William James

American psychologist and philosopher

• Born: January 11, 1842
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: August 26, 1910
• Place of death: Chocorua, New Hampshire

Seeking to reconcile a deep commitment to scientific thought with the emotional nature of human beings and longing for some kind of religious faith, James helped to create and popularize the modern science of psychology and the uniquely American approach to philosophy called pragmatism.

Early Life

The brother of novelist Henry James, William James was the eldest son of Henry and Mary (Walsh) James. His parents, who were of Scotch and Scotch-Irish ancestry, had four other children and provided one of the most remarkable home environments on record. There is little doubt that his childhood as part of this unusual family was instrumental in creating William James, the psychologist and philosopher, just as it helped mold his bother Henry to become a preeminent novelist.

Henry James, Sr., was a restless, perhaps even tortured intellectual with a religious bent, able to pursue his own private quest for truth because of a small inheritance. His family naturally became part of his search, and conversation around the Jameses’ dining table was more like a philosophical seminar than typical family chatter. The children were encouraged to think and to question and even defend their ideas under the watchful eyes of their parents. Education was considered too important to be left to chance.

Henry, Sr., moved his family from the United States to Europe and back again several times, enrolling his children in numerous schools in an attempt to find the perfect atmosphere for learning. This varied and unsettled experience gave both William and his brother Henry an excellent command of languages and the basics of a liberal education without providing deep knowledge in any particular area. The gypsylike introduction to the academic world and family debates did provide, however, a healthy respect for diversity and a tolerance for other opinions, including sometimes strange ones, that marked William James throughout his life.

As a youth, James was of slight to medium build with blue eyes and a less-than-robust constitution. Gradually, the determination to overcome his tendency toward physical and emotional illness became an important undercurrent in his celebrated attitude toward life. If by the force of will a sickly, neurotic youth could transform himself into a dynamic professor with an iron-gray beard, who seemed to his students perpetually engaged in productive thought, then others were also free to make such transformations. His mature outlook was open and optimistic, and his personality, dominated by humor and tolerance, made him almost impossible to dislike. His students treated him with near worship, and his many friends and acquaintances in the intellectual community of the world, even when they disagreed violently with his ideas, loved the man himself. However, the surface of this congenial thinker hid a storm raging beneath.

Life as part of the James family had been challenging, but it had not produced happiness. As a young man, William James continually struggled with bouts of emotional illness that at times necessitated an almost total retreat from the active world. At the center of the problem was the inability to reconcile his growing commitment to the rationalistic, scientific outlook of his age with the deep religious faith of his father. The elder James, who had rejected established religion as a young man, had been introduced to the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg when William was two years old. Though Henry James, Sr., was never able to become a strict follower of the Swedish theologian, he constructed his own system of belief that became a necessary spiritual consolation. His son could never accept his father’s simplistic faith, yet he always respected it and sometimes seemed to long for the certainty it provided. He later paid homage to his father’s ideas when he published some of the elder James’s letters in The Literary Remains of Henry James (1885).

The inability to please his father even haunted James’s choice of vocation. When William was eighteen, the family had moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where he could study art with William M. Hunt. His father had not been happy with this choice, but he was even less happy when his eldest son abandoned art a year later and entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University. This decision, however, was a significant turning point. Not only did it begin a lifelong connection between William James and Harvard but it also began the gradual development of his personality beyond the influence of his family. The process would be difficult and never complete, but it was well on its way when the young man gravitated almost naturally toward medical school at Harvard. His studies were interrupted for a year in order to accompany the famous anthropologistLouis Agassiz on an expedition to the Amazon, but James still received his medical degree in June, 1869.

Too unstable emotionally to begin a medical practice, he remained in a state of semi-invalidism until he was appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard, in 1872. Characteristically, James believed that the conquest of his emotional problem was made possible by a philosophical conversion. While in Europe during a phase of his medical education, he had been introduced to the ideas of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, whose stress on free will helped James reject the paralyzing fear of determinism. James’s struggle for personal independence would reach a climax of sorts with his marriage to Alice H. Gibbens of Cambridge, Massachusetts. By all accounts, the union was a happy one and eventually produced five children. More important, however, the establishment of his own family at the advanced age of thirty-six coincided with the beginning of his productive career.

Life’s Work

In the same year as his marriage, James agreed to a contract with Henry Holt and Company for the publication of a textbook on psychology. The agreement was, in part, recognition of his growing influence in an area of study that was undergoing transformation from a kind of mental philosophy into a laboratory science. During his European travels James had been influenced by the experimental approach to psychology current in Germany, and he taught his first course in psychology in 1875. His approach was revolutionary. Rather than the vague, often theological, speculation that characterized psychology in American universities, James started with physiological psychology, stressing the relationship between body and mind, and insisted on a thoroughly empirical approach. He soon established one of the first laboratories dedicated to psychological research in the United States.

James’s proposed textbook on psychology took almost as long to mature as James himself had. Scheduled for publication in 1880, the book did not appear until 1890, as The Principles of Psychology . It was hardly a textbook; instead, James had produced a monumental two-volume study covering the entire field as it stood in 1890 and proposing numerous theories that would influence psychology for years to come. However, the work was not the empirical tour de force that one might expect. In spite of his dedication to science, James never liked laboratory research, and his own contribution was more impressionistic and philosophical than scientific. Moreover, the enthusiastic reception of his work owed as much to literary eloquence as it did to sound research.

In fact, James had already tired of experimental psychology before The Principles of Psychology was ever published. Though he would continue to be influential in the field and engage in numerous scholarly debates, his primary interest had turned to philosophy. It was not as much a change of direction as it was a change of emphasis. Since youth, he had been interested in philosophical speculation, and he taught his first course in philosophy in 1879.

Much of James’s psychological work had philosophical overtones, and he was appointed professor of philosophy at Harvard in 1885. He had also exhibited an unusual interest in psychic phenomena, infuriating many of his fellow psychologists with his tolerant attitude toward the claims of spiritualists, mediums, and such dubious ideas as telepathy. This tendency was not an indication that James actually accepted parapsychology without qualification. Instead, it was a continuation of his quest for a reconciliation between humanity’s need for spiritual meaning and his commitment to rational inquiry. This problem became the core of his philosophical questioning for the last decade of the nineteenth century.

James had been thinking about the problem for most of his life and had published essays on the subject while writing The Principles of Psychology. He began to draw these ideas together with the publication of his collection of essays, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). He carried his ideas further when invited to give the Gifford Lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh. Ill health prevented him from appearing until 1901-1902. These lectures, published under the title The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, are his most definitive attempt at reconciling his empirical scientific approach with religion and the spiritual world. Although his conclusions would hardly please the most orthodox, they stand as a ringing defense of the “right” to believe beyond physical evidence and an important recognition of the limitations of science, which James believed had erected a new orthodoxy as limiting as the old.

The remainder of James’s life would be dedicated to defining and explaining his approach to philosophy, which he generally called pragmatism . The term was borrowed from his friend and fellow student Charles Sanders Peirce . Although Peirce clearly meant something different from James with the concept, it was James who popularized the term and made it part of American philosophical tradition. Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, depending on one’s perspective, most of James’s writing was directed toward a popular rather than a philosophical audience. As a result, many of the principles of pragmatism actually depend upon which pragmatist is responsible for the explanation. This vagueness, however, is probably inherent in the doctrine and is, at least partially, responsible for its widespread acceptance.

James’s final philosophical position had been evolving throughout his life and rested on a concept of the human mind that he had explained in his famous Principles of Psychology. In this sense, James always remained a psychologist, but he carried his psychological perspective into the world of metaphysics.

Early in his intellectual development, James had committed himself to what he called “radical empiricism,” which was firmly in the tradition of David Hume and John Stuart Mill and against the dominant rationalism implicit in the most influential philosophical school of his era, German idealism. Idealism, James believed, led to a concept of the “absolute” that resulted in a deterministic universe, something that he could not accept. However, materialism, the chief opponent of idealism, also leads to a deterministic universe. James sought the middle ground that, above all, would be useful to humankind.

Usefulness is perhaps the key to understanding James’s version of pragmatism. The meaning of an idea can only be judged by the particular consequences that result from it. If an idea has no real consequences, then it is meaningless. When placed in the context of James’s radical empiricism, which accepts reality as that which is experienced, this doctrine means that human motives play a key role in human beliefs. Such an approach would have its most radical impact on the philosophical conception of truth. To James, this hallowed term should not apply to some mysterious ontological reality. Instead, it should refer only to one’s beliefs about the world. To be true, an idea must refer to some particular thing and have “cash value,” that is, satisfy the human purpose for which it was intended. It is important to remember that for James and most pragmatists, this does not mean simply practicality or what might be called pure subjectivism. Rather, truth should be tied to rigid empirical criteria and motivations designed to maximize human values.

James spent the balance of his life defending his ideas in numerous essays and lectures, most of which have been published in various collections. In his last years, he became the best-known philosopher in the English-speaking world, and his ideas were seen as the American answer to the sterile speculations of continental rationalism. To answer those who criticized his tendency toward popularization, James hoped to bring his theories together in a complete metaphysical argument. However, the project was never completed. His less-than-robust health failed him, and he died at his country home in New Hampshire on August 26, 1910.

Significance

Never the ivory-tower intellectual, James always tried to live his own philosophy. For him, philosophy could never be separated from the real needs of human beings, and the answers he sought, even in the rarefied atmosphere of metaphysics, must have use beyond the lecture halls of universities. This explains his own tendency to simplify his ideas that, while leading to philosophical sloppiness, made them available to men without the training or the inclination for abstract thinking. It also explains his commitment to contemporary causes, such as his opposition to imperialism during William McKinley’s administration, his general opposition to war, and his defense of unpopular ideas such as faith healing. James was always concerned first and foremost with the real fate of human beings.

James’s philosophy would become one of the most important intellectual influences in American life, particularly in the twentieth century. Like his famous personality that made him so popular with friends and students, his ideas were essentially optimistic and positive. To him, the universe was pluralistic and capable of being understood. Humankind was not a passive victim of the cosmos but an active agent, whose role was essentially creative. Although humans might not be able to change the dictates of nature, they could change the conditions of their own environment.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. William James. New York: Viking Press, 1967. A full-length biographical study based on the James’s family papers. The author argues that James’s life should be understood as an attempt to overcome emotional problems based on his self-acknowledged neuroses. Provides an excellent account of James’s early life.

Bjork, Daniel J. The Compromised Scientist: William James and the Development of American Psychology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Concentrates on James as a founder of American psychology. The author is particularly interested in James’s clashes with contemporary American psychologists and the development of the discipline as a field of professional inquiry.

Conkin, Paul K. Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968. One of the finest examples of American intellectual history. Places James within the context of the development of American thought from Jonathan Edwards to George Santayana.

Cooper, Wesley. The Unity of William James’s Thought. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. Traces the systematic philosophy in James’s writing, arguing that the doctrine of pure experience links his early psychological theories with his later ideas about epistemology, religion, and pragmatism.

Feinstein, Howard M. Becoming William James. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. A biographical treatment of James that concentrates on the first three decades of his life. The author focuses on the psychological influence of James’s family and has a particularly interesting analysis of James as a frustrated artist.

Gale, Richard M. The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. This book, a revised edition of The Divided Self of William James, published in 1999, is an accessible introduction to James’s philosophy. Gale argues that James’s philosophy is divided between his beliefs in active pragmatism and passive mysticism.

Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. A collection of the letters and writings of William James, with biographical commentary.

Roth, J. K. Freedom and the Moral Life. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969. Concentrates on the relationship of James’s concept of pragmatism to ethics. The author is particularly interested in stressing the continued value of James’s idea of moral behavior.

Talisse, Robert B., and D. Micah Hester. On James. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2004. One in a series of books about philosophers, this volume offers a brief overview of James’s philosophy.

Wild, John D. The Radical Empiricism of William James. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Places James within the continuing empiricist tradition. Contains excellent though technical discussion of the relationship of pragmatism and phenomenology.

Wilshire, Bruce. William James and Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Concentrates on phenomenological aspects of James’s ideas. Although the book is not for the philosophical novice, it provides an important insight into the relationship of philosophical theories in the twentieth century.