Chapter 7

ONTOLOGICAL RELATIVISM: WILLIAM JAMES MEETS POO-BAH

"My William James," engaged as he was in the grand promethean quest to have it all, not surprisingly espoused an ethical theory whose ultimate normative principle is the duty always to act so as to maximize desire-satisfaction over desire-dissatisfaction. When this duty is conjoined with his will-to-believe-based belief that persons are free creators of their own beliefs through intentional acts of effortful attention the result is a bold revisionary moralization of epistemology, it now being our moral duty to believe in a way that maximizes desire-satisfaction, with a belief counting as true when it in fact does so. This highly promethean philosophy enables James to satisfy his underlying quest to have it all by allowing, nay requiring, him to seek full self-realization for each of his many selves, for this is the highest form that human flourishing takes.

The Introduction showed how this quest creates both an engineering and a metaphysical problem. There is nothing that can be done to solve the engineering problem due to our radical finitude other than to use our brief allotted time and resources in the most productive way we can. The metaphysical problem arises from the seeming clash between the ways in which our different selves conceive of the nature of reality. In Pragmatism James recommends the adoption of his pragmatic method for determining meaning and truth as a reconciler or mediator between these seemingly conflicting selves, of which our "tough- and tender-hearted" selves are prime examples.[1] The former, of whom the prime example is the absolute idealist, is "rationalistic, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, and dogmatical," while the latter is of a reductive scientistic bent, being "empirical, sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralist, and sceptical." (P 13) James does not neatly fit within either type, since he is, on the one hand, idealistic, optimistic, religious, and free-willist, all traits of the tender-minded, but, on the other hand, has the tough-minded traits of being empiricistic, though not sensationalistic, pluralistic, and sceptical for the most part. It is not surprising that James cuts across these types, since a Jamesian moral agent must accept both free will and pluralism, thereby cutting across the types.[2] It will be seen in Chapters 8, 9 and 10 that there is a more fundamental parting of the ways between these two type of mentalities than explicitly appears on his list, that being between the inner and outer approaches to understanding the nature of reality, with James ultimately siding with the former because of his deep desire to penetrate to the inner conscious core of a panpsychic reality through acts of sympathetic intuition. The tough-minded, being of a scientistic bent of mind, takes an exclusively outsider approach to understanding world, resulting in the depiction of a bifurcated world that is not a fit habitat for persons. The tender-minded, in contradistinction, demands an anthropomorphic understanding of reality and achieves this by projecting onto reality at large the features that are discovered through introspecting her own mind.

The clash between the tough- and tender-minded persons was seen by Perry as a clash between James’s scientific and moral-religious self. It will be argued in Part II of this book that the really deep division was between his promethean pragmatic self, of which both the tough- and tender-minded are different species, and his nonpromethean mystical self. But in Pragmatism James is concerned only with the clash between our need to do science and also function as morally responsible agents. Most of us have a hankering for the good things in both the tough- and tender-minded ways of taking the world, in spite of their apparent clashes.

Facts are good, of course--give us lots of facts. Principles are good--give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many--let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth--your ordinary philosophical layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours. But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy....We cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides. (P 14)

James's problem is to find a way in which we can have all of these good things with a good intellectual conscience.

I. Methodological Univocalism

The gospel preached by pragmatism is reconciliation through methodological univocalism. If it can be shown that the tough- and tender-minded selves employ the very same method for determining meaning and truth, then we can actualize both selves with a clear intellectual conscience. Since no one wants to impugn the legitimacy of doing science, if it can be shown that in our moral and religious lives we employ the very same method that science does, morality and religion will ride the coat tails of science to intellectual respectability, becoming subject to all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining. James uses Papini's simile that likens pragmatism to a hotel corridor

from which a hundred doors open into a hundred chambers. In one you may see a man on his knees praying to regain his faith; in another a desk at which sits some one eager to destroy all metaphysics; in a third a laboratory with an investigator looking for new footholds by which to advance upon the future. (EP 146)

This is a much higher class hotel than any I have ever been in, even though it allowed guests to use bunsen burners and, supposedly, cook in their rooms. All the occupants, regardless of what they are up to in the different rooms, must pass through the common corridor to get to their room in the sense that they have to employ the same pragmatic method for determining meaning and truth in their respective activities. Through methodological univocalism we can form a live-and-let-live alliance, though not synthesis or unification, between our tough- and tender-minded selves. James recommends that we adopt his pragmatism on a "try it, you'll like it" basis, as James Conant nicely has put it to me. By affording us complete freedom to "come and go" between the different rooms (maybe it wasn't such a high class hotel after all), pragmatism should eventually prove itself "the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds." (P 25) James is assuming that the normal run of minds shares his penchant to have it all and thus is looking for a way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting demands and claims made by their many selves.

James's pragmatic theory of meaning and truth was thoroughly explored in the preceding two chapters, and it was seen that this theory of meaning was exclusively future oriented because it had as its underlying raison d'etre to give us a way of conceiving things that will enable us to gain power over them so that we can use them as instrumental means in our quest to have it all. Thus the concept of a general sort of object, other than that of a simple sensible quality, for which he had a private language account, is a set of conditionalized predictions that prepares us to interact with objects of that sort in a fruitful manner, and a singular concept is an action-guiding recipe for getting hold of its referent for the purpose of using and enjoying it.

Although scientific concepts seem to be amenable, at least for the most part, to such an operationalistic analysis, it is questionable whether the sort of concepts that figure prominently in the life of the moral agent are. The challenge to James is to show that they are. Toward this end James attempted to give pragmatic or operationalistic analyses of these concepts, the most prominent of which are God, freedom, and design. According to James they "have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome." (P 63. my italics) The use of "sole" indicates that the future consequences of a belief in the realization of one of these concepts exhausts its meaning. That their meaning is exclusively pragmatic is borne out by his remark that "Taken abstractly, no one of these terms has any inner content, none of them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world whose character was obviously perfect from the start....Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of relief....Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, design, etc., have none." (P 61) Because the meaning of these concepts is what they portend for the future, they would have no meaning in a futureless world, as was seen in Chapter 6. What they portend for the future, moreover, must have consequences for what attitude and stance we should adopt toward the world.

Take for example the mystic's concept of the Absolute One or Nirvana. According to James's pragmatic rendering it "means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world consists" and thus would have us adopt a passive, accepting attitude toward the world. (P 140. See also 75) James makes it appear as if we are committed to calling a pill "God" or "Nirvana" if it should cause those who ingest it to feel blissful and safe. The "cash value" of the concept of the God of the absolutist or mystic is that it licenses us to take an occasional moral holiday, since we are assured that good will triumph no matter what we do or that evil is only an illusion and thus not in need of elimination. (P 41) The concept of determinism also requires us to take a passive or quietistic stance toward the world and the evils thereof, which served as the basis of The Dilemma of Determinism Argument that to accept determinism requires lapsing into pessimism. It was because of this undesirable consequence of a belief in determinism and the epistemic undecidability of determinism that James claimed we had a will-to-believe justification for rejecting determinism. James's analysis of God in terms of the conditionalized prediction

R'. If we collectively exert our best moral effort, then good will win out over evil in the long run. (WB 29-30 and P 139)

is another example of his rendering metaphysical concepts solely in terms of what they portend for the human future and thereby the stance and attitude that it is appropriate for us to adopt.

It is to James's credit that his vivid sense of reality prevented him from going all the way with these outlandishly reductive pragmatic analyses. In the last chapter it was shown how James enriched his pragmatic meaning with a type of content empiricism -- the "substantive content" of the concept. He even countenanced an irreducibly theoretical meaning for metaphysical concepts such as the soul and the Absolute. What basically is missing in his R' analysis of God is God himself -- a being who has conscious intents and personally interacts with us. At other places he brings in this personal God when he says that God "must be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he must be conceived under the form of a mental personality....A power not ourselves, then, which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which recognizes us--such is the definition which I think nobody will be inclined to dispute." (WB 97-8) Herein James combines the personal and pragmatic features of God. As Bruce Kuklick succinctly put it: "James's God was a consciousness greater than ours but not necessarily all-embracing. His spiritual power was such that we would triumph over the evil in the universe and give meaning to human existence if our own powers for good were added to his. This perspective received confirmation within human experience--in the day-to-day vindications of man's humanity to man." (RAP 335) This God, as will be seen in Chapters 10 and 11, has a substantial experiential content that is presented in mystical experiences understood as direct, nonsensory perceptions of a supernatural consciousness.

II. Ontological Relativism

Unfortunately, methodological univocalism does not go far enough in eliminating all the clashes between our many different selves. Our scientific self accepts determinism, epiphenomenalism, and the bifurcation between man and nature, but our 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, mystics eschew concepts altogether so that they can penetrate to the inner core of a cotton-candyish reality through an act of sympathetic intuition. A true reconciliation of the quests and world-views of these many selves needs something more than methodological univocalism.

The something more that is needed is found in Poo-bah, that delightful character in The Mikado who holds all the offices of state and avoids the apparent inconsistencies between the various things he says by restricting them to the perspectives or interests of different officials. The following dialogue nicely illustrates how he implicitly prefaces his every remark with a "qua this official" restriction.

Koko. Poo-Bah, it seems that the festivities in connection with my approaching marriage must last a week. I should like to do it handsomely, and I want to consult you as to the amount I ought to spend upon them.

Pooh-bah. Certainly. In which of my capacities? As First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chamberlain, Attorney-General, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse, or Private Secretary?

Ko. Suppose we say as Private Secretary.

Pooh. Speaking as your Private Secretary, I should say that, as the city will have to pay for it, don't stint yourself, do it well.

Ko. Exactly--as the city will have to pay for it. That is your advice.

Pooh. As Private Secretary. Of course you will understand that, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, I am bound to see that due economy is observed.

Ko. Oh! But you said just now "Don't stint yourself, do it well."

Pooh. As Private Secretary.

Ko. And now you say that due economy must be observed.

Pooh. As Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Ko. I see. Come over here, where the Chancellor can't hear us. (They cross the stage.) Now, as my Solicitor, how do you advise me to deal with this difficulty?

Pooh. Oh, as your Solicitor, I should have no hesitation in saying "Chance it."

Ko. Thank you. (Shaking his hand.) I will.

Pooh. If it were not that, as Lord Chief Justice, I am bound to see that the law isn't violated.

Ko. I see. Come over here where the Chief Justice can't hear us. (They cross the stage.) Now, then, as First Lord of the Treasury?

Pooh. Of course, as First Lord of the Treasury, I could propose a special vote that would cover all expenses, if it were not that, as Leader of the Opposition, it would be my duty to resist it, tooth and nail. Or, as Paymaster General, I could so cook the accounts that, as Lord High Auditor, I should never discover the fraud. But then, as Archbishop of Titipu, it would be my duty to denounce my dishonesty and give myself into my own custody as First Commissioner of Police.

Ko. That's extremely awkward.

Pooh. I don't say that all these distinguished people couldn't be squared; but it is right to tell you that they wouldn't be sufficiently degraded in their own estimation unless they were insulted with a very considerable bribe.

William James will be seen to be a metaphysical Pooh-bah. Instead of being many different officials, he has many different selves hungering for self-realization, each of whose interests are directed toward its own corresponding world. The seeming inconsistencies between the claims made by these different selves are neutralized by restricting them to a certain perspective or interest. 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 and attempts to penetrate to intuit reality as it is in itself. And so on, and so on. What is real depends upon the purposes and interests that are freely selected by a self, analogous to Poo-bah freely choosing which official's perspective to adopt.[3] But whereas Poo-bah's "qua"-clause restrictions had the modest goal of securing a bribe, James's have the more lofty one of enabling him to have it all.

There is a striking resemblance between James's Poo-bahism and both Nelson Goodman's "ways of world making" and Hilary Putnam's "realism with a human face" in that they too deny that there is a ready-made reality that our true concepts must copy or duplicate and instead hold that reality is what we make it to be on the basis of the interest-based concepts that we adopt for the purpose of helping us to create valuable experiences. It will be shown, however, that James plays Poo-bah only so far. Unlike Dewey, for whom it is "qua"-clauses all the way on down, the "trail of the human serpent," James's phrase for the ubiquity of human interests and purposes in determining what is real, will be found in Chapter 10 to end where James's mysticism begins. It is here that his pragmatically-based promethean stance of a creator gives way to the passive stance of the mystic awaiting to have reality reveal itself in its conceptless nakedness.

James's democratic plurality of equally real worlds, each awaiting the midas touch of interest to qualify it as the real world, is worked out in the chapter on "The Perception of Reality" in The Principles of Psychology. Herein an attempt is made to unearth what we mean by "existence" through a genetic analysis of the reasons why we call something existent. The existence of objects, when approached in this manner, is found to consist in their relation to ourselves. "Existence is thus no substantive quality when we predicate it of any object; it is a relation ultimately terminating in ourselves, and at the moment when it terminates, becoming a practical relation." (PP 919) By "practical" James means what appeals to our emotional and active life, what is of interest and importance to us. Since it is such an appeal that leads us to attribute reality to something, it follows that

reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life. This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men. In this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real....The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is ourselves. (PP 924-5)

That existence or reality is relative to a person at a time is due to the fact that interests vary across persons and over time for a single person. James even goes so far as to claim that "Whilst absorbed in the novel [Ivanhoe], we turn our backs on all other worlds, and, for the time, the Ivanhoe-world remains our absolute reality." (PP 922) Something has gone wrong here, for one who reads Ivanhoe in this way is not reading it as a novel but as they would a history book. One wonders whether James made a practice of leaping onto the stage so as to prevent the play's villain from committing some dastardly act.

In spite of the fact that attributions of existence are based on an object's emotional appeal to an agent due to its interest or importance, James holds that the agent chooses whether or not to believe in the existence of a conceived object. Immediately after saying that "in its inner nature belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else," he adds that belief also involves an act of "consent" that "is recognized by all to be a manifestation of our active nature." (PP921) The choice enters in as an effort to attend to some idea of which we are conscious. Thus, "Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit." (PP 401)

This gives rise to the discovering-making aporia that first surfaced in Chapter 2's account of James's voluntaristic theory of belief. It runs throughout James's philosophy and is due to the fact that we attend to is determined by its appeal to our interests but we nevertheless choose what we attend to. This seems to require that we can choose what will interest us. But this can't be done, since what interests us has to do with our emotions and we can't chose our emotions at will, for example chose to be in love. There is some textual basis for restricting cases of choice to those in which two or more conflicting ideas are competing for our undivided attention. He claims that in such cases "we give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL." (PP 926) There is a worry that the aporia cannot be avoided by limiting the activistic account to cases of conflict, in which we select which idea will emerge as the winner by making an effort to give our exclusive attention to it. For if we believe in the existence or reality of an object on the basis of the strength of its interest or importance to us, we would expect that in a case of conflict the idea that eventually wins out is determined by which one has a greater interest to us, this again being a matter that we cannot decide. James's Libertarian way out of this problem, as seen in Chapter 2, was to countenance a reasonless choice in cases of conflict, pace the underlying assumption of Plato's Euthyphro.

James claims in a Meinogian vein that every object thought of has some type of reality.[4] "For, in the strict and ultimate sense of the word existence, everything which can be thought of at all exists as some sort of object, whether mythical object, individual thinker's object, or object in outer space and for intelligence at large." (PP 923) The use of the "strict and ultimate" qualification is a tip-off that a revisionary analysis is in the offing. Each sort of object is a denizen of a world of related objects.

Every object we think of gets at last referred to one world or another....It settles into our belief as a common-sense object, a scientific object, an abstract object, a mythological object, an object of someone's mistaken conception, or a madman's object... (PP 922)

Not only do we believe in the existence or reality of every object that we attend to in an uncontested manner, i.e. that fills our conscious without a competitor, we assign that object to a world of related objects and thereby take this world also to be, not only existent, but the real world. "Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point--first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related with these"--their fellow world mates. (PP 926)

James identifies "the Universe" or "the total world" with the totality of these worlds, sometimes called "sub-worlds" or "sub-universes." (PP 921) "The total world of which the philosophers must take account is thus composed of the realities plus the fancies and illusions." (PP 920) Again, "The reality believed by the complete philosopher" comprises every object of thought along with its world of related objects. This "complete philosopher," furthermore, "seeks to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world which is." (PP 921) James correctly points out that "the various worlds themselves...appear...to most men's minds in no very definitely conceived relation to each other." (PP 922) This raises the question of what James took the unifying relation between worlds to be, in virtue of which they form a universe. Unfortunately, nowhere in any of his writings, either published or unpublished, does he explicitly address this issue. James was hard at work in his final years on a metaphysical magnum opus, posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy, that would "round out my system, which now is too much like an arch built on one side." (SPP xiii) In Chapter 11 an attempt will be made to develop from James's writings various ways in which this arch might be finished so as to effect a unification of the many worlds, assuming that it was this lacuna in his philosophy that he had in mind.

The solution to the unifying relation between worlds that is implicit in The Principles of Psychology and, in general, in his pragmatically-based writings is what I will call "The Promethean Solution." Each of the worlds is a self-contained unity, some even having their own ontology, conceptual system, presuppositions, and doxastic principles for making and justifying claims within that world. James's official doctrine of methodological univocalism might make him appear to be quite distant from this variant of Wittgensteinian language-game fideism; but he made unannounced relaxations in it when he recognized other species of meaning in addition to the pragmatic one. Even more important, as will emerge in Part II, is that his mystics have to think without concepts, thereby disqualifying them from being pragmatists. There are no direct relations between the worlds, only the mediated one consisting in their all being possible objects of interest-based selection by a promethean subject. Not only does the subject play a prominent role in structuring these worlds by supplying organizing relations within each world, but even determines through her interest-based choice which one of them will qualify as the real world, at least for the time being. This is James's version of the Schopenhauerian doctrine of the world being an expression of our will.

The reconciliation between the different selves and their corresponding different worlds is of a first-I-am-this-sort-of-a-self-and-then-I-am-that-sort-of-self. James makes this very point when he speaks of the philosophical layman as "living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it [his metaphysical scheme] or another to suit the temptations of successive hours." (P 14. my italics) Another example of this temporalized schizophrenia is his claim that "Of course as human beings we can be healthy minded on one day and sick souls on the next," and thereby take different worlds to be the real one on these different days. (P 141) More of this "taking turns" strategy for avoiding conflict is seen in his claim that "The interest of theoretic rationality...is but one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs." (EP 56) While this "taking turns" strategy might work in preventing conflicts in a nursery school between children all of whom want to use the swing, it does not succeed in enabling each of us to become an integrated self.

By effecting this sharp separation between the worlds and making their very actualization consist in being accorded reality by the interests of a promethean subject, James gives carte blanche to each of his many selves to assert itself with a clear conscience, providing the proper "qua this world" relativization is made so as to avoid any inter-world conflict. "Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to inhabit." (PP 401) This enables James to reconcile his scientific and moral agent selves. In a published letter of 1888 to the editor of the Open Court, James replies to Professor von Gizycki's criticisms of "The Dilemma of Determinism" that "We claim indeterminism, we claim that good things were possible where bad things now are, in the interests of moral activity, just as we claim determinism in the interests of scientific activity." (WB 445) This is repeated two years later in The Principles of Psychology. "Nor do I see why for scientific purposes one need give it [determinism] up even if indeterminate amounts of effort really do occur...Science, however, must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all." (PP 1179) He warns that "the aspiration to be 'scientific' is...an idol of the tribe to the present generation," which must be avoided by seeing it as the "one-sided subjective interest which it is." (PP 1236) "The popular notion that 'Science' is forced on the mind ab extra and that our interests have nothing to do with its construction, is utterly absurd." (PP 1260)

And in the same Poo-bah fashion James claims that the physiologist, qua practicing physiologist, is justified in refusing to admit "that there may be mental events to which no brain-events corresponds." But this same physiologist, qua moral agent, is permitted to believe that there are undetermined spiritual acts of causation. "The believers in mechanism do so without hesitation, and they ought not to refuse a similar privilege to the believers in a spiritual force." (PP 429) This spiritual force is the active inner self, and its nature changes with a shift in our perspective. Qua introspective psychologist attempting to ascertain "in what the feeling of this central active self consists," (PP 286) he holds that it is nothing but "the collection of...peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat." (PP 288) But qua moral agent, he identifies this active self, which is "the substantive thing which we are," with our "sense of the amount of effort we can put forth" quite independently of past causal determinants. (PP 1181)

Underlying James's Poo-bahism is his will-to-believe doctrine, according to which, if I may oversimplify the outcome of Chapter 4's discussion, we are morally permitted to have or acquire an epistemically non-warranted belief whenever we have a live, momentous, and forced option to believe an epistemically undecidable proposition such that our believing it helps to bring about some morally or prudentially desirable state of affairs. Throughout his career James argued that our intellect cannot determine which world is the real world. For example, in regard to the common-sense, scientific and philosophical stages of thought, James says that "It is impossible...to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely more true than any other." (P 92)

Given our intellectual limitations we should choose which world to take as real, at least for the time being, on the basis of our interests, since this will help us to satisfy these interests, which certainly is a desirable state of affairs, at least according to James's underlying axiological intuition that the satisfaction of a desire is in itself a good thing, in fact the only thing that is good in itself. In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" it is said that "the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand" or desire. (WB 153) "In general, it may be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose any action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty that of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematic tabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waiting and enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like." (PU 55) James is soft pedaling his Walter Mitty proclivities, which were explored in the Introduction above, for the sake of the staid and stodgy Oxford audience to whom he presented his lectures on A Pluralistic Universe by leaving out some of his less reputable selves, such as the Casanova one. Usually, there is no need to preface what one says with an explicit "qua"-this world restriction, since the background context will make manifest, as a rule, which of the many worlds is the operative one, that being for most people most of the time the world of sensible objects.

James, like Plato and Aristotle before him, equates reality, goodness, and knowledge (or truth). In his philosophy it takes the form of equating what is most valuable in the long run to believe with what is both real and true. Poo-bahism's postulation of an ontological equality between different worlds, each answering to the desires of one of our many selves, allows for the maximum satisfaction of our diverse and seemingly incompatible desires; and because such a belief has valuable consequences it is true. The richer our experiences the more valuable they are and the more, in turn, they reveal about the nature of reality.

The truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal. (TT 4)

Furthermore, Poo-bahism, by according a democratic equality to the many worlds, shows a "democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality." (TT 4) James's opposed imperialism in every form, be it in its political form in which one part of our world imposes its will and culture over another or its metaphysical form in which the perspective of one world is taken to be dominant over the other world perspectives.

While the many worlds and selves might get reconciled by Poo-bahism, they fail to get unified. As James matured as a philosopher he attempted to find ways of unifying the worlds so as get beyond this unsatisfying schizophrenic outcome. It will be the task of Chapter 11 to explore in depth the various ways in which the many worlds can get unified by making use of James's instrumentalism, concept empiricism, and trans-world causation, all of which give a seminal status to the moral agent's manifest world of ordinary empirical objects. The problem of unifying the many worlds, and thereby his many selves, will take on an extra difficulty due to a clash that will be found to break out between his metaphysical doctrine of Poo-bahism, requiring all reality-claims to be relativized to a person at a time, and the absolute, non-relativized reality-claims that he makes from the mystical perspective. This is the deepest and most disturbing aporia in James's philosophy, but it cannot be broached until an exposition is given of his mystically-based reality-claims, which is the task of Chapter 10.

III. Pure Experience

There is another way in which James attempted reconciliation between conflicting points of view, that being via his extremely bold and original doctrine of "Pure Experience," which is rightly considered to be his most significant contribution to technical philosophy. The reconciliation is not an inter-world one and thereby does not help to overcome his divided self. The reason is that James, being of an unusually intellectualistic bent of mind, cannot unify his many selves unless he can find a way to metaphysically unify the many worlds toward which their interests are directed. The doctrine of Pure Experience fails, for example, to reconcile the mystical point of view, with its absolute, non-relativized reality-claims, with the pragmatic point of view of the moral agent or scientist. It will be seen to give only an intra-world reconciliation and one, moreover, that holds only for the phenomenal world of sensible individuals.

The reason for this restriction is not hard to come by. The doctrine of Pure Experience denies that there is any irreducible ontological dualism between the mental and the physical -- nothing is mental or physical simpliciter -- and instead claims that every individual is composed of some sort of neutral stuff called "pure experience" and has both the potentiality to become physical and the potentiality to become mental, the former being realized when it actually enters into a law-like sequence of events and the latter when the sequence is a rhapsody of causally unconnected events that comprise a person's mental history. Obviously, the "every" quantifier must be restricted to denizens of the sensible world, since members of worlds composed of abstract entities, such as numbers, propositions and properties, do not have either of these potentialities for the simple reason that they cannot enter into a temporal sequence at all, being timeless and thus devoid of temporal relations. Furthermore, the purely spiritual entities that inhabit supernatural worlds, as will be argued in Chapter 9, do not have the potential to enter into a sequence of events that would qualify them as physical since that would result in their being spatially located, which is a conceptual impossibility. James did not explicitly make this restriction, but it will become clear in Part II, when it is seen that James countenanced nonsensible worlds comprised of supernatural and mystical entities, as well as ones comprised of abstracta, that he must do so. What is more, it will be seen that he even gave up applying the doctrine of Pure Experience to sensible individuals because he found deep compelling reasons for taking them to be essentially exclusively spiritual entities. Rather than being constituted of a neutral kind of stuff, they are conscious simpliciter, because they are essentially exclusively conscious, and thus are not conscious in James's relational sense.

The manner in which the doctrine of Pure Experience serves to reconcile within the sensible world is by giving a therapeutic analysis that dissolves perplexing and stultifying epistemological dualisms, primarily that between the subject and object of experience. The value of Pure Experience, according to James, is that "You escape the noetic 'chasm,' with its discontinuity." (ML 319) "Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome." (ERE 27) For reasons that will be given in Chapter 10, the dualism between the conscious subject and the physical object renders it impossible for the subject to perceive the object or have any other sort of relation to it. But, if the subject and object are made of the same underlying ontological stuff, namely pure experience, there ceases to be an unbridgeable ontological chasm between them. In the perception of a pen, say, there is only a single individual, the pen percept, that can be placed in two sequences such that it functions physically in one and mentally in the other. James says in Poo-bah like fashion that "The double functioning of the identical pen swings round the phrases 'in so far forth as,' or 'as,' or 'qua, or 'quantenus' or 'en tant que,' etc. In so far as it acts physically, in so far as it acts mentally, etc. the results differ." (MEN 98) The point of the "qua"-clause is to restrict the claim to a certain sequence of events in which the pen is included, it being up to the speaker which sequence it is.

The extreme rival doctrines of idealism, which makes the object part of the subject's consciousness, and materialism, which reduces consciousness to physical processes and states, are seen to be "solutions" to a bogus problem. By neutralizing the problem of how the "inner" and the "outer," the "subjective" and "objective" are connected, the clash between them is neutralized. This is reconciliation with a vengeance. The clash between the insider approach of introspection also gets reconciled with the apparently rival outsider approach of laboratory psychology. According to Taylor and Wozniak, "by transforming the problem of knower and known" through Pure Experience, "James effectively pulled the ground out from under the distinction between consciousness (as the medium of introspection) and the contents of consciousness (as scientific subject matter) on which the 'new' psychology was based." (PE xviii) By dissolving conceptual cramps and puzzlements, James helps us to get our intellectual house in order so that we can function more effectively as Promethean agents engaged in the grand quest to have it all. A fly in a bottle cannot achieve any important fly-like goals.

Having located the point of the doctrine of Pure Experience within the larger framework of James's philosophy, its details can now be considered. James does not lay them out in a neat and orderly manner, and it is up to the commentator to try and extrapolate them from the text, which is no easy task given that his discussion is very tentative and even inconsistent on central points. Plainly, he is thinking on paper in the 1904-5 articles in which he presents the doctrine, and which later got posthumously published under the title Essays in Radical Empiricism. His unpublished notebooks on "The Miller-Bode Objections," composed during 1905-8, reveal a mind that is agonizing over unsolved problems raised by these articles, problems that he never succeeded in resolving and that led him to abandon the doctrine. I commend the reader to Ignas Skrupskelis's splendid Introduction to Manuscripts Essays and Notes for an in depth account of this.

As I read the 1904-5 articles, they advance the following three tenets:

The Doctrine of Pure Experience

I. No event is mental or physical simpliciter, but is so only when related to earlier and later events in a certain manner;

II. All sensible events are made of the same neutral stuff -- pure experience.

III. For every sensible event there are actual sequences of events such that it qualifies as mental in some of them and as physical in others; or, more weakly

III'. For every sensible event there are possible sequences of events such that it qualifies as mental in some of them and as physical in others.

Before discussing each of these tenets in detail, it is important to point out two things. First, no tenet entails any other one, thus allowing us to be pick and choose shoppers. Tenet I, however, is the core of the doctrine and gets explained in III. Many have accepted I and some version of III but rejected II. Second, the doctrine of Pure Experience is logically independent of Radical Experience, not being entailed by nor entailing either its postulate of empiricism (that only empirically definable entities are to be discussable in philosophy), statement of fact (that relations are perceptually given), or generalized conclusion (that relations stand in no need of a transcendental source). Many commentators muddy the waters by including the doctrine of Pure Experience within Radical Empiricism, and there are passages in James that encourage them to do so. As far as I can see the only connections between the two doctrines is that, according to James, the doctrine of Pure Experience is supposed to gain partial support by following Radical Empiricism's empirical postulate. But, if we are to include everything discovered by following this postulate, Radical Empiricism becomes an unhelpful compendium of all empirically ascertained truths, such as that humans require water to survive. It is important to bear in mind this terminological point, for, when I argue that James abandoned the doctrine of Pure Experience after 1905, it must not be taken to imply that he abandoned Radical Empiricism, which is something that he never did.

I. James, no doubt wanting a grabber to get the reader's attention, makes the startling assertion that "'consciousness'...is the name of a nonentity." (ERE 3) What he means is that there are no conscious or mental entities, be they substances or processes, as understood by common sense, according to which an individual is conscious or mental simpliciter, meaning that the predicate or function "__is conscious (or mental)" is one-place or monadic. But grammatical appearances deceive, just as they were found in Section II to do for "exists" or "is actual," both of which also falsely appeared to be monadic predicates when they really are relational predicates for James that mean "World__is of interest to person__at time__," which makes "is actual" a triadic or three-place predicate. Similarly, James is going to argue that "is conscious" is really a relational predicate, and likewise for "is physical." By denying that "is mental" and "is physical" are monadic predicates James in effect is rejecting the Cartesian dualism between the mental and the physical, each of which is supposed to be an ultimate monadic form of stuff.

James's claim that what is experientially given is neither mental nor physical simpliciter can be viewed as following up the British phenomenalist tradition by adding that what it took the immediately given to be, namely a sensum or sense-datum, is in itself neither mental nor physical, pace Berkeley and representative realists who took it to be mental, as well as naive realists who took it to be physical. Although the mental-physical dualism does not apply to a given piece of pure experience taken in isolation, it does apply to temporal sequences of events so that an individual piece of pure experience qualifies as mental or physical when it is taken as a member of a mental or physical type of sequence respectively. James leans very heavily on the analogy of a pure experience with a letter in a crossword puzzle that can be placed in either a vertical or horizontal series, thus forming a part of different words in these two ways of being taken, the "a" in "cat" and "bat" for example. (MT 36 and ERE 269) Analogously, by taking a piece of pure experience in a certain way, we make it to be mental or physical. This is yet another instance of James's promethean humanism that the world is what we make it. Just as we determine by our interest-based acts of attending which world is the actual world, we determine by these acts whether the ontological status of the members of the selected world, provided it is one comprised of sensible particulars, in respect to their being mental or physical.

James initially characterizes the difference between a physical and mental type of temporal sequence of events in a viciously regressive manner, since he fails to use topically-neutral words to describe the members of the sequences. He winds up saying, roughly, that an event qualifies as mental when it is placed in a succession of other mental events, and physical when placed in a succession of physical events. An experience counts as mental if it "is the last term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar 'inner' operations extending into the future" and the very same experience counts as physical if it is the "terminus ad quem of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming, etc." (ERE 8-9) James's placing of "inner" within scare quotation marks does not protect him against the charge that he is analyzing a mental sequence in terms of mentalistic concepts that themselves refer to inner episodes or states that are conscious simpliciter, which are the very states that he wants to eliminate through his analysis. But his later, more considered account is based on whether the events comprising the succession are connected in a stable, law-like manner, which is a close cousin of Kant's Second Analogy of Experience criterion for objectivity. The percept of a pen counts as physical if "it is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper...So far as it is unstable, on the contrary, coming and going with the movements of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy" it counts as mental. (ERE 61) James seems to appeal to Kant's irreversibility of the order in which a sequence of events is experienced as a criterion for objectivity and thus for being a physical sequence: If I can reverse the order in which I sense a succession of events, as by moving my head for example, it is not an objective order. To speak more accurately, in a mental ordering it is the contents of the related experiences, what they represent, that do not stand in law-like connections: the experiences qua events can stand in cause and effect relations, as happens in sequences of experiences in a dream whose contents are not nomically connected according to scientific laws but which can stand in cause and effect relations to each other in which a later dream experience is caused by an earlier one, my dream experience of fear being caused by my early seeming to see a monster in my dream. But the contents of dreams experiences, what they represent, are not connectable according to scientific laws with either each other or the contents of waking experiences that precede or succeed the dream. Causal anomalies break out between these contents. I dream I am swimming in Georgian Bay and the next instant am walking in Pittsburgh.

James gives the misleading impression that every piece of pure experience belongs to either a physical or mental sequence, even to both types of sequence, but this can't be right. For there are two type of nonphysical sequences. One is a mental sequence that constitutes someone's mental history. It will be seen in the next chapter that this requires that the later members remember the earlier ones in some noncausal sense that involves the later members appropriating earlier ones because of their having a special sort of warmth and intimacy. Another is a sequence whose member experiences are not nomically connected but which do not constitute a personal series, since the later members do not remember the earlier ones. Thus, the dichotomy between mental and physical sequences is not exhaustive, since there is the third possibility of a temporal sequence of pure experiences in which the members are neither nomically connected nor psychologically continuous in virtue of the later members remembering the earlier ones. This will have repercussions for tenet III.

That immediate experience is neutral in the sense of being neither intrinsically mental nor intrinsically physical is supported by appeal to both therapeutic and introspective considerations. The therapeutic advantages concerning the overcoming of mentally paralyzing dualisms between the subjective and the objective, the inner and the outer worlds, have already been indicated. In particular, James hoped to dissolve the perennial epistemological puzzle concerning the problem of other minds and how two minds could know one and the same object and thereby escape from their separate solipsistic worlds. The problem of other minds is rooted in the supposed conceptual truth that a state of consciousness cannot be common to two or more minds, with the result that the only way in which one mind can know what is going on in another is through the risky Cartesian argument from analogy in which the person makes correlations between her overt behavior and mental states and infers that other persons satisfy the same correlations, thus allowing her to infer their conscious states from their observed overt behavior. Because she is conceptually barred from ever directly verifying that these correlations in fact hold for other persons, since she can't have their mental states, the door is left wide open for scepticism.

James puts his doctrine of Pure Experience to work in undermining the alleged impossibility of a conscious or mental state being had or shared by two minds, thereby closing the conceptual gap between them that invited scepticism. Just as a point can be a common member of intersecting lines, a piece of pure experience can be common to the mental histories of two minds in virtue of later members of each historical sequence remembering this experience. A pen percept is a piece of pure experience, in itself neither mental nor physical. For it to qualify as conscious requires that it be known by being remembered by a later piece of pure experience. There is no absurdity in this pen percept being remembered by both you and me, which would involve "its being felt in two different ways at once, as yours, namely, and as mine."[5] (ERE 66. see also 269)

But if it is possible for our mental histories to share a common pen percept when each of us remembers it, it must be possible for our earlier perceptions of the pen to be one and the same percept. James waffles over whether this is possible and finally comes to a negative view. Initially, James sides with a common sense "natural realism" that holds that "Your mind and mine may terminate in the same percept, not merely against it, as if it were a third external thing, but by inserting themselves into it and coalescing with it." (ERE 40) "We believe that we all know and think about the same world, because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common. (MT 30) Common sense believes that "my percept is held to be the pen for the time being--percepts and physical realities being treated by common sense as identical."[6] (MT 87)

This direct realism, however, seems to be taken back when James says that "when you and I are said to know the 'same' Memorial Hall, our minds do [not] terminate at or in a numerically identical perception," the reason being that "we see the Hall in different perspectives" because of our different spatial locations. (ERE 40) James is assuming that among the conditions for percept identity is having the same look, feel, appearance, and the like. Your percept of the Hall has a different shape than mine. Because the Hall is felt equivocally by us,

felt now as part of my mind and again at the same time not as part of my mind, but of yours (for my mind is not yours), and this would seem impossible without doubling it into two distinct things, or, in other words, without reverting to the ordinary dualistic philosophy of insulated minds each knowing its object representatively as a third thing--and that would be to give up the pure-experience scheme altogether." (ERE 63)

The only way in which our percepts could be one and the same is if our heads were to be spatially coincident at that time, like Siamese twins joined at the head. To assume that this is possible is to assume more than many would grant. Judging by the fact that James repeatedly gives the Cartesian argument from analogy for other minds and their contents (at ERE 36, 38 and MT 24, 30), it would appear that he has failed to convince even himself that an experience can be owned by different minds. In Chapter 9 it will be seen that implicit in James's writings is a completely different solution to the problem of how we can know another mind that is based on his theory of acts of sympathetic intuition in which one person I-Thous another.

Although tenet I seems to fail in its therapeutic intention to eliminate the "noetic chasm," it still might find support from the deliverances of introspection. Furthermore, even if it were to achieve its intended therapeutic purpose, the defenders of the doctrine that experience involves an "impalpable inner flowing" that is "pure diaphaneity" would not accept it. Like G. E. Moore in his 1903 "A Refutation of Idealism," they claim that when they introspect their own mind upon experiencing a sense datum, such as a yellow patch, they can separate off the yellow patch content from the conscious sensing that accompanies it, analogous to separating a paint into a menstruum and a pigmental mass. (ERE 6) James challenges their introspective reports, claiming that, at least in his own case, he is not able to make any such distinction. "I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking...is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing." (ERE 19. See also 268-9) This clash between rival introspectors of the "I think" and "I breathe" variety should raise suspicions about the legitimacy of appeals to what is introspectively vouchsafed, which will become a major issue in Chapter 10.

Much of James's defense of tenet I consists in neutralizing objections, the most important of which is that it violates the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals because it holds that one and the same piece of pure experience is both physical and mental and therefore is both spatially extended and not spatially extended. James's initial response is that "thought and thing [are not] as heterogeneous as is commonly said," because they share many features in common. (ERE 15) This response commits an ignoratio elenchi because it extends the objection so that it denies any commonality of properties between physical and mental events, which universal claim is easily refuted by counter-examples. But all the objection is asserting is that there is at least one way in which they differ, namely that one is essentially extended and the other is not. James eventually comes close to giving the right response to the objection when he says of an imaginary physical object, which is imagined as being extended, that "The difference between objective and subjective extension," between really being extended and only being imagined to be extended, "is one of relation to a context solely." (ERE 16) The context concerns the temporal sequence in which the pure experience is located. If being extended and being nonextended were monadic properties, the indiscernibility of identicals would be violated by saying, as James does, that a piece of pure experience is both extended and nonextended. But since these are relational properties, there is no contradiction; since to say that the experience is extended and nonextended means that it counts as extended qua member of one temporal sequence and as nonextended qua member of another sequence. Thus, it is numerically one and the same piece of pure experience that is a member of these two different sequences, just as it is one and the same point that is a member of two intersecting lines.

II. This thesis, which holds "that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed," has created great consternation for interpreters, since James seems to be back with the pre-Socratics seeking for the underlying metaphysical stuff that composes all things. Dewey so interpreted him when he disapprovingly quipped in a letter that at times James "seems to mix his neutrals with a kind of jelly-like cosmic world-stuff of pure experience." Many commentators cannot get themselves to believe that James was serious when he claimed that there is an underlying metaphysical stuff , since it would violate the empirical postulate of his Radical Empiricism "that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience." But, as seen in the previous chapter, James was quite willing to countenance metaphysical entities, such as God, free will and the soul, as well as the theoretical entities of science, that could not themselves be analyzed in terms of empirical contents, provided they played a worthwhile explanatory role. Thus, to be consistent with his actual practice as a philosopher he must amend his empirical postulate so that it holds that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience, or that are useful in explaining empirical phenomena.

But for those commentators who cannot get themselves to believe that James was capable of waxing so metaphysical, such as Andrew Reck (WJ 64), Charlene Seigfried (CC 40), William Gavin (WJ 83), Owen Flanagan (C 44-5) and Ruth Anna Putnam (LI 298), solace can be had in James's seeming retraction, a mere 11 pages later in "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?", of his claim that pure experience is the common stuff of which everything is composed. "Although for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced." (ERE 14) James, however, does not stand by his retraction, for 5 pages later he says that "thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are." (ERE 19) And in two subsequent articles he reiterates his Milesian metaphysical view, saying in "On the Notion of Consciousness" that "things and thought are not at all fundamentally heterogeneous; they are made of one and the stuff, which as such cannot be defined but only experienced; and which, if one wishes, one can call the stuff of experience in general" (ERE 271), and in "The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience" that "thoughts and things are absolutely homogeneous as to their material." (ERE 69) If we are just counting heads, it looks as if the metaphysical interpretation of pure experience wins.

Unfortunately, those commentators who opt for the non-metaphysical interpretation, as well as some who opt for the metaphysical one, such as Wendall Bush (WJ 325-6) and Eugene Taylor-Robert Wozniak (PE xv), make no effort to explain away the apparent inconsistency in the text. It is incumbent upon the commentator to exert every effort to resolve the apparent inconsistency, since an interpretation that has a great philosopher embracing an explicit contradiction is one of last resort. How, then, is the inconsistency to be resolved? James's explanation that it was for "fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience" is no help, for it is just as easy to say that there is no primal stuff of which everything is composed as it is to say that there is. Neither is it any help in resolving the conflict to point out, as has Gavin, that pure experience is ineffable because there is "great difficulty 'catching' it in language," (WJ 83) a point also made by Bush who finds pure experience as "inarticulate as mysticism tends to be." (WJ 325-6) Because a proposition is ineffable does not explain why a philosopher would both assert and deny it.

The solution must reside in finding suitably different senses of "stuff" and "composed of" in the affirmation and denial. The text amply supports such a dual meaning solution. To see how it does we must look again at James's rival claims.

Thesis

"There is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed," which is to be called "pure experience." (ERE 4)

Antithesis

"There is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experiences." (ERE 14)

The Thesis speaks of a "primal stuff" and the Antithesis of a "general stuff." There would be no contradiction if "primal stuff" means a metaphysical stuff that is wholly indeterminate because it is pure potentiality, and "general stuff" means stuff that is natured because already partially informed, in other words, some sort of empirical or scientific stuff. It is consistent to say that there is a wholly indeterminate metaphysical stuff of which everything is "composed" but no empirical stuff of which everything is "composed." There is a corresponding shift in the sense of "composed" from the Thesis, where it means "metaphysically composed" of something like prime matter, to the Antithesis, where it means "empirically composed," in the sense in which materialists believe that everything is composed of ultimate scientific particles. The Antithesis is a rejection of such a materialism. Plainly, Aristotle and James are not saying that if you physically decomposed a chair you would eventually come upon prime matter or pure experience, something which you do only when you "look" at the chair through your metaphysical "microscope," that is, when you try to answer the question of the ultimate grounds of individuation of individuals or how seemingly distinct individuals can be related to each other.

Obviously, more textual support is needed for this double-meaning interpretation. Fortunately, it can be found in remarks that explicitly identify pure experience with Aristotle's prime matter, most notably, "There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, I said; but the same identical piece of 'pure experience' (which was the name I gave to the materia prima of everything) can stand alternately for a 'fact of consciousness' or for a physical reality, according as it is taken in one context or in another." (ERE 69) That James was serious in this identification of pure experience with prime matter is further evidenced in his imputing to it the same role as pure potentiality that Aristotle did to prime matter. "The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality or existence."[7] (ERE 13. my italics) At one point James seems to identify his universal metaphysical stuff with a Platonic type receptacle of being. "Save for time and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there appears no universal element of which all things are made." (ERE 15) The formless space of Plato's receptacle, which should be upgraded to space-time, plays the same metaphysical role as does prime matter of offering a realm of pure potentiality that grounds the possibility of forms being instantiated and explains the ultimate ground of individuation of empirical particulars. It was seen in the previous chapter's that James's account of how different perceivers can be coreferers requires that they ultimately must use spatial indexical terms such as "here" and "this place" that denote one and the same region of space as such, a region of James's "universal space."

It is not just pure experience that James holds to be potentiality but also "baby's first sensation" of the "big, blooming, buzzing confusion." Are they identical, then? I think not because, whereas pure experience is pure potentiality in the way that prime matter is, the raw manifold of the perceptually given, baby's first sensation, is not since it is a chaos of sensible qualities and relations. James speaks of our fashioning of it into a meaningful array through our interest-based conceptualizing activities as being like a sculptor creating a statue out of a block of stone.

And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man's subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue express itself from out the stone. (WB 103)

James calls the fact that the given is plastic to our several different ways of conceptualizing it "the miracle of miracles." (WB 96) Whereas "perceptions" for James are an actualization of the potentialities inherent in the given "sensations," "sensations" are an actualization of the potentialities inherent in pure experience; but since the latter, like prime matter, is not an actualization of any potentiality inherent in something lower on the hyle-morphic ontological totem pole, pure experience is pure potentiality. As Seigfried has insightfully put it, "Since pure experience is a limit concept, an explanatory hypothesis which can be postulated but not experienced as such, the stream of consciousness provides an experiential correlate which comes closest to pure experience and therefore is a useful model for explication of the more obscure hypothesis." (CC 51) James is to be faulted not for making use of a nonempirical metaphysical concept but for not following through in putting it to a useful explanatory purpose, in the way that Plato and Aristotle did respectively for the Receptacle and prime matter.

III. This tenet holds that for every sensible event there are actual, for the strong version, and, for the weak version, possible sequences of events such that it qualifies as mental in some of them and as physical in others. The strong version obviously is too strong, since there are numerous sensible experiences for which there are no actual sequences of events in which they qualify as mental and/or physical. There is a menagerie of recalcitrant cases for the strong thesis, consisting of unobserved events, such as the infamous tree falling in a forest unobserved, as well as unveridical experiences, such as delusions and dreams, that are not accommodated by any actual mental or physical sequence respectively. In a more fine-grained analysis a distinction would be made between unobserved events that are accommodated by some actual physical sequence, and thus qualify as physical, and those that are not, these qualifying as neither mental nor physical. An analogous distinction can be made between unveridical experiences that are accommodated by an actual mental sequence, and thus qualify as mental, and those that are not, such as an unintegrated free-floating bit of experience as might occur in an extreme case of multiple personality, and thus qualify as neither mental nor physical.

James was well aware of these types of counter-examples to the strong thesis.

Does the pure-experience principle demand that every bit of experience should function both physically and mentally (complete "parallelism")? or may some bits only function in a mental and others only in a physical context? If the latter were the case, the principle would still mean non-dualism, for the stuff would be neutral, and only per accidens figure as belonging to either 'world,' or to both. (MEN 90)

"It is possible to imagine a universe of experiences in which the only alternative between neighbors would be either physical interaction or complete inertness. In such a world the mental or the physical status of any piece of experience would be unequivocal." (ERE 71) In these quotations James realizes that an event could qualify only as mental or only as physical, and thus be per accidens unambiguously mental or physical; however he fails to realize that an event could per accidens fail to qualify as either, since, as already seen, not every sequence of events need be of a mental or physical sort. James has three ways of protecting the weak version of III against recalcitrant cases -- by appeal to (i) "alternate worlds," (ii) "nonenergistic properties,"and (iii) "panpsychism." (i) yields a sound but unexciting version of Pure Experience, (ii) a false but exciting version, and (iii) an unwitting abandonment of the central idea of the doctrine of Pure Experience.

(i) Alternate Worlds. This attempted solution is found in a passage that James quotes from Hugo Munsterberg with full approval: "The objects of dreamers and hallucinated persons are wholly without general validity. But even were they centaurs and golden mountains, they still would be 'off there,' in fairy land, and not inside' of ourselves." (ERE 11) This gets developed by James in terms of his many worlds, engaged in a competition with each other to capture the subject's passing interest so as to qualify for the time being as the "actual world." Were there no perceptual world that primarily engaged our interest and precluded one of these imaginary, merely thought of worlds, "our world of thought would be the only world, and would enjoy complete reality in our belief. This actually happens in our dreams, and in our day-dreams so long as percepts do not interrupt them." (ERE 12)

All of the recalcitrant cases of a piece of unaccommodated pure experience can be handled by including them in an alternative world to the sensible one, such as were discussed in Section II on Ontological Relativism. In regard to the unobserved falling of the tree in the forest, James can avail himself of the sort of counter-factual analysis that is supplied by phenomenalism: If there were to have been an observer present in the forest (though there wasn't) who took the requisite steps, she would have been visually appeared to in a tree-falling like manner. This counter-factual proposition describes some alternative world to the one that we now take to be actual on the basis of our present sensible-based interests. We can create a counter-factual world for any recalcitrant piece of pure experience you please. The free-floating bit of consciousness experience is such that there is a counter-factual sequence of events in which it is remembered by later members and thus qualifies as mental. In other words, if the multiple personality subject of the original experience were to have had, though she didn't, subsequent experiences that remembered this experience, it would have qualified as mental. If the totality of history were to consist in a single event, a brief loud noise, it would satisfy the weak version of III, because if there were to exist the right sort of successions of events, ones in which it is remembered and others to whose members it is nomically connected, it would qualify respectively as both mental and physical in James's relational sense.

The worry is that the weak version of III is too weak, because the counter-factual alternative possible worlds it must invoke are not possible enough. On the basis of James's own analysis of possibility, he would be among those most dissatisfied. In league with Aristotle, as he is on all matters concerning possibility, James claims that a possibility must be grounded in actuality. For something to be possible in the weakest sense, a "bare" possibility, it is required that

there is nothing extant capable of preventing the possible thing. The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be said to make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or abstract sense. But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically? It means not only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some of the conditions of production of the possible things actually are here. (P 136)

A campfire burning unattended in a strong wind in a dry forest is a possible forest fire in James's "concretely grounded" sense, since nothing is afoot that will prevent its developing into a forest fire and moreover there are actual forces favoring its so developing.

The sort of counter-factual possibilities that must be employed to save the weak version of III fail to qualify as either bare or concretely grounded possibilities. The unobserved falling of the tree might occur in a world devoid of all observers, and thus there would be nothing in actuality that concretely grounds the possibility of there being someone who observes this event. What is more, this possibility is not even a bare possibility, since its realization is prevented by what exists in this observer-less world, namely that every individual that exists in this world has some property that is incompatible with being an observer. Imagine that its sole members are the tree, a clump of soil, and a rock. Being a tree logically precludes being an observer, and so on for the sortal properties possessed by the other members of this world.[8]

(ii) Nonenergistic Properties. Although James did not explicitly deploy his analysis of possibility against the "alternative world" version, it is clear that he felt a need to find another version that would not invoke its ungrounded possibilities. He played around with a second way of dealing with recalcitrant cases that made use of a distinction between two ways in which an object can possess a causal power or disposition -- "energetically" and "nonenergetically." A delusory or purely imaginary object need not be placed in some counter-factual physical sequence in order to have physical properties, such as the causal powers that are possessed by the kind of object it is, and thereby qualify as physical. Rather, it can possess them in the actual world and thus qualify as physical relative to the actual world alone but have them in a funny sort of "nonenergetic" manner.

We find that there are some fires that will always burn sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some waters that will always put out fires; while there are other fires and waters that will not act at all. The general group of experiences that act, that do not only possess their natures intrinsically, but wear them adjectively and energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitably to be contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures, fail to manifest them in the 'energetic' way. (ERE 17. see also 70)

It should be obvious to the reader that something has gone radically wrong. Imagine that you have ordered a set of ginzu knives for $19.95 from the William Sonoma James Company that you saw advertised on television as having exceptional sharpness, capable of cutting through even a two by four. You get the knives and to your dismay find that they quite literally can't even cut the mustard, no less a two by four. You write a letter of complaint to the Company demanding a refund because the knives do not have the advertised property of sharpness. You would not be satisfied if the company were to respond that the knives sold to you are sharp, as advertised, only they are not sharp “energetically,” meaning that they do have the causal power to cut but only in respect to imaginary objects. "Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real wood." (ERE 17) Enjoy your ginzu knives, you are told, but remember to cut only imaginary objects with them.

What has gone wrong here? James fails to realize that 'nonenergetically' is a reality-canceling modifier in the way that "toy" and "decoy" are, a toy or decoy duck not being a duck, as Austin has said. Similarly, to have a causal power or disposition nonenergetically is not to have it. As a result, James's claim that some fires have the causal power to warm and some water the causal power to put out fires but have them only nonenergetically commits him to there being fire and water that are devoid of their relevant causal powers. But this is conceptually impossible, since their causal powers are essential to them. If something cannot quench thirst or put out fires and the like, it isn't water, only "fool's water." Your $19.95 ginzu knives are only "fool's ginzu knives."

(iii) Panpsychism. Obviously, James was not fully satisfied with the ways (i) and (ii) handle recalcitrant cases, especially ones involving unobserved events. This third solution applies only to these types of recalcitrant cases. It contends that "unobserved events" really aren't unobserved, since they are at least present for themselves. Of such an event James says, "If not a future experience of our own or a present one of our neighbor, it must be...an experience for itself whose relation to other things we translate into the action of molecules, ether-waves, or whatever else the physical symbols may be. This opens the chapter of the relations of radical empiricism to panpsychism, into which I cannot enter now."[9] (ERE 43) Two years earlier, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James embraces this panpsychism. "The only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is 'in itself' is by conceiving it as it is for itself; i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of 'pinch' or inner activity of some sort going with it." (VRE 394) This means that when a rock falls off a ledge without any observers being around its fall is at least present "for itself," which, I assume, means that it is conscious of its own falling, and, if it could talk, might say, "I have fallen down and I can't get up." This is panpsychism, because it imputes an inner consciousness to every sensible particular, even apparently insentient ones like rocks.

It is not an accident that James did not develop his panpsychic suggestion for dealing with unobserved events in his articles of 1904-5, for it amounts to a complete abandonment of the central idea of Pure Experience -- that nothing is mental or conscious simpliciter but only in relation to other bits of pure experience. The rock's inner consciousness of its own fall does not seem to depend on its being related to any earlier or later world mates. James's suggestion of panpsychism is more than just a suggestion, since he commits himself to panpsychism in his wrtings both prior and subsequent to the 1904-5 articles. Chapter 9 will explore James's account, in a series of articles in the late 1890's, of a mystical I-Thou relation that can obtain not only between persons but between a person and nature, which is a form of nature mysticism that is committed to panpsychism. It is to be argued in Chapter 10 that James wound up embracing panpsychism in his final two books, A Pluralistic Universe and Some Problems of Philosophy and thereby gave up the doctrine of Pure Experience. No mention is made of the doctrine in his post-1905 publications.[10] What James eventually wound up espousing was not just panpsychism but the more extreme doctrine of idealism or spiritualism in which everything is nothing but consciousness through and through. Unlike pure experience, the stuff of which reality is made is not ontologically neutral.[11] Therefore, pure experience is not identical with but rather has been replaced by the conscious and spiritual realities of his final two books and The Varieties of Religious Experience, since pure experience is pure potentiality but these spirits are already partly determined in virtue of having the monadic property of being conscious.[12]

This completes the exposition of the promethean pragmatism of William James. But James's had a deep mystical streak that opposed his promethean pragmatism, and it is now its turn to occupy the spotlight. Herein the deep division within James's self is not between his scientific and moral agent self but between all of the above and his mystical self.

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