The Autumn of American Liberalism

...The religious problem of the age, as James laid it out, was not so much combating disbelief as finding a way to maintain the "live wire" of belief—that which made it possible for even nonbelievers to share the moral knowledge of right and wrong...

...Everything changed once Dewey reinterpreted the notion of a democratic mind...

...None of them, that is, except a professor and public lecturer named William James...

...union with the higher universe is our true end...

...The critical opinion of professional philosophers seems now to be that Peirce had, all in all, the better philosophical mind, and it was in the brilliant 1878 essay "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" that Peirce first laid out the principles that would come to define pragmatism...

...It was ethically serious, intellectually open, socially approved, and religiously advanced: more Presbyterian than Methodist, more Congregational than Presbyterian, more Episcopal than Congregational, and more Unitarian than them all...

...Simon carefully demonstrates, however, the extent to which James remained vulnerable to anxiety the rest of his life...

...Pragmatism was what made such belief possible in an age of science, and that belief was what allowed the pragmatism...

...It was, as it were, Massachusetts after the death of Ralph Waldo Emerson: assured of science, convinced of morality, and certain the future would be better than the past...

...It is perhaps this that lurks behind James's abiding interest in crystal-gazing mediums, table-rapping apparitions, and all the other paraphernalia of parapsychology, for he longed for some concrete experience of the transcendent...

...And among philosophers in any language, there is probably no one who ranks with James in sheer pleasantness of personality...

...for William James, pragmatism was something more...

...The Puritan root of liberalism's moral mood and the transcendental condition for its possibility is the reality of God...

...There was his strangely thwarted father Henry Sr., an eccentric Swedenborgian theologian...

...After James, it is too late to maintain the connection of democratic liberalism to its quickly fading religious inheritance...

...It was on this trip that James contracted smallpox and began to share the lifelong health problems—some physical, some psychological—that plagued his entire family...

...Her only failures are her inability to convey the mood of the days in which James lived and her indecision about why James matters...

...And whether they stepped gingerly or confidently— whether they were as aware as Nathaniel Hawthorne or as unaware J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard...

...Born in 1842 to a family made wealthy through his grandfather's early investments in the Erie Canal, he had all the connections and opportunities of the wellborn Boston Brahman: At two months old, he was visited by Emerson, who (according to family legend, related by Henry) condescended "to admire and give his blessing to the lately-born babe...

...If it hadn't been James, it would have been someone else...

...There are further streams that flow straight from Dewey's version of pragmatism to both the identity politics of the late twentieth century and such contemporary American philosophical works as Richard Rorty's 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which argues that we can hold only a "philosophy without mirrors" that deprives us of all ability to judge truth...

...The high liberals of the late nineteenth century were (to offer a different metaphor) living above quicksand, treading on boards laid down two hundred years before by their Puritan forebears...

...After James, the historical line that runs from the seventeenth-century Puritans to the nineteenth-century liberals is broken, and thus even in the next generation someone like T. S. Eliot must assert the ground of tradition by an act of will rather than an acknowledgment of existing fact...

...One interesting feature of Linda Simon's Genuine Reality is its documentation of the seriousness with which James took his hobby of investigating parapsychology and the ghostly manifestations of the supernatural...

...No one would have predicted much future production from a man who by thirty-one had given no sign that he would ever settle down to anything, but James blossomed as a professor...

...Throughout his work—in his teaching, his public lectures, his innumerable reviews and magazine pieces, and such writings as his Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909)—there is manifest his constant project, his unsystematic but nonetheless unceasing aim to find an epistemology that would allow Americans, or at least himself, to retain both confidence in the science that had been his fascination since he finished medical school and the high-liberal moral certainty that was his birthright as a New Eng-lander...

...In the fiction of Henry James there is mercilessly revealed a people whose moral thoughts, untethered from the intellectual foundations of previous generations, became moods rather than ideas...

...It is like a corridor in a hotel, from which a hundred doors open into a hundred chambers...

...And the utter triumph of Dewey in the field of education meant that it was the untethered form of pragmatism that would be passed along to future generations...

...Forced to a long-delayed maturity by his teaching and his marriage to Alice Howe Gibbens in 1878, he became over the next thirty years as dominant an intellectual figure as America has ever known...

...There was his spinster sister Alice, a brilliant diarist and an incurable hypochondriac...

...But there was a dominant stream of pragmatism that flowed from Peirce to James to John Dewey, James's successor as America's best-known philosopher...

...To Alfred North Whitehead, he was "that adorable genius...

...But Jacques Barzun— whose 1983 A Stroll with William James remains the best introduction to the philosopher—insists repeatedly upon the word "gentleman" to describe him, and James seems in fact to have been the highest example of a certain very Bostonian, nineteenth-century type...

...But these failures are enough to make her book unhelpful to anyone without a strongly formed opinion about James, for it is finally his life's work in philosophy for which she is unable to account: uncertain what James was seeking in his writings, and unsure what they amount to...

...His liberalism was to some degree an affirmation of Emerson's demand for "democratic minds," citizens possessed of a quasi-nominalistic awareness of the necessity to admit in a democracy the plurality of searches for what Emerson thought a monistic if inexpressible truth...

...His brother Henry seemed, if not content, then at least determined to describe the disease of America in endlessly precise detail...

...To some extent the corridor-theory describes all American philosophy after Charles Sanders Peirce...

...for to say, under such circumstances, 'Do not decide, but leave the question open,' is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no— and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth...

...And his solution was pragmatism, the philosophical school that is perhaps best described as a complicated theory of truth, a way of insisting that we examine—before deciding whether a proposition is true—the consequences that would follow if the proposition were true: "The whole function of philosophy," he declared, "ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one...

...In novels from Daisy Miller in 1879 to The Ambassadors in 1903, he betrayed for all to see the inner life of attenuated Americans—those weak figures whose consciousness, like their social life, moved entirely in cloudy shift-ings and inherited associations...

...Even while he declined orthodox religion for himself, he declared in The Varieties of Religious Experience his faith that "the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance...

...in a third a laboratory with an investigator looking for new footholds by which to advance upon the future...

...But William James was engaged not in etiology but in seeking a cure...

...It was beautiful, as high a pitch, perhaps, as human culture has ever reached...

...His medical studies soon gave way, however, to an expedition to Brazil with the naturalist Louis Agassiz...

...His teaching introduced the developing discipline to an entire generation of influential Harvard students, his Principles of Psychology defined the course of future academic study in America, and his popular expositions of mental science created a public fascination that continues to this day...

...After two years of ineffective psychological treatment, it proved to be his medical degree and Boston friendships that provided the means for his cure: a minor Harvard lectureship in anatomy in 1873, to which he added psychology in 1875 and philosophy in 1879...

...He was the last man able to receive his moral inheritance as simply as he received the money his grandfather made speculating on the Erie Canal...

...On a visit to England, he exasperated his brother by climbing over the garden wall to get a glimpse of Henry's next-door neighbor, G. K. Chesterton...

...For its originator Peirce, pragmatism was merely a philosophy...

...once described as speaking the way "God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was...

...It was, however, James who launched the school of thought as a new philosophical method when he gave his lecture "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results" in 1898...

...He is important in the history of philosophy for precisely the opposite reason: He happened to come last...

...No longer confident of the rightness of a single point of view—of intellectual Christendom, as it were—but possessing still the inherited attitude and mood of unity, philosophers invariably sought a sort of rising above the conflicting viewpoints to a theory of knowledge that could affirm, if not the truth of all practices, then at least the practice of all practices...

...He thus stands in contrast to Dewey, whom Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr...

...There are beliefs, he declares, that may be logically possible for us to hold, but it is pointless to discuss them unless they are something more than logically possible—unless they are "living" possibilities, in the way that electricians speak of the difference between "live" and "dead" wires...

...But it is difficult to put the whole theory in a simple way with any fairness...

...He loved sharp metaphors drawn from common experience, and he had a clean, powerful style, sometimes thought by other philosophers to be too accessible to general audiences— lacking the high opacity owed to serious philosophical work...

...It was all incredibly delicate, balanced on a needle's point...

...After James, or at least after Dewey's reformation of James, coherent liberalism can only be radical and coherent religion can only be conservative...

...The shelf of James biographies is already crowded, with Ralph Barton Perry's The Thought and Character of William James (1935) jostling Gay Wilson Allen's William James (1967) and Gerald Myers's William James: His Life and Thought (1986...

...What he once observed about his brother Henry was just as true of himself: "He is a native of the James family, and has no other country...

...It is not William James but John Dewey who is in fact the most influential philosopher in American history, thanks to his widely read pedagogical writings and his association with Teachers' College at Columbia University...

...It was energetic and hardworking, even when more from nervous excitement than from real robustness...

...The Autumn of American Liberalism In Defense of William James By J. Bottum Liberalism, in the finest and least political sense of the word, was an accident of the nineteenth century—an interlude of beauty, like New England in the fall, between the spring of the Puritans and the winter of the twentieth-century radicals...

...We might put this another way by observing the difference between James's importance in his first field, psychology, and his second field, philosophy...

...And it is certainly this that stands behind "The Will to Believe," a brilliant talk he gave in 1896...

...But after Dewey, we can only visit, no longer able to choose a room in which to live...

...spiritual energy flows in and produces effects within the phenomenal world...

...Pragmatism, in short, is a great corridor-theory...

...But the corridor belongs to all, and all must pass there...

...And within a generation, it had all been swept away—as perhaps it was in any case doomed to be...

...His current fame as the founder of American psychology and America's best philosopher certainly owes something to the abiding curiosity readers have about the characters in his wealthy New England family...

...This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other...

...In America, at the peak of its late-Victorian foliage, liberalism was humane, intelligent, and engaged...

...in another a desk at which sits someone eager to destroy all metaphysics...

...Deriving from the empiricism of David Hume and from fascination with what was perceived in the nineteenth century to be the unique logic of scientific experimentation, pragmatism was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the 1870s meetings of the ironically named Metaphysical Club, a discussion group attended by Peirce and James...

...But James is important to the history of psychology primarily because he happened to come early, writing in those first days of a discipline that was bound to emerge whether he did his work or not...

...That account—deriving mostly from Perry's first biography—claims that James's enormous productivity from his thirties to his death in 1910 is explained primarily by his triumph over his one breakdown at the age of twenty-eight...

...as the Harvard president Charles Eliot Norton of how rickety their intellectual flooring had become— none of them seemed capable of doing anything to keep from falling through...

...He had his lapses, as Simon shows, envious from time to time in middle age of his brother's literary success, annoying his wife by the flir-tatiousness with which he treated the young women who flocked to his lectures...

...Dewey was right, of course, when he observed that the principal difference between them was that "Peirce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist...

...But James believed also in a sort of ultimately practical realism that is the opposite of nominalism: Though at the abstract level of episte-mology there may be no absolute knowledge, there is nonetheless in concrete experience the possibility of knowledge that is right in all the classic senses of the word—true, beautiful, and good...

...But once Dewey had cut the thread that tied the philosophical school to New England's stern Protestant roots, pragmatism in America was bound to issue in a politics that is merely the struggle for power and an epistemology that is primarily a sophisticated skepticism...

...A year endeavoring to be a painter was followed by studies at Harvard starting in 1861, first in chemistry, then at the medical school in 1864...

...Attending various schools in Europe from 1855 to 1860, he found himself at age eighteen undecided about his future...

...But at least for a moment William James seemed to offer what America rejected even while it declared him its premier philosopher: the intellectual means to extend for a few more years the New England autumn of high American liberalism...

...The broad outlines of James's life are clear enough...

...Simon's success in Genuine Reality is to present (in half the nine-hundred pages that seems to have become the industry standard for biographies) all the available facts about the man's life...

...After a year of recuperation in Germany, he returned to Harvard in 1868 and took his medical degree the next year...

...Even James himself occasionally created difficulties when he tried—shocking his contemporaries, for example, when he declared that pragmatism is concerned only with the "cash value" of an idea...

...The professional certification seemed at first to make little difference, as James recoiled from actual medical practice and suffered in 1870 a profound emotional crisis whose onset he later described in harrowing terms: There arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his figure...

...In one you may see a man on his knees praying to regain his faith...

...He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human...

...But nominalism does not necessarily imply the refusal of a discernible public good that transcends political power relations, and it does not necessarily demand an intellectual skepticism...

...More than anything else, it seems to be an interest in tracing these family relations that motivates James's latest biographer, Linda Simon...

...For James, however, the key lay in the possibility that a particular practice might issue for the individual in genuine truth...

...There's no denying the significance of James in psychology...

...But Simon— the editor of the 1996 William James Remembered, an anthology of memoirs by such contemporaries as Gertrude Stein and George San-tayana—has managed nonetheless to make a real contribution in her new Genuine Reality: A Life of William James, adding an enormous amount of detail about the complex and curious relations among those complex and curious figures who made up the philosopher's extended family...

...Among philosophers who wrote in English, only the prose of David Hume ranks with that of James...

...It is, however, for reasons other than his family that William James remains a visible historical figure— perhaps the only American philosopher with a well-known personality, fleshed out in our minds far beyond either his fellow pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey or his fellow Harvard professors (and non-pragmatists) Josiah Royce and Santayana...

...What changed after 1870 was his ability to direct that anxiety toward productive work and rephrase his crises as philosophical problems he could try to solve...

...It seems almost superfluous to observe that James was hoping for something different from his philosophy...

...His sister Alice wrote in one of her last diary entries: "All that there is to be said of him, of course, is that he is simply himself, a creature who speaks in another language as Henry says from the rest of mankind and who would lend life and charm to a treadmill...

...And most of all, there was his brother Henry, the Bostonian novelist who fled to England and wrote the most modern of Victorian fiction in a prose so dense it was like tangled twine: The brothers, one English critic observed, consisted of a philosopher who wrote like a novelist and a novelist who wrote like a philosopher...

...James hoped from pragmatism a corridor off which are many rooms where we might live with truth...

...What James wanted from his philosophy is perhaps best revealed in a passage—written by his student Giovanni Papini—that James once declared the finest short definition of pragmatism: It is "a collection of attitudes and methods" that takes a position of armed neutrality in the midst of doctrines...

...And after Rorty, all the doors are locked...

...There were surprisingly profound differences among the pragma-tists—most notably in the conflict between Peirce's insistence on the basic reality of ideas and James's nominalistic dismissal of any reality beyond the particulars of bare experience...

...But James needed a sort of circularity for his humanism that the older Peirce never bothered with and the younger Dewey actively denied...

...He accepted a certain amount of nominalism as the price he thought he had to pay for being able to hold both science and liberal morality...

...Our passional nature," James declared, "not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds...

...One can, of course, insist too much on the connection between radical politics and radical epistemol-ogy—between the activism of what the French call the "Generation of '68" and the postmodernists' theories of knowing...

...By the time the stream of American thought reaches someone like Richard Rorty, everything but ironic detachment is banned from the liberal outlook...

...And it was doomed, twirling over the abyss like the last red and yellow leaves on a dying tree...

...But probably more helpful for understanding the philosopher is her insistence on the mistakenness of what might be called the "standard account" of James's life...

...If it hadn't been William James, it would have been no one...

...What once meant that proper citizens in a democracy must share certain accepting attitudes of mind came in Dewey to mean that the mind itself must become a democracy, a kind of scientifically inclined polity in which no point of view is ever allowed to abolish any other—except, of course, for those religious points of view, like Christianity, that continue to insist upon the reality of truth...

...That shape am I, I felt, potentially...

...But beyond his prose and personality, James is important for a far more significant reason...

...And Dewey— epistemologically and politically radical, and dominating the philosophical scene from James's death in 1910 until his own in 1952—turned philosophy in highly nominalistic directions: defining truth as "the experimental determination of future consequences," severing the last links to the world of nineteenth-century liberalism, and taking up in a radical way the political and social issues that Peirce and James had mostly ignored...