Young William James Thinking Read online

  tions. With vicarious hope, the elder James said, “I had always counted on a

  scientific career for Willy.” Carpenter even helped the Jameses pick out a

  microscope as a Christmas pres ent for William when he was in his late teens;

  and, indeed, the young man eagerly declared that once equipped with a

  “microscope . . . I would . . . go out into the country, into the dear old woods

  and fields and ponds . . . to make as many discoveries as pos si ble. ”8 He was

  exhibiting a youthful version of his father’s philanthropic hopes for scientific

  improvement of society. True to his father’s educational approach, however,

  another strong vocational appetite appeared: after some art lessons, William

  at age sixteen declared his desire to be a painter. His studies at the studio of

  William Morris Hunt for a year starting in 1860 fostered his humanistic

  leanings and his eye for the par tic u lar facts of nature. The artistic training

  encouraged his return to science, and in the fall of 1861 he enrolled at the

  Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, with his father’s high hopes that

  this training would add scientific authority to the spirituality he had so fer-

  vently tried to instill.

  William James would find in his professional training a largely diff er ent

  type of science from his father’s belief in empirical manifestations of spiritual

  10  Young William James Thinking

  truths. His peripatetic childhood education, and even his father’s spiritual-

  ity, especially with its worldly focus, would contribute to his curiosities

  about the experiential workings of the world, which he would pursue with

  more thoroughness and rigor in his scientific education, but with doubts

  about the sufficiency of materialist explanations that his father could ap-

  preciate. The diversity of his early education and the irreverence of his

  father would also contribute to his philosophical scrutiny of the methods

  and assumptions foundational to scientific work, even as he maintained a

  scientist’s commitment to open inquiry and the grounding of speculation in

  natu ral facts. He studied physics, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology be-

  fore earning his only degree, an M.D., in 1869. Starting in 1861 at the science

  school, then in 1864 at Harvard Medical School, and in 1865 on a natu ral

  history expedition to Brazil, he gravitated toward Darwinian methods and

  approaches. His scientific affiliations, spiritual concerns, and speculations

  about their relations would gain both stimulus and challenge from discus-

  sions in the Metaphysical Club, which would help him to take the first steps

  of his mature work in psy chol ogy and philosophy. Wrangling with the vig-

  orous empiricism of Chauncey Wright and the challenging fallibilism of

  Charles Peirce, James joined in the club’s gleaning of philosophical thought

  from the methods of science, which would lead to the advent of pragma-

  tism. James began his teaching career in 1873 with courses in anatomy and

  physiology, and most of his initial publications were on scientific topics.

  Until the late 1870s, James readily called himself a scientist; science was his

  work, and science provided the starting points for his thinking.

  During years of scientific study, James took his first steps in philosophy,

  even though at this point he called them “speculations.” Like a moth to

  flame, he felt compelled to inquire, even though he felt burned by the ab-

  stract uncertainties of these deep reflections and their distance from lived

  experience. Speculative grubbing at finer degrees of subtlety and the re-

  nouncing of assumptions in favor of constant questioning made him feel un-

  easy and unstable by the late 1860s, to the point of wondering about his own

  sanity; he even called deep reflection an “abyss of horrors [that] would spite

  of every thing grasp my imagination and imperil my reason. ”9 For the young

  James, philosophical reflection was a personal business that was at once

  serious, compelling, and troubling. The searing intensity of philosophical

  reflection made him doubt its sense or worth, even as he craved its illumi-

  nating power for finding direction in life. Philosophy would remain uncon-

  nected to his vocational work at least until 1875, when he first taught a

  Almost a Phi los o pher  11

  course on the psychological pro cesses within the anatomy and physiology

  courses he had been teaching for the previous two years. His prior prelimi-

  nary philosophizing was designed not for the seminar room, or even for

  publication, but as personal guidance. He did not have school training in

  philosophy; instead, many of his readings, journal reflections, discussions

  with friends, and even correspondence with letters as reflective essays be-

  came his gradu ate school, but they were generally the equivalent of modern

  night classes, since his speculative life took place after hours and alongside

  his vocational work.

  On one level, James’s private writings clearly show private purposes. Es-

  pecially because philosophy was for him a guide to life, he would write re-

  flections about the implications of his scientific work and about his personal

  insights and “crises”; he wrestled privately with his thoughts to sort out his

  choices. Yet these private writings also show bursts of insights that he

  would spell out in later and more thorough published work. For example, in

  1862 he declared that “nature only offers Thing. It is the human mind that

  discriminates Things.” In his radical empiricism essays, he would call the

  undifferentiated mass of data that nature offers “pure experience” from

  which the mind carves out (or discriminates) mental conceptions. By age

  twenty, during his first practical encounters with empiricism in his science

  classes, he was already maintaining that the mental act of “division is artifi-

  cial” and secondary compared to the undivided abundance of experience

  itself. In another example, he wrote to a friend in 1869, starting with sci-

  entific assumptions before adding his doubts: “[W]e are Nature through and

  through, . . . the result of physical laws, . . . but some point which is reason,”

  that is, some aspects of nature are not reducible only to physical explanation.

  Clashing views, such as these diff er ent ways of understanding nature, pres ent

  sharp contrasts, but he was already considering the weight of thinking on

  each side— what he would later call his pluralistic philosophy of “real ity . . . in

  distributive form,” an embrace of “the shape” of the world not as “an all” ex-

  plained by a unified theory but as “a set of eaches.” When he was thirty- one,

  he expressed the same idea quite directly: he accepted “some point[s]” from

  each side; the per sis tent “law of opposition that rules [diff er ent] opinions”

  filled him with ambivalence, but he was hoping to understand their rela-

  tions. 10 Clearly convinced of the real ity of natu ral facts but also restless to

  comprehend deep levels of meaning and interrelation, he was already pos-

  iting the simultaneous life of immaterial factors within the material stuff

  of nature.

  12  Young William James Thinki
ng

  James worked philosophically in his private and public writings, from

  his youthful speculations to his mature professional ambitions, not to stay

  there, but to harvest the fruit of reflection—to put philosophy to use. Phi-

  losophy was an impulse, helpful but limited, and not always pleasant. His

  former student and admiring antagonist George Santayana said “ there is a

  sense in which James was not a phi los o pher at all. . . . 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 discomfort with formal

  or fixed philosophies explains his tendency to circulate with those not

  bounded by “exactions and tiresome talk,” as the younger colleague observed;

  unlike most of his fellow professional intellectuals, he was attracted to

  eccentrics and to alternative views. Another of James’s students, Charles

  Bakewell, who would become a Yale phi los o pher and Connecticut politi-

  cian, remembers going to seminars in his teacher’s study at his house near

  campus; Bakewell noted that “the small work- desk tucked away in a far cor-

  ner suggested that the writing of an article or a book was just an episode in

  the enterprise of full and joyous living.” Even allowing for a student’s posi-

  tive prejudice for the teacher in these glowing words, the range of James’s

  interests and contacts shows that he did indeed regard philosophy as just

  one facet of human consciousness— compelling despite the discomfort it

  could bring. While working in science in 1873 but beginning to consider a

  career using his speculative interests, James complained that “a professed

  phi los o pher pledges himself publicly never to have done with doubt,” which

  then would constantly challenge any stable assumptions. Later in life, even

  when established in the field, he scrutinized himself in third person, stating

  frankly, “he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation,”

  because it is “ really NOT as weighty as . . . other things.” Despite his scientific

  experience, many phi los o phers perceived that James was holding profes-

  sional philosophy back from its need to align with the “conceptual apprehen-

  sion of science,” as Scottish phi los o pher James Seth maintained in support of

  the growing authority of science, while criticizing James for using “the in-

  tuitional and emotional apprehension of poetry and religion,” which could

  produce nothing more definite than “picturesque effect.” James the former

  science student agreed that all these human experiences need to be com-

  prehended in relation to science but, he insisted, also in relation to still

  more dimensions of human experience. 11 The discomforts of philosophy

  kept James at work in science during his young adulthood, and later that

  same impulse kept his philosophical focus on lived experience.

  Almost a Phi los o pher  13

  The sheer scale of the philosophical task shaped the fear of instability

  young James felt when speculating; and yet curiosity kept pulling him toward

  philosophizing, and this posture of theorizing with sensitivity to personal

  experience would become crucial to his introspective method. As he re-

  ported in one of his first major essays in the 1870s, he was captivated by the

  “brute Fact” of “existence, . . . to which . . . the emotion of ontological won-

  der shall rightly cleave”; and cleave it did: as he declared just months before

  his death in 1910, “no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.” He

  had spent his life examining diff er ent philosophical orientations, and still

  he noticed that basic “logical riddle untouched.” Such puzzlements became

  his version of fellow pragmatist Charles Peirce’s “irritation of doubt” moti-

  vating philosophical inquiry; he steadily tried to derive lessons from spec-

  ulations to address the uncertainties and mysteries of life. 12 An edifying

  philosophy regarding truth as a function or direction could provide guid-

  ance, ways to set one’s course, first of all for himself and then to a widening

  audience. During his young adulthood, when looking for direction, he put

  philosophy to work sharply on this task— pragmatic in action even before

  articulating pragmatic theory about action. His later philosophy was more

  elaborate, but speculations would never again be so useful as when they

  produced insights on how to live and what choices to make during his own

  first steps toward maturity.

  In his early adulthood, James was not yet working in the field of philoso-

  phy; and in a sense, even in maturity, he entered the field of philosophy but

  avoided full immersion, especially as a profession with refinement of in-

  sights leading to abstractions and claims for certainty. For all his extensive

  learning and even with the ambitions of his last de cade to write his defini-

  tive metaphysical statement, he still longed for “an earth that you can lie on,

  a wild tree to lean your back against.” In this setting, he pictured himself

  with “a book in your hand . . . without reading it”— many of his ideas were

  difficult to put into words, especially for expression of the relations of his

  interests; so early on he developed the skill of reading selectively, culling

  insights from a wide community of discourse, often quoting abundantly. Then

  he pulled back from that forest of information and interpretation to pres ent his

  own angle of vision. This vivid self- expression coincided with the methods of

  the Stoic phi los o phers and Ralph Waldo Emerson; like them, he was attracted

  to thinking for improving the art of living rather than only as a site for profes-

  sional standing or precision. So he maintained that “philosophy . . . is not a

  technical matter”; instead, “it is our more or less dumb sense of what life

  14  Young William James Thinking

  honestly and deeply means.” This comment from the end of his life bears

  the latter- day impress of his youthful confrontations with philosophy; he

  remained attracted to its flames of insight but wary of its potential to burn

  away at our connections to experience. At age thirty- one, he vowed that he

  could not engage in “philosophical activity as a business,” even as he quickly

  admitted his own philosophical drive, because “of course my deepest inter-

  est will as ever lie with the most general prob lems.” So he explained, even

  as he later tried to make his own epoch- making mark, philosophy “is only

  partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the

  total push and pressure of the cosmos.” This personal and practical ap-

  proach to philosophizing fostered his attention to the abundance of experi-

  ence, not yet divided into so many “ Things” indeed; theory brings the useful

  tools of discrimination and organ ization, but we should not mistake its neat

  packages for robust real ity. And yet, he wondered, Was there a way of think-

  ing that could approach fidelity to experience, making use of the mind’s

  power to detect unifying patterns and relations while still remaining faith-

  ful to the concreteness of natu ral facts? “We shall see,” he declared
at age

  twenty- seven, “damn it, we shall see.” 13 Understanding the depths of his

  own commitments is only partly got from his own books. In his early con-

  texts, experiences, and private writings, when he was still struggling to

  have his say about the universe, he asked the questions and established the

  directions that would point him toward his mature theories. From his late

  thirties, when he started to publish widely and achieve fame, he still re-

  mained at heart almost a phi los o pher.

  Beneath Many Jameses

  Becoming a phi los o pher rarely crossed James’s mind before the mid-1870s,

  and when it did, the career seemed a remote dream—or nightmare. He ac-

  curately doubted in 1868 that a job in philosophy would even be “attainable

  at all” to someone with scientific rather than religious training. In his pri-

  vate writings and in Metaphysical Club discussions, the budding phi los o-

  pher speculated about the character and implications of scientific work and

  its potential connection to broader questions. James’s per sis tent specula-

  tions for personal direction and in response to primal curiosities gave a re-

  ligious quality to his philosophy, even as his first vocational commitment

  would lend a scientific dimension to his religious studies. These combina-

  tions have supported his widespread reputation at best for compromising

  and at worst for ambivalence and indecision. Much impatience with James

  Young William James Thinking.

  “William James, c. 1869,” photo by J. B. Hawes, William James papers, bMS Am

  1092.9 (1185). Courtesy of Bay James and the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  Young William James experienced a range of trou bles. Yet even when he was

  discouraged, as reported by a friend who had first met him in the late 1860s, “[h]e was

  the cleanest- looking chap!” (LWJ, 1:26). And even his difficulties often became

  resources with “subtleties” that he would examine, often “with pen in hand” (PU, 84),

  as he later reported, in writing his frequent letters, notebook entries, and book

  reviews— and also with books in hand, as this photo from about 1869 shows. Even

  with the faraway look in his eyes, he could not imagine how long it would take to