William James

Introduction

William James is the American philosopher and psychologist whose work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave pragmatism its public face, founded the scientific psychology of consciousness in the United States, produced the canonical philosophical analysis of religious experience in modern thought, and articulated the position he called radical empiricism. James is, with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, one of the three foundational figures of the pragmatist tradition, and arguably the most influential single American philosophical voice of his era.

He was also one of the most stylistically distinctive writers in the philosophical canon. The combination of literary grace, psychological acuity, and philosophical seriousness that characterizes James's prose made his work accessible far beyond academic philosophy in ways few contemporaries achieved. The Principles of Psychology (1890) effectively founded American academic psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) remains the canonical philosophical study of religious experience over a century after its publication; Pragmatism (1907) is the most-read introduction to the pragmatist tradition. His work continues to be widely engaged by philosophers, psychologists, religious thinkers, and historians of ideas.

Life

William James was born in 1842 in New York City to a wealthy and intellectually distinguished family. His father, Henry James Sr., was a Swedenborgian theologian and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson; his younger brother, Henry James, became the major American novelist of the late nineteenth century; his sister Alice James was a diarist whose posthumously published journals are now recognized as a major work of nineteenth-century American literature.

James's education was unusually peripatetic. The family lived in Europe for portions of his youth, and James was educated in Paris, Geneva, London, and Bonn alongside more conventional American schooling. He entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1861, intending to become a painter but redirecting to science under the influence of Louis Agassiz. He joined Agassiz's biological expedition to Brazil in 1865 and then entered Harvard Medical School, completing his MD in 1869 after a long period of depression and physical illness.

James never practiced medicine. In 1872 he joined the Harvard faculty as an instructor in physiology and remained at Harvard for the rest of his career, gradually shifting his teaching from physiology to psychology to philosophy. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 1880, Professor of Philosophy in 1885, and Professor of Psychology in 1889. He founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in the United States at Harvard in the late 1870s (though the date is contested; the laboratory may have been founded as early as 1875 or as late as 1877).

The biographical years 1872–1890 were dominated by the composition of The Principles of Psychology, which James worked on for twelve years and which appeared in two large volumes in 1890. The Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902 produced The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Lowell Lectures in Boston and the Pragmatism lectures at Columbia in 1906 produced the eight lectures published as Pragmatism (1907). His final years were occupied by A Pluralistic Universe (1909), the polemical The Meaning of Truth (1909), and the unfinished Some Problems of Philosophy (1911, posthumous).

James died in 1910 at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, after long-standing heart trouble. The intellectual partnership with his brother Henry, the lifelong friendship with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the close contact with Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, the international correspondence with Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Wundt, and others — these connections constitute one of the most extensive intellectual networks of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

The problem he worked on

James's intellectual project was the development of a philosophical and psychological framework that took seriously what he called the concrete particularity of experience against the systematic abstractions of nineteenth-century idealism and the reductive abstractions of nineteenth-century materialism. The framework was supposed to do justice to the actual texture of conscious life — the stream of consciousness, the blooming, buzzing confusion of immediate perception, the will to believe under conditions of forced and momentous choice — in ways that the prevailing alternatives did not.

The organizing methodological commitment is what James called radical empiricism: the position that experience contains the relations among its elements as well as the elements themselves, that nothing should be admitted into philosophy that is not experienceable, and that nothing experienceable should be left out. The position is empiricist in its insistence on experience as the touchstone; it is radical in extending experience to include relations, continuities, and the felt structure of mental life that classical empiricism (from Locke through Hume) had treated as derivative or constructed.

Contributions

Pragmatism

James's most-popularized contribution. The pragmatic doctrine, as James presented it in the 1907 Pragmatism lectures, is that the meaning of a concept is its conceivable practical effects and that the truth of a belief is its working in experience. The position is presented as a method of clarifying disputes (translate the dispute into terms of practical effects; if no difference in practical effects, the dispute is empty) and as a theory of truth (a belief is true if holding it works out for us in the long run).

The doctrine has been continuously contested. James inherited the pragmatic maxim from Peirce, who had first stated it in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), but James extended and popularized it in directions Peirce came to disavow. Peirce eventually renamed his position pragmaticism ("a word ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers") to distinguish it from James's looser usage; the contemporary scholarly recovery of Peirce (especially by Cheryl Misak) has argued that Peirce's more rigorous version is the philosophically defensible core of pragmatism, while James's truth-as-utility formulations are problematic in ways the critics (Russell, Moore, the early analytic tradition) successfully exposed.

Whatever the systematic verdict, James's articulation in Pragmatism remains the most widely-read introduction to the tradition and one of the most influential single philosophical books of the early twentieth century.

The Principles of Psychology

James's twelve-year project, published in two large volumes in 1890. The Principles is the foundational textbook of American academic psychology and one of the most influential single books in the history of psychology. The work integrates physiological psychology, experimental psychology, introspective analysis, and philosophical reflection in a way no subsequent psychology textbook has matched.

Major enduring contributions include the analysis of the stream of consciousness (the doctrine that conscious experience is continuous, personal, selective, and changing rather than constituted by discrete sensations and ideas in the empiricist manner); the analysis of habit (whose plasticity provides the foundation for character formation and learning); the doctrine of the self as a complex of material, social, and spiritual aspects; the James-Lange theory of emotion (developed independently by James and Carl Lange, that bodily changes precede and constitute the felt emotion rather than following from it); and the chapter on will that anticipated much of subsequent psychology of intention and action.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

Delivered as the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 and published in 1902. Varieties is the canonical philosophical study of religious experience in the modern tradition and one of the most-read works in the philosophy of religion. James proposed to study religion not as a set of doctrines (which would require theological commitment) but as a set of experiences that could be analyzed by their phenomenal and pragmatic features. The result is a typology of religious experience — the religion of healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, the divided self, conversion, mysticism, saintliness — supported by extensive first-person testimony drawn from autobiography, devotional literature, and contemporary case material.

The book's substantive theses include the claim that religious experience has a distinctive phenomenal character (the felt sense of presence, the conviction of contact with a more); that religious experience produces measurable changes in human life (the fruits by which any tree is to be judged); and that the question of whether religious experience reliably tracks anything beyond itself is independent of the question of whether it is fruitfully had. The position is sympathetic to religion as a human phenomenon without committing James to specific theological doctrines; it gives religion a serious place within an empirical study of human life without reducing it to anything else.

The book has shaped the academic study of religion through the work of Walter Stace, Wayne Proudfoot, and the broader phenomenological-philosophical tradition; the psychology of religion through Carl Jung, Rollo May, and contemporary positive psychology; the philosophy of religion through engagement (positive and negative) by Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and others. It remains in print over a century after publication.

The Will to Believe

The 1896 essay The Will to Believe (originally titled The Right to Believe in the lecture form James later wished he had kept) argues that under specified conditions — when the choice between two options is live, forced, and momentous and when the evidence is insufficient to decide — we are intellectually entitled to believe according to our passional nature. The position is defended against W. K. Clifford's stricter claim (in The Ethics of Belief, 1877) that it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The doctrine has been continuously controversial. Critics from Clifford onward have argued that James's permission is too generous; defenders have argued that James's conditions (live, forced, momentous; insufficient evidence available; passional nature speaks) constrain its application and that ordinary epistemic practice already operates by something like the doctrine. The contemporary literature on religious epistemology, on the ethics of belief, and on pragmatic reasons for belief all engage the essay directly.

Radical empiricism

James's most distinctively philosophical position. Articulated in the Essays in Radical Empiricism (published posthumously in 1912 from journal articles), the position holds that experience contains the relations among its elements as well as the elements themselves; that conjunctive relations (felt connection, perceived continuity) are as much given in experience as the elements they relate; that nothing should be admitted into philosophy that is not experienceable, and nothing experienceable should be left out.

The position attempts to ground a metaphysics in the actual texture of conscious life without committing to either substance-metaphysics (which posits unexperienceable substrates beneath the experienced) or reductive materialism (which dismisses the experienced as superficial). The framework anticipates aspects of twentieth-century phenomenology (Husserl, the early Heidegger) and process philosophy (Whitehead, who explicitly engaged James as a precursor).

Key works

• The Principles of Psychology (1890, two volumes). The foundational American psychology textbook.
• The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). The collection containing the famous title essay.
• The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The canonical study of religious experience.
• Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907). The eight Columbia and Lowell lectures.
• A Pluralistic Universe (1909). The Hibbert Lectures, on metaphysics against absolute idealism.
• The Meaning of Truth (1909). The polemical defense of pragmatism against its early critics.
• Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912, posthumous). The collection articulating James's distinctive metaphysical position.
• Some Problems of Philosophy (1911, posthumous and unfinished). The introductory treatment James was working on at his death.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Charles Sanders Peirce (the philosophical partner whose 1878 statement of the pragmatic maxim James adopted and extended); Charles Renouvier (the French philosopher whose neo-Kantian voluntarism helped James out of his early depression); Hume (the empiricist tradition James extended and modified); Wilhelm Wundt (the German psychologist whose laboratory work James engaged); Henri Bergson (the French philosopher with whom James corresponded extensively in the last decade of his life); his father Henry James Sr. (Swedenborgian theology); Ralph Waldo Emerson (a family friend).

Influenced: John Dewey (who developed pragmatism into the comprehensive philosophy of experience, education, and democracy); George Herbert Mead (the social psychology of the self); George Santayana (his Harvard student); Alfred North Whitehead (who explicitly named James as a precursor of process philosophy); Edmund Husserl (the founder of phenomenology, who engaged James in the Logical Investigations); the entire American pragmatist tradition through the twentieth century; the psychology of religion through Carl Jung, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow; the philosophy of religion through extensive twentieth-century engagement; contemporary neo-pragmatism (Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979; Robert Brandom's inferentialism; the late work of Hilary Putnam).

The relationship with Peirce was particularly important and particularly fraught. James and Peirce were lifelong friends and intellectual partners; James championed Peirce's career when Peirce had been forced from academic life and provided him financial support in his later years. Peirce nevertheless regarded James's philosophical development as a departure from the rigorous Peircean original of pragmatism; the pragmaticism renaming is the visible sign of the disagreement. The recent scholarly literature on the relation between James and Peirce (especially Cheryl Misak's The American Pragmatists, 2013) continues to develop the question.

Reception

James's reception during his lifetime was substantial. The Principles of Psychology was immediately recognized as the major American psychology textbook; Varieties was widely reviewed and continuously in print; Pragmatism provoked extensive critical engagement from Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, F. H. Bradley, and many others. The pragmatist doctrine James articulated became the most discussed American philosophical position of the early twentieth century.

The early twentieth century saw James's reputation gradually diminish in academic philosophy as the analytic tradition rose. Russell's attacks on James's theory of truth (especially in Philosophical Essays, 1910) and the broader analytic suspicion of pragmatism as imprecise contributed to James being seen, by mid-century, as a figure of historical rather than systematic importance. The recovery began with the neo-pragmatist movement of the 1970s and 1980s (Rorty, Putnam) and has continued with monographs by Cheryl Misak, Hilary Putnam, Mark Johnson, and others.

James's reception in psychology was more continuous and more positive. The Principles shaped American psychology directly through generations of students at Harvard; the stream of consciousness, the analysis of habit, the James-Lange theory of emotion, and the analysis of the self entered the discipline as foundational categories and have remained engaged. The contemporary cognitive science engagement with James (especially through Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, 1991, which explicitly engages James, and the broader literature on consciousness studies) continues the philosophical-psychological dialogue.

James's reception in religious studies and the philosophy of religion has been continuous and substantial. Varieties established the framework within which subsequent academic study of religious experience has been conducted; the contemporary literature on religious experience (Stace, Proudfoot, Alston, Forman) is recognizably continuous with the Jamesian project.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Cheryl Misak's The American Pragmatists (2013), Robert D. Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006, the major biography), Russell B. Goodman's American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (1990), Charlene Haddock Seigfried's William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (1990), and the work of Hilary Putnam and Wayne Proudfoot. The William James Studies journal documents continuing scholarly engagement. The major collected edition of James's work is The Works of William James edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers (Harvard, 19 volumes, 1975–1988); the InteLex Past Masters electronic edition makes the corpus searchable. Active scholarly debates concern the relationship between James and Peirce, the philosophical status of James's theory of truth, the contemporary applicability of radical empiricism, James's place in the genealogy of phenomenology and process philosophy, and his political and ethical views (particularly his anti-imperialist writings around the Spanish-American War).

Further reading

• Pragmatism — the tradition James gave its public face
• Belief Systems — the concept James's analysis of religious experience helps articulate
• Free Will — the doctrine James defended in The Will to Believe
• Hume — the empiricist predecessor whose tradition James extended
• Varieties of Religious Experience — the canonical study of religious experience

The American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist whose work on consciousness, religious experience, and pragmatism made him the most influential single American philosophical voice of his era.