Born: 1842, New York, New York Died: 1910, Chocorua, New Hampshire

William James

Major Works: The Principles of Psychology (1890), "The Will to Believe" (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907) Major Ideas: Human consciousness is selective; it concentrates on some things and ignores others. Ideas and beliefs are essentially plans for organizing and structuring our experience and world. One cannot prove finally whether human action is free or determined, but there are good reasons, especially moral ones, for believing that human action involves freedom. A person's psychological, makeup affects his or her religious experience, and that experience is best evaluated in terms of its moral quality. Pragmatism consists of two parts: it is a method for the determination of meaning, and it is a theory about the nature of truth. The truth or falsity of a judgment, its agreement or disagreement with reality, depends on obtaining or failing to obtain corroboration of the expectations that follow from the judgment in question.

The best-known American philosopher of his day, William James is most famous for his contributions to the development and popularization of pragmatism. A theory about the nature of meaning and truth, James s pragmatism leads to meliorism, as he liked to call it His view holds that fulfillment and salvation for humankind and nature are neither necessary nor impossible and that our actions make a vital difference in whatever happens. It implies that process change, and open-endedness characterize all existence, that human existence is permeated by freedom and that hope, which is at the heart of human life finds its natural expression in religious faith. These concerns and convictions emerged from a life and career that were an intellectual and spiritual odyssey. James's journey took him from medicine and physiology to philosophy, with pioneering contributions to psychology in between.

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James's father, Henry James, Sr., was an independently wealthy man whose major interests included theology and the education of his children. Even before William James was out of his teens, the family, including William's younger brother, Henry James, Jr., who became a brilliant novelist, had been to Europe many times. Art and science were William's early interests but the latter won out, and in 1869 he received the M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School. Poor health restricted James's activities after graduation, but in 1872 he became an instructor in physiology at Harvard. While traveling in Europe, he became acquainted with novel developments in psychology. Thus, not only did he begin to teach psychology in 1875, but also he organized one of the United States's first laboratories for psychological studies. In addition, James found that psychology raised basic philosophical issues, and these questions ultimately captured and held his attention in ways that problems peculiar to physiology and psychology could not. By 1879, James was also teaching philosophy at Harvard, and in the late 1870s and the 1880s he wrote and published papers that concentrated on the nature of rationality and the freedom--determinism controversy. In 1890, after twelve years of work, James published his two-volume Principles of Psychology. In this book, which is still of great importance, James tried to delineate the foundations, boundaries, and findings of the relatively new science of empirical psychology. He found, however, that the task of securing the foundations of the new science was especially difficult, for philosophical assumptions were involved at every turn. James saw that a sound psychology requires a firm philosophical base, and he worked to clarify issues in both areas. Spent mostly at Harvard, the last twenty years of James's life were occupied primarily with the teaching and writing of philosophy, culminating in his development of pragmatism. A gifted writer and an eloquent speaker, James was much in demand at home and abroad. His Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1901-02 became his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience. An invitation to lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston during the winter of 1906-07 led to another crucial work, Pragmatism, which James subtitled A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. By the time of his death in 1910, James was well known both for his contributions to psychology and for his oftencontroversial philosophical views. The Principles of Psychology James believed that psychology and philosophy are closely related in the following way: Both need to emphasize the description of human experiences as well as the goal of finding causal explanations. Putting that principle into practice, he found five basic characteristics about human consciousness and thought: 1. Thought is personal; experiences are owned--they belong to someone. 2. Thoughts and experiences are constantly changing. No two experiences are ever identical. James did not deny that we experience the same objects over again, but only that our experience of an object has different qualities on different occasions. Moreover, even though

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change is always taking place, he stressed that nothing is ever totally wiped out in experience. Every experience leaves its mark, although not in a way that eliminates autonomy and freedom in the present moments of conscious awareness. 3. There is continuity as well as change in thought and experience. Conscious awareness is not chopped up into bits. Rather, consciousness flows like a stream--the concept of the "stream of consciousness," which plays important parts in literary creation and theory, has its origins in James. In addition, within this flow one basic structural feature stands out. Some object, person, or concept is focused on, but always against a broader, richer background or horizon. The focal point is "fringed" by a field of perceptions, feelings, time, and space, all of which play their parts in constituting the meaning of the central object and our experience. As our attention moves, different objects come to be at the center, but the figure-ground structure remains essential. 4. Thought is cognitive. It deals with something other than itself. This is James's way of asserting that we inhabit and know a world that is not entirely of our own making, however much our words and deeds may affect what goes on within it. 5. Consciousness is selective. It concentrates on some things and ignores others. James placed particular emphasis on this fifth characteristic. Consciousness is not passive. It is an organizing force that creates and brings specific patterns of meaning to light. Consciousness inhabits a rich and ambiguous field from the outset, but the particular world we inhabit is largely due to the interests that we bring with us, some of which are instinctual, and to the choices that we make. This emphasis on the selectivity of consciousness suggests that freedom plays an important part in James's understanding of human existence. He believed that we inhabit a world of freedom. Meaning and value are largely determined by our choices, and the significance and quality of human life are primarily our responsibility. The roots of freedom are in the selective powers of consciousness. For James, the assertion that we are free means that in present moments of conscious awareness we always have some power to control our concentration of attention on persons, feelings, ideas, or objects in the world. James denied that what we attend to in the present and in the future is exhaustively determined by what has already taken place. In addition, he held that our acts of attending and thinking are choices that naturally result in action. Our efforts may be insufficient to accomplish what we want, but through an original capacity to concentrate attention, which can grow and develop, human life and the world as, a whole become permeated with novel purposes, values, and actions, which are the results of our freedom. Determinism, Freedom, and the Will to Believe Many of James's views conflicted with the deterministic theories held by some of his contemporaries. These theories dealt with human conduct in terms of cause and effect relationships in which the past exhaustively fixes the present and the future. James defended freedom against this determinism in an interesting way. First, he argued that it is impossible to demonstrate conclusively either that human action involves freedom or that it is totally determined, because once an act has occurred, there is no possibility of exactly duplicating

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the circumstances to see whether the act could be altered But if final demonstrations are ruled out, it still possible to have a well-grounded belief in the reality of freedom. Our existence is characterized by feelings that the future is genuinely open-ended, that we do shape its course in the present moment, and that our actions are not adequately explained as fixed results of causes in the past. Furthermore, these undeniable feelings of freedom are fundamental to our experiences of moral striving and our convictions that life's quality can be improved. James believed, therefore, that the meaning and intelligibility of our lives depend largely on the existence of freedom, and he held that this fact gives us sufficient practical grounds for believing in freedom and rejecting deterministic theories. James's position on these and related issues is especially well illustrated in essays such as "The Dilemma of Determinism" and "The Will to Believe." The latter argues that there are times when we are confronted by situations in which we must make a decision without having all of the evidence we might like to possess. Life does not always allow us the luxury of waiting until we have conclusive data confirming the correct course of action. James's goal was to delineate some of the basic characteristics of such situations and to defend the view that the rational course of action in these circumstances is not to flee from reality by claiming the necessity of having to wait for more objective evidence before deciding what to do. Rather, James urges us to face such circumstances squarely, to meet them with full awareness of the risk and uncertainties that they involve, and then to choose the course of action that is most likely to add significance and fulfillment to our lives. What James called the "religious hypothesis" provides an example. If religion is taken generically, James found that it makes the following claims. First, it asserts that "the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word." Second, religion affirms that "we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true." These claims, James believed, constitute an option that is living, forced, and momentous. The point that James stressed is that when one is confronted by genuine options such as those that occur in religion, one is entitled to commit oneself positively toward the claims of religion without being branded irrational--provided, of course, that one acts with a clear awareness of what he or she is doing. The Varieties of Religious Experience Hope is at the heart of human life, and one of its natural expressions is in religious faith. James was no starry-eyed optimist. He had a profound sense of the negativity and evil that haunt existence. He knew that life smells of death. Yet pessimism was not his choice. In a world of freedom, hope can spring eternal. Hope is a quality peculiar to human life. It entails the feeling that the past and the present are not good enough and that the future can be better. As James understood it, hope is best embodied in what he called the "strenuous mood." This lifestyle involves a deep desire to find lasting meaning, a passionate concern to relieve suffering and to humanize existence, and a sense of urgency about developing and using one's talents to the utmost. Only hopeful persons can live this way.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience does not give high marks to every form of religious life, but it makes clear James's conviction that religious faith is instrumental in releasing human energy toward the moral ends of the strenuous mood. In turn, the strenuous mood points toward a need for religious faith. Any sensitive person knows that human powers are limited. Try as we may, human efforts alone seem insufficient to eliminate destruction and death. The hope that the strenuous mood entails, then, may not be sustained unless that mood points beyond itself, trusting that life is supported by divine power that can aid us in achieving our best ideals and that can save us from the clutches of negativity and absurdity. Caught in the ambiguity and frustration of human finitude--somewhere between ultimate success and total failure--the strenuous mood points toward religious faith as a source of courage. James contended, however, that some religious perspectives are more adequate than others. He opposed theologies that imply that the world and human existence are essentially complete and finished by virtue of their relation to a God, or an Absolute, who comprehends all being from a perspective of eternity. Instead, James inclined toward a finite God--one limited either in power or knowledge or both. Better than other concepts, he thought, such a view of God fitted a world that is characterized by freedom, openendedness, and change, and in which a real struggle with evil is taking place. Pragmatism James's pragmatism is in many ways a natural extension of his earlier ideas, especially those involving freedom and religion. It involves both an empirical method for clarifying the meaning of concepts and theories and a theory about the nature of truth. With respect to the clarification of meaning, pragmatism rests on the following principle: Meaning is revealed by examining a concept or theory with respect to the practical consequences in future experience that the object of the concept or theory leads us to anticipate. A complete account of such consequences would constitute a full analysis of the meaning of the concept or theory in question. This approach to meaning provides a good starting point for handling disputes. For example, if we are faced by two claims that seem to be in conflict, but no practical differences can be delineated concerning the results that will hold if they are true, then the dispute can be dismissed as purely verbal. However, if substantive differences are present, the pragmatic approach will reveal them. In addition, it will help us to find out the truth or falsity of the claims by urging us to see whether the consequences we are led to expect really do occur. In Pragmatism, James illustrated his approach to meaning in clarifying the major differences between a scientific materialism and a view--James calls it "theism"--that asserts the existence of a purposeful, creating God. If we look from the present back toward the past, James believed, no difference between the two views can be specified. Either perspective is capable of accounting for what has happened thus far. But when materialism and theism are contrasted with respect to what they promise and the expectations they produce in us, crucial differences in the two views begin to appear. The materialism that James has in mind leads us to expect the ultimate negation of human ideals and achievements. Such a world is finally devoid of hope, and life in this world will have a hollowness because the future is

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basically closed. On the other hand, a theistic perspective allows room for hope. It suggests that finitude, death, and evil are not the final words. Theism posits the hope that "an ideal order ... shall be permanently preserved." It asserts that because of God's presence "tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution [are] not the absolutely final things." It is not enough for us, however, simply to specify differences in meaning or to discover that some disputes are merely verbal. We also need to know the truth or falsity of our claims. James held that an examination of the concept of truth itself can help us in this quest. After a pragmatic analysis of the meaning of the concept of truth, James concludes that truth is a property of those ideas or beliefs that produce expectations concerning our future experience that do, in fact, get fulfilled. Thus, truth is synonymous with verification: An idea is true to the degree and only to the degree that it is empirically corroborated. This definition, in turn, suggests that truth has a temporal quality. James believed that ideas or beliefs become true as the expectations they produce are fulfilled. Truth itself is in the making. James's views clashed with the claim that truth is absolute, eternal, and forever unchanging. He argued that thinking in terms of absolutes takes us beyond actual experience, which does not demonstrate that truth is complete, fixed, and unchanging, although experience does show that some ideas have been validated for a very long time. At best, James contended, the notion of absolute truth serves as a helpful limiting concept. It refers to what would be the case if all possible inquiry and experience were completed. But as a limiting concept, absolute truth remains unattainable; it reminds us instead of our finitude and fallibility. James's denial of the completely static nature of truth led him to equate it with concepts such as usefulness, expediency and workability. The true is what works, or what is expedient or useful. Some critics found such moves dangerously ambiguous, for it seemed that James ignored the possibility that some ideas or beliefs could be useful or expedient without being true. In James's account, the critics argued, truth seemed to be reduced to subjective opinion. Aware that such objections might arise, James tried hard to answer his critics. The truth of beliefs or theories, argued James, involves their being expedient or useful over "the long run" and "on the whole." This was James's way of stressing the need for repeated testing and for obtaining consistency and coherence among all the beliefs and theories that we think are true. These qualifications are communal. They invalidate a narrowly subjective interpretation of expediency and usefulness. In stating his theory of truth, James no doubt used words that left him open to charges of unwarranted subjectivism. Nor it is clear that he put all those indictments to rest. But he did challenge a tradition about truth that was not as clear as it appeared to be. While showing that possession of truth depends on an ongoing, critical sifting of experience, his pragmatism complements the other parts of his philosophy by helping us to discern and evaluate the varieties of life's meanings. Further Reading

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Allen, Gay Wilson. William James. A Biography. New York: Viking Press, 1967. This study of James's life emphasizes his views about pluralism, empiricism, and theism and underscores how James's Pragmatism interprets the universe as one of flux and change. Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll with William James. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. An arresting interpretation of James's thought by a creative and influential scholar. Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphy. A History of Philosophy in America. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977. Flower and Murphy suggest that James's Pragmatism can still alert us to the subtlety and richness of experience, the purposeful quality of thought, and the active character of knowing. Ford, Marcus Peter. William James's Philosophy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. Ford offers a succinct overview that compares James's thought to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Myers, Gerald E. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Myers provides an extensive study of James's thought and the milieu in which it appeared. Roth, John K. Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969. Surveying the entire range of James's writings, Roth offers an interpretation of the moral philosophy of William James. Smith, John E. The Spirit of American Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Smith contends that James's philosophy is distinctively American because it underscores the vitality and variety of experience and accepts the challenge of adventure in an open-ended existence. Wild, John. The Radical Empiricism of William James. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1969. Interpreting James's psychology and its similarities to European phenomenology and existentialism, Wild emphasizes James's convictions about the freedom of the mind and the strenuous life. ________________ This article is by John K. Roth, and is taken from Great Thinkers of the Western World, Annual 1999 p402. COPYRIGHT 1999 HarperCollins Publishers.

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