James William (1842–1910), American philosopher, psychologist, and one of the founders of pragmatism. He was born in New York City, the oldest of five children and elder brother of the novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James. Their father, Henry James, Sr., was an unorthodox religious philosopher, deeply influenced by the thought of Swedenborg, some of which seeped into William’s later fascination with psychical research. The James family relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the father insisted on his children obtaining a European education, and prolonged trips to England and the Continent were routine, a procedure that made William multilingual and extraordinarily cosmopolitan. In fact, a pervasive theme in James’s personal and creative life was his deep split between things American and European: he felt like a bigamist ‘coquetting with too many countries.’ As a person, James was extraordinarily sensitive to psychological and bodily experiences. He could be described as ‘neurasthenic’ – afflicted with constant psychosomatic symptoms such as dyspepsia, vision problems, and clinical depression. In 1868 he recorded a profound personal experience, a ‘horrible fear of my own existence.’ In two 1870 diary entries, James first contemplates suicide and then pronounces his belief in free will and his resolve to act on that belief in ‘doing, suffering and creating.’ Under the influence of the then burgeoning work in experimental psychology, James attempted to sustain, on empirical grounds, his belief in the self as Promethean, as self-making rather than as a playing out of inheritance or the influence of social context. This bold and extreme doctrine of individuality is bolstered by his attack on both the neo-Hegelian and associationist doctrines. He held that both approaches miss the empirical reality of relations as affectively experienced and the reality of consciousness as a ‘stream,’ rather than an aspect of an Absolute or simply a box holding a chain of concepts corresponding to single sense impressions.
In 1890, James published his masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, which established him as the premier psychologist of the Euro-American world. It was a massive compendium and critique of virtually all of the psychology literature then extant, but it also claimed that the discipline was in its infancy. James believed that the problems he had unearthed could only be understood by a philosophical approach.
James held only one academic degree, an M.D. from Harvard, and his early teaching at Harvard was in anatomy and physiology. He subsequently became a professor of psychology, but during the writing of the Principles, he began to teach philosophy as a colleague of Royce and Santayana. From 1890 forward James saw the fundamental issues as at bottom philosophical and he undertook an intense inquiry into matters epistemological and metaphysical; in particular, ‘the religious question’ absorbed him.
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy was published in 1897. The lead essay, ‘The Will to Believe,’ had been widely misunderstood, partly because it rested on unpublished metaphysical assumptions and partly because it ran aggressively counter to the reigning dogmas of social Darwinism and neo-Hegelian absolutism, both of which denigrated the personal power of the individual. For James, one cannot draw a conclusion, fix a belief, or hold to a moral or religious maxim unless all suggestions of an alternative position are explored. Further, some alternatives will be revealed only if one steps beyond one’s frame of reference, seeks novelty, and ‘wills to believe’ in possibilities beyond present sight.
The risk taking in such an approach to human living is further detailed in James’s essays ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’ and ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,’ both of which stress the irreducibility of ambiguity, the presence of chance, and the desirability of tentativeness in our judgments.
After presenting the Gifford Lectures in 1901– 02, James published his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which coalesced his interest in psychic states both healthy and sick and afforded him the opportunity to present again his firm belief that human life is characterized by a vast array of personal, cultural, and religious approaches that cannot and should not be reduced one to the other. For James, the ‘actual peculiarities of the world’ must be central to any philosophical discussion of truth. In his Hibbert Lectures of 1909, published as A Pluralistic Universe, James was to represent this sense of plurality, openness, and the variety of human experience on a wider canvas, the vast reach of consciousness, cosmologically understood. Unknown to all but a few philosophical correspondents, James had been assiduously filling notebooks with reflections on the mind–body problem and the relationship between meaning and truth and with a philosophical exploration and extension of his doctrine of relations as found earlier in the Principles. In 1904–05 James published a series of essays, gathered posthumously in 1912, on the meaning of experience and the problem of knowledge. In a letter to François Pillon in 1904, he writes: ‘My philosophy is what I call a radical empiricism, a pluralism, a ‘tychism,’ which represents order as being gradually won and always in the making.’ Following his 1889 essay ‘On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology’ and his chapter on ‘The Stream of Thought’ in the Principles, James takes as given that relations between things are equivalently experienced as the things themselves. Consequently, ‘the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind.’ The description of consciousness as a stream having a fringe as well as a focus, and being selective all the while, enables him to take the next step, the formulation of his pragmatic epistemology, one that was influenced by, but is different from, that of Peirce. Published in 1907, Pragmatism generated a transatlantic furor, for in it James unabashedly states that ‘Truth happens to be an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.’ He also introduces the philosophically notorious claim that ‘theories’ must be found that will ‘work.’ Actually, he means that a proposition cannot be judged as true independently of its consequences as judged by experience. James’s prose, especially in Pragmatism, alternates between scintillating and limpid. This quality led to both obfuscation of his intention and a lulling of his reader into a false sense of simplicity. He does not deny the standard definition of truth as a propositional claim about an existent, for he writes ‘woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connexions.’ Yet he regards this structure as but a prologue to the creative activity of the human mind. Also in Pragmatism, speaking of the world as ‘really malleable,’ he argues that man engenders truths upon reality. This tension between James as a radical empiricist with the affirmation of the blunt, obdurate relational manifold given to us in our experience and James as a pragmatic idealist holding to the constructing, engendering power of the Promethean self to create its own personal world, courses throughout all of his work. James was chagrined and irritated by the quantity, quality, and ferocity of the criticism leveled at Pragmatism. He attempted to answer those critics in a book of disparate essays, The Meaning of Truth (1909). The book did little to persuade his critics; since most of them were unaware of his radically empirical metaphysics and certainly of his unpublished papers, James’s pragmatism remained misunderstood until the publication of Perry’s magisterial two-volume study, The Thought and Character of William James (1935). By 1910, James’s heart disease had worsened; he traveled to Europe in search of some remedy, knowing full well that it was a farewell journey. Shortly after returning to his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, he died. One month earlier he had said of a manuscript (posthumously published in 1911 as Some Problems in Philosophy), ‘say that by it I hoped to round out my system, which is now too much like an arch only on one side.’ Even if he had lived much longer, it is arguable that the other side of the arch would not have appeared, for his philosophy was ineluctably geared to seeking out the novel, the surprise, the tychistic, and the plural, and to denying the finality of all conclusions. He warned us that ‘experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges’ and no matter how laudable or seductive our personal goal, ‘life is in the transitions.’ The Works of William James, including his unpublished manuscripts, have been collected in a massive nineteen-volume critical edition by Harvard University Press (1975–88). His work can be seen as an imaginative vestibule into the twentieth century. His ideas resonate in the work of Royce, Unamuno, Niels Bohr, Husserl, M. Montessori, Dewey, and Wittgenstein. See also DEWEY, PEIRCE, PRAGMATISM. J.J.M.