A Stroll with William James:
Kellogg, Michael
Home-grown, full-bodied philosophy A STROLL WITH WILLIAM JAMES Jacques Barzun Harper & Row, $19.95, 344 pp. Michael Kellogg "AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER," like "English wine," is close to a...
...James Hillman Inter Views range, subtlety, and concreteness, are little read, even by academics...
...What he says of The Principles of Psychology could be applied to any of his works: "There is no closed system in this book...
...Pragmatism" seems to imply in the crudest sense that what works is good and true...
...In six years of a steady and eclectic diet of philosophy courses at two universities, nothing by William James was ever assigned reading...
...Hence the neglect...
...James coined the phrase "stream of consciousness" to capture the flowing, variable nature of experience...
...Through half a century of reading and meditating upon James, his enthusiasm for the nuances and refinements is undi-minished...
...Objects are not merely presented to the mind for labeling...
...He decries the lack of concreteness in modern discourse and the prevalence of colorless psycho-biographies...
...Truth resides in the creative interplay of autonomous concepts and given experience...
...He is the author of Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art...
...James is open to all that experience has to teach us...
...With it, he continually avoids both the dominant idealism of his day (which treated concepts as themselves objects) and the logical positivism that followed him (treating concepts as strictly reducible to bundles of experiences...
...Professors assign what they can summarize and impart in a lecture...
...He had an artist's love for the jumbled details of life and refused to take refuge in generalities that would "house and hide the chaos...
...As a consequence, he left no set of easily digestible doctrines upon which students and scholars alike could feast...
...His preferred method of batting is to walk on four consecutive balls...
...stroll motif, Barzun loves to wander off, applying Jamesian ideas and insights to contemporary issues...
...A deeper reason for the oversight, however, lies precisely in James's virtue of concreteness...
...In fact, his most persistent theme is the need to resist the tyranny of abstract thought...
...MICHAEL KELLOGG, a Harvard Law School Graduate with degrees in philosophy from Stanford and Oxford, is a clerk in Justice William H. Rehnquist's office in Washington, DC...
...Kuhn's on the philosophy of science by half a century...
...In other words, concepts are not predetermined by experience...
...Too wide-ranging, perhaps...
...All the more reason, then, to cherish those few products, like the philosophical writings of William James, that are both home-grown and full-bodied...
...philip novak is assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at Dominican College in San Rafael, California...
...More important, he has the gift of imparting that enthusiasm...
...James is simply too untidy to be packaged so...
...Despite the label, one expects little more than a watered-down import...
...Professor Barzun has opinions on everything and expresses them regardless of any real or imagined connection with James...
...But James's point is simply that, as we move from one level of generality to a higher one, we must ensure that no details crucial to the point at hand are left behind...
...Truth is what works in the sense that true propositions constitute a workable ordering of experience...
...Students read what professors assign...
...It cries out for judicious trimming and a more orderly presentation...
...ARLENE SWIDLER teaches religious studies at Villanova University...
...There is no hint of the scholar's forced march or the biographer's field trip...
...And it stakes out, in convincing fashion, James's claim to greatness and originality as an American philosopher...
...She is the author of Woman in a Man's Church (Paulist...
...Such a refrain may sound curious when intoned by a philosopher...
...Yet the book merits the persistence it requires...
...Despite the digressions, Barzun manages to convey not only the richness of James's writings on psychology and philosophy, but also their unifying theme: man's creative role in fashioning truth...
...He was reacting against British empiricism, which taught that the mind is merely a collection of ideas that passively mirror objects...
...Professor Barzun makes one burn to read William James...
...In keeping with the REVIEWERS Patrick Jordan was integrated into a baseball family...
...Abstractions, senseless or not, are his stock in trade and, as the saying goes, "It' s a poor carpenter who criticizes his tools...
...Professor Barzun's book is frustrating in many respects...
...This concreteness makes James a delight to read, but difficult to teach...
...His philosophical writings, despite their Therapy aims at bringing a person back to an unreflected way of working, an instinctual way . . . It's a crazy thing because the whole procedure is insight and reflection and conversation in an armchair, yet the intention is unreflected responsiveness, just plain old working . . . without neurotic encumbrances...
...Jacques Barzun's new book may go some way toward curbing this waste...
...gene H. bell-villada teaches Spanish at Williams College...
...James thought this static conception missed the crucial step wherein the mind imposes order on the flux of creating concepts...
...As Professor Barzun puts it, "James and Pragmatism have been branded as typically American, a mind and a doctrine to be expected from a nation of hucksters...
...They permit us to cope with the flux...
...But it still conveys a profound understanding of all aspects of James's thought...
...The book is aptly titled...
...We are introduced to James as to an intimate friend of the author's, and the conversation is lively and wide-ranging...
...Unfortunately, James, who died in 1910, is still known largely for his pioneering work in psychology...
...He discusses the death penalty, current research on the inheritance of acquired characteristics (a neo-Lamarckian doctrine to which James, Freud, and Nietzsche subscribed), and the deplorable state of our schools...
...Abstractions are not eschewed, merely refined and used with care...
...Hence, James's writings overflow with illustrations and qualifying examples...
...This neglect is due in part to the unfortunate label with which he saddled his thought...
...I fear my own experience is indicative...
...Rather, they are creatively imposed on experience as "the mind's act of self-defense against universal drift and decay...
...He also anticipates Wittgenstein's work on language and T.S...
...This neo-Kantian theory of truth informs James's thought on every topic, including ethics, aesthetics, and religion...
...We, in effect, "create" the objects by settling upon a particular scheme of concepts...
...Michael Kellogg "AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER," like "English wine," is close to a contradiction in terms...
...James's theory of truth is tied to this psychological insight...
Vol. 110 • October 1983 • No. 17
