WilliamJames

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[Varieties] Introductory lecture and Week I thinksheet
by Jesse Raber 09 Dec '13

09 Dec '13

*INTRODUCTORY LECTURE* 1. BIOGRAPHY Born in 1842, William James was the eldest son in one of the most remarkable families in American history. James's grandfather, a stonefaced Presbyterian of Irish descent, also named William, had made a fortune in Syracuse, New York<http://books.google.com/books?id=7rZW21At804C&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=%22willia…>, mostly in real estate speculation and moneylending. This elder William was constantly troubled by what he saw as the heresy and dissoluteness of his son Henry (later "Henry James Sr.<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/american/genius/henr…>"), who seemed to do nothing but drink, read non-Presbyterian theology, and spend money. Many times he warned Henry Sr. of his wayward ways, but the young man could not be moved, and he eventually cut him out of his will. Henry Sr., however, successfully contested the will and enjoyed the financially unaccountable life his father had tried to keep him from. After his father's death, Henry Sr., now free to be as heretical as he liked, developed into a religious visionary, self-publishing loosely Swedenborgian tracts<http://books.google.com/books/about/Substance_and_shadow.html?id=4XwTAAAAYA…> which, while read by only a handful of people, became well-known in the inner circles of Transcendentalism<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/>. He struck up a close personal friendship (and intellectual frenemyship) with Ralph Waldo Emerson <http://www.rwe.org/>, who became a frequent presence at the James house. Henry Sr. believed that the way to God was through mystical introspection, but he rejected the idea of an autonomous self as sacriligious, believing rather that if people turned inward to God they would see the underlying unity of all humanity. He also held that this spiritual fraternity could only be discovered if each person trusted their inner light and shunned all established churches (he eventually left the Swedenborgian church <http://www.newchurch.org/about/swedenborg/learn-more.html> for this reason), and also put material things out of their minds (easy to say for someone who never had to work for his bread). Henry Sr.'s paradoxical selfless individualism (for lack of a better term) left a deep mark on his three writerly children, William<http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jamesoo.html>, the novelist Henry Jr.<http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/JamesHenryByLafarge.html>, and the diarist Alice<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/american/genius/alic…>, each of whom explores the struggle of consciousness against the distortions of egoism<http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/09/03/120903crbo_books_lan…>. There were also two other siblings, Wilky and Bob. Wilky earned distinction in the Civil War (which his elder brothers didn't serve in due to health problems) and had a solid business career; Bob was a troubled alcoholic. Mary <http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jamesmary.html>, the beloved mother of the family, was a calming presence whose tireless domestic labor kept the whole operation going. James took a long time to find his vocation. As a young man he showed promise as an artist<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/William_James_self-portr…>, and studied painting under the American artistWilliam Morris Hunt<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Hunt_Selfportrait.…>. Then he became interested in science, and studied at Harvard under the renowned taxonomist Louis Aggasiz <http://www.icr.org/article/5932/>, accompanying Aggasiz on a formative expedition to Brazil<http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/JamesInBrazil1865.html>. While at Harvard he switched paths again, this time to medicine, and earned his medical license, although he never practiced. In 1873, at the age of thirty, he got his first job, teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard. He did that for a few years before encountering the cutting-edge experimentalist psychology of the German Wilhelm Wundt<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/> ("brass-instrument psychology," James later liked to call it). For James, Wundt's empirical studies of specific stimulus-response circuits held the exciting potential to overturn the overly abstract and category-oriented psychology of earlier thinkers, but he later grew uncomfortable with the reductive behaviorism to which Wundt's work logically led. Taking up a psychology position at Harvard in 1876, he began work on his first major treatise,The Principles of Psychology<http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/william/principles/contents.html> (eventually published in 1890), in which he develops his central interest in the radical but precarious freedom of the will amidst both neurological and environmental determinants. He married his wife, Alice<http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/JamesAliceGibbens.html>, in 1878, and they had a tumultuous but ultimately satisfying relationship that lasted until his death in 1910. In 1881 he switched his affiliation to the Harvard philosophy department, where he finally found stability. From then on, the outward story of James's life was one of steady publication, mounting academic distinction, and a rich family life. On the inside, though, James struggled with what was then called neurasthenia<http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/Neurasthenic-Nation,4746.aspx>, a nervous ailment with symptoms similar to what we would call anxiety and depression. Throughout his life he spent a lot of time in European spas<http://wigglingmytoes.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/baden-baden.jpg>, trying to calm and regenerate his nerves. When he wasn't on vacation, he kept his mind occupied with an extremely intense workload. But even late in life, he was haunted by the fear of a total mental collapse. He writes in The Varieties of Religious Experience (attributing the story to an anonymous correspondent, but clearly referring to his own experience): "Suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic…. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him." James's intimate knowledge of such inward struggles is reflected in all of his thought, and gives it a therapeutic thrust that bypasses any philosophical abstractions that do not help people manage their mental lives. His Harvard colleague George Santayana<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana/> said of him: "There is a sense in which James was not a philosopher at all. He once said to me, 'What a curse philosophy would be if we couldn't forget all about it!' In other words, philosophy was not to him what it has been to so many, a consolation and sanctuary in a life which would have been unsatisfying without it. It would be incongruous, therefore, to expect of him that he should build a philosophy like an edifice to go and live in for good. Philosophy to him was rather like a maze in which he happened to find himself wandering, and what he was looking for was the way out." This is an apt description of pragmatism in general, which is more interested in clearing away cumbersome abstractions in order to set free the creative soul than in definitively answering eternal questions. James once gushed to his sister about his new country house<http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/JamesChocorua.html>, "Oh, it's the most delightful house you ever saw; it has fourteen doors, all opening outwards." Many commentators have seen in this remark a perfect summary of the Jamesian spirit. 2. JAMES IN THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION The earliest intellectual influences on James were his father and Emerson, both of whom shared the fundamental principle that the human spirit is greater than any institutions or theories that might seek to circumscribe it. "Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn," Emerson writes in the essay "Circles" (1841); "that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens." Where Henry James Sr. sought humanity's true and unchanging grounding in the divine, however, Emerson was a philosopher of flux. "Power ceases in the instant of repose," Emerson writes in "Self-Reliance" (1841); "it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul *becomes*; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame." To realize itself, the Emersonian soul must move not only inward but, somehow, forward. Some scholars, such as Cornel West<http://books.google.com/books?id=EDkdjUUVLCIC&pg=PA9&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3…> andRichard Poirier<http://books.google.com/books/about/The_renewal_of_literature.html?id=nPBZA…>, have argued that these sentiments make Emerson a proto-pragmatist; others, such as Louis Menand<http://books.google.com/books?id=-hpHYbwdCCkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=menand…>, disagree, noting Emerson's use of fixed transcendental concepts such as the Oversoul, but still see Emerson as a necessary foil in pragmatism's development. The first thinker who can definitely be called a pragmatist was Charles Sanders Peirce <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/> (pronounced "purse"), an on-again-off-again friend of James's. Though the term itself came a little later, Peirce effectively defined pragmatism in the seminal essay "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878), in which he advises us to "consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." Peirce's main interests were logic and the philosophy of science. He argued that, while objective reality is a necessary assumption for scientific thinking, our picture of reality can never be any clearer than a peer-reviewing community of fallible human scientists can make it. Science must always keep the ideal of objective truth before it as a goal, but it can never claim to have reached it. Partly this humility springs from the inevitability of human error, but, for Peirce, its sources are even deeper than that; for all of its apparent lawfulness, he argues, the universe contains an element of "Absolute Chance," and will never be entirely predictable or categorizable. At the same time, the struggle for intellectual mastery over the universe is the great human calling. >From Henry James Sr., Emerson, and Peirce (among others), James inherited a permanent skepticism of all systems that squash the unpredictable human spirit into fixed classes and groups. As he wrote to a friend in 1899: "I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost: against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes after they are long dead, and puts them on the top." For this reason above all, James was opposed to racism, sexism, and imperialism (which obscures the humanity of conquered peoples). He objected to his mentor Aggasiz's attempts to set up a racial hierarchy based on evolutionary evidence, and to other contemporaries' attempts to classify people according to phrenological features; in arguing against these overreaching scientists, while Emerson and James Sr. gave him his values, it was Peirce who gave him the tools to critique them in their own scientific terms. James's focus was always on the experience of individuals, not primarily in terms of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, nor of engaging in detached contemplation, but in terms of the will's struggle to build a life and a self on the shifting sands of a modern world in which, to quote Marx, "all that is solid melts into air ... and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life." To understand the sense in which the self must be built for James, it is important to distinguish his psychology from that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Following Wundt, James's psychology is basically connectionist, and lacks any overarching theory of mental architecture like Freud's id, ego, and superego, or the ranked list of rational, passional, and automatic functions, growing out of Scottish common sense philosophy, that wasfavored by almost all of the "Founding Fathers" and baked into the American school system by Horace Mann<http://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-the-american-self-97801953878…>. While James is willing to identify certain broad patterns of mental activity such as attention and willpower, he sees the mind as fundamentally plastic, capable of forming an unlimited variety of psychological and behavioral habits in response to changing needs. The task of philosophy, for him, is to make our ideas supple enough to meet those needs. Like Peirce, Emerson, and Henry James Sr., James's politics are willfully undertheorized (as, for that matter, are his ethics and aesthetics; he is basically a psychologist and phenomonologist<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/>). He leaves the question of how to translate pragmatism into social life to later writers such asJohn Dewey<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-political/> , Jane Addams <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/addams-jane/>, Randolph Bourne <http://www.dkv.columbia.edu/w0410/about.html>, and Walter Lippmann<http://culturalapparatus.wordpress.com/walter-lippmann/> (and, down the line, to neo-pragmatists such as Richard Rorty<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/> and Cornel West). Dewey and Addams moved in a social-democratic direction, Dewey focusing more on progress and experimentation (preserving a spirit of constant striving that is, in my opinion, the truest to James), and Addams on basic welfare and dignity. Dewey supported WWI, which he later regretted but for which he never explicitly apologized, instead turning to peace activism and becoming one of the few American intellectuals to oppose entering WWII; he also led the commission to defend Leon Trotsky against Stalin, was a founding member of the NAACP, and ran the AAUP, among many other activities. Addams suffered widespread vilification for opposing WWI, but unlike Bourne lived long enough to say I told you so; she reformed some Chicago municipal services, deplored but defended populist vehicles like unions and urban political machines, played a significant role in the playground and urban park movements, attacked top-down models of charity and social work, and led workplace safety law campaigns. Bourne became a pacifist and quasi-anarchist, and famously split with Dewey over the latter's support of the First World War. Lippmann (whom I think of as pragmatism's Annikin Skywalker) called for a libertarian technocracy that would separate politics from values; in the sixties, incidentally, Lippmann became a hero to activists for opposing the Vietnam War, and Bourne's stance against WWI also brought him back into the limelight. All of these positions in some way reflect, or refract, James's influence; all of them are attempts to respect and profit from the endless and omnidirectional variety of human perspectives and desires. 3. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The Varieties makes a maximalist case for the existence and value of this human variety by showing how (like Emerson or Henry James Sr.) every individual may rightly claim the mantle of prophesy. Earlier I mentioned that for James the mind must be plastic to meet changing needs; these needs, for James, come from both without and within, for James does believe in something like an active unconscious (though in a somewhat different way than Freud or Jung). However we adjust our mental habits to filter the world, James argues, we will end up perceiving things that we cannot currently process; in fact, we cannot fully process most things that we see, cannot place them in contexts as wide as we'd want. These unprocessed perceptions are stored in what James calls the subliminal half of the mind, inaccessible to reason but pressing upward on the conscious mind, ready to erupt as religious experience. (Recall his interest in forces "stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water.") The Varieties, rather than exploring questions of theology, urges us to expect these eruptions in all areas of life and thought. What is the value of these eruptions? How should we integrate them into our day to day life, and into our thinking, and how should we react when other people have them? These are the questions that the Varieties take up. *WEEK I THINKSHEET *VARIETIES LECTURE I, THE PRESENT DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY, WHAT PRAGMATISM MEANS This week's two short essays were delivered as lectures at the Lowell Institute, endowed by the industrialist John Lowell, Jr., owner of the bustling textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. The Institute was intended to spread enlightenment to the common worker who could not attend college; Lowell Institute lectures were something like 19th-century TED talks. This is the context for James's apologetic remark that "I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students." But he is being a bit sly - he doesn't really talk all that much like a professor. Indeed, at several points in these essays he fends off imagined objections from academics in the audience who might find him not professorial enough. His unstable rhetorical position is perfectly in keeping with what he identifies as pragmatism's mission, which is to create a "commerce" between philosophical ideas and the trials of everyday living. Philosophical debates are technical and abstruse, but, for James, everyone, even the least educated, has a philosophy in the sense of a "dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means." The technical side of philosophy, then, becomes a way of clarifying and juxtaposing different "temperaments," and one can approve of a philosopher whose "heart is in the right place" even if his arguments lack rigor. Is this a good way to approach philosophy? Does it dismiss logical rigor too blithely? What exactly might the role of logical rigor be for someone like James? Do you think it's possible to understand philosophy without considering philosophers' intellectual temperament? Another major theme of the short essays, which is also the central theme of the first lecture of the Varieties, is the pragmatic preference for fruits over roots. Ideas are to be judged by their "cash value," the future "commerce" they open up between ourselves and our environment. At the same time, however, new ideas can be accepted only if they perform a "marriage-function" between our current needs and our stock of preexisting beliefs (which are, in a way, another, interior part of our environment). Thus there is a Burkean element to James's thought, an insistence that intellectual change must be gradual if it is to endure. James is thus exposed on both flanks, as it were: traditionalists can accuse him of a blind rush into the future, and radicals of an attachment to the arbitrary ideas of the past. Has James struck the right balance? Or has he adopted a half-measure that can please nobody?

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[Varieties] start date
by Eric Purdy 08 Dec '13

08 Dec '13

I vote we start as soon as possible. Given the 13-week length of the syllabus, this project is inherently going to overlap/conflict with school, unless we break it up into multiple chunks with space in between. -- -Eric

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