evaluates her teacher reveals a precociously deep insight into, and affinity with, his way of thinking, what he called the “center of [one’s] vision.”2 In fact, the style of her assessment is itself eminently Jamesian and one that he would have thoroughly approved. James never tired of stressing that our intellectual interests are fueled and shaped by our complete passional natures: Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-​operate just as they do in practical affairs. . . . It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination.3

142

142

David H. Evans

Whatever the precise proportions of accuracy and idealization in Stein’s portrait, it demonstrates how instinctively she understood and shared the way James saw our fundamental relation to the world. In James, she saw a model that she recognized and approved because it was the model that she would eventually—​and we may speculate, already in some way did—​recognize and approve in herself. In this sense, to talk about James’s influence on Stein is potentially misleading. Instead, it may be more accurate to conceive of their relationship in terms of an intellectual affinity that found expression in two different and distinct forms—​philosophical in one case and literary in the other—​neither form to be accorded a priority other than temporal. In the fall of 1892, Stein’s brother Leo enrolled at Harvard. The two had been inseparable companions throughout their lives, and the following year she followed him to Cambridge, enrolling at Radcliffe. Here she encountered James’s work for the first time, in the form of Psychology: The Briefer Course, an assigned text in her freshman course, Philosophy 1. The book evidently interested her, since the next year she signed up for Philosophy 20b, taught by James himself.4 In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she tells us: The most important person in Gertrude Stein’s Radcliffe life was William James [who] delighted her. His personality and his teaching and his way of amusing himself with himself and his students all pleased her. Keep your mind open, he used to say, and when someone objected, but Professor James, this that I say, is true. Yes, said James, it is abjectly true.5

James advised her to pursue psychology, which led to her entering the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1897. Though personal contacts were rare after Stein left Cambridge, the two would remain friends. He once visited her in Paris and, according to Stein’s somewhat self-​flattering account, declared himself “enormously interested in what she was doing, interested in her writing and in the pictures she told him about. He went with her to her house to see them. He looked and gasped, I told you, he said, I always told you that you should keep your mind open” (GSW, 1.740–​1). She sent him a copy of her first published book, Three Lives, in 1910, and in the last months of his life he took the time to write a gracious, if shifty, response: I have had a bad conscience about “Three lives.” You know(?) how hard it is for me to read novels. Well, I read 30 or 40 pages, and said “this is a fine new kind of realism&Gertrude Stein is great! I will go at it carefully when just the right mood comes.” But apparently the right mood never came. I thought I had put the book in my trunk, to finish over here, but I don’t find it on unpacking. I promise you that it shall be read some time!6

A few months before her death, Stein remembered and honored James’s own open-​ mindedness and Shakespearean generosity of outlook. In The Art of Fiction, Henry James famously advised the writer to “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” But Stein did not need the novelist’s lesson, since she had already learned it,

143

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

143

evidently, from his brother: “Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity. A great deal of this I owe to a great teacher, William James. He said, ‘Never reject anything. Nothing has been proved. If you reject anything, that is the beginning of the end as an intellectual.’ ”7 As commentators have shown, the connections between James and Stein are many and various; in what follows I  focus on two matters of common concern:  time and language.

The feeling of time Central to the whole range of James’s thinking is his conviction that temporality is fundamental and inescapable to the condition of our being in the world. As early as his 1884 essay “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” he takes orthodox psychologists to task for neglecting the transitional nature of consciousness and attempting to convert it into a series of static atemporal moments that can be studied, as it were, “post-​mortem.”8 “When we take a rapid general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness,” however, “what strikes us first is the different pace of its different portions.”9 James would expand and develop his conception of the dynamic and transitional character of the human mind in The Principles of Psychology (PP), in particular in the celebrated chapter devoted to “The Stream of Thought,” where he discusses at length the “transitive parts” of thought that psychology has hitherto either ignored or distorted: Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached, is really annihilating them . . . The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.10

As always, James’s striking metaphors make clear just what the problem is with the attempt to reduce the transitive parts of consciousness to traditional objects of contemplation, since the very act of contemplation destroys what would be its object by attempting to turn it into one, as light eliminates darkness in the act of illuminating it. It is the equivalent of attempting to step outside temporality in order to have a little more time to study it. These neglected transitive parts, despite, or perhaps because of the difficulty they present, fascinated James, since it is in them that our temporal condition is most clearly felt, and that we are made vividly aware of the fact that, as the title of one subsection puts it, “Thought is in Constant Change.” “Experience,” he affirms, “is remoulding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date,” and consequently, “no two ‘ideas’ are ever exactly the same” (PP, 1.228, 1.229). The perpetually shifting

144

144

David H. Evans

and developing condition of the mind is “obvious and palpable” (PP, 1.227) to anyone who pays sufficient attention to real experience, but that fact has been obscured, he argues, by a philosophical prejudice in favor of “unchanging simple ideas” (PP, 1.229). The implications of James’s attack should not be underestimated; in effect he is challenging a European philosophical tradition extending back as far as Locke.11 His summary is a bit bracing—​not least in its rhetorical suspicion that the tradition in question may amount to something like an intellectual card trick—​when he declares that a “permanently existing ‘idea’ or ‘Vorstellung’ which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades” (PP, 1.230). James’s focus on the temporal and transitional nature of conscious would be responsible for two of his most celebrated concepts, the “specious present” and the “stream of consciousness.” Not satisfied by traditional theories of time that reduced the present to a dimensionless, and paradoxically atemporal, instant, James argued that there is a temporal dimension within the present itself: “The practically cognized present is no knife-​edge, but a saddle-​back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were” (PP, 1.574). The influential metaphor, “the stream of consciousness,” is similarly based on James’s conviction of the inescapably temporal and fluxional character of experience: “Consciousness . . . does not appear to itself chopped up in bits . . . A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described” (PP, 1.233). In a passage of memorable figurative elaboration, he depicts graphically the limitations of “traditional psychology,” which would break up consciousness into discrete static moments, and as a result talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. (PP, 1.246).

Traditional psychology distorts the complex flow that constitutes the object of its study by reducing it to whatever can be statically contained in its pathetically inadequate vessels. After the publication of The Principles of Psychology, James would turn his attention to more properly philosophical topics, like the meaning of truth, but the inescapability of time remained a constant in his thought. One of the things that most dissatisfied him about the orthodox “copy-​view” conception of truth was its neglect of the temporal dimension of cognitive relations. Part of the originality of pragmatism’s conception of truth is its insistence on that dimension, an insistence that James emphasized by calling his own view

145

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

145

of knowledge “ambulatory,” as opposed to traditional “saltatory” theories, which conceive of knowing in terms of an instantaneous “self-​transcending leap” from subject to object.12 Pragmatism rejects this image of knowledge as a flash of cognition, replacing it with the idea that knowing something is a process that unfolds in time. If “the great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert static relation,” then the response of the pragmatists is that truth is an event: “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-​fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-​ation” (Pragmatism [P], 96–​7). Nor, for pragmatism, does the attainment of knowledge bring the cognitive process to a conclusion. “Metaphysics,” asserts James, “has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest,” specifically the pursuit of “the universe’s principle,” expressed in a word whose possession will allow us to “rest . . . at the end of [our] metaphysical quest” (P, 31). “But,” he continues, if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-​value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. (P, 31–​2)

Our cognitive relation to the world, then, is temporal through and through; it takes action in time to know the world, and our accumulating knowledge in turn directs us toward new actions in the future. The later essays in Pragmatism extend the implications of this conception, proposing that the alternative between the pragmatists and their opponents is not only “a question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself” (P, 124). Since knowledge for James is not a passive condition, but an intensely creative activity, we continuously remake our world, which is in a perpetual state of becoming, forever incomplete and incompletable: The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-​made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures. (P, 123)

Stein and time Now there is still something else the time sense in the composition. This is what is always a fear a doubt and a judgement and a conviction. The quality in the creation

146

146

David H. Evans

of expression the quality in a composition that makes it go dead just after it has been made is very troublesome. (GSW, 1.528–​9)

The vision of the universe as something “still pursuing its adventures” is one that would have appealed to Gertrude Stein. The root of “adventure” is “advent,” pointing in the direction of the constantly arriving but ever uncertain future, and Stein was nothing if not an adventurous writer, always cultivating uncertainty about what would happen next, whether in a single text or subsequent experiments. Such an orientation puts an emphasis on writing as an ongoing process of discovery, rather than as a display of settled truths, an orientation that makes time central, since time is the necessary medium of adventure. To appreciate the measure of Stein’s novelty it is useful to remember that literature has long had an adversarial relationship with time. Poets have frequently figured time as their enemy, the obliviating and obliterating force against which the poem wages a probably doomed struggle to preserve its memorials. “I have erected a monument more enduring than bronze,” boasted Horace in Ode 3.30, stronger than “the innumerable series of years and the flight of time.” Shakespeare’s Sonnet 81 is only superficially more modest: Though I, once gone, to all the world must die: The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-​read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead;

But there is a sting in the tale of such eternizing brags, betrayed by the poet’s own words, which can erect a “monument” to the life of its subject only at the price of previewing and presupposing its death. The perspective of literature, of writing in general, seems inevitably (to borrow James’s description of traditional psychology’s understanding of consciousness) “post-​mortem.” What we have is never the living thing itself, but the dead monument. The live “transitive parts” are lost, reduced to the apparent stability of the completed text. One way of interpreting Stein’s literary experiments is as an attempt to evade the inexorable postmortem effect of writing and reading. Instead of struggling against time, Stein’s work embraces it, incorporating it into her writing’s central operations. She strives not to eternize, but to temporize. Her writing is an unfolding process that participates in the creation of its object. Readers often complain of the inconclusive nature of her work, her unwillingness to come to a clear and definitive point. But stable conclusions are precisely what she is writing against, since, like James, she is most interested in the “transitive parts” of consciousness. And no less than James, she understands the difficulty of “see[ing] the transitive parts for what they really

147

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

147

are” since “stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached, is really annihilating them” (PP, 1.236). Her efforts to find a way to convey the transitional nature of experience without “stopping” it for the purpose of contemplation would lead her ultimately in the direction of a radical disruption of literary language, and even of grammar itself. As Jonathan Levin puts it, in The Poetics of Transition, “Stein’s writing, especially those aspects of it which have seemed so enigmatic, is designed to resist the repose that would put an end to the continuous movement of process and understanding.”13 Stein, we may say, discovered her distinctive literary project as she wrote, but she began to discover it very quickly. Her first completed fiction, Q. E. D., opens with the settled retrospective repose of a familiar nineteenth-​century novel, looking back at unsettling experiences from a position of tranquility: “The last month of Adele’s life in Baltimore had been such a succession of wearing experiences that she rather regretted that she was not to have the steamer to herself . . . A little knowledge is not a dangerous thing, on the contrary it gives the most cheerful sense of completeness and content” (GSW, 1.3). In the course of writing her next work, Three Lives, however, a shift is clearly beginning to take place. While the prose of the first story, “The Good Anna,” is relatively conventional, the central novella, “Melanctha,” is full of passages like the following, describing Jeff Campbell’s uncertain and gradually shifting feelings about the titular character: Always now he liked it better when he was detained when he had to go and see her. Always now he never liked to go to be with her, although he never wanted really, not to be always with her. Always now he never felt really at ease with her, even when they were good friends together. Always now he felt, with her, he could not be really honest to her. And Jeff never could be happy with her when he could not feel strong to tell all his feeling to her. Always now every day he found it harder to make the time pass, with her, and not let his feeling come so that he would quarrel with her. (GSW, 1.184)

It is no doubt passages like this that Stein had in mind when she later remarked that, in “Melanctha,” “there was a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present” (GSW, 1.524). The anaphoric “always now” not only draws attention to the flow of time in the fictional world, but also compels us to experience it in ours, like the ticking of a clock, each recurring tick reminding us of its slight difference from the others, just as each slightly differing sentence indicates the subtly shifting emotions in Jeff ’s mind. This points to the paradox of Stein’s favored technique for dealing with time in her writing: repetition—​or rather, apparent repetition—​which in the popular mind came to be regarded as the signature feature of “Steinese.” Superficially, repetition might seem to resist the temporal flow, but as James observed, “our state of mind is never precisely the same . . . When an identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared” (PP, 1.227). Repetition is thus a deception, but an instructive one, to the extent that it reminds us that experience is in constant change

148

148

David H. Evans

and time cannot be transcended. Or as Stein puts it, in more idiosyncratic terms, in “Portraits and Repetition”: Then there is the important question of repetition and is there any such thing. Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition [since] once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis. (GSW, 2.288)

It would be easy to argue that Stein learned this insight from James, but she claimed—​ whether accurately or in play—​to have come across it independently, a year before encountering his work, while listening to the gossip of a “group of very lively little aunts” in Baltimore: If they had to know anything and anybody does they naturally had to say and hear it often . . . This was not yet the beginning of writing but it was the beginning of knowing what there was that made there be no repetition. No matter how often what happened had happened any time any one told anything there was no repetition. And so I  began to find out then by listening [to] the difference between repetition and insisting and it is a very important thing to know. This is what William James calls the Will to Live. If not nobody would live. (GSW, 2.289)

The familiar returns, but “in a fresh manner.” The difference between repetition and insisting is crucial for Stein—​indeed, it is a matter of life and death, since “insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same” (GSW, 2.290–​1). It is perhaps significant that she seems to have discovered the literary potential of the method in the course of writing a work named for life: Three Lives. “Insistence,” in effect, is Stein’s strategy for preventing the writing of life, and the life of writing, from turning into a monument. Insistence would become ever more central in Stein’s work. In her early portraits, it serves as a way of recreating in the medium of writing the live creative energy of her subjects, as in “Picasso” (1912): This one was working and something was coming then, something was coming out of this one then. This one was one and always there was something coming out of this one and always there had been something coming out of this one. This one had never been one not having something coming out of this one. This one had been one whom some were following. This one was one whom some were following. This one was being one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. (GSW, 1.282–​3)

Later, insistence takes on a life of its own—​or rather, it is as if Stein were attempting to give life to the words themselves, liberated from their mortifying subordination to

149

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

149

meaning. By the time she came to compose “As a Wife Has a Cow A Love Story,” the conclusion to a work titled “A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow A Love Story,” in 1923, any sense of either character or narrative fades away very quickly. The piece toys with the reader, seeming to promise, after a series of short enigmatic vignettes, the relief of something resembling a more traditional tale, populated by such familiar folkloric actants as “wives” and “cows.” But any suggestion of narrative drive is rapidly lost in the insistent spinning of verbal wheels: Has made, as it has made as it has made, has made has to be as a wife has a cow, a love story. Has made as to be as a wife has a cow a love story. As a wife has a cow, as a wife has a cow a love story. Has to be as a wife has a cow a love story. Has made as to be as a wife has a cow a love story. When he can, and for that when he can, for that. When he can and for that when he can. For that. When he can. For that when he can. For that. And when he can and for that. Or that, and when he can. For that and when he can. (GSW, 1.502)

Worse is to follow, as even the sketchy characters in inhabiting these paragraphs disappear, replaced not by other functionaries but by grammatical functions that seem to have disposed of their arguments, drifting off into a logical space of abstract syntactic relations: Not and now, now and not, not and now, by and by not and now, as not, as soon as not not and now, now as soon now, now as soon, and now as soon as soon as now. Just as soon just now just now just as soon just as soon as now. Just as soon as now. And in that, as and in that, in that and and in that, so that, so that and in that, and in that and so that and as for that and as for that and that. In that. In that and and for that as for that and in that. Just as soon and in that. In that as that and just as soon. Just as soon as that. (GSW, 1.502)

There is a strong generative feel to “As a Wife”: readers often “hear” “as a wife has a baby” in the background of the title. But the parturitive relation in question here is not so much one between biped and ungulate as one involving words and phrases, which seem to reproduce themselves by a process of paratactic parthenogenesis, the products displaying both the genealogical similarities and the subtle variations of succeeding generations. Much of this is motivated by a pure will to play, but I would suggest that Stein is making a serious point about storytelling. All narratives are dominated by their ends, the place from which it is possible to look back and understand their structure and meaning—​the point that makes their point. This may, in part, be what Walter Benjamin has in mind when he remarks somewhat cryptically that “death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell.”14 The desire that drives the reader through the narrative is, in this sense, the desire to escape time and change, to reach stability and stasis, which for both James and Stein amounts to a desire to transcend life. Frustrating that desire, “As a Wife” denies our conventional desire to “rest,” as James might put it,

150

150

David H. Evans

“at the end of [our] metaphysical quest,” driving us back into the world of time, where reality is forever “still in the making.”

James and words James never devoted sustained attention to what would become the focus of Stein’s work, the question of language, but he was acutely aware of the problems the unconsidered use of words could create. In his letters, for example, he attributed much of the disapproval his ideas attracted to linguistic confusion: “What staggers me in the recent controversial literature of pragmatism and humanism is the colossal amount of mutual misunderstanding that can exist in men brought up in the same language and with almost identical educations. It is hard to believe! Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought” (The Correspondence of William James, 11.367). Similarly, in his public responses to his critics, he pointed to the inadequacies of terminology as the cause of the disagreement. In The Meaning of Truth (MT), for example, he objects that Bertrand Russell’s misunderstanding of his pragmatic theory of truth results from his failure to discriminate between “two different universes of discourse,” and complains about the confusions created by “the unlucky word ‘proposition’ ” (MT, 150–​1). Concern over the ways in which the limitations of language can serve to distort our perceptions of reality was a constant feature of James’s thought. The early essay discussed above, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” begins with a reflection on the ways in which the a posteriori nomination of mental states subtly but decisively transforms their understanding. For the purposes of the psychologist, they must have been “remembered, reflected on, named, classed, known, [and] related to other facts of the same order”; but since “in the naming, classing, and knowing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not also here?” The very attempt to designate feelings is a problem, and with careful consideration we discover, James argues, that the “act of naming them has momentarily deflected from their force.”15 Further difficulties arise from the limited and misleading terminology available for describing the phenomena of consciousness, to the extent that “the lack of a word” frequently leads to the assumption “that no entity can be there; and so we come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly recognized in speech” (PP, 1.194). The inadequacy of names to the mental states they purport to describe troubled James especially when he came to deal with perhaps his most consequential contribution to psychology, the stream of consciousness. Part of the problem with understanding subjective life in its perpetually transitional nature was the fact that “the whole organization of speech” seemed to reinforce the “mythological” notion of “unchanging simple ideas” (PP, 1.230, 1.229):  “What after all is so natural as to assume that one object, called by one name, should be known by one affection of the mind?” Anticipating later arguments about the ways language influences cognition (such as, to take the most famous example, the so-​called Sapir-​Whorf

151

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

151

hypothesis), James suggests that English grammar itself creates distortions, and proposes that “agglutinative languages, and even Greek and Latin with their declensions, would be the better guides” to understanding the constantly changing character of consciousness: “Names did not appear in them inalterable, but changed their shape to suit the context in which they lay. It must have been easier then than now to conceive of the same object as being thought of at different times in non-​ identical conscious states” (PP, 1.230). A slightly different but related problem is the definiteness of words, which conceals or distorts the continuity and thus inevitable vagueness of mental states—​what James calls their “psychic fringes or overtones” (PP, 1.250). The upshot is that “language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is” (PP, 1.234). The seductive influence and pernicious effects of language on thought appear in another form in Pragmatism. James’s criticism of traditional philosophy as a quest for a place of atemporal repose has been discussed above, but it is also important to note that, according to what we might call James’s idiosyncratic version of a philosophical anthropology, such a rest is premised on a “primitive” fetishization of language: You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be . . . So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-​bringing word or name. That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. “God,” “Matter,” “Reason,” “the Absolute,” “Energy,” are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. (P, 31)

Bringing the philosophical endeavor to a premature conclusion is not the only baleful consequence of the misuse of words; still more confusion arises from what James calls “vicious abstractionism” or “vicious intellectualism.” By this, he means conceiving “a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, [then proceeding] to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of ‘nothing but’ that concept” (MT, 135). This procrustean philosophical procedure “mutilates things; it creates difficulties and finds impossibilities,” and it results from an overconfidence in the adequacy of language: “The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind” (136). In A Pluralistic Universe he extends this charge, arguing in effect that metaphysics has its origins in the negligent abuse of “abstract names or concepts” (PU, 98): It is no wonder that earlier thinkers [James goes on to call out Plato and Socrates], forgetting that concepts are only man-​made extracts from the temporal flux,

152

152

David H. Evans

should have ended by treating them as a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as but their corruption and falsification. (PU, 99)

The ultimate consequence of this overvaluation of language is the object of James’s critique throughout A Pluralistic Universe, the sort of monistic idealism that posits an eternally static and unchanging universe: The classic extreme in this direction is the denial of the possibility of change, and the consequent branding of the world of change as unreal . . . You see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make the world of our most accomplished philosophers. Neither as they use it nor as we use it does it do anything but make nature look irrational and seem impossible. (PU, 100)

Stein and language James repeatedly pointed out the limitations of conventional language in adequately rendering the complex and unstable nature of the real world; Stein devoted herself to linguistic experiments that might offer ways of moving beyond those limitations. Very early on, Stein began to see language as a problem—​not a means of access to the world, but something that seems to work “against our perception of the truth.” Three Lives is instructive in this regard. Ironically, she seems to have begun the work with the intention of providing portraits of abstract personality categories—​just the sort of “abstract characters and class names” that James attacks so vigorously in A Pluralistic Universe. According to Richard Bridgman, she was seeking “to stabilize a chaotic world by progressively elevating particular cases . . . to more general categories. Stated at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, individual problems appear to become universal data.”16 But in the course of writing the work her attitude toward the adequacy of such abstract classification undergoes a shift. The first story, “The Good Anna,” offers a picture of a stereotypical good serving girl, and the prose is as simple, conventional, and unproblematic—​as “good,” in short—​as its humble object: Anna had always a firm old world sense of what was the right way for a girl to do. No argument could bring her to sit an evening in the empty parlour, although the smell of paint when they were fixing up the kitchen made her very sick, and tired as she always was, she never would sit down during the long talks she held with Miss Mathilda. A girl was a girl and should act always like a girl, both as to giving all respect and as to what she had to eat. (GSW, 1.79)

Already in next story, however, things seem to have changed. In fact, the failure of conventional and abstract language, the troubled relation between words and reality, could be said to be the central theme of “Melanchtha,” allegorized in the troubled relation between the two main characters, Jeff and Melanctha. Jeff is a

153

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

153

man characterized by restraint and rationality; as a doctor he is committed to the assumption that the chaotic world of subjective feelings and somatic responses can be reduced to symptoms of classifiable conditions. But Melanctha presents an unprecedented challenge to his diagnostic abilities. She resists clear and stable classification, and throughout the story she displays constant emotional lability and a tendency to “wander,” with the clear implication of sexual promiscuity. Their potential incompatibility is indicated early on in linguistic terms, in the form of a dispute over what each means by the word “love.” Jeff insists that he believes “strong in loving,” and his notion of love clearly tends in the direction of a sort of generalized benevolence insofar as it involves “being good to everybody, and trying to understand what they all need, to help them.” But Melanctha has little time for such dispassionate lofty-​mindedness, and objects: “That certainly ain’t the kind of love I mean when I am talking. I mean real, strong, hot love Dr. Campbell, that makes you do anything for somebody that loves you.” Real, strong, and hot is exactly what love should not be, for Jeff, since he does not, as he calmly explains, “like to get excited, and that kind of loving hard does seem always to mean just getting all the time excited” (GSW, 1.152). As Jeff becomes more infatuated with Melanctha, however, he does get more “all the time excited,” and ever more confused about how to classify her. The good Anna might be simply defined by her abstract goodness, but Melanctha’s goodness is a far less certain quantity, as Jeff gradually comes to understand: “He was beginning to feel he could almost trust the goodness in her. But then, always, really, he was not very sure about her” (GSW, 1.162–​3). At times, he complains directly to Melanctha about her duplicitous evasion of the limitations of any categorization: “Sometimes you seem like one kind of a girl to me, and sometimes you are like a girl that is all different to me, and the two kinds of girls is certainly very different to each other, and I can’t see any way they seem to have much to do, to be together in you” (GSW, 1.164). Jeff ’s failure to classify Melanctha represents a failure of words. What James would call “the whole organization of [his] speech” inclines Jeff to believe in “unchanging simple ideas,” specifically the unchanging and simple idea that he wants to label with the signifier “Melanctha.” Words, however, fail him, and he in turn abandons them: “Melanctha always had ways that made him feel uncertain with her, and yet he was so near, in his feeling for her. He now never thought about all this in real words any more. He was always letting it fight itself out in him” (GSW, 1.163). Melanctha is a figure in perpetual emotional transition, and for her, as for James, “language works against” an understanding of the complexity and uncertain lability of her subjective life, as she attempts to explain to Jeff: “I certainly never did see no man like you, Jeff. You always wanting to have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling. I certainly don’t see a reason, why I should always be explaining to you what I mean by what I am just saying” (GSW, 1.190). Her education of Jeff therefore takes the form of a tuition in the inadequacy of language:  “I certainly never do talk very much when I like anybody really, Jeff. You see, Jeff, it ain’t much use to talk about what a woman is really feeling in her. You see all that, Jeff, better, by and by, when you get to really feeling. You won’t be so ready then always with your talking” (GSW, 1.162). As

154

154

David H. Evans

she predicts, Jeff proves an eager pupil, ultimately revising the abstract and constricted conception of loving he had been content with in the early days of their acquaintance, explaining to her that I got a new feeling now, you been teaching to me, just like I told you once, just like a new religion to me, and I see perhaps what really loving is like, like really having everything together, new things, little pieces all different, like I always before been thinking was bad to be having, all go together like, to make one good big feeling. (GSW, 1.180)

Melanctha’s instability, however, finally proves too much even for the now more expansively minded Jeff, and she begins to “wander” again. Nevertheless, language will have the last word; in the final paragraph of the novella a nameless “Doctor” will classify her as “consumptive,” and confine her in a “home,” where she “stayed until she died” (GSW, 1.239). After Three Lives, Stein would become less interested in the limitations imposed by “the whole organization of our speech” and more concerned with ways in which they might be circumvented. Many of her texts can be considered as responses to James’s complaint that language distorts our mental states, particularly by excising the psychic “fringe of relations which is at every moment a vital ingredient of the mind’s object” (PP, 1.89). “Knowledge about a thing,” he asserts, “is knowledge of its relations” (PP, 1.250), but we “name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is” (PP, 1.234). Many of Stein’s boldest literary experiments can be considered precisely as attempts to confront this problem, by creating a complex “name” that would include these “thousand other things.” The difficult texts collected in Tender Buttons seem almost impenetrable when regarded as the equivalent of locked rooms for which one must somehow think into existence the correct hermeneutical key, but they become far more accessible when we approach them as highly open structures—​ with multiple doors, windows, and apertures leading onto different spaces—​and if there is a “trick” in reading them, it may consist in being as open to association as the texts themselves. The reason they appear so difficult to access is that they are not descriptions of things, but attempts to render linguistically the mental experience of things as a complex whole that includes not just the clearly defined idea of the object, but also its relations with a “thousand other things,” things that are fundamentally connected with what any specific object means to us, and which enter, however “dimly,” into our experience. The texts begin, typically, with a simple everyday object, something unremarkable and familiar. But it is familiar objects that acquire, over time, the greatest number of meanings and associations for us, even though we rarely pay attention to the fact. Let us take one example out of many: A seltzer bottleAny neglect of many particles to a cracking, any neglect of this makes around it what is lead in color and certainly discolor in silver. The use of

155

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

155

this is manifold. Supposing a certain time selected is assured, suppose it is even necessary, suppose no other extract is permitted and no more handling is needed, suppose the rest of the message is mixed with a very long slender needle and even if it could be any black border, supposing all this altogether made a dress and suppose it was actual, suppose the mean way to state it was occasional, if you suppose this in August and even more melodiously, if you suppose this even in the necessary incident of there certainly being no middle in summer and winter, suppose this and an elegant settlement a very elegant settlement is more than of consequence, it is not final and sufficient and substituted. This which was so kindly a present was constant. (GSW, 1.318)

The passage begins with a title, a simple name for a simple thing, like most of the titles in Tender Buttons; but Stein, no less than James, was highly suspicious of names, as she makes clear in “Poetry and Grammar”:  “A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it, if it is not then calling it by its name does no good” (GSW, 2.313). Thus the apparently simple singularity of the name, and of the idea to which it refers, is immediately revealed to depend on a “neglect of many particulars.” In the case of a seltzer bottle, for example, the neglect of the protective metal mesh that often surrounds the glass, making a network of multiple decussations that might easily, with its sparkly branching, resemble the very “cracking” it is intended to prevent. Such neglect means that we are only dimly aware of the metal filaments, which thus appear “lead in color”—​or more accurately like “discolor in silver.” “The use of this is manifold”: this is really a natural transition, since the seltzer bottle is, like Martin Heidegger’s famous hammer, defined by its Zuhandheit, its usefulness in particular worldly contexts. In itself, a seltzer bottle is meaningless—​an amusing ready-​made, or the possible inspiration for a painting, such as the famous Seltzer Bottle and Glass, by Stein’s friend Juan Gris. It gains meaning, however, by its use “in a certain time selected,” at a social gathering, say, like Stein’s famous Saturday evening salons, which because they are an “assured” routine with the attendance of certain people regularly expected, it seems safe to “suppose no other extract is permitted and no more handling is needed”—​and suddenly this long central sentence takes a lengthy detour, moving into a much larger world of associations, a detour that attempts perhaps to render in verbal form some of the “psychic fringes and overtones” associated with the seltzer bottle. Social occasions inevitably involve invitations and therefore messages, messages that are not always joyful, any more than social occasions always are:  “Suppose the rest of the message is mixed with a very long slender needle.” Perhaps a particular message is vaguely recalled here, one containing something pointed and painful—​the meaning of an object inevitably includes the memories it arouses, however “dimly”—​ and a message concerning death is certainly within the realm of possibility, since it was customary in the nineteenth century for letters announcing a death to have a “black border,” and certainly a funeral or a wake is a common enough social occasion. All messages have an address, and this is surely enough to make us think that “all this altogether made a dress”:  social occasions, especially those occasioned by a death,

156

156

David H. Evans

more often than not require appropriate clothing. Considering such an event, “the mean way to state it was occasional”—​that is, the “mean” or “typical” way to talk about such an occasion is to say that it is occasional—​what else could it be, after all—​–​but it is also mean-​spirited to dismiss a funeral as an event that happens only occasionally. The seltzer bottle, however, seems to call to mind a particular occasion, one that took place “in August,” but incites no more specific recollections, beyond a reminder that time does not stand still, even in the dog days of summer, and therefore it is a “necessary incident of there certainly being no middle in summer and winter”—​since a middle would imply an end and a beginning, which would constitute joints in the flow of time. Stein, however, shared James’s conviction that time, as experienced, is “nothing jointed”; social occasions, such as funerals, are ways of imposing divisions on social life, giving it the appearance of beginnings and endings, conventions that we have settled on to afford life the appearance of form, so that it is perfectly right that we “suppose this and an elegant settlement a very elegant settlement,” one that “is more than of consequence.” But however “elegant” any such “settlement” may appear, our temporal condition is one of perpetual flux and transition, so that “it is not final and sufficient and substituted” for the incomplete and, to borrow James’s term, borrowed from Benjamin Paul Blood, the “ever not quite” nature of reality. And so we return, it would seem, to the seltzer bottle itself, which may have been a thoughtful gift—​“so kindly a present was constant”—​but also one that arouses uncertain memories and associations, a gift whose real gift is the thoughts it gives rise to, a gift that constantly “gives to think,” to translate literally the common French idiom, ça donne a penser. Needless to say, any reader of James will be led to think of his claim that the “practically cognized present is no knife-​ edge, but a saddle-​back . . . from which we look in two directions into time,” as well as Stein’s own notion of the “continuous present” (GSW, 1.524). The only constant about experience is its constant change, its perpetual fading away into ever vaguer memories and connections, hints of emotions, and suspicions of feelings. Gertrude Stein took her inspiration from many sources, and her creativity expressed itself in numerous and diverse experiments in literary form. No single figure, however, provided a more vital inspiration than the man who told her “Never reject anything. Nothing has been proved. If you reject anything, that is the beginning of the end as an intellectual.” The irreducibly temporal character of experience and the limitations of conventional language for conveying the complexity of mental life are only two of the thematic strains that connect William James and his most innovative student, but they serve to illustrate vividly the profound importance of James’s thought both for Stein and for the culture of modernism as a whole.

Notes 1 Quoted in Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 212. 2 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 44.

157

"Never Reject Anything. Nothing Has Been Proved"

157

3 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 77. 4 Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 20–​1. 5 Gertrude Stein, Writings, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 1.738–​9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as GSW. 6 William James, The Correspondence of William James (Charlotttesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–​2004), 12.531. 7 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), 34. 8 William James, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” Mind 9, no. 33 (1884): 1. Most of this article would be incorporated into The Principles of Psychology. 9 Ibid., 2. 10 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.236–​7. 11 “These words are meant to impeach the entire English psychology derived from Locke and Hume, and the entire German psychology derived from Herbart, so far as they both treat ‘ideas’ as separate subjective entities that come and go” (PP, 195). 12 William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 79–​80, 61. 13 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 152. 14 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 94. 15 James, “On Some Omissions,” 1–​2. James reprints these comments in PP, 1.189–​90. 16 Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 57.

158

159

10

The Varieties of Robert Frost’s Religious Experience Mark Richardson

Few poets responded more immediately and instinctively to what William James liked to call the “center of his vision” than Robert Frost. Frost missed the chance to study personally with James at Harvard, but he read his writings on psychology there and assigned his texts during his period as a teacher at the Plymouth State Normal School; in later life he would refer to James as his “most valuable teacher.”1 Perhaps the most important lesson of that teacher, for Frost, lay in his conviction that our relation to the universe was fundamentally active and creative, rather than passive and contemplative. James’s claim that the “world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands . . . it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it”2 would have spoken deeply to Frost’s innate sense of humanity’s relation to the environment in which it found itself. Many critics have discussed the influence of James’s themes on Frost’s thinking;3 this chapter focuses on one particular dimension of that influence, and what it can tell us about the much debated question of the poet’s religious beliefs. I hope to show that Frost valued and assessed religion, and religious experiences, more or less as James did: by their unsystematic fruits—​by what they bring about, make possible, in highly particular lives, quite without regard to their “truth” in the sense of getting the cosmos right. But I also want to go a bit further, to argue that Frost’s notion of religious faith as an effort of the creative will to realize its vaguely felt object was not just of personal significance to him, but can also be seen as the model for his theory of poetry. In June 1948, Lawrance Thompson and his wife Janet walked into a small farmhouse on Robert Frost’s property in Ripton, Vermont. They had rented it from the poet for the summer. Propped against a sugar bowl on the kitchen table was a letter. “Dear Larry,” it began: I recently came across you in a curious and romantic way when I was getting out my old clothes here at the cabin for summer wear. One of them, a shirt, puzzled me by its material and the size of its collar. It was of wool which I never wear in summer or winter and the collar must have been size thirteen if I wasn’t mistaking a cuff for a collar. I can remember when I wore thirteen. (Never quote yourself. At least never accurately. I haven’t time to verify the passage.) In my perplexity and without stopping to consider that I might be invading another man’s privacy

160

160

Mark Richardson

I dove into one of the pockets for anything identifying and what I turned up was a set of questions in your typewriting that you had evidently resolved to corner me with that day if the rain hadn’t intervened to save me from telling you lies.4

Frost may have in mind a sense of the word “curious” now lost: “unduly minute or inquisitive” (as per the Oxford English Dictionary [OED]), as used in this remark, apt as it is for our purposes: “We must abstaine from ye curious searching of Gods maiestie.”5 A  sense of the illicit hangs about Frost’s “romantic” encounter with his “official” biographer in the person of a shirt that does not fit (the shirt collars Frost). The encroachments are double:  the biographer and his subject are invading one another’s privacies, the one by rifling through Thompson’s shirt, the other by rifling, or intending to, his subject’s mind so as to “corner” him for the straight dope on the condition of his soul. But Frost has the better of his suitor, and the gods on his side for “intervening” in such a way as to prevent the poet from bearing false witness in a case, it would appear, to be made against him. You can court Frost, but never convict him. He already has his extrication: never quote yourself accurately. The defendant has had the advantage of discovery. “The questions are fine and searching,” Frost continues. “The one I propose to deal with here is the one that touches my religion.” “Theology fascinated me from very young,” he adds, “but perhaps no more than other children.” What follows from the logic of that “but” gives the lie to—​or anyway seriously qualifies—​what precedes it. I have met children who live in fear of god, but not for the reasons Tertullian gave. The casual street-​urchin wit that follows only shores up our impression. Frost will not be taken gravely by any biographer (if he can avoid it): I couldn’t have been more than four or five when I  relished hearing a boy somewhat older ask if in hitting a nail on the head with the hammer in his hand he was hitting God on the head. “I must be hitting him somewhere since he is everywhere.” A little later (ten years later when I had learned to read) I was tickled by Shelley’s note on his dictum that there is no God.6 I was bored by Queen Mab and the Revolt of Islam and all such truck. But I thought Shelley and Godwin as much fun to contemplate as Mark Twain’s Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning or his Editing a Newspaper in Arkansas.7 (SL 530)

Frost “relishes” the quip about the hammer as much here, at age 75, as he did at the age of “four or five.” Extrapolation suggests how ulterior Frost is with his anecdotes. No one will hit him on the head, or “nail” him, as we now say, on any such question as religion. He is “tickled” by Shelleyan atheism—​delighted, charmed, pleased, amused, all of the above?—​but bored by its exposition in poems such as Queen Mab. And the whole matter (irreligion, atheism) is as “much fun to contemplate” as a tall tale by Mark Twain, whose impieties and wit Frost emulates (to some degree) in this letter. After recollecting high school days reading Twain and Artemus Ward with his friend Carl Burrell, Frost continues:  “Carl’s rather big library was a collection of American humor and, on the serious side, of the British scientists [Edward] Clodd,

161

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

161

Grant Allen, [Thomas Henry] Huxley and [Charles] Darwin. It would be found that Grant Allen wrote a book on the Evolution of the Idea of God. I grinned inside at the time.”8 What to make of that “grin” at Allen’s propositions that God is man’s creation and not the other way around, and subject to the laws of evolution that so undermined belief in Him as Frost came of age? A grin at the abuse of the word “evolution” (which Frost was always pleased to find out), or at the affront Allen was to orthodoxy, or at the prospect of Thompson reading a letter on religion tipped up against a sugar jar, or at all three? “One of my teachers warned my mother that Carl was too old for me,” Frost continues. “He had been a convert from religion of the kind you’re looking for [i.e., Christianity].” Seek and ye shall find. “I doubt I was ever religious in your sense of the word.” Surely this is the most candid remark made in the letter. “Tell them I am, Jehovah said. And as you know I have taken that as a command to iamb and not write free verse. It would be terribly dangerous to make too much of all this.” The pun—​“I am”/​“iamb”—​is by no means unserious. If you would find Frost’s religion, his way of obeying the Jehovian diktat, look for it not so much in the poetry (its themes, and so on) as in its making, in the composition of it, in the “iamb” of it. Frost adds, thinking of what Thompson would say about the matter in the biography he had agreed to publish only after the poet’s death: “I grow curious about my soul out of sympathy for you in your quest for it. As you pronounce lastly on it [i.e., in the biography] of so much place in Heaven I expect my reward.” Here “curious” means what it typically means. The pretense is that the poet was never concerned about his soul until Thompson assumed he had one and went in quest of it. And now Thompson himself is imagined to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence He shall come to judge the quick and dead. “I’m afraid I stay a semi-​detached villain. But only semi,” Frost adds (SL, 539). Detached or semidetached from what? Context seems to allow for no other reading than this:  semidetached from religion, and, if attached at all, attached by villainy (the role in which Frost casts himself in this impeccably un-​Pauline epistle). Frost continues: “My passion for theology must mean something. It’s the frosting on the cake for me to discover Thomas Aquinas’ explanation of the Holy Ghost.9 You know my mild prejudice against Ghost Writers. But I am sublimated in my shoes by the religious thought that in heaven we will all be Ghost Writers if we write at all” (SL 531). Sublimated in my shoes? Elevator shoes, of course. An experience of the sublime. Or maybe the meaning is to be found in a sentence such as this, from Charles Jarvis’s 1749 translation of Don Quixote (and placed into evidence by the OED): “Thou shalt see thyself so exalted and sublimated, that thou shalt not know thyself.” For all I know, given the “ghost writing” and the “I am”/​“iamb” pun, the shoes here are cobbled for poetic feet:  a poet wears them in this uncommonly literary letter, and Frost’s extravagance is often hard to set bounds to. Anyway, he winds up: Faith faith! What a thing it is. The last pop of poppycock was for Santayana to say, “true illusion and false illusion; that is all there is to choose between.” True illusion would be the falsity then, and false illusion the truth. Did it ever strike you that we

162

162

Mark Richardson

owe it all entirely to two or three Greeks that we aren’t all orphic (alias Christian) mystic fools crossing ourselves up with word tricks. Such as the truth shall set you free. My truth will bind you slave to me. You can do some very objective figuring about man and the universe by taking God’s name not altogether in vain. But you have to look out or you will end up using Jesus to rationalize the sixth marriage of Henry the Eighth. (SL, 531)

What does Frost do in this letter if not play the fool crossing himself (and Thompson) up with word tricks, as in the case of that too-​clever dismissal of Santayana? That would make him what the letter says he is not: “orphic (alias Christian).” And we are left with a paradox. Has Frost or has he not been taking God’s name “not altogether in vain”? Not in vain anyway does he point out how religion can serve, as it did for Henry VIII, as post hoc justification for the life you have decided to lead anyway and the Pope be damned. Thompson characterizes this performance as an “illustration” of Frost’s habit of “using words to confuse issues in order ‘to keep the over-​curious out of my secret places.’ ” Then, speaking of himself in the third person, the biographer adds: In conversation the next day RF asked if he had satisfactorily answered the question concerning his religious belief. It was a tight place. In his fear of voicing comments that might sound like complaints, Thompson replied that while the letter hewed consistently to a solid line of argument, some of the chips that flew seemed more interesting than the line itself. RF accepted that, nodded as he winked with one eye, and said quite sympathetically, “Don’t let me throw any dust in your eyes.” Then he changed the subject. (SL, 528–​9)

In the book in which this letter appears, The Selected Letters of Robert Frost, Thompson lists in his index, under the heading, “Frost, Robert Lee: Religious Belief,” twenty-​three entries referring the reader to letters or to headnotes composed by Thompson himself. They add up to nothing. But note Thompson’s assumption that the mischief in the letter screens us from something we have to get round behind the screen to find: the nature of Frost’s religious beliefs. The play, the sheer brio, in this letter cannot be the thing sought but the thing that lies in the way. Why? In his biography of the poet, Thompson refers to Frost as “a believer.” Dorothy Judd Hall and Edward Ingebretsen make similar assumptions in monographs on Frost and religion—​the only two books devoted entirely to the subject, so far as I am aware.10 Hall, Ingebretson, and Thompson make a fuss of clearing away all the contradictory, obscure, blasphemous, heterodox things Frost is on record as actually having said, as if, in getting around all that, we will be able to say that Frost believed in a creating and supervening God.11 But what they take as something to get back of, or to clear away, is, in fact, all that is there, if we are empirical instead of inferential and deductive. Frost’s religion can bear no name, but Hall et  al. are not wrong in wanting to find it. It is there, though not in any behind-​ness, not in anything “real” or “stable” behind what is apparent. It hides in plain sight, in the making of the

163

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

163

poetry, in the “I am” of the “iambs,” or in the satisfying composition of a letter. In A Pluralistic Universe, William James offers a defense of “radical pluralism”: It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat, they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility.12

We have no need to “clean up the litter” with which the record of Frost’s “religious” beliefs is strewn: it is a “muddled . . . sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline.” His “religion” is best arrived at by reading him as an “empiricist” to whom an unfoundational “pluralism” came easier than anything orderly or morally elevated. Frost said, in a 1927 letter, “I’m less and less for systems and system-​building in my old age. I’m afraid of too much structure. Some violence is always done to the wisdom you build a philosophy out of. Give us pieces of wisdom like pieces of eight in a buckskin bag. I take my history in letters and diaries, my philosophy in pensees [sic] thrown together like the heads of Charles the Bold’s army after it was defeated and slain in Switzerland.”13 Frost so lays out his poetics, it seems to me, as to qualify it as affording a “variety” of religious experience. In speaking of Frost’s “poetics,” I have in mind the following: the fairly well elaborated, if often obscure, account, to be found in Frost’s essays, of how and why poems are made, and what the composition of them entails and brings about. Dorothy Judd Hall entertains this idea—​that in writing poetry Frost might have had his variety of religious experience—​but only for the purpose of dismissing it on the otherwise correct assumption that, unlike Wallace Stevens, Frost never spoke of poetry as an alternative to religion. He never wrote a “Sunday Morning,” and we have seen already what he says of Santayana. But Frost did write “A Prayer in Spring,” “Putting in the Seed,” “Directive,” “I Will Sing You One-​O,” “Kitty Hawk,” and “Too Anxious for Rivers,” among other poems, all of which reflect certain Lucretian, Darwinian, and Bergsonian influences, which at times he seems to conflate. Lawrance Thompson came near the argument I would make when, in a letter to Hall, he said: “I really think Frost’s religious belief provides more problems than any other part of his art—​and it happens to be inseparable from his art.”14 And, to do Hall justice, though she makes Frost out a theist, she also adds, as she closes her book, a note that has force: “For Frost, design was sacred, and the pursuit of clarification through art was inevitably religious” (CB, 123). I do not have, and think Frost never had, anything to do with the “sacred” as Hall means it. Nor would I want to suggest that Frost regarded the making of poetry as in some sense sacramental—​though the uncharacteristically exalted phrasings of the conclusion to “Directive” may seem to hint otherwise. Ideas

164

164

Mark Richardson

of the sacred are too Eliotic ever seriously to entertain in connection with Robert Frost. But the “pursuit of clarification through art” of which Hall speaks, though not “inevitably religious,” did, as I say, afford Frost something like a religious experience. Here is Frost, in a 1935 letter to The Amherst Student: All ages of the world are bad—​a great deal worse anyway than Heaven. If they weren’t the world might just as well be Heaven at once and have it over with. One can safely say after from six to thirty thousand years of experience that the evident design is a situation here in which it will always be about equally hard to save your soul. Whatever progress may be taken to mean, it can’t mean making the world any easier a place in which to save your soul—​or if you dislike hearing your soul mentioned in open meeting, say your decency, your integrity. (CPRF, 114)

The fun begins at once. If all the ages of the world were not bad, “the world might just as well be Heaven at once and have it over with.” The question of how “the world” might possess agency and will such as to accomplish a feat like “being Heaven” is so absurd as to constitute satire:  the latent idea is that just as man needs God, so do men need Heaven, to square present injustices with future reward. How tame a planet we should have if the world did become Heaven and have it over with. And it is not “the design” but the “evident design” that the world should “always be about equally hard to save your soul in.” So “the world” would appear. Nothing not secular is really afoot here:  soul, integrity, decency—​as you like. Discourse in which these terms—​ and the several vocabularies they inhabit—​work as synonyms cannot be “religious” in tendency, certainly not in any way a true believer would accept. “Fortunately we don’t need to know how bad the age is,” Frost continues. “There is something we can always be doing without reference to how good or how bad the age is. There is at least so much good in the world that it admits of form and the making of form. And not only admits of it, but calls for it” (CPRF, 114–​15). Here is design as Frost finds it and it is neither sacred nor sacramental. The forms, the designs, are human—​made of what “admits of form” in what we find lying about us in a world that seems to “[call] for it.” This is our vocation, what we feel “called” to do. And for a reason: “We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches its height of form and through us exceeds itself ” (CPRF, 115). Everyone has felt the promptings of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. It is a child’s game. But Frost is speaking here by turns as a Darwinian, a Lucretian, and a Bergsonian. Bergson writes, in Creative Evolution: Life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way.15

165

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

165

Nature stumbled on consciousness in us, and by that means, “exceeded itself ” or “kept on its way” where in every other avenue it has “come to a stand.” Consciousness allows us to survey what we have been “thrust forward out of ”—​nature—​and find in it the makings for form. The world may be said to have become aware of itself in us. A few teleological intimations animate this: it is as if something is doing the “thrusting forward” toward a “height,” but they are intimations only, and are natural, not supernatural. A hint of Bergson’s élan vital here, or of a Lucretian “swerve” there, but that is it for us: makers of form, ourselves the height of form, answering to suggestions of form. As Frost says, “When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with.” In “doubt” about what, if not about your integrity, your decency, your sanity, or (if we are not “in open meeting”) your soul? “Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it,” Frost says, “is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way” (CPRF, 115). Note what Frost—​a good Latinist—​has done with the crucifixion in “stroking faith the right way”: brought it in via “excruciation,” which, in Latin (excruciare), refers to torture, and more specifically to torture on the cross, the crux. This essay is a little passion play, but a remarkably democratic one in which we invest our “faith” in private and contingent redemptions: The artist, the poet might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance. But it is really everybody’s sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing, gratifying, comforting, staying than those lesser ones we throw off, like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody’s cooperation; a basket, a letter [such as the one Frost propped up against a sugar bowl for his biographer to find], a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem. For these we haven’t to get a team together before we can play. (CPRF, 115)

Not having to get a “team” together to “stroke faith the right way” so as to be redeemed from the “larger excruciations”—​our time on the cross—​is ultra Protestantism of a post-​churchly kind I  associate with James. What follows is nothing James would object to: The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-​made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so? . . . We were born to [confusion], born used to it and have practical reasons for wanting it there. To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing. If I were a Platonist I should have to consider it, I suppose, for how much less it is than everything. (CPRF, 115)

Idealists and rationalists such as Plato are like the “philosopher” described in the remarks quoted above from A Pluralistic Universe. They look for some inner order in the confusion and chaos the world presents as, assuming that the chaos is illusory or unreal (and curable); this is the metaphysical impulse. And how far we have

166

166

Mark Richardson

come, in an essay that fits on a single page, from talk of Heaven and the salvation of souls to talk of the “hugeness and confusion shading off from where we stand into black and utter chaos.” The phrase “we people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature” now assumes an existentialist glamour. We “people” are thrust on the scene, in all its confusion, chaos, and blackness. We must tackle it, shape it up, order it for human purposes (if we are to stay “sane”); we must conceive ourselves as humane—​as makers of poems, gardens, paintings, and so on—​both in the chaos of Nature and somehow apart from it. Existence precedes essence. We make of ourselves what we will. We are “born to” the task; we have “practical” reasons for wanting the chaos and confusion to also serve by standing and waiting for us to get it up into “any small man-​made figure of order and concentration.” The Jamesian note in all this is the ease with disorder and “chaos.” “What pleasanter than that this should be so?” “To me any little form I assert upon [the background of confusion] is velvet.” No suggestion anywhere of a wish that the world, or Nature, be any less “the great blooming, buzzing confusion” James suggests it is for the newborn in The Principles of Psychology.16 I quote two more of Frost’s better essays, this time without commentary. The following is from a preface he wrote for E. A. Robinson’s King Jasper, also in 1935: How does a man come on his difference, and how does he feel about it when he first finds it out? At first it may well frighten him, as his difference with the Church frightened Martin Luther. There is such a thing as being too willing to be different. And what shall we say to people who are not only willing but anxious? What assurance have they that their difference is not insane, eccentric, abortive, unintelligible? Two fears should follow us through life. There is the fear that we shan’t prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man—​the fear that men won’t understand us and we shall be cut off from them. We began in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes. We recognized that they were the same feature and we could do the same things with them. We went on to the visible motion of the lips—​smile answered smile; then cautiously, by trial and error, to compare the invisible muscles of the mouth and throat. They were the same and could make the same sounds. We were still together. So far, so good. From here on the wonder grows. It has been said that recognition in art is all. Better say correspondence is all. Mind must convince mind that it can uncurl and wave the same filaments of subtlety, soul convince soul that it can give off the same shimmers of eternity. At no point would anyone but a brute fool want to break off this correspondence. It is all there is to satisfaction; and it is salutary to live in the fear of its being broken off. (CPRF, 116–​17)

And here Frost is, four years later, in “The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939): The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and

167

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

167

stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—​not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood—​and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad—​the happy sad blend of the drinking song . . . All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—​the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through. (CPRF, 131–​2)

I have said that Frost so describes his poetics as to indicate that the composition of poetry was his particular variety of religious experience. With this proposition in mind, note, in the paragraphs just quoted, that the terms he uses lean by turns toward the religious and by turns toward the psychological. On the religious side, we have these remarks: “Whatever progress may be taken to mean, it can’t mean making the world any easier a place in which to save your soul” (CPRF, 114); achieving order in poetry “strokes faith the right way”; “How does a man come on his difference, and how does he feel about it when he first finds it out? At first it may well frighten him, as his difference with the Church frightened Martin Luther” (116); a fear should follow us through life “that we shan’t prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God”; and, in writing poetry, in aiming for “correspondence” thereby, “soul [must] convince soul that it can give off the same shimmers of eternity” (117). On the psychological side, we have these remarks:  “If you dislike hearing your soul mentioned in open meeting, say your decency, your integrity” (114)—​”integrity” being here, as becomes clear in the essay I take it from, a measure of psychological health; or, the satisfactions of achieving form is “all there is to sanity”; and “there is such a thing as being too willing to be different. And what shall we say to people who are not only willing but anxious? What assurance have they that their difference is not insane, eccentric, abortive, unintelligible?” (116). The best example of Frost working both sides of the street comes in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” where he is at pains, to fend religion off, or hold it in its proper place (entirely on the temporal plane): a poem, as one writes it, “begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—​not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” The composition of poetry affords not the peace that passeth understanding, but the peace that passeth. Frost is right there, along the line that sets the two magisteria—​the religious and the psychological—​apart. What is this if not James’s at times bafflingly equivocal tactic in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where nearly every statement made as to religious experience is hedged? A few examples make this clear: “ ‘Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity’ is the theological way of putting [the] fact of the need

168

168

Mark Richardson

of self-​surrender; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, ‘Let one do all in one’s power, and one’s nervous system will do the rest.’ Both statements acknowledge the same fact.”17 Or what makes the difference between a sudden and a gradual convert is not necessarily the presence of divine miracle in the case of one and of something less divine in that of the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the fact, namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have one of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly upsetting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come. I do not see why Methodists need object to such a view. (VRE, 193)

The Methodists I grew up with certainly would object. So would they object to what Frost does in shifting so easily among his terms: soul, integrity, sanity, black and utter chaos, and so on. I might quote additional examples from The Varieties. Instead, I satisfy myself with the suggestion that, at times, the chapters on “Saintliness” and the “value” thereof fairly appall the reader. The effect of the entire chapter on “Saintliness” is as much revolting as it is conducive to admiration of the saints. One might be forgiven for supposing saintliness an unqualified abomination, and St. Ignatius Loyola a “theopath” of the darkest stamp. One wants to say, and feels James inclining one to say: Thank god for the Reformation, and may it continue to do its work—​all the way down to the ultra Protestantism I suggested we find in “The Letter to The Amherst Student.” Frost and James have in common a tendency to keep very worldly and naturalistic concerns in view when speaking of, or in, religious vocabularies. And they keep in view always the question of what these vocabularies allow us to do—​shore up our sense of integrity and sanity, and thereby move ahead, or justify the sixth marriage of Henry VIII—​not the degree to which any among them might be said to “correspond” to anything that was on the scene before we arrived to give our accounts of it. You will have noticed—though Frost never insists on the matter—that poetry, and the composing of it, is his salvation in a particular sense. What is he saved from? “Insanity,” “confusion,” “the vast chaos of all he’s lived through,” “the larger excruciations,” and so on. Serious business. The composition of poetry has work to do in Frost, and by its fruits you shall know it. Are you still sane or are you not? Can you front life and go on? Frost writes in a notebook: “Things to bear in mind for composure,” by which he means an experience of psychological peace and integrity. “There is nothing quite so composing as composition. Putting anything in order a house a business a poem gives a sense of sharing the mastery of the universe” (my emphasis).18 There you have it, from the highly local to the universal, and from the homely to the sublime. If making such a sweep is not what James flexes us up to do in the Varieties, I do not know what the book is about. Frost remains a high-​value target for theists who want his imprimatur. I have often found myself in quarters where the matter was debated, or had the question, Was Frost

169

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

169

religious? put to me directly. The question is easy to answer in one sense. He certainly was not a Christian. Nor was he a subscriber to any known sect. Twitting Amy Lowell in a 1917 letter he gave a brief history of his religious life:  “[Scotch] Presbyterian, Unitarian, Swedenborgian, Nothing.”19 Still, speaking in terms that recall James, he remarks in “Education by Poetry” (1931): The person who gets close enough to poetry, he is going to know more about the word belief than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays . . . There are four beliefs that I know more about from having lived with poetry. One is the personal belief, which is a knowledge that you don’t want to tell other people about because you cannot prove that you know. You are saying nothing about it till you see. The love belief, just the same, has that same shyness. It knows it cannot tell; only the outcome can tell. And the national belief we enter into socially with each other, all together, party of the first part, party of the second part, we enter into that to bring the future20 of the country. We cannot tell some people what it is we believe, partly, because they are too stupid to understand and partly because we are too proudly vague to explain. And anyway it has got to be fulfilled, and we are not talking until we know more, until we have something to show. (CPRF, 110)

Here is a fine example of what James describes in The Will to Believe (WB): a fact the existence of which depends on, is brought about by, our faith in its possibility: “Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps,” James says, “and have had the ill-​luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim,” he continues, “and nerve my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible.” Then he brings the point home: “In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. There are then cases where faith creates its own verification” (emphasis in the original).21 Such cases as these—​and the “immense class” to which they belong—​are what Frost has in mind. He continues: And then the literary [belief] in every work of art, not of cunning and craft, mind you, but of real art; that believing the thing into existence, saying as you go more than you even hoped you were going to be able to say, and coming with surprise to an end that you foreknew only with some sort of emotion. And then finally the relationship we enter into with God to believe the future in—​to believe the hereafter in. (CPRF, 110)

The language of prophecy and insight merge: the poet foreknows what will come as a surprise when he discovers what he was somehow always capable of saying. And the success cannot come by way of reason, only by “some sort of emotion.” Frost speaks

170

170

Mark Richardson

of believing something in, not of believing in something, and he all but makes (by apposition) the “future” and the “hereafter” mean the same temporal thing. And so he remains shy of religion as most believers understand it: he has to do with belief in things for which there can be no antecedent. Belief for him, as for James, is creative more than correspondent. “God” needs us to bring about the future, the hereafter. They could not exist otherwise, and because our creative faculties are here engaged, “God” is more a title of prestige with which to affiliate those faculties than a sine qua non. The notebooks abound in such claims as Frost makes in “Education by Poetry”: “Believing in God you believe the future in, believe it into existence. Belief is the end of the sentence more felt than seen—​the end of the paragraph the end of the chapter. There is no end so final, no form so closed, that it hasn’t an unclosed place that opens into further form.” And again, this time as if in answer to a “Questionnaire”: “Do you believe in God? Yes in some vague way of the Unitarians. My confidence to go ahead in life is a faith in life and the future. I believe the future in—​I believe in God” (NBRF, 282–​3). These thoughts accord with remarks Frost made in the question and answer session at the dedication of the Seagrams Building in 1959, for which a panel discussion on “The Future of Man” had been arranged, and in which Frost took part: “The chief guide in the world for us in the long way we’ve come is some more or less intelligent handling of that inexorable thing in us, Biblical thing, you know—​ passionate preference for something we can’t help wishing were so, wishing were true. All your guidance in politics, religion, and love22 is something way in the middle of your heart that you can’t help wishing was so. All the time. That’s what we’re talking about here, what we can’t help wishing were so” (CPRF, 351–​2). What we cannot help wishing were so; to bring the future in; to make us citizens in a world we crave—​speak of it as you will. It is perfectly Jamesian. James catalogs the same beliefs, and indicates their fruits, in the Varieties, in a passage that may have so impressed Frost that he recalled it in “Education by Poetry”: This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. (VRE, 398n. 16)

Worth mentioning also is Frost’s entire sympathy with James’ anti-​institutional bias in the Varieties: “The nearer the church the further from God,” says Frost (NBRF, 104). Here is James, toward the beginning of The Varieties: At the outset we are struck by one great partition which divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies institutional, on the other personal religion. As M.  P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man most in view. . . . Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as possible

171

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

171

the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple. (VRE, 32)

Lawrance Thompson reports a conversation he had with Frost along these lines in the early 1960s. Here the theological and the institutional are implicitly reduced to the private and particular, and man is certainly “kept in view”: The Jesus story is a very pretty story if you take it as a story of the crucifixion of “the spirit” by “respectability,” or by orthodoxy. But that kind of crucifixion is what always happens: of necessity, the spirit is always harnessed into conventions. . . . But: the best of everything is always outside convention. Frost went on to remind me that he had said it another way, long ago: “There is more poetry outside of verse than in; more religion outside of church than in; more love outside of marriage than in.” This time, he went on to say that he himself had lived a life in which he had chosen to stay outside, and he had gotten away with it; he hadn’t been crucified for it. But lots of people had tried to write him off because of the way he took. (CPRF, 334).

Religion abides in particular, and highly personal, experiences and outcomes; we couldn’t be further from St. Paul’s way of taking “the Jesus story.” The poet (on Frost’s account) is pretty radical in his empiricism, and should remain that way. He “is never systematic. He is more like the man in the streets, who sees things unsystematically. He views life in fragments,” and knows the pleasure and uses of what Frost called “unbelief ” (CPRF, 275). He knows that nothing could be “pleasanter” than “any small man-​made figure of order and concentration” set against the black and utter chaos into which we people find ourselves thrust. He knows that the making of form “is all there is to sanity.” Whether in such mischief as characterizes the letter I began this essay by reading, or in the act of wresting some contingent and momentary order out of “the vast chaos of all [he has] lived through,” Frost calls poetry to something like an antifoundationalist vocation. The poet, the modern poet, the poet as pragmatist, must remain plural in his dispositions, now making sport of religion (Holy Ghost writers, etc.), now letting it in on sufferance because of its fruits, now affirming evolution by natural selection, and so on. Our unbelieving poet says, “Philosophy [is] nothing but theology or an attempt to rationalize religion . . . Religion is superstition or it is nothing. It is still there after philosophy has done its best” (NBRF 636). “We find the parts of religion in everyone, the idea of sacrifice, of submission” (NBRF 159). “Religion always prescribed forms and for its own satisfaction found the reason why” (NBRF 97). Or he says this, in a January 2, 1915, letter to Sidney Cox: “Why literature is the next thing to religion in which as you know or believe an ounce of faith is worth all the theology ever written. Sight and insight, give us those. I like the good old English way of muddling along in these things that we can’t reduce to a science any way such as literature love religion and friendship” (LRF, 240). I recur to a remark already quoted from Frost’s notebooks: “Things to bear in mind for composure. There is nothing quite so composing as composition. Putting anything in order a house a business a poem gives a sense of sharing the mastery of the universe”

172

172

Mark Richardson

(again, my emphasis; NBRF, 281). Anyone familiar with Frost’s published prose will think, here, of the better-​elaborated claim made in his “Letter to The Amherst Student” (already quoted). Compare that essay to these remarks in the Varieties: When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, æsthetic, or moral,—​so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. (VRE, 346n. 7)

Note that the benefits enjoyed, whether in James’s or Frost’s accounts of deriving order from chaos, serve altogether human interests, and afford human satisfactions. They “stroke faith the right way,” as Frost puts it. And these wrestings of order out of chaos have something to do with salvation or redemption—​small, contingent redemptions to be sure, but there they are nonetheless. In 1904, James wrote to François Pillon: “My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a ‘tychism,’ which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making. It is theistic, but not essentially so. It rejects all doctrines of the Absolute. It is finitist; but it does not attribute to the question of the Infinite the great mythological importance which you and [Charles] Renouvier attribute to it. I fear that you may find my system bottomless and romantic.”23 On April 17, 1904, he wrote to James Henry Leuba: My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a God. I  envy those who have, for I  know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely. The Divine, for my active life, is limited to abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differences of intensity may make one’s whole centre of energy shift. Now, although I am so devoid of Gottesbewustsein [consciousness of God] in the directer and stronger sense, yet there is something in me which makes response when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me, “thither lies truth”—​and I am sure it is not old theistic habits and prejudices of infancy. Those are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical germ. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers.24

That is where I find Frost, who was not loathe to call himself a mystic.

173

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

173

One more look into “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Think of it as an account of how Frost believed a poem into existence—​an account of the “literary belief ” in action, in duration: For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I  didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken. . . . It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. . . . All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—​the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through. (CPRF, 132)

The idea that there are things we do not know we know; and that we sense that there are; and that we can bring these things into the field of active consciousness such that we know we know them; the idea that something lost to us unawares is restored, such that we are made whole (as the gangsters say): take Frost at his word and what have we here but an account of the unification of a divided self, an integrity newly achieved, a velveteen if momentary stay against confusion? And a signal feature, on James’s account, of the religious experience, though writ local and unsystematic. A hypothesis of great interest in The Varieties is that mystics—​and, more generally, people who undergo conversion—​are given over to an enlarged consciousness, which they typically ascribe to unity with the divine; but that this experience of unity, if we remain in the naturalistic-​psychological realm, is, in fact, simply an influx into consciousness of what had been “subliminally” present to the mind (VRE, 193). The sense of enlarged awareness, unity, and wholeness then has a sound psychological explanation. The same explanation may account for what Frost reports undergoing as he writes himself toward a clarification of life that gives him over to things he did not know he knew, and that restores to him, as by “revelation,” recognition of something “long lost” but that was nonetheless always his. I am suggesting that we have to do here with subclinical conversions, so to speak, or with quasi-​mystical experiences. Consider how queer the phrasing is: “I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing.” But I  should put my propositions to the test. Consider a poem first collected in Mountain Interval (1916): “Putting in the Seed”: You come to fetch me from my work to-​night When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see If I can leave off burying the white Soft petals fallen from the apple tree (Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,

174

174

Mark Richardson

Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea); And go along with you ere you lose sight Of what you came for and become like me, Slave to a Springtime passion for the earth. How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed On through the watching for that early birth When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, The sturdy seedling with arched body comes Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

In “Putting in the Seed,” we find a similitude—​in the two inseminations peculiar to husbandry on one hand, and to love-​and family-​making on the other—​that approaches the condition of a fully felt identity. The poem attains and leaves us with such a satisfying experience of harmony that one might call it “religious”: the little world given us here is entirely of a piece—​whole, deeply integrated, nothing left out of its scheme, its parts and functions all interleaved. This sense of the world—​ or of a world, if you like—​is a sense of the world as itself making sense. And that “sentiment of rationality”—​as James would call it (WB, 58)—​is stroked into purring when it dawns on us how apt the form of the poem actually is (a fine Petrarchan sonnet). The form not only allows for, but also is party to, participates in—​helps believe into being—​the feeling of integration I have described. “Putting in the Seed” is a tough-​minded poem that tender-​minds itself, or becomes, as it goes, ever more tender-​minded, in James’s sense of the term. James offers, you will recall, “the oddly-​ named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand [i.e., those felt by the tender-​minded rationalists and system-​builders, and those felt by the tough-​minded empiricists]. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts” (Pragmatism, 23). “Putting in the Seed” is “pragmatic” in this via mediatic, or melioristic, way:  it undoubtedly has in it “religiosity” of a kind (in manner as much as in theme), and yet it “preserves the richest intimacy with facts.” Richard Poirier pointed out a generation ago that the sonnet discovers itself, comes into its own, as it rises out of the particular and the colloquial—​out of the “fetch” it starts off in, out of its beans and peas—​into something that must have been as much a wonder to Frost as it is to us:25 a sestet that so enlarges the scene as to constitute a statement, or something like one, about the interfusion of the cultural (and the agricultural) with the natural. Add to that thought a further recognition that the sonnet, as it rises up, seedling-​like, out of the grounds it laid down, imbues the scene it describes with a certain Lucretianism (not for nothing does De rerum natura begin with an apostrophe to Venus) and also, it may be, a note of Bergsonian vitalism (which we know Frost to have entertained). Here, if ever Frost drew one out, is an illustration of what it means to say, as he does in his “Letter to The Amherst Student,” that “nature reaches its height of form in us and through us exceeds itself ”—​exceeds itself, for example, in sonnets wherein Nature stands up, becomes bipedal and reflects on its own husbandry and vitality. Something

175

The Varieties of Robert Frost's Religious Experience

175

is being born, even as the sonnet bears in. Nothing is more composing than such a composition as this; it strokes faith the right way, as I have hinted; it is a clarification of life; in it delight consorts with wisdom; the figure it makes is the same as for love; it is a singularly unifying act; it comes; it is, I submit, a variety of religious experiences (not merely a statement of such quasi-​religious ideas as are to be found in Lucretius and Bergson). “What Frost asks of us,” said Henri Bergson, “is not to add too much to experience through hypothetical considerations, and also not to mutilate it in its solid elements. We are absolutely sure only of what experience gives us; but we should accept experience wholly, and our feelings are a part of it by the same right as our perceptions, consequently, by the same right as ‘things.’ In the eyes of Robert Frost, the whole man counts.”26 You will have smoked out my sleight of hand. Bergson is, of course, speaking of William James. But stet the substitutions.

Notes 1 Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–​1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 643n. 19. 2 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 123. 3 See, e.g., Reuben A. Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975); Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); William H. Pritchard, Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Judith Oster, Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Robert Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 4 Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964): 530. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as SL. 5 From Thomas Vautrollier, Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to Galathians (1577). 6 Shelley supplemented his philosophical poem Queen Mab with extensive annotations. To the section of the poem headed “There is no God,” he added a note derived from his 1811 pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism: “There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-​ eternal with the universe remains unshaken.” 7 “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning” was published in 1880; the other tale may be “How I Edited An Agricultural Newspaper Once” (1870). In the former, Mrs. McWilliams panics at what she takes to be lightning and thunder brought down by “Providence” on the family homestead, partly in retribution for her husband’s (semi-​) profane talk. The tale closes as townsfolk, among them Mark Twain (in propria persona persona), come to the McWilliams place to look into the ruckus. There had been no storm at all, Providential or otherwise—​only the ceremonial firing of a cannon to celebrate the nomination of James A. Garfield. 8 The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions appeared in 1897, the year Frost entered Harvard at the age of 23. Allen was an agnostic and a socialist.

176

176

Mark Richardson

9 St. Thomas Aquinas treats the Holy Ghost in part one, question thirty-​six, of the Summa Theologica, a book we know Frost read. Lawrance Thompson reports a 1946 conversation with him: “[Frost] would give his students four books to buy—​not to read now, but at their leisure: Emerson’s Poems, Thoreau’s Walden, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and St. Thomas’s Summa.” Quoted in Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 347. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CPRF. 10 Dorothy Judd Hall, Robert Frost: Contours of Belief (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984); Edward Ingebretsen, Robert Frost’s Star in a Stone Boat: A Grammar of Belief (San Francisco: Catholic Scholars Press, 1994). 11 I do not have the time here to treat Frost’s A Masque of Reason (based on the book of Job), or A Masque of Mercy (based on the story of Jonah); suffice it to say that both, particularly the more successful Masque of Reason, are everywhere animated by such mischief and play as animates the letter I have discussed at such length. God appears in A Masque of Reason on a throne made of “prefabricated” plywood that collapses as Job’s wife gives Him what for. 12 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 26. 13 Robert Frost, The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920–​1928, ed. Donald G. Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 599. 14 Hall, Robert Frost, 18. 15 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 266. This is the translation Frost read. 16 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.462. 17 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 188. 18 The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 281. Hereafter cited parenthetically as NBRF. 19 Robert Frost, The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–​1920, ed. Donald G. Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 594. 20 The phrasing is correct. I examined the marked-​up typescript of the essay. 21 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 80. 22 As for the “love” belief, James is on record in The Will to Believe: “How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him! he will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts” (28). 23 William James, The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992–​2004), 10.410. 24 William James, The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2.211. 25 See Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 218–​19. 26 Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 329.

177

11

Notes toward the Specious Present: James and Stevens Kristen Case

In the realm of truth-​processes, facts come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into existence new facts which re-​determine the beliefs accordingly. So the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely.1 Throughout his writings on pragmatism, William James returns to the theme of truth as creative achievement: the product of ongoing work. In James’s epistemology, words function not as indicators of truth, but as tools by means of which truths get made, by which “truth happens to an idea” (Pragmatism [P], 97). This reimagining of what we mean by “truth” has important implications for pragmatism’s relation to other twentieth-​ century philosophies, including phenomenology, deconstruction, and process philosophy. In its reconciliation of the concepts of truth and making (or poiesis), it also has significant implications for the way the discipline of philosophy understands itself in relation to its long-​exiled Other, poetry. Beginning with Richard Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), several studies have examined the implications of pragmatist thought for literary studies.2 Modernist poetry has been at the heart of many of these inquiries into what might loosely be called a pragmatist tradition in American writing, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens has occupied a central place in that discussion.3 Stevens’s poems persistently, even relentlessly, address themselves to the central themes of twentieth-​century philosophy: our access to “things as they are,” the status of the human in “a universe of inconstancy,” “the dumbfounding abyss /​Between us and the object.”4 Stevens’s prose writings and letters demonstrate his familiarity not only with James, but also with Bergson, Plato, Aristotle, Russell, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Hobbes, Vico, Hegel, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, among others.5

178

178

Kristen Case

Stevens encountered James’s thought and writings at Harvard, where Stevens was a student and James a professor in the late 1890s, and the philosopher remained central to Stevens’s thinking for the rest of his life.6 In a 1942 letter to Henry Church, Stevens links the idea of a “fiction,” first suggested in the poem “A High-​Toned Old Christian Woman” in his 1923 volume Harmonium, to James’s The Will to Believe.7 The letter, which works through the idea that will become central to Stevens long poem, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (dedicated to Church and published later the same year), echoes James’s essay explicitly: “There are things with respect to which we willingly suspend disbelief; there is instinctive in us a will to believe, or if there is a will to believe, whether or not it is instinctive, it seems to me we can suspend disbelief with reference to a fiction as easily as we can suspend it with reference to anything else.”8 Much of the conversation around Stevens as an inheritor of pragmatist thought has centered on The Will to Believe, a text with clear thematic ties to Stevens’s long engagement—​worked out in poem after poem as well as in prose works such as The Necessary Angel—​with the relationship between what he calls “reality” and “imagination,” and more generally with the problem of belief. Joan Richardson writes: Late in his life, Stevens observed in a letter that the greatest problem of his age had been what William James phrased as “the will to believe.” He did not elaborate to his correspondent, however, the complexity this problem assumed in the face of the accumulating evidence through the first half of the twentieth century of the impossibility of certainty at the deepest levels of observation and knowledge. This elaboration he recorded, faithfully, in his poems.9

Despite the obvious inducements to reading Stevens’s work as demonstrating or explicating particular philosophical positions, the poems themselves—​ in their contradictions, repetitions, occasional veerings into nonsense, and especially, as I argue below, their lyricism—​resist being read this way. J. Hillis Miller long ago noted the essential difficulty of reading Stevens as an exponent of any single position or line of thought, observing that “self-​division, contradiction, perpetual oscillations of thought . . . are the constants in Stevens’s work. . . . There is no progress, only an alternation between contradictory possibilities.”10 With this characterization in mind, I want to think about Stevens’s “more than rational distortion[s]‌” of lyric conventions as itself a contribution to pragmatist thinking about time, a contribution animated by the use of sound as temporal matter. This argument assumes the possibility of free movement across the commonly recognized borders of philosophy and poetry and takes Stevens and James to be working in the same tradition: a tradition in which experience is inseparable from meaning (and thus the sound of language from its semantic value), and in which truth is arrived at via poiesis or making. Stevens seems to me the writer who most forcefully makes precisely this pragmatist point, one suggested by James but never fully articulated by him: that the effect of words is their meaning. What follows is thus less a philosophical reading of Stevens than a working through of several of his

179

Notes toward the Specious Present

179

strategies of composition in an effort to trace the consequences of pragmatism for our practices of thinking about poetry.

James and language as experience As Poirier observes, James “never bother[ed] . . . fully to puzzle out the literary, much less the social consequences of [his] inferable linguistic theories.”11 However, his writing itself suggests active experimentation with linguistic effects: James’s prose is full of direct appeals, fictional anecdotes, extended metaphors, jokes, provocations, and other rhetorical experiments intended to enliven the experience of the reader. In his discussion of “the specious present,” a phrase he credits to E.  R. Clay, in The Principles of Psychology (PP), James writes: “Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”12 Here, James marshals the reader’s immediate experience of time against its abstraction in an experiment designed to fail, the parallel phrases “melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming” reproducing syntactically the ongoingness against which the singular present is made specious. The sentence performs what it describes, so that the reader receives the message as comprehension and apprehension all at once. This orientation toward the reader’s experience of his words constitutes evidence of a linguistic pragmatism that is sporadically amplified in James’s work by explicit writing about language. In “What Pragmatism Means,” the second of his 1905 lectures on pragmatism, he expresses a wariness of words as solutions: The universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-​bringing word or name . . .“God”, “Matter”, “Reason”, “the Absolute”, “Energy”, are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-​value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work (P, 31–​2)

The contrast here between the word as name and the word as “program for more work” reflects an understanding of language as essentially performative rather than representational.13 As Richard Poirier notes, James’s emphasis on words as performing ongoing work echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s insight that “all language is vehicular and transitive and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”14 In contrast to the “solving names” listed in the first paragraph, words as James wants to use them are neither proper names nor possessions, but tools to be “set . . . at work,” not descriptors of experience but elements in its unfolding.

180

180

Kristen Case

Significantly, James’s imperatives for pragmatic language use come close to Cleanth Brooks’s definition of the “true poem” as resistant to paraphrase, operating instead at the level of own experience itself. In his explication of the “Heresy of Paraphrase,” Brooks asserts that that poet “must return us to the unity of the experience itself as man knows it in his own experience. The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality—​in this sense, at least, it is an ‘imitation’—​by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.”15 The contrasts as well as the similarities here are instructive: while both articulations emphasize experience, Brooks’s emphasis on the poem as simulacrum (in contrast to statements of the “prose sense” of a poem that can only be about experience) has the effect of marking off poetry as a site of specialized language use and takes the form of an imperative directed at “the poet,” rather than at “us,” the readers of the poem. Conversely, James’s broader conception is a direct imperative, addressed to “you,” the reader/​listener—​“You must bring out of each word its practical cash-​value, set it at work within the stream of your experience”—​and suggests not a specialized “task” but a general way of being with words, equally applicable to reading and to writing, poetry and philosophy, lecture and written text. In James’s version of linguistic performativity, we are all at work with words in the stream of experience. The collective imperative proposed here is in keeping with James’s whole enterprise, nowhere more clearly expressed than in his prose style, which emerged from a desire to rescue philosophy from the classroom and restore it to everyday life and common speech. Nevertheless, James was often frustrated by the limits of the “common language” to which he was committed. In “The Steam of Thought” chapter of The Principles of Psychology, he writes: We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not:  so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the substantive parts [of thought] alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use . . . All dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive perception they lead to, as thoughts “about” this object or “about” that, the stolid word “about” engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. (PP, 1.238–​9)

The habitual use of language as representational, as “about” experience rather than part of it, means that the materials with which James seeks convey to the reader the intricate fluidities and ongoing interrelations that constitute the stream of thought “almost refuse” that use. James’s own rapid shifts of metaphor in this chapter seem to reach toward the possibilities of poetic language-​use, a breaking of the habit of naming (the recognition of “substantive parts”) in favor of a more essentially relational and experiential language.16 Thus, while one of the consequences of James’s pragmatist epistemology is a dissolution of the boundaries between poetic and philosophical language, one of the consequences of his descriptive psychology is a movement toward the practices of lyric.

181

Notes toward the Specious Present

181

Stevens and reality as supreme fiction Stevens addresses the relationship between poetry and philosophy explicitly and at length in “The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet,” an essay in which he also quotes James.17 The essay begins with a seemingly neat division of “reason” and “imagination” as the respective terrains of philosophy and poetry, but ends by demonstrating, in an extraordinary passage, the fundamental entanglement of the two: If we consider the nature of our experience when we are in agreement with reality . . . standing in the radiant and productive atmosphere, and examining first one detail of that world, one particular, and then another, as we find them by chance, and observing many things that seem to be poetry without any intervention on our part, as, for example, the blue sky, and noting, in any case, that the imagination never brings anything into the world but that, on the contrary, like the personality of the poet in the act of creating, it is no more than a process, and desiring with all the power of our desire not to write falsely, do we not begin to think of the possibility that poetry is only reality, after all, and that poetic truth is factual truth, seen, it may be, by those whose range in the perception of fact—​that is, whose sensibility—​is greater than our own? From that point of view, the truth that we experience when we are in agreement with reality is the truth of fact. (CPP, 679–​80)

Stevens’s framing of this description with two iterations of the phrase “agreement with reality” seems a clear echo of James’s redefinition of truth-​as-​agreement in his lecture, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”: Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their “agreement,” as falsity means their disagreement, with “reality.” Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term “agreement,” and what by the term “reality,” when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with. (P, 96)

Stevens’s statement that imagination “is no more than a process” likewise echoes James’s claim later in the same lecture that truth “happens to an idea. It becomes true. It is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process” (P, 97). And the passage as a whole serves as an illustration of James’s extension of the meaning of experience in his definition of radical empiricism in “A World of Pure Experience”: “To be radical, empiricism must neither admit into its constructions anything that is not directly experienced nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.”18 The differences between Stevens’s and James’s formulations are instructive here as well: unlike James’s style of argumentation, which typically opens with a thesis that announces itself as such and is followed by examples and elaborations designed to clarify and convince, Stevens’s writing pulls the reader into “the radiant and productive atmosphere” of the thought itself, beginning with a position the writing goes on to

182

182

Kristen Case

complicate if not overturn. The definitions of philosophy and poetry in “The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet” (like the definitions of reality and imagination in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” the essay that precedes it) are shown to be unstable because the terms are mutually constitutive. The conclusion that “poetic truth is factual truth” is arrived at by slow stages. “For example,” “in any case,” “on the contrary,” “after all,” “it may be”—​these pivots and adjustments in the serpentine syntax of Stevens constitute a mimesis: a “simulacrum” of thought itself in the event of its unfolding. He deploys a similar strategy toward the same end in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”: That’s it, the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that. They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational

While the epistemology framed here seems clearly indebted to James, the deictic gestures “that’s it” and “yes, that” in the lines above are reflective of Stevens’s particular endeavor, which was not to explicate but to enact a thinking about the “fiction that results from feeling.” James’s assertion that “in our cognitive as well as our active life we are creative” (P, 123), that reality is at least in part a matter of our creative construction, an aesthetic achievement, becomes the premise for Stevens’s understanding of the poet’s essential work. Stevens’s contribution to pragmatist thought is an ongoing, imaginative construction of reality that understands itself as such. The principle material of this continual work, which also encompasses both destruction and rebuilding, is the sound of words. “When we find in poetry that which gives us a momentary existence on an exquisite plane,” Stevens asks in “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” “is it necessary to ask the meaning of a poem?” (CPP, 786). For Stevens, it is not necessary to ask because the momentary existence is its meaning: the reality it creates. This essentially constructivist view of truth has important implications for our understanding of Stevens’s lexicon, in particular those terms like “reality” and “imagination” which are, for him, always mutually constituted and defined. The Jamesian understanding of truth as the outcome of a creative process is especially important for reading Stevens’s concept of a supreme fiction, an idea that is consistently linked both to the possibility of belief and to poetry. In a 1942 letter to his publisher outlining the three sections of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (“It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure”), Stevens writes that the sections represent “three notes by way of defining the characteristics of supreme fiction. By supreme fiction I mean, of course, poetry.”19 This somewhat paradoxical statement echoes Stevens’s original use of the phrase in “A High-​Toned Old Christian Woman”: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.” It is possible to understand Stevens’s statement that “we can suspend disbelief with reference to a fiction as easily as we can suspend it with reference to anything else” as a claim that we can believe in things known to be untrue and thus as a

183

Notes toward the Specious Present

183

misreading of James’s The Will to Believe, since James insists we can only believe in “a real possibility.” However, with Stevens’s constructivist understanding of reality as well as his deep love for the dictionary in mind, we might read “fiction” not as an antonym to truth, but rather in terms of its Latin root fingere: to fashion or form. This reading of “fiction” also brings it closer to poiesis, from the ancient Greek ποίησις, meaning creation or production. To believe in Stevens’s sort of fiction, then, is not to believe in something known to be untrue, but rather to believe in something known to have been constructed. To believe that is, in (a) poiesis. Viewed in this light, Stevens’s statement that “poetry is the supreme fiction” seems less troublesome. It is only the epistemological habit of understanding construction or making as inherently untruthful that brings fiction into opposition with truth, an opposition that has its root in the Cartesian division between subject and object that both James and Stevens rejected in favor of a transactional model in which the knower is never essentially sundered from the known. In “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” James asserts that if we start with the supposition that there is only one kind of 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 part of pure experience; one of the terms becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. (Essays in Radical Empiricism [ERE], 4)

If there is no absolute distinction between the portions of pure experience that I call “internal” (or “imagined”) and those that are “external” (or “real”), then the opposition between constructed fictions and discovered realities is a false one, and questions of aesthetic form (“It Must Give Pleasure”) become those of knowing and, finally, of being. As Gregory Brazeal suggests, James is everywhere in his writings at pains to dispel the idea that pragmatism means one can believe what one wants, that one can believe in, for example, known untruths, and for this reason would never risk the word “fiction.” Stevens risks it (i.e., risks, being read as solipsistic or simply illogical) in order to shake the word loose, to set it at work again in the stream of our experience. This difference can be read as a synecdoche.

It must change The protagonist of “Sunday Morning,” the poem that perhaps most clearly frames Stevens’s search for “what will suffice” in the wake of religious belief, substitutes temporary beauty for the eternal certainties of Christianity (“that old catastrophe”). Her satisfaction is temporary, however: “But in contentment I still feel /​The need of some imperishable bliss (61–​2).” Recovery from the loss of the promise of imperishable bliss can be understood, as Richardson and Hillis Miller argue, as an essential motive

184

184

Kristen Case

for all of Stevens’s writing. That such a recovery must involve a reimagining of time is made clear by dialogic movement of the poem between an unchanging paradise, where “the boughs /​Hang always heavy” (77–​8) and earth, where “boys pile new plums and pears /​On disregarded plate” (73–​4). In the final stanza, Stevens offers a counterimage to the cold pastoral (“Is there no change of death in paradise? /​Does ripe fruit never fall?” [76–​7]) sketched in stanza six: We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness, And in the isolation of the sky, At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness on extended wings. (110–​20)

The poem’s closing landscape is in flux and is framed by a series of alternative hypotheses entertained by a mind also in flux.20 The first of these alternatives reads as a statement of certainty, an effect heightened by the end-​stop and the neat iambic rhythm of the monosyllables:  “We live in an old chaos of the sun.” Certainty is undercut by the “Or” in the following line however, which reveals this description to be nothing more than a hypothesis, and then gives way further as the end-​stopped iambic pattern is replaced by the dactylic rhythm and enjambment of the third (Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, /​Of that wide water, inescapable”). Dactyls and troches are conspicuous in the lines that follow, establishing a falling rhythm as the poem descends “Downward to darkness.” Everything in the stanza—​diction (“chaos,” “spontaneous,” “casual,” “ambiguous”), syntax, and meter—​urges us toward the relinquishment of both certainty and the possibility of immortality. At the same time, the lushness of both image and sound (the alliteration in the final line, the quasi-​hypnotic rhythm of “ambiguous undulations”) create a tone not of chaos but of enchantment. The compensation we receive for the sacrifice of paradise is the power to inhabit a world we imagine: to achieve “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane.” Perhaps the simplest way to articulate the link between Stevens and pragmatism is to say that for Stevens, poetry is essentially therapeutic.21 Of the “Supreme Fiction” Stevens insists, “It Must Give Pleasure.” In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” he writes that the role of the poet “is to help people live their lives” (CPP, 661). Like any pragmatic solution, however, the cure offered by a poem is not final but “momentary.” In “Of Modern Poetry” Stevens describes “The poem of the mind in the act of finding /​What will suffice” (1–​2). In this fragmentary definition, it is the activity of the poem, the “mind in the act,” rather than the sufficiency it provides, that is essential. The “satisfaction” the poem delivers must be, unlike the permanent paradise offered

185

Notes toward the Specious Present

185

by religion, fleeting. Hillis Miller writes of Stevens’s long poems that “like life, [they] proceed in a series of momentary crystallizations or globulations of thought, followed by dissolution, and then re-​conglomeration in another form.”22 If the poem succeeds in offering a satisfaction, it is no “solving name” but rather a “program for more work.” One way of thinking about lyric poetry is as a temporal arrangement: as Brooks defines it, “a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.”23 We may take this idea a step further by tracing Stevens’s pragmatist understanding of reality in general into the particular reality of temporal experience: a lyric poem, Stevens shows us, may make its own time, giving us a temporal scheme as real as the calendar, a scheme we may inhabit as fully as we inhabit calendar time, for as long as we inhabit the poem. To read “The Idea of Order at Key West,” for example, is to move into another kind of time, the simultaneous repetition and expansion of a present at once fluid and constant: She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. (1–​7)

The effects I wish to trace here are those that most noticeably structure temporal experience: rhythm, repetition, and consonance—​what Stevens calls “the proliferation of resemblances” at the level of sound (CPP, 691). What is perhaps most immediately noticeable in this, as in many of Stevens’s poems, is the intensification of lyric conventions to the point of radical distortion: the gentle iambic rhythm of the opening lines giving way to a more pronounced dyadic repetition, beneath which the iambic is still felt, of “made constant cry, caused constantly a cry”—​a line whose stress pattern, alliterative intensity, and mirror structure suggest the muscle memory of Anglo-​ Saxon verse. The last four lines each contain a medial caesura (unmarked in line six), creating a sort of tidal rhythm that overwrites the internal wave patterns of the lines. The repetition of the small nouns body and cry, like much else in this stanza, is incantatory, both a chanting and a calling forth, the body, the cry, summoned, made real in repetition. Northrop Frye’s concept of “babble” or melos as central to the emergence of the lyric seems particularly applicable to Stevens: The radical of melos is charm: the hypnotic incantation that, through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical response, and hence is not far from the sense of magic, or physically compelling power . . . Actual charms have a quality that is imitated in popular literature by work songs of various kinds, especially

186

186

Kristen Case

lullabies, where the drowsy, sleep-​ inducing repetition shows the underlying oracular or dream pattern very clearly.24

Especially significant is Frye’s characterization of lullabies as “work songs,” which aligns strikingly with Stevens’s concern with efficacy:  “The philosopher intends his integration to be fateful; the poet intends his to be effective” (CPP, 862). We may understand this orientation as pragmatist insofar as it derives its value from what works. But if Stevens’s orientation toward efficacy is influenced by Jamesian pragmatism, it is also directed by and through “the sound of words”; its means is melos. As Jean-​Luc Nancy writes, sound is first of all presence in the sense of a present that is not a being (at least not in the intransitive, stable, consistent sense of the word), but rather a coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating. Sound essentially comes and expands, or is deferred and transferred . . . But sonorous time takes place immediately according to a completely different dimension, which is not that of a simple succession (corollary of the negative instant). It is a present in waves on a swell, not a point on a line, it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches or contracts, and so on.25

The long association of sound, especially music, with duration and other forms of nonlinear time,26 plays out in the lyric tradition as a tension between the poem as it is seen and the poem as it is heard (by the physical or the “inner” ear). While one reads each word in clear succession, the sound of a line unfolding in the ear is “a coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating.” In John Keats and William Shakespeare this unity of time and sound is exploited both thematically and materially, to create within the linear poem a sense of continuity or timelessness—​for example, the conspicuous internal rhyme in line four of Shakespeare’s Sonnet One, “His tender heir might bear his memory,” a literalization of the concept of temporal continuity, sound here reproducing itself as Shakespeare urges the poem’s subject to do, against the march of metrical time. Keats produces a similar effect with the lines “Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d /​Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone” (13–​4) in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the conspicuous reoccurrence of the word ear seems to argue against the literal meaning of the line for precisely the power of continuity and resonance within heard melodies. In contrast to this marshaling of the temporal (musical) material of the lyric against the linear unfolding of time, Stevens works to reveal and exploit what he perceives as time’s fictiveness. The poems do not work toward immortality or a reversal of clock time, but rather toward establishing “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane,” an altered experience of time, itself temporary, that suggests the essential malleability of the way we live in time. For example, the poem “Human Arrangement” begins with the following lines:

187

Notes toward the Specious Present

187

Place-​bound and time-​bound in evening rain And bound by a sound which does not change, Except that it begins and ends, Begins and ends again—​(1–​4)

The word bound works on the reader in at least three ways: first as the slow tolling of a bell, the repetition in syntactical time of a clock-​sound, the aural sensation of temporal inexorability. Then, semantically, as a sense of confinement, compulsively elaborated. Taken together, sound and semantic meaning create a sense of boundedness in time and in the line itself. Alongside this sense and breaking it, however, is the abstraction of this description and the relentless repetition which make of the lines a purely sonic location, the word bound itself operating homeopathically as a release from the confines of clock time into an expanded present, into which the words enter and depart: Rain without change from within or from Without. In this place and in this time And in this sound, which do not change (5–​7)

Here the effect is almost incantatory, a kind of summoning-​into-​being of “this place,” “this time,” and “this sound”—​the syntactical repetition offset by the variation of the monosyllabic noun (an effect that seems to strip place, time, and sound of their discrete denotative meanings, making them at first blush only variant sounds) and the abstraction of those terms rendered particular by the repeated “this,” which points us not to any specific location in space or time but rather to the deictic center, to the poem as utterance: “this sound.” The phrase “which do not change” is a variant of the phrase “which does not change” in the opening stanza, the second iteration absorbing place and time into the sound that does not change, that changes only as it “begins and ends,/​Begins again and ends again –​.” The poem is a single sentence unfolding through layered, repetitively structured, declarative clauses—​ a combination of techniques Stevens uses in other poems, notably “The Snow Man.” “Human Arrangement” does not so much describe as evidence a human arrangement of sound and thus of temporal matter.

The specious present In his chapter on Henri Bergson in A Pluralistic Universe (PU), James articulates what it might mean for philosophy to shift its temporal orientation away from the completed past and toward the fluidity of the present, a shift he characterizes as a movement toward “reality”: What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can

188

188

Kristen Case

be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question of which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—​it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates.27

This evocation of poiesis, of the making, as the very movement of reality, and his suggestion that philosophy should seek this movement, seems a call, not only for a different kind of philosophical writing, but also for an abandonment of philosophy’s (imagined) exteriority and for a repositioning of itself in the making. In James’s description, the process of living and dying, composition and decomposition is ongoing, philosophy’s error having been to locate itself on the side of the completed thought, of decomposition and singular possession rather than on the side of creation and experience. Stevens’s contribution to pragmatist thought can be understood as an actualization of James’s imperative: a poetic tracing of “the mind in the act of finding what will suffice.” “When we find in poetry that which gives us a momentary existence on an exquisite plane, is it necessary to ask the meaning of a poem?” In Stevens’s formulation the poem does not reflect but rather gives existence, is the making that “buds and bourgeons, changes and creates.” Elizabeth Grosz suggests that “philosophy functions somewhere ‘between’ [science and art], seeking the two-​faced movement of universalization and particularity, of generalization and individuation: through that which unites them: the dual force of duration, the double generation of the past and present, the virtual and the actual, which is the movement of difference.”28 I  want to suggest however, that this alignment of art with particularity, science with generalization, and philosophy as the mediating movement might productively give way to an understanding of writing as mediation between the said (in James’s terms, the decomposed) and the yet-​to-​be-​ said, the in-​the-​making. In this way we might distinguish not between philosophical, scientific, and poetic descriptions, but rather between the sound-​devices of different instances of sentence and line. The lyric, then, especially as practiced by Stevens in its exaggerations and distortions, offers particular material mechanisms for the imagination of different kinds of time. Like motherese, like the nursery rhymes, like lullabies, Stevens’s lines invoke memory in two ways. First, in what Jonathan Culler calls a “rhythmical organization [that] lets language get under the guard of intelligence and lodge itself in mechanical memory”—​ that is the memorableness of a jingle or a pop song—​the matter of the poem itself mnemonic, made for memory, participating in its mechanisms by its very design; and in its demonstration of the melodic principle of duration, the sound of each line building from the sequence of sounds before it.29 Consider the second stanza of “The Idea of Order at Key West”: The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound

189

Notes toward the Specious Present

189

Even if what she sang was what she heard, Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. (8–​14)

It begins with a return to iambic stability (maintained throughout the stanza) and the assertion of the discreteness of song and sea, a separation marked by a strong caesura between two definite statements and confirmed by the stanza’s second line. In the following line, the separation is insisted on despite the possibility of an identity between sea and song—​“Even if what she sang was what she heard”—​that would seem to contradict the opening lines of the stanza. “Since what she sang was uttered word by word” extends this logical impossibility in two ways: first, by relating the song to language, and second, by describing it as composed of discrete units, “uttered word by word,” unlike the monolithic sea and its continuous sound. The suggestion of a difference that would maintain itself despite identity is reflected by the rhyming of the poem’s twin and intertwining subjects sea and she and a pattern of end-​rhyme unique to the poem:  “heard”/​“word”/​“stirred”/​“heard,” giving to the whole stanza a hall-​ of-​mirrors effect, the simultaneous dazzle and lull that is characteristic of Stevens’s “proliferation of resemblances.” James writes, “To act on anything means to get into it somehow, but that would mean to get out of one’s self and to be one’s other, which is self-​contradictory, etc. Meanwhile each of us actually is his own other to that extent, livingly knowing how to perform the trick that logic says can’t be done” (PU, 115). Lyric writing as a particular mode of action (I am thinking again here of Frye’s characterization of lullabies as a species of “work song,” i.e., a song that works on both mother and child) livingly knows duration, knows the way a line might say and unsay itself, like Frost’s oven bird “who knows in singing not to sing,” knows how patterned sound might make a momentary existence, within which the present, pregnant with the past, can be the fiction we need.

Notes 1 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 31–​2, 108. 2 Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Other titles include Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), my own American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011); Lisi Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Paul Grimstad, Experience and Experimental Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

190

190

Kristen Case

3 Stevens is central to the analyses of Poirier, Richardson, and Levin. Other inquiries into the Stevens-​James relation include Kay Harel, “Again Is an Oxymoron: William James’s Ideas on Repetition and Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds,’ ” The Wallace Stevens Journal 26, no. 1:(2002): 3–​14; Gregory Brazeal, “The Supreme Fiction: Fiction of Fact?” Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 1 (2007): 80–​100; Heather Cass White, “Pragmatist Poetics in Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 31 (2007): 148–​70. 4 Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Saint John and the Back-​Ache,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 135–​51, 329–​52, 375. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CPP. 5 David H. Hesla, “Singing in the Chaos: Wallace Stevens and Three or Four Ideas,” American Literature 57, no. 2(1985): 240–​1. 6 Stevens studied not with James, but with George Santayana, whose work bears important affinities with pragmatism and who introduced Stevens to James’s writings. See Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879–​1923 (Sag Harbor, NY: Beech Tree Books, 1986), 112. 7 The poem begins with the line, “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame”; William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 8 Quoted in Brazeal, “The Supreme Fiction,” 96. 9 Richardson, A Natural History, 179–​80. 10 J. Hillis Miller, “Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of Being,” in The J. Hillis Miller Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 200. 11 Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 92. 12 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.573. 13 See Karan Barad’s “Posthumanist Performativity” for a useful discussion of performative and representational models of language-​use. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–​31. 14 Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 93. 15 Cleanth Brooks, The Well-​Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), 205. 16 I am grateful to Kyle Manning’s unpublished paper “The Boat and the Stream: Continuity of Experience in The Ambassadors” for this insight about the shifting metaphors of “The Stream of Thought.” 17 The quotation reads: “Most of them [i.e., metaphysicians] have been invalids. I am one, can’t sleep, can’t make a decision, can’t buy a horse, can’t do anything that befits a man; and yet you say from my photograph I must be a second General Sherman, only greater and better! All right! I love you for the fond delusion” (CPP, 679). 18 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 22. 19 Quoted in Brazeal, “The Supreme Fiction,” 96. 20 For an excellent analysis of Stevens’s use (and suppression) of signaling words such as “if,” “or,” and “but,” see Helen Vendler’s “Hypotheses and Contradictions,” Representations 81, no. 1 (2003): 99–​117. 21 I use this term to echo Wittgenstein’s description of his method in Philosophical Investigations as “therapy” or the “treatment of an illness.” Ludwig Wittgenstein,

191

Notes toward the Specious Present

191

Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscome, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 133, 254; also relevant is Richard Rorty’s distinction between “edifying” and “systematic” philosophies in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 22 Hillis Miller, “Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of Being,” 201. 23 Brooks, The Well-​Wrought Urn, 203. 24 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 278. 25 Jean-​Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 15. 26 See Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (New York: Bloomsbury, 2002), 255ff. 27 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 117. 28 Elizabeth Grosz, “Bergson, Deleuze, and the Becoming of Unbecoming,” Parallax, 11, no. 2 (2005): 4. 29 Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 205.

192

193

12

Modernist Figures and James’s Pluralistic Universe Patricia Rae

To understand William James is to internalize his “methods.” Pragmatism and radical empiricism were not abstract philosophies but “way[s]‌of handling things”:1 strategies for overcoming the paralysis of epistemological uncertainty and determining the best plans for action. My aim in this chapter is to review some counterparts for these methods in modernist literary practices, more specifically, in the linguistic “figures” modernist writers devise to function in the world. Although modernist writing has a reputation for being difficult and impractical, some of its most serious practitioners viewed it as a practical enterprise, a means of “help[ing] people to live their lives.”2 The field of “modernist” literature is immensely varied and it would be foolish to make claims about the whole. My attempt to describe a Jamesian modernism consists only of a small set of case studies, each of which illustrates an approach to truth-​ making similar to James’s: studies of the Imagist “Image” and of its counterparts in the disturbing juxtapositions of Surrealism; of the subtle “hypotheses” of Wallace Stevens; and of the “dialectical allegory” of the late modernist, George Orwell. Linking these figures helps us to understand James’s approach to reality. It also reveals unexpected connections, or relations, between them, causing us to revisit our assumptions about their relationship to the world. Apparently inconsequential similes, or frivolous flights of fancy, in modernist writing, turn out to be more useful and socially consequential than they seem. They shift from being merely aesthetic exercises into politically subversive weapons.

James’s vision Like all distinctive methods, radical empiricism and pragmatism spring from a coherent vision of the world. This study begins, then, with some glimpses of the universe as James saw it. The sources for these extracts are the closely related texts Pragmatism (P, 1907), The Meaning of Truth (MT, 1909), A Pluralistic Universe (PU, 1909), and Essays on Radical Empiricism (ERE, 1912). Fundamental to James’s vision is what he called “pure experience”—​also the “immediate flux of life” or the “instant field of the present”

194

194

Patricia Rae

(ERE, 46, 36). The primary characteristic of this flux is its freedom from Cartesian division: it is “undifferentiated into thing and thought” (ERE, 36–​7). For James, all acts of truth-​making are confined to it. The primary “methodological postulate” of what he calls “radical empiricism” is that “nothing shall be admitted as fact . . . except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient . . . Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real” (ERE, 81). What this means is that the radical empiricist brackets unresolvable metaphysical questions having to do with first causes. He or she will not be caught up in debates, for instance, about whether or not what seems like a moment of divine insight actually is what it seems. As James explains, radical empiricism “gets rid . . . of the whole agnostic controversy, by refusing to entertain the hypothesis of trans-​empirical reality at all” (ERE, 99; my italics). This premise forms the basis for The Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE, 1902), a study that would model a new, agnostic perspective on creative inspiration for many modernist writers.3 If “pure experience” is not divided into subject or object, or the “here” and the “beyond,” it is also undivided in its contents and its flow through time. It is this characteristic that informs the Jamesian metaphor with the farthest reach within modernist writing: the “stream of experience” (ERE, 81–​2), or, as it is better known, the “stream of consciousness.” The term James used to capture the nature of states of consciousness, memory, and individual identity in The Principles of Psychology (PP, 1890)  was adopted by novelists from Dorothy Richardson to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to describe their experimental narrative style. The metaphor of the stream captures the primary structural characteristics, in both cases, of continuity and interpenetration. Continuity means that there are no gaps in the field—​no spaces between objects that matter. Interpenetration means that past states are always present in present ones. Another, slightly different take on “pure experience” is that it is comprehensive: it leaves nothing out. The radical empiricist is to include in his descriptions nothing that is not experienced and to exclude nothing that is (ERE, 73). In part, the point is to remind us that the subjective input of an observer—​his or her biases, emotions, and reactions—​is a substantive and consequential part of experience. This perspective would revolutionize the field of ethnography, where field reports had often tended to suppress any unattractive responses from the field-​worker. James Clifford has highlighted the common urge among ethnographers to emulate the “objective” sciences and to represent the “Anthropologist-​hero” as an “authoritative” persona free of bias and absorbed in “sympathetic understanding of the [O]‌ther.”4 What James modeled for the field (and communicated through the like-​minded ethnographic novelist, Joseph Conrad) was an alternative recording practice that included the field-​worker’s responses, capturing the whole of the encounter between field-​worker and subject in the ethnographic “contact zone.” James applies the principles of continuity and interpenetration to the whole of experienced reality. “The concrete pulses of experience,” he says, “appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual limits for them are confined by. They run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate. What in them is a relation and what

195

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

195

is matter related is hard to discern.”5 Crucial to this formulation is James’s emphasis on the experienced nature of the relations between things. “Relations of every sort,” he says, “of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, and what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, and . . . conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as disjunctive relations are” (PU, 126). His purpose is to dispel an atomistic view of the world, in which objects are separate and fixed, and also to establish that relations, no less than anything else, are in constant flux. James’s position on changing relations becomes most interesting when we pause to consider the purpose of the vision of the “pluralistic universe.” Reading the Essays on Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe can be frustrating because James devotes so much time in these texts to outlining beliefs he deplores, and relatively little to establishing the details of his own philosophy. What we gain from this, however, is a sense of how disruptive the constituent elements of his vision are meant to be. The target of James’s vision is the complex of “monistic idealism,” “rationalism,” and “intellectualism,” a worldview and method he associates especially with Hermann Lotze and F. H. Bradley, but in evidence everywhere. This problematic vision assumes a “whole” behind everything, an all-​inclusive and transcendental reality organizing phenomena into fixed and rational categories and laws; it “drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing” (PU, 146). Rationalism builds from this idea such that “movement and change” become “forms of mere appearance” (PU, 28), rather than significant parts of reality. The “vice of intellectualism” (PU, 36)  follows from these assumptions. It is a way of constructing truths and classifying the stuff of “pure experience,” a way, James believes, that radically diminishes the world’s complexity and its potential to change. For James, the essential problem with “vicious intellectualism” is its divisiveness, its reduction of a continuous, interpenetrated reality to rigid, mutually exclusive, categories. “When we conceptualize,” he complains, “we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A  concept means a that-​and-​no-​ other. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes plurality; independence excludes relativity; ‘mine’ excludes ‘yours’; this connection excludes that connection—​and so on indefinitely” (PU, 113). The intellectualist treats names as excluding anything their definitions fail positively to include. Once defined, moreover, his classifications are fixed:  distinct objects “must remain eternally as if in different worlds” (PU, 33). The upshot of this is a world of insurmountable discontinuities, starting with an unbridgeable gap between appearance and reality (one of Bradley’s central tenets [PU, 36–​7]) and progressing down to the various binaries on which scientific, social, cultural, and political discourses depend:  the categories of self and other, of human being and animal, of races and genders, nations and religions, and party affiliations. It is a short leap from this way of seeing to intolerance and closed-​mindedness. The sins of anyone belonging to one category belong automatically to all classified in the same way. Anything identified as one thing cannot also share commonalities with something different. There is no crossing of categories and no subdividing by degree. As James explains, the

196

196

Patricia Rae

absolutism underpinning intellectualism “seems to hold that ‘some’ is a category ruinously infected with self-​contradictoriness”: for it, “the only categories inwardly consistent and therefore pertinent to reality are ‘all’ and ‘none’ ” (PU, 41). We can now begin to appreciate the corrective, even healing, function of James’s vision of a “flowing sort of reality” (PU, 97). Overlaid on the “vicious intellectualist” system of orderly and rigid categories, the image of the “pluralistic universe” unstiffens these, opening up new possibilities for counteracting the problems they create. It illuminates incomprehensible contradictions; highlights unseen relationships between “opposite” or “different” things; introduces the possibility of organic, evolutionary change; and enables us to grasp the continuities of thought, feeling, and memory that constitute individual identity. The urgent need to counter intellectualism is what cements James’s appreciation for another giant among modernist philosophers, Henri Bergson (a thinker he says has “killed intellectualism definitively” [PU,  98]). James devotes an entire chapter in A Pluralistic Universe to explicating and endorsing Bergson’s vision of a fluid, interpenetrated universe. Especially important to him is Bergson’s picture of the fluid field of consciousness, designed to counteract an atomistic and deterministic account of human psychology. In that picture, the mental states the determinists had called distinct, and organized into predictable sequences, now “compenetrate and telescope” (PU, 114). So, conceptually distinct states that, according to intellectualism, could never coincide—​fear and peace, love and hatred, happiness and misery—​now overlap and combine in various measures, compounding and evolving in unpredictable ways. The same holds true of the experience of categories of time: memories inflect the present, as do thoughts of the future. The unfurling of this organic time-​sense (Bergson’s la durée) is the very essence of an individual’s identity. Bergsonism’s improvement on “vicious intellectualism” extends, of course, to phenomena beyond the individual consciousness. As in the visions of Heraclitus and Walter Pater, everything in Bergson’s universe participates in a process of change, or belongs to what he called l’evolution créatrice. This condition challenges the rigid categories of intellectualism insofar as, at any moment, data under one label may be shifting, making it advisable that they be relabeled. The process, moreover, is incremental:  “Changes,” James points out, “are not complete annihilations followed by complete creations of something absolutely novel”; there is at any moment partial decay and partial growth, “an endosmosis or conflux of the same with the different” (PU, 115, 114). The dialectical merging of opposites is one of the most important sorts of categorical change to be explored by modernist writers. A particularly consequential dissolving binary is that of “self ” and “other,” the foundation of national, political, racial, and gender identities. The intellectualist’s conception of such matters inserts an insurmountable distance between opposing parties. To James, however, “each of us actually is his own other to that extent, livingly knowing how to perform the trick which logic tells us can’t be done” (PU, 115). That is, human beings, no matter how different, can get inside each other, empathize and shape and change each other, in incremental ways. This vision of human relationships as an interpenetrated flux carries Jamesian radical empiricism and pluralism into the realms of ethics and politics.

197

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

197

An ethical or political perspective helps us make sense of James’s difficult notion that “relations” are just as much “true members of the flux” as the things they relate. The privilege the intellectualist gives to things over relations allows for no interaction between opposing parties, a condition breeding suspicion, hostility, even violence. By contrast, James’s vision of a “pluralistic universe” that is a panorama of experienced “relations” is potentially healing. Indeed, the fullest representation James gives us of this “multiverse” (PU, 146)  is of an alluring array of relations of diverse kinds, connecting things in nonhierarchical and provisional ways: Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely “external” environment of some sort or amount. Things are “with” one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word “and” trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. “Ever not quite” has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-​inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective center of consciousness or action, something else is self-​governed and absent and unreduced to unity. (PU, 145)

The contrast with intellectualist monism is palpable here. While it is “all-​inclusive,” no one category in James’s “multiverse” will ever be sufficient to capture the world’s complexity or its constantly evolving relations. Where the intellectualist’s categories are fixed, “pluralism admits that on another occasion they may walk together, or in some way be connected again” (PU, 146). It presents relationships as “strung-​along” or “synechistic,” meaning that “a thing can either take up a thing or drop another thing” without “losing its identity” (PU, 145–​7). It means, too, that a thing can be similar to something else without being identical to it: a cat may be “in a sense the same as a mousetrap, and a mousetrap the same as a birdcage; but in no valuable or easily intelligible sense is a cat the same as a birdcage” (PU, 151). Finally, in this world of “innumerable little hangings-​together,” anything can belong to more than one category at once, without contradiction: “The same part may figure in many different systems, as a man may hold several offices and belong to various clubs.”6 James’s term for the kind of category populating the pluralistic universe is “each-​form.” Unlike monism’s “all-​ form,” it affirms that a thing can be “connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connection,” and that it may be “in many possible connections which are not necessarily actualized at the moment” (PU, 146). The pluralistic universe, in other words, is not only intricately interconnected, but also pregnant with potential in ways the monistic one is not. It is the “pluralistic universe” that is the setting for James’s distinctive form of “pragmatist” truth-​making. The program for constructing and wielding pragmatist truths set out in Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth refers exclusively to experience, views all relations as provisional, and grants the truth-​maker a role in changing the universe.7 James’s sense that truth is provisional and that attitude and imagination

198

198

Patricia Rae

can shape the reality to be represented, unites him with many other nominalist or instrumentalist, thinkers. It differentiates him, though, from others who do not share his sense of the importance of checking all truths against the evidence of “experience.” Jamesian pragmatism differs from, say, the playful fiction-​making of Hans Vaihinger and Friedrich Nietzsche, or the instrumentalism of John Stuart Mill, in its respect for verification. As James specifies: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot . . .Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience” (P, 97, 99). That pragmatist truth-​making was not a free-​for-​all, but accountable to “facts” (or “verification-​processes” [P, 100]) was a point missed by many of James’s first readers. Indeed, James wrote a sequel to Pragmatism, The Meaning of Truth, in order to correct this misunderstanding. His critics assume that in conflating truth with “satisfaction” James licenses the pragmatist to say “whatever [he finds] it pleasant to say” (P, 111) and to call it truth. James responds by noting that his “satisfaction” includes “truth-​satisfaction,” or the pleasure of sensing the fittedness between representation and “fact.” Compared with the satisfaction that comes with recognizing “the inherent relation to reality of a belief,” he says, “all other[s]‌. . . are the hollowest humbug” (MT, 105, 106). This point springs from James’s belief in an objective reality, a conviction his critics have slanderously denied him.8 While a thinker may never have unmediated experience of that reality, his representations of it can be more, or less, accurate. In sum, as George Cotkin has put it, Jamesian pragmatism did not amount to “a right to make-​believe,” or “a right to believe in anything one wanted for whatever narrow purposes.”9 The pragmatist, James believed, “is willing to treat our satisfactions as possibly really true guides to [reality], not as guides true solely for us” (MT, 105). The upshot of all this is a method of truth-​making in which provisional accounts of reality form and are immediately tested against the stream of “experience.” As James envisions it: In the realm of truth-​processes facts come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into existence new facts which redetermine the beliefs accordingly. So the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the world is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. (P, 108)

The “truths” emerging from the flux are to be useful ones: James likens them to “blazes” in the forest that help us move along and find our way (P, 258). Every step of the way we “dip forward into facts” again (P, 108), revising them as the evidence demands. These formulations, meanwhile, can change the very reality they are tested against. Certain kinds of potential in the world, for instance, can be activated with optimism. In sum, pragmatic truths are experience-​based, flexible, and transformative, in keeping with the “pluralistic universe” in which they do their work.

199

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

199

These glimpses into James’s vision will be touchstones as we turn to the subject of modernist literary practices. Elsewhere I have argued that there is a close fit between “radical empiricism” and the ways modernist poets represent creative inspiration.10 Instead of making transcendentalist assumptions, as countless writers and artists did before them, poets like T.  E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens credited their “religious” experiences as experiences, bracketing first causes. Their “daylight mysticism”11 translated into an agnostic way of representing the insights inspiring them. This shift in perspective required a new language. James himself offered some hints about the sort of language that might be suitable, pointing, for instance, to the whole world of adjectives and attributes that are neither exclusively objective nor exclusively subjective, but that we use sometimes in one way and sometimes in the other, to our way of talking about the “preciousness” of a diamond or an “agreeable degree” of heat (ERE, 72). Pathetic fallacy, he noted, is another device capturing that “primitive stage of perception” in which subject and object remain undivided (ERE, 73). Other words promise to capture the plethora of emerging relations in the “pluralistic universe,” which James envisioned as “shot through” with “prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, ‘is,’ ‘isn’t,’ ‘then,’ ‘before,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ ‘like,’ ‘unlike,’ ‘as,’ ‘but’. . .” (ERE, 47). Modernist experiments in language would go beyond even what James envisioned, experimenting not only with words but also with grammatical structures, in the effort to respect the interpenetrated complexity of the pluralistic universe. My concern in the next section is with Jamesian “figures” in modernism: that is, with devices that organize radical experience provisionally, after the manner of Jamesian pragmatist truths. I examine the “Image” of the Imagist movement in poetry, as imagined by T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, and its similarly structured descendant, the catachrestic parataxis of Surrealism; then the “fictions,” more properly labeled “hypotheses,” of Wallace Stevens; and, finally, the “analogies” and “dialectical allegory” of the late modernist writer George Orwell. On the surface these authors and their works seem very different, but with James in mind we can see that their motivations, and the promise they hold out to readers, are strikingly similar.

The “Image” The father of the Imagist movement in poetry, the philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme, is famous for translating Bergson, but also wrote approvingly of James, and of A Pluralistic Universe in particular.12 Ezra Pound, who would define Imagism’s “Do’s” and “Don’ts,” also knew James’s work, mainly through his dealings with the Quest Society in London.13 James’s take on religious experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to Believe modeled a way of representing “mystical” moments we see replicated in the accounts of creative inspiration in these poets’s notebooks and manifestos.14 At the heart of Imagism is the figure called the “Image,” a device meant both to express a state of consciousness and to capture some insight into reality. The motive behind the device is a Bergsonian/​Jamesian understanding of a fluid, interpenetrated

200

200

Patricia Rae

consciousness, what Hulme called an “intensive manifold,” and Pound a “complex” of thoughts and feelings (Hulme, 170–​90).15 Because feeling-​words (“hatred,” “love,” “anger,” “contentment,” and so on) implicitly divide and distinguish, separating out interpenetrated states, the only solution for expressing a feeling-​complex was indirectly, with a particular cluster, or “arrangement,” of images—​the “Image.”16 Bergson himself had foreseen this solution, noting that “many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized.”17 Whether appearing before the consciousness of the poet, or on the page, before a reader, the right arrangement of images could capture the poet’s experience in all its interpenetrated complexity. The “Image” communicates states of consciousness by sharing with readers a perception of some relation, or relations, between juxtaposed images. It is an example of suggestive parataxis sometimes, though not always, presented as a simile. Unlike the symbol of the French symbolist poets or Yeats, which was premised on a monistic vision in which the poet sees into eternal relations or “correspondences,”18 the Image suggests a provisional relation, glimpsed in the pluralistic flux and subject to dismantling. It hints at a similarity, nudges the reader toward a theory, but then arrests that process, its images serving as empirical evidence of qualifying difference. Consider Pound’s simple presentation of spring blossoms and feline paw-​prints on snow: The footsteps of the cat upon the snow: (are like) plum-​blossoms.19 Or consider Hulme’s iconic Images of celestial bodies and faces:    Autumn A touch of cold in the Autumn night—​ I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-​faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children. (Hulme, 3)

The juxtaposed objects generate “experiences” of wavering relations. The delicacy of a cat’s tread evokes a blossom’s fluttering fall, even as winter’s cold contrasts with spring’s warmth. The ruddy red of the moon and the pure white of the sparkling stars evoke the skin tones of human beings, while the remoteness of the celestial bodies contrasts poignantly with the brevity of human life. As readers, we swim in a subtly moving array of incipient patterns, checked, modified, and enriched by perceptions of difference. The patterns capture a “complex” of thoughts and feelings. Any implied messages are bracketed agnostically. Where the symbolist poet would presume insight into divinely ordained equivalents,20 the Imagist shares an experience of perceived relations. As Hulme puts it, the poet suggests an analogy and asks the reader to take in “the view” (Hulme, 3).

201

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

201

The “Image” is the prototype for much to come in modernist poetry. As a vehicle for “states of consciousness,” it prefigures Eliot’s “objective correlative for feeling.”21 In its way of juxtaposing analogous fragments without commentary, it anticipates the larger canvases of modernist poetry, like Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s Waste Land, which present broad swathes of data—​images, textual fragments, and historical and mythological references—​hinting at larger patterns and possibilities in human experience. Inspired by Ernest Fenollosa’s analysis of Chinese writing, Pound would label those larger canvases “ideograms.” He also likened them to a shipman’s “periplum”: the record of a passing world “as . . . seen by men sailing.”22 Again, embedding the poem’s details within experience means bracketing the larger metaphysical questions that might be asked about them. The reader is left simply to mull over the presentation and to ascertain the “vibrations, cohesions, [and] ‘affinities’ ” between its elements.23 If the Imagists invite reflection on relations in the flux, they also share James’s sense that that flux is in a state of becoming, that its contents, including relations, are not fixed but ever-​changing. They believe, too, that the reader’s perception of the relations—​ which begins with a “sudden growth” in the consciousness—​has the potential to effect metamorphosis.24 If a reader perceives “repeats in history” in The Cantos’s fragments,25 parallels, say, between an American founder like Thomas Jefferson and a Renaissance patron like Cosimo de’ Medici, that perception might inspire a sense of what it means to be an American that might in turn shape the perceiver’s own choices and actions, and ultimately the sort of world in which he or she lives. In short, the Imagist “Image” and its descendant, the “ideogram,” are intended as vehicles for communicating complex, interpenetrated, and emerging truth. Detecting this Jamesian ambition in Imagist poems matters a great deal because it shows that they are anything but trivial. It teaches us that they may lead us to “discovery,” or “the analytical examination of truth,” that they may incite us to realize our own, and the world’s, latent potential.26 As if channeling James’s clarification of pragmatist truth-​ making in The Meaning of Truth, Pound specifies that his ideal figure is not a “fanciful” metaphor but an “interpretive” one.27 This elevation of “discovery” over play as a principle of selection in the construction of poetic figures is something we see repeated not only by Pound, but also by other modernist writers, including Stevens and Orwell. It elevates modernist writing above mere aestheticism and brings it into the arena of social and political action.

Pluralist surrealism A decade after Hulme and Pound defined the “Image,” surrealist writers, artists, and ethnographers began to work with strikingly similar artistic “arrangements” whose political purpose was sometimes more obvious. As James Clifford has observed, surrealism is “an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, [and] unexpected juxtapositions.”28 Here again, the core practice was to organize images into unusual combinations, highlighting unexpected similarities. Here again, the point was to challenge normative categories. Surrealist arrangements energized the

202

202

Patricia Rae

field of ethnography, where they showed the subversive potential of Jamesian radical empiricism and pluralism.29 Artist ethnographers including Marcel Mauss, and Michel Leiris, institutions such as the Collège de Sociologie and the journal Documents, and displays like the “Musée de l’Homme” at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, challenged viewers to think in new ways about what distant cultures have in common and what makes them distinct. The marker of a surrealist “Image” is its unexpectedness. It brings together objects that we do not expect to occupy the same space: natural objects and manufactured ones; high-​and low-​culture objects; artifacts from different regional or national cultures; and perceived images with imagined ones. In its strange spaces, patterns emerge:  a lobster aligns with a telephone, a woman’s breasts with desk drawers, the curves of a body with those of a violin, a masterpiece of sculpture with a cooking pot, and an African mask with the head of an odalisque. The more unlikely the combination, the surrealists calculated, the better, and potentially more revolutionary, the effect. “The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true,” wrote Pierre Reverdy, “the stronger the image will be—​the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.”30 The surrealist arrangement forces the viewer into an uncomfortable state in which intuition must take over from intellect. In the world it represents there is no safety for any of the exclusive binaries on which the infrastructures of nationalism and imperialism, among other products of “vicious intellectualism,” depend. Surrealism replicates the structures of Imagism, then, but develops their potential as a social and political force. Its “disturbing syncretisms” challenge normative distinctions and level cultures that have been hierarchized. In the process, they raise questions about “value-​charged categories” like art, beauty, sophistication, cleanliness, and so forth. What surrealist ethnographers achieved in the 1930s, says James Clifford, was “a disruptive and creative play of human categories and differences, an activity which does not simply display and comprehend the diversity of cultural orders but which openly expects, allows, indeed desires, its own disorientation.”31 Surrealist figures would appear in one of the mainstays of political writing in the 1930s:  Jamesian ethnography. The values of “radical empiricism” in field-​work reporting, inspired by James and first introduced into modernist ethnography by Bronislaw Malinowski, were passed on to activists and journalists including Egon Kisch, James Agee, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell, who reported on the devastating poverty of the Depression and on the complicated experience of fighting fascism with the international Republican militias in Spain. The salient lesson they absorbed was that their reports should be undivided and unexpurgated records of “experience,” blending information about the rituals and artifacts of a foreign culture and the “fieldworker’s” responses to them. Surrealist images are often part of the tapestry of such reports. Yoking familiar things with strange ones, they help the reporter capture what it feels like to collide with others—​often political comrades—​acculturated in ways different from their own. They can provide important information about impediments to the vaunted solidarity of those fighting both poverty and fascism. Above all, what surrealism shows us is the potential of a Jamesian modernist figure to challenge that most destructive of hierarchical distinctions favored by “vicious

203

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

203

intellectualism”:  the one between “self ” and “other.” Surrealist arrangements invite their viewers to contemplate the “conflux of the same with the different” (PU, 114), even if only for a brief, uncomfortable moment. Their constituent images interact in an unresolvable play of similarity and difference inviting the perception of new kinds of relations in a troubled world.

Wallace Stevens’s hypotheses An affinity with Jamesian pragmatism unites several modernist poets whose work is superficially quite different. Writers as diverse as T.  E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Elizabeth Bishop have been shown to play with language in Jamesian ways, their innovations reflecting the values of pragmatism and radical empiricism. Wallace Stevens’s emulation of James, which I address briefly here, helps us to see that he is more concerned with actuality, and with the need to “verify” poetic figures in relation to it, than many readers have credited. Stevens understood the rich creative possibility of James’s vision of a “pluralistic universe.” He captured James’s vision perfectly when he envisioned a “universe of reproduction [that] is not an assembly line but an incessant creation” (NA, 73)  and again when he imagined a “Theatre /​Of Trope,” a “volatile world” shimmering with “changing essences.”32 Stevens was fascinated by both the practice of seeking out previously unseen resemblances and the potentially transformative power of that practice. The right metaphor or simile, he notes, can “transfigure” its elements (NA, 77), or participate in the “freshness of transformation” (“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” CPWS, 397). Poet and reader have a responsibility, therefore, to ascertain resemblances that might do some good. Like James, Stevens recommends that we eschew negative or dispiriting analogies where more optimistic ones might just lead us where we want to go. He shares Pound’s sense that poet and reader might collaborate in the enterprise of changing reality, imagining analogues that would transform society for the better: “Is not the glory of the idea of any future state a relation between a present and a future glory? The brilliance of earth is the brilliance of every paradise” (NA, 77). The most obvious stylistic manifestation of this principle in Stevens is in the remarkable strings of similes flowing through his poetry. As Jacqueline Brogan describes the Stevensian simile, it “may well undercut the possibility of oneness, or being, or correspondence,” yet it “is also the means of positing their possibility.”33 The hopeful spirit behind many of Stevens’s imaginings is also exemplified by his fondness for the auxiliary “as if,” as in his Nietzschean criticism of the “over-​human god,” in “Esthétique du Mal”: “It seems as if the honey of summer might be enough” (“Esthétique du Mal, CPWS, 315). Stevens’s affinity with James and Pound on matters of figuration has been obscured by his own fondness for the word “fiction.” To most ears, his signature term “supreme fiction” is misleading because it seems to imply freedom from any obligation to verify. “Fiction” evokes “invented world[s]‌” and “inconceivable idea[s]” (“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” CPWS, 380). Coupled with the principle “It Must Give Pleasure”

204

204

Patricia Rae

(the title of one section of “Notes”), it signals licensed falsification. But the truth is that Stevens’s “pleasure,” like James’s “satisfaction,” includes “truth-​satisfaction.” He objects to metaphors that invent“without discovering.”34 Given this, it would seem fair to relabel Stevens’s favourite similes and metaphors as Jamesian hypotheses. As Hans Vaihinger, another important influence on Stevens, pointed out, “The intent of the hypothesis is to discover,” where “that of the fiction [is] to invent.”35 Stevens’s commitment to constructing poems out of “hypotheses” is reflected in a number of practices, of which his frequent use of similes is one. A simile is to him the same sort of provisional arrangement it is to Pound and Hulme: it causes a “relation” between things to emerge unexpectedly, like “the shade /​Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill” (“Connoisseur of Chaos,” CPWS, 215). Unlike the symbol, it is tentative about the relation: it invites us not only to note an emerging pattern, but also to read the particular case for qualifying differences. Stevens is fascinated by images of fluctuation and flickering—​by forms that prompt “a seeing and unseeing in the eye” (“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” CPWS, 385). A related technique is his tendency to qualify or contradict assertions immediately on making them, as in “Nothing exists by itself, /​ The moonlight seemed to” (“Les Plus Belles Pages,” CPWS, 244). Here, as in many other moments,36 Stevens signals his Jamesian commitment to testing propositions against empirical evidence. Or, as he puts it, to ensuring that “the abstraction [is] blooded.” Like a good pragmatist, he makes no claim to accessing an unmediated “harsh reality,” to arriving definitively at the “palm at the end of the mind” (“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” and “The Green Plant,” CPWS, 385, 506),37 but he does envision a fluctuating process of truth-​making that will bring us ever closer to that goal. It must be admitted that Stevens, while a superb match for James in theory, is a somewhat less satisfying match in practice. However much he may claim to be accountable to the “events [. . .] [that lie] beyond our power to tranquillize them in the mind” (NA, 22), the fact is that (the excellent work of Alan Filreis notwithstanding) the “actual world” always seems some distance away when we read his poetry.38 Despite his claim that exerting such pressure is part of the job of the “virile poet,”39 the dark social and political events of the 1930s and 1940s—​economic depression, the brutalities of imperialism, the intensification of nationalism, and the rise of totalitarianism—​do not often obviously “exert pressure” on the figures Stevens formulates in his poems. The place where Jamesian figures really come into their own in modernist writing is in the work of a writer rarely classified as a modernist, though that, too, is changing: George Orwell.

George Orwell’s “analogy” and dialectical allegory Until very recently, George Orwell has rarely been classified as a “modernist” writer at all. Thanks in part to the appropriation of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-​Four by anti-​ communist Cold Warriors, and also to the popularity of his decontextualized assertion that “good prose is like a windowpane,”40 he is known as a straightforward political journalist, too transparent a writer to be associated with a movement known for its concern with form, its indirection and difficulty, and its Prufrockian equivocation. My

205

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

205

own view is that this reading of Orwell ignores his artistry and greatly oversimplifies his political insights. In fact, Orwell revived certain key modernist literary practices in order to subvert crude Manichean thinking on the political front. He was concerned with “mak[ing] political writing into an art” and with “facing unpleasant facts” (CWGO, 18.319, 316) simultaneously, and found inspiration in the techniques of Joyce, Eliot, Hulme, and Henry Miller, in pursuing this goal. In redeploying these techniques, he was a key participant in the mid-​century revival of modernist literary practices we now call “late modernism.”41 One way of appreciating Orwell’s status as a “late modernist” is to see how often his “way of handling things”—​and especially his way of analyzing and representing the social and political crises of his time—​coincides with James’s. In 1946, Orwell declared that his writings of the previous decade had all been “written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism” (CWGO, 18.319). Singling out Animal Farm, he is clear that the form of his writing is as important to this project as its content. An interest in form is widely regarded as a sine qua non for modernist writers, and Orwell’s favourite formal strategies correspond closely with practices common among Jamesian modernists: they are techniques for capturing “pure experience” and deploying it as evidence; for proposing provisional truths that honor the structure of the “pluralistic universe”; and for reasoning in pictures, rather than in the divisive concepts of “vicious intellectualism.” Many of Orwell’s fellow leftists had rejected modernist techniques by the 1930s, seeing them as irresponsible and unacceptably indirect in a period calling for decisive social action. For Orwell, however, reviving these practices was just what the times required. The wars against poverty and fascism required solidarity across the divides of class and culture, which demanded, in turn, the insight made available by a “radically empirical” approach to witnessing. The rise of totalitarianism, with its unprecedented cynicism about truth, made it crucially important to respect the evidence of private experience. A globe traumatized by nationalist war desperately needed the insight that people and things can be “with” one another in different ways. If many progressives cultivated an “anti-​modernist” aesthetic in response to world crisis, Orwell’s revival of Jamesian practices represents a kind of “anti-​anti-​modernism.” Orwell’s documentary writings of 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier (1936) and Homage to Catalonia (1938), are ethnographic records of “pure experience.” They aim to correct popular misconceptions, not only about the poverty endured by Britain’s miners and the situation of Republican fighters in civil war Spain, but also about fissures in the much celebrated “solidarity” of activists for both causes. Unlike some other examples of “fact”-​oriented reporting in the 1930s, these texts make no pretense of cleansing the lens separating the reporter from his subject. The thing being reported and the thoughts and feelings of the reporter come to us in an “undifferentiated” stream (ERE, 36–​7). This holds true especially when the observer’s responses are unattractive or politically incorrect. Like a true radical empiricist, Orwell “excludes nothing” that is experienced. This means recording the squeamishness of the middle-​ class ethnographer encountering the habits of the poor. It means representing the alienation a lower-​upper-​middle class Briton feels in the company of radical Spanish militiamen, and his “sneaking sympathy” with the fascist landowners his comrades

206

206

Patricia Rae

are destroying (CWGO, 6.54). Orwell’s point in these texts is to teach us about how cultural difference threatens the ability of those fighting poverty and fascism to work together, a point activists ignore, he believes, at their own peril. Both The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia use the evidence of “pure experience” to counter received truths. It is in the latter, though, where we see Orwell behaving most like a Jamesian pragmatist. James, we remember, had reminded his critics that “giv[ing] up the doctrine of objective certitude” did not necessarily mean giv[ing] up the quest or hope of truth itself ”:42 that even if our That is, even if our experience of things is compromised by bias, it must still be respected as evidence. Orwell replicates this reasoning in Homage to Catalonia. Faced with communist propaganda accusing the revolutionary Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM) of colluding with the fascists, and of hoarding arms to disadvantage their fellow Republicans, he presents his own experience of the militia as evidence that no such conspiracy was—​or could have been—​at work. His understanding of what was going on may have been limited, but it was enough for him to testify that he and his comrades were too naive about power politics, too uncertain about their movements, and too short of decent armaments themselves for the accusations of conspiracy to be true. Referring to the street-​fighting episode in Barcelona in May 1937, an episode the communists were exploiting in their anti-​POUM propaganda, he states that “like everyone who was in Barcelona at the time I  saw only what was happening in my immediate neighbourhood, but I saw and heard quite enough to be able to contradict many of the lies that have been circulated” (CWGO, 6.131, my italics). The Spanish Civil War introduced Orwell to a culture of cynicism about truth-​ making and he responded in a very Jamesian way. In the important essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1942), he observed that it was in Spain “for the first time” that he “saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts” and “history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’ ” (CWGO, 13.503). Writing after the Blitz, which had given him firsthand experience of aerial bombardment, he declared that all of this playing fast and loose with truth was “more frightening than bombs” (CWGO, 13.505). He offered a terrifying vision of a world where accounts of reality became utterly malleable: a totalitarian world where “if the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—​well, it never happened,” or where “if he says that two and two are five—​well, two and two are five” (ibid.). Like James, he insists that even inevitable bias in reporting does not stop certain facts from being facts. The “truth about atrocities,” he stresses, “is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen” (CWGO, 13.500). Given this, we have an obligation to make our reports more, rather than less, true, in accordance with what evidence is available, and to respond with appropriate action. In the case of fascist atrocities, this means responding with arms. Readers will recognize in Orwell’s reference to the “Leader” with dubious math a first glimpse of Big Brother (CWGO, 9.262) and in his picture of a world without regard for truth the nightmare world of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-​Four. The point is important because it establishes a vital new purpose for Jamesian radical empiricism,

207

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

207

pragmatism, and pluralism, which is to offer resistance to totalitarianism. As we turn to Orwell’s Jamesian modernist practices, it is helpful to remember that he designs them with the specter of totalitarianism in mind. Totalitarianism, he said, threatens “individual integrity,” a person’s ability to know and to express with accuracy his own innermost thoughts and feelings. In totalitarian societies, “daring to stand alone” (CWGO, 17.371) is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous”: the pressure to conform to orders, in both thought and expression, is immense. Because totalitarianism “can never permit either the truthful recording of facts, or . . . emotional sincerity,” he observes, its triumph would mean the end of literature as we know it (CWGO, 17.376). For Orwell, then, the project of writing “sincerely” is seminal to political resistance (CWGO, 17.376, 17.428, 12.503),43 and his carefully chosen Jamesian figures are central to that effort. In encouraging empirical verification and challenging the rigid, exclusive, “vicious intellectualist” categories favored by totalitarian dictators, they show how a Jamesian vision might prove vitally subversive in the most oppressive of societies. Orwell’s famous manifestos on writing are motivated by a desire to counter increasing evidence of totalitarianism in British life. They comment especially on the growing prevalence of “duckspeak” (CWGO, 9.57), that is, on the way writers were tending to parrot prefabricated expressions instead of devising their own. Both “Politics and the English Language” (1946) and “New Words” (1940) recommend a writing practice uncannily close to Hulmean and Poundian Imagism, a method of writing with fresh similes that Orwell called the “method of analogy.” He envisioned a creative process beginning with mental “pictures” rather than words (CWGO, 12.133, 17.428–​30). The Imagist theorists had imagined their practice as an alternative to the thoughtless manipulation of abstract “counters” (or “reflex speech”) and hinted that it might play a role in political activism. Orwell revises their tenets with a view to reinstating sincerity and verification into a world overrun by unthinking orthodoxy and cynicism about truth. Like “Images,” too, the “analogies” that fascinated Orwell were versions of the “relations” or “connections” in James’s pluralistic universe. In bringing unexpected things together, they share the goal of subverting not only “duckspeak” or “counter speech,” but also the rigid categories of “vicious intellectualism.” If Orwell was disturbed by the increase in irresponsible truth-​making he was equally upset by a rise in the sort of rigid, binary thinking James also deplored. We can glimpse this hostility in his satirical picture of the pigs in Animal Farm, who, as David Fishelov has put it, “are characterized by their tendency to simplify and to divide the world into opposite, dichotomic, categories, remaining blind to the variety of intermediate shades, and to the moral differentiations within the various categories.”44 Orwell challenges this tendency repeatedly in his political writings, focusing especially on the phenomenon of “nationalism,” which he defines in terms very reminiscent of James’s “intellectualism”: By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled “good” or “bad.” . . . I  mean the habit of identifying

208

208

Patricia Rae

oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. (CWGO, 17.141)

We see here a version of the exclusive conceptual thinking James deplored:  a clear instance of “that-​and-​no-​other” classification (PU, 113), focusing on that binary distinction between “self ” and “other.” Orwell’s history of challenging this particular binary was long, extending from his early critiques of British colonialism in Burma, to his exploration of the divide between fascists and anti-​fascists in Spain, to his analyses of how totalitarian leaders scapegoat other nations in their bids to retain power. By the time he officially defines “nationalism” in 1946, he is able to locate it in everyone from nazis to zionists, from xenophobic Englishmen to Scottish nationalists. Orwell’s adherence to a Jamesian analysis is especially apparent in his treatment of the communist assault on the antifascist revolutionaries who defied Joseph Stalin’s orders in Spain. The communist propagandists saw any departure from the party line as reason to call these determined socialists “fascists.” They saw any attribute shared with the Francoists, such as a disagreement with the communist leadership about war aims, as reason to classify them as Francoists. Orwell’s account of the problem is essentially the same as James’s. In the overheated communist rhetoric about Spain, he observes, “XY has been heard to speak favourably of world-​revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist” (CWGO, 11.45). In James’s terms, what is at work here is the monist “all-​form,” in which a cat cannot have anything in common with a mousetrap without becoming one. By contrast, Orwell’s own philosophy about how to classify people corresponds with James’s view of relationships as “strung-​along” or “synechistic” (PU, 147). To use an apt analogy from James, he has a propensity for pointing out what members of opposing “club[s]‌” (P, 67)  have in common with one another—​often to those members’ discomfort. In his writings on colonialism, for instance, he takes pleasure in noting what the colonizers share with the colonized. His writings on poverty in Britain alert British leftist intellectuals to attitudes they have in common with the imperialist colonizers they despise. His postwar analysis of nationalism calls out Zionists for an exclusionary attitude similar to that of Nazi Germany. Elsewhere, he is among the first to notice the similarities between the enemy regimes of Germany and of the Soviet Union and, later, between countries like Britain and the United States and the totalitarian powers they have positioned themselves against. This propensity for noting how “each of us actually is his own other,” as James put it, earned Orwell a reputation for “perversity”45 and, not surprisingly, many enemies. It also underpinned his attraction to the figure of “analogy,” a trope that could call attention to similarities without lapsing into assertions of identity. How does the “method of analogy” shape Orwell’s own practice? Sharp, bright similes pepper his writings, their function being often to subvert the binary oppositions governing accepted discourse and to challenge readers to see new and unexpected “relations.” One instance of this comes courtesy of the protagonist of Burmese Days, John Flory, a colonial official who does not accept the rigid, hierarchical, and racist assumptions prevailing at the Englishmen’s Club he inhabits with other colonial

209

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

209

officials. In James’s terms, Flory is acutely conscious of the way the English and Burmese are “their own others.” He shares the insight with a potential lover, Elizabeth Lackersteen, by gesturing toward some analogies: “Look at the moon, just look at it!” Flory said. “It’s like a white sun. It’s brighter than an English winter day.” Elizabeth looked deep into the branches of the frangipani tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light like snow. Even Elizabeth, indifferent to such things, was astonished. (CWGO, 2.182, my italics)

Flory’s vision here is of unexpected relations in a “multiverse”: the supposed binaries of summer and winter, daytime and night time, Burma and England, are “with” one another, “strung-​along,” in some unexpected ways. “Mine” remains mine, but does not exclude “yours.” Flory’s hope is that Elizabeth will share in “the view.” Deploying free indirect discourse, the whole of Burmese Days is mainly a record of Flory’s experience of the flux, and, as such, it is thick with startling similes along similar lines. East and West are constantly coming into relation:  a Burmese prisoner’s ringworm resembles a medieval knight’s coat of mail; the banks of the Irrawaddy river are made of “glistening mud, like chocolate”; a churning sea recalls the foaming of a Coca Cola (CWGO, 2.76, 164, 99). At times, these examples are strongly reminiscent of the “strange juxtapositions” or “disturbing syncretisms” (Clifford, “Surrealism,” 540, 549–​ 50) of Surrealist ethnography. They subvert the “value-​charged categories” not only of Burma and England, but also of “nature” and “culture,” of “primitive” and “developed” societies. Orwell puts surrealist analogies to similar use in The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, where they capture the encounters, respectively, of an upper-​ middle-​class southern English leftist with the struggling poor in the north of England, and of a similarly privileged English antifascist volunteer with proletarian comrades in Spain. In these texts, the records of the protagonist’s “pure experience” have him likening the digging of coal to the scooping of Neapolitan ice cream, the journey down into the mines to the one of descending in the lift at the Piccadilly tube station, a ride in a rickety Spanish ambulance to one on a carnival ride, and a fellow militiaman’s head to a coconut at a fair. These moments contribute to an exposé of the much vaunted “solidarity” of the era’s progressive left-​wing causes, revealing the cultural differences that make camaraderie difficult. Orwell’s privileged narrators reveal through their analogues emotions of alienation and disgust, a background of privilege, and an incomprehension of the factors motivating their proletarian comrades. It is impossible to capture all the ways in which Orwell lives up to his instruction to renounce “prefabricated phrases” (CWGO, 17.430) for the “method of analogy.” The text of “Politics and the English Language” practices what it preaches, deploying numerous startling similes to capture the character of the despised “reflex speech.” Countless other bright similes pepper Orwell’s prose, fulfilling his requirement for fresh

210

210

Patricia Rae

visual effect. One kind of analogy in particular may be especially worth noting: the kind juxtaposing human beings and animals. The Burmese citizens Flory encounters resemble mares and tomcats, frogs, and crocodiles. Animal Farm, of course, hints at analogies between people and pigs, sheep, dogs, cats, and a host of other creatures. In Nineteen Eighty-​Four, Winston Smith envisions Party officials as beetles and quacking ducks, the “proles” as ants and horses and herds of cattle, and children as monkeys and tiger cubs (CWGO, 9.118, 163, 57, 96, 73, 74, 168, 170, 25). In the same way that the analogues between England and Burma were the stuff of John Flory’s consciousness, these perceptions are part of the “pure experience” of Winston Smith. Among other things, they suggest that Winston intuits a commonality between animals and humans that may prove useful to him and others facing the predicament of living under totalitarian oppression. Orwell would have known T. E. Hulme’s insight that “animals are in the same state that men were before symbolic language was invented” (Hulme, 14), and he appears to share Hulme’s view that animals model a sort of presymbolic visual thinking for poets and other writers wishing to express themselves sincerely. Such a capacity becomes invaluable in totalitarian Oceania, where cynical relativism, “vicious intellectualism,” and rigid nationalism prevail. There, the only accepted way of speaking is “duck-​speak”: the thoughtless utterance of prefabricated phrases. With these phrases, Big Brother and his henchmen work to control not only the hearts and minds of Oceanians, but also their memories. But what Winston intuits is that he and the “proles” have strengths outside the range of Big Brother’s control, most notably a capacity for picture-​thinking, coinciding with intuition and private memory. We witness Winston experiencing, through his own perceptions of analogy, a series of insights subversive of Party doctrine: a sense of his own inner life, for instance, as a watery sea-​bottom or crystal globe, interpenetrated, private, and free (CWGO, 9.28, 154). Those suggestive clusters of images are very difficult for the forces of surveillance (whether telescreens, microphones, moles, or language police) to detect. Because they do not describe thoughts and feelings in symbolic language, but only suggest them through images, they cannot be “heard” in the conventional way. When Winston famously intuits that “if there is hope . . . it lies in the proles” (CWGO, 9.72), he may well be thinking of this capacity for subversive presymbolic thinking, which Orwell and Hulme both thought was especially prevalent in the working class (Hulme, 8; CWGO, 16.219 and 12.298–​99). Orwell also offers an allegorical story of the “Image” at work under totalitarianism with a mysterious object that is Winston’s most prized possession: a glass and coral paperweight reminiscent in size, structure, and materials to the silent, solid objects of Imagist poetry. The paperweight is the antithesis of everything Big Brother represents—​an inspiration to Winston in the darkest of worlds. If the simile is Orwell’s most consistent Jamesian figure, repeatedly striking at rigid intellectualist boundaries, the other Jamesian strategy central to his work is a distinctive sort of dialectical allegory. That Orwell is an accomplished allegorist is hardly a new insight—​George Steiner named him, in 1969, the most significant practitioner in the genre after John Bunyan and Jonathan Swift46—​but understanding his Jamesian habits of thought helps to clarify how his allegories work. The standard reading of Animal Farm assumes a one-​to-​one correspondence between the literal

211

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

211

story and the story of Russia’s Communist revolution—​a reading that made the book a powerful ideological weapon during the Cold War. But this sort of reading flattens the novel’s dialectical complexity. In fact, Orwell constructs it to provoke comparisons between the postrevolutionary Soviet Union and other regimes: Adolf Hitler’s Germany, revolutionary France and Spain, but mainly a prospective socialist England. Through a clever blend of details of place and historical allusions, he weaves a pluralistic vision of relations between people and places, not often thought to be related. So, for instance, the villain of the story, the despotic pig Napoleon Bonaparte, suggests at different moments the totalitarian leaders Stalin and Hitler, the British monarch George VI, and the French emperor whose name he bears. As in Orwell’s essays, but implicitly, we are encouraged to contemplate the creation of a new category (totalitarianism) that encompasses several societies marked by certain common characteristics, even though they may consider themselves enemies. Historical allusions, like those to Napoleon, prompt us to reflect on whether this new category represents something entirely new in human history. Orwell’s carefully woven allegory hints at unexpected similarities in things, but also, in keeping with his Jameisan deference to evidence, of what distinguishes certain characters and regimes from one another. For instance, when the animals sing Napoleon’s praises in a song reminiscent of God Save the King (CWGO, 8.60–​1), we are likely to think about how different the contract is between Englishmen and their monarch from those of the French toward Napoleon, or between the Russian people and Stalin. Orwell also populates the farmyard with some animals, like cats and chickens, which suggest eccentric, free-​minded, Englishmen. His goal is ultimately to reassure readers that a socialist revolution in England is unlikely to degenerate in the same way, or to the same degree, as the Communist revolution in Russia. He makes the same point, explicitly, in his 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn. In sum, Orwell’s allegorical writing extends the “tensional” quality of his Jamesian Images into narrative, weaving a tapestry of referents that are “with” one another in some ways and not in others. The result is a much subtler message than the standard Cold War reading allows. Politically, it is a warning against totalitarianism, but also a retort to conservatives who had been arguing that a Welfare State in England, of the sort being proposed by William Beveridge, Clement Attlee, and other Labourites, would inevitably devolve into totalitarianism. Orwell’s final novel, Nineteen Eighty-​Four, works in a similar way, subtly inviting comparisons between totalitarian Russia and capitalist England and America. Coupled with the book’s hints of how picture-​thinking might inspire “the proles,” to rebel, this reading of Orwell through the lens of Jamesian modernism makes him seem far less pessimistic than the critical tradition on this novel suggests.

Conclusion These examples are only a handful of the many Jamesian “figures” to be found in modernist literature. This book offers several other examples of modernist writers who

212

212

Patricia Rae

“handle things” in Jamesian ways, and the past two decades have seen nuanced critical studies of Jamesian modernism in writers from Henry James to Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. I  regret not having the time here to address how the remarkable linguistic experiments of James’s student Gertrude Stein recreate the supple, shifting, subversive motions and experienced relations of the “pluralistic universe.” My hope, however, is that my grouping of Jamesian modernist figures has brought into focus two aspects of James’s thought often overlooked by commentators on “pragmatist” modernism:  its emphasis on evidence-​ based truth-​ making and the subversive potential of the pluralistic vision, and its role as an alternative interpretation to the “stiff and stubborn, man-​locked set”47 of intellectualist concepts. Understanding how Jamesian modernist figures challenge the exclusionary view of categories, showing how a thing can be “with” one thing and yet also with another, is key to understanding their significant social and political potential. The Jamesian reading of modernism promises to disrupt and extend the critical categories with which we map twentieth-​ century literature—​divisions between the formalist and the political, the imaginative and the empirical, the modernist and the realist—​in ways James himself would surely have endorsed.

Notes 1 William James, Essays on Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 79. 2 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 29. Hereafter cited parenthetically as NA. 3 See Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997), 114–​19. 4 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-​Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 110. 5 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 127. 6 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 67. 7 See Rae, The Practical Muse, 74; and Walter Sutton, “Coherence in Pound’s Cantos and William James’s Pluralistic Universe,” Paideuma 15, no. 1 (1986): 7–​21. 8 William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 104–​7. 9 George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 81. 10 See Rae, The Practical Muse, 39–​42; 81–​5; 111–​26. 11 Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 223. 12 See Hulme’s 1912 translation of Bergson’s 1903 Introduction à la métaphysique, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1912). Hulme’s first published article (“The New Philosophy,” New Age 5 (July 1, 1909) was a review of A Pluralistic Universe. He discusses the “stream of conscious life” and the related concept of the “fringe” of awareness in “Notes on Bergson,” The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen

213

Modernist Figures and James's Pluralistic Universe

213

Csengeri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 147–​8, and the principle of the “intensive manifold” in “The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds,” in Hulme, Collected Writings, 170–​90. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Hulme. 13 Pound encountered followers of James at weekly meetings of the Quest Society between 1911 and 1913; he contributed the important, Jamesian essay “Psychology and Troubadors” to the society’s journal in October 1912. He also discussed James with W. B. Yeats. See James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 224–​5. 14 See Rae, The Practical Muse, 44–​88. 15 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 4. 16 Ezra Pound, “Vortex Pound,” in Blast, ed. Wyndham Lewis (1914; rpt. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 154, and Gaudier-​Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 81. 17 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, ed. John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman (London: Palgrave, 2007), 10. 18 See Rae, The Practical Muse, 35–​6, 40–​1, 55. 19 Pound, Gaudier-​Brzeska, 89. 20 See ibid., 86 (my italics). 21 See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 121–​6. 22 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), LIX 324. 23 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 94. 24 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1960), 4. 25 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–​1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 210. 26 See Pound, Gaudier-​Brzeska, 83. 27 See Pound, Literary Essays, 162; and Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 23 n. 28 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 539–​64. 29 See Patricia Rae, “Orwell’s Heart of Darkness: The Road to Wigan Pier as Modernist Anthropology,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 22, no. 2 (1999): 72–​102. 30 Pierre Reverdy, cited by William Skaff, “Pound’s Imagism and the Surreal,” Journal of Modern Literature 12, no. 2 (1985): 186. 31 Clifford, “Surrealism,” 549, 550, 559. 32 Wallace Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 397. Hereafter cited parenthecally as CPWS. 33 Jacqueline V. Brogan, Stevens and Simile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986),154. 34 Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates, rev., enlarged ed. (New York: Knopf, 1989), 203; my italics. 35 See G. R. S. Mead, “The Philosophy of the As-​If: A Radical Criticism of Human Knowledge,” Quest 4 (1912–​1913): 459–​83; my italics. 36 See Rae, The Practical Muse, 188–​93. 37 Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” and “The Green Plant,” Collected Poems, 385, 506; Opus Posthumous, 141.

214

214

Patricia Rae

38 See Alan Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 39 When Stevens asserts that he plans to eschew metaphysics in thinking about poetry, he says he does so “for all the reasons stated by William James” (NA, 59). 40 George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998, 20 vols.), 18.320. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CWGO. 41 For excellent summaries of critical comment on “late modernism,” see Cheryl Hindrichs, “Late Modernism, 1928–​1945,” Literature Compass 8, no. 11 (2011): 840–​55; and Peter Childs, Modernist Literature: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 135–​42. 42 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 23. 43 See also CWGO, 12.501–​6. 44 David Fishelov, “Satura Contra Utopiam: Satirical Distortions of Utopian Ideas,” Revue de littérature comparée 268 (1993): 468–​71. 45 See William E. Cain, “Orwell’s Perversity: An Approach to the Collected Essays,” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 115–​32. 46 George Steiner, George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 371. 47 Wallace Stevens, “Angels Surrounded by Paysans,” Collected Poems, 497.

215

13

William James’s Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious in Joyce and Proust Gian Balsamo

William James would be the first to point out, had he a say in the matter, that his influence over modernist writers may be best registered by a notion of confluence, that is, the convergent streaming of radically different minds and manners of expression, than by a notion of direct influence or, worse, passive derivation. It is such a convergent and spontaneous flowing together of different minds that defines the historic turnabout we identify with James’s writings. And it is the spontaneity of the confluence toward a rather loose and eclectic persuasion that consciousness manifests itself as a stream (or to be precise, that consciousness is the experience of the stream) that confirms the vision of the thinker who labeled this phenomenon in a rigorous way. Let us pause a moment and take a quick look at James’s notion of the stream: “The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other molded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.”1 If, predictably enough, the most frequent noun in this passage is “water,” it is noteworthy that the second most frequent one is “freedom.” In Du côté de chez Swann, Marcel Proust unpacks William James’s same analogy in an attempt to describe the incomparable impression of freshness given him by the waters of the Vivonne river. This freshness, he writes, is in a sort of “perpetual . . . flight between the water without consistency in which my hands could not capture it and the glass without fluidity in which my palate could not enjoy it.”2 The moment you grab the stream and make it your own, it turns itself into a quagmire. To understand conceptually a phenomenon as elusive as the stream, one must, first of all, surrender to its intrinsic logic, which is the opposite of the restrictive interplay, as Proust writes two lines above, of “content” versus “container”—​or in our specific case, of source versus derivation. In this light, it is my contention that for too long literary critics have succumbed to a notion of influence that confuses the stream with the bucket. William James is the

216

216

Gian Balsamo

largest bucket in the stream leading to the several modernist versions of the stream of consciousness, no doubt, but he must not be confused with the whole stream or with the sole source. By doing so, one would undercut the kaleidoscopic spectacle, as I am sure James would define it, of the innumerable autonomous tributaries to the dominant stream. Being caught up in the stream as much as the artist, the critic who is willing to privilege confluence over influence (or as in the following discussion, a forward-​ looking over a backward-​looking discourse) may even aim at lifting a new wave—​ new in the sense of original, however tiny—​in our understanding of James’s stream of consciousness. In what follows I  argue that if one deals in proper terms with the stream of consciousness in texts by Proust and James Joyce, and if one pays proper attention not so much to their surface (which is where the gaze of most neuroscientists doing exegetic work on Proust rests these days) as to their elusive undertow—​if one pays proper attention, in other words, not so much to the rhetorical technique as to the multilayered content, one may derive useful insights for an original reflection on the notion of cognitive unconscious. Central nowadays to the researches of James’s disciples,3 the cognitive unconscious is something that James chose to keep apart from the “real world’s nucleus” of the things that he called “practical realities” (The Principles of Psychology [PP], 1.922–​3, 923n. 10). So, if my forthcoming argumentation proves persuasive, by the end of this chapter we will have indeed both lifted and ridden the new (tiny) wave I mentioned a moment ago. Why are Proust’s precise descriptions of his characters’ introspective stream more attractive to the neuro-​and cognitive scientist than Joyce’s exuberant and uncontainable cascades of sensori-​and psychomotor information? Simply because in its apparent illustration of a case study, Proust’s narration in the stream-​of-​ consciousness mode reflects the dynamics of human consciousness with greater analytical clarity—​yet with less phenomenological immediacy, as I will show. Proust and Joyce do something on the page but a lot more behind it; their best results in the representation of the stream of consciousness are achieved through the silences whereby they intimate those semiconscious and unconscious experiences that could only be conveyed by omission and indirection. In what follows I  describe two metaphors of embodied memory, from Proust’s Recherche and Joyce’s Ulysses. By the notion of “embodied memory,” I refer to a storage-​room of mnemonic data susceptible to acts of recall and remembrance that are not strictly mental, but rather organismic. This predicate, “organismic,” derives in turn from my presumption that, just as Simon Chu and John Downes have shown of early-​life memories,4 certain intensely passionate or amorous episodes from one’s past tend to react, or be “cued,” by sensory impressions rather than mental (linguistic or conceptual) “labels”; hence, their function in the neuronal constitution of the individual is mainly contingent on sensorimotor information. The protagonist and narrator of Proust’s novel, whom henceforth I refer to as the Narrator, ascertains that his remembrance of his beloved and deceased grandmother has a visceral depth to it, which can be retrieved and reexperienced only in sleep, as “the black stream of [his] blood” sails him through the

217

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

217

“sextuple bends” of his digestive apparatus—​as he journeys, in other words, deep into a radically embodied metaphor of the cognitive unconscious. Analogously, Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s novel, is aroused by the stimulation of his taste buds, which reawakens a memory of osculation, which reminds him, in turn, of the two sexual acts that led to his two children’s conception. I am going to analyze how these two manifestations of embodied memory emerge in the introspective mode of the stream of consciousness; moreover, in agreement with the extension, advocated by current neuroscience, of James’s theory of the stream of consciousness to the “cognitive unconscious,” I  am going to show that memory’s unconscious or semiconscious workings play a crucial role in both cases.

Marcel Proust’s analytical language and William James’s stream of consciousness In Proust’s Recherche, the Narrator is often engaged in the retrieval of a remembrance that surfaces to his consciousness in the guise of an involuntary memory. This retrieval hinges on the analogy between “a common quality to two [distinct] sensations,” one being presently experienced and the other having been experienced in the past and then forgotten.5 The Narrator’s remembrance derives from the “transmutation” of a “directly felt reality” into the recognition of analogous qualia (or experienced qualities) in some past sensation,6 and the “miracle of this analogy” depends on his “escape from the present,” on his ability to tear two distinct moments in time away from the dictates of chronological separation and join them together.7 The process of this retrieval is from time to time minutely described and self-​consciously analyzed by the Narrator; in a retrospective instantiation of the past experience, the Narrator recovers, in Russell Epstein’s words, the intricate web of “sensory, emotional, and appetitive” modalities that constitutes, post factum, the meaningful cohesiveness of an earlier moment in time.8 The presently felt sensation gives the Narrator “a delicious pleasure,” and his mood “of a moment ago is superseded by a surge of elation.”9 Yet, the Narrator is, as a rule, disinclined to overemphasize the poignancy of this state of elation. Despite the exuberance of his affective investment in the retrieval of the elusive remembrance, and despite as well the sensory, emotional, and appetitive target of this mnemonic effort, the Narrator pushes gradually in the background the excitement provoked by his mood swing. His elation, collateral to the dawning stage of his present effort of memory recall, fuels his mental exertion, and gets then gradually distilled away from his “re-​instantiation of [the] earlier experience.”10 It is almost as though mnemonic retrieval could be successfully undertaken by the Narrator only in a condition of stasis, of inaction, of immunity from external agitation, requiring the abrupt and rigorous interruption of the contingent flow of moods, events, situations, and conversations that would normally surround the mental life of a fictional character. The Narrator engages in his “soliloquy,” as Gérard Genette suggests, not as an emotive act of self-​ expression, but rather for “purposes of [analytical] demonstration.”11

218

218

Gian Balsamo

It is not that the expressive resources of the monologue intérieur—​the narrative technique whereby Édouard Dujardin anticipated, according to James Joyce, the latter’s dramatizations of his characters’ unfolding consciousness—​are not accessible to him.12 Dujardin envisioned the interior monologue as a discourse lacking logical organization, “in a mode which gives the impression that the original thoughts are actually being reproduced [in speech].”13 On selected occasions, Proust can indeed be caught toying with this narrative technique, as Genette has remarked (180). Yet, apparently averse to the sort of “psychological realism” inherent in the narrative technique of interior monologue, the Narrator chooses, as a rule, not to avail himself of it.14 The process of retrieval analytically described by the Narrator consists of two distinct stages, namely, the stage of memory recall (triggered by an involuntary memory) followed by accomplished remembrance. If it does not exhibit the faintest trace of the inarticulate, infralinguistic “hodgepodge” advocated by Dujardin,15 it shares instead, according to Russell Epstein, a spectrum of structural correspondences with William James’s theory of the “stream of consciousness.” James described this theory, as a key component of his description of conscious experience, in The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890—​three years after the publication of the novel by Dujardin that inaugurated the literary usage of the interior monologue. From the perspective of William James’s theory, the kind of memory favored by the Narrator, which surfaces at first in the guise of a random emotion or sensation, has the advantage of not being abstracted, as is the case with a deliberate or voluntary recollection, from the “conjunction of sensations, goals, and desires” of its original context.16 It is well known that James’s formula was adopted in literary circles to define a narrative technique that depicts “without logical organization [a]‌flux of thoughts, sensations, and feelings . . . nearest the unconscious.”17 According to David Lodge’s description of this technique in The Art of Fiction, the expressive means of this technique go beyond the reach of inner speech, as they call for a calibrated blend of interior monologue, free indirect speech, and third-​person narration.18 James’s stream of consciousness bridges the distinction between the “fringe” or “feeling of tendency” and the “substantive state.” The fringe is a vague, dimly felt emotion pointing a present sensation in the mental direction from which a previously experienced sensation—​its tendential correlate, if you will—​is about to manifest itself again. The fringe occurs in a “transitive state” informed by the elusive feeling that a still undefined relation links two distinctly diachronic sensations. The “substantive state” occurs when the previously experienced sensation, which is intrinsic of course to a temporarily forgotten memory and exhibits some sort of “relation” with the present sensation, is fully identified. The achieved identification corresponds to the “goal” or “meaning” itself of the stream of consciousness, and, in the cases exemplified in the Narrator’s words, enables the remembering agent to unearth the salient, contextual modalities (sensual, emotional, appetitive, and autobiographic) that informed the episodic matrix of the original sensation (PP, 1.236, 238–​9, 243–​4, 250–​1). Subsequent to the Narrator’s relentless probing of his “fringed” sensation, the achieved identification that brings his mental stream to completion presents him with

219

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

219

a moment of intensified awareness; it bestows on him a pause of joyful gratification, an “unfringed” moment of emotional repose (cf. PP, 1.451n. 17).

James Joyce’s psychological realism and William James’s fringed feelings Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate . . . Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I’m not thirsty . . . Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly . . . Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered . . . Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy.19

The above citation consists of an abridged stream of consciousness from Joyce’s Ulysses. Bloom is experiencing an emotional pause equivalent to the ones cherished by the Narrator in Proust’s Recherche. This pause occurs at the end of the excerpt, at the moment when the memory of Bloom’s first sexual intercourse with Molly, who has now been his wife for sixteen years, manifests itself to his consciousness: “Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth,” and so on. Contrary to Proust’s Narrator’s frequent, analytical elucidations of his mnemonic probing into the forgotten past, Bloom is not aware that he is trying to remember something—​his own memory seems to react “to a secret touch” of its own independent volition, rather. The comestible sensations that precede both the achieved reminiscence and its inherent condition of emotional repose are a sensorimotor dramatization of the fact that a “feeling of tendency” is being conveyed to his memory by his taste buds. “Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese . . . Touched his sense moistened remembered.” It is immediately evident that Joyce’s dramatic intention reflects the inarticulation of Dujardin’s “hodgepodge.” The stylistic apparatus in the description of the scene, inclusive of third-​person narration, free indirect speech, and interior monologue, is broader in expressive reach than the one advocated by Dujardin in Le monologue intérieur, though. A closer scrutiny leaves one under the impression that Joyce has plunged his character into an experience surrounded by a typically Jamesian “penumbra of recognition” (PP, 1.634)—​a fringed set of gustatory feelings, Dujardin’s “dawning state” of a conscious process presented in the cascading immediacy of a plethora of elusive and apparently uncoordinated sensations and emotions.20 The phenomenology of sensation is clearly prevailing over the work of analytical introspection here. Joyce teases Bloom’s taste buds with the “imminence” of some sort of revelation, and then gradually presents him with the revelation itself.21 This narrative procedure makes it looks as though the situation required no

220

220

Gian Balsamo

purposeful memory work on Bloom’s part—​none of those systematic and analytical efforts of gradual retrieval that Proust’s Narrator excels at, and none either of those quests, introspective and sensory at once, that were triggered in William James by any ordinary, tip-​of-​the-​tongue experience: “It tingles, it trembles on the verge, but does not come” (PP, 1.634). I now compare the mnemonic process triggered in Bloom by comestible sensations with the one experienced by Proust’s Narrator in the emblematic episode of the cup of tea. The difference between Proust’s and Joyce’s approach to the memory work triggered in their respective protagonists by a comestible sensation can be put this way: Proust provides his reader with the Narrator’s description of his own mnemonic feat as he sits in front of his cup of tea, frozen in concentration, soaking crumbs from his madeleine, till he gradually achieves the goal of the quest and enjoys his well-​deserved pause of gratified repose, in mental contemplation of “all the flowers of our garden and those of M.  Swann’s park, and the water lilies of the Vivonne river, and the good folk of the village,” and so on.22 Joyce’s reader is made to savor instead the very taste of the streaming hodgepodge which, after setting Bloom’s taste buds under siege, climaxes in his reminiscence of the sensuous, “sweetsour” stream or flow or penetration of Molly’s “mawkish pulp” into his own mouth. Bloom’s process of memory retrieval competes in sensuous urge with the Jamesian tip-​of-​the-​tongue experience at the “fringe.” No less stimulating to his taste buds than the memory itself of Molly’s comestible kiss, it tingles, it trembles, and for a while it refuses “to come.” The fringed sensation and its tendential correlate coalesce with each other via a unified stream of essentially identical sensory impressions, unmediated by the slightest evidence that Bloom is engaged in an introspective, self-​conscious effort of meaningful recollection. The Narrator’s introspective analysis of his fringed sensation is described by Proust at great length, but the sensation’s sensorimotor effects on him are not mimetically expressed to a similar extent; the sensory impression from the cup of tea earns greater relief from its resistant fringe-​character, in other words, than from its direct effect on the Narrator’s taste buds and sensori-​and psychomotor reactions. From this perspective, the Narrator’s fringed sensation presents itself as more purposefully cognitive in nature and intention than Bloom’s fringed sensation, which manifests itself in the phenomenological immediacy of sensori-​and psychomotor effects. In the terminology of Bruce Mangan, whose effort to bring James’s notion of the fringe up to date with current cognitive science is central to the following discussion, one could say that the fringe triggering the Narrator’s memory retrieval is captured and circumscribed in Proust’s novel as “a completely distinct domain of consciousness [with respect to its tendential correlate] with a completely distinct cognitive role.”23 James’s firm distinction between the fringe’s cognitive role and its tendential correlate’s condition as the object or the target of cognition is unequivocally expressed in his well-​known metaphor of the snowflake:  “As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing” (PP,

221

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

221

1.237). The snowflake crystal stands for the elusive fringe or feeling of tendency, while the water drop stands for the stable, substantive state. One can catch or comprehend the term or goal or meaning that the fringe adumbrates, but never the fringe itself, which is not an object but rather a function of intellectual cognition—​the manifestation of an emotion or a feeling foreshadowing the distinct manifestation of a previous experience. In the case of Proust’s Narrator, the fringe figures as the attractor of the emotional drive leading to an introspective, self-​conscious act of cognition—​which the Narrator describes, as we saw, in the analytical language of “demonstration” rather than in the mimetic and sensorimotor language of self-​expression.24 Clearly this distinction does not apply to Leopold Bloom’s alimentary emotions. In his case, the intimation and the manifestation of the retrieved memory are placed at the opposite ends of a common phenomenal continuum. The fringe intimation received from the “pungent” and “feety” flavor of Bloom’s midday snack at Davy Byrne’s pub occupies the low end in the continuum, being informed by merely culinary, sensorimotor emotions, when compared with the remembrance of both the penetration of Molly’s alimentary kiss and the joyful aftertaste of it. Yet Bloom’s inner speech treats both fringe and remembrance as belonging in a homogeneous class. However, a certain amount of purposeful memory work is required, if not of the character, of the reader of this passage, who shall perhaps miss at first the symptomatic repetition of the adjective “mawkish,” at line 851 in the description of the fringe experience and fifty-​six lines later, at line 907 in the description of the retrieved memory of Molly’s kiss. Used first to refer to the green cheese and then to the chewy pulp streaming out of Molly’s mouth, the adjective “mawkish” with its slightly mushy and repugnant overtone stands out in bright relief, like a provocative linguistic flag; it reminds the reader that the fringe attractor of Bloom’s joyful pause of conjugal reminiscence is akin to his penchant for excretory sensations—​such as the “fine tang of faintly scented urine” attached to his culinary preferences, his inhalation of “his own rising smell” in the outhouse after breakfast, and his kiss of the “mellow yellow furrow” of Molly’s “rump” before falling asleep (U, 45, 56, 604). If the reader were simply “established . . . in the thought of the principal personage,” to adopt Joyce’s own definition of Dujardin’s interior monologue, if he or she were simply apprised of “what this personage is doing and what is happening to him” by the “uninterrupted unrolling” of that thought,25 he or she would presumably share with the character the same amount of mental work and the same kind of emotional recognition. But this is obviously not the case. The reader is enabled to read through Bloom’s interior process and decode the inner logic behind the apparent serendipity of his joyful reminiscence. The urge, sexual and comestible at once, that informs the fringe of Bloom’s culinary enjoyment in the episode of remembrance under consideration is not simply dramatized or phenomenally imitated by Joyce. If it were, a partial recognition on Bloom’s part would entail an equally partial recognition on the reader’s part, as I have just suggested. Bloom’s culinary-​sexual urge is instead signaled by means of a linguistic allusion that, although sprouting out of Bloom’s stream of consciousness, clearly evades his intentional control. As I said, Bloom’s “thought in its dawning state” keeps

222

222

Gian Balsamo

the transitive and substantive stages of his comestible sensations (i.e., the intimation or adumbration or imminence perceived at the fringe of the sandwich’s taste on one hand and the tendential correlate of Molly’s kiss on the other) at the opposite ends of a common phenomenal continuum, constituted by a broad spectrum of sensory impressions and intimately homogeneous emotions. Joyce’s stream of consciousness, however, differentiates these two stages as distinct processes in the eyes of his reader, pertaining to distinct domains of consciousness and endowed with distinct cognitive roles.26 In Mangan’s cognitive terminology, Bloom’s fringed sensory impression functions as a “call command that initiates the conversion of information implied in the fringe into [the] detailed experience” of a remote memory (748). This experience refers back to an episode that occurred almost sixteen years earlier (on September 10, 1888) on Howth Head (U, 605), the day when Molly forced a chewed piece of seedcake into Bloom’s mouth while they kissed. This mouth-​ to-​mouth exchange was almost immediately followed by the seminal counterflow whereby Bloom impregnated Molly with their daughter Milly, who was born nine months later, on June 15, 1889 (U, 568). Bloom’s memory is one of erotic bliss and conjugal reproduction at once.27 Is this “call command” voluntary, as maintained in recent contributions to the cognitive study of fringed feelings, or utterly independent of Bloom’s control?28 In other words, has Bloom successfully undertaken a feat of memory work, comparable to Proust’s Narrator’s purposive probing of fringed feelings, or did the process of reminiscence occur without his intervention, as implicitly suggested by the passively sensuous stream of his comestible sensations? Before answering this question, we need to take a detour into Proust’s approach to fringed sensations as cognitive phenomena.

Narrated syllogisms and the passion for sensations in Proust Leopold Bloom apprehends the reminiscence of Molly’s kiss as the result of a smooth stream of comestible sensations informed, at the moment of (substantive) capture, by a matrix of contextual emotions that, although more intense and gratifying than those experienced at the (transitive) inception of the stream, are not heterogeneous with respect to them. By contrast, once Proust’s Narrator has assessed the fringed character of his comestible sensation in front of the cup of tea, he leaves expeditiously behind the sensation itself and devotes all his attention to the fringe and its tendential correlate, which he submits to a rigorous analysis. Unless truncated by failure or frustration, the Narrator’s frequent analyses of his fringes reach their conclusion when the feeling of tendency stops tingling and trembling, and, in the guise of a distinctly retrieved memory, comes home to him—​at which point the Narrator provides the reader with a further analysis, that of his intimately satisfied state, in contemplation of the retrospective instantiation of the meaningful cohesiveness of this retrieved moment in time. Most of the Narrator’s feats of memory retrieval are patterned according to the same purposive figure of mental rapprochement; one logical step at a time, the Narrator

223

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

223

gradually and relentlessly approaches the target or destination of his quest. In short, the Narrator’s conversion of the emotional fringe into the detailed experience of a retrieved memory consists of a narrated syllogism that is rather impervious to affective participation; the agitation of his emotional state is not mimetically represented. Such a stylistic procedure is paradoxical in that it shelters, behind the logical screen of a punctilious analysis, an anti-​intellectual experience of intense passion. As noticed by Genette, “the single apparent exception” to the Narrator’s persistently logical syllogisms is found in the first section of Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe II, precisely in “the last sentence of the Narrator’s dream at Balbec” (181). In waking up from this dream, the Narrator catches himself uttering a weird string of words, addressed apparently to his father:  “You know very well though that I  shall always live near her, stags, stags, Francis Jammes, fork.” Then he continues: “But already . . . I had come back to the surface, where the world of the living opens out; so, if I was still repeating ‘Francis Jammes, stags, stags,’ this sequence of words no longer held the limpid, logical meaning they had expressed so naturally for me only a moment before and which I  could no longer recall.”29 Genette remarks that the initial string of words, pronounced at the intersection between the Narrator’s dreaming and wide-​ awake consciousness, “contrasts with the perfectly articulate character of the words exchanged in [the] dream until then.” In the space of the dream, everything is . . . expressed by speeches with perfect linguistic coherence. It is at waking . . . that what was “limpid” and “logical” loses its transparency . . . The infralinguistic “hodgepodge” is thus in Proust never the speech of a supposedly alogical depth, even the depth of dream, but is only the means of representing . . . the gulf between two logics, each as distinct as the other (181).

A strong validation of Genette’s interpretation of the weird string of words (his “infralinguistic ‘hodgepodge’ ”) may be found in Proust’s thirteenth esquisse of Les Intermittences du Coeur, which contains a longer version of the dream. “But I shall live always by her side, you see, stags, stags, succinctly, Francis Jammes, stags, forks. . .” As I speak thus to my father, I see clearly my thought at the bottom of these words, and feeling my ardor grow more intense I repeat these words faster and faster, while my breathing rushes over till I am winded: “succinctly, Francis Jammes, fork, stags, to get hold of yourself.” Then I woke up. I say once more, as I get my wind back: “succinctly, Francis Jammes, forks, to get hold of yourself,” but I had already lost sight of that logic, so natural and urgent, that linked them to one another a minute earlier. All signification had evacuated this phrase, which had lost all its life and all its consistency.30

The above passage incorporates an example of the fringe experience called “semantic satiation.” Semantic satiation is experienced in consequence of the increasingly rapid repetition of a word or a string of words, until the “unobtrusive overtones of felt

224

224

Gian Balsamo

meaning begin to disappear, becoming evident in their absence.”31 The experience of semantic satiation provoked by the Narrator’s repetition of the “infralinguistic hodgepodge” precedes the fading away of the “logic” inherent in his dream. I maintained above that William James posits the fringe sensation as a domain of consciousness that is to be kept distinct from consciousness’s substantive states, and second, that Proust’s Narrator represents the passage from the former to the latter domain of consciousness in unambiguously syllogistic descriptions, distinguishing with accuracy the transitive from the substantive state. The novelty arising from the incoherence of the Narrator’s transition from the oneiric to the wide-​awake state consists in this: except for the transition itself, the Narrator represents even the oneiric condition by means of an unambiguously syllogistic description, endowed with its own cognitive role. This manner of representation is not a merely stylistic stratagem. As it clashes with James’ dismissive view of the significance of dreams,32 it anticipates the attention paid to the cognitive unconscious by current neuroscience; moreover, it grafts on this notion an oneiric component. The Narrator’s soliloquy posits the oneiric experience as a distinct domain of consciousness in its own right. The fact that our personal sensations are experienced in chaotic, inarticulate, even nightmarish forms in the course of an oneiric experience, lending themselves to senseless, infralinguistic expressions, such as the one spontaneously escaping the Narrator’s own lips on awakening, would therefore be irrelevant. Ultimately these sensations make as much sense as any other in the Narrator’s universe, and it is therefore as meaningful and comprehensible experiences that, syntactically speaking, they are described. But Proust is playing for even higher stakes. Before signaling his transition from the oneiric to the wide-​awake domain of consciousness by means of the infralinguistic phrase, the Narrator describes the experience of remembrance as organically enhanced by sleep. In this passage Proust stretches an emotion, that of grief, to its most extreme literal and anatomical consequences, while describing it, at the same time, in the most lucidly and soberly analytical terms. It is almost as though Proust meant to suggest that, when torn away from the wide-​awake restraints of intellect and will, the fringed sensation becomes the dominant expression of our sensitive apparatus; our sensory perceptions, narrowly defined, would hence be turned into subordinate aspects of the fringe. As we are going to see presently, despite its analytical and syllogistic rigor, the principal attractor of the Narrator’s stream of consciousness is a passion for sensations. After years of indifference to his grandmother’s death, the Narrator remembers her, first in a scene from the day of their arrival together at the sea resort of Balbec, then in a later scene, from the day when he hurt her with gratuitous cruelty; these memories come escorted by the shocking realization that his grandmother is dead. His past cruelty to her is now irremediable. The Narrator reexperiences this cruelty several times by relieving it in memory. He feels that the pain he inflicts on himself by recalling over and over the pain he inflicted on his grandmother may bring to the surface of his consciousness his more authentic self, one faithful to the memory of his grandmother. But “the ingenuity of the mind in safeguarding us from pain” tells him she is watching

225

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

225

his remorse benevolently from the heavens. The Narrator knows that this is a pious travesty devised by his own intellect, and seeks refuge from it in sleep.33 This would appear as a highly inconsequential move for such a rigorously syllogistic reporter of conscious experiences, were it not for the fact, just discussed, that the Proustian narrative represents three fundamental domains of consciousness—​ substantive state, transitive state, and oneiric state—​ as logically and analytically representable. It is in the condition of sleep that, his intellect and will having lost their habitual supremacy, the Narrator is enabled to enter into genuine intimacy with his emotions; his bloodstream grows turgid with the pain of the recollection of his grandmother. The “dark currents” of his bloodstream carry the Narrator across the otherworldly Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and bring him in full sight of the dead. I have pointed out elsewhere that the Narrator’s crossing of the Lethe reverses the direction followed by the souls in Virgil’s underworld; these souls must cross into oblivion in order to be reborn into another body, while the Narrator brings his lost “self ” (the self that existed in a condition of “mutual predestination,” of reciprocal fusion with his grandmother) back to life by crossing the river backward, into remembrance.34 Unmoored from the control of intellect and will, the Narrator’s memory and anatomy become one and the same thing. A repertory of remembrances that would normally be impervious to his wide-​awake conscience fills his sleeping body like multiply convoluted intestines. A fugitive from the realm of rational deliberation, the Narrator navigates his own viscera to encounter the shade buried within them—​the way the epic visitors to the underworld crossed the underground rivers forbidden to the living. The Narrator describes his heartbeats as caught in a spiral of reciprocal influence with the unraveling of his mournful reminiscences. These disordered and fluctuating heartbeats may engender unbearable anguish, panic, physical pain, or on the contrary a condition of serene comfort, but the Narrator emerges from the dream with a crystal-​clear description of this experience. His conscious experience of his own body has become, for a time, entirely mnemonic. Reluctant to reduce the fate of his grandmother to the materialism of physiological decomposition or the transcendentalism of spiritual immortality, he engages in the demolition of this antinomy by refuting the duality of his own body and mind, and incorporating the mental and the physical experience of her remembrance in one organismic whole. The Narrator’s experience is based on an original model of the cognitive experience undergone in dreams. This experience is predicated on the oneiric condition being treated as a distinct domain of consciousness, and on the sensory apparatus functioning, in the oneiric state, not only as a conveyor of sensations but also as a fringe-​driven source of emotions. In my opinion the Narrator’s dream conveys a convenient trope for the phenomenon of the “cognitive unconscious,” to which much attention is being devoted nowadays by cognitive theorists. There seems to be emerging of late a widespread agreement that the study of unconsciously cognitive factors may provide a satisfactory explanation for the mediating processes “between stimulus and response.”35 Of particular importance to my argument is the fact that James’s fringe experience is included among these unconsciously cognitive factors by Mangan. To justify this

226

226

Gian Balsamo

inclusion, Mangan adapts the notion of the cognitive unconscious to James’s intuition that the fringe is liminal with respect to consciousness, consisting as it does of the conscious feeling of an unconscious phenomenon:  the fringed feeling subsists in consciousness as long as one has not consciously grasped the character of the previously experienced sensation that the fringe points at—​and no longer than that. Mangan defines the fringe as the manifestation of a genetic endowment enabling human beings to access diverse compartments of consciousness, endowed with diversely stored sorts of information: The . . . fringe experience appears to be the result of a biological adaptation—​a trade-​off strategy that is all but mandated by the remarkably limited capacity of consciousness to articulate experience. The fringe is apparently a device to radically condense context information in consciousness and in a sense finesse the limited capacity of consciousness . . . [It is] a distinctive domain of consciousness with a completely distinct cognitive role . . . The fringe represents some context information directly in consciousness, albeit in an extremely condensed form.36

Fringe sensations point us in the direction we want to take, yet we are not conscious of this direction until we have concretely taken it. According to this view, fringe sensations function as call commands that initiate the conversion of unconscious and semiconscious information into conscious information. Their phenomenology clearly indicates that the antinomy of body and mind, with all the ancillary variations of it that inform the history of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, rhetorics, neurophysiology, and even medical anatomy, is dramatically ineffectual when it comes to capturing the codetermination of effects displayed in the daily operations of our organism. The Narrator’s memory is a trigger of affections and a vasodilator too; and neither effect is indifferent to the manifestation of the other. This discussion comes to our aid in giving a direct answer to the question that was left in abeyance above, as to whether Leopold Bloom engages in active memory work in the course of his midday snack. The foregoing discussion brings to the fore that this question was poorly formulated, reflective as it is of the rigid alternative between a conscious or deliberate and an unconscious or deterministically conditioned sort of mnemonic act.

Memory and embodied intentionality in Joyce It is now time to tackle the question concerning Leopold Bloom’s midday snack at Davy Byrne’s pub and the sort of memory work, if any, in which he engages. I intend to argue that there occurs in Bloom’s memory work an organismic codetermination of effects, such that Bloom is actively engaged in a mnemonic act that he is not immediately aware of. While the soliloquy of Proust’s Narrator focuses on the rendition of the introspective efforts that accompany (and provoke, to an extent) the unraveling of his retrieved memory, Bloom’s inner monologue focuses on the expressive representation

227

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

227

of the sensori-​and psychomotor effects that accompany (and provoke, to an extent) the unraveling of his retrieved memory. To the extent that they are both illustrating a relevant phenomenological aspect of the mnemonic experience, and more broadly speaking of the experience of self-​awareness, both Proust’s and Joyce’s narrative techniques deserve in this case the Jamesian label of “stream of consciousness.” As she kisses Bloom on Howth Head, Molly is chewing a seedcake, sighing endearingly, and pushing a mouthful of chewed food into Bloom’s mouth (a kaleidoscopic figure of impregnation, as I  have pointed out elsewhere); at the same time, Bloom penetrates her womb and impregnates it. “All of Molly’s side of this complex equation is expressed by the image of her ‘mumbl[ing of a] mawkish pulp’ into Bloom’s eager mouth.”37 Symmetrically, Bloom’s blending mastication of wine-​soaked bread, mustard, and “mawkish cheese” at Davy Byrne’s pub binds his present culinary sensations with his recollection of his and Molly’s mutual penetration on Howth Head. Karen Lawrence is correct, but only partially, when she posits that Bloom is led to the recollection of the episode on Howth Head by the liquefaction of the words of his interior monologue, a mental phenomenon provoked by the mouth-​watering liquefaction “occurring in [his mouth while] he tongues the soft pulpy mixture” of his midday snack. As enzymatic transformation “liquefies the bodies of food,” and the taste in his mouth transfigures the mental diction of his inner monologue, Bloom is induced to attach a grander than gustatory significance to the analogously pungent sensation that his taste buds enjoyed sixteen years earlier on Howth Head. What he remembers is love-​in-​taste, or taste transfigured and spiritualized—​or “transcorporealized,” as Lawrence phrases it—​into love.38 I submit, to complement the irresistible lyricism of Lawrence’s deterministic scenario, that the amorous remembrance of love-​in-​taste has been present to Bloom’s consciousness all along in the guise of a fringe emotion. The predicative attribution of the adjective “mawkish” to the gorgonzola cheese activates Bloom’s recollection of the “mawkish pulp” in Molly’s mouth. However, it is arguable that sixteen years earlier the chewed seedcake deposited the first sediment of this “mawkish” sensation in the folds of Bloom’s memory. I now intend to show by what direct and what circuitous means Joyce outlines the function of this term, “mawkish,” as the magnetic attractor of Bloom’s culinary decisions at Davy Byrne’s pub on June 16, 1904. From a neuroscientific viewpoint, the term “mawkish” may be seen as permanently installed in Bloom’s affective vocabulary, having acquired the status of a mental endowment of epigenetic origin, endowed with the sort of autonoetic (i.e., self-​knowing) signification that bestows on it the three predicates of feeling highly personal to Bloom, unquestionably veridical, and permanently positioned in the chronology of his past experience.39 This viewpoint supports my argument that even before entering Davy Byrne’s pub, Bloom is already nurturing the unconscious or semiconscious intention to stimulate his own taste buds with the comforts of a “mawkish” sensation. “Seems to a secret touch telling me memory” (U, 144):  as Bloom reflects on the apparently automatic and effortless effect of mastication on his experience of recollection, the reader is made aware of a more ambiguous feedback linking the

228

228

Gian Balsamo

distinct functions of conservative transformation intrinsic to the digestive and mnemonic apparatuses. The trope according to which both stomach and memory function in a ruminative regime of creative repetition has a long history, which may be traced back to the Bible.40 However fond of the “language of rumination,” which he adopts in Enarrationes in Psalmos 46.1 and in De Trinitate 11.7, St. Augustine condemns this trope as misleading and ineffective. One cannot store memories as a cow stores its cud, he argues in Book X of the Confessions. Brian Stock has concisely explained this view of Augustine’s in Augustine the Reader:  “If our past emotions are placed in a mental ‘belly,’ we could experience the same emotions again, just as a cow, on chewing its cud, tastes the food that it has already swallowed. The uniqueness of human emotional recollections consists in our metacognitive awareness that the present reiterates the past without reduplicating it.”41 Bloom’s remembrance of the episode on Howth Head contradicts Augustine’s opinion. His remembrance is a powerful reduplication rather than a weak reiteration, insofar as, in the economy of Bloom’s self-​representation, it duplicates the past in the sensori-​and psychomotor immediacy of its autobiographic significance. One could say that there is something Aristotelian, rather than Augustinian, to Bloom’s remembrance. (In his commentary on Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia, Averroes argues that in recollecting an experience, one may feel again the pain or pleasure of that experience.42) As an effect of this recollection, Bloom’s present conjugal and personal circumstances are led to hinge on his past—​noticeably, on one specific affective recombination of past occurrences. This is why his present condition, although burdened with the prospect of Molly’s estrangement, comes to acquire new existential sense to him. This is the Proustian moment of conversion, the Proustian “escape from the present,” whereby Joyce’s Ulysses subverts Cartesian ontology: Bloom memorat ergo est43 (Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, 450). Before reaching Davy Byrne’s pub for his midday snack, Bloom enters the Burton restaurant as though in a hurry, primarily in order to escape the oppression of the “warm human plumpness settled . . . on his brain” (U, 138); this intimate impression of Molly’s sensuality has tormented him all day long together with his constant awareness of his wife’s and Blazes Boylan’s adulterous assignation in the afternoon. But he leaves the restaurant almost instantly, disgusted by the sight of too many men “wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food.” These greedy eaters, he feels, are as vociferous as Homer’s “famished ghosts” were made by the drinking of “smokinghot” blood (U, 138, 140). This sight in the Burton restaurant brings back memories of his second-​born child, Rudy, who was born on December 29, 1893, and died eleven days later, on January 9, 1894 (U, 605). Karen Lawrence has argued that this cannibalistic scene induces Bloom to the degrading identification of “Rudy as dead matter and . . . dead meat.” As he hurries out of the Burton Restaurant, Bloom would come face to face with “[Rudy’s] unredeemed and unredeemable corpse.”44 If Lawrence’s funereal and materialistic diagnosis were unequivocally correct, though, one would be left wondering why Bloom does not carry this gnawing grief with him to Davy Byrne’s; he carries with him instead, as we are going to see presently, the cathartic recollection of Rudy’s conception, almost eleven years before. Bloom’s Proustian experience of “escape from the present” begins with the words:  “Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck,” and ends 22 lines later with the

229

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

229

words: “Stuck, the flies buzzed” (U, 144). The “framing device” of the two copulating flies stuck to each other on the windowpane, which Bloom watches at the beginning and end of his mawkish recollection of the Howth Head episode, has been unanimously understood as depressive and counterclimactic.45 Karen Lawrence has defined the image of the two flies as “the antithesis of the erotic moment [on Howth Head which Bloom] has just remembered.”46 Understood as such a deflating factor, this device discourages the critic from devoting proper attention to the catalogue of episodic memories intrinsic to the image of the two flies. As I explain in Joyce’s Messianism, this image frames Bloom’s recollection of Milly’s conception with his recollection of the spring day in 1893 when he and Molly conceived their second child, Rudy: The scene of copulating dogs, in their notorious position of enervating immobility, suggestive of a “stuck condition” (the male “up in [the bitch’s] behind in the middle of the naked street,” as Molly puts it in her monologue [640]), was rather ordinary in the streets of European cities at the beginning of the 20th Century. It is while she observes the two dogs that Molly invites Leopold to “[g]‌ive [her] a touch.” She is “dying for it,” as she puts it. And that’s “[h]ow life begins,” as Bloom himself will put it, when he remembers the event in the “Hades” episode (74). The diction and the description of the scene suggest that Leopold gives Molly “a touch” from behind, while she keeps standing at the window and they both look at two dogs in their similar position and predicament (which interpretation explains, incidentally, why Bloom knows that the prison sergeant was “grinning up” [79]).47

The mnemonic reach of the passage under discussion must be realized in all its amplitude. As Bloom snacks on a gorgonzola sandwich, the memory of an event that occurred sixteen years earlier on Howth Head (U, 605), correlated with the memory of the parturient consequences of this event nine months afterwards (June 15, 1889:  Milly’s birthday), is framed by the memory of the sexual intercourse at the window that led to Rudy’s conception, eleven years earlier, correlated with both the memory of its parturient consequence nine months afterwards (December 29, 1893:  Rudy’s birth day) and the memory of its mournful sequel eleven days later (January 9, 1894: Rudy’s death day). Bloom’s decision to present his taste buds with the pungent sensations from gorgonzola cheese, mustard, wine, etc. depends on the mental flavor of a word, “mawkish,” to which his unconscious attaches qualia that resist the constraints of narrowly literal reference or allegorical reduction—​a mental word capable of autonoetic signification. I referred earlier to Karen Lawrence’s observation that the episode of cannibalism at the Burton restaurant induces Bloom to the degrading identification of “Rudy as dead matter.” But this is not Bloom’s first encounter of the day with the funereal memory of his son. Bloom experienced a previous encounter with the memory of Rudy’s corpse (together with that of his own mother) in the morning, during Patrick Dignam’s funeral at the Prospect cemetery—​particularly at the moment when he thought about the northwest corner location of the plot that he acquired in this same cemetery, on the

230

230

Gian Balsamo

side of the village of Finglas, for the graves of himself and his own family: “Mine [i.e., my burial spot] over there towards Finglas, the plot I bought. Mamma, poor mamma, and little Rudy” (U, 91). While he prepares to take leave of Dignam’s corpse, Bloom envisages the grounds of the cemetery as being fertilized by “corpsemanure”: “a tallowy kind of a cheesy” substance swarming with “a devil of a lot of maggots,” he reflects (U, 89). Joyce’s linguistic subtlety reaches here one of its proverbial pinnacles, and so do his proverbially severe demands on his reader’s alertness to oblique signals. Bloom’s “corpsemanure” with its maggots invites one to trace a clear-​ cut correspondence between Molly’s “mawkish pulp,” Bloom’s “mawkish” gorgonzola, and the matter of bodily decomposition as a breeding ground for maggots. The key word is not so much the predicate “cheesy,” which could be related to Bloom’s snack at Davy Byrne’s pub (but not to Molly’s seedcake), but rather the word “maggots.” And again, not so much because maggots belong to the generic group of flies or flying insects, a copulating pair of which affects Bloom’s memory at Davy Byrne’s (none of which, though, has a relevant role in the kiss on Howth Head), but because the Middle English word for maggot is “mawke,” from which derives the definition of a slightly mushy and repellent substance as “mawkish.”48 In the unfolding of Bloom’s densely articulated remembrance, the triangular interaction and reciprocal dependence between the memory of Molly’s “mawkish” pulp in Ulysses’s eighth episode, the consumption of his “mawkish” gorgonzola cheese in the same episode, and the experience of his next-​of-​kin’s corpses as maggot-​or “mawke”-​breeding manure in the sixth episode is chronologically originated in the morning, at the cemetery; yet, it can only be reconstructed backward by the reader through a linguistic association, thanks to the qualia which, Joyce’s text intimates, link each corner of the triangle to the other two. Around noon Bloom conceives of decomposition as “mawkish”; around 1:30  p.m. he orders a combination of bread, cheese, and wine whose “mawkish” flavor he could have easily anticipated; a few minutes later the impact of this flavor on his taste buds evokes in turn the “mawkish” kiss that closes this mnemonic circuit and, at once, inaugurated its possibility fifteen years and nine months before. Something analogous to the organismic remembrance experienced in sleep by Proust’s Narrator occurs in Bloom’s chewing or ruminative manner of remembrance. The compact between Bloom and Molly was not sealed on Howth Head; their lovemaking on the promontory was the compounded result of Bloom’s youthful, awkward eagerness and Molly’s manipulative narcissism. Rudy’s tragic death, ten years and five months later, bestows on their relationship the cohesion whose strength neither of them would have been capable of conceiving or aiming at. Rudy’s death transfigures both Bloom’s and Molly’s mental constitution by making their marriage infrangible—​and this despite Molly’s infidelities, and despite as well her and Bloom’s prolonged interval, since Rudy’s death, of limited sexual intimacy. In 1907 Robert Hertz, an anthropologist who was active in Paris at the time of the writing of Ulysses, published a study of “endocannibalism” or funerary necrophagy, arguing that this primitive practice enabled “the living [to] integrate to their own substance the vitality and the special qualities which resided in the flesh of the deceased.”49 In Bloom’s recollection at Davy Byrne’s pub, both his midday meal and his remembrance

231

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

231

of Molly’s nourishing kiss acquire a gently endocannibalistic connotation. His wide-​ awake condition does not perform according to some medieval view of the integrated balance of intellect, memory, and will. Most of the time, the baggage of reminiscences carried by his stream of consciousness overflows the limited vessel of his understanding and purposiveness, and functions in a regime of pure, unalloyed emotionality, similar in this to the world of sleep of Proust’s Narrator. By incorporating itself to his digestive apparatus, the stream of reminiscences inaugurated by the sandwich and the glass of wine induces Bloom to position himself at the receiving end, retrospectively at Davy Byrne’s and prospectively on Howth Head, of the precious matter of Rudy’s mawkish decomposition. On June 16, 1904, the distinctive cohesiveness and meaningfulness of the episode on Howth Head from 1888 is first adumbrated and then captured by Bloom’s conscious attention through the mediation of his taste buds.

Conclusion Proust’s and Joyce’s writings display such a depth in the penetration of the human mind (and the human organism as well, broadly speaking) that they deserve better than being treated as ephemeral derivations or confirmations of the state of the scientist’s art. In fact, I maintain that Joyce’s and Proust’s writings can contribute to the design of future cognitive research by broadening, for instance, the time-​space horizon of the phenomena to be causally related in the study of human consciousness—​just as our preceding discussion has shown the distinctively impressive ways by which both these writers broadened such horizons. However different in style, both Proust’s and Joyce’s stream of consciousness intimate that personal history tends to manifest itself as organismic rather than strictly mental. In their fictions, personal history straddles the divide between conscious and unconscious recall, as well as that between sensori-​and psychomotor vestige on one hand and meaningfully mental cohesiveness on the other. All our discussion of salient passages from Proust and Joyce was based on the principle that it is through silences and omissions that the most insightful literary texts speak most loudly, which is a way of closing the circle of our reading by claiming that well-​versed literary critics can do more and better than assessing the influence of science over art, or worse, resigning themselves, as many cognitive literary theorists seem to do nowadays, to derivatively applying this or that tool of cognitive science to literary discourse. This chapter is meant to show that literary critics are uniquely equipped to make the silences and omissions of the insightful literary text audible to those cognitive scientists who are genuinely inclined to listen to it.

Notes 1 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.246. 2 Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 166. Whenever Proust’s writings are referenced by their French title, the English translation is mine.

232

232

Gian Balsamo

3 See, e.g., John F. Kihlstrom, “The Cognitive Unconscious” and Bernard J. Baars, “The Fundamental Role of Context: Unconscious Shaping of Conscious Information,” both in Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness, ed. Bernard J. Baars et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 4 Simon Chu and John J. Downes, “Long Live Proust: The Odor-​Cued Autobiographical Memory Bump,” Cognition 75, no. 2 (2000): B41–​50. 5 Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 468. 6 Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, ed. Pierre Clarac and D’Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 399. For the definition of “qualia,” see, e.g., Gerald M. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 10. 7 Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, 450. 8 Russell Epstein, “Consciousness, Art, and the Brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust,” Consciousness and Cognition 13, no. 2 (2004): 219. 9 Kirsten Shepherd-​Barr and Gordon M. Shepherd, “Madeleines and Neuromodernism: Reassessing Mechanisms of Autobiographical Memory in Proust,” a/​b: Auto/​Biography Studies 13, no. 1 (1998): 42. 10 Epstein, “Consciousness, Art, and the Brain,” 21. 11 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 179. 12 The anecdotes of James Joyce’s discovery of Edouard Dujardin, author of Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887), as the “announcer of interior speech” are too well known to be discussed here. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 520; David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (New York: Viking, 1993), 47–​8; Genette, Narrative Discourse, 180. The term “interior monologue” was introduced in literary circles by Valery Larbaud, the first critic of James Joyce’s Ulysses, who “borrow[ed the] term from Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis (1893)”; see Ellmann, James Joyce, 519. 13 Morris Beja, James Joyce: A Literary Life (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 67. 14 Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 49. 15 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 174n. 18. 16 Epstein, “Consciousness, Art, and the Brain, 218–​19. 17 Beja, James Joyce, 66–​7. 18 Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 43–​4. 19 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 142–​4. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as U. 20 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 174n. 18. 21 The feeling of “imminence” is another Jamesian attribute of the fringed sensation. See PP, 1.634. 22 Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 47. 23 Bruce Mangan, “The Conscious ‘Fringe’: Bringing William James Up to Date,” in Baars et al., Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 743. 24 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 179. 25 Joyce’s illustration of Dujardin’s method is found in Valery Larbaud, Préface, in Les Lauriers sont coupés, ed. Edouard Dujardin (Paris: A. Messein, 1924), 7. Joyce gave this description to Larbaud himself in the course of a conversation described in Ellmann, James Joyce, 519.

233

William James's Stream of Consciousness and the River of the Unconscious

233

26 Mangan, “The Conscious ‘Fringe,’ ” 743. 27 See Gian Balsamo, Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the Messianic Self (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 103. For a detailed analysis of this episode in Davy Byrne’s pub, see 93–​107. 28 See Mangan, “The Conscious ‘Fringe,’ ” 748. 29 Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005), 160. 30 Marcel Proust, Esquisse 13, À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 3.1046. 31 Mangan, “The Conscious ‘Fringe,’ ” 741. See also Elizabeth Severance and Margaret Floy Washburn, “The Loss of Associative Power in Words after Long Fixation,” American Journal of Psychology 18, no. 2 (1907): 182–​6. 32 As a scientist, James was dismissive of the significance of dreams. He was of the opinion that “the dream holds true . . . in one [entire] half of the universe,” but that half—​the oneiric half, that is—​was to him a supernatural universe whose reality may only be measured in terms of its degrees of inferiority with respect to the “real world’s nucleus” of the things perceived by the senses, which he called “practical realities” (PP, 2.923, 2.923n. 10). 33 Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 156–​7. 34 Gian Balsamo, “The Place of the Soul in Augustine and Proust: Amorous Memory versus Neuroscience,” The Journal of Religion 88, no. 4 (2008): 455. 35 See Arthur R. Reber, “Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge” and Howard Shevrin and Scott Dickman, “The Psychological Unconscious: A Necessary Assumption for All Psychological Theory?” both in Baars et al., Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 623, 554. 36 Mangan, “The Conscious ‘Fringe,’ ” 742–​3, 747. 37 Balsamo, Joyce’s Messianism, 103–​4. 38 Karen Lawrence, “Legal Fiction or Pulp Fiction in ‘Lestrygonians,’ ” in Ulysses—​En-​ Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes, ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 108–​9. 39 Endel Tulving, “Memory and Consciousness,” in Baars et al., Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 581. 40 See Ezekiel 3:1–​3 and Revelation 10:9–​11. 41 Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-​Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 219. 42 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69. 43 Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, 450. 44 Lawrence, “Legal Fiction or Pulp Fiction,” 105–​6. 45 Balsamo, Joyce’s Messianism, 105. 46 Lawrence, “Legal Fiction or Pulp Fiction,” 108–​9. 47 Balsamo, Joyce’s Messianism, 104–​5. 48 Ibid., 101–​2. 49 Robert Hertz, “Contribution à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort,” Année sociologique, 1ier série, tome X (1907): 23–​4. Reprinted in R. Hertz, Sociologie religieuse et folklore (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970); my translation.

234

235

14

“That Skilful but Slow-​Moving Arranger”: Habit in James and Proust Lisi Schoenbach

We can connect William James and Marcel Proust in two ways:  first, through a surprisingly dense web of historical and biographical associations; and second, through the intellectual and aesthetic affinities that defined each thinker’s work. This chapter begins by briefly tracing the complex biographical networks that bound the two thinkers to one another, but devotes most of its efforts to teasing out the philosophical affinities that connected them. In particular, it gives sustained attention to their respective theorizations of habit. Reading James and Proust together will emphasize not only the depth and breadth of James’s contributions to modernist thought, but also the significance of Proust’s contributions to philosophy, and in particular his unexpected but significant contribution to the pragmatist project. It is not at all difficult to make the connection between Proust and James by way of two much better-​known and well-​established intellectual friendships: the one between Proust and Henri Bergson, and that between Bergson and James. Bergson was Proust’s second cousin by marriage (Bergson married Proust’s cousin Louise Neuberger in 1891, with Proust serving as best man at the wedding), and the philosopher served as an influence and a mentor to the younger novelist throughout his career. Roger Shattuck and Walter Benjamin, among many other critics, have argued that Bergsonian philosophy had a direct influence on Proust’s great novel, and in particular that Bergson’s mémoire pure served as a model for Proust’s mémoire involontaire.1 Although Proust himself disputed the claim that he himself was a “Bergsonian” novelist, the two thinkers undoubtedly shared a number of central preoccupations, with, among other subjects, memory, experience, and the passage of time.2 As to the relationship between William James and Henri Bergson, the two philosophers shared a warm and mutually influential friendship and correspondence from the 1890s until William James’s death in 1910. They read each other’s work with interest and met several times in person during James’s trips to Europe. Like the relationship between Bergson and Proust, the intellectual kinship between James and Bergson has been widely noted and discussed, beginning with James’s biographer, Ralph Barton Perry, who devoted two full chapters of The Thought and Character of William James to James’s connection to and correspondence with Bergson, characterizing their mutual “affection and esteem” as a “remarkable example of friendship without

236

236

Lisi Schoenbach

submergence of individual differences.”3 James brought Bergson’s work repeatedly to the attention of an Anglo-​American audience, devoting an entire lecture in A Pluralistic Universe to the subject of “Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism,” and helping with the English translation of Bergson’s Creative Evolution. Bergson, in turn, wrote the introduction to the 1911 French translation of James’s Pragmatism and quoted James’s writings extensively in his own work. Proust’s own intense philosophical interests led him to read Bergson’s works avidly and to stay up to date with the key philosophical journals, and he would surely have been cognizant of pragmatism’s larger importance in European philosophy. In other words, even without tracing out the many significant connections between James and Bergson or between Bergson and Proust, we may find it more than likely that a serious devotee of Bergson’s philosophy and contemporary philosophy more generally (as Proust was) would have read, at the very least, Pragmatism, the slim volume in which James crystallized his philosophy, and whose French translation had appeared with an introduction by Bergson. Connections between James and Proust are easy to make even in the absence of biographical information—​the two thinkers wrote on similar subjects, at roughly the same moment; shared key influences; and tended toward philosophical approaches that emphasized memory, experience, time, and emotion over rigid systems of logic. When we read one of them with the other in mind, the connections sometimes appear to be downright uncanny—​as in the moment in “The Stream of Thought” chapter of The Principles of Psychology (PP) when James reflects on “the strange difference between an experience tasted for the first time and the same experience recognized as familiar, as having been enjoyed before, though we cannot name it or say where or when? A tune, an odor, a flavor [or, one might venture to add, the taste of a little fluted cake] sometimes carry this inarticulate feeling of their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that we are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power.”4 Though it would be difficult to prove that Proust’s novel is a 3,000-​page-​long expansion of this single moment in James, such a moment certainly captures the depth of the kinship that existed between the two thinkers. When we look closely at their respective bodies of work, the connections become still more specific, concrete, and powerful. To draw such connections we need not depend on the (very strong) possibility that Proust read James. Rather, we need only take both thinkers’ intellectual contributions seriously and consider the range of strikingly similar philosophical problems to which they each devoted their respective careers. At the center of these philosophical problems lies the question of habit. For both thinkers, poised at the transition between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the question of habit was far more complex than it had appeared to previous generations of thinkers, or than it would to future generations. Philosophers since Aristotle had argued that character is built on repetitive actions, making proper conduct and behavior the key to moral life, and nineteenth-​century philosophers turned to a similar notion of habit as a way to affirm morality and maintain social order. The emergence of modernism turned this discourse on its head, as thinkers from Walter Pater to Victor Shklovsky made habit synonymous with deadness, routinization, and

237

"That Skilful but Slow-Moving Arranger"

237

intellectual ruts. The modernists, especially in their avant-​garde manifestoes, exhorted artists and thinkers of their moment to “make it new,” in Ezra Pound’s phrase—​to throw off the shackles of habit and burst forth unfettered into a brave new world. In contradistinction to this simple understanding of habit, Proust and James each offered a dialectical vision of habit, founded on the notion of habit’s inescapable and ubiquitous nature. Linking habit’s role in regulating the most invisible and fundamental physical actions, from breathing to digestion, to its larger intellectual and behavioral incarnations, these thinkers acknowledged the impossibility of escaping from habit, and stressed equally the danger of living without properly established habits and the danger of a life lived entirely in habit’s thrall. Through their treatments of habit, James and Proust also offered strikingly similar responses to the ubiquitous modernist problem of sweeping, radical, and transformative change. Their vision of the relationship between individual behaviors and the social transformations in which those behaviors took place were each founded on a careful, even a minute, attention to daily, repetitive, and accumulative behaviors. In the modern context, habit could no longer serve as a straightforward antidote to social upheaval, as it had done in the nineteenth century; but for neither thinker did it signify, on the contrary, as it did for many modernists, a past that was long since dead and ready to be discarded. Habit was at once the closest ally and the worst enemy of social, artistic, and personal transformation; it was at the same time the key to dynamic, positive change and the most dogged safeguard against it. For both thinkers, as well, lifelong struggles to regulate their daily lives—​and a conviction that proper habits would enable creative thought—​meant that the question of habit was more than a merely philosophical one. Because it lies at the heart of both thinkers’ work, habit also touches on many of the other key ideas and issues that connect Proust and James. As I show in the sections that follow, habit as a concept is inseparable from, for instance, Proust’s notion of involuntary memory, or James’s discussions of perception and association. For both thinkers, a close analysis of the role of habit is also crucial to a deeper examination of lived experience and the degree to which, as James puts it in A Pluralistic Universe, “reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it.”5

Habit in James Habit is the hidden heart of pragmatist philosophy—​a preoccupation shared by all the major pragmatist philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. For James, as for Proust, the significance of habit was intensely personal as well as philosophical. As more than one of his biographers has noted, he struggled throughout his life with depression and found in the concept of habit a sort of intellectual life preserver as well as a way of articulating and understanding his own psychological struggles.6 If some of his work on habit has a prescriptive, finger-​wagging quality to it, we may trace this to James’s sensitivity, to his acute sense of his own failings, and

238

238

Lisi Schoenbach

to his lifelong fear of succumbing to lassitude, inertia, and depression. And, despite the judgmental and prescriptive attitude that permeates some of his writing on habit, “James on habit,” as Robert Richardson observes, “is not the smug advice of some martinet, but the too-​late-​learned, too-​little-​self-​knowing, pathetically earnest, hard-​ won crumbs of practical advice offered by a man who really had no habits—​or who lacked the habits he most needed.”7 James’s discussion of habit in The Principles of Psychology is straightforward: “Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed” (PP, 1.119). Yet this mundane term takes on global importance in his work, functioning as a link between the psychological and the social. The concept of habit finds its origins, and its clearest expression in the actions of a single human body and an individual consciousness. James emphasizes “the nervous system” as the seat from which habit exerts its pull. The connection of the bodily and the conceptual, of daily behaviors with larger modes of thought and dominant social structures, makes habit a particularly flexible term, linking the psychological with the philosophical, the physical with the intellectual, and the individual with the collective. Habit is the very ground of our existence, as James implies when he writes that we are “mere walking bundles of habits” (PP, 1.130), or “stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.”8 But although James’s discussion of habit begins with the physiological and the merely descriptive, there is also a powerfully prescriptive aspect to his discussion. The discussion of habit in The Principles of Psychology is filled with exhortations. Some are general words of wisdom: “The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . . . For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague” (PP, 1.126). Others are oddly, ominously specific: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test (PP, 1.130).

Should we wonder what is to be gained by following James’s recommendations, the same chapter on habit offers a number of vivid cautionary tales about the dangerous effects of developing wrong, or inconsistent, habits. James’s greatest scorn is reserved for the unfortunate soul who finds himself without any habits at all:  “There is no more contemptible type of human character,” James sneers, “than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed” (PP, 1.129). Critics have imagined this figure as a veiled insult aimed at his brother Henry, but it is equally possible to read it as a description of James’s own worst fears about himself. The image is an important one in any case because it captures the urgency of developing good

239

"That Skilful but Slow-Moving Arranger"

239

habits, at least before “the age of thirty, [when] the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again” (PP, 1.126). This is important, one should add, not only for personal happiness and productivity, but also because habits enable truly creative, artistic, and even revolutionary thought. James considers the idea that we could ever leave habit entirely behind a fantasy that depends on an oversimplified and severely constrained idea of what habit really is. Habit, by definition, endures:  in the continuities of our personhood, and in the basic mechanics of survival, such as breathing, chewing, and walking. Indeed, daily habits, far from being the enemy of change, are for James the prerequisite for truly creative thought. This is true in several ways:  first, people are complexes of habits, and it is impossible to change all of them at once. Rather than distracting ourselves by disrupting all of our habits, argues James, we should commit as much as possible to habit so that our thoughts can become more creative and experimental: “The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work” (PP, 1.126). Further, even our “higher powers of mind” are aided by habit, for they resolve themselves into new patterns and forms almost immediately. James cites concert pianists to support this claim, but we might consider a range of artists, from painters to dancers, in order to imagine the thousands on thousands of conventionalized, repetitive behaviors (scales, pliés, figure studies, and so forth) that are the necessary underpinnings of the the greatest—​and sometimes the most radically experimental—​ creative accomplishments. The key to understanding habit’s dynamism in James lies in the notion of plasticity. Plasticity helps us undersand how habit can be at once “the enormous fly-​wheel of society, its most precious conservtive agent” (PP, 1.125), and at the same time the hidden but most vital component of meaningful change. “Plasticity,” explains James, “means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once” (PP, 110). Plasticity allows us to yield to the onrush of change as a sapling bends in a gale-​force wind: without habit we would be blown flat and would never spring upright again. But an excess of rigid, unchanging habits poses an equal danger. Without some flexibility we run the risk of snapping under the pressures of change. The idea of plasticity is a nod to the necessity of change, and it also helps us understand the breadth of habit’s significance. Lest it appear that Jamesian habit is intrinsically conservative or that it serves merely as a bulwark against change, it is worth noting that James very explicitly disavowed such a notion throughout his career. In Talks to Teachers (TT), he sketched the processes through which “new habits can be launched”: New habits can be launched, . . . on condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements. Now 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; and if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up in him a new or regenerate “nature.” (TT, 53)

240

240

Lisi Schoenbach

James, then, for all his prescriptions about proper behaviors, takes an extremely complex view of the problem of habit. This is no simple self-​help technique or formula for personal fulfillment, nor is it merely a bleak warning about the intransigence of the status quo and the impossibility of change. Rather it is framed as a response to potential crises and to “critical and revolutionary experiences.” And, as in Proust, those disruptions to habit and the regenerated and revised habits that follow are just as important as the regular routines and beneficial daily exertions that prepare us for what is to come.

Habit in Proust Proust’s analysis of habit’s role in change over time is the most thorough and exhaustive treatment of the subject outside pragmatist philosophy itself. Though the discourse of habit has a history stretching back to Aristotle by way of Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and David Hume, the similarities between the Proustian and the Jamesian versions of this discourse are remarkable, as are the sheer depth and reach, the concentrated attention paid to the subject by their respective analyses. Both James and Proust recognize that habit can be a stultifying limit to creativity on one hand and an enabler of creativity on the other. Both thinkers, likely because of the complexity with which they have treated it, have also been widely misread on this subject. Just as James is unfairly taken as habit’s uncritical champion, generations of critics have enlisted Proust as a symbolic general in the modernist war against habit. It is true that through disruptions of habit, Marcel continually recharges and reinvigorates his powers of perception, a process that would seem to associate him, justifiably, with a tradition of condemnations of habit. But such discussions of habit in Proust have almost invariably ignored the full complexity of the steps following the disruption of habit. For the hypersensitive Marcel also depends on habit to build on these new perceptions. Throughout the novel, habit is presented as a constant and dialectical movement rather than a static state of existence. While moments of disorientation are important, they are not privileged in Proust’s schema. Habit enables as much as it numbs or deadens. Anyone familiar with Remembrance of Things Past will recall Marcel’s regular paeans to Habit, “that skilful but slow-​moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.”9 For Proust, habit is at once the principal enabler of comfort and action, the benevolent force that allows us to find our place in the world, and the primary enemy of fresh perception, the “anodyne” that keeps Marcel cordoned off from artistic epiphany. Throughout the novel, Marcel cycles through the stages of habit: he begins in comfort enabled by habit, then contends with disruptions of habit (often due to travel), followed by the excruciating discomfort of being stripped bare of habit, which is ultimately replaced by a new openness and sharpness of perception that paves the way for the novel’s great revelations. Habit is

241

"That Skilful but Slow-Moving Arranger"

241

neither Marcel’s enemy nor is it his salvation; it is, however, a constant, the engine thrumming in the novel’s background. The character of Marcel at times resembles nothing so much as James’s “nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer.” With his sensibility attuned to the tiniest shifts in the psychological or social atmosphere, Marcel from the beginning of the novel founders, bereft of habit, “in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion” (PP, 1.125). Indeed, Proust’s novel opens with a moment of profound epistemological crisis. The famous opening lines of Proust’s novel initiate an extended description of the disorientation and alienation that surround sleeping and waking in unfamiliar rooms. As Marcel awakens, he struggles to reconstruct his place in time and space, while the vertiginous effects of his uncertainty come alive in the sensation that the walls and furniture of his bedroom are wheeling madly around him: I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I  was more destitute than the cave-​ dweller; but then the memory—​not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be—​would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-​being . . . In a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-​ lamps, then of shirts with turned-​down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego. (RTP, 1.5–​6)

From the very beginning of the novel, then, the construction of selfhood as an ongoing process of accumulation and painstaking repetition demonstrates the extent to which habit lies at the heart of Proust’s artistic vision. Proust’s conception of habit is deeply embedded within time and is inseparable from his much more frequently discussed analyses of personal memory and cultural history. In this opening scene, habit, operating to enable memory, restores Marcel to selfhood by lowering a rope into the “abyss of not-​being.” It is implicitly credited with moving Marcel through human history, through his personal history, to a point where he can “piece together the original components of [his] ego.” Habit thus functions as a kind of epistemological global positioning system—​it tells him where he is in relation to the world that surrounds him, and carries within it the history of how he got to his present location in space and time. Beyond enabling the reflections and recollections that inspire the novel, this opening episode initiates a pattern that define and structure the entire 3,000 pages to follow. Disruptions of habit, and the disorientations that follow, are repeatedly figured as a painful but necessary prerequisite to meaningful experience, be it artistic epiphany, the discovery of new love, or the appreciation of a longed-​for journey. While the opening scene establishes this characteristic pattern of the novel, the paradigmatic examples of this process take place during Marcel’s travels, where he finds himself in unfamiliar places and is forced to disrupt and reconstitute his normal habits. The first major journey of the novel, in which Marcel travels to Balbec with his grandmother, is described over about thirty pages at the beginning of the section

242

242

Lisi Schoenbach

titled “Place Names: The Place.” This section begins with Marcel waiting in nervous apprehension at the Gare St. Lazare and concludes the next morning on his arrival in Balbec. The process described in the interim represents a remarkably comprehensive and meticulous anatomy of habit disrupted and reconstituted, step by arduous step. At the opening of this section, Marcel’s recognition that he will not return to sleep in his own bed that evening begins to make him agitated and nervous. In an attempt to stave off the initial shock of the departure, Marcel’s doctor has advised that he have a few drinks “so as to begin the journey in a state of what he called ‘euphoria,’ in which the nervous system is for a time less vulnerable” (RTP, 1.700). Marcel thus finds himself in a chemically enhanced state of heightened awareness. He spends the next few hours staring in rapt attention at the window shade next to his seat, whose blue seems, in its “intense vividness, to efface . . . all the colours that had passed before my eyes from the day of my birth up to the moment when I had gulped down the last of my drink and it had begun to take effect” (RTP, 1.702). In this state of euphoria, he gladly divests himself of habit and greedily reaps the rewards, not only in the form of a heightened perception of the window shade, but also, the next morning, by the vision of a girl selling milk at dawn, her face “flushed with the glow of morning . . . rosier than the sky” (RTP, 1.705). In the midst of his rhapsodic celebration of this picturesque apparition, and the romantic fantasies she inspires, he pauses to reflect on how much of the pleasure of the experience is enabled by the disappearance of habit: I was giving the milk-​girl the benefit of the fact that it was the whole of my being, fit to taste the keenest joys, which confronted her. As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, for once were missing, and all my faculties came hurrying to take their place, vying with one another in their zeal, rising, each of them, like waves, to the same unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath, appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination. (RTP, 1.706)

The euphoria described in this passage is both emotional and physical, experienced as “waves” of pleasure derived from the awakening of the senses. Aware for the first time of his “breath, appetite, the circulation of [his] blood,” Marcel is able to “taste the keenest joys” with “the whole of [his] being.” The physical awakening he describes is crucial to the disruption of intellectual ruts and habits: “receptivity and imagination,” among other higher-​order faculties, are enabled by a sensual awareness of the body. At each level of the experience—​ bodily, emotional, artistic, intellectual—​ Marcel feels that he is living fully, that his “dormant faculties” have been jolted to vibrant, pulsating attention. If Proust were to stop here, his analysis of habit would be largely indistinguishable from that of Pater, Shklovsky, or a host of avant-​garde figures who

243

"That Skilful but Slow-Moving Arranger"

243

read habit as the primary enemy of creativity. But Proust does not stop here; he continues to Balbec with Marcel and reveals the consequences of the euphoria he has just been describing—​a dramatic emotional and psychological crash that picks up velocity over a passage of about two pages and culminates in the following lines: I was half dead with exhaustion, I was burning with fever; I would gladly have gone to bed, but I had no night-​things. I should have liked at least to lie down for a little while on the bed, but to what purpose, since I should not have been able to procure any rest for that mass of sensations which is for each of us his conscious if not his physical body, and since the unfamiliar objects which encircled that body, forcing it to place its perceptions on the permanent footing of a vigilant defensive, would have kept my sight, my hearing, all my senses . . . cramped and uncomfortable. . . It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in my bedroom at Balbec; it was full of things which did not know me, which flung back at me the distrustful glance I cast at them, and, without taking any heed of my existence, showed that I was interrupting the humdrum course of theirs . . . Having no world, no room, no body now that was not menaced by the enemies thronging round me, penetrated to the very bones by fever, I was alone, and longed to die. (RTP, 1.716–​18)

Marcel’s euphoria gives way to exhaustion as he is forced to contend with the superhuman effort required to constantly consider his “breath, appetite, the circulation of [his] blood” alongside more abstract faculties such as “receptivity and imagination.” The experience is now rendered in a different tenor:  his body becomes a “mass of sensations,” his perceptions are placed on a “vigilant defensive,” leaving “[his] sight, hearing, all [his] senses . . . cramped and uncomfortable.” As it marks a powerful affective shift from “zeal” to “vigilance,” the passage recalls James’s observations about the benefits of trusting our lower level habits to the “effortless custody of automatism.” Although he exulted for a time in the newfound awareness of every habit, he now is reduced to a huddling mass of uncoordinated impulses, incapable of maintaining his vigilance or indeed of doing anything at all except lying prostrate on his bed. Such a scene helps us to recall that habit has not only been represented as the enemy of perception in the novel up to this point, but also as a benevolent, maternal force, whose influence has been to offer comfort and reassurance and “the hope of resurrection” (RTP, 3.119) and not just to narrow the range of Marcel’s experience. As he lies in a fever in the strange bed in Balbec, he longs implicitly for “the doorknob of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorknobs in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to move of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious, had its manipulation become” (RTP, 1.11), or for the moment at the end of a walk with his parents, after which “I did not have to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where for so long my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Habit had come to take me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child” (RTP, 1.160).

244

244

Lisi Schoenbach

Marcel eventually recovers from his arrival at the Grand Hotel of Balbec, and his traumatic experience clears the way the next morning for fresh perceptions and a newly discovered happiness. But here, too, the process complicates any expected narrative of habit disrupted. The fresh perceptions he welcomes the next morning are accompanied, even enabled by, the new habits that immediately begin to put down their roots. The possibility of his happiness in the hotel room is signaled by his imagination of a future moment in the narrative when he will have developed new habits suited to Balbec: he informs us optimistically, for example, that “it was at this window that I was later to take up my position every morning” (RTP, 1.723). With the help of his adoring grandmother, he gradually feels the room growing more familiar, and begins to reflect on the new routines that will characterize his life during this seaside vacation. Then, and only then, can he revel in the disruption of his habits and enjoy the intensity of the bright light, which illuminates the “chaos” of his scattered belongings: Dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over the splashed surface of the basin-​stand and into my open trunk, where, by its very splendour and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder. (RTP, 1.724)

This gentle, domesticated, and intensely mediated vision of chaos—​an open trunk, a sprinkling of water, and an unmade bed on a sunny morning—​captures the subtlety of Proustian habit, in which disruptions are always placed against a background of regular patterns, routines, and behaviors. There is no escape from habit, Proust tells us, even aboard a speeding train or in a foreign room. Rather, habit represents an ongoing challenge; it is more a process that must be continued indefinitely than an entity that must be destroyed. We may choose to live unconsciously within habit and to ignore this challenge, but to take up the challenge requires a good deal more than a singular moment of shock, rupture, or rebellion. Habit is often figured in Proust as a personal vacillation between struggle and solace, but it also has its collective significance. Early on in the Combray section, Marcel describes the “asymmetrical Saturday,” a shared ritual to which every member of his family has become habituated (or “routined,” in the words of the housekeeper Françoise). The asymmetrical Saturday describes the family’s practice of eating lunch one hour early on Saturdays, so that Françoise can go the market at Roussainville-​le-​ Pin in the afternoon: At the moment when ordinarily there is still an hour to be lived through before the meal-​time relaxation, we knew that in a few seconds we should see the arrival of premature endives, a gratuitous omelette, an unmerited beefsteak. The recurrence of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of the those minor events, intra-​mural, localized, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national tie and become the favourite theme for conversation . . .

245

"That Skilful but Slow-Moving Arranger"

245

it would have provided the ready-​made kernel for a legendary cycle, had any of us had an epic turn of mind. (RTP, 1.119)

The nostalgic glow that suffuses the Combray section is very much in evidence in this recollection of superfluous bounty punctuating a daily life that already overflows with every imaginable comfort. But the passage is also permeated by a gently self-​ deprecating tone: as Marcel recalls that the family referred to “everyone who was not acquainted with Saturday’s special customs” as a “barbarian,” it becomes clear that he is ironizing the “patriotism” enabled by the asymmetrical Saturday, and using it as a way to consider the wide range of affiliations that constitute daily life. The descriptive terms he uses:  “intra-​mural,” “localized,” “civic,” “national,” and “patriotic,” suggest a continuum from the town hall to the national capitol, evoking a multitude of overlapping and mutually constitutive affiliations that stand between the individual Marcel and the state itself. Proust’s analysis of what Dewey called the “customary [which is] taken for granted” and of the “persistent modes of association [which goes] unnoticed”10 renders such forms visible, and allows us to see how these modes of association intersect with individual habits and behaviors. Though the Combray section hardly concerns itself with the endlessly proliferating official bureaucracies that so thoroughly infiltrated French life under the Third Republic, it provides a sense of the complex webs of connection for which there exists little or no vocabulary but that function much like microclimates within a larger ecosystem. Anatomizing these associations, and drawing an explicit connection between the chains of habit that link a family, a community, and a nation-​state, Proust accounts for the role and power of affiliations at every social level. Habit thus gives us another way to understand his much-​vaunted ability to perceive and describe the subtlest shifts in and deployments of social power: from his readings of Legrandin, the social snob who attempts to communicate his friendship for Marcel with a gesture that begins and ends inside his eyelid, to the machinations of Mme. Verdurin’s “little clan,” to the massive upheavals of the social order with which the novel concludes. In this light, we might reconsider Marcel’s claim that the asymmetrical Saturday “would have provided the ready-​made kernel for a legendary cycle, had any of us had an epic turn of mind.” The comment is simultaneously a joke at the expense of the grave importance his family places on their shared rituals, and a self-​conscious reference to the “epic turn of mind” that will give rise to the 3,000-​page novel that follows. Proust’s own take on the legendary cycle offers a vision so thoroughly permeated with social habits and institutional forms that it becomes impossible to imagine a person who is unaffected by each turn of the social kaleidoscope. Beyond Marcel’s many struggles with and reliance on daily habits, Proust relies on unconscious habit—​the bad kind, it is agreed on by everyone from Pater and Shklovsky to James and Dewey—​to provide the source of his great book. It is unconsciousness, after all, that allows habitual experience to provide fodder for the Proustian epiphany—​ whether the experience of madeleine, of paving stones, or of anything else. It is not just memory, but a memory that did not register when it was experienced and thus

246

246

Lisi Schoenbach

has not been “parried by shock” in Walter Benjamin’s terms. As Benjamin puts it in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an experience can become a component of the mémoire involontaire.”11 Or as Proust puts it, “The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us . . . From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown” (RTP, 3.914). Even when habit appears static and unchanging, then, it is still part of time, part of change, and part of history. Its dormancy is as temporary and contingent as everything else about experience. Habit in a very real sense provides one of the richest untapped resources an artist can dream of—​endless reserves lie deep inside each of us, waiting for their chance to bubble up at the touch of an accidental scent or sound or vision. James and Proust on habit give us an original way of thinking about change across time, perception, and memory. Habit for these two thinkers is not mere repetition, but rather accumulation—​ our accumulation of selfhood, as well as the gradual accumulations of minor adjustments, which, taken as a whole, can lead to major changes. Reading the two thinkers together offers us surprising illuminations of both. Proust’s novel can be read as, among other things, a materialization of James’s key philosophical ideas, a chance to see them in action. Jamesian habit, in turn, offers an indispensible vocabulary with which to interpret Proustian experience, and there is no doubt that James’s pluralistic universe was the very world that Proust imagined, and so indelibly described.

Notes 1 Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). 2 For an overview of this complex relationship, see Pete A. Y. Gunter, “Bergson and Proust: A Question of Influence,” in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, ed. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 157–​76. 3 Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 636. 4 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.244. 5 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 96. 6 Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), especially 174–​6. 7 Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 240. 8 William James, Talks to Teachers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 48.

247

"That Skilful but Slow-Moving Arranger"

247

9 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1981), 1.9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as RTP. 10 John Dewey, The Later Works: 1899–​1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 2.290. 11 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 160–​1.

248

249

15

William James and Italian Pragmatism Giovanni Maddalena and Michela Bella

In the preface to Pragmatism (P, 1907),1 the international vocation of the movement was immediately evident to William James, who was careful to suggest several European references for further reading about pragmatism. In this respect, we may notice that besides the British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller and his American colleague John Dewey, James recommends some writings of French thinkers such as Gaston Milhaud, Édouard Le Roy, and Maurice Blondel; more interestingly, he announces that the Italian philosopher Giovanni Papini is going to publish very soon “a book on Pragmatism, in the French language.” The relationship between James and Italian Pragmatists helps us to understand this consciousness of a “common project” that Pragmatists from both sides of the Ocean shared.2 It must of course be remembered that, at the beginning of the history of pragmatism, there were celebrated differences between Charles Saunders Peirce’s and James’s approaches to philosophy; later, there were almost as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. However, from Arthur O. Lovejoy’s distinctions among thirteen pragmatisms3 to the numerous recent books presenting pragmatism, critics have underlined differences in order either to promote one side of pragmatism from ideological motivations, or to surrender to the impossibility of finding any unity. In recent times, for example, Cheryl Misak and Robert Brandom have written books that willfully overlook James’s contribution to pragmatism in order to present it as a precursor of, and a resource for, analytic philosophy. As is well known, Rorty did not consider Peirce’s pragmatism significant because he wanted to propose a more radically historical and relative version. And the same story can be found in almost all surveys of pragmatism. Alan Malachowski’s conclusion in The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism is quite the opposite: desperate to find a unique thread, he concludes with the words of Nicholas Rescher that “it is clearer than ever that pragmatism as a whole comprises a collection of rather different doctrines and that if one is to be a pragmatist one must choose among them.”4 If one does not accept either ideological or skeptical views, one has to go to the texts and the facts. In doing so, one can discover a more common project and, eventually, a more interesting legacy through which pragmatism may be useful to our contemporary philosophical situation. One of these many paths of approach to what really happened and what was really said is the story of the encounter of William James—​probably

250

250

Giovanni Maddalena and Michela Bella

the thinker most aware of the commonality of the pragmatist project5—​with the Italian pragmatists. This chapter aims to tell this story and to draw some philosophical conclusions, which we hope will shed some light on the common pragmatist project and its internal nuances.

The story of the encounter At the beginning of the twentieth century, Italy was enjoying a propitious period of innovation and progress in many fields of knowledge. James acknowledges it as the “intellectual rinascimento” of Italy,6 even if he criticizes what he sees as the peculiar tendency of Italian thinkers to politicize everything. A new political vitality, in fact, went together with an almost as vigorous cultural renaissance that was blooming outside the academy against more conservative positivistic and idealistic lines of thought. New generations of young, ambitious, and skillful intellectuals were making their own contributions to the Italian intellectual renovation and the so-​called Florentine band of Leonardists (EPhil, 145) should be framed within this historical context. This group of Italian pragmatists was headed by Giovanni Papini, at only twenty-​ two years old the editor in chief of the journal Leonardo,7 with the fundamental aid of Giuseppe Prezzolini; their most valuable and expert collaborators were Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni. Other collaborators and friends of the review were Giovanni Amendola, Ettore Regàlia, Emilio Cecchi, Giovanni Vacca, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, and many others. Papini and Prezzolini founded the new journal in Florence at the beginning of 1903, and it was soon proclaimed “the official organ of Pragmatism in the European continent.” As Papini tells it in his Un Uomo Finito (1913), he was the leader of a group of young and passionate intellectuals and artists who aimed to change the dead and fixed cultural paradigms of the Italian Academy, particularly the entrenched positions of positivism and idealism. A  decisive impulse for the journal came from Vailati’s stay in Florence between 1904 and 1905: Vailati was a former collaborator of Giuseppe Peano and was forty years old when he met the young Leonardists. Vailati was a keen mathematician and a voracious reader of philosophical literature; he led the group in many new philosophical readings and signaled the radical importance of pragmatism for the antirationalist project that the Leonardists had in mind. When Vailati moved to Florence in order to direct the critical national edition of Evangelista Torricelli, the most interesting period of the journal began. The meeting between James and the “little band of ‘pragmatists’ ”8 happened on the occasion of the Fifth Congresso Internazionale di Psicologia, which was held in Rome in 1905 (April 26–​30). At that conference, the American philosopher gave his famous lecture “La Notion de Conscience” in the last plenary session.9 The link between James and the Italian pragmatists was the young psychologist Giulio Cesare Ferrari, assistant of Augusto Tamburini who had directed the Manicomio di San Lazzaro in Reggio Emilia since 1892. In 1896 Ferrari became editor in chief of the Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria, directed by Tamburini, and in 1905 he founded the Rivista di Psicologia. The lifelong correspondence between James and Ferrari started

251

William James and Italian Pragmatism

251

some years before the conference, in 1898, when Ferrari asked permission to translate James’s The Principles of Psychology. James granted him permission and an Italian translation of extended parts of James’s masterpiece came out very soon in 1901; James wrote a preface to this edition, in line with Ferrari’s wishes. In the following years, Ferrari took on himself the translation of other works of the American psychologist and philosopher, developing an intense and fruitful collaboration with him and becoming the main expert on James’s works in Italy. He translated Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals in 1903, and together with Mario Calderoni The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1904; then James suggested finding another translator for The Will to Believe, so that he would not spend all his life on James’s texts (The Correspondence of William James [CWJ], 11.157). Ferrari was genuinely interested in James’s psychology and, more generally, in his epistemological pluralism. Psychological and philosophical interests, indeed, were the common concern of the circle of Italian pragmatists and particularly Giovanni Vailati, whom Ferrari met in the cultural circles of Turin. In 1896 Vailati met Mario Calderoni at a conference on psychology in Monaco di Baviera. As mentioned above, in 1904 Vailati moved to the Istituto Tecnico Galileo of Florence to oversee the national edition of Evangelista Torricelli’s writings on behalf of the Accademia dei Lincei, and he had the chance to collaborate much more than before with Papini, with whom he had a real friendship, and with Prezzolini, Papini’s friend and closest collaborator. The “Florence Pragmatist Club,” as Papini used to call it, was thus complete when they encountered the great William James in Rome. At the conference, James could finally meet Ferrari, his untiring Italian translator, “in flesh,” and was also introduced to the quite well-​known circle of Italian pragmatists. In Papini’s memoir, Passato Remoto (1948), he tells having introduced himself directly to the American philosopher, who recognized his name and proposed a meeting the day after at the Grand Hôtel de Russie, where he was staying, to talk at more length. At that time James had already heard about their activity in Florence through Ferrari; he knew that Schiller was in contact with Prezzolini and had published his “Gesta Deorum” in the Leonardo of November 1904.10 He also knew of Calderoni for his help in the work of translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience; moreover, a couple of years before, Papini had written a long article titled “Philosophy in Italy,” which appeared in The Monist.11 However, until the day of their meeting, James might have been skeptical that these young writers in Florence were seriously interested in pragmatism and working energetically for its diffusion in Italy; also, he might not have suspected that they were trying to give a solid Italian contribution to its philosophical elaboration. Getting back from an afternoon tea organized at the Palazzo Borghese, James wrote to his beloved wife Alice about his first conversation with these very talented Italian intellectuals: I have been having this afternoon a very good and rather intimate talk with the little band of “pragmatists,” Papini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, etc., most of whom inhabit Florence, publish the monthly journal “Leonardo” at their own expense,

252

252

Giovanni Maddalena and Michela Bella

and carry on a very serious philosophic movement, apparently really inspired by Schiller & myself (I never could believe it before, although Ferrari had assured me) and show an enthusiasm, and also a literary swing and activity that I know nothing of in our own land, and that probably our damned academic technics and PhD. machinery and university organization prevents from ever coming to a birth. These men, of whom Ferrari is one, are none of them Fachphilosophen, and few of them teachers at all. It has given me a certain new idea of the way in which truth ought to find its way into the world. (CWJ, 11.26)

Already in these few lines, we can see some reasons for James’s enthusiastic interest in the “Florence Pragmatist Club.” First, these young intellectuals seemed to be “really inspired” by his philosophy, and second, they were not “Fachphilosophen.” Probably their young, passionate, and active way of living philosophy gave James that “certain new idea of the way in which truth ought to find its way into the world,” while, last but definitely not least, he appreciated the “literary swing” of these writers. As mentioned, James was able to meet the “Florentine band of Leonardists” only once, but the fruits of their encounter were quite abundant. James started an intense correspondence with Papini that lasted until the end of 1907, and had a few interesting exchanges with other “Leonardists,” often in relation to possible translations of his works, and sometimes addressing theoretical issues or misunderstandings of his pragmatism. Soon after the conference in Rome, James wrote to Vailati to thank him for the excellent résumé of his paper (“La Notion de Conscience”) at the Fifth Congresso Internazionale di Psicologia, which had just been published in Ferrari’s brand new review.12 His comment was quite eloquent about his esteem for the Italian intellectual, as he apparently wrote that at least one person—​namely, Vailati—​ understood his argument. Indeed, Vailati reviewed several other works of James for the same journal. Moreover, in line with James’s natural tendency to found working connections on intellectual affinities, another letter from Peirce, of July 23, 1905, records that he sent to his American colleague copies of Leonardo and a paper by Vailati. James’s correspondence shows that he continued an intense collaboration with Ferrari, being a faithful reader of his Rivista di Psicologia till 1909 (CWJ, 12.257). The names of Papini, Prezzolini, Vailati, Calderoni, and Amendola, on the other hand, appear almost exclusively in the years 1905–​07. In fact, Leonardo was shut down in 1907 by Papini and Prezzolini themselves. It was the end of a philosophical drama in which Papini pushed his need for action and creation to an extreme. The last direct exchange between James and Papini was in December 1907. After a clarification regarding Katharine Royce’s translation of Papini, James expressed his sorrow to have learned from Ferrari that Leonardo had been discontinued. The last number of Leonardo was published in August 1907. James was eager to see the publication of Papini’s book on pragmatism and hoped that Papini would have appreciated his own book Pragmatism, in particular the chapter on truth. On December 26, 1907, Papini wrote to James for the last time. His news was quite perplexing, since he informed James that for some time he had not done any writing. He had recently

253

William James and Italian Pragmatism

253

“killed” his creation, the Leonardo, and had got married, and he confessed that he had been ill “both in soul and body.” With regard to James’s Pragmatism, he had received a copy and read it; he considered it a “lucid” work though not groundbreaking, and added that James “is aiming at popularity, which prevents him from deepening his thought” (CWJ, 11.628). When Schiller went to the Heidelberg International Congress of Philosophy in September 1908, he wrote to James that Henri Bergson, Le Roy, Papini, and Charles Augustus Strong were not there and so he only met Vailati and Calderoni among the Italian pragmatists (CWJ, 12.92). In the following weeks, James asked Ferrari for news about Papini, being worried by his silence and suspecting some “cerebral crisis or disturbance” for the abrupt interruption of his intense editorial activity. In 1909, in a letter to James Gibbons Huneker, James mentions Papini again and the rumors that the young promising Italian philosopher had died insane. James expresses sorrow for such a loss and reaffirms his conviction about the genius of Papini:  “Too bad! for he was indeed a genius. The freest I have known, even if he did delight a bit too much in épater ing the bourgeois” (CWJ, 12.209). That year James read in a copy of Avanti, the Italian socialist journal, of the premature death of Giovanni Vailati and wrote words of condolence to Ferrari. On that occasion he also asked Ferrari to tell him the truth about Papini: “It is evident that some eclipse has come over the most meteoric & brilliant of all contemporary intellectual careers” (CWJ, 12.257). In 1910, Schiller wrote to James about his recent journey to Florence, where he met Calderoni and Prezzolini, but did not see Papini. He gossiped that Papini “has become a recluse and has married a servant girl. Prezzollini has become a journalist, but Calderoni was a sound pragmatist” (CWJ, 12.641).

The common project It could be said that the relationship between James and the circle of Italian pragmatists mainly consisted in the history of the brief but intense intellectual relationship between William James and Giovanni Papini. After the Rome encounter, James published an interesting and very passionate article on “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy” in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods.13 James was fascinated by the Italian pragmatists. Both as a philosopher and as a professor, James could not but admire the enthusiastic spirit of initiative and enterprise of this young, talented group of “philosophers.” Probably much of his esteem was prompted by their superlative ability in translating his works into Italian, and by Vailati’s fineness of thinking, which was fixed in James’s memory, and Papini’s natural philosophical insightfulness. James praised Papini’s passionate writing and his “energy” in keeping “the pragmatistic ball rolling” (CWJ, 11.165). To Ferrari he expressed his appreciation of Papini for not being afraid of “carrying too much ‘panache.’ I’m glad there is one of us to lead in that way. It enables some of the others to be more sober. I think that your Italian cénacle of pragmatists is splendid” (CWJ, 11.210).

254

254

Giovanni Maddalena and Michela Bella

Even if the title of the article mentioned all pragmatists, James was really talking almost exclusively of Papini, whose “genius” highly impressed him; it is evident that James grew definitely convinced of Papini’s “genius” in 1906. He writes, first in an enthusiastic letter to Schiller (CWJ, 11.197), and then directly addressing Papini, how much he appreciated Papini’s book Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi (1906)—​ being particularly impressed by the final chapter, Licenzio la Filosofia—​and another article that appeared in the Leonardo of February 1906 about the “Man-​God” theory.14 Moreover, through Papini’s and Dewey’s elaborations of pragmatism, James confessed to have better realized both the value of the young Italian intellectual as a great philosopher and the “full import for life and regeneration” of his own and Schiller’s reflections: Papini is a jewel! To think of that little Dago putting himself ahead of everyone of us (even of you, with his Uomo-​Dio) at a single stride. And what a writer! and what fecundity! and what courage, (careless of nicknames, for it is so easy to call him now the Cyrano de Bergerac of Philosophy) and what humor and what truth! (CWJ, 11.197)

Beyond the correspondence with Schiller, he wrote about Papini’s gifts to Wincenty Lutoslawski and many others. In a letter to John Jay Chapman, for instance, he inserted the name of Papini among the leaders of the new international movement of “ ‘pragmatistic’ or ‘humanistic’ philosophers” (CWJ, 11.224), together with Schiller, Dewey, himself, H.  G. Wells, and eventually G.  K. Chesterton. Such an enthusiastic reception of Papini’s works may be the reason why he apparently toyed with the idea of dedicating his Pragmatism to Schiller, Dewey, and Papini, arguing in a letter to Schiller that his idea of the “Uomo-​Dio” made Papini deserving of such a mention (CWJ, 11.289). In 1907, he wrote to Théodore Flournoy about “the youthful and empanaché Papini” who gave him, together with Schiller, “great confidence & courage” (CWJ, 11.332). Moreover, that year he proposed that James McKeen Cattell publish Papini’s “Introduzione al Pragmatismo” in the Popular Science Monthly, asking Katharine Royce to translate it. According to him, this article, which first appeared in the Leonardo of February 1907, was “a clever & instructive article on Pragmatism” (CWJ, 11.418).15 Also, despite the very sharp critique launched by Lovejoy against Papini’s philosophical excesses and ambiguities (CWJ, 11.499–​500), because of James’s interest in the “Uomo-​ Dio theory,” he sent his recent paper “The Energies of Men” to Papini as a contribution for the Leonardo of February 1907. In the 1906 article and in Pragmatism James makes specific reference to two very important notions of Papini, both of which are rather revealing of James’s interest in the philosophy of the young intellectual and his Florentine circle. The first is the idea of pragmatism as a “corridor-​theory,” which he found particularly fitting and meaningful: As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it [pragmatism] lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on

255

William James and Italian Pragmatism

255

his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. (P, 32)

As we will see, James found this metaphor quite a convincing vehicle for representing the pragmatist conception of experience, going beyond both rationalism and empiricism in the name of what we would call today a more holistic view of phenomena. He also makes reference to Papini’s idea that “pragmatism tends to unstiffen all our theories” (P, 78). These ideas can be found in Papini’s article “Il Pragmatismo Messo in Ordine” (1905), which was in fact an attempt to resolve an internal quarrel about the meaning of pragmatism between Calderoni and Prezzolini as defenders, respectively, of a Peircean and a Jamesian pragmatism. The article by “The Florence Pragmatist Club” made clear that under the name “pragmatism” there was room for both visions and, possibly, for a third one—​held by Vailati—​who combined Peirce’s pragmatic maxim with an element of psychological choice derived from Franz Brentano. From this and a few other articles that appeared in Leonardo between 1905 and 1906, and from the initial and final chapters of Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi, James drew his sense of Papini’s grasp of pragmatism. From James’s comments we can see the common aspects of a project that were shared, despite their different perspectives, by all pragmatists. James himself listed these points of convergence in his article (EPhil, 144–​8), but we can summarize them under four headings: antirationalism; a conception of experience that does not divide epistemology and ontology; the unity of practice and theory; and the issue of freedom and creativity. a) Antirationalism: James saw in Papini the radicalism of an antirationalism shared by all pragmatists. This attitude can be described as anti-​Kantian, insofar as we understand Kant as the philosopher of the first Critique. The cruel portrait of the German thinker in Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi is not a masterpiece of philosophical accuracy, as James acknowledges, but it states some important antirationalist points. The chapter says that the distinctions between noumenon/​phenomenon and analytic/​synthetic judgments are indefensible on logical grounds. Kant does not explicate how we can talk about the noumenon if it is not reachable in any way by knowledge, and our analytic judgments are born from synthetic ones. Papini drew his thoughts from Vailati, who really was a consciously radical anti-​ Kantian. His argument is not based on a personal antipathy toward the German thinker. In the same article on Papini and the Italian pragmatists, William James, who was often harsher toward Kant than any other pragmatist, maintains that Kantianism is a good source of pragmatism if we take it in a practical sense. In other places, James recalls the importance of the religious impulse in Kant, but, like all pragmatists,16 he always rejects the phenomenon-​noumenon distinction, the autonomy of morals, and the separation among parts of reason.

256

256

Giovanni Maddalena and Michela Bella

b) The conception of experience: James appreciates Papini’s strong statements about what nowadays we would call the difference between ontology and epistemology. According to the pragmatist version of “experience,” we cannot single out an ultimate ontological element, whether it be the factual datum or the mind, in order to define what experience is. Moreover, we cannot really draw a line between what we know and how we know: often in science, as well as in literature, ethics, and religion, our way of knowing things, and believing them, determines what we know. Vailati used to say that the “world of paper” interferes with, and sometimes creates, the world of facts: scientific theories are originally hypothetical and determine what experiments we do, what part of reality we single out for knowledge, and sometimes, what part of reality we modify. Is there a difference between social artifacts like scientific laws and hard facts, as Maurizio Ferraris claims?17 pragmatists deny this distinction: social facts are determined by human interests. In his usual radical way, much anticipating our understanding of virtual reality, Papini used to say: “I mondi ideali sono stati costruiti sul mondo reale ma sono superiori a questo e servono per aumentarlo e padroneggiarlo” (“The ideal worlds have been built on the real world but they are superior to this and they are used for increasing it and for dominating it”; our translation).18 Hard theories and distinctions had to be unstiffened. c) The continuity of practice and theory: The love for this concrete unity in James and Papini is a love for the single action and the particular object in which the theoretical-​practical experience could be embodied. They both called it “nominalism,” perhaps engendering ambiguities. They did not think that generals were nonexistent or disconnected from our reality, to which the ideal-​real issue of point b) testifies. They were deeply opposed to theories and knowledge separated from the concrete happening of facts (pragma). Following Scotus, Peirce thought of continuity between theory and practice as realism and of discontinuity as nominalism, but both James and Papini were not so well versed in the history of logic. If we label the relation between practice and theory “continuity,” we would surely identify one of the deepest concordances among pragmatists. d) Freedom and the power of freedom: Papini brought the points mentioned above into sharpest focus: knowledge is action and action is power to change. Therefore, we should get rid of useless abstract questions (but not of the useful ones) and try to be as creative as possible in changing reality. James knew that Papini went to the extreme with his “Man-​God” theory, but he thought that this was a useful way to make everybody see the powerlessness of academic rationalist philosophy, and that it was also a new way to think about knowledge. James himself did not fully grasp the rationale of this powerful synthetic drive of pragmatism, otherwise he would have criticized more the Kantian synthetic/​ analytic distinction; nonetheless he felt that Papini was touching on a very important topic for the whole movement.

257

William James and Italian Pragmatism

257

Finally, a nota bene has to be included about the alleged Fascism lurking in the young Papini’s character and overlooked by James. As is well known, this old story is rooted in the unfortunate quotation of James in an interview for the Sunday Times in 1926 in which “Il Duce” referred to the American philosopher as one of his sources.19 Mussolini knew James through Papini, and Papini at a certain point adhered to Fascism. Some historians have suggested an alliance between pragmatism and fascism, but as we have seen, Papini terminated his “pragmatist experience” in 1907, keeping a distance from it. Mussolini at that time was a Socialist, and the Fascism movement was not founded until 1919. As much as we can stretch historical relationships, when pragmatism was there, fascism did not yet exist; and when Fascism was there, pragmatism no longer existed.20

Conclusion The story of the encounter between James and Italian pragmatism reveals many characteristics of the unity of the pragmatist project. To be sure, these traits do not prevent very different outcomes and proposals, but they still remain fundamental marks of pragmatism in the past, and in the present. To this common picture Papini and the Italian pragmatists added their peculiar contributions.21 In particular, they added an existential tone. This existential tone was responsible not only for the fighting, courageous attitude of Leonardo and for the incredible range of articles printed in the journal—​which discussed Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, St. Theresa and the Eastern mystics, Cardinal Newman and Henri Bergson—​but also for the final attempt to find an extra-​philosophical realization of the unity between theory and practice, and eventually for the end of the journal. In the last issue, Papini said that the necessity of finding a reason to live was the most important question to which Leonardo was not able to find the answer. “Perhaps because there is no answer?” he asked himself in a sort of nihilist conclusion. For the Italian pragmatists, and especially for Papini, pragmatism was a matter of life and death and, in a certain sense, the end of Leonardo marked their defeat, or at least the defeat of pragmatism as an essential weapon in this battle. Calderoni and Vailati, who felt this existential crisis less, were more disappointed by the demise of the organ, but even for them pragmatism was a weapon against superficiality and the arrogance of thought, especially academic thought. The struggle against the narrowness of positivism and the redundancy of idealist monism are emblematic of this “militant” version of Italian pragmatism, characterized by the “courage” to risk one’s ideas and the need to find “allies” among thinkers from all over the world. The relationship between James and Papini is thus the encounter between philosophers aware of the great novelty they were bringing to birth and nurturing. It is probable that neither James nor the Italian pragmatists succeeded in making this originality completely clear to themselves and to others, but their legacy remains, and the creative possibilities of this radical philosophical opportunity stemming from pragmatism are still open.

258

258

Giovanni Maddalena and Michela Bella

Notes 1 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5. 2 R. M. Calcaterra, Pragmatismo: I valori dell’esperienza. Letture di Peirce, James, Mead (Rome: Carocci, 2003); R. M. Calcaterra, “Varieties of Synechism: Peirce and James on Mind-​World Continuity,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 25, no. 4 (2011): 412–​24; G. Maddalena, The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists’ Incomplete Revolution (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2015). 3 Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 5, no. 1 (1908): 5–​12; 5, no. 2 (1908): 29–​39. 4 Alan Malachowski, The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 9; Nicholas Rescher, Profitable Speculations: Essays on Current Philosophical Themes (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997): 41. 5 Wiliam James and C. S. Peirce, Alle Origini del pragmatismo: Corrispondenza tra C.S. Peirce e W. James, ed. M. Annoni and G. Maddalena (Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2011). 6 William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 144. 7 The journal was irregularly published between January 1903 and August 1907 in 25 numbers. 8 William James, The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992–​2004), 11. 26. 9 In the Atti del V Congresso Internazionale di Psicologia (Rome: Forzani, 1906), we can read résumés of some remarks made on James’s lecture and a summary of his reply, 146–​55. 10 F. C. S. Schiller, “Gesta Deorum: Una Storia della Creazione,” Leonardo (November 1904): 1–​3. 11 G. Papini, “Philosophy in Italy,” The Monist 13, no. 4 (1903): 553–​85. 12 G. Vailati, “‘La Concezione della Coscienza’ di William James,” Rivista di Psicologia Applicata alla Pedagogia ed alla Psicopatologia 1, no. 4 (1905): 242–​5. The translation of James’s address first appeared in Leonardo 3, no. 3 (1905): 77–​81. 13 William James, “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 3, no. 13 (1906): 337–​41. 14 G. Papini, “L’uomo Dio” (or “Dall’uomo a Dio”), Leonardo 4, no. 1 (1906): 6–​15. 15 Papini’s “Introduzione al Pragmatismo” first appeared in the Leonardo 5, no. 1 (1907): 26–​37. It was translated by Katharine Royce and appeared as “What Pragmatism Is Like” in the Popular Science Monthly 71 (October 1907): 351–​8. 16 See Maddalena, The Philosophy of Gesture. 17 M. Ferraris, Introduction to New Realism (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 18 G. Papini, Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi (Milan: Società Editrice Lombarda, 1906), 271. 19 We can read an extract of Mussolini’s interview in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 2.575. 20 We owe this incisive statement to a private conversation with Mario Quaranta, possibly the greatest expert on the Italian pragmatists. 21 See G. Maddalena and G. Tuzet, I pragmatisti italiani: Tra alleati e nemici (Milan: Alboversorio, 2007).

259

16

James’s Pluralism and the Problems of Modern Political and Social Thought Robert Danisch

In 1908, when William James delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, Alain Locke, his former student, sat in the audience as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. Locke went on to complete his doctoral dissertation at Harvard in 1918, “The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value,” a work influenced by the position James articulated in his Hibbert Lectures. Locke interpreted James’s lectures as an attack on the kind of philosophy that promoted the creation of hierarchy-​based logics of difference/​identity. Concepts, so James argued, became ways of denying contingency and plurality to create order and hierarchy. That kind of thinking, for Locke, served as a justification for excluding and segregating. It was James’s philosophical position that gave Locke the justification for the arguments he laid out later in The New Negro, one of the central texts of the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro was published in 1925, the same year that John Dewey published Experience and Nature. Dewey’s book carried the arguments that James made in the Hibbert lectures further by claiming that philosophy should be a “critique of prejudices.” Dewey argued that prejudices are embedded in the “classificatory device[s]‌” used by the “genteel tradition” to elevate “unity” at the cost of relegating “unreconciled diversity,” “the recalcitrant particular . . . the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality,” to a “metaphysically inferior” order of existence.1 Critiquing prejudices, recovering mixture, and dissolving segregation, Dewey’s stance in 1925 was the philosophical counterpart to Locke’s critical position and a clear extension of James’s pluralism. Dewey’s commitment to democratic equality is also evoked in Experience and Nature, just as The New Negro contextualized that same commitment in terms of aesthetics and race relations. I have begun by citing Dewey and Locke to show how short the line is from James’s pragmatism and pluralism to some of the major problems and preoccupations of modern sociopolitical thought and practice. Plurality, contingency, and diversity, on one hand, and prejudice, segregation, unity, on the other:  James’s work stands at the philosophical center of the most pressing political and social issues of the twentieth century. The aim of this chapter is to think through some of the central problems of modern sociopolitical thought in the light of James’s work. In order to do that, I first offer a brief reading of James’s pluralism and

260

260

Robert Danisch

pragmatism. Second, I trace the consequences of James’s pluralism and pragmatism to Alain Locke’s work on race, John Dewey’s commitment to communication and social democracy, and Richard McKeon’s work on human rights and rhetoric. Direct relationships between James’s pluralism and pragmatism and these three philosophers show just how intimately James’s work is bound up with modern sociopolitical thought. Third, I  conclude with an argument for the ongoing usefulness of James’s pluralism and pragmatism. In many ways, we are still working through the central modern sociopolitical problems that are so deeply embedded in James’s work, and he offers enduring and advantageous insights into how we can operate within our own moment. Pluralism itself is one of the central problems of modern and contemporary political thought. Since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when James spent considerable time touring the United States giving lectures, until our own moment, sociopolitical practices have had to respond to, account for, and work with diversity and plurality. Massive immigration and urbanization at the end of the nineteenth century dramatically altered the American sociopolitical landscape. In addition, new scientific discoveries and theories (from Darwin’s theory of evolution to Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty) reinforced the belief that the world is plural, uncertain, and determined by human perception. James’s position, that we should stop trying to eradicate all of this multiplicity and start trying to celebrate it, was not necessarily unique in his moment or ours. Trying to eradicate pluralism was a kind of violent and destructive move that could never accomplish conceptual or epistemological certainty anyway (and contradicted material evidence), so we were better off discovering and inventing the best methods for coping with conditions of unremitting plurality so as to improve our own circumstances. Our political task remains very much committed to avoiding the conceptual violence that James described in the Hibbert Lectures while still being able to imagine and make a common, public good out of the scene of pluralism and contingency. It is a process we have yet to master, and James describes a set of circumstances that remain pressing in our moment.

James’s pluralism and pragmatism The central argument advanced in A Pluralistic Universe (PU), the book based on the Hibbert Lectures, is that respect for and attention to individual experience must not be ruined by over-​conceptualization, or, in other words, “individuality outruns all classification.”2 With this emphasis on individuality, James wanted to shift attention toward the arbitrary flux of life and away from the arresting and static nature of concepts. The lectures themselves, replete with metaphors and vivid imagery, enact this call away from conceptualization by trying to communicate the varied, complex, and uncertain characteristics of the “pluriverse.” This “pluriverse” also made questions of perceptual experience important matters for James. The Principles of Psychology (PP) addressed the question of sensation and perception at length by showing how conscious states influence behavior and guide activity by selecting some parts of

261

James’s Pluralism and Modern Political and Social Thought

261

experience and not others. James argued that interests (practical, ethical, religious, and so on) controlled an individual’s selective attention. Individual consciousness plays a critical role in perceptual encounters for James, and our descriptions of the world reveal our own self-​interests, our own perspective, or our own conscious state. This psychological perspective reinforces the arguments advanced in A Pluralistic Universe. There James locates questions of existence in a language of process, flux, and change so as to refute versions of absolutism that rest on the assumption that reality is fixed: “What really exists is not things made but things in the making . . . Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—​it buds and burgeons, changes and creates” (PU, 117–​18). It is impossible to achieve a complete and final apprehension of a world that is changing, budding, and burgeoning. Instead, such a world readily lends itself to multiple interpretations affected by the interests of an individual’s consciousness. This view of the world lies at the center of James’s pluralism. James’s psychology begins with the premise that individuals have different perceptual encounters with the world and proceeds to the claim that the world itself is in flux and hence pluralistic: “Every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition. Only concepts are self-​identical; only ‘reason’ deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more” (PU, 129). A Pluralistic Universe refutes the kind of logical and rationalistic philosophy inspired by Socrates and Plato. According to James, “The ruling tradition in philosophy has always been the Platonic and Aristotelian belief that fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be one and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and corruptible” (PU, 106). James’s pluralism, therefore, rejects the kind of communication inspired by rationalistic, conceptual thought that expects language to represent the real and the absolute: “Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its definition. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing is whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth about it” (PU, 99). The philosophical urge to access the fixed, real essence of the world is precisely the position that James’s pluralism works against. According to Edward Schiappa’s Defining Reality, twentieth-​century philosophy has generally dismissed the absolutist position that definitions reveal fixed essences in favor of the position that meaning in language is a matter of how words are used.3 Schiappa claims that James’s arguments against essentialism, and for pluralism, are one of the sources of this change. Definitions, according to Schiappa, constitute rhetorically induced social knowledge. Such a perspective suggests that definitions should not be treated as “philosophical or scientific questions of ‘is’ ” but rather “as sociopolitical and pragmatic questions of ‘ought’ ” (3). Defining Reality is an example of how the

262

262

Robert Danisch

implications of James’s pluralism can be developed into a more complete sociopolitical theory. But instead of focusing on language, James attends to the process of perceptual experience, the mind, and how it comes to believe in one reality rather than in other possible realities. Such a preoccupation with experience betrays a concern with the effects of the world on an individual and an individual’s ability to affect a world through conscious choices. What is most notable about James’s position is how closely it aligns with the philosophical orientation of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory. Gorgias, a Greek teacher of rhetoric and dialogic partner of Socrates, argued for a similar experiential pluralism in On the Nonexistent and developed a sociopolitical account of how one opinion prevailed over others and influenced the outcome of human events within the context of this experiential pluralism. In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias explains how rhetoric affects audiences and thus influences human affairs. Logos, for both classical and contemporary rhetorical theorists like Gorgias and Schiappa, is the means by which one individual can inspire, convince, or move another to believe and to act. For James, the connections between belief, experience, and action are more complicated. But both James’s position and rhetorical theory issue from arguments that reject the idea of a fixed and absolute real world, in favor of a world of uncertainty, plurality, and change regulated by human experience. Both seek to understand the human tools or mechanisms that cause change and lead to action. The question James’s position poses for sociopolitical life should be clear: in a world of change inhabited by a variety of people with different, heterogeneous experiences of the world, how do we come to agree and act collectively? James never quite answered that question or followed such a line of thinking. His pluralism did, however, rest on a belief in the benefit of experience: The more of it a man has, the better position he stands in, in respect of truth; . . . some men, having had more experience, are therefore better authorities than others; . . . the more systematically and thoroughly such comparison and weighing of opinions is pursued, the truer the opinions that survive are likely to be. When the pragmatist talks of opinions, it is opinions as they thus concretely and livingly and interactingly and correlatively exist that he has in mind4

In and through a person’s experiences of the world opinions are acquired, but in and through the careful measurement of those experiences one can produce more truthful claims. James concedes that all people have opinions, and that “their opinions are self-​willed.” The corollary to this assumption is that truth is formed “out of the life of opinion,” and thus truth “does indeed consist of nothing but opinions” (MT, 145). However, James’s pragmatism holds some opinions to be more truthful than others based on their verifiability in experience. Truth and opinion are only important if they have “cash-​value” or if they are useful: A new opinion counts as “true” just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success . . . in doing this, is a matter for

263

James’s Pluralism and Modern Political and Social Thought

263

the individual’s appreciation. When old truth grows, then by new truth’s addition, it is for subjective reasons . . . That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously . . . It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works.5

This is one of the basic beliefs of pragmatism and it is made possible by pluralism’s insistence that we look away from static concepts and toward the rich, heterogeneous complexity of life. As a pragmatist, James is interested in practical action, not abstract reflection, because abstract reflection can never generate an accurate account of an ever-​changing, heterogeneous world. In such circumstances, we need an epistemology that holds the potential to generate sociopolitical order and meaning in the light of experiential pluralism. James’s blooming and buzzing “pluriverse” is open to a variety of experiences. His epistemology rests on opinionated individuals willing to experience the world around them while using and acting on their beliefs. Such an epistemology ensures further plurality, a process of correction and accommodation, and the search for a method to test truth. As a philosopher James is committed to seeing the world as a process in which experience can cause changes in beliefs, opinions, and truths. Perhaps what is more important is that James stipulates that the world is in the process of being determined, which implies “the possibility that things may be better” (P, 61). This is an admittedly cursory, basic, and (I hope) uncontroversial reading of James’s work. My aim here is to try to determine what can be made of this kind of pluralism, what the practical “cash-​value” might be, and what affective results are entailed by such a position. My argument is that James’s pluralism sets the stage for seeing rhetorical communication as central to sociopolitical affairs because of the ways in which rhetoric can symbolically produce meanings out of the chaos of the “pluriverse.” In the wake of James, modern sociopolitical theorists began to see that communication and rhetoric were essential considerations in a world marked by contingency and plurality, and that abandoning the search for absolutely true conceptual, abstract accounts of the world meant embracing the effective, pragmatic rhetorical construction of beliefs that could be used to make the American sociopolitical order better. One sees this argument clearly in the work of Alain Locke, John Dewey, and Richard McKeon—​perhaps the three philosophers most deeply and directly influenced by James’s work.

Alain Locke From the beginning until the middle of the twentieth century (at least), James’s pluralism clearly animated important debates about race, democracy, and rights. Ross Posnock’s book Color & Culture describes, for example, the connection between James, W.  E. B.  Du Bois, and Alain Locke as three separate generations of Harvard pragmatists.6 By exploring the relationships between these three figures, Posnock argues for the importance of questions of race and power in the pragmatist tradition. Locke, in particular, revised James’s pragmatism through his attention to art and race. Locke’s work highlights the limits of James’s pluralism and pragmatism because of the

264

264

Robert Danisch

latter’s neglect of power. Nonetheless, Locke deployed a kind of Jamesian pragmatism as a strategy for correcting social and political inequalities in race relations and confronting issues of power and empowerment. Locke turns James’s pluralism into a kind of cultural pluralism in order to confront the lived realities of race. He did this by bringing philosophy to bear on issues of race and culture and by showing a “vital connection between pluralism and democracy” that is only hinted at in James’s work. In 1942, Locke summarized his commitment to James’s legacy: “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 . . . Today, in our present culture crisis, it is both timely to recall this, and important . . . to ponder over it.”7 Much of Locke’s philosophy is devoted to working through the implications of a pluralistic value theory. Throughout many of his essays, Locke argues that interethnic violence stems from the fact that people are motivated by conflicting, universalized value imperatives. In response to this situation, Locke challenges notions of value absolutism by focusing on the philosophical mistake of categorizing values as products of universal reason instead of group-​influenced personal feelings. His challenge is supported by the belief that cultural uniformity about values is undesirable and impossible. In “Values and Imperatives,” Locke contends that our ways of valuing are “feeling-​ modes” that reflect both personal disposition and the influence of group norms that operate in the cultural context within which a person lives. These value feelings act as interpretive guides and imperatives to action in shaping our responses to situations. Such a position reiterates and extends James’s psychology. Locke points out that people can revise these value feelings on the basis of reasoned judgments or available experience, but oftentimes people regard their values as universal categorical imperatives, which is the grounds for inevitable conflict. But this does not entail declaring “for value-​anarchism as a wishful way out” of the situation (PAL, 36). Instead, this presents the “gravest problem of contemporary philosophy.” How is it possible “to ground some normative principle or criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into their corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, of intolerance and mass coercion” (ibid.)? In answering this question, Locke “calls for a functional analysis of value norms and a search for normative principles in the immediate context of valuation.” This means that for “a practical understanding of the operative mechanisms of valuation and of the grounds for our agreements and conflicts over values” we must attend to values as “feeling-​attitudes and dispositional imperatives of action-​choices” and not as products of universal reason or judgment (ibid.). Here we see a major sociopolitical problem of the twentieth century that is entailed by James’s pluralism—​ how do we find the grounds for agreement within the context of unrelenting plurality? Locke is clearly extending James’s pluralism and pragmatism. He emphasizes feeling, experience, and action as potent factors in determining both the attitudes that define values and the “pragmatic consequences” that determine our actions. Like James, Locke seeks a “middle ground between” the “extremes of subjectivism and objectivism” because “human behavior is experimental” and “selectively preferential” (PAL, 38). Classifying values “in terms of the mechanics of value-​feelings” is a more

265

James’s Pluralism and Modern Political and Social Thought

265

useful method of understanding both how values work and why they arise, and such a position avoids “leaning too heavily upon logical definition” (PAL, 41). This position also points to the claim that “our varied absolutes are . . . largely the rationalization of our preferred values and their imperatives. Their tap-​root, it seems, stems more from the will to power than from the will to know” (PAL, 46). In other words, objective, logical reasons for holding values come only after we act on our feelings: “The effective antidote to value absolutism lies in a systematic and realistic demonstration that values are rooted in attitudes, not in reality, and pertain to ourselves, not to the world” (ibid.). This “systematic realization” requires that we learn, in the words of Judith Green, “to understand the historically located experiences and culturally specific values of various, differing peoples through new culture-​specific scholarship and, on that basis, to discover the commonalities within human experience that make certain basic values broadly humane.”8 Locke calls the philosophical framework for guiding such scholarship “cultural pluralism.” In another essay, Locke summarizes his position on values as attitudes toward facts that manifest a person’s “feelings, desires, interests, purposes, needs, and acts” by outlining five main commitments that follow from his perspective (PAL, 111). First, inherent in all values is a relation to personality not to universality or reason. Second, values arise “out of the mind’s practical attitude, when it reacts upon stimulation” (ibid.). Third, values are qualities that are added to objects by people in order to express personal relations. Fourth, transvaluations should be regarded as normal and entirely legitimate. And fifth, we are blind to transvaluations “by the stability of words; for these change their form much less rapidly than their meaning” (PAL, 125). The final commitment points to the rhetorical process at the center of a functional analysis of values. From Locke’s perspective language shapes and solidifies our value-​attitudes, and thus obscures the process of change. Returning to the notion of “culture-​specific scholarship,” Locke believes that a cross-​disciplinary “anthropology in the broadest sense” would demonstrate the specific functional value adaptations that diverse people have made to their own environmental, historical, and political context (PAL, 72). This form of scholarship must account for the role language plays in shaping stable value systems and in contributing to transvaluations. Furthermore, the keys to overcoming the interethnic violence rooted in disagreements between value systems are the cross-​ cultural norms of tolerance and reciprocity based on a pluralistic understanding of the historical and functional character of varying group values. In other words, we cope with sociopolitical plurality with tolerance and reciprocity. I can think of no two more important values in twentieth-​century political practice. This position implies that on pragmatic grounds scholarship that displays different value systems is useful in establishing the existence of pluralism. The norms of tolerance and reciprocity are equally useful in connecting competing value systems around concepts that lack rigid dogmatism:  “What is achieved through relativistic rapprochement is, of course, somewhat different than the goal of the absolutists. It is fluid and functional unity rather than a fixed and irrevocable one, and its vital norms are equivalence and reciprocity rather than identity or complete agreement” (PAL, 71). Thus a realistic understanding of values offers clues for “a more practical and consistent way” of holding them in a fluid and functional manner. And, more

266

266

Robert Danisch

importantly, “it is here that the connection between pluralism and intellectual democracy becomes evident” (PAL, 57). In attending to the fluid process described by Locke, value dogmatism is disregarded: “Value assertion would thus be a tolerant assertion of preference, not an intolerant insistence on agreement or finality. Value disciplines would take on [a]‌tentative and revisionist procedure” (ibid.). Based on his theory of values and his cultural pluralism, Locke believes that his perspective gives rise to “three working principles” that underscore the flexible norms of tolerance and reciprocity. First, the principle of “cultural equivalence” demands that we search for “functional similarities in our analysis and comparisons of human cultures” and not differences (PAL, 73). Second, the principle of “cultural reciprocity” demands that we recognize the “reciprocal character of all contacts between cultures” (ibid.). In other words, exchanges between value systems are an integral part of a plural democracy like the one in the United States, and those acts of exchange shape value systems. And third, the principle of “limited cultural convertability” suggests that there are limits to the scope of cross-​cultural exchange that we must respect so as to avoid domination. These three “working principles” point to the process of negotiation implicated in cross-​cultural exchanges, and the recognition of both functional value commonalities and valued diversity as twin aspects of democratic decision-​making and collaborative action. Locke suggests that we best develop our practical capacity to engage in cross-​cultural conversation, collaboration, and negotiation so as to make a pluralist democracy possible. “Intellectuals” play a significant role in this process, according to Locke, by engaging in scholarship and teaching that displays the diversity of values, the functional adaptation of values to specific conditions, and the commonalities that unite different value systems: “What intellectuals can do for the extension of the democratic way of life is to discipline our thinking critically into some sort of realistic worldmindedness” (PAL, 63). Here Locke points to a concept that he variously calls “cosmopolitanism,” “civilization-​type,” or “culture-​citizenship.” These concepts all imply the need for assimilation and adaptation regarding questions of value. Being able to acknowledge and understand diverse cultural value systems requires a form of cosmopolitanism derived from scholarship that demonstrates a functional understanding of values. In addition, participation in “culture-​citizenship” subjects one’s own value imperatives to reconsideration and revision based on interactions with other cultures. The “civilization-​type” is not ruled by the desire for domination, but instead respects diversity, seeks collaborative conversation regarding values, and is open to the prospect of adapting or changing value imperatives. This seems like a fairly accurate description of William James.

John Dewey When John Dewey arrived in Chicago during the unrest of the Pullman Strike at the beginning of his career, he was alerted to the actual, practical machinations of a democratic culture marked by the kinds of value pluralism that Locke described. This

267

James’s Pluralism and Modern Political and Social Thought

267

both sparked an ongoing social and political activism and drove his more speculative, philosophical projects. Dewey then sought to articulate a different, but still potentially achievable, set of sociopolitical conditions that could improve decision-​ making and incorporate a greater number of citizens into the life-​affirming participatory process of democracy while working within the context of difference, debate, and unremitting pluralism. This is how one ought to read Dewey’s proclamations about communication. On one hand, they were descriptions of what he witnessed as central experiences within his democratic culture, buttressed by both his psychology and James’s pluralism. On the other hand, they were prescriptions for how to improve the conditions for communication within American democracy with the hope that those improvements would be able to reconcile the value differences Locke described. Take, for example, his statements about communication in Democracy and Education: “Men live in a community by virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common . . . communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes common possession. It modifies the disposition of both the parties that partake in it.”9 Here is a general description of the coordination of social action and the sharing of experience. But it also states, at the same time, an ideal. What we might add, in the light of James’s work, is that philosophical concepts cannot provide these common possessions because of the pluralism that attends human experience. We must communicate in order to have things in common because we do not, at first, possess things in common, and we probably ought to communicate with the kind of value theory that Locke had in mind. Democracy as a way of life meant participation in a communicative process that could transform unremitting pluralism into common values and beliefs. Without that social aspect, democracy could not secure the values it promoted, namely, freedom and equality, because those values would mean different things to different people. The Public and Its Problems takes up the challenge of articulating the conditions for the formation of what Dewey called “the great community.” Dewey engaged in such a task because when he surveyed his own sociopolitical circumstances he saw, for the most part, the absence of community and the presence of pluralism. Public decision-​making could not be democratic in the absence of community, but pluralism entailed that we needed to do the work of building a community out of heterogeneity and diversity. The famous proclamations from The Public and Its Problems are both descriptive and normative: “The essential need . . . is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends essentially on freeing and perfecting the process of inquiry.”10 Thus The Public and Its Problems is an attempt to outline the practical and intellectual conditions for community-​based inquiry as a method of channeling communicative practices for the benefit of democratic society. At the core of the “great community” lie two methods of inquiry: inquiry that requires deliberation and discussion, and inquiry based on the methods of scientific thinking. These two prescriptions would improve American democratic culture, or so Dewey thought, by generating collective beliefs capable of guiding public decision-​making by following a rigorous method able to cope with the conditions of plurality. Dewey is arguing for a

268

268

Robert Danisch

kind of social democracy that seeks the cooperation necessary for community-​based inquiry. Such a social democracy does not require an agonistic or mediated rhetoric, but instead seeks the face-​to-​face in an effort to leverage the knowledge of each participant in a deliberation. The rich plurality of life, described by James, could be leveraged to improve democratic society according to Dewey through communication practices that formed the “great community.” The Public and Its Problems centers on a vision of this “great community” by calling on the “perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action” (155). Accordingly, Deweyan pragmatism seeks methods of communication that would allow individuals in a democracy to participate in decision-​making and realize the interconnectedness of the community to which they belong. It does not seek abstract, conceptual propositions that pretend to universality. Instead, it takes the Jamesian reverence for the particular as a starting point and argues that we need practices of communication to transform those particulars into commonly held beliefs. The hard work of reconciling the unremitting pluralism described by James is found in the communication practices of the social democratic project. Dewey, therefore, suggests a social democracy that makes communion and cooperation possible and desirable in the context of pluralism. Democracy and community are tied together for Dewey by the belief that a specific version of communication as rhetoric is the primary means by which individuals become self-​actualized and politics becomes a melioristic instrument of change: The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it . . . Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is the name for a life of free and enriching communion . . . It [democracy] will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication. (184)

This is no doubt one of Dewey’s most famous proclamations about communication. It is an endorsement and a prescription, as all of The Public and Its Problems is, of a specific form of communication (communal inquiry, discussion) and is brought into being by specific rhetorical acts (artful and cooperative). I do not want to spend too much time developing Dewey’s position (a recent wave of scholarship on Dewey in rhetorical studies has done a great deal of work toward that end). I want simply to point out how deeply influential this view of democracy is, and how deeply committed such a view is to understanding the importance of communication for sociopolitical affairs. From Jane Addams at Hull House, to Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals, to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed are the Organized, to the contemporary Occupy Wall Street movement, the last hundred years of American political thought is replete with examples of how best to develop communities in order to realize American democracy and critiques of the mass media’s role in promoting communication practices that alienate us from one another.

269

James’s Pluralism and Modern Political and Social Thought

269

As John Durham Peters has argued, communication became perhaps the central problem of the twentieth century as we anxiously considered how we could reconcile the unremitting pluralism that James identified.11 In Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey, sounding very much like James, attends to the importance of deliberation in human affairs: “A world that is at points and times indeterminate enough to call out deliberation and to give play to choice to shape its future is a world in which will is free, not because it is inherently vacillating and unstable, but because deliberation and choice are determining and stabilizing factors.”12 A great deal of Human Nature and Conduct is devoted to explaining the role of deliberation in individual decision-​ making (the kind of internal dialogue that James described). When Dewey makes claims about improving the methods of debate, discussion, and persuasion in The Public and Its Problems, he shows how difficult and important deliberation is on a public scale. Improving the practice of communication, therefore, can help the individual make better decisions and, more importantly, it can help improve the life of the community because it is necessary for action in the light of unremitting plurality and change. Elevating communication practices over conceptual abstractions was a way for pragmatism to preserve particularity, avoid the violence of hierarchies that come with abstraction, and still build communities capable of collective action. Dewey was advancing these arguments at Columbia University in the 1920s while working just a few streets away from Alain Locke.

Richard McKeon Richard McKeon was a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University. After completing his doctoral work there, he moved on to the University of Chicago, where he became dean of humanities. While at Chicago, he also served as an adviser to the United States delegations at the first three sessions of the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In the wake of World War II, the Charter of the United Nations, signed in 1945, provided for the promotion of international cultural and educational cooperation. From these beginnings, plans for UNESCO grew with the conviction that peace based only on economic arrangements would not last and that an enduring international order needed to be based on the solidarity of mankind. UNESCO was an experiment in building solidarity from the plural relations between peoples. In September 1947, Richard McKeon was one participant in a committee of experts assembled in Paris to advise the director on a UNESCO program in humanities and philosophy. This work eventually led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Much can be written about UNESCO and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but my concern here is strictly limited to the fact that a student of John Dewey’s, and a prominent pluralist philosopher, was an integral part of the conversations surrounding that work. McKeon’s understanding of how that work unfolded and the problems it brought to the fore clearly demonstrate the ways in which James’s pluralism helped address the leading sociopolitical problems of the middle of the century.

270

270

Robert Danisch

What was immediately apparent to McKeon, as both a philosopher and a participant in the UNESCO meetings, was that different people had different interpretations, reasons, and understandings of various problems and truth claims: “The philosophic and educational problems are both implicated in the political problem of achieving common understanding among the peoples of the world.”13 Pluralism created conditions in which different peoples did not understand the meaning of terms like “rights” or “reason” and thus UNESCO was tasked with helping generate some degree of common understanding in the context of such pluralism. According to Eugene Garver, “McKeon’s life project is a continuation of the kind of social inquiry to which his teacher John Dewey devoted his own life, an attempt to formulate a relation between theory and practice appropriate for what William James called a pluralistic universe.”14 McKeon’s most fundamental insight as a philosopher was that we have always lived with, and within, a diversity of philosophic methods. If there is a diversity of ways of thinking and philosophical methods, then we can draw the conclusion that neither method nor truth can be simply the codification of preexisting behaviors that we call rational. For McKeon, this entails a commitment to the virtues of communication and understanding others, both instrumental in keeping any conversation going and treating with respect those with whom we disagree. These are virtues associated with the arts of rhetoric, which McKeon tried to bring to the attention of philosophers. The modern circumstances of politics, as McKeon lived them, are ethical and epistemological pluralism, and plurality without coordination is the classic modern sociopolitical problem, from which problems of justice, morality, and order arise. Furthermore, plurality without coordination is also the classic modern condition in which the problems of philosophy arise. Each time we encounter new forms of pluralism, we rediscover the ways in which reflection can be a practical act and the ways in which considerations of how others think and act becomes part of one’s deliberations about what to do. Pragmatism has always carried the useful message that practical agreement does not require agreement on philosophic principle—​a position that was clearly part of the UNESCO deliberations over universal human rights. Practical agreement can take place even when we disagree about philosophic principles, but how? While Dewey championed democracy as a way of life and face-​to-​face communication as a mechanism for building community, McKeon’s main contribution to the history of philosophy (aside from his historical explication of pluralism) was to articulate the importance of rhetoric as an architectonic art for the modern sociopolitical conditions of pluralism. When we acknowledge pluralism in both sociopolitical circumstances and philosophic method, then the problems of relativism are replaced by the problems of rhetoric and communication:  “Recognition that the discovery of truth and the formation of thought are evidenced and tested only in communication need not lead to skepticism or relativism. On the contrary, the means to avoid sophism and dogmatism are provided by communication, and criteria of truth and value are translated into means of improving the content and efficacy of communication and of forestalling its use as an arbitrary and authoritarian instrument of control.”15 In McKeon’s writings on politics, no single doctrine can be formulated to establish any set

271

James’s Pluralism and Modern Political and Social Thought

271

of statements regarding economic, social, or political relationships, or once and for all define freedom, rights, justice, well-​being, or any other term. In other words, peoples of any two cultures (or even members of one) cannot be brought to single-​minded agreement on substantive principles or concepts (nor should they). The right thing to do, then, is to clarify the differences, so that the originally opposing parties could soon grasp and respect the opinions embraced by each other. This requires rhetoric, and one can analyze and understand how this process works by attending to rhetorical processes: “Determination of the problems of our times, and action to resolve them, stand in need of an architectonic productive art. The problem of constituting such an art and applying it once constituted is one of rejoining wisdom and eloquence, rhetoric and philosophy.”16 It is far beyond the scope of this chapter to go into detail about McKeon’s “architectonic rhetoric” and its utility for both philosophy and sociopolitical affairs. My aim here is simply to point to the ways in which Jamesian pluralism leads to McKeon’s argument and conditions his experience of his work at UNESCO. In the wake of World War II, McKeon bore witness to massive advances in technology and new, vast stores of knowledge. But he also bore witness to breakdowns in human relations: As we enter the final decades of this century, we boast of a vast increase of output in all arts, and we are puzzled by the absence of interdisciplinary connection and by the breakdown of interpersonal, intergroup, and intercultural communication. We need a new architectonic productive art. Rhetoric exercised such functions in the Roman republic and in the Renaissance. Rhetoric provides the devices by which to determine the characteristics and problems of our times and to form the art by which to guide actions for the solution of our problems and the improvement of our circumstances. (Selected Writings, 2.204)

This is a startling argument for a philosopher to make, and perhaps an argument that many other philosophers have ignored in the latter half of the twentieth century. McKeon, however, makes this argument because it is the only means of avoiding the conceptual violence that James pointed to in the Hibbert lectures and, at the same time, pragmatically improving our own circumstances by relating disparate peoples and ideas. Rhetoric opens up possible methods of directing and relating knowledge, action, and production, by instituting an architectonic productive art of improving and increasing both the production of utilities and goods (utilia and honesta) and the use and enjoyment (uti and frui) of the products. The guidelines for both tasks are found in the continuing use of basic distinctions made in the fundamental vocabulary of rhetoric, and the mark of the validity and relevance of those distinctions is found in the fact that the common vocabulary in which we discuss the problems of our times is already structured on those distinctions and that facts are as much determined by orientations as orientations are determined by facts. (Selected Writings, 2.205).

272

272

Robert Danisch

That last point is a reiteration of James’s position, and McKeon turns to rhetoric as both the practical and conceptual means of coping with the circumstances of that position.

The cash value of James for our sociopolitical circumstances How do we hold together a multiracial, multiethnic society? What is democracy and how do we build a democratic culture? How do we forge alliances and bonds with countries vastly different from our own? I  take these three questions to be central preoccupations for sociopolitical thought in both our century and the twentieth century. We have not escaped the problematic scene of pluralism so deftly captured by James, and we have seen the violence that issues from conceptual hierarchies that pretend to be absolute truths. As I write this chapter, the United States is bombing, once again, the desserts of Mesopotamia in what has become a war without end, the intent of which appears to be to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East. From one perspective, the challenges in Iraq and Syria are no different from the challenges outlined by Locke, Dewey, and McKeon. The unrelenting realization that we live in a world marked by differences of value, opinion, belief, and truth means that we are constantly confronted by the sociopolitical challenge of creating shared meanings while resisting the philosophical desire to identify a conceptual hierarchy that might possess the one, absolute truth. This is what pragmatism seeks and why it turns to rhetoric, communication, deliberation, and other methods for pursuing that end. This is what we mean when we claim that we must “win their hearts and minds.” I cannot think of a more difficult practical, political problem. Perhaps the explosive violence of the last hundred years is an indication of how intractable and impossible that problem is. Abstract conceptual hierarchies are not as violent as unmanned drones, improvised explosive devices, or Beretta M9s. It seems we fall back on these latter methods when we become overwhelmed by the complexities and difficulties of building shared meanings in a “pluriverse.” But for those, like James, working in the pragmatist tradition we must find ways of living with others in a plural world without recourse to these instruments of violence. When James announced his scientific and philosophical pluralism at Oxford he deftly explained the roots of the violent century that was about to unfold and set the stage for what would become, and remain, our gravest political challenges. William James suffered throughout his life from bouts of depression, anxiety, and a variety of other mental and physical ailments. In some ways, we can read James’s psychobiography as an example of how difficult it is for an individual to accept and cope with conditions of unrelenting change, uncertainty, and plurality. The current chaos of international politics can be a curious corollary to the chaos of James’s inner psychic state. But what makes pragmatism such an appealing and enduring American intellectual tradition is the optimism that underpins the entire project. The realization of the scientific and philosophical pluralism articulated by James may be disorienting and difficult, but it need not lead to paralysis or violence. James, after all, did manage to produce a vast body of superb intellectual work

273

James’s Pluralism and Modern Political and Social Thought

273

despite his various ailments, just as the twentieth century managed to produce some impressive forms of multinational collaboration throughout the violence of the last century (I am thinking of large-​scale scientific and technological advances like the mapping of the human genome, as well as political institutions like the United Nations and the European Union). Pragmatism is a philosophy of hope. It begins by critiquing nearly all the underlying premises of Western philosophy from Plato to Descartes, and it dismantles epistemological realism, logical certainty, and our search for universal moral laws. Such a powerful and sweeping critique is made possible by the stipulation of the conditions of pluralism, but it does not end with resignation. James, Locke, Dewey, McKeon, and many other pragmatists roll up their sleeves in response to the central challenges that lie in the wake of the critique of Western philosophy and the realization of unavoidable pluralism. To imagine the complex and sizeable tasks facing, for example, Locke in Harlem in the 1920s or McKeon in Paris in the 1940s is also to realize how much work has been done by relying on communication and rhetorical practice to forge meaning out of the chaos of pluralism. James’s impact on sociopolitical thought is, in equal measure, the realization of pluralism and the hope of overcoming it in melioristic ways. In many ways, we are still living out the projects that Locke, Dewey, and McKeon started and we are better off for the achievements, advancements, and successes of those projects. Hope lies in a kind of rhetorical pragmatism that can offer methods of coping with Jamesian pluralism. That is James’s enduring sociopolitical message, and one I think we can, and ought to, heed if we wish to continue the project of improving our own democratic ways. Philosophy and political theory can sometimes forget the difficult, mundane, and messy task of face-​to-​face communication, but James never did. He was, by practice, a popular public lecturer. I chose to begin this chapter with a reference to a lecture instead of a book because nearly all of James’s books were first delivered as lectures. We may overlook this fact too easily, but it clearly demonstrates the extent to which James thought (and worried) about the challenges of communicating with a diverse audience. His performances were nearly always well received (as the Hibbert lectures were) and that, in itself, offers us hope that communication really can create shared meanings out of the conditions of plurality. To be a democratic citizen is, on some level, to be someone who talks to strangers. To talk is to participate in mitigating pluralism, and that is just what James did and what he tells us we ought to be doing too. We have Locke, Dewey, McKeon, and others to thank for showing us how complex, difficult, and necessary that political project can be.

Notes 1 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), 41–​2. 2 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 7. 3 Edward Schiappa, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 40–​2.

274

274

Robert Danisch

4 William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 145. 5 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975)), 36. 6 Ross Posnock, Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 7 Alain Locke, The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989), 53. Hereafter cited parenthetically as PAL. 8 Judith M. Green, “Alain Locke’s Multicultural Philosophy of Value: A Transformative Guide for the Twenty-​first Century,” in Harris, The Philosophy of Alain Locke, 87. 9 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, NY: Free Press, 1944), 4. 10 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 208. 11 John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 12 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1922), 310. 13 Richard McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 35. 14 Eugene Garver and Richard Buchanan, eds., Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 112. 15 Richard McKeon, Selected Writings of Richard McKeon: Volume 1: Philosophy, Science, and Culture, ed. Zahava McKeon and William Swenson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 396. 16 Richard McKeon, Selected Writings of Richard McKeon: Volume 2: Culture, Education, and the Arts, ed. Zahava McKeon and William Swenson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 205.

275

Part Three

Glossary

276

277

17

James on Chance and Indeterminacy Kyle Bromhall

Willliam James’s commitment to indeterminacy is primarily a statement about the metaphysical status of possibilities and is meant as a counterpoint to the mechanistic and deterministic accounts of reality common in both the philosophy and science of his day. Such accounts rest on two claims:  first, that there is only ever one possible course of events; and second, that all apparent indeterminacy is due to ignorance. James rejected both these claims, holding instead that “possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be ambiguous.”1 James’s view that possibilities are in excess of actualities is informed by his deep commitment to Darwinism. James argues that the worldview necessitated by Charles Darwin is that of a “sort of table on which dice are continually being thrown.”2 James notes that indeterminacy is not found in a retroactive analysis of an event: for an event that has already happened, the causal history is fixed and static (The Will to Believe [WB], 121). Indeterminacy is found before an event occurs, when the universe is still dynamic. While there may be some states of affairs that may be more likely to come about than others, there is nothing in past events that necessitates only one possible state of affairs.3 The future is ambiguous, as “[the universe] is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future.”4 This probabilistic and dynamic view of the universe has significant consequences throughout James’s work. The primary function of consciousness is to “load the dice” by making states of affairs that are beneficial to the organism more likely to come about than harmful states of affairs.5 The “star-​performer” in volition is the ability to attend to one idea of how to act over another, tipping the scales in its favor (The Principles of Psychology [PP], 1.428). Even James’s commitment to pluralism is underwritten by the essential open-​endedness of reality (Pragmatism [P], 76–​7, 88). James also rejects the view that all apparent indeterminacy is due to ignorance. Determinism holds that “necessity . . . and impossibility . . . are the sole categories of the real” (WB, 118). As such, indeterminacy is “an illusion” (ibid.): a by-​product of having an incomplete account of the causal mechanisms that led to the apparently indeterminate event. A further consequence of this view is that with sufficiently advanced tools for observation, a complete account of an event is in theory possible, as all causal relations are static and fixed at that time. Contrary to this, James argues that

278

278

Kyle Bromhall

apparent ambiguity is the result of the events or objects in question being themselves ambiguous. James notes that a full understanding of an event requires an inventory of all of its causal relations, both past and future. This is an impossible task. First, we lack the ability to grasp all of reality in a single intuition; we cannot provide a full account of all of the causal forces that led to a particular event (WB, 165). Second, we cannot account for the future causal relations of an event because the future has not happened yet (WB, 123). This is especially important to James’s account of truth, which emphasizes revisability in the face of future evidence on the basis of the incomplete nature of reality.6

Notes 1 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 118. 2 William James, Essays in Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 53. 3 William James, Essays in Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 54. 4 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 123; emphasis in original. 5 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.143. 6 William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 63.

279

18

James on Habit Lisi Schoenbach

Habit is arguably William James’s central subject, a topic to which he returns repeatedly throughout his work. It is at once a subject for philosophical reflection, an occasion for inspirational exhortation, a rich field for analysis, and an incredibly flexible conceptual tool. Though it is intensely personal for him, it is also a key point of convergence between his work and the work of the other major pragmatist philosophers, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. James’s work emphasizes the degree to which habit is ubiquitous, inescapable, and foundational to every aspect of human thought and behavior: “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits—​practical, emotional, and intellectual—​systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”1 Jamesian habit brought together categories that had long been considered opposed:  past and future, stimulus and response, mind and body, individual and collective. In this sense the term epitomizes James’s larger philosophical project of doing away with received philosophical dualisms. Habit is, in effect, not inherently anything at all; it is a contentless mechanism, with no implicit politics and no inherent moral valence. It is, quite simply, everywhere: an inextricable aspect of all we do, think, and feel. In this sense, Jamesian habit revises the past philosophical tradition: while earlier treatments tended to oscillate between overwhelmingly optimistic or pessimistic views of habit, positing it either as a key to personal and political success or as the intractable enemy of social progress, James attempts in his work to capture the full complexity and dynamism of the concept. The personal implications of habit were particularly intense for James, who tended to struggle with depression and for whom the development of good habits seemed to offer the hope of personal salvation. The urgency of his tone with regard to personal habits is unmistakeable: “The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. . . . For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible as many useful actions as we can.”2 (The Principles of Psychology [PP], 1.126). Aside from the conservation of our energy, and the encouragement of a more “healthy-​minded” approach to life, an additional benefit of committing as much as possible to habit is that it allows us to develop more creative and experimental modes of thought and expression: “The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will

280

280

Lisi Schoenbach

be set free for their own proper work” (ibid.). James’s major example of this is that of the pianist, who begins by awkwardly banging out individual notes, but for whom years of muscular repetitions culminate in the ability to sit down at the instrument and translate notes written on a page directly into an expressive and meaningful artistic performance. The social implications of habit are equally important in James’s work. In one of his most well-​known passages, James calls habit “the enormous fly-​wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent”: [Habit] alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein . . . It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. (PP, 125)

The tragic vision in this passage of a world in which people toil away in prisons built of the accumulated habits of their upbringing and the collective habits of their culture is accompanied by a seeming complicity with and approval of the entire enterprise. James imagines change, including radical change, elsewhere in his work, but this particular passage, with its dramatic images and its novelistic feel, offers habit as both the cause of the trouble it describes and as the comforting compensation for that trouble. Ambivalence, multiplicity, complexity, and dynamism are the terms that capture James’s notion of habit, and these terms also suggest the ways in which this vision is a particularly modern concept. Bringing together a range of ideas and categories that had long been estranged, James’s concept of habit offers a new vocabulary for understanding, preparing for, and initiating individual and collective change.

Notes 1 William James, Talks to Teachers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 47. 2 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.126.

281

19

James on Morality David Rondel

William James’s moral philosophy is most lucidly set forth in the celebrated essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891).1 James there distinguishes between three different questions in ethics, concluding in each case that the degree of determinacy and normative neatness typically sought by moral philosophers simply is not in the cards. The first question is the “psychological” one. It concerns how a thing is made significant or good in our minds. Here the contrast with utilitarianism is striking. While James acknowledges the importance of pain and pleasure in ethics, he also insists that “it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way” (The Will to Believe [WB], 143). This conclusion is bolstered by a simple thought-​experiment: suppose that millions could be kept permanently happy on the “one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-​off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture” (WB, 144). For most people, the enjoyment of such a utopia would be a “hideous thing” at such a cost. That feeling, James reasons, cannot be accounted for by any utilitarian calculation and must be “brain born” (ibid.). James next turns to the “metaphysical” question, which concerns the nature and meaning of moral terms like “obligation,” “good,” and “ill.” James argues that the “application” and “relevancy” of such words wholly depends on the existence of sentient life. Goods and evils do not reside in physical facts or material reality. “Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo” (WB, 145). Nothing can be good or right “except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good or thinks it to be right” (ibid.). In short, something is valuable because someone values it, and James believes that every person has an equal ability and right to engender value. It follows on James’s view that each demand or preference an individual expresses is equally valid, and thus presents an equally strong prima facie claim to be satisfied. “Any desire,” James says, “makes itself valid by the fact that it exists at all” (WB, 149). Obviously the satisfaction of some desires can be overridden by other considerations, but the mere fact that a desire or preference exists, James seems to have thought, gives us some reason to value its satisfaction. It is just better that preferences be satisfied than frustrated. A moral universe containing more satisfied preferences is better, all things being equal, than one containing fewer. This helps explain why the guiding principle for an ethical

282

282

David Rondel

philosophy on James’s view is “simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can” (WB, 155). James then turns to the “casuistic” question, which concerns “the true order of human obligations” and “the measure of the various goods and ills” that human beings recognize (WB, 142). Here James movingly argues for a deep and persistent pluralism: there are innumerably many ideals—​some of them incommensurable and mutually exclusive—​and they “have no common character apart from the fact that they are ideals” (WB, 153). Against a strong current of ethical thought, James concludes that “no single principle can be used to yield a “scientifically accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale” (ibid.). James’s ethics can be profitably read as a series of correctives to the two most dominant ethical doctrines of the last several centuries, Kantian or deontological theories on one hand, and utilitarian or consequentialist theories on the other. James’s ethics takes consequences seriously (as Immanuel Kant’s does not), but it does not assume (as Jeremy Bentham’s does) that different goods can be converted into some supreme moral metric like utility or happiness. Unlike Kantians and utilitarians, who, despite all their differences, agree that there is always a correct course of action for every moral situation, James argues that some part of our ideals must be “butchered.” Moral loss, he thinks, is an inescapable feature of the human predicament. James also stresses, against Kant and Bentham, that morality cannot be summed up in a list of principles or a set of obligations. There is no master maxim from which right conduct can always be deduced. Ethical life is infinitely richer than a collection of principles can disclose. James sets himself against finality and closure in ethics: because obligations are always tied to the claims of concrete others, “concrete ethics cannot be final” (WB, 159), at least not “until the last man has had his say” (WB, 141). Such openness and indeterminacy is at the very center of James’s ethical vision. We may hanker for systematic closure and finality, but James reminds us that the honest and responsible ethical agent must “bide their time” and be prepared to revise their conclusions from day to day.

Note 1 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1979), 141–​62.

283

20

James on Philosophical Temperaments Tom Donaldson

In the first lecture of Pragmatism (P), William James says: The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. . . . Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises.1

This claim will remind some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim that “every great philosophy so far has been . . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”2 F.  H. Bradley put it more bluntly when he defined “metaphysics” as “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.”3 James goes on to distinguish two different philosophical temperaments: he called them “tough-​mindedness” and “tender-​mindedness.” Briefly, tough-​minded people are empiricist, scientific, and sceptical; tender-​minded people are rationalistic, religious, and dogmatic. James gives Gottfried Leibniz as a paradigm of tender-​ mindedness (P, 18–​20);4 he also claims that the absolute idealists are tender-​minded. We might offer David Hume as a paradigm of tough-​mindedness. James suggests that some tough-​minded philosophers are materialists.5 However, he also claims that some tough-​minded philosophers are phenomenalists.6 James asserts that the “antagonism” between the two kinds of people has “formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere.” However, he argues that tough-​ mindedness is currently ascendant. “Never were as many of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day,” he writes. “Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific (P, 13–​14). Even so, James claims that few people can be content with a purely tough-​minded philosophy that is satisfactory: For a hundred and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man’s importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no lawgiver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must

284

284

Tom Donaldson

accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman though it be, and submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert byproducts of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of “nothing but’ ”—​ nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-​minded find themselves congenially at home. (P, 15)

This passage echoes James’s earlier claim, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, that “sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic or naturalistic shceme of philosophy.”7 At the same time, James suggests, the tender-​minded philosophers have a “feeble grasp of reality” and so they construct “pure but unreal” theories, out of touch with our “concrete facts, and joys and sorrows” (P, 20, 18, 17). What is needed, James thinks, was a third alternative: “You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaption and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type” (The Principles of Psychology (P, 17). James then promised to provide this third alternative: “I offer the oddly-​named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts” (P, 23). To introduce this philosophy was the central goal of Pragmatism.

Notes 1 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1975), 11. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 13. 3 F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1930), x. 4 This example should be sufficient to dispel any inclination to think that by “tender-​ minded” James means “stupid.” 5 “Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic” (P, 12). 6 I have in mind the following comment from Lecture VII: “The tough-​minded are the men whose alpha and omega are facts. Behind the bare phenomenal facts, as my tough-​ minded old friend Chauncey Wright, the great Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is nothing” (P, 126). 7 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 119.

285

21

James on Pluralism Susan Dieleman

The term “pluralism” first shows up in William James’s published work in “The Dilemma of Determinism” (1884), where he suggests that his theory of indeterminism “gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene.”1 Out of this initial statement, there emerge multiple senses of pluralism that shape the entirety of James’s thought. Various commentators have highlighted up to seven senses of pluralism; I focus on four here.2 This first published appearance of “pluralism” represents a metaphysical sense of pluralism, largely interchangeable with James’s use of “indeterminism,” according to which the world itself is composed of possibilities. It reappears in the opening to The Will to Believe (WB), where James notes, “Prima facie the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form” (WB, 6). The radical empiricist is the person who takes metaphysical pluralism as his or her “hypothesis” (ibid.). This metaphysical sense of pluralism persists throughout his career: “Ever not quite” becomes a rallying cry of the concluding chapter of A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and it shows up as the organizing theme in his posthumously published textbook, Some Problems of Philosophy (1911). Another, connected sense of pluralism is hinted at in these passages: an experiential sense of pluralism, which picks out the impossibility of capturing a “whole scene” from just one perspective. This experiential sense is expanded in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899), where James emphasizes the impossibility of seeing the world from other perspectives, including those of other humans and other creatures. This experiential sense of pluralism gives rise to two further, related senses of pluralism. The first is an epistemological sense. This pluralism can be traced back to the imperfect fit James identifies between percepts and concepts: any conceptual scheme is limited in its ability to fully capture experience: “Conceptual knowledge is forever inadequate to the fullness of the reality to be known.”3 There are, James thinks, multiple correct ways to describe the world; thus, “the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truth in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin Language or the Law.”4 The experiential sense of pluralism also gives rise to an ethical pluralism, which makes its most forceful appearance in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,”

286

286

Susan Dieleman

(1891/​1896) and “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899). James’s ethical pluralism suggests that there are multiple goods: “There is hardly a good which we can imagine,” he notes, “except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good” (WB, 153–​4). Moreover, having limited perspectives means that not all goods are recognizable to each of us; this is the lesson to be learned from James’s tale of coming across the “coves” in North Carolina and seeing them initially as “unmitigated squalor” before learning that they were, to their owners, a symbol of “duty, struggle, and success.”5

Notes 1 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 136. 2 I am grateful for two specific essays that helped guide my thinking here: James R. O’Shea, “Sources of Pluralism in William James,” in Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity, ed. Maria Baghramian and Attracta Ingram (London: Routledge, 2000), 17–​43; and Russell B. Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” Revue international de philosophie 260 (2012): 155–​76. 3 William James, Some Problems in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 45. 4 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 116. 5 William James, Talks to Teachers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 133–​4.

287

22

James on Pragmatism Colin Koopman

William James’s most famous definition of pragmatism is that offered in his 1907 book Pragmatism (P): “The pragmatic method . . . is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.”1 James there traces the origins of this method to an 1878 essay by Charles Peirce, which he summarizes as follows:  “To develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce” (P, 29).2 The primary ingredient in pragmatism is, says James, “πρᾶγμα, meaning action” (P, 28). In unpacking this idea, James describes pragmatism as a method for attending to the “conceivable effects of a practical kind” that follow from a given thought—​a thought’s effects consist in “what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare” (P, 29). In this description James offers a philosophical intervention that has proven decisive for the history of pragmatism. James here, rather quietly, specifies not one but two ingredients of pragmatism:  conduct (“reactions”) and experience (“sensations”). In earlier work, James was not so noiseless about this addition. His 1898 essay “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” is generally regarded as his first statement of pragmatism, a point noted by James himself both in that essay and again in 1907 (P, 258, 29).3 Later republished in 1904 under the title “The Pragmatic Method,” James prepared the way for his 1907 statement of pragmatism as “a method only” that “does not stand for any special results” (P, 31–​2).4 James in 1898 also explicated pragmatism via Peirce’s 1878 essay; in the earlier case, however, James also marked his own notion as ranging “more broadly” than Peirce’s: “The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires. But it inspires that conduct because it first foretells some particular turn to our experience which shall call for just that conduct from us” (P, 259). Is pragmatism a method focused primarily on conduct and action or on experience and sensation? Interestingly, the history of James’s own philosophical career neatly encapsulates this debate in subsequent pragmatist philosophy. From 1898 to 1907 James appeared to want to emphasize both the place of conduct and experience in pragmatism. But in both later and earlier work James was wont to emphasize the priority of either conduct or experience. At the end of his career, in his 1909 A Pluralistic Universe (PU), James finally cashed in everything for the experiential option with an encomium to the “sensational life.”5

288

288

Colin Koopman

Following pragmatism’s anti-​intellectualism to its furthest conclusion, James praised contemporary French philosopher Henri Bergson’s recognition of a conceptually uncontainable experiential flux: “We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled” (PU, 128).6 This is the bookend of James’s philosophical career that helped launch John Dewey’s pragmatist metaphysics of experience and that helps sustain contemporary accounts of classical pragmatism as above all a philosophy of experience. At the other end of James’s philosophical career is a quite different bookend. James’s first published reference to Peirce’s 1878 essay (and so perhaps the first published seed of his pragmatism) was a short 1881 address titled “Reflex Action and Theism.” James here offered an account of the mind as a triadic assemblage of “sensory impression,” intellectual “reflection,” and “the final act,” and asked which of these three “departments” has priority.7 Here the early James emphasized not experiential sensation but rather willful action:  “The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior’s sake” (The Will to Believe, 92). James’s most famous statements of pragmatism from 1898 and 1907 mediate between, by endorsing, both the younger James’s conduct pragmatism and the older James’s experiential pragmatism. A contemporary observer of the philosophical scene today can see James’s own internal philosophical transformations being recapitulated in ongoing debates that continue to (re)constitute the history of philosophical pragmatism.

Notes 1 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 28. 2 For the original, see Charles Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” The Essential Peirce, Volume 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 3 “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” is reprinted as appendix I in the Harvard University Press edition of Pragmatism. 4 On the retitling, see the editorial note in P, 255. 5 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 120. For the details of James’s argument, see ch. VI (esp. 110–​13). 6 For the details of James’s Bergsonian argument, see ch. VI (esp. 110–​13). The crux is his seemingly non-​pragmatist willingness to dispense with the term “practical” (by way of disparaging “practical ends only” [121]) in order to defend Bergson’s philosophy of sensational flux. 7 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 92.

289

23

James on Psychical Phenomona Ermine L. Algaier IV

Even though many contemporary scholars either ignore or are embarrassed by it, the fact remains that William James was a pioneer in the field of psychical research. Rather than neglect the “unclassified residuum” of “wild facts” and fringe experiences, James devoted more than two decades of his life to open-​minded and rigorous scientific investigation of “obscure and exceptional phenomena.” Throughout his career he continually drew on case studies and reports of psychical researchers, using them as leverage to challenge the dogmatic assumptions that dominated the orthodox epistemologies of medicine, philosophy, psychology, religion, and science. James firmly believed that those who pay attention to the facts of irregular phenomena will best serve philosophy, the sciences, and the “border-​lands of human experience.”1 Evidence of his commitment to psychical research is peppered throughout his biography, correspondence, and works. At the personal level, it was largely due to his work with Mrs. Leonora Piper, the famous Bostonian medium, that James was persuaded of the importance of investigating certain psychical phenomena. By 1895 he was convinced that the careful experiments of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), taken in aggregate, “appear to make it unreasonable to doubt any longer the fact that occasionally a telepathic relation between one mind and another may exist.”2 Similarly, James’s investigations led him to philosophize about the existence of some sort of cosmic consciousness, a relationship between the subliminal faculties of the trance subject and a panpsychic or “cosmic environment of other consciousness” (Essays in Psychical Research [EPR], 372–​3). At the end of his life, James felt it pertinent to “put [his] own state of mind upon record publically” for the “commonness” and “typicality” of psychic phenomena, while also asserting the “presence,” though rarity, of “supernormal knowledge” (EPR, 373). Ultimately, however, he maintained that regardless of the bias of his personal over-​beliefs, “the only certainty is that the phenomena are enormously complex” and thus he refused to commit to a position, instead wishing to “remain a psychical researcher waiting for more facts before concluding” (EPR, 374). On a professional level, James was an active and invested member of the SPR for twenty-​six years. He became a corresponding member of the SPR from 1884 to 1889. James went on to serve as vice president from 1890 to 1893 and again from 1896 to 1910. During the interim years of 1894 to 1895 he acted as president. He was also a

290

290

Ermine L. Algaier IV

founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), serving on the twenty-​one member council since its inception in 1884. He served as vice president of the ASPR from 1889 to 1890. During his tenure with the ASPR, James served on five different committees: Experimental Psychology, Hypnotism, Mediumistic Phenomena, Thought-​Transference, as well as a committee on Work. Between 1869 and 1910, James authored thirteen articles, seven circulars, two encyclopedia entries, more than two dozen letters, two notes, five reports, and nineteen book reviews—​all of which explicitly address topics such as apparitions, hypnotism, veridical hallucinations, trance states, mediumship, and so on.3 One should not assume, however, that his psychical research was divorced from his more respectable works. From a naturalistic point of view, both The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience repeatedly draw on case studies of altered states of consciousness, mental-​healing, trances, and visions. More philosophically, in The Will to Believe James’s pluralism and radical empiricism, coupled with an implicit philosophy of science, offer a critique of dogma and certainty that, among other purposes, sought to democratically level the epistemological playing field by opening up a space wherein the “unclassified residuum” could be given a fair and genuine hearing. And finally, at the speculative level, traces of his emerging conception of coconsciousness/​ cosmic consciousness are discussed in Human Immortality, The Varieties of Religious Experience, A Pluralistic Universe, and Essays in Radical Empiricism.

Notes 1 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 222–​4. 2 William James, Essays in Psychical Research (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 120. 3 The bulk of this material has been republished in EPR. Additional documents are located in William James, Essays in Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) and William James, Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

291

24

James on Pure Experience Joel Krueger

William James’s “pure experience”—​developed in his posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism (ERE)—​greatly vexed his peers. Many simply did not know what to make of it. One reading—​which Bertrand Russell adopts when developing his own neutral monism—​is to see pure experience as a strong metaphysical thesis positing a monistic, all-​encompassing “primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed.”1 But James was at best a halfhearted metaphysician; he ultimately rejects the epistemic possibility of an Archimedean point beyond experience from which we might construct an objective, reality-​encompassing system. Moreover, he elsewhere seems to contradict this metaphysical reading when he concedes that “there appears no universal element of which all things are made” (ERE, 15). An alternative reading—​consistent with James’s lifelong philosophical interest in the body, as well as his commitment to radical empiricism, or the idea that “the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience”2—​is to see pure experience as a phenomenological thesis. On this reading, pure experience is meant to characterize the fundamental way that minds inhabit and relate to their world:  namely, not as a detached Cartesian cogito divorced from a world of value-​neutral objects, but rather as an embodied agent enmeshed in concrete, value-​ laden “activity situations.” More specifically, “pure experience” refers to the prereflective phenomenological unity of subject and object within the myriad activity situations constitutive of everyday life:  gingerly sipping hot coffee, maneuvering our car through traffic, erupting into laughter at a friend’s wry comment, intensely practicing our guitar scales, lunging for the bumped wine bottle as it teeters off the table, gently stroking an infant’s forehead as we sing a quiet lullaby, and so on. For James, these experiences are “pure” in that, as we enact them, dualistic distinctions such as subject-​object or mental-​physical are not operative. There is simply experience-​in-​action:  an immediate encounter with, and creative responsiveness to, the demands of that particular activity situation. Pure experience is thus situated within “this immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories” (ERE, 46). James further insists that no “dualism of being represented and representing resides in the [pure] 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

292

292

Joel Krueger

contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience” (ERE, 13). If it is a monistic thesis, pure experience is a monism grounded in the embodied dynamics of perception and action. The philosophical significance of pure experience for James is to remind us that we do not first come to know the world via concepts or reflection—​contra the Cartesian cogito—​but instead within perception and action. James argues that concepts only give us a static and incomplete picture of the world; unlike experience, they cannot capture the richness and dynamism of a world continually in-​becoming. Additionally, concepts—​as universal—​pass over the particularity and novelty of things and their relations. But experience itself preserves this multiplicity. James thus urges that “our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive” in logical and conceptual analysis, but must instead “at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it”.3 That universe is a universe of pure experience. This reading of pure experience aligns James with phenomenological thinkers like Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, who writes similarly that embodied subjects originally emerge not from acts of reflective cognition, but in “a universe of experience, in a milieu which is neutral with regard to the substantial distinctions between the organism, thought and extension.”4

Notes 1 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 4. 2 William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 6. 3 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 94. 4 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. L. Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963), 189.

293

25

James on Radical Empiricism Loren Goldman

Radical empiricism is the Weltanschauung1 at the core of William James’s philosophy. Empiricism restricts the ambit of knowledge to whatever is drawn from experience; as such, it forms the foundation of the modern scientific worldview. Traditional empiricism ascribes reality only to the concrete phenomena of perception; chairs, desks, and billiard balls are commonly employed examples in the philosophical canon. James’s version of empiricism is radical insofar as it incorporates the relations between phenomena as experiential data. James holds that we should ascribe genuine reality not only to chairs, desks, and billiard balls, but also to the conjunctive and disjunctive relations between them: when we perceive a chair and a desk, for example, the “and” is just as much a part of experience as are the chair and the desk.2 As James puts it, “in actual experience the more substantive and the more transitive parts run into each other continuously, there is in general no separateness needing to be overcome by an external cement; and whatever separateness is actually experienced is not overcome, it stays and counts as separateness to the end.”3 Since James did not leave a definitive account of this “tolerably definite philosophic attitude,”4 radical empiricism’s precise characterization can be elusive.5 Its clearest statement comes in the “Preface” to The Meaning of Truth (MT), where James explains that it consists of (1) a postulate, (2) a statement of fact, and (3) a generalized conclusion. The postulate is “that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience” (MT, 172), a claim shared by empiricists of all stripes. Radical empiricism’s distinctiveness accordingly resides in its final two aspects. The statement of fact, James writes, “is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves” (MT, 173). Closely related to this statement is the conclusion that “the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-​empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure” (ibid.). Here James refers to the experiential basis of radical empiricism: “pure experience,” the unmediated, pre-​interpretive, brute experience of bare being in the world, akin to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of infant consciousness described in his Principles of Psychology (PP, 462). To borrow from the language of this work, one can say

294

294

Loren Goldman

that radical empiricism takes as equally important both the transitive “flights” and substantive “perchings” of consciousness (PP, 236). Intended as an alternative to both absolutism and traditional materialism, radical empiricism allows James to avoid a number of thorny philosophical problems; in Jacques Barzun’s words, radical empiricism “gets rid of the hide-​ and-​seek of Appearance and Reality and the quarrels among their classifiers.”6 On the ostensible epistemological divide between subject and object, for example, there is no need to supply an explanation of how the objects of the external world cohere, be it René Descartes’s evil demon, George Berkeley’s God, or Immanuel Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. Rather, the experience of conjunction or disjunction between phenomena is also a given empirical datum:  ghosts in the machine or supervening authorities that link objects or experiences together are rendered moot because togetherness is as much a part of reality as its substantive discrete phenomena. On a political and moral plane, radical empiricism undergirds both James’s meliorism and his pluralism. By stressing the unfinished and dynamic nature of reality, it presents the possibility of its transformation, and ultimately underlines the importance of a pluralistic ethics that reflects this “mosaic philosophy . . . of plural facts” (ERE, 22).

Notes 1 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 22. 2 See the analysis of “the pack of cards is on the table” in Wiliam James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 272. 3 James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 42. 4 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 5. 5 See John J. McDermott’s discussion of inconsistencies in James’ different accounts in his editor’s “Introduction” to Essays in Radical Empiricism (ERE, xxv–​xxx and passim); for common philosophical criticisms of the doctrine, see ERE, xxxvii–​xlvii, and John E. Smith, America’s Philosophical Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71–​84. 6 Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 111.

295

26

James on the Reinstatement of the Vague Rosa Slegers

A theme that William James stressed repeatedly was that the flux of our sensations is “a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair” too vague to be captured in concepts.1 This vagueness is both rich and intense, but too private and individual to be measured, dated, or straightforwardly described. Our utilitarian intellect tries to abstract from the complexity and depth of sense-​reality through concepts, but “a concept means a that-​ and-​no-​other” and can never reproduce an individual fact. In the lived experience of individuality “there is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling alone can answer for.”2 The vagueness that eludes concepts is an essential part of “realities in the completest sense of the term” and a world without vagueness is “without solidity or life.” Concepts give us a sense of calm as they make us feel like rational beings in a rational world, but it is only in the “living world” of private, individual phenomena where we “catch fact in the making” (The Varieties of Religious Experience [VRE], 395). Conceptual knowledge is useful but of necessity stays on the surface of things. It is “knowledge about things, as distinguished from living or sympathetic acquaintance with them” (A Pluralistic Universe [PU], 111). In sympathetic acquaintance we experience the rich intensity of the vague, but it eludes us the moment we try to conceptualize it. Concepts help us be clear and avoid vagueness when we try to communicate, but as William Gavin explains in The Reinstatement of the Vague: “We are prone to presume that if there is no word for an experience, such an experience does not exist.”3 Our experience is richer than the words we typically use to express it, but “one can use language to transcend the limitations of language . . . and in such a fashion have a glimpse of ‘pure experience’ ” (Gavin, 91). A poet like Emerson is able to use language in this way and demonstrates that “truth [has] to be clad in the right verbal garment.”4 James himself preserves the vagueness of individual experience in his own work through live metaphors and detailed personal accounts, for example, of people who are particularly attuned to vagueness (like Emerson) or those who live in a world deprived of vagueness. We habitually ignore vagueness because it does not serve a straightforward, practical purpose. But even the “best possible theoretic philosophy” is “a monstrous abridgment of life.”5 A  denial of the vague, in a life ruled entirely by concepts and theories, results in a complete absence of enchantment, wonder, and interest. James calls this condition anhedonia, a state of “passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement,

296

296

Rosa Slegers

dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring” (VRE, 123). Though it is unclear how exactly anhedonia comes about, James observes that a “craving for hard facts, answers, can breed pessimism” (The Will to Believe, 40). For the anhedonic person there is no knowledge by acquaintance but only knowledge about. The “turbid privacy of sense” is no longer experienced from within but has been reduced to concepts. A world without vagueness is “unhomelike,” without “a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life” (VRE, 126). What is missing is the “vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air” (VRE, 398).

Notes 1 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 26. 2 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 359. 3 William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 18. 4 William James, Essays in Religion and Morality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 110. 5 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 33.

297

27

James on Religious Experience Michael Bacon

William James views religious experience to be the outcome of a relationship between an individual believer and his or her conception of the divine. He writes, “Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”1 By referring to this understanding as “arbitrary” James makes it clear that others are available, but that individual and personal experiences are what interest him in his work. James approaches religious experience as both a psychologist and a philosopher. He explains religious experiences in terms of episodes in which subconscious states (half-​ forgotten memories, bodily dispositions, habits, and so on) impinge on the conscious mind. His most evocative account of the different ways in which that relation produces religious experiences is his discussion of what he calls “the religion of healthy-​ mindedness” and the contrasting “sick souls.” The healthy-​minded have an optimistic temperament and are by nature happy. In contrast, sick souls are characterized by a sense that their lives revolve around a confrontation with evil. For some sick souls, evil is a result of external influences that might, with considerable effort, be overcome. For others, evil is not external but is experienced as something wrong with their own nature. Such people possess what James terms a “divided self,” and seek a means to be unified through personal transformation. James outlines various ways in which that division might be overcome, arguing that, when successful, the result is a marked sense of relief from the evils suffered. This sense of relief gives rise to religious experience: “However it come, it brings a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould” (Varieties of Religious Experience [VRE], 146). In seeking to explain religious experience in psychological terms, James might be taken not to have explained those experiences, but to have explained them away as expressions of something else. However, he rejects what he regards as reductive explanations of religion, arguing that the causes of religious experience have no bearing on their significance. In Varieties this point is made through a distinction between existential judgments, which concern the origin and history of religious experiences, and spiritual judgments, which have to do with their meaning and value. These are taken to be two entirely separate issues, and for much of Varieties James is concerned

298

298

Michael Bacon

solely with the latter; as he remarks, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots” (VRE, 25). James’s emphasis on the role religion plays in individual human lives connects to pragmatism. The central feature of James’s understanding of religion is that religious experiences reflect particular psychological needs and dispositions. But he also examines the value of religious experiences, which he argues is determined by the practical role they play in meeting those needs. He writes that the value of religious experience “can only be ascertained by spiritual judgements directly passed upon them, judgements based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria” (VRE, 23).

Note 1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 34.

299

28

James on the Stream of Thought Alexis Dianda

The metaphor of “the stream of thought” first appears in William James’s 1884 essay “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” and resurfaces—​under various related headings, including “sciousness,” “experience,” “subjective life,” and “consciousness”—​ both in Pragmatism (P) and his late essays in radical empiricism. Its fullest articulation appears in chapter nine of The Principles of Psychology (PP), titled “The Stream of Thought,” which announces the beginning of The Principles’s “study of the mind from within.”1 The purpose of James’s “stream” metaphor is to challenge the orthodox empiricists’s reduction of experience to a chain of stable and atomized substantive elements held before the mind. First, James argues, the image of associated “chains” and “trains” violates precisely what experience should teach, namely, that consciousness appears as a personal, continuous, and active stream. Second, the classical account of experience results in the perceived necessity of some extra-​experiential faculty or substance that could account for the unity of piecemeal experiences. Looking “within,” James argues, we do not find a chain of associations or a substantive soul but a passing action. The “universal conscious fact” we discover is therefore not that “ ‘feelings’ and ‘thoughts’ exist’ ” but that “ ‘I think’ and ‘I feel’ ” (PP, 1.221). From this, James concludes that a reductive stance perverts “immense tracts of our inner life,”2 and must be supplanted with a new empiricism. The remainder of the chapter articulates James’s alternative according to the following five characteristics of the stream: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. 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. (PP, 1.220)3

As is clear from his stance against orthodox empiricism, James’s emphasis on a stream informs his thought in numerous ways. For one, it brings out the crucial role of attention. If, for James, “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be

300

300

Alexis Dianda

experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system,”4 then when we move from the vague “fringes” to the center of our thought, when we “perch” on some topic or thought, we do so by an act of attention. It is only our tendency to focus on the “perches” of thought (i.e., substantive concepts and words) that has led us to overlook the role of the relations and “flights” between them, the transitive states and feelings of relation that suffuse the stream and form the dimly perceived fringe (PP, 1.237–​49). When we make that move from the vague fringes to the center of thought, we do so by an act of attention. In ­chapter 11 of The Principles, James goes as far as to say, “My experience is what I agree to attend to” (PP, 1.380). This attending and active component of the stream is developed throughout The Principles, most notably in the discussions of habit, will, belief, and perception. Moreover, the metaphor informs his picture of the self. Despite the sometimes mentalistic or dualistic language of “The Stream of Thought,” James emphasizes at every turn that the self is never independent from the organic features of the body. Most notably, when James seeks to describe our “innermost activity” what he finds is a collection of cephalic and bodily motions (PP, 1.288). By emphasizing the stream of thought, James reduces the subject—​as John Dewey would note—​to “a vanishing point,” having no substantive existence independently of its interactions with the environment.5 While it would take a number of years for James to explicitly reject the existence of an entity called “consciousness,” the conceptual work is laid in the early descriptions of the stream and would continue to play a vital role in the development of James’s pragmatism.

Notes 1 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1.219. 2 William James, Essays in Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 143. 3 In the abbreviated Psychology: Briefer Course James omits the fourth characteristic, “It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.” See, William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 140. 4 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 22. 5 John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey: 1925–​1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 14.155–​67.

301

29

James on Time and the Specious Present David H. Evans

William James’s conception of time is inseparable from his conviction that everything is connected and that there are no absolute divisions either in consciousness or in reality, a conviction that subtends the full career of his thought. In his first book, The Principles of Psychology (PP), he argues against the notion that our sensations can be reduced to “mental atoms or molecules;”1 in A Pluralistic Universe, published the year before his death in 1910, he was concerned about distinguishing his radical empiricism from the “doctrine of mental atoms [that] sensations are disjoined only.”2 No element of James’s thought allied him more closely with the philosophy of Henri Bergson than his view of time, as the latter clearly recognized: “The conception of the durée réelle developed in my Essai [sur les données immediates de la conscience], coincides in many points with James’s description of the ‘stream of thought.’ ”3 All mental objects merge with one another, and all differences are defined in terms of degree, not clear and definitive distinction. In the “Stream of Thought” chapter of The Principles of Psychology, James asserts that “the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt”: “The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo” (PP, 1.231, 233–​4). This continuity applies even in the case of seemingly “explosive appearances,” like a sudden thunder-​clap, since, James claims, into “the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-​breaking-​upon-​silence-​and-​contrasting-​with-​it” (PP, 1.234). No mental event is complete in itself; instead, each includes “the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead” (PP, 1.246). Indeed, the meaning of the event seems to reside less in itself than those relations: “The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it” (ibid.). This conception of the continuity of temporal experience leads James to offer a new definition of the present. Traditional theories of time had typically begun with the idea that the present is a durationless instant—​the now dividing past and future, whether in the form of Aristotle’s nun or Georg Hegel’s Jetzt. So conceived, the now is the elemental component of temporality—​but paradoxically, because it has no duration, the now is

302

302

David H. Evans

itself atemporal.4 Though he does not discuss it in these terms, James’s redefinition of the present offers a highly pragmatic response to this paradox, insofar as it resolves it by defining it out of existence. James’s rejection of definite limits in experience allows, and indeed, requires him to revise the traditional notion of the durationless now, proposing instead that the “practically cognized present” is, in fact, not a “knife-​edge, but a saddle-​back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were” (PP, 1.574). We are, that is, never at rest—​whether swaying on the galloping horseback of time or glancing simultaneously forward and backward as we steer our unsteady little craft down its relentless stream. To characterize this now-​with-​duration, James, who recognized a memorable phrase when he saw one, borrowed and popularized the psychologist E.  R. Clay’s coinage, “the specious present” (PP, 1.573). With this pithily suggestive expression, James announced that the traditional philosophy of time had been, for practical purposes, the history of an error.

Notes 1 William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1.225. 2 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 126. 3 Quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 2.600. 4 See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Grammè: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 29–​68.

303

30

James on the Will To Believe Mark Richardson

The metaphor of courtship figures conspicuously in The Will to Believe (WB). James writes, as to our hesitation to believe ahead of the evidence that what we believe in is, or can be, real: “It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-​possibility as decidedly as if he went and married someone else?”1 The Will to Believe is, in fact, a remarkable literary performance in which James courts and charms his readers into supposing that belief in his proposals is so “live” an “option” (to borrow his terms of art) as to have given him the day already: “Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head’s play-​instincts,” he concedes to his doubters, “much better than any rigorous idealism2 can. Some men (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-​hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease” (WB, 28). James here imagines his own standing as a “hot old moralist” in relation to constituencies he has yet to win over: “The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which (as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox” (WB, 28). From scepticism to play-​ instincts and cool-​heartedness, and from there to the supercilious, the knowing, and the cunning, James has a knack for smuggling ad hominem arguments in. To be sure, James begins his essay in a terminological welter. He has come to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities to deliver “something like a sermon on justification by faith,” or “an essay in justification of faith,” or a “defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.” He then speaks of defending “the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith” (WB, 13). We are justified; we have a right to adopt a believing attitude; it is lawful to do so. You’d think there had been in progress at Harvard something like what the evangelical right now calls a “war on Christianity.” But of course we mistake James if we take his “sermon” as in any way sectarian, or, in fact, as limiting itself to what he calls “the religious hypothesis.” That hypothesis is what he is chiefly concerned to defend. But before he does, James addresses a category of “facts” that cannot come into existence before we believe they can (including the

304

304

Mark Richardson

“angel-​possibility” spoken of above). These “facts” we believe into existence, to adapt a useful phrase from Robert Frost. James implicates us all in believing ahead of the evidence that our beliefs are warranted, thereby maneuvering us into a position from which it will be hard to reject out of hand the “lawfulness” of what he calls “the religious hypothesis” (WB, 30). For example, James speaks of “social organisms” (“whether large or small”) as “facts that cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in their coming.” James’s faith in the possibility that his audience will meet him halfway, here, plays no inconsiderable part in the creation of the “fact” of the “social organism” called “pragmatists.” The Will to Believe, as a literary fact, holds a curiously salient position in the history of pragmatism, some years before James would publish his major book on the topic; it helped bring pragmatism about as a “live option.” For James, we are all “players” and “lovers” on a field, or in a world, where real losses and victories depend on our inclination (when we are unaware of what we are doing), or on our volition (when we are aware), to believe ahead of the evidence. The sheer dynamism of the world James gives us in The Will to Believe is dazzling. On his account, we are more makers than finders of the truths that matter most to us.3 The dynamism I speak of is reflected in the terms James favors: candidates for faith ahead of the evidence are “live,” “forced,” and “momentous” (WB, 14). All of them must be socially available, or accredited, in a vital sense (“live”): belief in the god Apollo is no more a live option to a woman raised in Tokyo than Roman Catholicism is a live option for a man raised in a congregation of Appalachian snake-​handlers. But James has so de-​ particularized his defense of the “religious hypothesis” that it must be as vital in Jakarta as in Oslo, Shanghai, Kyoto, Peoria, Alabama, or Tehran. James’s “religious hypothesis” should cover all cases if it is to embrace even one. With regard to every particular religious hypothesis (Shia, Sunni, Southern Baptist, Quaker, Mormon, Coptic, Hindu, Catholic, and so on) it must remain applicable, in its proper place and time. And of the varieties of religious experience on offer in the world, William James, in his office as radical empiricist, is as aware as any thinking man could be. It would be foolish to discount James’s defense of the “will to believe” by affixing it to any particular religious enterprise. He speaks of “the gods” rather than “God” for good reason (WB, 31). James is no more attached to God with a capital G than he is to Truth with a capital T.4

Notes 1 William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 30. 2 Moral, not philosophical, idealism. 3 See Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 2000). 4 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1975), 111.

305

Contributors Ermine L. Algaier IV completed his doctoral studies at Temple University in the Department of Religion. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School, working on William James’s personal library, and secretary-​treasurer of the William James Society. For his work on James he was awarded the 2014 Douglas Greenlee Prize and the 2014 William James Society Young Scholar Prize, and has published articles in The Pluralist and William James Studies. Barry Allen teaches philosophy at McMaster University. He is the author of Truth in Philosophy, Knowledge and Civilization, Artifice and Design, Vanishing into Things, and Striking Beauty, and is an associate editor at the interdisciplinary journal Common Knowledge. Michael Bacon is senior lecturer in political theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written on pragmatism and theories of democracy. His is the author of Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Theory and Pragmatism: An Introduction (2012), and is currently working on a book on neo-​pragmatism. Gian Balsamo, a financial data scientist with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Vanderbilt University, has taught literature at Northwestern University and Stanford University. He is the author of Proust and his Banker, Joyce's Messianism and Rituals of Literature. Balsamo is a member of Statistics without Borders and is currently affiliated with the Department of Mathematics at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Michela Bella received her PhD in philosophy at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2015. Her work focuses on American pragmatism, in particular William James. She is currently working on the Italian translation of a selection of the correspondence between William James and Henry James for Mimesis Edizioni. Kyle Bromhall is a sessional instructor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He specializes in James’s psychology and its relation to action theory. His current research navigates the competing Humean and Kantian influences on James’s thought concerning action, especially with respect to his account of motivated behavior, his theory of the emotions, and his unique brand of naturalism. James Campbell was educated at Temple University and Stony Brook. He is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo, Ohio. He was a Fulbright lecturer in Innsbruck and Munich. He is the author of volumes on Franklin, James, Dewey, pragmatic social thought, and the American Philosophical Association. Campbell is a former president of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and the William James Society.

306

306

Contributors

Kristen Case is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe and Little Arias, a book of poems. She is coeditor of Thoreau at Two-​Hundred: Essays and Reassessments. She teaches American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. Robert Danisch is an associate professor in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric and Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism. He has a PhD in communication from the University of Pittsburgh (2004) and has written extensively about the relationship between pragmatism and rhetoric. Alexis Dianda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. She is the editor of The Problem with Levinas (2015) and the senior editor of The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. Susan Dieleman is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. Her areas of research include social and political philosophy, pragmatism, and feminist philosophy. She is currently working on a monograph that explores the intersections of epistemic injustice and deliberative democracy. Tom Donaldson completed his PhD in philosophy at Rutgers University in 2012. He spent two years as a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and is now an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Stanford University. His interests include American pragmatism, the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and epistemology. David H.  Evans is associate professor of English at Dalhousie University. He is the author of William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition and has written about Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, among others. He is currently working on Chiefly the Vigor of Prophecy: The Fate of Epic Vision in Twentieth Century American Fiction. Owen Flanagan is James B.  Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He also holds appointments in psychology and neurobiology. His most recent book is The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011), and his current project is The Geography of Morals, a book on what twenty-​first-​century moral psychology and cross-​ cultural moral philosophy can teach each other. William James is one of his favorite philosophers. Loren Goldman is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on pragmatism, critical theory, and German idealism, and he is currently completing a book on hope in political thought. He has degrees from Yale, Oxford, and the University of Chicago, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Rutgers (Center for the Cultural Analysis of Contemporary Culture) and University of California Berkeley (Rhetoric). He is the book review editor of William James Studies.

307

Contributors

307

Jill Kress Karn has taught at Cornell University, the Eastman School of Music, Saint John Fisher College, and the University of Rochester. Currently, she teaches American literature and creative writing at Villanova University. She is the author of The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton (2002). Colin Koopman is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. He has written two books: Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty and Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. He has published a number of articles on William James and his pragmatism, most recently in Political Studies Review in a special issue on pragmatist political theory. Joel Krueger is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter. He works on various issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with a particular focus on emotions and social cognition. He also works on philosophy of music, Asian and comparative philosophy, and pragmatism. Giovanni Maddalena is associate professor of history of philosophy at the University of Molise. He works on American philosophy, especially focusing on Charles S.  Peirce and the classic pragmatists. His most recent books include La lotta delle tradizioni:  MacIntyre e la filosofia in America, Istinto razionale, and Metafisica per assurdo. He has also edited, translated, and introduced a large Italian anthology of Peirce’s work: C. S. Peirce, Scritti scelti. Alan Malachowski is Fellow of the Centre for Applied Ethics, Stellenbosch University. He is the author of Richard Rorty (2002) and The New Pragmatism (2010), and editor of Reading Rorty (1990) and The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism (2013), among other works. Patricia Rae is professor of English at Queen’s University, Ontario. She is the author of The Practical Muse:  Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (1997); Modernism and Mourning (2007); and numerous articles on pragmatism, modernist poetry, and the literature of war. She is completing a monograph, Modernist Orwell, which examines Orwell’s writings in relation to a range of modernist experimental practices. Mark Richardson is professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. His books include The Ordeal of Robert Frost (1997), and, as editor or contributing editor, Robert Frost: Poetry, Prose and Plays (with Richard Poirier) (1995); The Collected Prose of Robert Frost (2007); The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–​1920 (with Donald Sheehy and Robert Faggen, 2014); and Robert Frost in Context (2014). David Rondel received his PhD in philosophy from McMaster University in 2009, and is presently an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Nevada. He works primarily in ethics and political philosophy, often through the lens of American pragmatist thought (especially James, Dewey, and Rorty). Lisi Schoenbach is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where she works on twentieth-​century literature and philosophy, with a particular

308

308

Contributors

focus on modernism, pragmatism, and political theory. She is the author of Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford, 2012)  and is writing a second book titled Modernism and the Democratic State. Rosa Slegers received her PhD from Fordham University and MBA from Babson College. She is associate professor of philosophy in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College. Her book Courageous Vulnerability (2011) draws on the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson, and Gabriel Marcel to frame a cluster of moral and aesthetic attitudes in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Her current research focuses on the role of vanity in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and contemporary business education. John J.  Stuhr is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies and chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University. He is the editor of the Indiana University Press American Philosophy series and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and his publications include John Dewey; Genealogical Pragmatism:  Philosophy, Experience, and Community; Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy; and Pragmatic Fashions: Democracy, Pluralism, Relativism, and the Absurd. Heather Wallace is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Duke University and associate director of the Duke Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature. She is writing about Simone de Beauvoir, and she has interests in philosophy of mind and philosophy and literature.

309

Index absolute 77–​87, 93, 99–100, 151, 172, 179, 261–2, 265, 272 Addams, Jane 268 Agee, James 202 Alinsky, Saul 268 Allen, Grant 161 Amendola, Giovanni 5, 250–2 analytic philosophy 10, 67, 79, 249 Aristotle 25, 177, 228, 236, 240, 301 art/​artist 1–2, 8–10, 108–9, 111–15, 121, 128–30, 163–6, 169, 188, 199, 201–2, 216, 231, 237, 239, 246 St. Augustine 228 Averroes 228 Balla, Giacomo 10 belief 11, 25, 33–7, 52–6, 64–8, 70, 106, 159, 161–71, 173, 178, 182–3, 198, 262–4, 267–8, 272, 289, 300, 303–4 Bell, Milicent 140n. 23 Benjamin, Walter 149, 235, 246 Berg, Alban 9 Bergson, Henri 4–5, 9, 11, 77–9, 83–6, 88, 90, 91nn. 10, 11, 14, 105–17, 117n. 4, 163–5, 174–5, 177, 187, 196, 199–200, 235–6, 253, 257, 288, 288n. 6, 301 Creative Evolution 106–8, 110–12, 117, 164, 236 The Creative Mind 106, 109–10, 112–17 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience 91nn. 10, 11, 301 An Introduction to Metaphysics 109, 114–15 Laughter 109, 111–13, 115 Matière et Mémoire 4, 91n. 11 Time and Free Will 108, 110–11 Bishop, Elizabeth 203, 212 Blau, Joseph Leon 101n. 6 Blom, Philipp 9 Blondel, Maurice 90, 249 Blood, Benjamin Paul 32, 90, 156 Bloom, Harold 61n. 2

Boccioni, Umberto 10 Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio 250 Bosanquet, Bernard 77 Bourne, Randolph 3–4 Bradbury, Nicola 131, 140n. 24 Bradley, F. H. 77, 94, 97, 195, 283 Bragaglia, Anton 10 Brandom, Robert 249 Brentano, Franz 25, 255 Bridgman, Richard 152 Brogan, Jacqueline 203 Brooks, Cleanth 180, 185 Brooks, Van Wyck 3 Brown, Angus 140n. 21 Brown, Bill 140n. 22 Bunyan, John 210 Calderoni, Mario 5, 250–4, 255, 257 Carrá, Carlo 10 Case, Kristen 10 Cecchi, Emilio 250 chance/​indeterminism 31, 39–41, 130, 269, 277, 282, 285 change 9, 12, 18, 20–3, 27, 77–8, 80, 86, 88–9, 95, 101, 102n. 11, 105, 107, 110, 143–4, 147, 149–53, 182–4, 187–8, 195–6, 201, 203, 237, 239–40, 246, 256, 261–3, 265, 268–9, 272, 280, 299, 301 Chapman, John Jay 111, 254 Chesterton, G. K. 75, 254 Chu, Simon 216 Clay, E. R. 179, 302 Clifford, James 201, 209 Clifford, W. K. 56 Clodd, Edward 160 Coe, George A. 56 cognitive unconscious 12, 216–17, 224–6 communication 260–3, 267–73 community 267–70 concepts 8, 25, 35, 68, 80–1, 86–9, 95, 97, 99, 101n. 8, 105–16, 118n. 15, 126, 151, 163, 172, 187–8, 194–6, 205, 208,

310

310

Index

212, 216, 259–61, 263, 267–9, 271–2, 285, 288, 291–2, 295–6 Conrad, Joseph 194 consciousness 2, 7, 9–12, 17–29, 58, 79, 82–​7, 89, 93–9, 110, 113, 121–38, 139nn. 4, 7, 11, 143–4, 146, 150–1, 157, 164–5, 173, 194, 196–7, 199–201, 215–27, 231, 236, 241, 260–1, 277, 289–90, 293–4, 299–301 continuity 18, 21–2, 27, 66, 78–9, 86–7, 107, 110–11, 115, 122, 127, 129–30, 133, 138, 140n. 14, 151, 186, 194–5, 293, 299, 301 conversion 51, 55–6, 173 Cooper, John Xiros 139n. 4 Cotkin, George 10, 198 Crunden, Robert M. 5 Darwin, Charles/​Darwinism 51, 77, 80, 85–6, 161, 163–4, 260, 277 Davidson, Donald 70 Debussy, Claude 9 Deleuze, Gilles 11, 90, 92n. 11 democracy 260, 263–4, 266–8, 270, 272 Derrida, Jacques 3, 90 Descartes, René 2, 83, 177, 273, 294 Dewey, John 4, 7, 32, 58, 60, 237, 245, 249, 254, 259–60, 263, 266–70, 272–3, 279, 288, 300 Democracy and Education 267 Experience and Nature 259 Human Nature and Conduct 269 The Public and Its Problems 267–9 divided self 55, 173, 297 Douglas, Anne 10 Downes, John J. 216 dreams 98, 224–5 dualism 2–3, 9, 34, 77, 94–8, 279, 297 Du Bois, W. E. B. 3, 263 Duchamp, Marcel 9–10 Duhem, Pierre 73n. 6 Dujardin, Édouard 218–19, 221, 232nn. 12, 25 Duns Scotus 256 Durkheim, Emile 4, 58 Eddy, Mary Baker 55 Eliot, T. S. 8, 164, 201, 203, 205

Emerson, R. W. 53, 55, 77, 123, 179, 295, 303 empiricism 2, 9, 11, 31–2, 48, 63, 76, 78, 84–6, 89–90, 93–5, 109, 121–4, 126, 128, 163, 171–2, 174, 181, 183, 193–6, 199, 202–3, 206, 255, 264, 284, 290–1, 293–4, 299, 301 Epstein, Russell 217–18 ethnography 194, 201–2, 205, 209 Evans, Brad 130, 140n. 19 Fechner, Gustav Theodor 77, 81–2, 85, 89 Fenollosa, Ernest 201 Ferguson, Kennan 115, 118 Ferrari, Giulio Cesare 250–6 Filreis, Alan 204 Fishelov, David 207 Flournoy, Théodore 75, 81–2, 85, 87 flux 9, 20, 71–2, 80, 86, 88–9, 95, 101, 106– 16, 144, 156, 184, 193–8, 200–1, 209, 218, 260, 288, 291, 295 Foucault, Michel 74n. 23, 90 Fourier, Charles 78 Freud, Sigmund 58 Friedman, Melvin 7 fringe of consciousness 12, 23–5, 27, 87, 93, 125, 127, 140n. 14, 151, 154–5, 212n. 12, 218–27, 232n. 21, 289, 300 Frost, Robert 3, 11, 159–75, 189, 203, 212, 304 “Education by Poetry” 169–70 “The Figure a Poem Makes” 166–7, 173 “Letter to The Amherst Student” 164, 168, 172, 174 “Preface to King Jasper” 166 “Putting in the Seed” 173–4 Frye, Northrop 185–6, 189 futurism 6, 10 Garver, Eugene 270 Genette, Gérard 223, 277–8 God/​gods 27–8, 31, 33, 37–8, 42–3, 47–8, 54, 57–8, 61, 72, 76–7, 79, 82–4, 87–8, 141, 151, 160–2, 164, 166–7, 169–72, 175n. 6, 176n. 11, 179, 203, 254, 256, 294, 304 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 76 Gorgias 262 Gorlier, Claudio 6

311

Index Graham, Kenneth 128 Green, Judith 265 Green, T. H. 77 Grosz, Elizabeth 188 Guturow, Jacek 140n. 20 habit 12, 26–7, 52–3, 235–46, 279–80, 300 Hall, Dorothy Judd 162 Hand, Learned 3 healthy-​minded/​once-​born 54–5, 59, 279, 297 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 41, 77, 79, 80–1, 87, 177, 301 Heidegger, Martin 3, 155, 177 Hemingway, Ernest 202 Heraclitus 196 Hertz, Robert 230 Hobbes, Thomas 88, 177 Hocks, Richard 121, 138n. 1 Hokenson, Jan Walsh 118n. 15 Horace 146 Hulme, T. E. 7, 199–201, 203–5, 207, 210 humanism 6, 32, 85–6, 150 Hume, David 88, 94, 99, 157n. 11 Huneker, James Gibbons 253 Huxley, T. H. 85, 91n. 13, 161 Ignatius Loyola 168 imagism 12, 199–203, 207, 210 intellectualism/​vicious intellectualism 8–9, 11–12, 32, 57, 63, 69, 73n. 4, 74n. 22, 80–1, 85–7, 89, 105–17, 145, 151–2, 181, 195–7, 202–3, 205, 207, 210, 212, 261, 288 intellectuals 266 James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady 131 Preface to Roderick Hudson 129 The Wings of the Dove 124, 128–37 James, William “Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism” 236 “The Continuity of Experience” 125–6 “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” 93, 183 Essays in Philosophy 102n. 12, 277 Essays in Psychical Research 289

311 Essays in Radical Empiricism 2, 11, 93– 100, 113, 123–8, 140n. 14, 183, 193–4, 199, 205, 290–2, 294 “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy” 6, 253 The Meaning of Truth 11, 64–8, 70–2, 73n. 10, 85, 100n. 4, 150–1, 193, 197– 8, 201, 262, 293 “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” 9, 143, 150, 299 “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” 1, 287 A Pluralistic Universe 6–7, 9, 12, 32–3, 75–91, 93, 105–12, 116, 125–8, 151–2, 163, 165, 187, 189, 193, 195–7, 199, 203, 208, 212n. 12, 236–7, 260–1, 285, 287–8, 290, 295, 301 Pragmatism 1, 4, 6, 8, 11, 32–3, 41, 62n. 6, 63–72, 72n. 2, 75, 79–80, 83, 85, 90, 91n. 11, 93, 100n. 4, 106–7, 114, 117, 145, 151, 174, 177, 179, 181–2, 193, 197–8, 208, 236, 249, 252–4, 263, 277, 283–4, 284n. 6, 287, 299 “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” 181 The Principles of Psychology 2, 5, 7, 9, 10–12, 18–29, 31, 82, 86, 91nn. 2, 11, 93, 110, 123, 125, 127, 139n. 12, 143– 4, 146–7, 150–1, 154, 157n. 11, 166, 179–80, 194, 216, 218–20, 233n. 32, 236, 238–9, 241, 251, 254–5, 260, 277, 279–80, 284, 290, 293–4, 299–302 Psychology (Briefer Course) 31 “Quelques Considérations sur la méthode subjective” 4 “The Sentiment of Rationality” 34–7, 39 Some Problems of Philosophy 93, 106, 285 Talks to Teachers 115–16, 239, 251 The Varieties of Religious Experience 6, 11, 51–61, 62nn. 3, 6, 7, 93, 113–16, 167–8, 170–3, 194, 199, 251, 284, 290, 295–8 “What Pragmatism Means” 64, 179 The Will to Believe 7, 11, 31–48, 93, 108, 115, 169, 174, 176n. 22, 178, 183, 199, 251, 277–8, 281–2, 285–6, 288, 290, 296, 303–4 “The Will to Believe” 11, 33, 39, 45, 56, 62n. 3

312

312

Index

“A World of Pure Experience” 99, 123–4, 140n. 14, 181 Jefferson, Thomas 201 Joyce, James 7, 12, 17–18, 20–1, 29, 194, 205, 216–22, 227–8, 230–1, 232nn. 12, 25 Ulysses 8, 17–18, 20–1, 216, 219–22, 226–31 Kallen, Horace 3–4 Kant, Immanuel 94, 177, 255–6, 282, 294 Karl, Frederick R. 9 Keats, John 186 Kierkegaard, Søren 81, 177, 257 King, Kristin 140n. 26 Kisch, Egon 202 Kitcher, Philip 60 knowledge 2, 7, 20, 34, 36–7, 39, 44, 46, 57, 59, 80–1, 84, 88–90, 93–6, 99, 100n. 6, 107, 110–12, 116, 123–4, 126, 132–7, 145, 150–1, 154, 169, 173, 178, 183, 189, 207, 255–6, 261, 277, 285, 289, 292–3, 295–6 language 11–12, 25–8, 70–2, 79, 109, 115–16, 121–9, 135–8, 139n. 11, 145, 147–54, 156, 169, 177–80, 182, 186–9, 190nn. 13, 20, 199–200, 203, 207–10, 221, 223, 227–30, 237, 261–2, 265, 281, 295, 300 Latour, Bruno 90 Lawrence, Karen 227–9 Leibniz, Gottfried 88–9, 283 Leiris, Michel 202 Le Roy, Edouard 249, 253 Leuba, James Henry 172 Levenson, Michael 128 Levin, Jonathan 10, 147 Lewis, Wyndham 7 Lippmann, Walter 3 Locke, Alain 3, 259–60, 263–7, 269, 272–3 Locke, John 2, 27–8, 94, 144 Lodge, David 218 Lotze, Hermann 77, 79, 195 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 85, 249, 254 Lowell, Amy 169 Lucretius 163–5, 174–5 Luther, Martin 166–7 Lutoslawski, Wincenty 77, 254

Malachowski, Alan 249 Malinowski, Bronislaw 202 Mangan, Bruce 220, 222, 225–6 Mauss, Marcel 202 McDermott, John J. 100n. 2 McKeon, Richard 260, 263, 269–73 McTaggert, J. M. E. 77 Mead, George Herbert 101n. 10 Meade, G. R. S. 7 Medici, Cosimo de’ 201 Meisel, Perry 124 meliorism 48, 83, 85, 174, 268, 273, 294 Ménard, Pierre 78 Metzinger, Jean 9 Milhaud, Gaston 249 Mill, J. S. 77, 198 Miller, Henry 205 Miller, J. Hillis 178, 183, 185 Misak, Cheryl 249 modernism/​modernity 1–2, 5–12, 17–18, 41, 63, 65–6, 71–2, 121–2, 124, 128, 132, 137–8, 156, 177, 193–4, 196, 199, 201–5, 207, 211–12, 215–16, 235–7, 240 monism 31–2, 63, 77–85, 87–8, 102n. 11, 152, 195, 197, 200, 208, 257, 291–2 Moody, Dwight L. 53 Moore, Edward Carter 102n. 11 Moore, G. E. 67, 79, 81 Moore, Marianne 212 Mumford, Lewis 3–4 Mussolini, Benito 6, 257 Myers, Gerald H. 6, 139n. 7 mysticism 51, 57, 87, 116, 128, 162, 172–3, 199, 257 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 186 naturalism 44, 46, 48, 56–60, 168, 173, 283–4, 290 Newman, John Henry 57, 257 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7–8, 14n. 33, 65, 118n. 15, 177, 198, 203, 257, 283 Orwell, George 12, 193, 199, 201–2, 204–11 Animal Farm 205, 207, 210 Burmese Days 208–9 Homage to Catalonia 205–6, 209 The Lion and the Unicorn 211

313

Index “Looking Back on the Spanish War” 206 “New Words” 207 Nineteen Eighty-​Four 204, 206, 210–​11 “Politics and the English Language” 207, 209 The Road to Wigan Pier 205–​6, 209 pantheism 32, 77, 82 Papini, Giovanni 1, 5–​6, 249–​57 Park, Robert 3 Parmenides 77, 79 Pater, Walter 196, 236, 242, 245 Paulsen, Friedrich 77 Peano, Giuseppe 250 Peirce, C. S. 7, 32, 65, 68, 86, 237, 249, 252, 255–​6, 279, 287–​8 Perry, Ralph Barton 235 Peters, John Durham 269 Picasso, Pablo 5 Pillon, François 172 Plato 70, 76–​7, 80, 107, 151, 165, 177, 261, 273 pluralism 3, 11–​12, 19–​20, 27, 31–​2, 37–​8, 40–​1, 48, 63, 75–​80, 82–​7, 89–​90, 92n. 19, 93, 99–​100, 106, 163, 171–​2, 195–​ 200, 202–​3, 205, 207, 211–​12, 246, 251, 259–​73, 277, 282, 285–​6, 290, 294 Poirier, Richard 10, 174, 177, 179 Posnock, Ross 2, 3, 10, 139n. 3, 263 postmodernism 10, 72 Pound, Ezra 7, 41, 199–​201, 203–​4, 213n. 13, 237 pragmatism 1–​4, 6–​7, 10, 14n. 43, 32, 51, 57, 63–​5, 67, 70–​2, 73n. 10, 75–​6, 83, 85–​6, 90, 93, 105–​6, 117, 138n. 1, 144–​5, 150, 174, 177, 179, 183–​4, 186, 190n. 6, 193, 198, 203, 207, 236, 249–​ 52, 254–​7, 259–​60, 262–​4, 268–​70, 272–​3, 284, 287–​8, 298, 300, 304 Prezzolini, Giuseppe 6, 250–​3, 255 Proudhon, Pierre-​Joseph 78 Proust, Marcel 12, 215–​24, 226–​7, 230–​1, 235–​7, 240–​6 Du côté de chez Swann 215 Les intermittences du coeur 223 À la recherche du temps perdu 216–​17, 219 Remembrance of Things Past 240

313

Sodome et Gomorrhe II 223 pure experience 2, 93, 95–​9, 101n. 8, 113–​14, 123, 125–​6, 183, 193–​5, 205–​6, 209–​10, 291–​3, 295 Putnam, Hilary 67–​9 Putnam, Robert 268 Quine, W. V. O. 66, 68, 70, 73n. 6 race 3, 195–​6, 259–​60, 263–​4, 272 radical empiricism 9, 31–​2, 41, 48, 78, 85–​6, 90, 93, 99–​100, 100n. 3, 102n. 12, 109, 121–​4, 126, 172, 181, 193–​4, 196, 199, 202–​3, 205–​6, 264, 285, 290–​1, 293–​4, 299, 301, 304 rationalism 32, 57, 64, 71–​2, 72n. 2, 74n. 22, 76, 83, 85, 88–​90, 99–​100, 102n. 12, 106, 109, 145, 174, 195, 255, 284 reality 2, 8, 11, 35, 37, 45–​6, 59, 61, 69–​72, 74nn. 17, 19, 77–​81, 83, 85–​6, 88–​90, 97–​9, 101nn. 8, 11, 105–​17, 121, 127, 129, 137, 145, 150, 152, 156, 178, 180–​3, 185, 187–​8, 193–​6, 193–​5, 198–​9, 202–​4, 206, 217, 233n. 32, 237, 256, 259, 261–​2, 277–​8, 281, 284–​5, 291 Regàlia, Ettore 250 relations 11, 18, 20, 23, 25, 28, 41, 79–​80, 88–​91, 97, 99–​100, 102n. 11, 106, 110, 121–​30, 132–​4, 136–​8, 144, 147, 154, 195–​7, 199–​204, 207–​9, 211–​12, 218, 220, 292–​3, 299–​301 religion/​faith 1, 11, 32, 36, 38, 43–​8, 51–​61, 61n. 2, 62nn. 6–​7, 63–​4, 72, 76–​7, 83, 87, 88, 93, 159–​65, 167–​75, 183, 185, 195, 199, 255–​6, 283–​4, 289, 297–​8, 303–​4 Renouvier, Charles 4, 78, 172 Rescher, Nicholas 249 Reverdy, Pierre 202 rhetoric 226, 260–​3, 264, 268, 270–​3 Richardson, Dorothy 7, 194 Richardson, Joan 10, 178, 183 Richardson, Robert 238 Robinson, E. A. 166 Rorty, Richard 3, 10, 14n. 43, 61, 62nn. 3, 7, 70, 74n. 23, 190n. 21, 249

314

314

Index

Royce, Josiah 57, 77, 79, 94, 252 Russell, Bertrand 7, 10, 67, 76, 79, 81, 84, 150, 177, 291 Sabatier, M. P. 170 saintliness 31, 55, 168 Santayana, George 76, 161–​3, 190n. 6 Saunders, George 29 Schiappa, Edward 261–​2 Schiller, F. C. S. 5–​7, 84–​5, 108, 117, 250–​4 Schoenbach, Lisi 10 Schoenberg, Arnold 10 Schopenhauer, Arthur 14n. 33 Schwartz, Sanford 9 self 22, 27–​8, 53, 55, 82, 87, 121–​5, 127–​30, 132–​4, 136–​8, 173, 178, 189, 195–​6, 203, 208, 224–​5, 241, 246, 300 sensation 9, 18, 21, 82, 86, 88, 95–​6, 98, 101n. 8, 106–​7, 110, 112, 187, 195, 217–​22, 224–​7, 229, 232n. 21, 241, 243, 260, 287–​8, 288n. 6, 296, 301 Shakespeare, William 146, 186 Shattuck, Roger 235 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 160, 175n. 6 Shklovsky, Victor 236, 242, 245 sick soul/​twice-​born 54–​5, 59, 297 Skrupskelis, Ignas K. 100n. 3 Socrates 80, 107, 151, 261–​2 specious present 144, 179, 187, 302 Spinoza, Baruch 77, 87–​9 spiritualism/​spiritual world 7, 38, 44–​5, 48, 53–​4, 56, 58, 76–​7, 79, 85, 87–​8, 95–​8, 115–​16, 127, 163, 225, 227, 289–​90, 296–​8 Stearns, Harold 3 Stein, Gertrude 3, 5, 11, 141–​3, 146–​50, 152, 154–​6, 203, 212 “As a Wife Has a Cow A Love Story” 149 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 142 “The Good Anna” 147, 152 “Melanctha” 147, 152–​4 “Picasso” 148 “Poetry and Grammar” 152 “Portraits and Repetition” 148 Q. E. D. 147 Tender Buttons 154–​6 Three Lives 142, 147

Stein, Leo 5 Steiner, George 210 Stevens, Wallace 8, 11, 163, 177–​8, 181–​9, 193, 199, 201, 203–​4 “Connoisseur of Chaos” 204 “Esthétique du Mal” 203 “The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet” 181–​2 “The Green Plant” 204 “A High-​Toned Old Christian Woman” 178, 181 “Human Arrangement” 186–​7 “The Idea of Order at Key West” 185, 188–​9 “The Irrational Element in Poetry” 182 The Necessary Angel 178 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” 182, 184 “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” 178, 182, 203–​4 “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself ” 9 “Of Modern Poetry” 184 “Les Plus Belles Pages” 204 “The Snow Man” 187 “Sunday Morning” 163, 183–​4 Stock, Brian 228, 231n. 41 Stout, Jeffrey 268 stream of thought/​consciousness 2, 7, 9, 17–​23, 25, 27–​9, 107, 110, 112, 117, 123–​4, 130, 143–​4, 150, 179–​80, 183, 194, 198, 205, 212n. 12, 215–​19, 221, 224, 227, 231, 236, 299–​300 Strong, Charles Augustus 253 subconscious 53–​4, 87, 127, 297 surrealism 194, 199, 201–​3, 209 Swift, Jonathan 210 Tamburini, Augusto 250 Tarski, Alfred 74n. 19 Taylor, Charles 60–​1, 61nn. 2-​3 temperament 26, 32–​3, 37, 39–​40, 42–​4, 48, 54–​5, 57, 63, 78, 81, 283–​4, 297 tender-​minded/​tough-​minded 32, 63, 76, 174, 283–​4 St. Theresa 257 Thilly, Frank 101n. 8 Thomas Aquinas 161, 176n. 9, 240

315

Index Thompson, Lawrance 159–63, 171 time/​temporality 2, 9–10, 21–2, 78, 80, 85, 87–9, 97, 108, 110–12, 128, 130, 143– 50, 156, 178–9, 184–8, 194–6, 217, 222, 231, 235–6, 241, 246, 301–2 Tolstoy, Leo 59 Trilling, Lionel 72n. 2 Trotter, David 124, 139n. 9 truth 2, 4, 7, 11–12, 34–5, 38, 41, 43, 46–7, 56–9, 64–72, 72n. 2, 74n. 19, 77, 79– 81, 86–7, 100, 100n. 2, 105–6, 115–17, 144–6, 150–2, 159, 161–2, 172, 176n. 22, 177–8, 181–3, 193–5, 197–9, 201, 204–7, 212, 252, 261–3, 270, 272, 278, 284–5, 287, 295, 304 Twain, Mark 160, 175n. 7 Vacca, Giovanni 250 Vaihinger, Hans 198, 204 Vailati, Giovanni 5, 250–3, 255–7, 258n. 12 vicious intellectualism, see intellectualism

Vico, Giambattista 177 Wahl, Jean 78, 80, 90, 91nn. 5, 8, 12, 92n. 19 Ward, Artemus 160 Webster, Noah 1 Wells, H. G. 75, 254 Werth, Leo 9 Wesley, John 53 Whitehead, Alfred North 2, 13n. 7 Whitehead, Deborah 11 Whitman, Walt 32, 43, 53 William of Ockham 88 Williams, William Carlos 8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 70, 190n. 21 Woolf, Virginia 7, 17–18, 20, 29, 194 Mrs. Dalloway 17, 29n. 2 Worms, Frédéric 118n. 4 Wundt, Wilhelm 18, 77 Yeats, W. B. 200, 213n. 13

315

316

317

318

319

320