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The Pragmatist
WILLIAM JAMES
In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. A Biography.
By Robert D. Richardson.
Illustrated. 622 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $30.
Philosophy is typically represented as a rigorously impersonal business, its participants engaged in a conversation initiated in ancient Greece and pursued still by men and women constructing and evaluating arguments according to dispassionate considerations of soundness. In this view, the flesh-and-blood people involved — their personality and temperament, their history and circumstances — are irrelevant to understanding what it is they are saying as they speak to one another across the centuries. The biography of philosophers has no place in the history of philosophy, and any attempts to say otherwise will be dismissed as “the genetic fallacy.”
But there are mavericks who argue that philosophical positions do not walk abroad disembodied from the person. For them, the hard and subtle business of explicating what a philosopher’s positions truly are — a precondition for evaluating them — gains from delving into the life’s story. For such thinkers, the case of William James is apt to be a sweet one.
It is hard to maintain the illusion of the disembodied philosopher in the face of this larger-than-life and fascinatingly cracked personality, who pragmatically turned the very fissures of his soul into metaphysical positions. William James not only exemplified the suggestion that philosophy is personal; he insisted on it. “Whatever principles he may reason from, and whatever logic he may follow,” he wrote, the philosopher, “is at bottom an advocate pleading to a brief handed over to his intellect by the peculiarities of his nature and the influences in his history that have molded his imagination.”
James’s own philosophical positions were fused with his reactions to the experiences of his life. A deeply divided man who squandered years just trying to decide which profession to pursue, he not only defined “the divided self” as a technical term in psychology, but also wrought out of his own divisions a host of philosophical positions that had as their dominant theme the importance of the individual will in stepping into one’s life and making it one’s life.
To trace the subtle reciprocities between philosophizing and living is the ambitious task that Robert D. Richardson sets himself in his absorbing, if also frustrating, biography “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.” James’s philosophical conclusions played themselves out in a life of such endearing originality as to lead Alfred North Whitehead to call him “that adorable genius,” and he has served as a hero in more than one novel, including my own “Dark Sister.” Richardson goes after the man with the gusto, indefatigability for detail, and, yes, adoration, that William James deserves.
James came from a remarkable family, and so the dauntingness of doing justice to him is compounded by the dauntingness of doing justice to the whole clan. His paternal grandfather, William James of Albany, had come from Ireland and made a fortune in business. This permitted William’s father, Henry James Sr., to be a philosopher in the popular sense of the term, never having to hold down a job. A considerable amount of Henry Sr.’s restless energy was focused on his five children, yielding them a chaotic, peripatetic trans-Atlantic childhood in search of the perfect education. Despite the pedagogical theories of their father, at least two of the children successfully took possession of their genius.
William’s younger brother was Henry James, of whose success William was ambivalently proud, unable to restrain himself from offering the modern master of English prose tips on how to write better, chiding him to say “a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever.” Their younger sister Alice, who shared her two famous brothers’ heightened self-consciousness, spent most of her life as a nervous invalid.
As fascinating as the relations among the siblings are, the central figure in understanding the philosopher remains the paterfamilias, as Richardson makes clear. Henry Sr. was a spiritual picaresque who had suffered in 1844, as a young father living in England, a sudden and dramatic breakdown that he and the family referred to as his “vastation.” It was precipitated by his sensing “some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room ... raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.” Immersion in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic, eventually delivered Henry Sr. from the psychological — he would say the “spiritual” — crisis, and he would always describe his own torments, and those of his five children, in the grandest of metaphysical terms. William and Henry’s younger brother Robertson (whose dyspeptic, ne’er-do-well life suggests what William’s might have been like had he not battled constantly for it to be otherwise) once told William that if there was an afterlife he hoped not to meet their father there, trailing Swedenborgian spirits like translucent fish hooked onto a spectral line.
In “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902), a masterpiece in the psychology of religion, James distinguishes two religious mentalities. There is the “religion of healthy-mindedness,” emanating from those whose “soul is of this sky-blue tint,” whose celebratory attitude toward existence comes naturally. And then there is “the sick soul,” always attentive to the tragic possibilities of life, whose religion provides a fragile solace wrested from the maws of despair. James betrays the tint of his own soul with stunning indirection: “Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”
William James, born in New York City in 1842, had undergone his own “vastation” at the age of 28. He was still groping for his true vocation, even though he had just received his medical degree from Harvard University, where he would eventually end up a venerated and beloved professor of both psychology and philosophy. He came to write about his breakdown, many years later, in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” though he carefully disguised that it was a bloody piece of autobiography (a fact that Richardson, strangely, acknowledges only in an endnote). “The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic fear,” James wrote in “Varieties,” offering an example from a “French correspondent” who describes going “into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there, when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence.” The narrative continues with grim vivacity.
Whereas Henry Sr. battled his demons with mysticism, William wielded philosophical arguments. This led to various philosophical positions — most profoundly, the assertion of the will’s primacy, even in choosing what to believe. “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will,” he recorded in his journal, in 1870.
The key to so much of James’s thought is his hand-to-hand combat with his own sick soul, his (willed) belief that the will can — that it must — insert itself into the fight and determine how the man shall experience the world. The heroic mind, he wrote in his groundbreaking “Principles of Psychology” (1890), “can stand this Universe,” finding “zest in it” by a “pure inward willingness to face the world with those deterrent objects there.” James put his whole will behind willingness, behind seeking zest and standing life.
Unsurprisingly, James’s life was crammed with large-minded activity, vigorously lavished on family, friends, colleagues, students, the public. Richardson gives us a great deal of it, confessing at one point, “His life was exhausting; just tracing it is exhausting.” The author justifies all the quotidian clutter in his biography by claiming that James “didn’t write and think as he did because he lived this way, he lived this way because he thought as he did.” But what is so gripping about the case of William James is that the influences between life and thought flowed forcefully in both directions. It is in using the life to grasp the philosophy that Richardson’s book disappoints. Too often the philosophical positions themselves come out wrong, the emphasis cockeyed, the subtlety subtly missed.
Take, for example, Richardson’s discussion of James’s classic essay “The Will to Believe” (1897). James begins by restating Pascal’s wager, which urges us to place our bets on the existence of God, since there’s everything to win if he does exist and not much to lose if he doesn’t. Richardson gets James’s attitude toward this wager wrong, writing: “James dislikes both the gambling aspect and the coercive logic, which he calls ‘a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the unbelieving heart.’ It is, for him, unconvincing, not possible, a dead option.” Not only is Richardson misusing James’s technical terms of “live and dead options” (which James applied to hypotheses about the world, not argumentative strategies). More importantly, “The Will to Believe” ends by endorsing a smartened-up version of Pascal’s wager, insisting that considering the pay-off of a belief is not “a last desperate snatch” after all, but rather broaches justification. “Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.” James is here adumbrating what would come to be called the “pragmatic theory of truth,” daring us to make “the leap of faith” on its basis, and hardly shying away from coercive logic. “I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped.” Not surprisingly, since he has misinterpreted the logic of the piece, when Richardson comes to state James’s conclusion in this important essay, he falls short.
Richardson credits James with the modern dethronement of Plato — in particular the Platonic assertion that concepts are real, in fact more real than anything else. But this makes too much of James’s place in the Western canon, while at the same time diminishing his radicalism. Others (for example, Aristotle) had long before wrangled with conceptual realism, and this is hardly the aspect that places James “in the maelstrom of American modernism,” as Richardson puts it in his subtitle. Rather, what made James new was his insistence on the ineradicable personal element in philosophy, opening up the possibility of biography’s relevance to the history of philosophy. So it is all the more ironic that this particular biography — in many ways so admirable — fails to grasp James’s truly maverick perspective on philosophy, his psychologically shaped claim that it is psychology that shapes philosophy.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and a novelist. Her latest book is “Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.” She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.