Part 1

IN 1908 TWO years before his death William James is closing the book, renouncing “words, words, words,” as Hamlet wearily, wittily says when asked what he is reading. As a young man he was haunted by Shakespeare’s Prince, with whom he shared a guilty sense of indecisiveness, in the philosopher’s case exacerbated by sitting out the Civil War at his father’s insistence (Cotkin 33). Though he balks at literally closing the book on and of words, James’s need to “return to life” shapes his antagonistic relation to language and philosophy. In his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford (published as A Pluralistic Universe) he is pushed to the edge of renunciation by frustration at how the rule of concepts “arrest[s]” life, “cutting it up into bits as if with scissors,” so inveterately are they “retrospective and post mortem” (Writings 2:739). Concepts function to generalize, to classify, and hence devour particularity: “A concept means a that-and-no-other” (746). It leaves no remainder, no “fringe,” no “muchness,” the excess James esteems as precious freedom. As if recalling Emerson’s praise of silence—“if I speak, I define, I confine, and am less”—he offers his own silent conduct as an “example” to imitate: “No words of mine will probably convert you, for words can be the name only of concepts”; “the return to life can’t come about by talking. It is an act” (Emerson, Essays 426; James, Writings 2:762–763). Anticipating Wittgenstein’s wish fourteen years later that we treat his statements as a ladder to be tossed once grasped, James urges his listeners to ignore his words and plunge into the preverbal flux. But his urging is in vain; he must face the frustrating fact that his vow of silent action is merely figurative. Unlike Wittgenstein who offers his exit strategy as the Tractatus concludes, James announces his in the middle of a long lecture, shackled to words as he tries to escape them.
Stalled in merely figurative gestures of farewell, James is enthralled by his new ally Henri Bergson, whose style, he admits, “seduces you . . . he’s a real magician” (Writings 2:732). Many regarded the Frenchman in these rapt terms; in the second decade of the century he would lecture to crowds within and outside the academy. Although he regretted that Bergson had erected a “great system” with the Ă©lan vital as its metaphysical foundation, James welcomes his life philosophy as a deathblow to “intellectualism,” which promotes the tyranny of concepts by positing that experience is above all a mode of knowing (James, Letters 2:292). So eager is James to reach “the inner life of the flux” that he gainsays (while granting) the cost of abandoning himself to the non-conceptual: “Both theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives” (Writings 2:728). Hence he admits that to renounce concepts is to “regress” and shed our “proud maturity.” But “difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way” (755). And with equal resolution he vows to “close” his “ears” to the “intellectualist.”
James has imprisoned himself in a stifling dichotomy: either submit to the “conceptual decomposition of life” or dive into the flux of “immediate experience” (747, 749). About this impasse, a philosopher friend wrote him: “Is choice limited to these alternatives? Here I think is the crux of the whole problem.” The friend mentions that “concepts are of various sorts,” noting Hegel’s “concrete universal” and adds that Kant speaks of a kind of concept that has “no fixed limits”—apparently an allusion to the “aesthetic idea” (James, Correspondence 10:322–323). But James seems willfully to insist on his either/or. He certainly wants no help from Kant: “Think of the german literature of aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre!” he fumes in another lecture (Writings 2:638). After all, Kant’s “aesthetic idea” was the exception in his system whose rule was a narrow notion of cognition as the subsuming of particulars under concepts.
Not only has a false dichotomy brought James to this strange impasse; even stranger, few knew of its falsity more profoundly than did he. In Some Problems in Philosophy (1911), his final, posthumously published work, he stressed how we rely on both percepts and concepts, “as we need both our legs to walk with,” and urged that we treat concepts functionally, as leading us back to reality’s thickness (Writings 2:1008, 1010). In Pragmatism (1907) he noted that we do not need to abandon ourselves to the precognitive because we already have done so; “we are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense.” He elaborates his simile: the sea is the “world of sensible facts” and the air above is the “world of abstract ideas”; both are real and they interact. Though we are “unable to breathe” the air of abstract ideas “pure,” we “get our oxygen from it” while the “locus” of “everything that happens to us” is the water of experience (Writings 2:541). Here James offers what he will jettison in his Hibbert Lectures—the reciprocal interaction of a homeostatic system in which neither abstract reasoning nor “unverbalized life” rule (755). But his deliberate simplification doesn’t make any less significant—indeed makes more intriguing—his need to stage a renunciation of words and become a child again as a way to honor the non-conceptual. His willingness to “regress” is a kind of martyrdom to his belief in “the fact that life is logically irrational” (724).
Though he ultimately became a revered professor, James was uneasy in that role. This self-described anarchist was impatient with the confines of the classroom and with Harvard’s aloofness from “the tangled and muddy” hard facts of life. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he decried how “wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation” and hence “we have grown literally afraid to be poor.” He envies monks’ poverty as an enactment of the “strenuous life” absent from the modern world, and praises “the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly” (Writings 2:333). The Hibbert Lectures uphold that right: they are a barely sublimated act of flinging away. Seeking to divest himself of words and flirting with a vow of silence, James declares his own attraction to a monastic regime via his late Victorian experiment in regression as emancipation. He extols “poverty” as redemptive in ways that recall Meister Eckhart and his praise of the riches of spiritual poverty in his famous sermon “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit.” Josiah Royce had already drawn his colleague James’s attention to Eckhart in a chapter devoted to him in Studies in Good and Evil (1898).
James found philosophy less a consolation than a “maze . . . and what he was looking for was the way out,” as his colleague Santayana noted, quipping that James remained “a sort of Irishman among the Brahmins” (Character and Opinion 62–63). But unlike Emerson or Nietzsche James never found the exit. Instead, he devised a philosophy that embodied his restless urge to renounce institutions: his pragmatism, though a method based on scientific experiment and respect for “the triumph of the Darwinian theory,” was, finally, an anti-philosophy that mocked what his colleagues revered: the rationalist mind’s love of system. In all this James shows kinship with Nietzsche. Of philosophers Nietzsche remarks: “Their trust in concepts has been as unconditional as their mistrust of the senses” (12). James’s word for this mistrust of the senses is “refinement,” both as a defensive refuge in abstraction and as an insulating patrician value.
James’s attraction to irrationalism in 1908, his need to shed maturity, point back to possible roots in an earlier renunciation—of his love, at seventeen, of painting and drawing. By 1860 James had plans to make art a career until his pseudo-benign, meddling father soon squelched them. An astute biographer narrates this collision in terms of “the murdered self,” referring to the violent imagery of James’s own drawings at the time of his decision to quit painting; in one, an ogre devours a man whole (Feinstein 144). James’s late urge to renounce words for life emerges as a subliminal effort to be reborn, or at least redeem his forced desertion of the wordless medium of art by now championing the very heart of the aesthetic—the non-conceptual. “It ought to be called a ‘Defense of Poesy,’” noted James’s friend John Jay Chapman (after hearing the Hibbert Lecture on Bergson), a shrewd remark that grasped the relation between the aesthetic and James’s impatience with concepts (Chapman 231).
It is a defense of painting, as well. Listen to James’s lyrical evocations and pleas to “place yourself . . . inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand. . . . Install yourself in phenomenal movement . . . put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing.” His diction suggests a moving hand in the act of making brush and pencil strokes, achieving an “active thickness” as the touch of the brush smears viscous paint onto canvas (Writings 2:750–751). Who more than the working artist or artisan feels from literally hands-on experience that “what really exists is not things made but things in the making”? I am seeking “the instantaneous,” said James’s contemporary, the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, “to see the world through the eyes of a man born blind who has suddenly regained his sight: as a pattern of nameless color patches” (qtd. McEvilley, Exile’s 18).
While James’s fantasy of art making remains latent within his yearning for silence, in The Principles of Psychology (1890) he had made more practical efforts to loosen the hold of concepts. He urged replacing their stolidity with the “transitive” rhythms of language—“alternation of flights and perchings”—that evoke experience “fringed forever by a more that continuously develops” (Writings 1:159; 2:1173). He seeks to explode “the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things.” In this same passage he sums up what he is “so anxious to press” on our “attention”: “the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life” (Writings 1:164). These commitments to “possibles not yet in our present sight” would capture the imaginations of Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, all Harvard students influenced by James’s teaching.
His impassioned futile protest in 1908 against abstraction on behalf of life and the life of art and his praise of poverty anticipate some of the most radical modernist innovators in their war against culture. James’s reanimation of the act of painting also looks back—to a pre-Enlightenment era when image, not word, had affective power. The medieval icon—the image as “immediate evidence of God’s presence”—challenged the traditional privilege accorded God’s word in Scripture. The Reformation, by reinstituting the priority of language—“only the abstract word . . . is the bridge to God,” John Calvin insisted—enthroned hearing and reading while devaluing seeing and the senses and the surface appearance of the visible world (Belting 15, 550).
Residues of the premodern cling to James’s modernism, a pattern pervasive in twentieth-century art and thought. Linguistic and spiritual forms of poverty, including the apophatic discourse of the unsayable, which began with Plotinus, fascinate modernists in their revolt against representation. In the 1930s Antonin Artaud reinvents theatre that escapes the Enlightenment priority on words to express emotions and ideas. He is inspired by fourteenth-century Japanese Noh drama. Seeking to undermine the authority of the written word (without jettisoning it), Artaud creates “a language designed for the senses” and “independent of speech,” where sonority rather than grammatical meaning has priority, a “concrete language” of sounds, gestures, pantomime expressed in the bodies of the actors (231–233). To help himself reach a preverbal consciousness Artaud experimented with peyote. James himself tried nitrous oxide to “stimulate the mystical consciousness,” his experience of trance verifying his belief that our “normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type . . . whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different” (Writings 2:349). His last published essay celebrated the thought of the “pluralistic mystic” Benjamin Paul Blood (reason, Blood wrote, “is but an item in the duplex potency of the mystery”) and James concluded with the imperative that “Philosophy must pass from words . . . to life itself” (1313).
In Japan, in 1911, Kitaro Nishida made the same move from abstraction to life, employing not drugs but the mind-altering Zen practice of koan. This meditation allowed him to reach a state of non-attachment regarding “his arid intellectual desire for secular fame and success,” in the words of his biographer (Yusa xviii). Renouncing worldly desire, Nishida next renounced the priority of the concept. Inspired by reading James in 1904, he immersed himself in Being as “pure experience”—what is prior to conceptual appropriation and the split into subject and object. “At the instant of seeing color or hearing sound . . . before even the judgment of what this color or sound is, has been added”—this is what Nishida calls “experience in itself” (qtd. Sharf 21) and James calls “the instant field of the present” when knowledge is still “in transit,” “on its way” to being verified (Writings 2:1175). “Nishida could follow James,” says Herwig Friedl, “because his Zen training had conditioned him” to cope with the permanently “indeterminate term of Being as nothingness,” a no-thing, a mere “that,” perpetually beyond the reach of conceptual modes of awareness. It has to be kept undefined lest it become a separate entity and summon the specter of an epistemology grounded on “aboriginal dualism” (Friedl, “Global” 204). Retrospectively, upon reflection, we rationally reconstruct what we see and hear. But, James, as does Nishida and, later, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, dwells in what rationalism ignores or discredits—the pre-cognitive transitional realm of perception—“a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought” (Writings 2:1175). At least in 1905, however, James restricts pure access to immediacy to “only new-born babes or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows” (“The Thing” 46).
James’s late thinking affirms that life (experience) defeats intelligibility (meaning), a tension that Barthes, a student of Zen, finds fundamental in modernity, especially literature. Literary realism’s “reality effect” turns out to depend on “futile” and “useless” details—a “luxury” of insignificance. Such “superfluous” excess produces potential “vertigo” if not brought to a halt by the imposing of meaning (“The Reality Effect” 141, 145–146). Analogously, if sensory experience “seems to have a meaning, we are at once suspicious of its authenticity,” as Fredric Jameson has recently glossed Barthes. “If it means something it can’t be real; if it is real, it can’t be absorbed by purely mental or conceptual categories” (Jameson 34, 37).
If even as conservative a genre as realism—invested in the solidity of bourgeois reality—possesses an animus to the intelligible, then visionary projects magnify animus to Meaning. The most influential is Rimbaud’s campaign, commencing in 1871, of “making” himself a “seer.” Like James, the poet is drawn to the flux, which the seventeen-year-old prodigy calls “the unknown!”—a forever beckoning non-place of vertiginous immediacy that defies conventional logic and language. “And when, bewildered,” the seer “ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things” (Rimbaud, Complete 307). Afoot with his vision, the poet is in no need of understanding. So relentlessly did Rimbaud ride the momentum of forward movement that before long he left literature altogether, moving past poetic to geographical experiment, abandoning Europe, pushing into places in the Horn of Africa “where no white man had ever yet penetrated” (Starkie 358).
. . .
Literature’s modernity is the (unrealizable) effort, says Paul de Man, to slough off the past and at last to reach a “true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.” “Some of the impatience of Rimbaud or Artaud echoes in all literary texts, no matter how serene and detached they may seem” (148, 152). Artaud’s battle cry is “no more masterpieces.” Art becomes the “enemy of artists,” Sontag explains, because it is practiced “in a world furnished with second-hand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of words” (Introduction 293). As impatient as James with the conceptualizing power of language, Rimbaud’s manic urge for new departures of all kinds marks his commitment to being “absolutely modern.” But even Rimbaud, for all his verbal and psychic tumult, remains a believer in “truth” and hopes to heal a psychical breach inflicted by modernity—the mind/body split that Cartesian rationalism inherits from Christianity: “I shall be free to possess truth in one body and soul,” is how he concludes Une saison en enfer (Complete 209).
To be a seer, says Rimbaud, requires nothing less than a “rational derangement of all the senses” (Complete 307). The oxymoronic “rational derangement” can be regarded as the banner under which Rimbaud sails, suggesting his mix of pagan contempt for Christianity, his breaking of poetry’s referential circuits, and his faith in reason; indeed, he was drawn to the radical politics of the Paris Commune where one splinter group urged the “people” to seize “science”: it is “your conquest, science belongs to you, come and take it” (qtd. Oxenhandler 51). Analogously, Rimbaud’s unprecedented expeditions were not simply acts of visionary rambling but made him a prosperous financier: by 1888 “most of the foreign trade in southern Abyssinia revolved around Rimbaud” (Robb 401).
Rimbaud’s example reminds us of the slippery relation—of opposition and affiliation—between Enlightenment modernity and artistic modernism, a doubleness inevitable given that both are constituted by analogous contradictions that reflect the double imperatives of capitalist modernization—investment in risk, fluidity, experiment co-exists with disciplinary and normalizing regimes of control and organization. Recall that the imperative to make a “new departure” is shared by anti-metaphysical thinkers eager to recover the ground, suspicious of the transcendent, and by logical positivists inspired by Descartes. Modernism at once seeks to repair the psychic damage modernity inflicts and displays an exhilarated mimicry of modernity’s ease with change and innovation. So T. S. Eliot writes poetry of fragments “shored against” the world’s “ruins” while crafting an aesthetic that joins what has been torn asunder—thought and feeling, the intellectual and emotional.
Contrary impulses also shape modern art: a quest for the pure beginning—Pollock’s dream to paint the first painting or Artaud’s ambition to create theatre before “the split between language and flesh” has a flip side in the quest for ending (Sontag, Introduction xxxv). Each pursuit has provided fertile strategies of renunciation. Regarding the effort at ending, Yves-Alain Bois argues that the “whole enterprise of modernism, especially of abstract painting” in the postwar era, “could not have functioned without an apocalyptic myth.” The earlier generation’s “liberation from tradition” could “not but function as an omen of the end.” “Freed from all extrinsic conventions, abstract painting was meant to bring forth the pure parousia [presence] of its own essence, to tell the final truth and thereby terminate its course.” Ad Reinhardt’s “last pain...