Part 1
IN 1908 TWO years before his death William James is closing the book, renouncing âwords, words, words,â as Hamlet wearily, wittily says when asked what he is reading. As a young man he was haunted by Shakespeareâs Prince, with whom he shared a guilty sense of indecisiveness, in the philosopherâs case exacerbated by sitting out the Civil War at his fatherâs insistence (Cotkin 33). Though he balks at literally closing the book on and of words, Jamesâs need to âreturn to lifeâ 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 âarrest[s]â life, âcutting it up into bits as if with scissors,â so inveterately are they âretrospective and post mortemâ (Writings 2:739). Concepts function to generalize, to classify, and hence devour particularity: âA concept means a that-and-no-otherâ (746). It leaves no remainder, no âfringe,â no âmuchness,â the excess James esteems as precious freedom. As if recalling Emersonâs praise of silenceââif I speak, I define, I confine, and am lessââhe offers his own silent conduct as an âexampleâ to imitate: âNo words of mine will probably convert you, for words can be the name only of conceptsâ; âthe return to life canât come about by talking. It is an actâ (Emerson, Essays 426; James, Writings 2:762â763). Anticipating Wittgensteinâs 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, âseduces you . . . heâs a real magicianâ (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 âgreat systemâ with the Ă©lan vital as its metaphysical foundation, James welcomes his life philosophy as a deathblow to âintellectualism,â 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 âthe inner life of the fluxâ that he gainsays (while granting) the cost of abandoning himself to the non-conceptual: âBoth theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest of our human prerogativesâ (Writings 2:728). Hence he admits that to renounce concepts is to âregressâ and shed our âproud maturity.â But âdifficult as such a revolution is, there is no other wayâ (755). And with equal resolution he vows to âcloseâ his âearsâ to the âintellectualist.â
James has imprisoned himself in a stifling dichotomy: either submit to the âconceptual decomposition of lifeâ or dive into the flux of âimmediate experienceâ (747, 749). About this impasse, a philosopher friend wrote him: âIs choice limited to these alternatives? Here I think is the crux of the whole problem.â The friend mentions that âconcepts are of various sorts,â noting Hegelâs âconcrete universalâ and adds that Kant speaks of a kind of concept that has âno fixed limitsââapparently an allusion to the âaesthetic ideaâ (James, Correspondence 10:322â323). But James seems willfully to insist on his either/or. He certainly wants no help from Kant: âThink of the german literature of aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre!â he fumes in another lecture (Writings 2:638). After all, Kantâs âaesthetic ideaâ 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, âas we need both our legs to walk with,â and urged that we treat concepts functionally, as leading us back to realityâs 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; âwe are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense.â He elaborates his simile: the sea is the âworld of sensible factsâ and the air above is the âworld of abstract ideasâ; both are real and they interact. Though we are âunable to breatheâ the air of abstract ideas âpure,â we âget our oxygen from itâ while the âlocusâ of âeverything that happens to usâ is the water of experience (Writings 2:541). Here James offers what he will jettison in his Hibbert Lecturesâthe reciprocal interaction of a homeostatic system in which neither abstract reasoning nor âunverbalized lifeâ rule (755). But his deliberate simplification doesnât make any less significantâindeed makes more intriguingâhis need to stage a renunciation of words and become a child again as a way to honor the non-conceptual. His willingness to âregressâ is a kind of martyrdom to his belief in âthe fact that life is logically irrationalâ (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 Harvardâs aloofness from âthe tangled and muddyâ hard facts of life. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he decried how âwealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generationâ and hence âwe have grown literally afraid to be poor.â He envies monksâ poverty as an enactment of the âstrenuous lifeâ absent from the modern world, and praises âthe right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsiblyâ (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 âpovertyâ as redemptive in ways that recall Meister Eckhart and his praise of the riches of spiritual poverty in his famous sermon âBlessed Are the Poor in Spirit.â Josiah Royce had already drawn his colleague Jamesâs attention to Eckhart in a chapter devoted to him in Studies in Good and Evil (1898).
James found philosophy less a consolation than a âmaze . . . and what he was looking for was the way out,â as his colleague Santayana noted, quipping that James remained âa sort of Irishman among the Brahminsâ (Character and Opinion 62â63). 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 âthe triumph of the Darwinian theory,â was, finally, an anti-philosophy that mocked what his colleagues revered: the rationalist mindâs love of system. In all this James shows kinship with Nietzsche. Of philosophers Nietzsche remarks: âTheir trust in concepts has been as unconditional as their mistrust of the sensesâ (12). Jamesâs word for this mistrust of the senses is ârefinement,â both as a defensive refuge in abstraction and as an insulating patrician value.
Jamesâs attraction to irrationalism in 1908, his need to shed maturity, point back to possible roots in an earlier renunciationâof 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 âthe murdered self,â referring to the violent imagery of Jamesâs own drawings at the time of his decision to quit painting; in one, an ogre devours a man whole (Feinstein 144). Jamesâs 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 aestheticâthe non-conceptual. âIt ought to be called a âDefense of Poesy,ââ noted Jamesâs friend John Jay Chapman (after hearing the Hibbert Lecture on Bergson), a shrewd remark that grasped the relation between the aesthetic and Jamesâs impatience with concepts (Chapman 231).
It is a defense of painting, as well. Listen to Jamesâs lyrical evocations and pleas to âplace 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.â His diction suggests a moving hand in the act of making brush and pencil strokes, achieving an âactive thicknessâ as the touch of the brush smears viscous paint onto canvas (Writings 2:750â751). Who more than the working artist or artisan feels from literally hands-on experience that âwhat really exists is not things made but things in the makingâ? I am seeking âthe instantaneous,â said Jamesâs contemporary, the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, âto see the world through the eyes of a man born blind who has suddenly regained his sight: as a pattern of nameless color patchesâ (qtd. McEvilley, Exileâs 18).
While Jamesâs 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 âtransitiveâ rhythms of languageââalternation of flights and perchingsââthat evoke experience âfringed forever by a more that continuously developsâ (Writings 1:159; 2:1173). He seeks to explode âthe ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things.â In this same passage he sums up what he is âso anxious to pressâ on our âattentionâ: âthe reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental lifeâ (Writings 1:164). These commitments to âpossibles not yet in our present sightâ would capture the imaginations of Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, all Harvard students influenced by Jamesâs 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. Jamesâs reanimation of the act of painting also looks backâto a pre-Enlightenment era when image, not word, had affective power. The medieval iconâthe image as âimmediate evidence of Godâs presenceââchallenged the traditional privilege accorded Godâs word in Scripture. The Reformation, by reinstituting the priority of languageââonly the abstract word . . . is the bridge to God,â John Calvin insistedâenthroned 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 Jamesâs 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 âa language designed for the sensesâ and âindependent of speech,â where sonority rather than grammatical meaning has priority, a âconcrete languageâ of sounds, gestures, pantomime expressed in the bodies of the actors (231â233). To help himself reach a preverbal consciousness Artaud experimented with peyote. James himself tried nitrous oxide to âstimulate the mystical consciousness,â his experience of trance verifying his belief that our ânormal 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 differentâ (Writings 2:349). His last published essay celebrated the thought of the âpluralistic mysticâ Benjamin Paul Blood (reason, Blood wrote, âis but an item in the duplex potency of the mysteryâ) and James concluded with the imperative that âPhilosophy must pass from words . . . to life itselfâ (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 âhis arid intellectual desire for secular fame and success,â 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 âpure experienceââwhat is prior to conceptual appropriation and the split into subject and object. âAt the instant of seeing color or hearing sound . . . before even the judgment of what this color or sound is, has been addedââthis is what Nishida calls âexperience in itselfâ (qtd. Sharf 21) and James calls âthe instant field of the presentâ when knowledge is still âin transit,â âon its wayâ to being verified (Writings 2:1175). âNishida could follow James,â says Herwig Friedl, âbecause his Zen training had conditioned himâ to cope with the permanently âindeterminate term of Being as nothingness,â a no-thing, a mere âthat,â 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 âaboriginal dualismâ (Friedl, âGlobalâ 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 discreditsâthe pre-cognitive transitional realm of perceptionââa simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thoughtâ (Writings 2:1175). At least in 1905, however, James restricts pure access to immediacy to âonly new-born babes or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blowsâ (âThe Thingâ 46).
Jamesâs late thinking affirms that life (experience) defeats intelligibility (meaning), a tension that Barthes, a student of Zen, finds fundamental in modernity, especially literature. Literary realismâs âreality effectâ turns out to depend on âfutileâ and âuselessâ detailsâa âluxuryâ of insignificance. Such âsuperfluousâ excess produces potential âvertigoâ if not brought to a halt by the imposing of meaning (âThe Reality Effectâ 141, 145â146). Analogously, if sensory experience âseems to have a meaning, we are at once suspicious of its authenticity,â as Fredric Jameson has recently glossed Barthes. âIf it means something it canât be real; if it is real, it canât be absorbed by purely mental or conceptual categoriesâ (Jameson 34, 37).
If even as conservative a genre as realismâinvested in the solidity of bourgeois realityâpossesses an animus to the intelligible, then visionary projects magnify animus to Meaning. The most influential is Rimbaudâs campaign, commencing in 1871, of âmakingâ himself a âseer.â Like James, the poet is drawn to the flux, which the seventeen-year-old prodigy calls âthe unknown!ââa forever beckoning non-place of vertiginous immediacy that defies conventional logic and language. âAnd when, bewildered,â the seer âends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable thingsâ (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 âwhere no white man had ever yet penetratedâ (Starkie 358).
. . .
Literatureâs modernity is the (unrealizable) effort, says Paul de Man, to slough off the past and at last to reach a âtrue present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.â âSome of the impatience of Rimbaud or Artaud echoes in all literary texts, no matter how serene and detached they may seemâ (148, 152). Artaudâs battle cry is âno more masterpieces.â Art becomes the âenemy of artists,â Sontag explains, because it is practiced âin a world furnished with second-hand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of wordsâ (Introduction 293). As impatient as James with the conceptualizing power of language, Rimbaudâs manic urge for new departures of all kinds marks his commitment to being âabsolutely modern.â But even Rimbaud, for all his verbal and psychic tumult, remains a believer in âtruthâ and hopes to heal a psychical breach inflicted by modernityâthe mind/body split that Cartesian rationalism inherits from Christianity: âI shall be free to possess truth in one body and soul,â is how he concludes Une saison en enfer (Complete 209).
To be a seer, says Rimbaud, requires nothing less than a ârational derangement of all the sensesâ (Complete 307). The oxymoronic ârational derangementâ can be regarded as the banner under which Rimbaud sails, suggesting his mix of pagan contempt for Christianity, his breaking of poetryâs 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 âpeopleâ to seize âscienceâ: it is âyour conquest, science belongs to you, come and take itâ (qtd. Oxenhandler 51). Analogously, Rimbaudâs unprecedented expeditions were not simply acts of visionary rambling but made him a prosperous financier: by 1888 âmost of the foreign trade in southern Abyssinia revolved around Rimbaudâ (Robb 401).
Rimbaudâs example reminds us of the slippery relationâof opposition and affiliationâbetween Enlightenment modernity and artistic modernism, a doubleness inevitable given that both are constituted by analogous contradictions that reflect the double imperatives of capitalist modernizationâinvestment in risk, fluidity, experiment co-exists with disciplinary and normalizing regimes of control and organization. Recall that the imperative to make a ânew departureâ 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 modernityâs ease with change and innovation. So T. S. Eliot writes poetry of fragments âshored againstâ the worldâs âruinsâ while crafting an aesthetic that joins what has been torn asunderâthought and feeling, the intellectual and emotional.
Contrary impulses also shape modern art: a quest for the pure beginningâPollockâs dream to paint the first painting or Artaudâs ambition to create theatre before âthe split between language and fleshâ 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 âwhole enterprise of modernism, especially of abstract paintingâ in the postwar era, âcould not have functioned without an apocalyptic myth.â The earlier generationâs âliberation from traditionâ could ânot but function as an omen of the end.â âFreed 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.â Ad Reinhardtâs âlast pain...