The Varieties of Jamesian Experience

...James sought to be utterly faithful to mental experience as it is given, without hastily boiling it down to its physiological component and without surreptitiously engaging in metaphysics His strictures against wrongheaded abstractness still count against those who earnestly liken the mind to a computer, or who would reduce the mind to the brain, that "blood-soaked sponge " Principles offers excitement of such high order in such abundance that Barzun only has time to touch appreciatively on a few prominent points, most notably the invigorating chapters on "Habit" and "The Stream of Consciousness ". Forays into medicine and psychology notwithstanding, James was rooted in philosophy throughout his career Most who have condescended to him have a distance to go before they approach his erudition, few will ever achieve his strength of expression The man is in the writing, with his constant bursting into metaphor, his exuberance and wit, his "picturesque exaggeration " Moreover, the issues he discusses so vividly-free will versus determinism, the nature of truth and belief-still perplex us...

...The Varieties of Jamesian Experience A Stroll with William James By Jacques Barzun Harper & Row 344 pp $19 95 Reviewed by Brian Thomas Uplift has a bad name among most present-day philosophers They scoff at the effort to equip oneself for living as unworthy of serious study, ignoring the role this probably played in leading them to their field in the first place Therefore they often dismiss William James (1842-1910) as a mere purveyor of inspiration, a more rakish Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fossil Yet a comparison of James to current philosophizing is wicked fun The thunder, shrewd humor and exquisite subtlety evident in The Principles of Psychology, "The Will to Believe," Pragmatism, and The Varieties of Religious Experience shine with brilliance next to the timid blackboard scratchings that now pass for philosophy...

...Today's academics jostling tor tenure must marvel ruefully at the way President Charles W Eliot of Harvard recruited James for the faculty in 1873, eventually giving him the means to set up the world's first psychological laboratory Here he wrote 77ie Principles of Psvchology, published in 1890 Barzun deems it a masterpiece on the order of Moby-Dick, because James does for the human mind what Melville does for whaling-and because it has not been surpassed...

...He termed his method pragmatism, a much-abused word with a checkered history that Barzun mordantly anatomizes For James, pragmatism was less a set of opinions than an experimental study of the uses of knowledge Considering it nothing new, he observed that it harmonized with a number of ancient ideas In fact, James continued a tradition that began with the Sophists, a sense that there was no privileged method for assessing human endeavor In the great joint-stock company, as James frequently put it, no one has cornered all the shares, no one has controlling interest, every voice is on the same level For those w ho seek a master vantage point, whether they call their loffy platform God or the dialectic, James is an irresponsible antinomian As Rorty describes the view, "in the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our lovalty to other human beings clinging together in the dark, not our hope of getting things right ". Philosophical Pecksniffs often anathematize this approach as relativism, or worse Barzun embraces the accusation, arguing strenuously (if not always effectively) for a Jamesian openness to experience The blend of life and works that Barzun relies on in A Stroll is perfect for a book on James, who exemplified his own assertion that all philosophies are visions, expressions of one's temperament With him, ethics and esthetics were two branches of the same trunk, and biography shaded imperceptibly into metaphysics In this spirit, Barzun takes pains to insure that what Henry James called his brother s vivacity and "Williamcy" of mind come through undimmed...

...Richard Rorty, for instance, maintains in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) that as the analytic doctrines and preoccupations of Anglo-American philosophy are pushed to their limits, philosophers will find themselves taking positions not very different from those of James The man who wrote A Pluralistic Universe, he says, waits at the end of the road that French anti-Platonist radicals like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault have been traveling So lacques Barzun's timing in "paving an intellectual debt" to his "particular discourser on the world" is propitious...

...Some practitioners apparently have been arriving at the same conclusion for the past decade or so, taboos against discussing certain nontopics-like religion and morality-have been slackening, making a truer assessment of James possible...

...Nevertheless, the reproof of James comes in a telling form (as was most recently demonstrated in R Jeffrey Lustig's excellent, little remarked 1982 study, Corporate Liberalism The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920) Despite James' demand that we take in the total context and keep an eye on potentialities of every variety, where institutions and social practices are at stake his long run does dwindle into mere expediency His moral athleticism does nothing to strengthen our political fiber, for all his blasts against" pernicious and immoral fatalisms," James and his fellow pragmatists drew their boundaries in a more constricted, passive fashion than they realized They adhered to a pinched theory of rationality as a matter of technical validation This accounts for the man in the street's not unjustified notion of pragmatism as an espousal of cynical opportunism...

...James loved stress and uproar, despised dullness He insisted that "I am no lover of disorder, but fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it wholly " Perhaps But after spending a week at the idyllic Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chatauqua Lake-"a foretaste of what human society might be were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners"-he commented...

...Here, I think, James was more of his time than he knew, yet this shrinkage does not invalidate his philosophy Instead, the moral is to be more of a Jamesian than William was-a noble goal to strive for...

...The purpose of this Stroll is to refresh our memories of James in a leisurely way, to expose misconceptions about his views and to argue for his relevance "We go astray and suffer from not knowing our James," Barzun admonishes Name any intellectual vice you can think of reductionism, Manichean thinking, "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," metaphysical dogmatism, blinkered scientism, the careless use of cliches According to the author, regular exposure to James is a sovereign remedy against all of these...

...He never paid much attention to social theory, although he did train his civic-minded outrage on some current events, like America's genocidal havoc in the Philippines This neglect of politics led some to accuse James and the pragmatists in general of moral Babbitry, of caving in to the pressure of commercial expediency Barzun counters the crude version of this criticism without strain, citing James' condemnation of the "bitch-goddess success" and his more spacious conception of the long run...

...His "proneness to the truth" was dearly bought The justifiably famous phrase in The Varieties about being twice-born applies to him with special force The beginning was auspicious-the oldest child in a lovingly permissive household, a brilliant talker in a widely-traveled family where conversation and controversy were among the chief joys His father, who had inherited money, was a one-legged eccentric S wedenborgian theologian and later a Fourierist, a younger brother became a great novelist William spent a year m Brazil with the explorer-naturalist Louis Agassiz before attending medical school at Harvard Along the way he also studied art, revealing a strong talent for drawing and painting At 28 these possibilities were blighted by a "vastation," a paralyzing bout of depression similar to a malaise that had haunted his father For three years William felt himself "a wretched, impulse-tom creature " Then he effected a self-cure by reading Charles Renouvier on determinism and deciding that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will-an intellectual strategy that recurs in much of his later thought...

...And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying 'Ouf, what a relief' Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate this atrocious harmlessness in all things-I cannot abide Let me take my chances in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings " Barzun decides that the supreme concept for James is thickness, "an intense awareness of multiplicity-in nature, in persons, in art, religion and social reality ". As a result, "block-universe monisms," authority and the rationally finished always roused his sarcasm, while the fringes of things, the glamours, the lusters that are so often ignored constituted his zone of interest He once approvingly cited "an unlearned carpenter" of his acquaintance who said (in a suspiciously Jamesian tone of voice), "There is very little difference between one man and another, but what little there is, is very important " In a similar vein, he found the evidence for God's existence in personal experience Barzun ably demonstrates the connection between James' love of the particular and his belief that religion "is a man's total reaction upon life ". Reviews of books on America's greatest philosopher tend to complain that the author has omitted some favorite bit of James lore To Barzun's credit, his omissions do not make A Stroll any less informative or enjoyable But his scrutiny suffers from a lack traceable to James himself...