William James
From Philosopedia
James, William (11 January 1842 - 26 August 1910)
“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism,” James once wrote. However, at a later time he did develop a form of personal religion and was sympathetic to mysticism.
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The Jameses
William and Henry James were the sons of Henry James Sr., described by his biographer Alfred Habegger as a one-legged man who “reeked of turpentine, burned flesh, blood, pus, rot, agony, guilt, and endless waiting, and its fluids soaked so deeply into the folds of the boy’s [Henry Jr.’s] mind that he was permanently altered.” From time to time, a physician would cut bits of flesh away with a small, sharp knife, later finding it necessary to saw the leg off above the knee. But the stump did not heal, and yet another piece of the leg had to be sawed off, higher up. Henry Sr. had five children by three wives, and he lived a life of doom, guilt, and repentance, having been brought up in northern Ireland by his Presbyterian family. He turned to drink (then was able to stop), then turned to religion (from which he could not stop), enrolling in 1835 in the Princeton Theological Seminary. At this point he spoke out against Catholics and Spiritualists, believing that it is faith, not good works, which is the only hope of salvation. He then joined an obscure congregation inspired by the Scotsman Robert Sandeman, one that held the all clericalism and all ritual are corrupt, all doctrines superfluous, all men are depraved. In 1840, however, Henry Sr. married a woman whose small “Primitive Christian” community congregated in New York City’s Canal Street. In time, he met Emerson and became interested in Swedenborg. It was Swedenborg who told him that God is not a cruel Calvinist father who sacrificed his son, that sin is not deep inside, and that sin is the result of spirits, a fact he knew because he had “talked” to the spirits. Meanwhile, Henry Sr. was an opponent of women’s suffrage and held that woman is “inferior in passion, inferior in intellect, and inferior in physical strength.” Her very inferiority, in fact, was what made her so appealing to man. It was from such a family that William and Henry James came. William he treated as a chosen one. Henry Jr. he considered sweet, not very bright, and his mother’s favorite. The three younger children he considered as “extras.”
Radical Empiricism
Called an inspiration for many of the pragmatists who refined his philosophic outlooks, William James was a “radical empiricist.” He greatly influenced John Dewey’s instrumentalism, and he rejected transcendental principles, holding that the truth of a proposition is judged by its practical outcome. James joined the Harvard faculty in 1872 as a lecturer on anatomy and physiology and in 1880 he taught in the department of psychology and philosophy. His philosophy had three aspects—voluntarism, pragmatism, and radical empiricism. That which is true is “only the expedient in our way of thinking.” He believed that ideas do not reproduce objects but prepare for, or lead the way to, them. An idea’s function is to indicate “what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare.” This theory of knowledge he called pragmatism, a term already used by Charles S. Peirce. It rejects all transcendent principles and finds experience organized by means of “conjunctive relations” that are as much a matter of direct experience as things themselves.
Views on Religion
His philosophical writings include The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).
A postscript of The Varieties of Religious Experience and the last chapter of Pragmatism spell out James’s religious views. These include a “piecemeal supernaturalism” that could be interpreted as a vague or “enlarged and tolerant naturalism,” states William James Earle in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4.
Under certain specified conditions, James wrote in his 1897 article, “The Will to Believe,” we have a right to let our passional nature decide which of two alternative hypotheses to adopt. As summarized by the University of Edinburgh’s T. L. S. Sprigge,
- These are that the matter cannot be settled on intellectual grounds, and that the choice between them is living (we find each credible), forced (we must act in the light of one or the other), and momentous (really important). Examples are the choice between theism and atheism or free will and determinism.
One of his students at Radcliffe College who was influenced by his views on pragmatism was Gertrude Stein, who at the time was greatly interested in psychology. At Harvard, one of his students was George Santayana, who later became a colleague.
- R. W. B. Lewis, in The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991) supports other academics’ suspicions that James’s “problems” included a belief that a link occurs between introspection and masturbation and between masturbation and insanity. The possibility that James was a compulsive masturbator is discussed but is generally denied.
In a 17 April 1904 letter to James Leuba, whose position he called "dogmatic atheistic naturalism," James wrote,
- My personal opinion 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.
In another 1904 survey, he wrote Prof. James B. Pratt that he believed in God not because of any personal experience or the authority of the Bible but because he needed such a belief. Why? He admired religious people and for "social reasons."
William and Henry
When elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, James created a flurry by objecting to
- the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own connivance) and enabling them to say to the world at large ‘we are in and you are out.’ . . . On the whole it seems to me that for a philosopher with my pretensions to austerity and righteousness, the only consistent course is to give up this particular vanity. . . . And I am more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy.”
Leon Edel commented that the two brothers could not “live under the same roof . . . and occupy seats side by side.” At any rate, William quit the Institute, and Henry remained in the Academy. Such a statement led wags to gossip about his brother Henry’s (1843—1916) homoerotic stories and about their sister Alice’s being, according to A. L. Rowse, “a Lesbian of a pronounced type.” Henry also is alleged by Kaplan to have had homoerotic feelings toward William. Sibling rivalry was an easy case study for the eminent psychologist, whose youthful heterosexuality, according to biographer Fred Kaplan, included writing erotic poems of “phallic desires” penned to Alice. Lyndall Gordon, in A Private Life of Henry James (1999), wrote that Henry “never thought of himself as deviant, for the simple reason that the Edwardians drew a sharper line between sexual activity and tender friendship. Gordon suggests that the two women who inspired Henry the most—neither in a seriously sexual way—were Minny Temple (the prototype for Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, and Milly Theale) and Constance Fenimore Woolson (the prototype for Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors and for several character in his short stories).
His Impact on Others
Meanwhile, in Cock and Bull (1992), Will Self fictionally, although not necessarily historically, castigates Henry, saying he had “only half a cock. Not a lot of people know that. The poor man lost it chasing after a fire engine, trying to help out as an amateur fire fighter in his native Boston. He tripped and fell beneath the horses’ hooves, only to emerge white and half unmanned. They carried him home to his exceptional family on a board. His brother William looked at poor Henry. He focused on the bloody patch that coated Henry’s breeches, and challenged God, whomsoever he might be, to make his brother whole again. He was praying for all of us you see, he knew his brother. He knew that all we could look forward to was a series of thick, turgid novels; penis substitutes. Since poor Henters couldn’t fuck anybody else, he resolved to fuck us all up with his serpentine sentences . . . uncoiling inside our minds like ever-lengthening weenies.” In short, the Jameses had and continue to have their strong critics.
Joseph McCabe found James’s attitude to religion “peculiar” because he did not believe in a Supreme Being but was inclined to believe in a number of super-human beings. . . and said that therefore he was rather a polytheist than a theist. He also noted that the father had been a Swedenborgian minister, that Henry remained throughout life somewhat mystic though quite outside Christianity. Henry rejected the Swedenborgian and every other creed and had no sympathy with spiritualism. . . . In A Pluralistic Universe William James speaks very disdainfully about the God of the churches. In spite of his ‘will to believe’ and against the false claim of Spiritualists he never attained a belief in personal immortality, as he admits in his Ingersoll Lecture two years before he died. His brother Henry he found “had much the same position except that he (as he said) ‘liked to think’ that there was some ground (not Spiritualism) for believing in a future life.”
Science writer and skeptic Martin Gardner points out that James was a theist who believed in an afterlife, which he defended with a clever model of the brain in his little book, Human Immortality. Gardner also argues that James was “too gullible and too ignorant of methods of deception to appreciate the ease with which intelligent persons can be deceived by crafty charlatans,” and specifically he relates how James was conned by Mrs. Leonora Piper in an article, “Communicating With the Dead: William James and Mrs. Piper.”
Luc Sante, reviewing The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult by Clement Cheroux, wrote that James was "sympathetically inclined, if not actually enlisted in the ranks" of the spiritualist movement. Challenging this, Linda Simon, Chair of Skidmore College's English Department, wrote in The New York Review of Books (6 April 2006),
- That's hard to defend, since James was a founding member of the American Society for Psychicl Research and a member of its Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena. As part of his research, he attended séances and sessions with mediums for more than two decades, and he died hopeful that future investigators might discover the "dramatic possibilities of nature" by verifying the existence of spirit phenomena.
Retorted Sante,
- Professor Simon enrolls William James in the spiritualist movement on the grounds that he took part in investigations of claims, and that he hoped that spirit phenomena could be verified. But neither inquiry nor hope constitutes belief, and belief thrives best in the abence of any doubt. In the postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience, he wrote: "It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove 'spirit-return'. . . . I consequently leave the matter open."
John Banville, reviewing The Most Entertaining Philosopher by Robert Richardson in 2012, includes,
- The special thought of Fechner’s with which James tells us he is most concerned “is his belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part constituted by the more limited forms.” “We rise upon the earth,” James beautifully writes, “as wavelets rise upon the ocean,” and Fechner “likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many sense-organs of the earth’s soul…. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.” James sets out for us the essence of Fechner’s thought:
- We must suppose that my consciousness of myself and yours of yourself, altho in their immediacy they keep separate and know nothing of each other, are yet known and used together in a higher consciousness, that of the human race, say, into which they enter as constituent parts. Similarly, the whole human and animal kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider scope. This combines in the soul of the earth with the consciousness of the vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes its share of experience to that of the whole solar system; and so on from synthesis to synthesis and from height to height, till an absolutely universal consciousness is reached.
- James follows Fechner’s lead in insisting that “there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.” This may seem woolly-minded to a latter-day, “scientific” taste, and certainly it reveals the Victorian William James at his most feelingly rhapsodic.
- Yet James is a philosopher—practical and romantic, down-to-earth and ecstatic, accommodating and specific—whom we need ever more urgently in our own times. In Robert Richardson, whose biography of James is, along with his lives of Thoreau and Emerson, one of the glories of contemporary American literature, the philosopher has found a tireless champion and a perceptive editor. Richardson is that increasingly rare phenomenon among academics, an enthusiast, even a lover, of his subjects. In this book, no less than in the biography, he brings to life this great thinker and rare human being. As he observes of James, with rueful wit, “Even his own children were fond of the man Alfred North Whitehead once called ‘that adorable genius.’”,
(Free Inquiry, Spring 1992; see entry for Eve Sedgwick, for Henry James, and for Shadworth Hodgson.)
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