Download Philosophy as Therapeutic Amelioration

Philosophy as Therapeutic Amelioration: Crisis and Reflection in the
Thought of William James
Introduction: Existential Crisis, Philosophical Response, Therapeutic Implications
At the age of 28 William James suffered an emotional breakdown. Ralph Barton
Perry refers to this crisis as “the ebbing of the will to live for lack of a philosophy to live
by—a paralysis of action occasioned by a sense of moral impotence.”1 On February 1, 1870,
James describes his crisis in the following way:
Today I about touched bottom…. Can one with full knowledge and sincerely ever bring
one’s self so to sympathize with the total process of the universe as heartily to assent to the evil
that seems inherent in its details? Is the mind so purely fluid and plastic? If, so optimism is
possible…. [If one has] vigor of the will enough to look the universal death in the face without
blinking, he can lead the life of moralism.2
According to Perry, “It is important to note two things: first, the fact that he
experienced a personal crisis that could be relieved only by a philosophical insight; and
second, the specific quality of the philosophy which his soul-sickness required.”3
My thesis, echoing Perry, is that James’s initial crisis did give birth to a philosophical vision
in which the will exercises a formative influence over the shape the world assumes. At age
28, James’s vision existed in statu nascendi; he had not yet been afforded the opportunity to
develop his existential insight into a philosophy per se. James’s first systematic effort, The
Principles of Psychology, was intended to be a textbook on psychology.
While composing the Principles, another crisis in James’s intellectual development
occurred; one that would also have major implications. James realized that whenever
psychological reflection is rigorously pursued “the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at
every joint.”4
At the risk of over dramatization, these episodes can be viewed as a philosophical
tour de force in which James transforms himself from passive spectator to empowered agent.
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Some type of nascent awareness of the the “will to believe” and of “radical empiricism” is
necessary for this transformation to occur. Both conceptions existed at the “fringe” of
James’s crises, acting as a lure from the beginning. James’s reflections “[were] fringed
forever by a more that continuously develop[ed], and that continuously supercede[d]
them….”5 James captures this feeling in the following:
The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its
life. We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition,
something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be
the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration.
“Yes,” we say at the full brightness, “this is what I just meant.”6
James’s second, “intellectual” crisis is every bit as important as his first, “existential”
crisis. Had James’s convictions not been shaken at their very foundation, it is unlikely his
later philosophical vision would have materialized. As James stated in the last years of his
life:
The deeper we go into things, the more enigmas we discover and for my part I confess
that ever since I began to take a serious interest in psychology, this old dualism of matter and
thought, this supposedly absolute heterogeneity of the two, has always presented difficulties
for me.7 I thus went through [an] inner catastrophe…. I had literally come to the end of my
conceptual stock-in-trade, I was bankrupt intellectually, and had to change my base.8
The therapeutic implications of James’s thought are evident; we now have the means
to see “ourselves [as] parts of the universe and share the same deep concern in its destinies.
We crave alike to feel more truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its
amelioration.”9 Personal history assumes the form a “dramatic outcome” in which we play a
leading role. While delivering the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1909, James was influenced
by the work of British philosopher-theologian Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (1860-1955) to
express this very theme:
Either what the philosopher tells us is extraneous to the universe he is accounting for…;
or the fact of his philosophizing is itself one of the things that is taken account of in the
philosophy, and self-included in the description. In the former case the philosopher means by
the universe everything except what his own presence brings; in the latter case his philosophy
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is itself an intimate part of the universe, and may be a part momentous enough to give a
different turn to what the other parts signify.10
James as Conflicted Scientist/Metaphysician: An Inner Tension Within
The Principles of Psychology
The tension between science and metaphysics is visible in the very opening pages of
the Principles. Psychology views the relationship between thought and reality dualistically.
James wastes little time critiquing this assumption:
The psychologists attitude toward cognition ... is a thorough going dualism. It supposes
two elements, mind knowing and the thing known, and treats them as irreducible. Neither
gets out of itself or into the other, neither in any way is the other, neither makes the other,
they just stand face to face in a common world....11
James wants to approach psychological data as it is “lived through” or, in
phenomenological terms, erlebt. Lived experience reveals “minds inhabit[ing] environments
which act on them and on which they in turn react.”12 Experience is, to use a term of
James’s, “double barreled: it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and
material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality.”13
Consciousness is not some type of sequestered activity within the mind of a subject. Our
mental life consists of an efficacious activity deeply embedded in a world of concrete
relations. The notion that mentality has a formative, telic dimension and not simply a passive
receptacle has important implications:
The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the conceiving department and
the feeling department; or, in plainer English, perception and
thinking are only there for behaviors sake.14
James increasingly realizes that “it is hard to carry through [with] this simple dualism,
for idealistic reflections will intrude.”15 Consciousness is more appropriately viewed as an
activity; a “selective industry [working] in close connection” with a governing interest.16 But
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James wants to push even further: “[T]he interests in which consciousness seems to exert
[itself] are its interests and its alone, interests which it creates, and which, but for it, would
have no status in the realm of being whatsoever.”17 How goes consciousness endow
something with ontological status? According to James:
[O]ur minds carry an immense horizon with them. The present image shoots its perspective
far before it, irradiating in advance in which lie the thoughts unborn.18 Different individuals
present constitutional differences in this matter of width of field. Your great organizing
geniuses are men with habitually vast fields of mental vision, in which a whole program of
future operations will appear dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead into definite
directions of advance. In common people there is never this magnificent inclusive view of a
topic.19
Apprehending things in a worldly context requires the ability to pre-reflectively
recognize potential patterns that later solidify into more solid relationships. But according to
James, “Our intellect casts, in short, no ray of light on the processes by which experiences
get made.”20 James takes great pains to avoid the reductive tendency that Alfred North
Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” – the tendency to identify the
carefully refined products of experience as experientially primary.21 Experience, in its most
immediate manifestation, exhibits a field-like character. The determinate locus of the field
James calls the “centre of the energy.”22 This “center” is fringed by a halo of possibilities that
become organized through the selective activity of consciousness. Other possibilities may be
evoked as well: “[T]he human world and the self around which it is ordered are neither
logically or ontologically necessary.”23 Human being plays a determining role as to which
possibilities get realized over others. James treats this issue beautifully using the image of the
sculptor:
The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities.... the mind, in short, works
on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood
there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to
thank is to thank for extricating this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, however
different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations,
which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently.... But all the while the world we
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feel and live will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have
extricated out of this, like sculptors.... Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other
minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos!”24
The Will to Believe and Radical Empiricism: An Indissoluable Marriage
As James examines the relational contour of experience, he finds that “that which is
outside of us and that which is inside ... blend into one another in an indissoluble marriage.”25
Experience is a tissue-like structure exhibiting a diaphanous continuity:
The individualized self ... is a part of the content of the world experienced.... The word ‘I,’
then, is primarily a noun of position....26 Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.27
The tissue of experience consists of “relations … of different degrees of
intimacy.”28 James characterizes experience in this original state as “pure.” Pure
experience, ontologically speaking, consists a state of undifferentiated aboriginal
potential. As James says:
The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the “pure” experience. It is only
virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain unqualified
actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this naïf immediacy it is of course valid, it is there, we act
upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby,
is just one of the acts.29
Pure experience is neutral. Epistemological distinctions, i.e. thought and reality,
are not given; they are taken: “[T]he separation [of experience] into consciousness and
content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition.”30
How, then, do lines of order get traced upon pure experience? According to
James, “the difference between objective and subjective extension is one of context
solely.”31 The experiential field exhibits a web-like configuration with human beings
occupying an anchor-like position at the center. Much like a series of concentric circles,
when one of these relations is impacted, a ripple-like affect occurs: “members
interdigitate with their next neighbors in manifold directions…. [I]t now follows a
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zigzag…. [N]ot only do the terms themselves and their associates and environments
change, but we change and their meaning for us changes….”32 Through what James
refers to as an “interstitial alteration,”33 the content of experience can be transformed:
“[the] real effectual causation … of reality is just what we feel it to be, just that kind of
conjunction which our own activity series reveal.”34 This potential for experiential
readjustment is a function of a confluence of relations —“the coalescence of next with
next.”35 This activity of adjustment is “intellectual as well as emotional ... [wherein]
conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes which in their
way work towards rearrangement.”36 Consciousness is impulsive – an intentionally act
directed to something other.37 The focus of consciousness, however, can be redirected.
Relative intensities at successive moments may cause one and the same content to be
viewed at one moment as the “kernel” and at another moment the “fringe.”38 This
realignment of focus and fringe, realized through a shift in context results in a different
segment of the experiential continuum becoming illuminated.
The process of readjustment may be facilitated further by an act of will which
“when it is most ‘voluntary’ [can] ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before
the mind.”39 The fact that James capitalizes the word ‘ATTEND’ implies that the act of
attention is ontologically disclosive:
From its first dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive faculty,
where it exists at all, appears but as one element in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to
higher mental powers, − the powers of will…. [I]t is more than probable that to the end of our
time our power of moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ
of communication therewith we shall ever possess.40
Nowhere is this sense of ontological disclosure through consciousness more
evident than in James’s discussion of “mind-cure” in the Varieties. Mind-cure,
demonstrates how our conception of the world is experimentally guided by the ideas in
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which we believe. Referring to mind-cure as “mental hygiene” and “concrete
therapeutics,” James offers the following account:
Live as if I were true, she says, and everyday will practically prove you right. That the
controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are forces, that the
powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are
propositions which your whole body and mental experience will verify. And that experience does
largely verify these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that that the mind-cure
movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable
experiential results…. We …find the belief corroborated by its observation.41
The implication of James’s discussion of mind-cure, according to one
commentator, is that “cognitive inquiry quite properly as much creates its object as
discovers it.”42 But what is so interesting about James’s discussion of mind-cure is the
way in which he explicitly compares the activity of mind-cure to the method of science:
“[in mind-cure], if we have anything at all, we have the method of experience and
verification.”43
How is it that something as scientifically suspect as mind-cure, e.g. faith healing,
can be compared to science? The activity of mind-cure, viewed in its affinity to scientific
method, provides an excellent perspective from which to view the pragmatic upshot of
James’s doctrine of the will to believe. Through the process of belief, we craft a “live”
hypothetical vision and project it towards the world. Ideas, translated into action, act as a
probe into the tissue of experience; enabling us to tease out possibilities that might lie
dormant. In short, beliefs become constitutive of the way things appears: “Our thoughts
determine our acts, and our acts re-determine the previous nature of the world.”44 James
provides a somewhat lengthy but wonderful account of the very fine difference of degree
that exists between belief and reality in the Principles:
When an idea stings us in a certain way, makes as it were a certain electric connection
with our Self, we believe that it is a reality. When it stings us in another way, makes another
connection with our Self, we say, let it be a reality. To the words ‘is’ and to the words ‘let it be,’
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there correspond particular attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to seek to explain. The
indicative and the imperative moods are as much ultimate categories of thinking as they are of
grammar. The ‘quality of reality’ which these moods attach to things is not like other qualities. It
is a relation to our life.... and the transition from merely considering an object as possible, to
deciding or willing it to be real, ... is one of the most familiar things in life.45
As beliefs are intentionally directed towards the world, the world quixotically
presents itself in accordance with those beliefs. As James says, “Truly enough, if we have
already bagged the facts in a certain order, we can dispense with any warrant for that
order.”46 Once the process of projection has been activated, a confirming self-referential
trajectory validating the projection follows—the data is the projection. As Kant said,
“Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own.”47 Relying
upon traditional, substantialist categories, we have come to perceive the world in James’s
terms as “discontinuous and fixed.” Such traditional concepts are not “parts” of reality
but, rather, “suppositions” taken by us that in no way “dip into” or reflect the nature of
reality. Once the world is projected in this manner, our logic retrospectively limps
behind, looking for a way to codify that inference:
But how comes it … that the logical relations among things should form such a mighty
engine for dealing with the facts of life? … It is a very peculiar world, and plays right into logic’s
hands.48
Conclusion: Philosophy as Therapeutic Amelioration
“With the facts yet to come the case is different.”49 James sees the universe in a
way similar to Leibniz – as “big with the future.”50 James’s conception of the universe is
of things in the making as opposed to things simply made. Human beings have the ability
to be co-implicated in the process of making as it unfolds: “We live, as it were, upon the
front edge of an existing wave crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling
forward is all we cover of the future of our path.”51 Perry captures the importance of
open-ended futurity for James in the following:
9
The classical empiricists had emphasized the reference to the past, whereas James in
keeping with the spirit of experimentalism, emphasized the reference to the future. [For James,]
ideas are cognitively justified by their achievements and prospects.... [W]hereas according to the
traditional view experience has spoken, according to James experience has yet to speak, and its
response will be proportional to the boldness and happy inspiration with which it is interrogated.52
The Jamesian notion that the self participates in the ongoing development of
experience has powerful implications that can be identified at the individual, the
metaphysical, and the sub-atomic levels. Each individual contributes to the their
experiential trajectory through the efficacious act of belief. The testimonials that James
gives to the cognitive power of belief in “The Will to Believe” are legion: “There are,
then cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.
And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which
should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of
immorality’ into which a thinking being can fall.53
The constitutive effects of belief experience can be traced at the metaphysical
level as well. As indicated earlier, James was influenced in the latter stages of his career
by the British philosopher-theologian, L.P Jacks: “No ultimate distinction can be drawn
between what you the philosopher think of the world and what the world through you
thinks of itself.”54 In Jamesian terms, “What we say about reality depends on the
perspective into which we throw it. The that of it is its own; but the what depends on the
which and the which depends on us.”55 Even the most abstract systems, no matter how
objective they appear, are contextual and perspectival. As Dewey pointed out, “our
formal conceptions arise out of ordinary transactions ... [and] when they are formed they
are also formative.”56
10
The efficacy of belief can also be traced at the sub-atomic level. James’s insights
prefigured developments in 20th Century physics. Quantum mechanics represents a
significant epistemological shift, according to Patrick J. Heelan, because:
The measuring subject or observer [is] the heart of quantum mechanics. The classical
physics of [the] time presupposed either no observer or one separated from matter and outside of
history. Quantum mechanics is concerned with contextual observations or descriptions; that is,
every observation of a quantum-mechanical system is dependent on the context of observation....
Given a definite observational or descriptive context, say, that for localizing a quantum
mechanical system with precision, a horizon of possibilities (of localized phenomena) opens up.57
One of the most important implications of quantum mechanics, for Heelan, is that
“[m]an and nature ... determine one another reciprocally, ... the cut between them is not
fixed, and the two are evolving both linearly and dialectically in history.”58 This
transactional relationship between “self” and “world” viewed synoptically level has been
characterized by Robert C. Pollock, as “an all embracing drama.” According to Pollock:
But what a drastic alteration in perspective when men can envisage a wide open world in
which development, spontaneity and novelty are entirely at home! Here at last is a universe which
no longer cramps man’s style, a universe which makes it impossible for man to regard himself as
‘an unnaturalized or unnaturalizable alien the world.’ Given this new image of the universe,
experimentation and creativity are endowed with a new dignity, for they have gained a status
within nature itself. Now looked on as essential aspects of a growing world, they speak with an
authority to which man gladly responds.59
The fact that “experimentation and creativity ... have gained a status within
nature itself [and that] they speak with an authority to which man gladly responds”
enables us to appreciate the therapeutic implications of James’s thought. The manner in
which we relate to the world has ontological implications. To illustrate this point, James
uses as an example the way that paint consists of both the “pigments” and “menstruum.”
From a Jamesian perspective, the pigments by which we paint our picture of reality may
be a function of the language or the concepts that we use, but the menstruum, as “the
primary reality ... that holds them in suspension, is ... pure.”60 It is upon pure experience
that we act and affect the fabric of relations.
11
It is through the constructive power of our visions that we make our most
effective contribution to the world. As I envision possibilities I also explore the
possibility of their realization; ways of instantiating these possibilities in the present
while direct them towards a future: “We have the whole butt and being of [reality] in our
hands; and the healthy thing for philosophy ... is to try to solve the concrete questions of
where effectuation in this world is located.”61 The locus of this effectuation is the
concrete power of belief in which “all depends on the character of the personal
contribution x.... The belief creates its own verification. The thought becomes literally
father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought.62
For James, our perceptions are a function of our commitments. As early as the
Principles, James recognized that our capacity for sensory input exhibits a plastic
resilience that can add to the richness of our psychological history while resounding
throughout the experiential field. Experience is an interactive, reflexive process through
which subject and object are co-constituted such that “human being and knowing are
brought to bear most directly on the development of each.”63 We are no longer sit as mere
spectators or “readers only of the cosmic novel ... but [become] the very personages of
the world drama.”64 James’s philosophy is a vivid testimonial to the constructive power
of human thought.
Notes
1
Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 322.
2
Ibid., 322.
3
The Thought and Character of William James, 323.
4
William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 334.
5
William James, The Meaning of Truth, [68] 234.
6
William James, A Pluralistic Universe in Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, 256.
Hereafter referred to as PU.
7
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism in Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic
Universe, 110. Hereafter referred to as ERE.
12
8
PU, 261.
Ibid.,, 128.
10
Ibid., 138-139.
11
Ibid., 218.
12
Ibid., 6.
13
John Dewey, Experience and Nature, 8. Dewey appropriates the notion of experience as “doublebarreled” from James.
14
William James, Reflex Action and Theism, 114.
15
Psychology: The Briefer Course: 331-332.
16
Principles, Vol. I: 139, 286.
17
Ibid., 140.
18
Ibid., 256.
19
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 187. Husserl also refers to “rays (Strahlen) of
meaning.” See Experience and Judgment, p. 179: “Thus, in all situations ... there are constant connections,
and the ‘awakening,’ the calling-to-mind of the earlier, is only the vivifying of something which previously
was already there. To be sure, this vivifying does bring in something new ... [and] the awakening ray goes
towards what is submerged and make[s] it living.”
20
PU, 234.
21
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, 7-8: “This fallacy consists in
neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely in so far as it
exemplifies certain categories of thought.”
22
See Varieties of Religious Experience, 187-188: “Until quite lately the unit of mental life which figured
most was the single ‘idea,”.... But at present, psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is
more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the
thought at any time....”
23
Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James: 50. Wild continues, page 51: “We cannot say it must be
as it is. What we can say is only it is.”
24
Principles, Vol. I: 288-289.
25
ERE, 113.
26
Ibid., 90-91.
27
Psychology, Briefer Course: 42.
28
ERE, 26. See also page 32: “Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of
experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time.”
29
Ibid., 15.
30
Ibid., 7.
31
Ibid., 19.
32
PU., 246, 282.
33
Varieties, 163.
34
ERE, 97-98. See Varieties, p. 162: “All we know is that there are dead feelings ... and there are hot and
live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystalize about it.”
35
PU: 276. See ERE, p. 46: “Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it
proliferates into the next by transitions which … continue the experiential tissue cannot, I contend, be
denied.”
36
Varieties: 133, 171.
37
Principles, Vol. II: 535.
38
See Principles, Vol I: 281-283. See also Principles II: 535-536: “The intensity of particular thought
processes and stimulations may also change independently ... thus result[ing in] great possibilities of
alteration.”
39
Principles, Vol. II, 561.
40
Reflex Action and Theism, 140-141.
41
Varieties, 105.
42
T.L.S. Sprigge, James & Bradley: American Truth and British Reality, 43.
43
Varieties, 106. See also page 105: “[mind-cure] succeeds using science’s own peculiar methods and
weapons.”
44
PU: 273.
9
13
45
Principles, Vol. II: 568-569.
The Sentiment of Rationality, 80-81.
47
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 20.
48
Principles, Vol. II: 651-652. As James says in PU, 206: “[P]hilosophy is more a matter of passionate
vision than logic, ... logic only finding reasons for the vision afterward.”
49
Sentiment of Rationality, 81.
50
G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, 271.
51
The Meaning of Truth, p. [68] 234.
52
Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. I: 558.
53
The Will to Believe, 25. See also The Sentiment of Rationality, pp. 96-97: “The truths cannot become true
till our faith has made them so.... There are then cases where faith creates its own verification.”
54
Ibid., 35.
55
James, Pragmatism, 118.
56
John Dewey, “The Pattern of Inquiry,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. John J. McDermott, 224.
57
Patrick J. Heelan, S.J., “Nature and Its Transformations,” in Theological Studies, Vol. 33, 1972: 498.
58
Ibid., 502.
59
Robert C. Pollock, “Process and Experience,” in John Dewey: His Thought and Influence, 165. See John
McDermott’s comment in The Writings of William James, xvii: “Robert Pollock stands out as one in our
time who embodies the majestic vision of William James.”
60
ERE: 117.
61
Ibid.,: 98.
62
The Sentiment of Rationality: 102-103.
63
Sandra B. Rosenthal, Speculative Pragmatism, 83. S
64
PU, 145.
46
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