Introduction

 

            William James (1842-1910) was considered America’s leading philosopher and psychologist during his lifetime, a distinction that many still claim for him today, though Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey must be recognized as serious contenders for the former title. There is no need for this book to say much about James’s life, since there already are numerous excellent biographies, in particular those by Ralph Barton Perry (TC), F. O. Matthiessen (WJ), Gay Wilson Allen (WJ),  Jacques Barzun (SWJ), Howard Feinstein (BWJ), and George Cotkin (WJ). After a peripatetic childhood in which his father, the theologian Henry James, Sr., hustled him and his younger siblings, among whom were the novelist Henry James, Jr., from one European nation to another in search of an adequate education, and a brief stint as a painting student of William Morris Hunt, William entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1861. Upon graduation in 1864 he enrolled in the Harvard Medical School, completing the M.D. degree in 1869, with a year off to participate in Louis Agassiz’s research expedition to Brazil. After suffering serious ill health and depression from 1869 to 1872, he became an instructor in physiology at Harvard, where he spent his entire career until his retirement in 1907. He rapidly moved up the academic ladder, becoming instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1973, assistant professor of physiology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1880 and full professor in 1885, and a professor of psychology in 1889. Additions will be made to this bare bones biographical sketch when it will contribute to our understanding of his philosophy, which is the primary concern of this book.

The best way to characterize the philosophy of William James is that it is deeply rooted in the blues. It is the soulful expression of someone who has "paid his dues," someone who, like old wagon wheels, has been through it all. Whereas its immediate aim is to keep him sane and nonsuicidal -- "to help him make it through the night" -- its larger one is to help him find his way to physical and spiritual health. In this respect he is very much in the Nietzschean and Wittgensteinian mold. His is not a nihilistic V.D. blues of the "I have had my fun, if I don't get well no more" variety but rather of the "I can get well and have my fun" sort. The deep difference between James and Dewey is that Dewey couldn't sing the blues if his life depended on it. 

            One form that the blues takes for James is "The Many Selves Blues." James is about as complex and multitalented as a man can get. Within him are numerous potential selves each crying out for full self actualization. This poses both an engineering and ontological problem for him. The former consists in his genius and passion being almost limitless but his time being radically restricted, thereby creating a competition between his many different selves for sufficient time for self realization. This conflict finds expression in a letter he wrote when twenty-six.

Whatever we are not doing is pretty sure to come to us at intervals, in the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent regrets that it is lost to us. I have felt so about zoology whenever I was not studying it, about anthropology when studying physiology, about practical medicine lately, now that I am cut off from it, etc., etc.; and I conclude that that sort of nostalgia is a necessary incident of our having imaginations, and we must expect it more or less whatever we are about. (LWJ, I, 128)

            The same sentiment is found in this humorously exaggerated, though nevertheless seriously intentioned, autobiographical aside, written twenty-two years later in The Principles of Psychology.

I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint....But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. (PP 295)

James's highly fictionalized description of the "accomplished gentleman," who "has tasted of the essence of every side of human life, being sailor, hunter, athlete, scholar, fighter, talker, dandy, man of affairs, etc., all in one," is more of the same Walter Mittyish fantasizing. (PP 1057)

            Although James did not seriously contemplate actualizing all these selves, and certainly not pursuing all of these professions, he did want to find a way of life that would maximize the realization of the full range of feelings, thoughts, and emotions that are experienced by these selves. For James, every type of experience is revelatory of some aspect of reality; and thus the more rich and varied our experiences, the more aspects of reality we uncover and become intimate with. If there were a virtual reality machine available that could simulate the experiences of all these different selves, James would have gladly plugged into it, for this would enable him vicariously to know what it is like to be these many different selves. The conflict that James so acutely felt did not so much concern the choice of a profession, as has been contended by many of his psycho-biographers, as what existential stance to take toward the world. In particular, should it be that of the scientist, religious believer, moral agent, aesthete, or mystic? A virtual reality machine, however, would have failed to satisfy James’s most basic underlying aspiration, namely, to be a free promethean agent in respect to his own self-realization. It is not enough for all of his many selves to be actualized, resulting in his having the full range of experiences that are open to him. He also must bring about this self-realization through his own free, morally responsible actions. His most ultimate quest is to be a promethean agent who is the right sort of active cause of his maximizing his full range of potentialities.

James's quest for full self-realization takes an especially lustful form. What is required is not only that each of his many selves get actualized, or at least get actualized in the attenuated, vicarious manner that a virtual reality machine would afford, but do so with maximal richness and variety.  He comes across as a Kierkegaardian aesthete bent on seeking ever new and exciting experiences of all the Walter Mittyish varieties. To be sure, James craved the morally strenuous life above all else, but only when the proper healthy mood was upon him and mainly because of the thrilling tingles he got from it, "the stinging pain inside my breast-bone," as he described it in a letter to his wife. (CWJ, 4, 571) The thought that there are genuine possibilities "is what gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle...with so strange and elaborate excitement." (WB 183) One ought to postulate the existence of God "as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest." (WB 161) James's quest for the maximal array of zest and tingles makes him the ultimate hipster, a veritable experience junkie, even when it involves so seemingly stodgy an activity as the moral life.

            There is a story about another famous hipster, Charley Parker, that could almost be true of James. The Bird was playing at a club on 52nd Street and was found by members of his group rolling around naked in the back of a garbage truck between sets. Thinking he was juiced, they pulled him out and asked him why he was doing this, to which he soberly replied that if you go out and do something different between sets, when you get back on the stand you might have a fresh idea. That could just as well have been William James, only he would have been rolling around naked in a pile of professional journals in the stacks of the Harvard library or, more likely, experimenting with laughing gas or mescaline with the hope that he might finally understand Hegel. He claims the former did the trick but only while he was under its influence![1] Obviously, if the war on drugs is to succeed, Hegel must be banned, for he provides too great a temptation to his reader to get high. ("Just say no to Hegel") Both James’s and Parker’s exceedingly low threshold of boredom and wild passion for everything that life had to offer continually drove them to seek out new ways of experiencing the world. James's youthful passion for painting was one way in which he pursued his pluralistic need for novelty. Arthur O. Lovejoy remarked that "William James brought...to human nature, and the world of ideas, the artist's freshness and purity of vision." (TP 94) James also availed himself of the perspective of the novelist in his attempt to understand what made the world go, this requiring that he penetrate to the inner consciousness of things in the way in which a novelist does for each of her fictional characters.

            The thesis of this book is that James's underlying quest is to find a philosophy that would enable us, as the beer commercials enjoin, to have it all, to grab for all the gusto we can. Running throughout James's writings is an obsessive use of the metaphor of leaving all doors and windows open so as not to block any experience from entering in. "Philosophy, like life, must keep the doors and windows open." (SPP 55) Pluralism accepts "a universe unfinished, with doors and windows open to possibilities and uncontrollable in advance." (SPP 73. see also ML 412) "The most a philosophy can hope for is not to lock out any interest forever. No matter what door it closes, it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects." (PU 19) "When one's affections keep in touch with the divinity of the world's authorship...It is as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed." (VRE 373. see also 381) "Because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me...I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked." (VRE 411) Even James's taste in architecture and landscaping gave expression to his desire for open doors and openness in general. His sister, Alice, quotes him as extolling the virtues of his summer home in Chocorua by saying, "Oh, it's the most delightful house you ever saw; it has fourteen doors, all opening outwards."[2] His son, Henry, wrote that "James was an insatiable lover of landscape, and particularly of wide 'views.' His inclination at Chocorua was to 'open' the view, to cut down obstructing trees, even at the expense of the foreground." (LWJ, I, 272) 

            Sometimes he used the metaphor of lowering or bursting the dam to express the same sentiment: "Man lives by habits, indeed, but what he lives for is thrills and excitements....The dams of routine burst, and boundless prospects open up." (ERM 122) Dickinson Miller, James's student, disciple and close friend, as well as his most outlandishly unfair critic, claimed that because James sought for the full "richness and satisfaction of human life...he would have us open our minds to every means, even the most unexpected or unaccredited...'Open doors and windows' to any idea, mood, attitude, propensity, that might possibly aid toward the great end." (PA 54-5) There is another possible biographical explanation for his open door metaphor -- his need to flee his family and find his own space just after each of his children was born. Gerald E. Myers, the best of all the James expositors, has suggested that this same penchant finds expression in James's metaphor for experience as being like the successive perchings and flights of a bird, the flights being his need to depart from home after a child's birth since "any perching-place was soon uncomfortable, including his own home."[3] James's attraction to open doors and lowered dams metaphors is the antithesis of the preferences of the hero of August Wilson's play, Fences, who liked fences because they blocked intrusion from outside influences. James was especially concerned not to fence out intrusion from the supernatural cosmic consciousness that envelops our ordinary finite minds. "We with our lives are like islands in the sea...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." (EPR 374) The key point is that we not fence out this surrounding mother-sea of consciousness.

            James realized that every actualization carried on its back an indefinite number of negative fleas -- possibilities that went unrealized. If the table is blue then it is not red, not yellow, etc., etc. If James is doing anatomy, then he is not doing anthropology, not doing zoology, etc., etc. In this vein, James poignantly asked, "Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta?--both cannot be the choice of his heart." (WB 154) This gives rise to "The Agony of Actualization Blues." James went so far as to characterize a choice between competing desires as "deliberately driving a thorn into one's flesh" (PP 1141), also as a "tragic situation" because "some part of the ideal must butchered." (WB 154)

            James's personal horror at the thought that we have only a finite future duration, that all ends with our death at some future time, is based, no doubt, on the realization that the sort of maximally rich actualization of his many selves that he craved requires an unlimited amount of time. The letter he wrote to Alice upon her imminent demise expresses his feeling that our worldy life is farcical because our innermost ideals are infinite in their demands but we have only a finite time in which to realize them.

I know you've never cared for life, and to me, now at the age of nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together in all of us - and life a mere farce of frustration in all, so far as the realization of the innermost ideals go to which we are made respectively capable of feeling an infinity and responding. (LTR I, 310. My italics.)

            His famous "farewell" letter to his dying father also expresses a feeling of regret about the brevity of one’s life. "And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night." (LTR I, 220) In response to those who eschewed consideration of what the indefinite or unlimited future held in store in favor of a more short-ranged view, James claimed that "the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man." (P 56) Common to all religions is the faith that "Perfection is eternal." (WB 29), that "an ideal order...shall be permanently preserved." (P 55) In a remarkable letter he wrote when sixteen, he heartily endorses Rousseau's claim that "Life is gone in an instant. In itself it is nothing. Its value depends upon the use to which you put it. The good which you have done is lasting and that alone,--and life is valuable only by that good." (CWJ, 4, 13) If we cannot last forever, at least we can produce something that will. Such immortality is a distant second best for James, since he would have resonated to Woody Allen's remark, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my works but by living forever."

            It is interesting to note that for agents intent on achieving full or unlimited actualization of all their many different selves there is an important conceptually-based temporal asymmetry between their attitudes toward the past and future: Whereas they regret that their future existence is finite they do not regret in the same way that their past existence is. The reason for this is that whereas their past finitude does not limit their possibilities for full or unlimited self-realization, their future finiteness does. For James, it is tragic that we are not temporal fatmen in the future direction, for what we need for full or unlimited self-actualization is enough time, and there never is enough. While all of a self-realizer's present first-order intentions might require only a finite future time for their realization, it is an essential part of this self-realizer's agenda to have the second-order intention always to have a new intention, always to have her projected horizon recede as she succeeds in satisfying former intentions; and, thus, death always represents a cutting off of her possibility for a fuller self-realization of her inherent potentialities.

            The engineering problem -- "The Agony of Actualization Blues" -- admits only of amelioration through making the best use we can of our limited time. In contradistinction, the ontological problem arises from a clash between the perspectives and interests of James's many selves. Henry Adams claimed that James "was disabled by the multiplicity of his experiences, each with its shock and mystery, each implying its own world, each world different."[4] Eugene Fontinell did not exaggerate when he wrote that "James's 'scientific' bent, combined with his religious sensibility, gave rise to what at times appears to be almost schizophrenia." (SGI 113) This gives rise to "The Divided Self Blues." Who are these different selves, and how are they to achieve unification? The underlying thesis of this book is that the primary clash is between his promethean and mystical selves, and the ultimate aim is to find some way in which James can unify them, or at least reconcile them with each other so that they can lie down together in peace.

 

The Promethean Pragmatist

            Due to Ralph Barton Perry's masterpiece, The Thought and Character of William James, it has become the "official" view that James's "Divided Self Blues" involves a conflict between his scientific and religious-moral aspirations. (see especially 122 and 259) Pragmatism is seen as James's way of healing this breach within his divided self by showing that there is a pragmatic method for determining both meaning and truth that these opposing selves share in common, thereby allowing him to actualize both of these selves with a clear conscience. For, if one of them is legitimate, so is the other; and, since no one wants to deny the legitimacy of science, religion and morality ride the coat tails of science to respectability, being subject to all of the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining. Pragmatism, thereby, serves as the ultimate mediator or reconciler but, as shall be seen, not synthesizer or unifier between his tough- and tender-minded selves.

            Charles Morris rightly characterized the overall tenor of James's philosophy as the "'Promethean' or 'pioneer' type...favored by young American culture."[5] (PM 11) James's preferred term for his philosophy was "humanism," according to which the world is, as F. C. S. Schiller had said, "what we make of it."[6] (P 117) Metaphorically, it says that "the trail of the human serpent is...over everything," meaning that human interests and endeavors are omnipresent, coloring not only the way in which we depict reality but even the very nature of this reality.[7] (P  37) It will be seen that our interests, along with the actions guided by them, play a crucial role in determining the following: which world, among the many possible worlds, is the actual one; an idea's truth; the existence of value and obligation; meaning and reference; the distinction between the mental and the physical; and even our own personal identity over time. In all these cases we make things to be a certain way by freely taking them to be so. There is a sensorily given that is independent of our will and which imposes limitations on what we can create, in the way in which a marble block limits the creative possibilities of the sculptor. By taking the given in a certain way we create meaning and value, and fashion a cosmos out of a fluid and fugitive chaos. 

            There are several sources for James's promethean vision of man. His depiction of man as a creator of a cosmos out of the "big, buzzing, blooming confusion" of the sensorily given, in addition to being deeply rooted in James's artistic nature, also derives from the surrounding culture of his day. On the one hand, there is the myth of the promethean pioneer who carves a human habitat out of a wilderness that continued to have inspiring influence in spite of the actual disappearance of the physical frontier. James had a "vision of a world to be organized, not one found in tidy completion," as Jacque Barzun aptly said. (SWJ 199) The clearing of forest land by the North Carolina mountaineers is glorified by James, although not without serious reservations, as Ellen Suckiel has pointed out to me, as "a very paean of duty, struggle, and success." (TT 134) He even delighted in posing for pictures at Chocorua looking every inch like a backwoodsman. According to Horace Kallen, James gave "an expression of what was noblest in the life and labor of the pioneer generation that in the nineteenth century brought into growth the arts and sciences of industrial civilization." (ML 55)

            Another source of his prometheanism was the technological breakthroughs that modern science made possible and which produced an unbridled optimism that there would be unlimited progress in the future. James experienced in his life the transition from trails to rails.[8] Barzun has pointed out that between 1889 and 1914 "nearly every idea of the twentieth century was hatched." (SWJ 182) Among the inventions was the automobile, the airplane, the movies, the X-ray, the wireless, and the use of electricity to power the factory, home, and city.

            The greatest source of inspiration for the promethean view, however, was supplied by Darwinian biological psychology, which depicted a human being as an organism whose mind was an instrument for securing a favorable adjustment with the environment. "The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon." (PP 21) Our biological nature determines us to be creatures continually on the make. "The current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out at our hands, feet, or lips....perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake." (WB 92) The "I think" that Kant claimed to be an accompaniment of our every mental act or state is enriched by James with the "I will": "the last of presuppositions is not merely...that 'I think' must accompany all my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all my thinking." (WB 103) James Edie has pointed out that for James "There is a 'subjunctive' aspect of perceptual experience, and this is the reason why Husserl and Merleau-Ponty say that consciousness, on this primary level of experience, is more of an 'I can do' than an 'I think that,' an invitation to exploration rather than to contemplation." (WJP 5)

            Darwinian Evolutionary Theory showed that when we are confronted with an object "the germinal question...is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical 'Who goes there?' or rather...'What is to be done?'" (PP 941) Herein James anticipated the recent movie starring Joe Louis, Ginger Rogers, and Clint Eastwood -- Duck, Dance, or Draw. The point of the movie's title is the necessity of being prepared to act toward objects in a way that will be practically beneficial. All of our concepts, therefore, are teleological instruments that we have forged to aid us in gaining power over our environment by depicting objects in a way that tells us how we should act toward them--fight them, dance with them, make love to them, shoot them, shake hands with them, attempt to dissolve them in aqua regia, and the like. Toward this end, James's pragmatic theory of meaning reduces the meaning of a concept to a set of conditionalized predictions that connect action with experience, such a prediction being of the form "If we perform an action A, then we shall have some experience E." Armed with a battery of concepts that present us with these conditionalized predictions we can act upon the objects that confront us in a way that will satisfy our needs and desires. Even metaphysical doctrines are so rendered: theism, for example, is reduced to the conditionalized prediction that if we collectively exert our best moral effort, good will win out over evil in the long run. This is the central tenet of his beloved religion of meliorism, and becomes the prime candidate for a "will-to-believe" option, in which we are morally permitted to believe upon insufficient evidence or epistemic warrant when doing so helps to bring about an over-all desirable state of affairs. An idea or belief becomes true when the actions based on it produce the desired practical results of satisfying these needs and desires, and in many cases it is we who bring about these results, often as a result of our prior will-to-believe based acceptance of some evidentially or epistemically nonwarranted proposition.

            What follows is a brief overview of my book whose purpose is to supply the reader with a synoptic vision of how the different chapters hang together. Chapter 1 will show how James's Darwinian based prometheanism gives rise to a type of utilitarian ethical theory that holds us to be morally obligated always to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction, that is to act in a way that enables us, if not to have it all, to have as much of it as we can under the given circumstances. Since we are determined by our very biological nature to be always intent on satisfying some felt need or desire, it seems reasonable to make the attainment of this our moral ideal. For what other end could we have? James’s naturalization of ethics resembles the attempt of natural law theorists to deduce normative conclusions from a scientifically based account of man's nature, with the exception that James did not think that the former is entailed by the latter, agreeing with Hume that ought does not follow logically from is.  Rather, given the scientific account, the normative conclusion appears to be the only practically viable alternative open to us human beings. To ask whether it really is good for us to act in accordance with our nature is an idle question in just the way that a scepticism-in-general is. The challenge of the deontologist, who holds there to be intrinsically valuable states, such as justice, will figure prominently in the discussion, the outcome of which will be that James must find some way to accommodate these deontological moral intuitions within his desire-maximizing ethical theory.

            Chapter 2 will show that belief is an action for James in the sense that we can either believe at will (intentionally, voluntarily, on purpose) or at will do things, such as acting as if we believe, that shall self-induce belief.  When this is combined with our moral obligation always to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction, it follows that we are always morally obligated to believe in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction. This yields the following seemingly valid syllogism.

1. We are always morally obligated to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction over the other available options to act. 

2. Belief is an action.

3. Therefore, we are always morally obligated to believe in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction over the other available belief options.

Thus, from the moral duty to act so as to have it all, or as much of it as the circumstances permit, the moral duty to believe in a way that accomplishes this follows when it is added that belief is an action.

            James, however, would not accept this syllogism unless it is added to premise 2 that belief is a free action, for James held that ought implies can in the full-blooded sense of freely can. If we have a moral duty to believe in a certain manner we must be free to do so. Chapter 3 will present  James's Libertarian theory of free will and show how he applied it to belief itself. Chapter 4 will explore his famous doctrine of the will to believe that justifies our believing without adequate evidence when doing so will help to maximize desire-satisfaction. The evidentially nonwarranted proposition that we are free to believe becomes a prime candidate for a will-to-believe type option that justifies our believing that we can freely believe at will, thereby making our beliefs subject to the duty prescribed in premise 1 in the preceding syllogism.

            Since the true is what we ought to believe, it follows that a proposition is true when believing it maximizes desire-satisfaction. This attempt to base epistemology on the moral duty to try to have it all is James's boldest and most original contribution to philosophy and will be the topic of Chapter 5 wherein It will be shown how James's highly revisionary analysis of truth and belief-acceptance is motivated and justified by his promethean quest to have it all.[9]  James's analysis of truth in terms of what maximizes desire-satisfaction for believers will be found to incorporate guiding principles or instrumental rules enjoining us to have beliefs that are both consistent and epistemically warranted, and to follow a conservative strategy when it becomes necessary to revise our web of belief; however, we are permitted to violate these rules when doing so on some occasion will maximize desire-satisfaction. James professes acceptance of the common sense law of bivalence and its commitment to absolute truth but gives us a new and supposedly better way of expressing them in which this law is given a subjunctive conditional rendering in terms of what would be discovered if inquiry were to be properly pursued, with absolute truth being the ideal limit toward which properly conducted on-going inquiry would converge. It will be show that the subjunctive conditional version entails the categorical version, thereby capitulating to common sense realism, and that the Peircean ideal limit theory is incompatible with James's empiricism and humanism. It will be argued that James would be well advised to abandon this attempt to placate the realist and openly admit that his morally-based analysis of epistemological concepts is highly revisionary of our common sense concepts and beliefs concerning belief-acceptance and truth.

            Chapter 6 will explore his future-oriented pragmatic theory of meaning and reference, which also is fueled by his promethean quest to gain power to control our environment so as to realize our goals, and the theory of "truth" that falls out of it on the assumption that a theory of meaning gives truth-conditions for the proposition expressed by a sentence. This theory is at odds with the one in Chapter 5 based on maximizing desire-satisfaction. The clash will be neutralized by having James reject this assumption, thereby interpreting the pragmatic theory of meaning as giving conditions for a proposition to be epistemically warranted, rather than true, thus the reason for the scare quotation marks around "truth" in the title of the Chapter 6 -- "The Semantics of 'Truth'."

            James appeals to his promethean ethical theory of belief formation and acceptance to legitimate letting each of his many selves take its turn at seeking self realization, thereby enabling him to have it all. For whether we take the stance to the world of the scientist, moral agent, melioristic theist, or mystic we employ the same promethean pragmatic theory for determining the meaning, reference, and truth of whatever we might say from these different perspectives. Unfortunately, the magical elixir of methodological univocalism does not go far enough in enabling each of his many selves to see the light of day and flourish; for there are clashes between the claims and assumptions made by these different selves from their different perspectives --  and the one thing that James personally could not abide was a contradiction.

            The scientific self accepts universal determinism, epiphenomenalism, and the bifurcation between man and nature, while the moral agent self believes that there are undetermined acts of spiritual causation in a world that has human meaning. Furthermore, whereas both use concepts as teleological instruments for gaining power to control the world of changing objects, his mystical self eschews concepts altogether in order to penetrate to the inner conscious core of a cotton-candyish reality through an act of sympathetic intuition. How are the clashes between the claims made from these different perspectives, each of which supposedly is a requirement for "having it all," to be reconciled?

            Chapter 7  will explore a strategy that James had  for neutralizing these seeming clashes. Let each of his many selves be directed to its own world with no world qualifying as the real world absolutely or simpliciter. The predicate "is real" or "is the actual world" is not the monadic predicate it grammatically appears to be, but instead is the disguised three place predicate "__is real for self__at time__".  When used by a person on some occasion this predicate gets filled out as "A certain world W is real for me now." This doctrine, which aptly could be called Ontological Relativism, allows us, as our interests and purposes change, successively to take different worlds to be the real or actual world without inconsistency.

            The seeming inconsistencies between the claims made by our different selves are neutralized by restricting them to a certain perspective or world. Qua the tough-minded scientist, James affirms determinism and that there is no psychosis without neurosis, but qua the tender-minded moral agent, he rejects both and instead accepts the reality of undetermined acts of spiritual causation. Qua promethean man of action, he carves reality up into a plurality of discrete individuals in terms of pragmatically-based classificatory systems; but, qua mystic, he eschews concepts altogether so as to achieve a deep unification between himself and a surrounding mother sea of consciousness. And so on, and so on. What is real depends upon the purposes and interests that are freely selected by a self. The doctrine of Ontological Relativism turns out to be an instrument forged by James's promethean self that aids his endeavor to have it all.

            James's highly influential theory of "pure experience," often called "neutral monism," held that no individual is intrinsically physical or mental but becomes one or the other when we take it in a certain way by placing it in some temporal sequence of events. Whether a sequence is physical or mental depends on the manner in which its members function in relation to each other, in particular whether or not they stand in nomically-based causal relations with each other in the manner described by Kant in his Second Analogy of Experience. I will argue that the theory of pure experience was implicitly restricted to the world of sensible realities and had the reconciling function of neutralizing clashes that arose between the claims of realists and idealists as to the true nature of these realities and the manner in which "inner" states of consciousness are hooked up with "outer" physical states. Through the dissolution of this pseudo-problem our intelligence is freed from the coils of traditional epistemology so that it can more effectively perform its promethean function.

 

The Anti-Promethean Mystic

Prometheanism, however, is not the whole story about James’s philosophy, as many commentators would have it. For coexisting with his promethean self was a mystical self, and ultimately it was the mystical self that had its way, or at least the final word, quite literally since mysticism is the dominant theme of his final two books, A Pluralistic Universe and Some Problems of Philosophy. Whereas his promethean self wants to ride herd on objects so as to control them for his own ends, his mystical self wants to become intimate with them by entering into their inner conscious life so as to become unified with them, though not in a way that involves complete numerical identity, for James always favored pluralistic mysticism, such as is found within the Western theistic tradition, over its monistic Eastern version. But what James most craved was not unification with others but unification among his many selves that continually threatened to render him schizophrenic through disintegration into the sort of split personality that so fascinated him in the research of Janet.

            This quest for intimacy, and ultimately union, between himself and others, as well as among his many selves, begins with his giving pride of place to introspection over objective causal analyses. Chapter 8 will show how James's analysis of personal identity over time is based exclusively on what is introspectively vouchsafed to each individual. Chapter 9 explores James's attempt to "I-Thou" other persons by projecting onto them what he finds when he introspects his own mind. By an act of empathetic intuition he enters into the inner conscious life of these Thous. By discovering this inner life, which is what bestows significance on their lives, they cease to be an It to be used by his promethean self and become something to be cherished and respected because each has its own special way of experiencing the world and finding some meaning in it. Whereas his promethean self accepts the ethical rule of maximizing desire-satisfaction, his mystical self enriches this with a democratic deontological principle that persons must, in virtue of their possessing a unique inner life that renders their life significant, be left free to flourish in the manner that they deem best, provided that they don't interfere with the right of others to do likewise. This entails that they cannot be used as mere means to realize the maximization of desire-satisfaction. Thus, there is a clash between the maximizing ethics of prometheanism and the mystically-based deontological ethics of reverence and respect for the autonomy of others. The I-Thou experiences between man and man get extended to I-Thou experiences between man and nature at large and, finally, to supernatural spirits, including God, also called the More and the surrounding mother-sea of consciousness.

            But James quest for intimacy and union does not stop with I-Thou-ing other persons, both natural and supernatural. He wants to accomplish this for reality at large. To accomplish this, as Chapter 10 will show, he must learn to jettison all concepts so that he can have a pure intuition of the inner life of all these others. He is aided in this endeavor by a string of a priori arguments that show the impossibility of concepts being true of reality. These arguments play the same role in James's quest for intimacy and union as do koans in Zen Buddhism: in both cases the subject is shocked into a new form of consciousness through the dialectical activity of immersing herself in the paradoxes or koans. The mystical James must dispense with all concepts since they are the agents of his active, promethean self through their presenting this self with recipes for using objects. In order to have a pure intuition of the essence of things he must no longer view reality as a Duck, Dance, or Draw movie.

            To discover the true nature or essence of things he must begin by introspecting what goes on in his own consciousness and then project what he finds onto the world at large, as was the case with I-Thou-ing other persons. As Craig Eisendrath rightly pointed out, there was a reassertion of romanticism in James in which he "attributed to all existence the motions he felt in himself." (UM 233) What he finds through introspection of what goes on when he endures over time and acts intentionally so as to bring something about is a fusing or melting together of neighboring conscious stages; and he then assumes that there is a similar sort of mushing together between all spatial and temporal neighbors, the result of which is panpsychism since only in consciousness can such mushing together occur. James's quest for intimacy with the universe through projecting what is introspectively vouchsafed onto external reality, thus, is also a quest for unification between both the subject and objects, as well as between the objects themselves. Thus, the quest for intimacy and unification that begins with the sort of I-Thou experiences depicted in Chapter 9 reaches its full zenith in the mystical experiences of unification between man and nature that are the subject of Chapter 10. It is not only the full-blooded mystical experiences of absorption into a surrounding mother sea of consciousness that are salvific but also the conceptless Bergsonian intuitions of the flowing into each other of spatial and temporal neighbors.

            At the root of the clash between his promethean and mystical self is his ambiguous attitude toward evil, his both wanting and not wanting to believe that we have absolute assurance that we are safe because all evils are only illusory or ultimately conquered. When James was in his healthy promethean frame of mind he tingled all over at the thought that we are engaged in a Texas Death Match with evil, without any assurance of eventual victory, only the possibility of victory. This possibility forms the basis of his religion of meliorism. But there is a morbid side to James's nature, a really morbid side, that "can't get no satisfaction" in the sort of religion that his promethean pragmatism legitimates. In order to "help him make it through the night" he needs a mystically-based religion that gives him a sense of absolute safety and peace that comes through union with an encompassing spiritual reality. The assurance that all is well comes not from philosophical theodicies, for James always charged them with being intellectual dishonest, but from what is vouchsafed by mystical experiences of unification.

            The best way to bring out his ambivalent attitude toward evil is through an account of the two different attitudes he took toward his famous experience of existential angst in 1868 when he came upon a hideous epileptic youth in an insane asylum. He gave the following description of this experience.

That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. (VRE 134)

            William Barrett has suggested that this experience of angst resulted from his worry that he did not possess free will because all of his actions were predetermined by past causes: "That idiot will be me, and there is nothing I can do, if the particles are already irreversibly spinning in that direction. The imagination cowered before this prospect like a Calvinist shivering at the conviction of eternal damnation." (IT 263) This can't be the right explanation, since James must have realized that even if he possessed free will it did not assure him that horrible things would not befall him, regardless of what efforts he made to the contrary. Free will doesn't give us omnipotence. Rather, the sight of the idiot made James aware of the radical contingency of existence, that everything hangs by a very delicate thread which can snap at any moment, no matter what we might do, freely or otherwise.[10]

            In his 1884 Introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, James alludes impersonally to the existential angst experience when he says: "we are all potentially sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with the lunatics and prison inmates."[11] (ERM 62)  Unlike his father, who must escape the existential angst that evil occasions by postulating some absolute being or God who gives assurance of salvation and safety, James's response is to "turn a deaf ear to the thought of being" and instead to suck it up and courageously follow the melioristic route of living the morally strenuous life without any assurance of success. He concludes his Introduction with one of the most tender and diplomatic, yet cutting, sentences ever written in which he contrasts himself with his beloved father.

Meanwhile, the battle is about us, and we are its combatants, steadfast or vacillating, as the case may be. It will be a hot fight indeed if the friends of philosophic moralism should bring to the service of their ideal, so different from that of my father, a spirit even remotely resembling the life-long devotion of his faithful heart. (ERM 63)

            But, surprise of surprises, eighteen years later in The Varieties of Religious Experience (45-6), immediately upon his anonymous description of his experience of existential angst, he draws an opposite conclusion from it. The message now is that our salvation must be found not in living the morally strenuous life but rather in finding an abiding sense of safety and peace through absorption into a higher surrounding spiritual reality. It is as if he is treading the same path as his former promethean self but now goes in a diametrically opposed direction when he gets to the crucial fork in the road at which sits the epileptic youth.

            The theme of the insufficiency of meliorism and the healthy-minded outlook in general is repeated over and over again in this book. We are told that "the breath of the sepulchre surrounds" our natural happiness (VRE118), that the advice to the morbid-minded person upon whom there falls "the joy-destroying chill" of "Cheer up, old fellow, you'll be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!" is "the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality." (VRE 118-9) What we need is a "life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature."[12] (VRE 119) By experiencing absorption in a supernatural power, the "More" that surrounds our ordinary finite consciousness, we gain "an assurance of safety and a temper of peace,  and, in relations to others, a preponderance of loving affection" that cannot "fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease the fret, if one be conscious that, no matter what one's difficulties for the moment may appear to be, one's life as a whole is in the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust." (VRE 383 and 230) Armed with such mystically-based assurance, James might now be able to view the epileptic youth without having one of his father's Swedenborgian vastation experiences, but I wouldn't bet on it since he never completely shook off his morbid-minded self. The clashes between James's promethean and mystical selves are synchronic rather than diachronic, for he never succeeded in becoming a unified self.

            So far it has been seen that James's mystical self, unlike his promethean pragmatic self, dispenses with all concepts so that it can assume a passive stance for the purpose of becoming unified, at least partially, with the inner consciousness of whatever it experiences. As a consequence of these unifying experiences the mystical self adopts a deontological ethical stance toward others, in contrast to the desire-satisfaction maximizing project of the active self, and furthermore views evils as only illusory or sure to be overcome, which assurance is denied to his promethean melioristic self. There are, however, even deeper clashes between these two selves over meaning and truth.

            Whereas the promethean self, in virtue of always running ahead of itself into the future for the purpose of satisfying desires, adopts an exclusively future-oriented theory of meaning that identifies a concept with a set of conditionalized predictions, the mystical self interprets the meaning of mystical claims in terms of the present content of mystical experiences. The pragmatic James reduced the whole meaning of claims about God and the absolute to our being licensed to take a moral holiday or feel safe and secure because all is well, but the mystical James finds their meaning in experiences of a unifying presence; the star performer finally gets into the act. Furthermore, since the meaningful content of the mystic's assertion that there exists a unification is based on the content of the mystical experience itself, the truth of the assertion will depend primarily on whether the experience is objective or cognitive. And among the most important tests for this is the immediate luminosity, the feeling of reality, supplied by the experience.

            The most important clash between James's pragmatic and mystical selves, however, will not emerge until Chapter 11. Herein the "Big Aporia" in James's philosophy will be brought out, this consisting in a clash between his pragmatic self's meta-doctrine of Ontological Relativism -- that all reality claims must be relativized to a person at a time -- and the absolute, non-relativized reality claims he based on mystical experiences. An attempt will be made on his behalf to find a one world interpretation that will succeed in neutralizing this clash. If James is to succeed in having it all, some way must be found to unify his many selves so that they all inhabit one and the same world, rather than schizophrenically successively occupying different worlds. Only through a unification of the many worlds will James's many selves get unified; for James's intellectual scruples preclude a personal unification of his many selves that is not anchored in a metaphysical unification of the many worlds toward which their interests are directed. The latter task requires no less than a synthesizing of the outlooks of the East and the West, the masculine and the feminine, even that of  time and eternity. Needless to say, there is a very good chance that this attempt will fail miserably, since things probably have been rigged so that we can't have it all. Chapter 11 has the daunting task of attempting well neigh impossible task.

           

 

The Problem of Interpreting James

            Before getting down to the business of putting flesh on the preceding outline of "My William James," I need to address some thorny issues in how to read and interpret James. Because James's philosophy is an attempt to have it all, to let all of his many selves fully realize themselves, it presents the interpreter with a dazzling array of seemingly incompatible positions and thereby the temptation to attempt to neutralize these clashes by zeroing in on one of them to the exclusion of the others.  Because he had such a wide diversity of selves, nothing that pertained to human nature was alien to James, and thus he was able to be the great appreciator of both persons and ideas.  According to Lovejoy

James's capacity for admiration of the intellectual performances of others was astonishing in its range and in its heartiness; not only his old pupils, but utter strangers, neglected Spinozas of the ghetto or Hegels budding unobserved in provincial newspapers, were likely at any moment to receive a letter, or one of his characteristic post cards, with a few, or sometimes many, words of heartening applause --  applause often too liberal, but not undiscriminating -- evoked by the reading of some piece of work that seemed to him to have in it something of freshness or individuality. (TP 94-5)

Justice Learned Hand lauded James because "his mind and his nature were so rich and varied that he was apparently able to harbor harmoniously what others with less gifts of conciliation found mutually rebellious. It always seems to me that the angels must have visited his cradle and bestowed on him whatever was charming and understanding and helpful and beautiful." (quoted from Townsend MH 164)

            So great was James's appreciation of philosophical ideas that it bordered on philosophical satyism. It seemed that he never met a philosophy to whose charms he did not succumb, at least for the time, short though it might have been, that the appropriate mood was upon him, for this philosophy, no matter what its content, was bound to appeal to at least one of his many selves. It was this quality, coupled with his literary genius, that enabled him to write the most mouth-watering sketches of the full range of alternative philosophical doctrines, even those that he was officially sworn to oppose, such as monism and determinism. These sketches captured with passion and eloquence the essence of whatever philosophy he was expounding, often making the philosophy look more attractive than did the accounts given by its defenders. In this respect James ranks as one of the great historians of philosophy, in spite of his scholarly limitations, for no one resonated more to philosophical ideas than he did. 

            Because James was such a great appreciator, his philosophical writings were very rich and suggestive, so much so that every major subsequent movement in philosophy can find its roots in them. But the price that James had to pay for lighting so many fires was to be the brunt of numerous self-serving anachronistic interpretations by the devotees of these different movements, anxious to further their own cause by getting him aboard their bandwagon. Phenomenologists portray James as one of their own heroes, a mere stone's throw from Husserl. Whiteheadians view him as a process philosopher, who unfortunately lacked the technical sophistication and systematicity of the Master. Existentialists bill James as America's Existentialist, or at least as the closest thing to an existentialist that America was capable of producing. Numerous analytic philosophers have made James out to be a tough-minded verificationist who wanted to clean out the stable's of traditional philosophy. Materialists of a functionalist bent claim that their approach is adumbrated in James's The Principles of Psychology. James has even been made out to be a deconstructionist who wanted to do away with business as usual in philosophy.

            These usurping expositions, with the exception of the deconstructionist one, are of value, since they capture some part of James’s philosophy.  Unfortunately, some of them leave us with a basketcase James, because they ultimately fail to capture the broad sweep and unity of his philosophy, such as I have just sketched. It will turn out that the existential and process interpretations are the closest to the mark, for James was an exceedingly tender-minded philosopher who wanted a universe that provided us with a cozy human habitat. None of the interpreters, however, have fully appreciated the extent of the coziness -- that it winds up in mysticism. The reason why they all overlook the centrality of mysticism in James's philosophy probably is due to the fact that mysticism is not one of the fashionable movements in the professional circles within which they move. The most distorted interpretations, except for the deconstructionist ones, are those that portray James as a good naturalist who advocated the tough-minded ways of thinking of the scientist, sort of a John Dewey who was cursed with a good writing style. Because this scientistic interpretation of James has gained wide-spread currency, in large part because of Dewey's own career-long account of James's philosophy, a special appendix will be devoted to exposing this sad chapter in the history of philosophy.

            The way to avoid anachronistic interpretations, so that William James can be William James rather than an extension of the interpreter's own ego, is to make James's published writings the star performer. By doing so we respect James's autonomy, according him the dignity of his own free choices as to what writings he wanted to be publicly committed to and ultimately to be judged by.  Furthermore, greater weight should be accorded to the later publications, since they represent his more mature all-things-considered view. His numerous unpublished writings, including his diary, letters, manuscript lectures and notes, and course lecture notes, can be used to fill in and fill out his published views, but they never alone can be the basis for either attributing or denying a view to James, unless there is good evidence that he wanted them to be published.

            But even if we make the published texts the fons et origo of our interpretation, there still is widespread leeway, especially since they abound in apparent inconsistencies as a result of the philosophical satyism, due to his many selves. To the casual reader James's writings resemble a spotlight that aimlessly roves over a wall on which is written every possible philosophical doctrine, successively illuminating in a most brilliant manner one after the other. Certain doctrines get star billing, because they spend more time in the spotlight or are returned to more often than others. There is a strong temptation to try and do James a favor by freezing the spotlight on one of these positions, thereby ignoring the other things he says or dismissing them out of hand as being due a bad day at the office. To do so is a violation of James's personhood that comes close to negating his very existence, since, as Plato said, to exist is to be a causal agent, and a philosopher achieves this mainly through publication.

            If my Quest-to-have-it-all thesis is correct, these inconsistencies arose from James's attempt to develop a philosophy that would satisfy the seemingly conflicting ideals and aspirations of his many different selves. The explanations that have been given for the plethora of apparent inconsistencies in his philosophy are shallow because they have not appreciated this deep source of his inconsistencies. Many claim that he did not have the patience to sweat the details and thus published things without subjecting them to sufficient critical reflection. Dewey attributed the inconsistencies to James's "willingness to make concessions to his opponents in the hope of finding common ground beneath and to his large-minded indifference  to minor details of his own former writings." (MW, 6, 101) Lovejoy, on the other hand, sees their source in James being misled by his "enthusiasm...and...an instinct for the effective and emphatic way of putting things" to overstate a position, omitting the needed qualifications. (TP 59) While James's magnanimity and love of forceful, dramatic prose are part of the explanation, they are a small part.     

            It is up to the expositor to attempt to resolve these inconsistencies or aporias, but it must be made clear where James's writings end and the expositor's own contributions begin. I will take my own turn in trying to neutralize these inconsistencies, but I will be careful to follow my own advice. There are, of course, numerous ways of reworking James's texts, so that I cannot claim that my interpretation is the right one, especially since how they get reworked will depend on what the interpreter takes to be the underlying spirit of James's philosophy, as well as what makes for the most attractive philosophy in its own right, issues about which there can be considerable disagreement. I cannot stress strongly enough that "My William James" is only one way of interpreting James. What I do contend is that the mystical aspects of James's texts that I will bring to light are far more prevalent and important than any expositor has realized so that any acceptable interpretation must provide an important place for them.  

            Although pride of place must be accorded to the published writings, our understanding of them can be enhanced by seeing how they grew out of and reflected James's life experience. James's philosophy is a paradigm case of his own sentiment of rationality doctrine, according to which one's basic philosophical commitments are rooted in psychological predilections and life experiences. Biographical excursions, in addition to being interesting in their own right because of the fascination of the man himself, who is one of the greatest and most enticingly complex geniuses of all-time, can also serve to fill in and fill out his published writings. But, as is the case with his unpublished writings, these biographical excursions can never alone be the basis for attributing or denying a position to James.