Everything about William James totally explained
William James (
January 11 1842 –
August 26 1910) was a pioneering
American psychologist and
philosopher trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology,
educational psychology, psychology of
religious experience and
mysticism, and the philosophy of
pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist
Henry James and of diarist
Alice James.
William James was born at the
Astor House in
New York City, He was the son of
Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric
Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Horace Greeley,
William Cullen Bryant,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
Charles Peirce,
Josiah Royce,
George Santayana,
Ernst Mach,
John Dewey,
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Helen Keller,
Mark Twain,
Horatio Alger, Jr.,
James George Frazer,
Henri Bergson,
H. G. Wells,
G. K. Chesterton,
Sigmund Freud,
Gertrude Stein,
Carl Jung and
Benito Mussolini.
Early years
William James, with his younger brother
Henry James (who became a prominent novelist) and sister
Alice James (who is known for her posthumously published diary), received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French languages along with a
cosmopolitan character. His family made two trips to
Europe while he was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an early apprenticeship in the studio of
William Morris Hunt in
Newport, Rhode Island, but yielded in
1861 to scientific studies at
Harvard University's Lawrence Scientific School.
In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as
neurasthenia, and which included periods of
depression during which he contemplated
suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the
Civil War, but the other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice) all suffered from periods of invalidism.
James switched to medical studies at
Harvard Medical School in
1864. He took a break in the spring of
1865 to join Harvard's
Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the
Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, having suffered bouts of severe
seasickness and mild
smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to
Germany in search of a cure and remained until November 1868. (During this period he began to publish, with reviews appearing in literary periodicals like the
North American Review.) He finally earned his
M.D. degree in June
1869, but never practiced medicine. What he called his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in
1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878.
James' time in Germany proved intellectually fertile, helping him find that his true interests lay not in medicine but in philosophy and psychology. Later, in
1902 he'd write: "I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave".
Professional career
James spent his entire academic career at Harvard. He was appointed instructor in
physiology for the spring
1873 term, instructor in
anatomy and physiology in
1873, assistant professor of psychology in
1876, assistant professor of philosophy in
1881, full professor in
1885, endowed chair in psychology in
1889, return to philosophy in
1897, and emeritus professor of philosophy in
1907.
James studied medicine, physiology, and biology, and began to teach in those subjects, but was drawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was constituting itself as a
science. James's acquaintance with the work of figures like
Hermann Helmholtz in Germany and
Pierre Janet in France facilitated his introduction of courses in scientific psychology at
Harvard University. He taught his first experimental psychology course at Harvard in the 1875-1876 academic year.
During his Harvard years, James joined in philosophical discussions with
Charles Peirce,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and
Chauncey Wright that evolved into a lively group known as the Metaphysical Club by the early 1870s.
Louis Menand speculates that the Club provided a foundation for
American intellectual thought for decades to come.
Among James' students at Harvard were such luminaries as
Boris Sidis,
Theodore Roosevelt,
George Santayana,
W.E.B. Du Bois,
G. Stanley Hall,
Ralph Barton Perry,
Gertrude Stein,
Horace Kallen,
Morris Raphael Cohen,
Alain Locke,
C. I. Lewis, and
Mary Calkins.
Following his January, 1907 retirement from Harvard, James continued to write and lecture, publishing
Pragmatism,
A Pluralistic Universe, and
The Meaning of Truth. James was increasingly afflicted with cardiac pain during his last years. It worsened in 1909 while he worked on a philosophy text (unfinished but posthumously published as
Some Problems in Philosophy). He sailed to Europe in the spring of 1910 to take experimental treatments which proved unsuccessful, and returned home on
August 18. His heart failed him on
August 26 1910 at his home in
Chocorua,
New Hampshire.
He was one of the strongest proponents of the school of
Functionalism in psychology and of
Pragmatism in philosophy. He was a founder of the
American Society for Psychical Research, as well as a champion of alternative approaches to healing. He challenged his professional colleagues not to let a narrow mindset prevent an honest appraisal of those phenomena.
In an empirical study by Haggbloom et al using six criteria such as citations and recognition, James was found to be the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th Century.
Writings
William James wrote voluminously throughout his life. A fairly complete bibliography of his writings by John McDermott is 47 pages long. (See below for a list of his major writings and additional collections)
He gained widespread recognition with his monumental
Principles of Psychology (1890), twelve hundred pages in two volumes which took twelve years to complete.
Psychology: The Briefer Course, was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English
associationist school and the
Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and sought to re-conceive of the human mind as inherently purposive and selective.
Epistemology
James defined
true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. Truth, he said, is that which works in the way of belief. "True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse" but "all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere," he wrote.
James's assertion that the value of a truth depends upon its use to the individual who holds it's known as
pragmatism. Additional tenets of James's pragmatism include the view that the world is a mosaic of diverse experiences that can only be properly understood through an application of "radical empiricism." Radical empiricism, distinct from everyday scientific
empiricism, presumes that nature and experience can never be frozen for absolutely objective analysis, that, at the very least, the mind of the observer will affect the outcome of any empirical approach to truth since, empirically, the mind and nature are inseparable. James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition — over and against duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality — has maintained a strong influence in American culture, especially among liberals (see
Richard Rorty), and his radical empiricism lies in the background of contemporary
relativism. James's description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of a "
stream of consciousness," had a direct and significant impact on
avant-garde and
modernist literature and art.
In
What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief, that "truth is
one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.
Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."
Richard Rorty claims that James didn't mean to give a theory of truth with this statement and that we shouldn't regard it as such. However, other pragmatism scholars such as
Susan Haack and
Howard Mounce don't share Rorty's
instrumentalist interpretation of James.
In
The Meaning of Truth, James speaks of truth in relativistic terms: "The critic's [sc.,the critic of pragmatism] trouble...seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.' "
Cash Value
From the introduction to William James's
Pragmatism by Bruce Kuklick, p.xiv.
» James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of 'true' by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if in the long run it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world. James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "Cash Value" was, what consequences they led to. A belief wasn't a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment. In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as
biological fitness
. If what was true was what worked, we can scientifically investigate religion's claim to truth in the same manner. The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked. James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying — they enabled us to lead fuller, richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives. Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence, just as scientific beliefs were.
Will to Believe Doctrine
In William James's lecture of 1897 titled "The Will to Believe," James defends the right to violate the principle of
evidentialism in order to justify hypothesis venturing. Although this doctrine is often seen as a way for William James to justify religious beliefs, his philosophy of
pragmatism allows him to use the results of his hypothetical venturing as evidence to support the hypothesis' truth. Therefore, this doctrine allows one to assume belief in God and prove its existence by what the belief brings to one's life.
Philosophy of religion
James did important work in
philosophy of religion. In his
Gifford Lectures at the
University of Edinburgh he provided a wide-ranging account of
The Varieties of Religious Experience (
1902) and interpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings. Some of the important claims he makes in this regard:
- Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius.
- The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things.
- In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain "over-beliefs" in things which, while they can't be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives.
The investigation of
mystical experience was constant throughout the life of James, leading him to experiment with
chloral hydrate (1870),
amyl nitrite (1875),
nitrous oxide (1882), and even
peyote (1896). James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand
Hegel. He concluded that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they're certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such.
Theory of emotion
James is one of the two namesakes of the
James-Lange theory of
emotion, which he formulated independently of
Carl Lange in the
1880s. The theory holds that emotion is the mind's perception of physiological conditions that result from some stimulus. In James' oft-cited example; it isn't that we see a bear, fear it, and run. We see a bear and run, consequently we fear the bear. Our mind's
perception of the higher adrenaline level, heartbeat, etc., is the emotion.
This way of thinking about emotion has great consequences for the philosophy of
aesthetics. Here is a passage from his great work,
Principles of Psychology, that spells out those consequences.
William James' bear
From
Joseph LeDoux's description of William James'
Emotion
» Why do we run away if we notice that we're in danger? Because we're afraid of what will happen if we don't. This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions.
» It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled "What Is an Emotion?" The article appeared in a philosophy journal called
Mind, as there were no psychology journals yet. It was important, not because it definitively answered the question it raised, but because of the way in which James phrased his response. He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus . The mental aspect of emotion, the feeling, is a slave to its physiology, not vice versa: we don't tremble because we're afraid or cry because we feel sad; we're afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry.
Philosophy of history
One of the long-standing schisms in the
philosophy of history concerns the role of individuals in social change.
One faction sees individuals ("heroes" as
Thomas Carlyle called them) as the motive power of history, and the broader society as the page on which they write their acts. The other sees society as moving according to
holistic principles or laws, and sees individuals as its more-or-less willing pawns. In 1880, James waded into this controversy with "Great Men and Their Environment," an essay published in the
Atlantic Monthly. He took Carlyle's side, but without Carlyle's one-sided emphasis on the political/military sphere, upon heroes as the founders or overthrowers of states and empires.
"
Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness," James wrote. "
Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical effects;
Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality,
Artemus Ward to our humor;
Emerson kindles a new moral light within us."
Study of spiritualism
In 1909 William James published
Expériences d'un Psychiste, a book which he relates many experiments that he'd with the
medium Leonora Piper. His first commentary about Piper, however, was published in
Science:
In the trances of this medium, I can't resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she's never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.
William James gave more detailed informations about his first experiments with Piper in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Reasearch:
I made Mrs. Piper's acquaintance in the autumn of 1885. My wife's mother, Mrs. Gibbens, had been told of her by a friend, during the previous summer, and never having seen a medium before, had paid her a visit out of curiosity. She returned with the statement that Mrs. P. had given her a long string of names of members of the family, mostly Christian names, together with facts about the persons mentioned and their relations to each other, the knowledge of which on her part was incomprehensible without supernormal powers. My sister-in-law went the next day, with still better results, as she related them. Amongst other things, the medium had accurately described the circumstances of the writer of a letter which she held against her forehead, after Miss G. had given it to her. The letter was in Italian, and its writer was known to but two persons in this country.
[Imay add that on a later occasion my wife and I took another letter from this same person to Mrs. P., who went on to speak of him in a way which identified him unmistakably again. On a third occasion, two years later, my sister-in-law and I being again with Mrs. P., she reverted in her trance to these letters, and then gave us the writer's name, which she said she hadn't been able to get on the former occasion.]
But to revert to the beginning. I remember playing the esprit fort on that occasion before my feminine relatives, and seeking to explain, by simple considerations the marvellous character of the facts which they brought back. This did not, however, prevent me from going myself a few days later, in company with my wife, to get a direct personal impression. The names of none of us up to this meeting had been announced to Mrs. P., and Mrs. J. and I were, of course, careful to make no reference to our relatives who had preceded. The medium, however, when entranced, repeated most of the names of " spirits" whom she'd announced on the two former occasions and added others. The names came with difficulty, and were only gradually made perfect. My wife's father's name of Gibbens was announced first as Niblin, then as Giblin. A child Herman (whom we'd lost the previous year) had his name spelt out as Herrin. I think that in no case were both Christian and surnames given on this visit. But the facts predicated of the persons named made it in many instances impossible not to recognise the particular individuals who were talked about. We took particular pains on this occasion to give the Phinuit control no help over his difficulties and to ask no leading questions. In the light of subsequent experience I believe this not to be the best policy. For it often happens, if you give this trance-personage a name or some small fact for the lack of which he's brought to a standstill, that he'll then start off with a copious flow of additional talk, containing in itself an abundance of " tests."
My impression after this first visit was, that Mrs. P. was either possessed of supernormal powers, or knew the members of my wife's family by sight and had by some lucky coincidence become acquainted with such a multitude of their domestic circumstances as to produce the startling impression which she did. My later knowledge of her sittings and personal acquaintance with her has led me absolutely to reject the latter explanation, and to believe that she's supernormal powers.
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