The Jamesian Mind

Sarin Marchetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429639111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

William James (1842–1910) is widely regarded as the founding figure of modern psychology and one of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Renowned for his philosophical theory of pragmatism and memorable turns of phrase, such as 'stream of consciousness' and the 'will to believe', he made enormous contributions to a rich array of philosophical subjects, from the emotions and free will to religion, ethics, and the meaning of life.

The Jamesian Mind covers the major aspects of James's thought, from his early influences to his legacy, with over forty chapters by an outstanding roster of international contributors. It is organized into seven parts:

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• Intellectual Biography
• Psychology, Mind, and Self
• Ethics, Religion, and Politics
• Method, Truth, and Knowledge
• Philosophical Encounters
• Legacy.

In these sections fundamental topics are examined, including James's conceptions of philosophical and scientific inquiry, habit, self, free will and determinism, pragmatism, truth, and pluralism. Considerable attention is also devoted to James in relation to the intellectual traditions of empiricism and Romanticism as well as to such other philosophical schools as utilitarianism, British idealism, Logical Empiricism, and existentialism. James's thought is also situated in an interdisciplinary context, including modernism, sociology, and politics, showcasing his legacy in psychology and ethics.

An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching James's philosophy, The Jamesian Mind will also interest those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, and sociology.

Part I

Intellectual biography

1
William James

A sketch

Linda Simon

DOI: 10.4324/9780429029639-3

William James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, the first child of Henry James (b. 1811) and his wife, Mary (b. 1813), who had married in the summer of 1840. Fifteen months after William’s birth, another son, Henry, was born on April 15, 1843. Eventually the Jameses had five children, with the addition of Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice. Soon after his birth, the infant William and his parents moved to Washington Square, a fine Manhattan neighborhood, where Henry had bought a house from his brother John, and where they were joined by Mary’s unmarried sister, Catharine Walsh, known in the family as Aunt Kate.

Henry James had been a restless and defiant young man who bristled at the authority of his father, William James Sr., a wealthy and influential businessman; educators; and the Calvinist Presbyterian church in which he was raised. At Union College in Schenectady, New York, which his father insisted he attend, Henry had a reputation for drunkenness. At the same time that he acted out rebellion, he was beset by guilt, incited by a severe accident that he suffered at the age of thirteen. Playing with a fireball along with other youngsters, Henry was burnt: his pants leg caught fire, and for two years, physicians tried to save his leg. In the end, however, it was amputated below the knee. Henry saw his suffering as evidence of his own culpability and God’s wrath, and he pointed to that event as generating his overwhelming interest in religion, morality, individual responsibility, and God’s will.

After graduating from Union College, and refusing to bow to his father’s desire that he study to become a lawyer, Henry left for Boston, where he worked for five years. Finally, he decided to follow his older brother William, a minister, by enrolling in Princeton Theological Seminary. Although he had no aspirations to train for the clergy, he hoped to find some enlightenment about the theological and ethical questions that absorbed him.

Princeton, though, proved disappointing, and he dropped out to forge his own intellectual path, becoming what now would be termed an independent scholar, studying, writing, and preparing lectures on religion and philosophy along with marriage and social issues. Early on, he was drawn to the works of eighteenth-century Scottish theologian Robert Sandeman, who had railed against ecclesiastical authority, and in 1838 Henry published, at his own expense, an edition of Sandeman’s essays, followed in 1840 by a pamphlet reflecting his own interpretation of Sandeman’s thought. Neither attracted a readership nor invitations to lecture, and Henry looked enviously on the careers of his contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott. When Henry and Emerson met in 1842, Emerson, at thirty-nine, was already famous, having published Nature and delivered his address “The American Scholar” at Harvard. Henry hoped that Emerson would give him some pointers, but when he invited Emerson to his home after William’s birth, the New England sage instead offered his blessings to the newborn.

Despite Henry’s professional disappointments, the family lived well, supported by a legacy from Henry’s father, who left an estate of more than a million dollars. His two eldest sons, William and Henry, bequeathed a lesser amount than their siblings, successfully contested their father’s will, ensuring an adequate annual income for themselves and their families. Henry did not have to work to support his wife and children: indeed, he denigrated men who sullied themselves in the business world. He saw himself as toiling on a higher plane, but failure to achieve respect and recognition, added to ongoing feelings of self-doubt and guilt, generated bouts of depression.

Frustrated with being ignored by his peers, Henry decided to move to what he hoped would be a more accepting and enriching environment: Europe. In May 1843, Henry, Mary, and Aunt Kate – burdened with children, a nursemaid, and the prodigious amount of baggage required for a lengthy stay – embarked on what would become a familiar pattern: travel to Europe, residence in one country or another, a return to the United States, and yet another trip abroad. Since Henry knew no European languages, they started out in London, where Henry was set on meeting with the scientist Michael Faraday and forging a friendship with Thomas Carlyle, to whom he had a letter of introduction from Emerson. Social connections in London, though, were not as fruitful as he had hoped, and soon Henry gathered up his family for a move to Paris. After a brief, uncomfortable stay there, they returned to England, this time finding a house near Windsor. One night, Henry suffered a sudden bout of anxiety and despair so severe that Mary had to divert her energies from the children to her husband.

Besides Mary’s solicitous attentions, Henry tried the popular therapy of hydropathy, which entailed plunge baths, showers, and cold body wraps. During his water cure, Henry was advised that the unsettling experience he suffered was known as a vastation, a stage of personal regeneration posited by the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who encouraged his followers to give up pride, ambition, and manifestations of selfhood. All men were good, Swedenborg taught, because a divine spirit permeated them and shone through them, and it became one’s duty and obligation to give oneself up to that divine spirit, to refuse to celebrate one’s individuality and assert one’s own identity. Swedenborg’s teaching allowed James to believe in the possibility of leaving guilt and recrimination behind him; returning to America in 1845, James devoted himself to healing himself, publicizing Swedenborg’s philosophy and relying on that philosophy of self-abnegation to guide his children.

The children’s lives were disrupted by the family’s peripatetic way of living: they were educated by a revolving cast of tutors, with whom Henry repeatedly became dissatisfied, or dropped into one school and another; they could not form lasting childhood friendships; and most of all, they grew up surrounded by their father’s anxieties and depression. Henry doted on his two firstborn sons, but at the same time often felt irritated by them. He competed with them for Mary’s attention, which he seemed to need even more than the children.

1. Temperament and vocation

Growing up, William felt the burden of his father’s personal and philosophical struggles. Unlike other boys, whose fathers encouraged them to pursue the law, a business apprenticeship, or higher education in general, Henry forbade William to go to college. No doubt recalling his own undergraduate experience, he saw colleges as hotbeds of decadence; instead, he wanted William to follow in his own footsteps as a philosopher of moral, ethical, and theological issues or, perhaps, to study science with the goal of being a natural philosopher. In a sense, William circled back to his father’s dream for him, but not without significant digressions. He struggled with Henry to affirm his own interpretation of his personality and, broadly speaking, his vocation, and to extricate himself from the self-abnegation that his father so passionately attested.

When he was sixteen, William flirted with the idea of becoming a civil engineer, although he had no real sense of what that profession entailed. Certainly, he would need to get a college education, and he despaired of convincing his father to allow him to do so. Hoping that Henry would relent and allow him to enroll in college, William spent the summer of 1858 studying art in Newport, Rhode Island, where the family had alit, for the time being at least, among many old friends. He found encouragement from William Morris Hunt, an inspiring 34-year old artist whose enthusiasm for creativity and beauty was infectious. William was talented, and he suddenly changed his mind about his future: he would become an artist. But Henry feared that his son was becoming too attached to his art teacher and surely misguided in his attraction to art. Escaping from what Henry saw was a detrimental atmosphere for his children, he dragged the family once again to Europe.

This time, Henry settled them in Geneva, where the children were parceled out to different schools. Returning to his idea of having William become a philosopher-naturalist, Henry enrolled him in preparatory science and mathematics courses. William excelled, as he had in America, but he chafed at his father’s plans for his future; by the end of the summer, he felt, decisively, that he wanted to study art seriously, resuming his lessons with Hunt. William’s desire to return to Newport coincided, fortuitously for him, with Henry’s worry over finances, stemming from a recent financial panic in America. With Europe having become prohibitively expensive, the Jameses headed home.

Once back in Newport, although art engaged him, William now had a chance to observe how artists (Hunt and John LaFarge) labored to make a living, having to attract commissions for portraits or clients to purchase paintings. Being an artist was one thing; surviving as an artist was another, and William decided that he was not talented, or driven, enough to succeed. Instead, he swung in an entirely different direction: to science. In 1861, his father agreed to a new plan: William could attend the Lawrence Scientific School. With Abraham Lincoln calling for volunteers to fight against the Confederacy, it may well be that Henry struck an agreement with his son: if William stayed out of the war, he would allow him to enroll in an institution of higher education.

While his family remained in Newport, William, boarding in Cambridge, confronted the challenge of the Lawrence Scientific School – and of deciding about his vocational future – alone. He was impressed with professors who included anatomists Jeffries Wyman and Asa Gray, chemist Charles Eliot, and Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, and he happily engaged in Cambridge social life. Nevertheless, he stayed at the school only three semesters and focused on chemistry. He then took a semester’s leave, during which he read science on his own and dealt with the physical and psychological symptoms that would recur throughout his life during times of stress: eyestrain, back pain, digestive problems, headaches, and despondency. When he returned to the Lawrence Scientific School in 1863, he gravitated to Wyman’s field of anatomy and physiology, at the same time beset with indecision about his future. Early in the semester, writing to his cousin Katharine Prince, he lamented “the awful responsibility” of choosing a profession. “I have 4 alternatives: Natural History, Medecine [sic], Printing, Beggary.” Infected by his family’s ongoing concerns about how much he was spending, he was acutely aware of the need to be financially independent. “Medecine wd. pay, and I shd still be dealing with subjects wh. interest me – but how much drudgery, and of what an unpleasant kind is there!” (C4: 81). By November, his anxiety was intense: “I feel very much the importance of making soon a final choice of my business in life,” he wrote to his mother. He was torn between science, which he saw as “the pure pursuit of truth” – although, as his father’s pursuit of truth so amply demonstrated, not remunerative – and medicine, a profession that might enable him to support himself and, perhaps, a wife and family (C4: 85–86). By the end of the semester, likely with the advice of Jeffries Wyman, who himself had a medical degree, he made a decision. In February 1864, William reluctantly entered Harvard Medical School.

Medical education was disappointing from the start. In the mid-nineteenth century, the training of physicians in America was inadequate, with Harvard being no exception: there were no admission requirements, no application process, and poor facilities. A staff of part-time professors – physicians and surgeons – offered lectures in subjects that included materia medica, obstetrics, and anatomy; lab work consisted of dissection of a cadaver. There were no written exams, no grades, and no pretense about the teaching of science. “My first impressions,” William wrote, “are that there is much humbug therein, and that, with the exception of surgery in wh. s’thing positive is somewhat accomplished, a doctor does more by the moral effect of his presence on the patient & family than by any thing else. He also extracts money from them” (C4: 90).

Along with medical studies, William pursued his interest in anatomy and physiology on his own, which resulted in a review of Thomas Huxley’s Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy. Accepted for the North American Review, it revealed William’s engagement with Darwin’s thought and also marked his beginnings as a published writer. William praised Huxley for his “faith in the doctrine of Transmutation of Species” (ECR: 197) as well as his acknowledgment of the distinction between synthesists (“theorists, who require their knowledge to be organized into some sort of unity”) and analysts (“actualists, who are quite contented to know things as isolated and individual, who see differences rather than resemblances”; ECR: 199). Throughout his career, James would return to examine, and struggle with, this tension between the desire for unity and the acceptance, and even celebration, of “individual excentricity” (ECR: 199).

As he had done when attending the Lawrence Scientific School, William interrupted his medical education, this time to sign on as a student volunteer to accompany the famous naturalist and anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz on an eight-month scientific expedition to Brazil, with the goal of collecting fish specimens for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The trip was arduous: William contracted a mild form of smallpox, which hospitalized him for several weeks, and travels through the tropics forced him to confront a harsh, enervating climate. Paddling on the Amazon, making forays into local communities, and encountering the native population, William proved to himself that he had the energy and grit required of him, but not the commitment to the intense fieldwork that he would need to undertake if he pursued a career as a naturalist.

2. Distress and relief

When he returned to America in 1866, too late for the medical school semester, he once again was overcome with agitation about his future. As his father had done so many times before, William tried to assuage his distress by going to Europe. From April 1867 to November 1868, in Dresden, at spas in Teplitz and Divonne, and in Berlin, he read, wrote reviews, and tried to find relief from severe backache, depression, and anxiety. To his friend Henry Bowditch, he confided his worries about the future. “Of course I can never hope to practice,” he wrote in December, 1867, “but I shall graduate on my return, and perhaps pick up a precarious and needy living by doing work for medical periodicals or something of that kind, tho’ I hate writing as I do the foul fiend.” He could not do laboratory work, which meant he could not teach physiology, pathology, or anatomy. “I’ll tell you what let’s do!” he wrote. “Set up a partnership, you to run around and attend to the patients’ while I will stay and home and read everything imaginable in Eng., Germ., & French, distil it in a concentrated form into your mind” (C4: 235). It would be, he thought, a brilliant arrangement.

James’s despondency and symptoms persisted after his return, after he resumed his medical studies, and after he finally graduated. He tried blistering, galvanism, and the hypnotic drug chloral, just as he had tried water cure in Germany; he tried keeping to a routine; he tried rest. Nothing alleviated his symptoms, which intensified once he was ensconced in his family’s home, and especially after the death of his beloved cousin, Minny Temple, in March 1870, a loss that shattered him. The following month, however, in the work of French philosopher Charles Renouvier, James made a life-altering discovery in Renouvier’s definition of free will: the choice to sustain one thought rather than another. As James famously confessed in his diary, his first act of free will was to believe in free will.

He was determined to cultivate habits and outlook that would lift him from despair, which included accepting a job. In 1872, when Bowditch tapped James to replace him for one year as a teacher of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, James agreed, and in January 1873, he taught his first course. He was surprised at how much he enjoyed teaching, which he found both “very interesting and stimulating.” “I should think it not unpleasant as a permanent thing,” he wrote to his brother Henry. “The authority is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• William James: a philosopher without theories
• Part I Intellectual biography
• Part II Psychology, mind, and self
• Part III Ethics, religion, and politics
• Part IV Method, truth, and knowledge
• Part V Philosophical encounters
• Part VI Legacy
• Index