Young William James Thinking Page 4
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