The Philosophy of William James: Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism 1442223049, 9781442223042

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Preface
1 The Role of Pure Experience
2 Distinguishing Self from World
3 Knowledge of a Common World
4 Islands of Awareness
5 The Alleged Bankruptcy of Traditional Empiricisms
6 Sensate and Causal Aspects of Experience
7 Experience and Emotion
8 Experience and Value
9 Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The Philosophy of William James

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The Philosophy of William James Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism

Donald A. Crosby

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, inc. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4422-2304-2 (cloth : alk, paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-2305-9 (electronic)

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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For My Friend and Colleague Wayne Viney In gratitude for our many years of conversing, teaching, and writing about the philosophy and psychology of William James

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Contents

Preface

ix

Chapter 1

The Role of Pure Experience

1

Chapter 2

Distinguishing Self from World

15

Chapter 3

Knowledge of a Common World

31

Chapter 4

Islands of Awareness

45

Chapter 5

The Alleged Bankruptcy of Traditional Empiricisms

59

Chapter 6

Sensate and Causal Aspects of Experience

75

Chapter 7

Experience and Emotion

91

Chapter 8

Experience and Value

105

Chapter 9

Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism

121

Notes

147

Works Cited

155

Index

161

About the Author

167

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Preface

One of the deepest mysteries confronted by philosophers and other inquisitive thinkers is the mystery of the nature and actions of the human self and the relations of the self to the human body and the world. It is far from being clear at present, for example, how a three-pound, meaty, multifolded human brain, in concert with an elaborate network of nerve fibers and other physical systems throughout the body, and in their relations to the world beyond the body, can support or give rise to conscious awareness and its feelings, imaginings, beliefs, conceptions, strivings, purposes, decisions, and creations. Medically trained Harvard anatomist, psychologist, and philosopher William James (1842–1910) devoted a great deal of thought to this mystery. He was not so much interested in attempting finally to solve the mystery as to approach it in refreshingly novel and interesting ways and to warn us against overly simplistic modes of conceiving and trying to unravel it. James was especially concerned to expose to critical scrutiny assumptions about the self and its relations to the world that lead us astray and bar us from directing our inquiries toward the concreteness, depth, and fullness of experience in all of its dimensions. He was a relentless foe of the reduction of mental processes to the theoretical descriptions of physics and of the kind of materialistic metaphysics that is committed to the causal closure of the physical and that can thus find no place for genuinely free, reason-guided choices by the human self among relevant alternatives. He was profoundly open to and respectful of theories and findings in the natural sciences such as those of Newtonian physics, Darwinian biology, and the neurophysiological researches

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of his day, but he was insistent throughout his life that these developments and findings be supplemented with what he regarded as perceptive insights and critical perspectives of other important fields of thought and awareness such as the arts, morality, religion, and philosophy. Above all, he insisted that those who are committed to thinking deeply about the self and its relations to the world should stay in constant close touch with the disclosures, practices, and demands of ordinary, day-to-day life. He wanted to develop a philosophy that was not just carefully thought about and critically defended but that could also be successfully put into practice and lived. My principal focus in this book is on the philosophy of William James as it relates to his conceptions of “pure” and ordinary experience, the respective natures of self and world, and the interrelations of experience, self, and world.1 I provide explications and critical interpretations of these themes in James’s philosophy and, when I think appropriate, make substantive suggestions for their clarification and improvement. I defend the thesis that these themes offer a promising basis for building a credible philosophy of mind and its relations to the world. They are an excellent starting point or springboard for such a philosophy, although they should not and cannot be considered a place to stop or remain. Along the way I consider some recent objections to empiricism as an epistemological program and defend empiricism in general and James’s brand of empiricism in particular (what he called radical empiricism) against these objections. Finally, I argue the need for a greatly expanded, enriched, and multidimensional version of a materialistic metaphysics and contend that such metaphysics can be fully integrated with James’s philosophy of radical empiricism. It can be so despite his fervent objections to the much narrower Newtonian conception of materialism he tended to take for granted and that was widely assumed in his time. This constricted, mechanical, oneeyed, and outmoded view of matter and its functions continues to contribute substantially toward making the inescapable fact of consciousness and its routinely experienced capabilities the intractable hard problem for a nondualistic philosophy of mind that it is generally considered to be in our own day. Readers should regard this book as an excursus into the exciting ideas of an extremely original and suggestive thinker, William James. But they should also see it as an invitation to reason both critically and imaginatively about a central problem in philosophy that has both metaphysical and epistemological import and that bears crucially on the whole of life, namely, the problem of the conscious human self and its relations. The problem can be broken down into questions such as the following:

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Who and what am I as a conscious self? How do I relate to my body? How can I distinguish between what is in me and what is in the world? How do I and my body relate to the world, including the world of other selves? What is the relation of experience in its various guises to my conceptualizations, beliefs, purposes, and values? How is it possible for me to know anything, either about myself or the world, and how can I tell when I or others are thinking, or are on the path of thinking, reliably and veridically? What is matter, and what is the relation of matter and mind? Am I free, and if so, what is the extent of my freedom? What ought I to aspire to become as an individual self? What sort of world of the future should I envision, contribute to, and work toward, and why?

James’s discussions of these and related questions and his proposed answers to them are thoughtful and insightful. They can stimulate us to think critically about who we are and have the potential to become as conscious selves, what are our relations to our physical and cultural environments, and how we should go about living our lives both individually and in relation to others. His answers to the questions he poses are not indisputable or final, nor did he intend or hope for them to be seen as such. But they provide provocative, open-ended context and motivation for us to probe ever more persistently into the questions he has posed. No better service could be provided by any philosopher. In the first four chapters of this book I describe and critically evaluate in turn four interrelated features of the philosophy of William James: his contention that “pure experience” and reality come down to the same thing; his way of distinguishing self (or conscious mind) and world within the field of pure experience; his analysis of how two (or more) minds can have knowledge of particular nonmental things; and his interpretation of how and to what extent two minds can know one another. These four features are so closely connected to one another in James’s philosophy that explication and critical analysis of any one of them require for adequate intelligibility specific reference to the other three. The main source for the descriptive parts of these chapters is the collection of previously published writings by James brought together after his death by Ralph Barton Perry in 1912 and entitled Essays in Radical Empiricism (James 1976), but I shall also refer to other works of James when appropriate.

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I bring under critical discussion in chapter 5 and a part of chapter 6 the question of the continuing credibility of empiricism as such in philosophy, a topic that has been much discussed and disputed in the years following James’s presentation of the brand of empiricism he terms radical empiricism. I contend that empiricism of the Jamesian sort not only continues to be a plausible option in philosophy but that it deserves recognition as a credible approach to knowledge of oneself and the world, and of the relations of human selves to one another in the world. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 examine the roles and interrelations of sensation, causation, emotion, freedom, and value in James’s radical empiricism. Chapter 9 is the construction of a case for the consistency of James’s philosophy of radical empiricism with an expanded and multidimensional conception of matter I call radical materialism. On this basis, I defend the thesis that James’s philosophy is perfectly compatible with a materialistic metaphysics, so long as we are willing to recognize matter to be everything it has shown itself over evolutionary time and in its manifold configurations to be capable of accomplishing or producing. In other words, matter is what matter does. And part of what it does, at least in some of its evolved and highly organized forms, is to be alive and aware, to feel and think, to intend and plan, to exert effort and experience resistance—in short, to function as life and mind. The discussions in this final chapter are placed in the context of some continuing quandaries in contemporary physics and of recent emergentist views of life and mind. While I am sympathetic with the general outlook of James’s philosophy, as can readily be seen in the focus, tone, and content of this book, I seek to cast important new light on themes discussed and interrelated in the book. For example, I • contend for a purely epistemological (and not metaphysical) interpretation of James’s concept of pure experience; • claim that pure experience is not some kind of single amorphous reservoir independent of individual persons; • demonstrate that experience does not require a prior experiencer; • exhibit that radical empiricism and pragmatism are in no way opposed but are aspects of a single, entirely consistent outlook; • discuss, amplify, and exemplify James’s contention that emotions can be ways of knowing and not just of subjective, self-contained feeling; • expose the fallaciousness of simple-minded and wildly misleading interpretations of James’s so-called will to believe;

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• show why it would be impossible, on James’s ground, for two firsthand experiences to coalesce into one; • respond to the charge that James is a closet Cartesian; • defend the continuing viability of empiricism, and James’s brand of empiricism in particular, against contemporary critics of empiricism as an epistemological approach or program; • provide support of my own for indeterminism and noncompatibilist freedom, complementing that of James’s; • contend that consciousness and mind are not confined to the brain but are functions of the whole bodily organism in its relations to the external environment, including the social and cultural environment (in keeping with the insistence of writers such as W. Teed Rockwell, Alva Noë, Michael S. Gazzaniga, and Evan Thompson, whose works are discussed or cited); • insist that matter is what matter does and illustrate the wide variety of things it does; • endeavor to show the compatibility of radical empiricism with what I call radical materialism and with new perspectives brought to bear on the concept of matter in such areas as contemporary physics, emergentist biology, and neurophysiology; • make a case for a multidisciplinary approach to an adequate understanding of the potentialities, functions, and manifestations of matter, one that is especially cognizant of the contribution philosophy can make in this regard. Thus, while my views of James’s philosophy are mostly positive, I have tried throughout to clarify, elaborate, defend, critique, or revise—not just take for granted—significant aspects of his outlook. This book is dedicated to an esteemed friend and fellow admirer of the philosophy and psychology of William James, psychologist and historian of psychology Wayne Viney. He and I jointly taught a graduate course called “The Psychology and Philosophy of William James,” wrote articles and presented papers at conferences together, gave presentations and led discussions in each other’s classes at Colorado State University, and traveled together to study manuscripts of James’s writings in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. We have had and continue to have many fascinating conversations over the years regarding James’s ideas. Wayne went through an early draft of this book with conscientious care and gave me valuable detailed advice concerning the writing of it. His gracious willingness to spend time

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talking and working with me about our shared interest in James stands in my mind as a shining example of collegiality and interdisciplinary engagement. Philosophers George Allan, Donald Dryden, Jennifer Hansen, and Robert E. Innis read drafts of this book with keen critical eyes, as did an anonymous reader for Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, noting places where arguments needed to be improved, pertinent references made, examples provided, and inconsistencies or unclarities resolved. They also made valuable suggestions about the book’s organization. I gratefully acknowledge their invaluable help and support. I also thank my wife Pam for the many enjoyable hours we have spent together reading aloud and talking about James’s writings. It was in one such session that the idea occurred to me of writing a paper on James’s concept of the self that eventually grew into this book. Pam’s observations and questions about James’s arguments and ideas were always stimulating and well-directed. She read through the manuscript of this book, sometimes going through different versions of particular chapters, and offered many helpful criticisms and suggestions for the book’s improvement. I am of course entirely responsible for the final result—rough edges and all—but I have been greatly aided by these persons along the way.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Role of Pure Experience

“Pure experience” is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes only the material to our later reflection, with its conceptual categories. —William James (1976: 46)

We begin our investigations with the theme of this initial chapter, which is James’s conception of pure experience and the pivotal role it plays in his philosophy. His terse definition of pure experience is contained in the epigraph to the present chapter, but he hastens to add that its “purity,” in the contexts of normal, everyday, non-pure experience “is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies” (James 1976: 46). This statement about unverbalized or unconceptualized experience will be seen to have particular importance for our discussion of the viability of empiricism as an epistemological outlook and program in chapters 5 and 6, because were there no distinction between experience and its conceptualizations, experience as such would be left with no standing as a test of the adequacy of current conceptualizations or as a source of bold new insights and understandings. Experience and conceptualization would then be blended indissolubly together. Their complete, unqualified entanglement would allow no independent role for experience as over against conceptual theorizations or interpretations. The idea of at least relatively pure experience, on the other hand, allows us to envision the distinct possibility of a newly noted, freshly emphasized, or previously unconceptualized aspect of 1

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experience coming to stand in contrast with and in that way to challenge the appropriateness of one or more of the taken-for-granted, familiar, and hitherto unquestioned ways of understanding, organizing, and interpreting experience. Philosopher of mind Evan Thompson helps us to comprehend James’s concept of pure experience when he talks of what he calls “prereflective bodily self-consciousness.” The “bodily” part of his terminology will have to await my later discussions of the relations of mind and body in James’s (and Thompson’s) thought. But the notion of “prereflective consciousness,” as Thompson also refers to it, is highly germane to James’s idea of pure experience and gives us a good sense of the latter’s importance for understanding our experiences of ourselves and the world. “The term prereflective is useful,” Thompson urges, “because it has both a logical and a temporal sense. Prereflective experience is logically prior to reflection, for reflection presupposes something to reflect upon; and it is temporally prior to reflection, for what one reflects upon is a hitherto unreflected experience” (2007: 249–50). Similarly for James, pure experience is the diffuse field of awareness from which focused items of attention and conceptualization are drawn and thus operates as the logically transcendent precondition, context, or background for the latter’s intelligibility and meaning. And pure experience is temporally prior to all selections and conceptualizations because their occurrence requires an already existent impetus and basis for what is sorted out and reflected upon. James adamantly insists that no set of conceptual categories, however ingenious or refined, is or can be adequate to capture the fullness of experience in all of its dimensions and depths. We always experience more than we can clearly state, analyze, or explain. The necessary excess of felt but unverbalized resonances of meaning in every particular experience points toward the all-encompassing, inexhaustible reality of pure experience. Within the field of pure experience there are, he tells us, teeming multitudes of thats which are not yet whats (James 1976: 8). These are particular details, units, or aspects of experience that have not been sorted into conceptual categories and relations even though they may qualify for such sorting. Pure experience is a vast swarm of unnamed particulars in continual flux, a confusing mélange of connections and disconnections, similarities and differences, interfusions and separations. In his book A Pluralistic Universe, James contrasts the “thickness” of experienced reality with an implied thinness of any or all of the concepts we use at any time to explore and explicate its character and meanings (James 1996a: 250–51, 261). In his essay “The World of Pure Experience” he declares that “our fields of experience,” properly understood, “have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed for-

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ever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds” (James 1976: 35). Bruce Wilshire nicely captures the plausibility of this notion when he states, “At every waking moment of our lives there is a margin of things known vaguely. James wants to grasp the environment in which we actually live—that which shades off on all sides into the dense, opaque, and vague; that which lies in the corner of the eye” (Wilshire 1968: 200). Pure experience is James’s term for what the world would be like for us humans or any other kinds of creature if we or they had no organs of perception or discrimination, no memories or expectations, no capacity for sorting or selecting, no conscious powers of acting or interacting, no sense of what is important or unimportant at given times or circumstances amid the teeming flow of things. In such an imagined world of inexhaustible, incomprehensible density and complexity, no creature could survive, find its way, or leave progeny in the world. We humans cannot live the whole or experience the whole; we can only cope with parts of the whole. Our senses themselves are at bottom, James observes in The Principles of Psychology, “organs of selection,” and they enable us to ignore “as completely as if they did not exist” most of the welter of goings-on present to us at any moment (James 1950: I, 284). Those parts of potential experience we either instinctively or consciously select for focus and attention are surrounded by a penumbra of all that is not focused upon or attended to, a penumbra that shades off into the murkiness of a stupendously vast and ever-changing experiential world. In his widely influential 1890 work The Principles of Psychology James anticipates the penumbral character and all-pervading influence he was later to attribute to pure experience. He notes there, in a style of considering various theses about the concept of the unconscious mind and replies to those theses, that [m]ost of our knowledge is at all times potential. We act in accordance with the whole drift of what we have learned, but few items rise into consciousness at the time. Many of them, however, we may recall at will. All this cooperation of unrealized principles and facts, of potential knowledge, with our actual thought is quite inexplicable unless we suppose the perpetual existence of an immense mass of ideas in an unconscious state, all of them exerting a steady pressure and influence upon our conscious thinking, and many of them in such continuity with it as ever and anon to become conscious themselves. (James 1950: I, 167)

The stress in this passage is upon ideas conceived in the past but not now present in the conscious mind, while James’s later theory of pure experience

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gives primary emphasis to items of flowing and fleeting experience that are unsorted and devoid of conceptualization. Still, the passage in The Principles contains some of the flavor and suggests to an important extent the role he attributes to pure experience in his later thought. James also tries to suggest to us something of the nature of the chaotic and undiscriminated world of pure experience when he compares it to the hazy, blurred consciousness of “new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows” (James 1976: 46). In his considered view, such a world must be presupposed as the diffuse but necessary background and setting of all conscious cerebration. E. H. Gombrich makes a point about the art of painting that bears some resemblance to James’s observations when he says, [I]n principle . . . all attempts to copy nature must lead to the demand of representing the infinite. The amount of information reaching us from the visible world is incalculably large, and the artist’s medium is inevitably restricted and granular. Even the most meticulous realist can accommodate only a limited number of marks on his panel, and though he may try to smooth out the transition between his dabs of paint beyond the threshold of visibility, in the end he will always have to rely on suggestion when it comes to representing the infinitely small. (Gombrich 2000: 219–20)

Our optical experience is another reminder of this inescapable fact of the need for selection of relatively small aspects of a more vast and encompassing whole in order to make sense of things, as the following passage from an article by Marcus E. Raichle indicates: “Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, the equivalent of 10 billion parts per second arrives on the retina at the back of the eye. Because the optic nerve attached to the retina has only a million output connections, just six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only 10,000 bits per second make it to the visual cortex” (Raichle 2010: 47). In similar fashion for James, the specificity and selectivity of our day-to-day perceptive and other kinds of experience can only hope to bring into focus a tiny part of the inexhaustible richness and complexity of pure experience. Another way to think about James’s notion of pure experience is to use the analogy of radio waves. Large numbers of radio programs are being broadcast over the air at any given time. If we were to try to tune them all in at once, all we would get is a static-ridden cacophony of sound, that is, meaningless noise. We can tune into, and in that way receive, only one program at a time. Similarly, pure experience is a chaos of potential sensations and meanings and can be rendered into something actually meaningful to us only

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when we are able to select out aspects of it in particular contexts of inquiry, purpose, or use. James’s point in setting up the conception of pure experience is not that it is devoid of implicit structures or characters in its own right but rather that not all of its implicit aspects or shades of meaning could possibly be recognized or registered in exactly the same manner or in exactly the same details by any particular creature—including us humans—at any given time or even throughout all the course of time. “Our perceptual experience,” James observes, “overlaps our conceptual reason; the that transcends the why” (James 1996b: 141). I can use a commonplace example to illustrate further what I think James has in mind when he talks of pure experience. I pick up a fallen Chalk Maple leaf in my front yard. I place it on my desk and begin to contemplate the ways in which I experience it. It has a particular five-cornered shape that is connected to its stem. The leaf is basically green this time of the year, but it also has shadings of yellow, red, and brown. It is deeply veined. It emits a slight crinkle when turned around. It produces a slight sense of weight when lifted. It has a musty odor and distinctive taste when I touch it to my tongue. When I turn away, it is not where I am now focusing, but when I return to its place, it is there. It will not go away but persists in being there and impinging upon my field of sight. I briefly ignored it before, while doing something else, but now it again commands my attention. If I push it away, it pushes back, although its resistance to my push is tiny. If I turn it this way and that, it retains its character as an individual thing in space and time despite the fact that its appearance undergoes changes as I view it from different perspectives. The leaf stirs up memories of leaves of its type I have encountered before, the trees from which they were suspended, the branches and boughs to which they were attached, and the like. There is a fleeting recollection of the stout live oak trees I used to climb in northwest Florida as a child, and of the delicious feelings of freedom and adventure, but also of slight trepidation, I experienced when doing so. A darting memory is also stirred of the first time I startlingly observed the cells of a leaf through a microscope in a biology class and was thereby awakened to a beguiling new world. The room in which the leaf is placed also resides somewhere in my consciousness, with its furnishings and knickknacks, its piled-up and shelved books, and its many associated memories. The temperature and moisture content of the room are also there to be felt and taken note of, although I am presently not doing so. I am struck at the periphery of my awareness with the leaf’s beauty, its intricacy of organization, its elegant star-like shape, and its shades of color. I also marvel that such a life form as this should exist, with its ability to use the energy of the sun to transform carbon dioxide and water into food for the

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tree and to emit oxygen as a waste product into the air—the oxygen that I and other aerobic beings are able to breathe. This aspect of my experience of the leaf stirs feelings of reverence and awe. I also have a lurking sense of concern for the well-being of trees and their natural environments throughout the world, and especially for the diminishing rain forests of South America and elsewhere. So there are aesthetic, religious, and moral dimensions to my experience of the leaf, informing and suffusing it at various points. I can stop to think that it is a conscious and self-aware “I” who is looking at the leaf on the desk and thinking about it, but usually I do not pay attention to that fact. This “I” has a complex of memories, a history, and a field of hopes and anticipations, some but definitely not all of which could be called into focused awareness but which are presently not being evoked. However, I do have a vague and distant present sense of my bodily weight in the chair, my regular breathing, my mental tiredness after a day of writing, the duties I have to perform and the meal I shall eat before I sleep, the things I thought about and did earlier in the day, the annoying itch of a mosquito bite on my arm, the mewing of my cat in the background, and the waning of the sun’s light. My wife Pam is writing on her computer across the table from me, and I am gratefully but indirectly aware of her presence. Finally, there are comings and goings of vague, teeming, gently intruding and surrounding thoughts, intimations, inclinations, feelings, and the like for which I have no distinct concepts and no specific names. I could go on endlessly with such a description of any ordinary, day-to-day experience. The central points of these and similar ruminations are two. (1) When I attend to one aspect of the possible experiences of the leaf, I find that I cannot simultaneously attend to the other. I select one part of it for attention and by so doing throw other possible ways of attending to it into the background. And yet, all the encompassing and interfusing experiences of the moment are the context and field for my focused attention at any time, whatever that may be. (2) I become aware through my reflections that the possible ways of experiencing the leaf are infinite. The earlier list is only a tiny segment of what could be noticed about the leaf, its surroundings, its associations, and my own self as its perceiver, manipulator, and contemplator. “Scandalous though it may seem to those for whom logic tells the only truth,” writes John J. McDermott, “if we were to focus on a single object and detail its relations, we would have access to a perceptual entailment which would involve us in everything that exists” (McDermott 1987: 149). The pure experience of specific episodes of experiencing consists of everything that is left out of any particular conceptualized experiences or of any distinct focuses of attention, however broad or inclusive we might try

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to make the latter, and that nonetheless persistently pervades those focuses of attention. It is the necessary background of possibility for diverse and multitudinous experiences of inexhaustible kinds. To be sure, some of this massive background has been previously attended to, conceptualized, and named, but much of it has yet to be explicitly noticed or verbalized, and the vast majority of it persistently outstrips the capacities of our languages and conceptual schemes. To state the matter somewhat differently, pure experience is like the indistinctly heard, vaguely describable, and yet profoundly felt and subtly informing resonant overtones of a passage of music. These essential but indefinable overtones are part of the whole musical experience, even though they are not written into the score, deliberately performed, or focally attended to. Similarly, we cannot explicitly concentrate on the whole of experience at any given moment of experience; we can only concentrate on aspects of the whole. Still, the whole is not left entirely out of account; it continues tacitly to pervade and influence our present more focused, more selective consciousness. Our linguistic and conceptual schemes, and our individual modes of interpretation, are like the rocks in a turbulent river that we may use to cross it. There are many other possible rocks for crossing than the ones we actually use, and the river itself has nothing like the inertness and distinctness of the rocks. The other possible crossing rocks represent alternate languages and alternate ways of coming to understand and cope with the surging wildness of our ever-streaming experience. Individuals select their crossing rocks in particular situations based on their own acculturations, interests, and habits of attention. What they emphasize and attend to, as Ellen Kappy Suckiel points out, “is determined to a significant extent by categories of interpretation, shared in common with others. Within that common conceptual scheme, however, there is much play for the individual’s own particular interests to determine how he will select from the stream of experience and arrive at an acceptable interpretation of the world” (Suckiel 1984: 20). The different sets of rocks are not totally alien to one another, for they generally enable us to cross the river. But no one set of rocks and not even all of the rocks in the riverbed together can begin to encompass or justly represent the roiling ferocity of the river itself. Just as the river rushes madly over the rocks in its headlong dash to the sea, so does the overbrimming energy and fullness—to say nothing of the ever-emerging freshness and newness—of pure experience swamp the discrete conceptual rocks by whose means we seek at any given time to work our way through it and find meaning in it. The rocks help us across, but much is of necessity left out and left behind.1

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The creative, enriching, convention-questioning possibilities of pure experience in its relations to ordinary experience are suggested in a passage from an essay by celebrated James scholar John J. McDermott. The passage also reminds us of the analogy, noted earlier, that James draws between pure experience and the experience of newborn babes. McDermott writes, “Genetic epistemology has much to teach us, for children naturally make their own relations until we teach them that the world has already been named and properly codified. Against their aboriginal bent, they are told to march in step, name by name, definition by definition, until they too see the world as an extension of local grammar and hidebound conceptual designations” (McDermott 1987: 151). James is right to remind us that there is always much more lying potentially in experience than can be grasped by any prevalent grammar or set of assumed concepts, and it is important to be constantly aware of this fact. Not to be so aware is to consign ourselves unwittingly to an unnecessarily narrow world. I think it might also be useful to contrast James’s concept of pure experience with its direct opposite, that is, a state of radical sensory deprivation in which no sensible inputs are felt and one is left in a posture of seeming disconnection from the world. Here, instead of a plethora of experiences from which one is able to sort out only a small part, there is a void of experience altogether. Such a void is the furthest remove from James’s concept of pure experience, in my view. The distinction I have in mind is between a radical excess or daunting “too-muchness,” on the one hand, and a radical emptiness or distressing “not-enoughness,” on the other. Wayne Viney, in a personal communication, notes that sensory deprivation experiments in a water tank can have the effect of causing the minds of subjects of such experiments to manufacture substitute, bogus stimuli in the form of hallucinations in order to compensate for the loss of normal sensations. The former can turn out to be extremely frightening and may induce panic in the subjects. James’s pure experience should be seen as an overflowing superabundance of experience that at all times defies complete conceptual assimilation or capture, rather than as a distressing deficiency of experience such as that in the sensory deprivation experiments.

Pure Experience and Reality Why, though, does James speak, as he sometimes seems to, of the totality of the real world as pure experience? Why does he bluntly assert that “experience and reality come to the same thing”? (James 1976: 30). And what does he mean when he claims that pure experience is the “one primal stuff

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or material in the world, a stuff of which everything else is composed”? Or what can we make of his later correction in the same essay that there is in fact “no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the things experienced”? (James 1976: 4, 14). What these statements amount to or allude to, in my judgment, is simply that James is a fervent, insistent empiricist. The only world that has meaning for him is a world accessible to experience—a world that is experienced, is amenable to experience, or can be rightly inferred on the basis of experience. We admittedly do not directly experience such things as one another’s minds, ether waves, or ions, James observes, but our experience can put us into the “neighborhood” of them and enable us to infer their existence and character (James 1976: 34, 36). Experience for him is not a veil cast over the world, behind which it inscrutably lurks, but the only meaningful way of conceiving of and gaining access to the world. For James, as for Alfred North Whitehead and John Dewey, experience enables us to “sound the utmost depths of reality” (Whitehead 1967: 18) and to reach “down into nature” (Dewey 1958: 4a), including human selves as parts of reality or nature. Reality or nature for James is always what is experienced, what is experiencable, or what can rightly be deduced from experience. In The Meaning of Truth he stipulates as a fundamental postulate of his radical empiricism “that the only the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. [Things of an unexperiencable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate]” (James 1975: 172–73). In sum, then, pure experience, in contrast with particular experiences, is the welter of all that might at some time or place be experienced by us or other creatures but can at no particular time or place be experienced in its totality. Each experience is selective and partial, capturing some parts of the experiencable world at the expense of ignoring or casting into dim background other parts. Moreover, each experience is spatially and temporally located and thus cannot encompass all of the spatial or temporal regions within which experiences have occurred, might have occurred, are occurring, or might yet occur. What causes experiences in their pure form to be what they are is a nonsensical question for a strict empiricist like James. “[H]ow the experiences ever get themselves made,” he reflects, “or why their characters and relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand” (James 1976: 66). To try to respond to such a question would be to reason in a circle, finding a particular experience or range of experiences that would purport to account for experience as a whole, including that particular experience or range of

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experiences. In other words, we would be appealing to some part of experience to explain the totality of what is experienced or experiencable instead of recognizing the totality of what is experienced or experiencable as the ultimate source and basis of all possible explanation. We would be seeking for what Charlene Haddock Seigfried calls “a ground of constitution of facts” which would amount to “a needless metaphysical duplication” of reality (Seigfried 1978: 83). Experienced or experiencable facts are all the ground and reality needed for any investigation or any purpose. It makes sense to explain one aspect of experience on the basis of another, as we frequently do, but it is meaningless to try to explain experience itself on the basis of something assumed to be more fundamental or significant. “[E]xperience as a whole,” James flatly asserts, “is self-containing and leans on nothing” (James 1976: 99). Hypothetical entities may be posited and speculative hypotheses set forth, but they must always be rooted in experience or brought to the test of experience, that is, have empirical meaning, character, or consequence, if they are to have factual (or valuative) significance or be genuinely descriptive of something real (James 1976: 81). Is experience William James’s metaphysical ultimate, then? Does it have the role in his philosophy that substance (ousia) does for the metaphysics of Aristotle, namely, that which is finally and most fully real, that with reference to which everything else is a derivation or an abstraction?2 James’s outlook does have this role in one sense but not in another. For him, all concepts or conceptualizations with existential import are ultimately rooted in and derived from pure experience, and they are abstract in varying degrees, in contrast with its density and concreteness. But I do not interpret James to mean by these ideas that pure experience is a kind of metaphysical ultimate in the way that Aristotle’s ousia is, even though his statements seem sometimes to suggest this view. He does not always clearly distinguish between the notion that reality is made up of pure experience as its primal “stuff” (or “natures”) and the notion that our knowledge of reality and contact with it require pure experience as the context or condition within which or on the basis of which we arrive at judgments about the nature of reality and the characters and relationships of different sorts of reality. I suggest that it is this latter view that James really has in mind (or, at least, ought to have had in mind) and that this view gives more plausibility and coherence to his overall philosophical position than the other interpretation does.3 Experience is not a substance or thing, and not a metaphysical ultimate in its own right, but a source of awareness and mode of awareness.

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This statement applies to so-called pure experience as well. I agree with McDermott’s contention that James “does not utilize the notion of ‘pure experience’ to close off analysis of the real but to give it new impetus and to send it away from traditional but narrow categories” (McDermott in James 1977: xlv). These points will be important for my discussion in chapter 9 of the compatibility I claim for James’s philosophy with what I call the metaphysics of radical materialism. David C. Lamberth continues to view pure experience as having a crucial metaphysical status and character as well as an epistemological role, and this contention is a central theme of his appropriately titled book William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Lamberth 1999: 24, 26, 30, and passim). But in my interpretation, pure experience for James is the transcendental condition that lies behind and is unavoidably involved within or presupposed by all empirically based metaphysical theories, whatever specific form or character they may have. This strictly epistemological conception is in keeping with James’s notion that all that can qualify as reality—including the reality of individual selves and extra-mental reality—is contained within the orbit of pure experience, which means within all of what is or could possibly be experienced directly or indirectly. We saw earlier that Thompson envisions a similar role for what he terms prereflective bodily self-consciousness or, more simply, prereflective experience. I can come at this issue from a slightly different angle by noting, as does Fredrick J. Ruf, how critically important in the earlier The Principles of Psychology is the concept and role of chaos to James’s views of the world, on the one hand, and of the human self as a stream of consciousness, on the other (Ruf 1991: 29 and passim). For example, James writes, “without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos” (James 1950: I, 402). The indeterminate, inchoate, chaotic (or at least quasi-chaotic; see Seigfried 1978: 86, 107) character of pure experience, as James describes it in Essays in Radical Empiricism, reflects this earlier view, but now world and self are encompassed within the unifying conception of pure experience rather than being viewed as entirely separate realities. And James makes more explicit here the idea that he is making no attempt to describe either as it is in itself but only as it is experienced or accessible to experience. In the more dualistic mind-set or methodology of The Principles he was, as Ruf points out, vague and unsettled on this point (Ruf 1991: 21–24). There is thus a subtle but discernible shift in the Essays from claims in The Principles about what self and world are like in themselves to unwillingness on James’s part in this later work to describe reality in any other way than phenomenologically, that is, from the standpoint of experience.

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At the root of this phenomenological emphasis is the distinction between chaotic or unstructured, unconceptualized experience prior to any sort of description, interpretation, or selection, and experience that results from these discriminations, with the latter affording, among many other features, awareness of the distinction between world and self. This latter awareness takes into account what Wilshire describes as “interweaving histories.” There is the history or biography of the one doing the believing “and the history of the thing or things about which one is believing something” (Wilshire in Stuhr 2010: 103; my emphasis). Both are regarded as features of reality, that is, as enduring mental and nonmental aspects of reality brought into view by discriminations of ordinary experience whose character will be discussed more fully in the next chapter. But behind these discriminations lie the possibilities or latent patterns and urgings of pure experience. Pure experience thus conceived is not a collection of metaphysical “stuffs” or any sort of metaphysical reality in its own right but is the basis and condition for recognizing conceptual and valuative distinctions of any sort, including distinctions between what is and is not real. It offers and affords innumerable kinds of conceptualizations and discriminations potentially, and many of these become explicit in ordinary, day-to-day experience. But it is impossible for the turgid, roiling, rushing immensity of pure experience to be captured by any or all of the acts of selective attention that for James characterize ordinary or conceptualized experience at any given time or over long stretches of time. Wilshire uses what I regard as a misleading phrase when he speaks of James’s “metaphysics of radical empiricism” (Wilshire in Stuhr 2010: 100; see also Wilshire 1968: 58, 167). Radical empiricism is not itself a type of metaphysics, and pure experience is not some kind of metaphysical ultimate. Both are, as I shall continue to argue and assume, primarily epistemological, not fundamentally metaphysical, in character. Whatever metaphysics pure experience and radical empiricism might provide a basis for or open the way toward is never laid out with systematic completeness by James, although it is clear, as Wilshire points out, that he thinks of radical empiricism as allowing for the reality of the self intimately commingled with and yet also in important respects distinct from the reality of the extra-mental world, and that our beliefs about the two are not mere mental constructs. This can be regarded as a metaphysical sketch, but only as that. It is far from being a wellworked-out metaphysical system or theory. The reality of self and world is always for James an experienced reality, accessible only from the standpoint of experience and ultimately from the suffusing field of pure experience, a field within which discriminations of various kinds present themselves for thought and action. In chapter 9 I shall develop the position that James’s

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epistemology of pure experience or radical empiricism permits of a thoroughgoing materialistic metaphysics if materialism as a metaphysical option is properly interpreted and understood. The central epistemological role James assigns to what he calls pure experience, as I have sought to interpret it here, is one of what I take to be the three major features of his “radical empiricism.” The other two are his insistence that experience exhibits everywhere connections as well as disconnections, relations as well as things related (in contrast with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s exclusive, nominalistic emphasis on the disconnectedness or isolatedness of simple impressions of sensation and reflection), and his conviction that experiences critical to our understanding of ourselves and the world encompass more than sensations and include such things as cause-effect relations; recollections, anticipations, and efforts; emotional responses, needs, and yearnings; dreams, intimations, and infusions of the unconscious; and confrontations with aesthetic, moral, and religious types of significance, value, and demand. I expound on some of these aspects of James’s conception of experience in chapters 6, 7, and 8. McDermott rightly points out concerning this third feature of James’s radical empiricism that his notion of experience is one “whose width and novelty is unrivaled in the history of Western philosophy” (McDermott in James 1976: xxviii). James’s conception of the role of pure experience can easily include the amended, expanded, and multidimensional theory of matter, and the particular version of a materialistic metaphysics, I outline and argue for in the final chapter of this book. Seen as I continue to interpret, explain, and—when I think helpful and appropriate—critically revise it, there is no in-principle conflict between James’s philosophy of pure experience and a thoroughgoing materialistic vision of reality. This claim may seem strange and unconvincing at first to those familiar with James’s thought and with his own sometimes avid objections to what he himself construes as a materialistic view of the world, but I shall endeavor to make a convincing case for the claim. James’s objections to materialism at some places in his writings should be understood, as will be made evident in chapter 9, as objections to something quite different from the kind of materialistic metaphysics I am prepared to defend.

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CHAPTER TWO

Distinguishing Self from World

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the “pure” experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. —William James (1976: 13)

Among the discriminations and characterizations that lie latent within the field of pure experience, according to James, is the all-important distinction between self and world. He insists that the distinction is not one of two different kinds of substance or entity but rather one of a fundamental difference of function and use. Aspects of the external world are much more obdurate and constraining, much more regular and stable, much more forceful and energetic, and far less readily compliant to acts of the imagination or will, than are those of the mental world. Factors of the mental world, on the other hand, exhibit in addition to these differences a peculiar “warmth,” “intimacy,” “immediacy,” and firsthandedness lacking in ingredients of the world external to the self (1976: 64; 1950: 239). Pure experience persistently and naturally sorts itself, then, into an outer world of stubborn resistant fact and an inner world of pliable and intimate subjective awareness. Moreover, the two aspects of self and world contained in germ in pure experience are associated with different contexts and uses. We do not, says James, subtract mind from world or world from mind in order to characterize or recognize each of them in its own right. Instead, we instinctively add them to or connect them with different kinds of wider context that help to give to each of them its own peculiar function, character, and use (1976: 6–7). 15

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Self and World as Functions of Pure Experience The distinction between self and world is already implicit in experience as a whole for James, just as numerous other kinds of distinction are. I learn about this distinction as I develop as a person and become progressively cognizant of the various manners in which experience presents itself. Among these manners is a certain hardness or obduracy of some parts of my experience and a relative softness and complicity of others. Some things are pliable to my will, but other things resist my will. When I push, the world pushes back. My freedom is conditioned and constrained, and what conditions and constrains it is more often than not some aspect of the world distinct from the self and external to the self. I am free, for example, to construct ideas of many sorts about the world, but only some of these ideas find fitness and support in aspects of experience over which I do not exercise control. I can easily imagine picking up a bale of cotton or a grand piano with my little finger, but try as I may, I cannot perform such a task, at least not without some kind of external aid. I may also vividly imagine encountering leprechauns as I step into my garden on a summer’s evening but fail to experience any of them affecting my sense organs in the way that the eager tail wags and joyful barks of my dog immediately do in that place. The resistant, responsive, and reactive world is the real world external to the self. The effortlessly manageable or limitlessly imaginable world is not. The latter traits belong to the self. In other words, by manipulating and interacting with the world, we experience the world’s causal efficacy. This is an extremely significant part of our knowledge of the world external to us, and it is made possible by our embodiment, that is to say, by our embodied selves interacting with a material world. James is well aware, then, that it is not just our five senses that give us access to and essential information about the world but our interactive experiences with the causal powers of the world. A writer who devotes a book-length development and defense to this idea is Michael O’Donovan-Anderson in Content and Comportment: On Embodiment and the Epistemic Availability of the World. A summary of his important thesis, which fits well with James’s outlook now under discussion, is that “knowing is not just seeing, but also coping” (O’Donovan-Anderson 1997: 137). We do not just mildly and from a distance entertain abstract ideas about a world external to ourselves but are in constant intimate, energetic, and necessary engagement with that world. The world is that aspect of our experience which functions to limit and constrain us, but it also affords us a wide field of conceptualization and action as we learn to make effective use of the opportunities and potentialities its rigorous principles and laws set before us.

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James develops a similar idea in the seventh lecture of his book Pragmatism when he notes the tension between the stubbornly constraining or resistant aspects of experienced reality and those aspects that are at least partially amenable to our persistent attempts to find meaning and truth within them. He suggests at one place there that we restrict our conception of “reality” to the unyielding constraints experience places upon us, and “truth” to “what we say about them, . . . the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote relations” (James 1975: 117; emphasis mine). In a later place in the same work, however, he describes the humanist or pragmatist conception of the universe or reality as “something resisting, yet malleable, which controls our thinking” and which grows and alters as our attempts at more adequate thinking take place (James 1975: 124). He admits that it may be “impossible . . . to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience” and that “you can’t weed out the human contribution” (James 1975: 120, 122). Reality is thus in this wider view a blend of interpretations of experience and the experienced constraints upon or controlling factors for those interpretations. The basic idea as James presents it in this lecture is that there is no underlying, unchanging, unalterable something—a supposed in-itself, “eternally complete” world—beyond the dynamic, never-ending dialectic of experienced resistance and malleability, obduracy and interpretation. Reality is always a reality for us, based upon the interactions of experience and interpretation, not something in and of itself. He sums up this point about the character of both reality and truth as inevitable mixtures of experience and interpretation when he says, “[T]ruth grows up inside of all the finite experiences. They lean on each other. But the whole of them, if such a whole there be, leans on nothing. All ‘homes’ are in finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies” (1975: 124–25). The contexts and not just the characters of self and world are also quite different. James uses the example of a room in order to illustrate this point (James 1976: 7–9, 12–13). I shall embellish it in my own way. One context of our experience is the room as we reflect upon and imagine its connections with our previous personal, internal experiences, that is, with our own biographical history. In this case, we relate the experience of the room to our stock of memories; for example, to what we thought about, fretted about, or worked on in this room several days ago, a year or so ago, or perhaps the first time we entered it. We can recall people we talked with in person or on the telephone in this room on various occasions, and the various topics we

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addressed. We can ponder the relations of these people to ourselves. We can also imagine the room as having different dimensions, a different color of paint, and different furniture and decorations, or as being located at another building in a different time. Or we can try to project what the room might look like several years from now, or how it could be altered or renovated. The room of our memories, imaginations, and reveries is a room of the mind, not a room in the world. We can reside in it as long as we wish, says James, and never have to pay rent (James 1976: 9). We can manipulate our images of it as features of our mind with relative ease. The room as related to our personal biography, memories, feelings, anticipations, and the like is a room brought into or “added” to a mental context. It is a mental room, a part of our conscious mind. In contrast with the room associated with a mental context is the room associated with the context of the external world. Here the room has its own history. It was built at a certain time. It had particular planners, constructors, and financers. It has been painted and repainted on a number of occasions. Its furniture has been changed or rearranged. It has undergone wear and shows the effects of that wear. I cannot walk through one of its walls by simply willing to do so, even though I can imagine trying magically to do so. It has certain measurable dimensions. It costs someone to rent it or own it, and to occupy it over a period of time. I can imagine its destruction, but my imagination alone will not produce that destruction. Only demolition, earthquake, fire, or something similar could bring about that consequence (James 1976: 9). And so on. In this context, the room is an enduring feature of the external world, not just part of a chain of personal memories or varying constructions of the mind. The experience of the room has use or functions in two different contexts, and these help appreciably to demarcate its mental or extra-mental character. Pure experience is thus “double-barreled,” as James puts it (James 1976: 7), meaning that it has potentially both mental and nonmental aspects that can be distinguished from one another on the basis of their characteristic traits and associations, functions, and contexts. There is the history of the room and the history of my consciousness of the room. Both are outcomes and interpretations of pure experience and of the markedly different contexts with which it can be associated. A graphic example of James’s way of drawing the distinction between self and world is suggested to me by a passage in Derek Robinson’s novel A Piece of Cake, which is about a squadron of Royal Air Force pilots in World War II. The passage describes an experience of one of the pilots named Pip Patterson as he is flying his Hurricane fighter over the English Channel toward the coast

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of France. It is early in the war, and there has as yet been no actual combat between the RAF and Luftwaffe pilots. Patterson looks down at the expanse of the sea, shimmering blue-green in the light of the sun. He is unable to believe that a world as sunny and splendid as this was at war. He tried to imagine a German plane up here, invading this same piece of sky, coming in to the attack. He could picture it as clearly as a scene in the cinema, but it was no more menacing than that. The enemy guns fired but they could not harm him. They could not even make him blink. (Robinson 1984: 73)

In sharp contrast to this gentle play of Pip’s imagination, a projection of his mind that is serene, unthreatening, and completely under his control, are later scenes of the novel in which brutal actual battles are taking place between British and German pilots. The tracer bullets playing around one’s airplane are now all too real, containing the real menace of maiming, burning, exploding, or plummeting in screaming terror toward the depths of the sea. Such things are happening all around the sky now as the fighters jockey for position, twisting and turning in the air, spraying one another with lethal fire, and they may well happen to any particular pilot in the next instant. Here is no idle play of the imagination. The distinction between self and world in the two scenarios is abundantly and urgently clear. I can imagine someone objecting at this juncture that James’s way of explaining the self-world distinction and how we come to draw it experientially sounds a bit artificial and oversimplified. We do not stop consciously to weigh and evaluate the relative obduracy or causal efficacy of experience at every moment in order to ascertain whether or not it points beyond the self. And our recognition of the distinctions between ourselves and the world requires a more sophisticated and detailed explanation than that offered by James in his Essays in Radical Empiricism. In response to the first part of this objection, I think it would be correct to interpret James to be saying that, while we may initially learn to draw the distinctions in question along the lines he sketches—and probably to learn them to a significant extent instinctively rather than deliberately—once having done so we continue to make the distinctions usually by way of more or less unconscious reactions, not as continuing acts of explicit evaluation or inference. But we could still subject such an assumed distinction to the kind of conscious evaluation and inference James describes if we chose to do so, and doing so might well help us to gain more clarity in some circumstances about the distinction at issue. In response to the second part of the objection, James’s explanation is admittedly only a sketch, and it would need to be spelled out in much greater

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psychological detail to be a fully adequate account. Still, the main line of his explanation seems to me to be correct. We have to learn to negotiate the obduracies and constraints of the external world in order not only to survive but also to deal creatively and meaningfully with that part of experience. Moreover, we have to learn over time who we are and what we are capable of becoming as selves, and how to relate effectively to our inner lives and their promising capacities for enrichment, creativity, and development, on the one hand, and their regrettable susceptibilities to stultification, delusion, and destructiveness, on the other. In short, we must learn how to discern the resources and constraints of our personal selves and how to engage these with the resources and constraints of the world and of others in the world, in order to live positive and constructive lives. To achieve an appropriate and realistic balance between self and world is no easy task, and reliable knowledge of the respective natures of the two and of the distinctions between the two is a critical part of that task. James’s analysis at least points us in the right directions, even though it does not fill in all of the requisite details.

Experience and Experiencers Someone else might object in another vein to James’s reasoning by declaring that experience, whether “pure” or otherwise, must presuppose, in contrast to his view, an experiencer. There must first be a self capable of having conscious experiences before we can speak about experience of any kind. We cannot talk meaningfully of experience in the raw, experience in the absence of a subject, experience that is not owned by someone. It makes no sense, according to the objection, to posit experience of any kind as something prior to rather than following upon the distinction between self and world. Subjects have experiences; experiences do not float in from nowhere. Experiences are traits or properties of subjects, not the other way around. In personal correspondence Viney calls my attention to the fact that for some mentally ill patients, unpleasant experiences come “uninvited from nowhere and seem, for a time, to be beyond control.” In this case, the experiences seem to have the patients, rather than the patients having the experiences. But generally, we tend to associate the term experience with a prior experiencer, namely, with a person or persons having a particular experience. It is this commonly accepted association that James is taking issue with in his conception of pure experience as prior to the distinction between self and world. His view gains support when we reflect that the distinction between self and world is not always easy to come by. The borders between self and world

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are sometimes fuzzy and blurred. Our field of awareness does not always fall sharply into a sense of what is self and what is world. It is there as something that is for the present unpossessed and unowned, something on whose basis we strive to draw the distinctions between self and world. “Am I imagining this, or is it something real?” is a typical question in an initially baffling situation. There is an experience but we do not yet know what to make of it. A somewhat different example is that I sometimes find myself unconsciously assuming that I am gazing at something off in the distance from my screened porch, only to realize somewhat later that it is just a spot on the screen. The smallness of the spot is similar to what a large object would look like some distance away. The supposed large object is, then, just a figment of my mind. Only subsequently to the experience itself do we find ourselves able to decide what is self and what is world. The experience comes first; our discernment of its existential significance comes second. We should also not fail to note that there is a well-known and frequently observed stubborn obduracy of personal commitments, convictions, and assumptions as well. And these can sometimes cause us firmly to believe certain things that turn out, on later investigation, to be falsely attributed to the real world. Experience does not always or even generally stand with absolute precision over against its conceptualizations but is often deeply pervaded by them. Experience, as the saying goes, is theory-laden. So felt obduracy and constraint by themselves do not always provide sufficient safeguards against confusion of ideology and idiosyncrasy with reality. It is not the case that experience always presupposes a distinct sense of self as experiencer in contrast with experience itself or what is being experienced. I shall discuss at more length in this chapter and later in the book the issue of conceptual obduracy as contrasted with the constraints of the world, and the problem of distinguishing the two of them this issue poses for James’s philosophy of pure experience. We humans are not only good at confusing projections of the self with traits of the world, we are also good at allowing aspects of the world—especially machinations and manipulations of our social and cultural environments—to swamp an appropriate sense of the autonomy, integrity, and responsibility— even the identity—of our individual selves. The process of making the latter distinction progressively clear, with increasing levels of sophistication and discernment, is for most of us ongoing and the work of a lifetime. Socratic self-knowledge and Emersonian self-reliance are by no means easy to achieve. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy notes in this connection that “[c] hildren are not born with a sense of a unified [personal] identity—it develops from many sources and experiences. In overwhelmed children, its development

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is obstructed, and many parts of what should have been blended into a relatively unified identity remain separate” (Beers and Berkow 1999: 1522; quoted in Richardson 2007: 296). In similar fashion, it takes time for the developing child to acquire even a relatively clear sense of its surrounding world. In order to do so, the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty remarks, “the child would actually have to totalize his experience under general concepts.” But he has no way of doing so, given the fragmentariness of his knowledge and the limits of his conceptualizing capacity (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 98–99). There is much about the world that must remain opaque for the child and much that is as yet indistinguishable within the experiences that flood it from every side. James in his Principles of Psychology states, “The first time we see light, in [Etienne] Condillac’s phrase, we are it rather than see it. But all our later optical knowledge is about what this experience gives” (James 1950: II, 4).1 He makes this statement with reference to babies who have not yet learned to distinguish themselves and their experiences from a world being experienced. But a sudden flash of brilliant light can have a similar momentary effect for adults as well. So the distinction between self and world is not in all cases clear-cut, and it is sometimes quite obscure. This fact is most clearly indicated, James argues, when I as a self realize that my body is ambiguous with respect to its status as something physical or mental. I can properly regard it as something out there, as a feature of the external world that can be perceived or operated upon by others as well as myself. But I can also treat it as something peculiarly “mine,” as a distinctive possession and feature of the inward, mental me. Its processes and perturbations are experienced, for example, as my pains and pleasures, as my efforts or emotions, and even as my sensations or thoughts. What in experiences is mental and what is physical, James concludes, can “surely be nothing intrinsic” in the individual experiences. Instead, the difference lies in items or aspects of the experiences’ ways of “behaving towards each other, their systems of relations, their function, and all these things vary with the context in which we find it opportune to consider them” (James 1976: 7). James also points to the ambiguity of what he calls “affectional experiences . . . our emotions and appreciative perceptions.” This ambiguity illustrates, he declares, his “central thesis that subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification. Classifications depend on our temporary purposes” (James 1976: 71). (They may also depend, I can add, on our habitual inclinations.) We can speak interchangeably, for example, of pain as located objectively in our feet or subjectively in our minds. We can talk of the redolence and beauty of the

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magnolia blossom as something we discover to be true of it or of redolence and beauty as subjective feelings produced by the flower. We can note the agreeable feeling produced in us by the heat or simply specify the agreeable degree of heat in the day as an objective fact. We commonly call attention to such things as “a weary road, a giddy height, a jocund morning, or a sullen sky,” thus easily connecting affectional adjectives with objects in the world. And in the grip of optical vertigo, “both we and the external universe appear to be in a whirl” (James 1976: 72). We should also note that affective or emotional pressures, impulses, predilections, and commitments can have their own kind of obduracy or pose the problem of their own kind of ambiguity that can on some occasions confuse us into thinking that something is functioning as an aspect of the world when it is really only an aspect of our consciousness. We might so strongly wish something to be true of the world, for example, or fear that it is true, as to be too easily convinced that it must be true. The issue is complicated further when we reflect that, for James, emotions are part of the wider conception of experience he champions, a conception in which emotions have cognitive import and assist our being put in touch with the world despite the fact they can also sometimes seriously distort our outlook. I shall have more to say in chapter 7 about the important place of the emotions in experience, as James understands experience, and about their crucial contributions to our knowledge of the world and of ourselves as part of the world. The old distinction between primary and secondary qualities is also used by James to back up his point about the ambiguity of experiences when it comes to their mental or physical character. It was once thought by the seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes and John Locke, as well as by their near contemporary, the physicist Galileo Galilei, that a clean demarcation could be made between those traits of experience that belong to the external world and those that belong solely to the mind. But the eighteenthcentury philosophers George Berkeley and David Hume were able to throw such assumed sharp demarcations into extreme doubt. Berkeley argued that the notion of material substance is a mere abstraction based on and reducible to the particulars of conscious experience and that only minds and their ideas are real. Hence, the only real substance is mind, and the constancies of the divine mind account for the regularities and constraints of human experience. To experience the world external to ourselves is to think God’s thoughts after him, to replicate in our minds ideas in his mind (Berkeley 1988: Principles of Human Knowledge, I: 5–33, 54–64; Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, passim). Hume exhibited in his A Treatise of Human Nature that arguments intended to prove

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that certain qualities are “primary” can just as convincingly be employed to relegate them to “secondary” status, thus breaking down the assumed distinction (Hume 1980: Bk. I, Pt. 4, Sec. 4; pp. 225–31). Whether such qualities are objective or subjective was therefore a question left unresolved, exhibiting their ambiguous character. James brings the issue up to his own time when he remarks that hardness and softness, once assumed to be primary qualities, “are effects on us of atomic interactions, and the atoms themselves are neither hard nor soft, nor solid nor liquid” (James 1976: 74).2 He summarizes the results of his reflections in his essay on “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience” in this way: If “physical” and “mental” meant two different kinds of intrinsic nature, immediately, intuitively, and infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever in whatever bit of experience it qualified, one does not see how there could ever have arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity. But if, on the contrary, these words are words of sorting, ambiguity is natural. For then, as soon as the relations of a thing are sufficiently various, it can be sorted variously. (James 1976: 76)

All of the above considerations mean that there is no flagrant absurdity in regarding experience as in some basic sense prior to its discriminations into awareness of self and awareness of world.3

A Challenge from Scientific Thinking James’s notion of pure experience, where neither self nor world, mind nor body, is prior to the other but are both held in suspension in pure experience antecedent to their discrimination from one another, might be challenged on the grounds of contemporary scientific thinking. Most scientists today view life, mind, and selves as emergent from matter and as functions of highly complex organizations of material bodies. The material world, then, is chronologically prior to mind in this view and not, as the objector interprets James to think, coeval with it. In fact, in this view, matter is much older than mind and was prevalent on earth long before mind came into being. How might James respond to such an objection? His response might be something like the following. The scientific scenario already presumes a distinction between self and world, matter and mind. It implies that if subjects had been present in the earliest days of the earth’s development, they would have experienced their distinction from and contrast with the purely material features of that world in the manner he describes. The notion that matter preceded mind chronologically is itself

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dependent upon mind’s current examination of the relevant evidence favoring such a view. We interpret the past on the basis of what is available to us in the present. Just as we assume that the future will resemble the past in significant ways, so do we assume that the past has resembled the present in significant ways. Our baseline for assessing both past and future is, then, our present experience. In other words, the world for us is always a world in relation, a world perceived and conceived on the basis of experience. Without a knower, there can be nothing known, and without something to be known, there can be no such thing as a knower. Were there no subjects, there would be no objects, for what count as objects in the world for us humans are what are experienced as such from our perspectives as subjects, that is, what someone sees, hears, feels, thinks, remembers, postulates, infers, and the like. And subjective awareness, for its part, has a built-in, necessary intentionality or reference to objects in the world. Were there no such objects, subjective awareness would be a meaningless muddle, lacking any felt distinction between what is and is not the self, between what is mere reverie and what is reality apart from the self. Self and world are thus correlative terms for James. Neither is derived from the other, and in the final analysis neither has meaning apart from the other.4 These statements include the worlds of past and future as well as the world of the present. This seems to me to be the principal point of James’s insistence on the epistemic ultimacy of pure experience in his philosophy. We need not think that minds have always existed in order to conclude that any sort of meaningful world—including the conception of a purely material world—presupposes the mind as interpreter of that world. Once again, the contrast with self, subjectivity, and consciousness is both implicit and necessary. In similar manner, any meaningful world of the future must also be conceived as such by analogy with the world of the present, a world in relation to a field of awareness that incorporates aspects of self and world. We must be careful here to think in terms of an explicitly pragmatic theory of reality and truth, and not tacitly to assume the correspondence view of these matters that James explicitly rejects. The imagined objector might persist. He or she might claim, “There must certainly be a lasting difference between the world as we may presently claim to know it and the world as it truly is or has been in and of itself—the world that is independent of our interpretations and experiences of it.” But this statement illicitly and uncritically assumes a correspondence theory of truth. For the pragmatist, truth does not exist as something antecedent to inquiry but as the outcome of inquiry. As James puts the matter, “Knowledge of sen-

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sible realities comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time” (James 1976: 29). He states this idea in similar fashion in Pragmatism: “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its vali-dation” (James 1975: 97). What these statements amount to is that truths about the character and traits of the world are what we are justified in claiming about the world in light of our experiences of it at any given time—no more and no less. But does not this view confuse the criteria for determining what is true and real with truth and reality themselves? The objection begs the question, because for James truth and reality are the results of determinations using appropriate and adequate criteria, not something prior to or separate from the determinations. His considered rejection, on pragmatic grounds, of the commonly assumed difference between the experiential means of determining truth and an assumedly “solid,” “self-transcendent,” wholly independent status of truth itself is the very point at issue. “What,” he asks, “would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in advance of all experiential mediation or termination be known-as? What would it practically result in for us, were it true?” (James 1976: 36). In the debate between James and John E. Russell published as “Controversy about Truth” (James 1976: 145–53), James defends his pragmatic view of truth against Russell’s defense of the traditional correspondence theory of truth. James confesses himself unable to understand what is left over to be talked about or understood once we see truth as something that either results from empirical verification or is dependent upon future verification. What practical difference could it make or import could it have, he asks, to wonder about a supposed truth that is something other than the outcome of actual or possible processes of verification making use of appropriate criteria of verification? What would such a transcendent, in-itself truth, thought to be entirely independent of or separable from any of our available means of knowing it, amount to? James insists that no meaningful or convincing answer can be given to these questions.5 For James, then, the credibility of a claim’s justifications or expected justifications is not only the measure of its truth but constitutes all that can legitimately be meant by its truth. Therefore, the status of truth and reality is nothing more than the status of specific attitudes, beliefs, or claims about truth and reality to the extent that those attitudes, beliefs, and claims are guided and confirmed (or confirmable) by reasoned appeals to relevant experiences. This is not an easy notion to wrap our minds around, accustomed as

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we are to assume as obvious and incontestable a distinction that James takes pains to scrutinize and reject, but it is critical to our understanding of his idea of pure experience and the roles it plays in his epistemology and metaphysics. To return, then, to the point of contention I am addressing here, we may conclude on empirical grounds that the physical has preceded the mental in the passage of evolutionary time and thus that mind has emerged from body, but there is no real conflict between this conclusion and James’s insistence that pure experience contains in germ the all-important distinction between body and mind or world and self. The claim about the emergence of mind from matter is itself experientially grounded, showing that all reliable claims about the world must have an empirical basis, and this empirical basis requires a fundamental interpretive interaction and distinction between what functions as self and what functions as the world external to and transcending the individual self. Philosopher W. Teed Rockwell helps us to acknowledge from another perspective James’s insistence on the extent to which self and world are united in pure experience, showing that the distinction between the mind, body, and surrounding world is not nearly as sharp and exact as we often assume it to be. He does so by explaining why we should understand them to be actually much more united than divided, and why their separation from one another should be regarded as relatively abstract in contrast with the concreteness of their initial unity. Rockwell argues forcefully and convincingly—drawing upon theories and findings in the neurosciences as well as the reflections of other philosophers about implications of these theories and findings—that the mind is not centered merely in the brain but located in many other regions of the body and extends from the body into the world external to the body. Functions of mind are constituted not simply by neuronal firings or synaptic connections confined to the brain but by a complex nervous system that extends throughout the body and by such things as hormonal secretions and exchanges occurring elsewhere in the body. And these functions are intimately connected to, involved with, and responsive to events in the world. Hence, Rockwell contends that “all theories and experiences emerge from the relationships that constitute the brain-body-world nexus” (Rockwell 2007: xviii). Or as he puts the point elsewhere, [E]xperience emerges from (is implied by) the world, not just our neurons. When we inquire into the world, we discover the system whose natural parts are the body, the brain, and world. But we have no reason to assume that the brain can produce experience without the other two, any more than the lung can perform its proper function without oxygen. (Rockwell 2007: 101)6

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Rockwell thus defends a view similar to James’s, namely, that experience does not originate from or have its seat in a supposed distinct, isolable self but is a variable function as much of the whole body as of the brain and of the world that contains both body and brain. “At any given moment, there will be a distinction between those processes that constitute the subject and those that constitute the environment,” he writes. “But there is good reason to think that this distinction does not have a constant and enduring borderline” (Rockwell 2007: 206). Our bodies belong to us, but we also belong to our bodies.7 Rockwell concludes that we must think of mind or self as an aspect of what he calls an encompassing “dynamic system” or “behavioral field” and not as a distinct entity located exclusively in the brain (Rockwell 2007: 204–7). If his analysis is in general correct, as I believe it to be, James is well within his rights in claiming that it does not go without saying that experience must presuppose the self as subject or experiencer. Rather, it is both intelligible and credible to regard embodied experience as the wider context or field presupposed by a narrower and contextually variable experience of self. James’s insistence on the initial unity of self and world is endorsed from another quarter and in a different way by philosopher of mind and neuroscientist Christine A. Skarda. She insists upon the initial holistic functioning of living organisms in their integration with their natural environments as the basis for their subsequent “articulations” or “shatterings” of that whole into the distinction between perceptual experiences and the world being perceived. “The goal of perceptual functioning is [thus] to break up the holistic fabric of reality into perceived objects and states of affairs and perceivers of them” (Skarda 1999: 81, 85). In other words, the idea of ourselves as subjects independent of objects in the world is created by our perceptual activity. It is not the initial or most fundamental reality. For Skarda, “the holistic fabric of reality” is assumed to be physical (Skarda 1999: 92), but her insistence on an as yet to be interpreted and discriminated reality that is prior to and the basis of the distinctions in experience between what functions as mind and what functions as the environing world is reminiscent of James’s key conception of pure experience as the prior context and condition.

The Obduracy of Concepts I mentioned earlier in this chapter the fact that concepts and conceptual relations can also exhibit a kind of forcefulness and obduracy that can be compared and contrasted with the resistances and constraints of experience that James interprets as generally calling attention to the presence of

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an extra-mental world. He is even willing to admit that pondering or being carried along by conceptual relations or being involved in strictly ideal and wholly abstract inferences or chains of reasoning can be considered a kind of experience that he calls “conceptual experiences” and distinguishes from perceptual ones (James 1976: 9–10, 17). He refers at one place in his Principles of Psychology to the experience of having read from a page of text in a familiar language. Rather than having attended to any given word in isolation, he says, “we habitually got it clad with its meaning the moment we caught sight of it, and rapidly passed from it to the other words of the phrase. We apprehended it, in short, with a cloud of associates” instead of as a bare “sensational nullity” (James 1950: II, 81). In other words, we experienced the conceptual relations and flow of the text and, with that, its overall meaning.8 James finds many species of conceptual reasoning or experiencing to have a kind of “objectivity” of their own, that is, a logical or mathematical cogency and forcefulness deemed to be independent of any vagaries of mind of the subjective reasoner (James 1976: 10). Such conceptual or merely ideal “objectivity” can all too easily be conflated with or confused with extra-mental, nonconceptual reality if not brought, or if not capable of being brought, to the test of experiences that are at least in some significant degree distinct from the concepts themselves. James’s contemporary and philosophical adversary the British philosopher F. H. Bradley dismissed out of hand in his book Appearance and Reality (Bradley 1969) the reliability of sensate experience, for example, in favor of purely conceptual relations. The latter showed clearly, at least to his satisfaction, that reality is wholly ideal. Conceptual relations, properly explored, provide a coherence and convincingness entirely lacking in the relative discontinuities and muddles of sensate experiences. Space, time, external relations, separateness, individuality, and the like are all swallowed up, for Bradley, into the exceptional clarity, logical elegance, and serene unity of the Absolute. Ideas thus entirely trump what James regards as the kind of experience that can and should call the adequacy of mere ideas and merely ideational relations into question. For Bradley, logical and conceptual obduracies count for far more than the obduracies of nonconceptual experience, touted by James as generally reliable indicators of the real world (see James 1976: 47–49). Responses to obduracies of conceptual relations in rigorous deductive systems like those of logic and mathematics, so far as truths about the world are concerned, will depend on the view one takes of the cognitive significance of following out such relations. James contends that these relations, in and of themselves, are merely ideal rather than real (see chapter 28 of James 1950). A logical or mathematical Platonist’s response will be quite different.

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In James’s view, even the most compelling, impressive, elegant logical or mathematical systems must finally be put to the test of experience if they are to give us reliable knowledge about the world. Ideal experiences and leadings are not sufficient by themselves to give us such knowledge, although they can be important ways of fertilizing our imaginations and pointing us in the direction of propositions and ideas that can be usefully put to the test of experience. Our logical and mathematical reasonings may well motivate us to attend to aspects of actual or possible experiences that we have neglected to notice or have failed hitherto to take into account. But of course here, once again, we must assume or be able to defend some meaningful distinction between the conceptual and the empirical aspects of our thought, if the latter are to be the definitive test of the existential import of the former. The indisputable fact of conceptual obduracy and of its beguiling and for James sometimes grossly misleading and even “vicious” influences9 make all the more pointed and pertinent his admission that it is “hard . . . to decide by bare introspection what it is in experiences that shall make them either spiritual or material” (1976: 76–77). We shall have occasion in chapter 5 and part of chapter 6 to take up this issue of whether an alleged inability—in all situations and not just particular ones—to separate experience from its entrenched and often unnoticed conceptual overlays and interpretations dooms James’s and other professed empiricists’ program of resorting to experience as the decisive check on the adequacy of concepts and conceptual schemes, and as the ultimate test of reality and truth. James acknowledges that “the individual has a stock of old opinions already” that he or she generally brings to experience, but he insists that the individual may also meet “a new experience that puts them to a strain.” Can new experiences have such a challenging and adjudicatory role in relation to the stock of established opinions with which our outlooks and experiences are usually suffused? And can it do so despite our being admittedly anxious to save as much as we can of our previous views, since in matters of belief “we are all extreme conservatives”? (James 1976: 34–35). James is convinced that experience can and often does have this critical role. Is he right in thinking so? We shall see.

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CHAPTER THREE

Knowledge of a Common World

Practically . . . our minds meet in a world of objects which they share in common, which would still be there, if one or several of the minds were destroyed. I can see no formal objection to this supposition’s being literally true. —William James (1976: 39)

In the first chapter of this book I discussed James’s conception of pure experience and the central role it plays in his philosophy. I argued that it should be seen not as some kind of metaphysical substance or “stuff” but as the transcendental condition for all empirical knowledge of the world—the only kind of putative knowledge that for him can be rightly relied upon. In the second chapter I examined James’s account of how self and world should be regarded as functions rather than entities and how these two functions can be distinguished from but also related to one another within the encompassing field of pure experience. Now that these two topics have been brought into view, elaborated upon, and critically discussed, we are ready to turn to another aspect of James’s philosophy of pure experience, namely, his analysis of how it is possible for two minds to know one thing or, more generally, to have knowledge in common, an analysis he offers from within the context of his concept of pure experience and his description of the functions and relations of self and world. The starting point of his analysis is an account of what it means to speak of one mind’s coming to know something in the world. Once he has explained that,

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James reasons, it becomes relatively easy to resolve the problem of how two or more minds can be said to know the same nonmental thing, when minds and things are conceived in the manner he describes.

Knower and Known James’s idea of “appropriation,” as explained in Essay IV of his Essays in Radical Empiricism, is the key to understanding his view of how two minds can be said to know one nonmental thing. But he first makes use of the idea of appropriation in analyzing how a single mind can know something to be an enduring fact of the world and not just a passing phase of its own consciousness. He reasons as follows. A later experience recollects an earlier perceptual item that is as yet unqualified, uncategorized, and thus “pure.” The earlier percept simply “is,” and there is as yet no awareness of what it is. This later experience can associate the earlier percept exclusively with the stream of consciousness, thus appropriating it as an item of awareness connected with multiple other items of awareness and their interrelations that for James constitute the self. But the later experience may be able to appropriate the earlier percept not only into the context of subjective awareness but also into the context of things existing in the extra-mental world. In either event, the originally pure percept has now come to be known, that is, known as an aspect of the self alone or also as an aspect of the world outside the self. The knower, James avers, is the later experience that thus identifies and categorizes the earlier one. A point of clarification is needed. When James tells us that a present experience recalls an earlier one to determine whether or not it is a feature of the self exclusively or also a feature of the world, he leaves us unclear as to how an experience by itself can do any such complex thing (James 1976: 63–64). It must therefore be the already formed self of that moment that does the introspecting, recalling, and interpreting. When he speaks vaguely of experience in this context he should have spoken of the self as an interconnected stream of consciousness of that moment, a proficient self ever open to ongoing alteration and change but possessing sufficient organization and integrity in the present to carry out the task he has in mind. Detached and indeterminate experience by itself would seem to have no such capacity. However, even bearing this needed clarification in mind, James does not here or elsewhere in his writings, to my knowledge, analyze or explain in a clear and convincing manner just how the self, regarded as a stream of consciousness, is able to have or to exercise the proficiency required.

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In his Principles of Psychology James tells us that “if we postulate the fact of . . . thinking at all, I believe that we must postulate its power as well,” and he goes on to assert that certain steps in the process of thinking seem to be passive, and others, “active in a supreme degree.” He concludes, therefore, that if our thoughts exist, “we ought to admit that they exist after the fashion in which they appear, as things, namely, that supervene upon each other, sometimes with effort and sometimes with ease” (James 1950: II, 571). The “with ease” part of this statement would include reference to the crucial role of habit in the chapter by that name in the Principles. It is the matter of the consciously exerted effort of interpreting and concluding that is in contention here. How do the act and effort of analyzing and interpreting take place from within or as a deliberate act of the self, viewed as a stream of consciousness? How can a mere stream of consciousness be understood to have the capacity of functioning as an active agent—in the present case as an agent of interpretation? James’s long chapter in the Principles on “Will” examines the phenomenon of effort and will in the context of the body and the nervous system, not just that of the self as a stream of consciousness, and he does not simply presuppose the phenomenon as he does in this fourth chapter of his Essays on Radical Empiricism. But even in the former work, after much discussion, the phenomena of agency and will are left in a considerable cloud of mystery. And the critical subjects of indeterminacy and freedom of the will are deliberately bracketed and left out of account (James 1950: 576). James M. Edie argues that what lies closest to the center of James’s thought is “the category of action, understood primarily as the individual action of a unified behaving organism in the world.” He goes on to state that “[t]his is the distinctive point of view from which James approached reality and which . . . ultimately motivated his philosophical positions” (Edie 1987: 79). There is much truth in this interpretation, for James’s account of how at the age of twenty-seven he resolved a life-threatening crisis in his life by resolving to act as if he were free despite the fact that he could not be sure that he was; his notion of the self as always flowing and moving toward the future, thus encountering and incorporating the novel aspects of the future; his observation, in explicating his pragmatism, that things can be shown to be true and real only by our willingness actively and continually to test their truth and reality in ongoing experience; his indication that some things can only be made to be true or false by our deliberate decisions and actions; his perspectivism and his frank recognition of the determinative role of different temperaments and angles of vision among responsible active interpreters—all see the individual

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self as a constructive agent actively engaged with and arriving at its own distinctive ways of viewing and relating to the experienced world. I shall discuss some of these features of James’s thought later, but the point at issue here is that James’s self is in no sense, as Edie points out, a mere passive responder to or copier of external reality (Edie 1987: 75). Nevertheless, his critical notion of the dynamic, thoroughly active and engaged individual self is never fleshed out in a fully developed, perspicuous manner. James does not show clearly or convincingly what there is about the self as he depicts it in his various writings that makes it capable of such effective deciding and acting. Eugene Fontinell suggests that this question can be resolved, at least partly, by viewing the self as “a centered-activity field.” The center, which James characterized in one of his writings as “the habitual centre of [a person’s] energy” (James 1929: 193), has no reality, Fontinell notes, “apart from the relations that constitute the full field as well as the center itself.” This center undergoes continual change “while retaining in some fashion its earlier modes of being” (Fontinell 1986: 95–96). These comments are suggestive, but they tend merely to name the problem rather than resolving it. How is the center of a field capable of action? We certainly feel ourselves to be capable of action and of effective effort against resistance, and we do experience something like a present self that is capable of appropriating aspects of its past experiences or of projecting itself through willed action into the future. But James’s stream of consciousness or field of present awareness set within a larger field of past awareness and anticipating and feeling able to influence a related field of future awareness—to say nothing of having effects on the world beyond the self—while describing our experience with some intriguing plausibility, does not go far in explaining its possibility. Just what is this center? How can it function in the ways James recounts and seems largely to take for granted? How can it be capable of choice and action? These questions are left largely unanswered by James. In fairness to him, however, we should note that the mystery of deliberate, self-guided, free, and purposeful action is closely connected with the mystery of consciousness itself. I am convinced, in fact, that the two mysteries are inseparable and that neither can be approached, understood, or resolved apart from the other. Without some measure of real freedom, there can be no such thing as consciousness, and without some degree of consciousness, there can be no such thing as meaningful freedom or purposive action. The two interconnected mysteries are far from being resolved in present scientific or philosophical thought. James emphasizes the role of ongoing active choices in consciousness or thought in his Principles of Psychology when he lists as one of consciousness’ traits that it “is interested in some parts” of objects indepen-

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dent of itself “to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while” (James 1950: 225). William Gavin contrasts this robustly active view of consciousness with the more passive one that was dominant in James’s day in the following striking manner: The then prevailing views of the mind were that it copied reality like a photographic plate, that it received and assembled the elements of experience like a machine, that it combined ideas like a chemist. For this “scientist” mind, James substituted one that was a born artist—a wayward, creative mind, impelled by inner wants, fringed with mystery, and capable of infinitely subtle, unrecordable nuances. (Gavin 1992: 24)

Just how the mind, consciousness, or self, conceived as a field or stream, is able to have this active, creative, choice-guided role, however, James fails to make clear.1 Philosophers frequently meditate on ordinary objects in their direct vicinity, such as the desks, lamps, or chairs in their studies, in order to formulate and illustrate their views. James reflects on the pen he holds in his hand as he writes. He imagines having a perception that he calls that of a “pure pen,” pure in the sense that it has not been assigned to the context of an inner mental world or to the context of external reality. We should note in passing, however, that “pure pen” is, strictly speaking, a contradiction, because if something is already categorized as a pen it can no longer be regarded as “pure.” James is being somewhat careless in characterizing it this way. We must assume that what he is referring to has already been conceptualized as a pen, even though discrimination has not yet been made as to its mental or extra-mental status. In other words, it has not yet been decided whether it is only an imagined pen or a real pen. Bearing this clarification in mind, if a present experience attends to the earlier pen percept and remembers it to be, along with others similar to it, free-floating, passing, peculiarly “intimate,” “warm,” and readily subject to varying whims of thought, will, and imagination, then the present experience can confidently consign the remembered pen percept to the realm of mind and thought. It then has the character of being only the idea of a pen. But if there is a recollection of stubborn stability and regularity in the percept and others similar to it, and if the interrelated percepts exhibit resistance to easy manipulation or alteration by imagination or will, then the present experience can confidently appropriate these percepts as apprehensions of a continuing thing in the external world. James summarizes this part of his discussion in this way, drawing upon his notion of pure experience as double-barreled: “I believe that

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what I see myself writing with is double—I think it in its relations to physical nature, and also in its relations to my personal life; I see that it is in my mind, but that it is also a physical pen” (James 1976: 65). So an earlier pure experience awaits categorization or appropriation, through retrospection by a present experience, into either the context of the self or that of the world external to the self. James cites with evident approval in this connection a saying attributed to the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard that “[w]e live forward but understand backward” (1976: 65, n. 6). Given his analysis of the self not as a substantial entity but as what functions as a stream of consciousness, and his analysis of the world as functioning differently within the field of pure experience, James is within his rights in seeing the knower as one complexly interrelated aspect of ongoing experience and the known as another complex aspect that is reflected upon and interpreted by the first aspect. Neither self nor world is for him a substantial being. Rather, each is a process, a passing parade of bits and pieces exhibiting various kinds of connections and disconnections, characteristics and capacities, the one parade falling into the pattern of a self, the other falling into the pattern of a world outside the self. Among their other ways of functioning, therefore, the self-stream can function as knower (although precisely how it is capable of doing so can be called into question, as I recently noted), and the world-stream can function as the known—a known having the distinctive traits, relations, and contexts of an external world. The difference lies in how aspects of pure experience come to be recognized, interpreted, or appropriated. Philosopher of mind Owen Flanagan helps us understand how the “I” can be viewed, in Jamesian fashion, as a model or complex of models, rather than as some kind of substantial entity, and how this “I” can be interpreted as a kind of perspective upon or within a field of experience that is prior to it and the basis for it. Because the “I” appropriates the contents of an ever changing stream, and because it meets that stream with models of “me,” of a complex self whose parts are undergoing constant revision, the “I” itself is continuously enriched and renewed. The system is dynamic. No part of the system resembles the soul, the ego, the self, or the “I” of traditional metaphysics. (Flanagan 1992: 188)

Flanagan goes on to reason in similar fashion about the idea of a world external to the self. He observes that there are “multifarious models of the external natural world” and of “other selves” (Flanagan 1992: 189). These models grow out of experience and give expression to different aspects of

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experience. Experience is prior; the models, whether of self, world, or other selves, are subsequent to and derivative from experience. In another place Flanagan refers to the model of the self as a “narrative construction” (Flanagan 1992: 192). In James’s view, we also construct—and specifically for him, pure experience initially suggests and motivates—narratives about the self, the world beyond the self, and other selves, and in these ways distinctive paths of stability, order, and meaning are laid out in the midst of experience’s dynamic, volatile, ever-changing character. But we now need to raise an important question: Is James’s way of drawing the distinction between knower and known in the fourth essay of the Essays in Radical Empiricism too exclusively introspective and, more specifically, too exclusively retrospective—especially to the extent that his analysis relies upon his notion there of “appropriation”? I believe the answer to this question in all of its aspects should be affirmative. Let me try to show why I think this to be the case. The knower, as we have seen, is for James a later part of the stream of experience, and the known is an earlier part viewed retrospectively or through memory by the later part. Is this an adequate description of what counts as knower and what counts as known? With respect to the idea that both the knower and the known are to be located within the stream of experience, I think that it is. But I do not think that the sole or even most basic indication of this relationship is to be found in introspection, which James seems strongly to suggest that it is in this fourth essay. In other words, not just the individual’s felt distinction between malleability and obduracy, fleetingness and stability, in an object of awareness is at stake. There are extremely important public as well as private tests of the character and reliability of what one claims to know as extra-mental and objectively real, and James brings these into focus in his work Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. There he presents or alludes to five criteria for ascertaining whether something qualifies as knowledge of some aspect of the external world. Only the first of these criteria is relatively private; the other four can be publicly applied and adjudicated. The first criterion is that a proposal for truth should be verified (or be verifiable) by relevant personal experiences that exhibit the doggedness, efficacy, and constraint characteristic of encounters with the external world; lead through a chain of perceptual and/or conceptual transitions to such an experience; or are capable of being so led. The second is that a claim based on such experiences should be amenable to corroboration in public experience, that is, be confirmed or confirmable by similar experiences of other persons in like circumstances. Empirical verification or confirmation in both of these cases includes for James discernible positive significance in practice, being of some

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definite use in interpreting and responding to demands of the lived world. It also includes, therefore, considerations of purpose and value. The “moral helpfulness” James indicates as a criterion of religious truth in his Varieties of Religious Experience would fall under such considerations of purpose and value (James 1929: 19). The third criterion is that assertion of a new claim to truth should be compatible with a background of previously accepted truths, truths that have already passed muster with the five criteria. Either that, or the new claim or the background—or both—should be capable of adjustment so that a coherent relation can be maintained between the two. The putative new truth should not stand baldly at odds with already established truths. The fourth criterion is that there should be careful regard in claims to truth for the validity and soundness of the patterns of reasoning that might underlie or lead to a claim to truth, and for the logical relations of abstract ideas qua ideas with reference to one another. Finally, of two truth claims with equal adequacy to the deliverances of experience, the simpler of the two should be acknowledged as the superior claim (James 1975: 102, 104).2 These five criteria, I submit, elucidate a large part, if not the whole, of what James means when he refers, as he frequently does, to the pragmatic “workability” of true beliefs, assertions, or theories.3 It is important to keep in mind, though, James’s more general assertion—in keeping with the spirit of his radical empiricism—that pragmatism’s “only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted” (James 1975: 44). When the tests of the five criteria are brought into play, it would seem that traits of the self and traits of the world beyond the self can usually be discriminated in a reliable manner. But the introspective approach alone, as depicted in my earlier exposition in this chapter of how James seeks to explain the relations of knower and known, is often not adequate to make this discrimination, not even for a single knower assuring himself or herself of alleged knowledge of an extra-mental reality. There will be boundary cases, as James rightly recognizes, cases difficult to decide even with the considerations and criteria he has adduced, so we need the qualification “usually” indicated previously. But we can add to James’s account of the differences between self and world as evidenced in two insistently different aspects or operations of pure experience, an account of how putative distinctions between the two fare when brought to the test of the five criteria. When we do so, we have a reasonably convincing account of the differences between what is personal and private, on the one hand, and what transcends the predilections and outlooks of particular subjects, on the

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other. James would seem to be correct in thinking that these differences can be adjudicated within streams of experience and do not require postulation of two different kinds of substance, mental and physical. However, there is another aspect of James’s account of the relations between knower and known in the fourth of his Essays in Radical Empiricism that also needs to be called into question, and that is his apparent exclusive or near-exclusive focus on recollection in giving that account. Surely the primary thrust of his pragmatism is toward the future, not the past! We set up hypotheses that predict certain occurrences in the future and then ascertain whether these occurrences do in fact take place. To the extent that they do, then our hypotheses are confirmed. To the extent that they do not, our hypotheses are shown to be false. James’s well-known and crucial notion of “leading” in his analysis of how we come to know something not immediately perceived is oriented toward the future, not the past.4 So if I want to know for sure whether this is a real pen and not an imagined one, I apply the pragmatic test of operating with it in certain ways here and now in order to find out whether it fulfills my predictions of what an objectively real pen would be like. If it is a real pen, it will have a certain roundness, hardness, and heft, make sounds of scratches, and leave dark marks on paper, and so on. I predict, not merely recollect, that it will have these traits and then seek to find out if it does. When James in the ninth essay of Essays in Radical Empiricism quotes once again the saying of Kierkegaard that we live forward but understand backward, he now notes that this saying is inconsistent with his own pragmatic way of understanding truth and the tests for objective reality that transcend reveries, imaginings, or projections of the subjective mind (James 1976: 121).5 If the pragmatic method consists in testing hypotheses in terms of predicted outcomes, then we not only live forward; we understand forward as well, as James acknowledges in this essay. A thread of memory is of course presupposed in making predictions about the future and seeing if they are confirmed, but the focus is on the future rather than the past. More generally, it is in the knitting together of past, present, and future—of memory, present experience, and anticipation—whether actually or potentially, that knowledge or awareness of things external to oneself consists. And the same point applies to knowledge of oneself as enduring over time. Where is the knower in this more refined account, then? The knower is the reflective aspect of a present experience as it recalls past experiences and expects future ones. Recollection and anticipation are both involved. There is a felt continuity of connectedness with what has been, is now, and is yet to come. As James insists, this sense of connectedness is as fundamental a

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feature of experience as are those aspects of experience it evidences to be distinct from or out of connection with one another. And the felt continuity or connectedness can be discriminated as self or something external to the self along the lines of James’s account of the introspective and retrospective differences between the two and by drawing upon his pragmatic epistemology in general, with its all-important five criteria of truth. Introspection and retrospection are part of the story, but not the whole story needed for distinguishing between knower and known. In the preface to Pragmatism James states that “there is no logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as ‘radical empiricism.’ The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist” (James 1975: 6). Be that as it may, I am seeking in this chapter to show how James’s pragmatism and his radical empiricism can be brought together and recognized as necessarily complementary to one another despite their admitted differences of approach. Also, I am not convinced by Robert Richardson’s contention that in his “rush toward pragmatism,” James “somewhere along the way . . . benched radical empiricism.” Richardson weakens his own case when he admits that “the main ideas of radical empiricism” continue to “figure henceforth in James’s thought and writing as settled notions, to be quietly taken for granted” (Richardson 2007: 482). I agree with Lamberth’s stronger statement that “most of the details of pragmatism’s theory of meaning and truth can be seen as closely related to, if not also actually dependent on, James’s radically empiricist way of thinking” (Lamberth 1999: 54). I also concur with McDermott’s statement that for James pragmatism “is a methodological application of his radical empiricism” (McDermott 1976: 102). I do not find convincing Richard M. Gale’s attempt to show that radical empiricism and James’s pragmatism are notably distinct in that the former allows for what he terms “content empiricism” with a focus on present experience, while the latter, which he refers to as “pragmatic meaning,” focuses solely on future experience. My demur from Gale’s allegation is simply this: pragmatic meaning would have no significance were it not for the expectation and prediction of something in the future to be directly experienced or experiencable. And as for past facts, which Gale thinks to lie beyond the province of James’s pragmatic meaning with its allegedly sole focus on the future, we need only call on imaginary post-dictions of the past, conceiving on the basis of contemporary evidence of what it would have been like to experience these facts or to be led to experience them were we there at that time to do so. Thus radical empiricism and the pragmatic theory of meaning cannot be so easily separated as Gale seems to think. Part of the pragmatic

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meaning of a belief is the future (or imagined post-dictions) of direct experience (or experiences) it implies, and radical empiricism clearly encompasses experiences of the future as well as those of the present, as can be seen in its key notion of conjunctive transitions leading by successive stages to consummatory and confirming experiences (see Gale in Stuhr 2010: 113–18; James 1976: 27). The revised account of the relations of knower and known I offer here gives greater clarity and convincingness to James’s analysis of the relations of knower and known, but it still leaves two other issues without resolution. The first one is the issue of how two or more minds can have common experience and knowledge of features of the external world, an issue crucial to understanding how the second pragmatic criterion listed previously can contribute to the reliability of claims to knowledge of the external world. It is obvious that this criterion can work only if it is possible for two or more minds to have shared knowledge of the world. The second issue is how to resolve the problem of two or more putative knowers being in the grip of the same kinds of possibly distorting and biasing emotions, influences, assumptions, or acculturations, thus rendering questionable from that angle the reliability of the second pragmatic criterion of knowledge for ascertaining what is attributable to the world and what belongs solely to the self. In the next section, I shall take up the first issue, but I reserve development and discussion of the second one for chapter 5 and the first part of chapter 6. It bears crucially upon the feasibility of empiricism in general as an epistemological program.

How Two or More Minds Can Have Knowledge of a Common World James next directs his attention to the question of how two different minds, that is, experiences of two different streams of consciousness, can be said to know one thing in the world external to these two minds. His answer to this question is straightforward. A pure percept or set of pure percepts can be felt warmly, intimately, and as “mine” by two different streams of consciousness and thus appropriated as units or traits of each of the two streams. But the percept or set of percepts can also be appropriated by the two streams as a single enduring feature of the external world, in the manner described earlier. In this case, two minds can be said to know one thing. There is no more mystery, says James, about experiences operating in this cognitive manner in the consciousnesses of two different persons at a given time than there is for experiences of one person to operate in that way. The two streams of consciousness can appropriate the one originally pure percept

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or set of percepts in such a way as to regard it or them as functioning, not only as aspects of their two mental lives, but also as parts of a world that is outside the two streams and common to them. The two streams of consciousness started with something independent of them and prior to appropriation by themselves, namely, the pure percept or set of pure percepts, and then appropriated that something in such a way as to recognize it as a feature of each of them and yet also as a unitary something that by the character of its additional functioning shows itself to transcend the differences between them. A question can be raised about whether or to what extent the so-called pure pen, for example, soon to become appropriated as a mental or physical pen can be the same for two persons. This question does not arise for the pen appropriated as part of the external world, because that pen is (or by definition ought to be) accessible to others as well as to an individual subject. I do not quite see, however, how two persons can appropriate the same pure pen as a feature not of the world but of each person’s privately experienced self. In what sense could this pure pen, thus appropriated, be the same? James evidently means that it is not literally the same but has precisely the same characteristics for both subjects when entertained as an aspect of the continuity of their selves. But even that notion is puzzling. They would have to regard it in quite different contexts, from quite different perspectives, and as part of quite different streams of consciousness. So are its characteristics really the same, and if so, in what specific sense or senses? This puzzle is not clearly addressed by James, but I think it should have been. Perhaps instead of suggesting, as he seems to, that two persons pick out of the field of pure experience the same aspect of that experience to be appropriated (for example, the one pure pen), James should have made it clearer that the two persons appropriate aspects of pure experience in such a manner as to find themselves able to acknowledge these aspects as something accessible in experiences common to the two. They can touch it together, pass it back and forth, lift or weigh it, exchange experiences of writing with it, mutually observe the results of such writing, and so on. The pure pen becomes the same pen, then, only when two or more people can have experience of it and characterize it in publicly available ways. It cannot rightly be termed the same pen when appropriated by or linked exclusively to their particular individual selves or subjective modes of awareness. Two persons can have knowledge of one thing only when that thing is correctly appropriated as a public, not as a private, thing. And this would require tacit if not explicit utilization of at least some of the five pragmatic criteria listed earlier. This distinction between private and public modes of adjudication will become even more critical when I discuss in the next chapter James’s

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account of the manner in which and the extent to which two persons can know not just the same external thing but one another’s minds. Another issue raised by James’s analysis of how two or more selves or minds can know one thing is the issue of the precise nature and status of pure experience in relation to those selves or minds. James seems to reason as though pure experience is something independent of the two knowers, a kind of reservoir or well upon which they can draw in common. This notion is mystifying. I can conceive of pure experience as the rich and teeming background from which an individual discriminates between self and world, a background out of which the individual selects, deliberately or instinctively, aspects for attention and emphasis in the context of particular purposes or needs. But I have no clear perception of how that selfsame background could be prior to and common to two or more different minds. James’s reasoning on this issue is murky. He seems also to be assuming one and the same pure experience for two or more minds, a view that he nowhere explicates or defends. Is there a way out of this apparent muddle? If there is, I have yet to find it clearly laid out in James’s writings. But let me suggest a way of dealing with the problem that I think will work. Let us conceive of individual persons as having separate streams of consciousness. Each also has a distinctive penumbra, field, or arena of pure experience on the basis of which he or she is capable of arriving at many different kinds of emphases and distinctions, including a more or less clear distinction between its surging stream of consciousness and the world beyond itself. The penumbras, fields, or arenas of pure experience of two or more persons can overlap or be shared by them only in the sense of having commonalities of character that transcend their differences. James’s use of the analogy of one undivided estate (that is, pure experience) being owned by two or more heirs is thus in this light more misleading than helpful (James 1976: 66). Pure experience is not a single, undivided, all-encompassing phenomenon common to two or more persons but two or more distinct phenomena associated separately and individually with each person that may and often will have implicit traits that turn out to be common to them both. Although “associated” with them, the respective encompassing clouds of pure experiences are not yet, as pure, “owned” by either of these persons, because they have not been appropriated by either of them in the manner James describes. It is as if each of them were applying for a considerable sum of money through separate mortgages on two different pieces of property, in contrast with the joint ownership of an undivided estate of which James speaks. The two mortgages are distinct large sums of money not as yet acquired, in relation to the more modest amount each of

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the two persons is able to offer as down payment, just as the pure experience of each person contains separate, inexhaustibly abundant potential sources of meaning, truth, and value upon which each of them is able to draw—in contrast with the more restricted meanings, truths, and values in each person’s present possession. Each self or individual person is a relatively determinate focus within an indeterminate but richly resourceful field of pure experience, a focus with persistent threads of continuity amidst ongoing change. In the clarification or revision I am suggesting, therefore, it is not as though pure experience is a single amorphous something independent of two or more individuals, even though James seems often to talk in that way. Rather, the pure experiences are different for each of them and yet coincide in potential character in a variety of ways. I agree with Phil Oliver’s observation, therefore, that “James would have done us all a service if he had spoken not of pure experience but rather of pure experiences” (Oliver 2001: 91). It is the coincidence of character, ascertained in public not in private, but no doubt informed by shared public influences, that enables persons to have experiences of things with common traits, and thus to be said to know some one thing in a common fashion. I think that something like this must be what James must have had in mind when he explains how two or more minds can be capable of knowing the same external thing. The proposed clarification helps, but James certainly should have given this matter more careful attention. His general account, although highly suggestive by pointing us in a new direction of thought, is not sufficiently precise or complete. Given the various claims and arguments presented by James relating to the distinctions between self and world that we have brought into focus, and in view of his analysis of how two minds can be said to know one thing, we can now raise the further question: How and to what extent—if any—can two minds know one another, that is, be aware of the contents and qualities of each other’s inner consciousness? This question will be taken up in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Islands of Awareness

My experiences and your experiences are “with” each other in various external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours pass into yours in a way in which yours and mine never pass into one another. —William James (1976: 25)

In the preceding chapter we saw how James interprets and explains our capacity as human beings to have shared knowledge of the external world, a knowledge common to two or more individual minds. The same notion of “appropriation” is operative in this regard, he argues, as is involved in the ability of one mind to know objects and events external to itself. We saw that things are not quite as simple as he portrays them to be in this regard and that his argument is in need of some qualification and revision. The question that will command our attention in this chapter is: How and to what extent is it possible, according to James, for two or more individual minds to have knowledge of one another, that is, to recognize and comprehend one another’s internal mental processes and states? James’s answer to the question of how two minds can know one another is basically this: It can relatively easily be shown that one mind can know another indirectly and by analogy, on the basis of events in their shared external world. But it is highly unlikely, although perhaps possible in some manner as yet unexplored or unknown, that direct acquaintance with another person’s mental states can be experienced or achieved. James enunciates a version of this second claim in the epigraph to this chapter, 45

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quoted from his Essays in Radical Empiricism. He makes the point even more emphatically when he contends in The Principles of Psychology that each individual mind “keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.” He continues in this vein, alleging that the separations between thoughts belonging to two different minds “are the most absolute breaches in nature” (James 1950: I, 226). What, then, are the ways in which one mind may make contact with another and gain knowledge of contents of that other mind? My clue to the presence and contents of your mind, says James, is the actions of your body. Your body’s facial expressions, gestures, bodily positions, instinctive physical reactions, and general deportments, as well as your spoken or written words, give expression to your inner states of consciousness, and when they coincide with my own bodily expressions in similar circumstances I can safely, in most circumstances, draw conclusions about the character of your relevant mental states. Your “hurtful words and deeds,” for example, can lead me to “the very brink, to the chromatic fringes” of your actual feelings of anger, placing me at least in their “neighborhood” and providing me with “knowledge about” your inner feelings, even if not direct access to them. I reason by analogy, then, from your bodily actions and their expressive character to my quite similar bodily states and their expressive character (James 1976: 36, 38–39). What we can and do share, then, is our experiences of the external world as mediated by our respective bodies and bodily actions, and these experiences entitle us to infer at least some of the significant goings-on of each other’s mental world. If there is no direct way of one mind’s gaining consciousness of another mind, then access to it, if at all possible, must be in ways that are indirect, external, and mediated. Each separate consciousness is like an isolated island of awareness. The ships of inference by analogy required to make contact with such islands can receive information about them while nearby but must remain always offshore. Passengers on those ships, that is, other minds, can never set foot on any particular island’s interior. Two minds can be said to know one another by virtue of their ability—as shown in the preceding chapter—to know one thing, that is, one thing in the world common to them both and external to them both. The possibility and reality of such a publicly accessible world are assured in their turn, James assumes, because of his analysis of the marked difference in function between mind and world as two fundamental aspects of pervasive, finally real fields of pure experience that underlie, are prior to, and provide the ultimate source and basis for that difference.

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Philosopher of mind John Searle points to a problem with the notion that we can gain knowledge of someone else’s inner states of mind by reasoning from analogy in the manner set forth by James. The problem is this: If I alone have access to my inner states of mind, then I alone know what a mind is like from within. I have no such access to anyone else’s mind. When I reason from analogy from my mind to someone else’s mind, there is no independent way to check the accuracy or reliability of that reasoning. So I can never be sure that someone else’s mental states are really like mine. I assume that [w]e both pass the same color blindness test because we both make the same discriminations in our behavior. If asked to pick out the green pencil from a box of red pencils, we both pick the same pencil. But how do I know that the inner experiences you have that enable you to discriminate are similar to the ones I have that enable me to discriminate? (Searle 2004: 14)

James’s answer to this puzzle would no doubt be that it is true that I can have no such thing as absolute, unassailable knowledge at every point of the detailed goings-on of someone else’s mind. Our knowledge of other minds is fallible and approximate at best. But it is generally good enough, and it satisfies the relevant pragmatic criteria. Our inferences from analogy are practical and workable. They enable us to communicate our thoughts and feelings and generally to get along together, even though they may at times fall short of optimal accuracy and effect. The fact that we can have only indirect or analogous knowledge of one another’s minds raises for James no specter of solipsism. It does not pose a Cartesian quandary about the existence of other minds or our ability to have reliable knowledge of them, partly for reasons to be adduced later in this chapter showing that the epistemologies of James and the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes have very different starting points and outlooks. I should note here the remarkable fact that James gives surprisingly little attention to language as a medium of public communication when he talks in Essays in Radical Empiricism about how two minds can know one another. Language is learned in public, acquires its meanings in public, and comes to be used in such a way as to call attention, in its own indirect, mediated fashion, to assumed states of mind. James briefly discusses the acquisition and use of language in The Principles of Psychology (James 1950: II, 355–58). He only mentions “words” in passing as one of the kinds of bodily (or physical) indication of the contents of other minds in Essays in Radical Empiricism (James 1976: 38).

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The cognitive role of language is also of great importance, as is its role in allowing for self-awareness. In his reflections on the thought of Susanne Langer, Robert E. Innis makes two comments that show these connections. In the first, he remarks that “[n]ot only might the categories of our thinking be different if we indwelt a different system or mode of speech, but our deepest perceptual commitments would be different too.” And in the second, he notes that verbal conception “seems to be the conditio sine qua non of a creature’s being able to have a sequential memory of its life” (Innis 2009: 221, 223). By this reckoning, therefore, language pervades and conditions human experience, thought, and self-awareness, and it would be difficult to overestimate its importance in any of the three domains. In addition, as Innis and Langer emphasize, language permeates and deeply informs dreams and the emotional aspects of human awareness (see Innis 2009: 226). Langer lays out in rich detail the decisive roles language plays in human thought and life in the final chapter of the second volume of her trilogy Mind (Langer 1972: 317–55). She discusses and defends there the claim that “the influence of language on human life goes much deeper than communication; it is intrinsic to thinking, imagining, even our ways of perceiving” (Langer 1972: 318). The public medium of language, therefore, along with numerous other ways in which the individual self is profoundly affected by its setting within a shared culture and community, deeply influences and provides rich potential content and direction for the phenomena of personal self-consciousness. We should not overlook this fact when thinking about James’s view of the self. Also, as social beings, we must negotiate questions of truth and falsity, value and disvalue, agreement and disagreement, and the like in our relations with others, and the most important of the ways in which we humans do this is through the public medium of language. Moreover, we can continue critically to examine our personal assumptions, beliefs, valuations, and commitments in this social fashion, testing them in the arena of public interaction and discourse, as James’s second pragmatic theory of truth bids us to do. The self is thus not just a private self; it is also a social self.1 There is an important difference, however, to which James gives considerable emphasis, and that is the difference between my hearing you say that you have a particular state of mind and your direct experience of that state of mind. For example, my hearing you tell me that you are having an intense pain is obviously quite different from your (or my) having the pain at first hand. Still, you can give me important information about your state of mind when you report or describe it to me with the public medium of language. Vocal utterances or marks on paper are types of physical phenomena that have acquired power over long stretches of time to express and describe such

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states of mind. And they can do so with a keenness and specificity in many situations that other types of bodily action or physical expression are incapable of. James should clearly have given more attention to this extremely important, even if only indirect and mediated, way in which persons can gain access to the contents of one another’s mind. We now need to ask whether the barrier between two minds is really as impassable as James presents it as being, especially given his insistence on the permeability of the boundaries between self and world, and on the derivation of the self-awareness of two individual selves from realms of pure experience not yet distinguished into self and world. Two minds can know one another, as we have seen, in an indirect or mediated way, but not in a direct or unmediated way. James states that their contents are walled off from one another so far as the possibility of any kind of direct acquaintance of one mind with another mind is concerned. Each mind has an ineluctable privacy that cannot be infringed upon or entered into by any other mind when it comes to immediate thoughts, feelings, recollections, anticipations, intentions, judgments, and other modes of firsthanded conscious awareness. But in view of the fact that James sees the distinction between self and world as being fuzzy or ill-defined in some situations, why would it not be possible in at least some cases for two minds to know one another directly, and not merely through the mediation of events in the external world? In other words, why would it not be possible for your mental world, as generally part of my external world, to become—in admittedly unusual instances—a part of my mental world, or at least be experienced as not clearly distinguishable from my mental world? Why cannot our two mental worlds coalesce with such vagueness on some occasions, just as what is experienced as my mind and what is experienced as my world do on other occasions, so that I then experience as ambiguous and unsettled the issue of whether you and your mental states are exclusively yours or at least partially also mine? If the boundary between my own self and my world is sometimes porous and vague for me, why could not the boundary between what functions as my mind and what functions as your mind be sometimes porous and vague as well? In this case, James’s view would seem to allow for a kind of clairvoyance or mental telepathy, and it would not be fitting for him to be as adamant as he is about one mind being absolutely cut off from direct contact with another. Or at least it would help to explain why twin siblings seem at times to be able to anticipate or share one another’s thoughts and feelings.2 One response to these questions is to note the important difference between one mind finding the distinction between itself and its world to be sometimes permeable or vague, on the one hand, and two minds finding the

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distinction between one another to be permeable or vague, on the other. If part of your mind were to function as an ingredient of my mind, in James’s sense of “to function,” it would cease to be a part of your mind and become a part of my own mind. To the extent that it functions for me as mine, it could not function for me as yours. Your thoughts would literally become my thoughts and would no longer be recognizable by me as yours. They would be warm, compliant, fleeting, intimate, and so forth, and thus be experienced as something not external to or distinct from me, but as internal to me. If your thoughts were unmediated and experienced by me directly, they would cease to be your thoughts and become mine, and I would not have any way of directly knowing that they are also yours. Furthermore, to speak of vague boundaries is not the same thing as to speak of one person’s having a clear consciousness of the content of another person’s mind. My being vague about whether I am experiencing my mind or yours, even if that were possible, would be far from the same thing as my having distinct knowledge of one or more of your mental states. Hence, when James builds a solid wall between two or more minds, so far as the possibility of any direct or unmediated access to one mind by another is concerned, he has warrant for doing so. And he is consistent with his own theory as I outlined it earlier. I should note, however, that he leaves the door of this possibility slightly ajar when he says in passing in his Principles of Psychology that it would be unduly “rash” to be too final or categorical in affirming that two minds must in all cases be completely “insulated” or closed off from one another, “in view of the phenomena of thought-transference, mesmeric influence, and spirit-control, which are being alleged nowadays on better authority than ever before” (James 1950: I, 350). In his Essays in Radical Empiricism he also mentions the idea of two minds flowing over what would seem “to be an ultimate barrier between them” by somehow becoming “co-conscious.” But “thought transference apart,” he notes, this possibility “is not supposed to be the case” (James 1976: 40). James’s lifelong interest in and open-mindedness about parapsychology shows through in these guarded comments, but he seems to be well aware that the force and direction of his own theory militate against a distant possibility he so dimly and rather reluctantly envisages. Perhaps we can come at this question of whether two minds could ever be in direct contact with one another’s states in a different way. James argues that pure experience is not “owned” by anyone (James 1976: 66). That is, in its purity it is not the province of any particular self or mind. It is prior to the distinction between self and world. But if that is the case, would it not make sense to say that, since two distinct minds emerge from the unitary field of

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pure experience and become aware of their distinctness by virtue of ways in which that unitary experience presents itself functionally and for categorization, they ought to be able to communicate directly with one another, at least some of the time? What begins with unity, in other words, ought to be able to come back to unity, to a reabsorption into what was originally not distinct. However, even if this were the case, there would not be a merging of two distinct minds that remain such or that remain aware either of their distinction from one another or of their merger. What came from and was based upon an originally formless and nameless chaos would simply return to that chaos, in which case the notion of two minds being in contact with one another qua two distinct minds would be inappropriate and inapplicable. But more basically, I argued in the previous chapter that each consciousness has a separate penumbra or fringe of pure experience surrounding it. It is not the case that pure experience is a single amorphous something prior to and independent of each and all consciousnesses. James sometimes leaves us with this impression, but I think it is mistaken. Pure experience is that aspect of experience that is as yet and will to a significant extent always be “unowned” by a particular consciousness in the sense of not having been sorted into distinctive aspects of self and world, but it will be a particular pure experience associated with a particular consciousness. So to speak of a “unitary pure experience” that is supposedly prior to all consciousnesses is a mistake. And because it is so, we cannot argue from such an assumed unity of pure experience to the co-consciousness of two or more minds. I conclude, then, that James is correct—certainly in terms of his own overall theory of the relations of minds to the world and of minds to one another—in his insistence that two minds can communicate with one another only indirectly, that is, through the mediation of actions or events in their shared extra-mental world, and that they seem otherwise to be radically separate or even “insulated” from one another. What we might call the fact of privileged inwardness or exclusive first-person subjectivity must therefore be acknowledged and affirmed. These phrases are ways of calling attention to what is more routinely termed uniquely individual consciousness and selfawareness. Despite claims to the contrary in some quarters, we are nowhere near to adequately explaining or accounting for immediate personal consciousness and its remarkable powers, and we are certainly not in a position to be able convincingly to explain them away. After remarking on how “stunning and mysterious” the phenomenon of consciousness remains to this day, Searle goes on to say, “One of the weird features of recent intellectual life was the idea that consciousness—in the literal sense of qualitative, subjective states

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and processes—was not important, that somehow it did not matter. One reason this is so preposterous is that consciousness is itself the condition of anything having importance.” He trenchantly explains, “Only to a conscious being can there be any such thing as importance” (Searle 2004: 110). Any attempt by putative studies of the mind to minimize or set aside firstperson consciousness and its phenomenological states would in fact be cut off at the knees. Flanagan states the simple reason for this observation: “the study of the brain alone will yield absolutely no knowledge about the mind unless certain phenomena described at the psychological or phenomenological level are on the table to be explained.” We would learn nothing about mental function, he goes on to say, by framing our inquiries into the brain solely with the languages and approaches of physics, chemistry, or biology. Our neuroscientific inquiries into the mind, in order to be informative and fruitful, must be guided by linking “robust phenomenological states with distinctive types of neural activity” (Flanagan 1992: 12, ch. 4, passim). The states to which Flanagan refers are by definition experienced personally and at firsthand. Flanagan’s insistence on taking fully into account the first-person phenomena of immediate experience (or “qualia”) does not mean that he accedes to the view that such subjective phenomena are wholly ineffable or totally inaccessible to objective, third-person, interpersonal means of investigation. He argues that important aspects of or conditions for such experiences can be illuminated by neuroscience, on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other. Throughout his book and in his philosophy of mind Flanagan seeks to bring these three areas of study—phenomenology, neuroscience, and cognitive science—into “reflective equilibrium” (Flanagan 1992: 11, 68). Contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science are thus for him third-person ways of interpreting and gaining understanding of aspects of direct personal experiences that can supplement in today’s modes of thought the indirect, mediated, or third-person ways indicated by James and discussed previously. Achieving such “reflective equilibrium” would also be greatly aided by being careful to avoid assuming such a narrow view of the nature, traits, and potentialities of the physical as tacitly to preempt out of hand any meaningful relations between the mental and the physical. James’s thought points us in the right direction, but of course much more work is needed to attain a broad and adequate conception of the nature and capacities of the physical in its relations to the mental. Philosophy has an important role to play in this regard. But we should note explicitly and in the spirit of James that the third-person techniques and inquiries of the natural sciences cannot be

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expected by themselves wholly to account for or make completely intelligible what is firsthanded, phenomenal, or subjective. They can analyze the objective conditions and analogues for subjectivity and have great value and importance in doing so, but their analyses cannot substitute for the direct experiences of subjectivity or convert them wholesale into something external and objective. Neither of the two fundamental functions of pure experience can be reduced without crucial remainder to the other. Herman Weyl makes an extremely important observation in this regard when he says, Of myself, of my own acts of perception, thought, volition, feeling and doing, I have a direct knowledge entirely different from the theoretical knowledge that represents the “parallel” cerebral processes in symbols. This inner awareness of myself is the basis for the understanding of my fellowmen whom I meet and acknowledge as beings of my own kind, with whom I communicate sometimes so intimately as to share joy and sorrow with them. (Weyl 1949; quoted in Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 311)

Flanagan sums up an important aspect of his view, an aspect which is also precisely the view of James, when he writes, “There are other minds, and we have knowledge of them. But such knowledge never involves grasping exactly what it is like to have another’s experiences or inner life” (Flanagan 1992: 107). Why is this so? It is partly because no two individuals have the same body; the same brain with its particular neuronal connections; the same genetic makeup; the same patterns of habits, associations, memories, and anticipations; or the same complex, interconnected backgrounds and histories—and, thus, the same sense of self or personal identity. Flanagan makes a similar point when he remarks that “[t]he organic integrity of individuals and the structure and function of individual nervous systems grounds each individual’s special relation to how things seem to him” (Flanagan 1992: 91). And he reminds the reader of his book that “[o]nly your sensory receptors and brain are properly hooked up to each other and to the rest of you so that what is received at those receptors accrues to you as your experiences” (Flanagan 1992: 94; the emphasis is mine). The particularity and privacy of firsthanded experiences or modes of conscious awareness should therefore come as no surprise. Subjective experience is thus something inescapably firsthanded and private, something that can be partially and usefully interpreted and communicated by what is objective and public but cannot be converted into it.

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Oliver comments on the implications of this fact for scientific approaches to the mystery of conscious inwardness: “It is commonly conceded that scientific usefulness depends upon generality. The fact that subjectivity is the form of our experience is general enough, but experience itself is inescapably, irreducibly, delightfully specific” (Oliver 2001: 27). Individual subjective experience is thus, by its very nature, beyond the reach of complete scientific description. Its ineliminable idiosyncrasy, privacy, and first-person character defy capture by the principles, laws, and techniques of objective, third-person scientific generality. Individual minds can make mistakes in interpreting their own inner goings-on, of course, but they alone can have direct experiences of themselves. This observation should not lead us, however, into the conclusion that we are locked into our subjective awareness with no access to the world or to the awareness of other persons in the world. Flanagan is entirely correct when he states, as noted earlier, “There are other minds, and we have knowledge of them.” Although we cannot share with any other person the immediacy and necessary idiosyncrasy of that person’s firsthand awareness, we can and continually do share in knowledge of a common world and of mediated experiences, feelings, and beliefs of other selves in the world that transcend but are also necessarily related to each of our respective firsthand modes of awareness. We share in culturally mediated meanings of a common culture, for example, and in essentially meaningful references and relations to other aspects of the world external to our individual selves—including the indisputable fact of other selves—because self and world are, as James so clearly recognized, indissolubly bound together. The one is implicated, both conceptually and actually, in the other. They cannot be torn apart. As we shall see in chapter 6, sensations for James, just to take one especially pertinent example, are in their very nature sensations of something or other. They do not stand alone apart from references to the world, references from which or in the context of which they gain their meaning. Conversely, a meaningful world is one recognized to be such and responded to as such by acts of the conscious self. A final question I want to raise and discuss in this chapter relates to all of the topics we have so far discussed. That question is: Does James’s use of an argument from analogy in explaining how two minds can gain indirect knowledge of one another’s mental states imply that James is really a Cartesian dualist in disguise? Some other questions are implicit in this one: Does James start with ideas in his own mind and infer on that basis, but with keenly felt uncertainty, that there is such a thing as an external world? And does he find it extremely problematic to think of someone else’s having a

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mind or having similar ideas in his or her own mind? Lastly, does James assume, for these reasons, that he must resort to an argument from analogy in order to try to find some way of establishing, albeit with considerable uncertainty and doubt, that there are indeed other minds with contents similar to his own directly and certainly known mind? One thinker who contends that all of this is indeed the case for James is Stephen P. Thornton. Thornton does not discuss James directly, but he includes him in a list of so-called Cartesian thinkers “who accept the Cartesian account of consciousness.” Thornton sees James and others (he also mentions John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and A. J. Ayer) as caught in the Cartesian account and its relentless drift toward solipsism because he identifies James with those who assume or presuppose three distinctive beliefs he closely associates with Cartesianism. The three beliefs are “What I know most certainly are the contents of my own mind”; “There is no conceptual or logically necessary link between the mental and the physical”; and “The experiences of a given person are necessarily private to that person” (Thornton 2007: 4, 2). I want to look at each of these three assumptions or beliefs in turn, to see if it really applies to the thought of William James. As for the first one, I cannot find any express statement where James asserts it. He does say that I alone can be in direct contact with the contents of my own mind. But that is not the same thing as saying that what I know most certainly are those contents and those alone. James does not state or suggest, as Descartes did, that he must start from a primal certitude of self-awareness and reason from that to the external world. Self and world are given together in the field of pure experience. Neither is prior to the other, and neither is an inferential basis for the other. Thornton has possibly been misled by the fundamental role James assigns to experience in his philosophy, assuming that the term experience refers initially or primarily to a particular person’s introspective or private experiences rather than to a dense field of possibility containing within itself the seeds of both self and world as separate but closely related functions. James’s use of the term does have this tendency to mislead, as we noted in chapter 2 when discussing the common assumption that experience must always presuppose an experiencer. With regard to the second assumption or claim, it seems equally incorrect to apply it to the thought of James. If the mental is not prior to the physical; if the mental and the physical are linked virtually or in solution in pure experience, and its unity precedes their disunity; if the physical functions to constrain, limit, or push back against the mental and, indeed, to be the seat,

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context, and intermediary of all things mental—all of which James asserts3— then the second claim also does not apply to the lineaments of his thought as described earlier. Body and mind are intimately connected in his philosophy. With regard to the third assumption or claim, I have shown that James clearly does not accept or endorse it. The experiences of a person can readily be made public—and usually unquestionably so—in the indirect, mediated ways we have already discussed. As far as their distinctive characteristics or meanings are concerned, these experiences come to have them largely, if not entirely, through the mediation of bodily expressions publicly conveyed and language used in accordance with public rules and publicly assumed conventions. Thus, for him, it is altogether as natural, primitive, and warranted for us to believe in the existence of an extra-mental world with which we are in continuous interaction—including the existence of other minds as parts of that external world—as it is to believe in the existence of our own mind or self, or in the experienced contents of our own mind or self.4 Our knowledge of the workings of the brain is much greater today than it was in James’s time, as is our ability to simulate many of its operations with sophisticated computer models and to stimulate those operations with various instruments and probes. Yet we have no clear understanding of how objectively observable physical processes in the brain and other parts of the body can produce—in their interactions with the world external to the body—sensations, feelings, and other kinds of direct subjective consciousness and awareness. As we saw in chapter 2, James gives no account of how pure experience comes to be divided into the two functions of experience of an external world (including our ability to study the brain as an external object) and experience of an inner self. This distinction for him is a primordial given, as fundamental a fact of experienced reality as, for example, its spatiotemporal character. In the chapters of this book up to this point, we have examined and critically discussed four central features of William James’s philosophy of radical empiricism: his conception of pure experience and its roles within his empiricism; his treatment of the distinction between self and world; his explanation of how two or more minds can come to have knowledge of aspects of a common world; and his analysis of ways in which and the extent to which two or more minds can acquire knowledge of one another’s inner, subjective experiences. With these four topics in mind, we can now move to a question that bears fundamentally on James’s entire philosophic program and vision: Is human experience ever sufficiently distinct from or independent of its prior conceptualizations, theories, or assumptions to serve as a meaningful check on or to test the truth or falsity of those same conceptualizations, theories, or

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assumptions? To put the question another way: Is human experience always so hopelessly theory-laden, concept-laden, or emotion-laden, already so shot through with firm and often unconscious antecedent beliefs, commitments, and expectations, as to make it generally useless for judging issues that might challenge or lie beyond the reach of its theoretical, conceptual, or emotional biases? If the answer to this second version of the question is in the affirmative, then any alleged epistemic role of experience as such—to say nothing of a so-called pure experience—must necessarily go by the board. The only appeal that can then be made is not to experience itself but only to the relative consistency and coherence of the ideas, convictions, and commitments that thoroughly condition, order, and pervade it. In the next chapter and the early part of the succeeding chapter I consider some important arguments that purport to show the bankruptcy of empiricism in general and thus also of James’s brand of empiricism in particular. I develop a critical response to these arguments and a defense of empiricism as an epistemological position and program. In the process of doing so, I make a case for the general continuing credibility of James’s radical empiricism.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Alleged Bankruptcy of Traditional Empiricisms

[A]ttempts to get behind language to something which “grounds” it, or which it “expresses,” or to which it might hope to be “adequate,” have not worked. The ubiquity of language is a matter of language moving into the vacancies left by the failure of all the various candidates for the position of “natural starting-points” of thought, starting-points which are prior to and independent of the way some culture speaks or spoke. —Richard Rorty (1982: xx)

Is there such a thing as pure experience? James admits that completely pure experience is mostly extremely rare, something encountered, if at all, only in exceptional moments or very early in life. What, then, about relatively pure experience? James insists that relatively pure experience is present at all times as the accompaniment of ordinary, day-to-day experience. It is the larger, more encompassing, freely flowing, and ever-changing context within which daily experience takes place, the field of vague but evocative awareness within which the latter’s selections, emphases, categorizations, and interpretations occur, as guided by routine sorts of purpose and inquiry. Can such relatively uncategorized and uninterpreted experiences, if they exist and come and go in ever-renewing and potentially challenging forms, as James asserts, serve as a possible check or correction on the texture and orientation of ordinary experiences in some situations, calling into question some of the engrained beliefs and commitments associated with those experiences, perhaps suggesting a need for their alteration in significant ways, or

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even urging on occasion their complete abandonment? Is the relative purity or freedom from familiar conceptualization James alleges for this kind of fringing, flowing, and intrusive experience sufficient to allow for it the innovative and corrective role he assigns to it as a convinced empiricist? He is persuaded that such relative freedom is the case. But if relatively pure experience is nonexistent and thus cannot play such a role, then we are stuck with experiences so thoroughly imbued with fixed conceptualizations, commitments, and expectations as to offer no gap between experience and belief. The circle of belief and the circle of experience are then concentric and coincident—one and the same. Beliefs suffuse and give meaning to experience, but experience can provide no independent test of the adequacy of beliefs. A bankruptcy of empiricism is thus alleged. On the other hand, if we do experience much more than on any given occasion we can clearly think, as James believes—if a welter of vague but intrusive and larger experience lies beyond the easy reach of our ordinary experience, with its customary beliefs and anticipations—then this wider (and wilder) range of experience can be a potential source of surprisingly or even shockingly different and sometimes recognizably more adequate perspectives, insights, and ways of thinking. Thoroughly interpreted and relatively uninterpreted experience can be in constant tension and interaction with one another, the former giving conceptual emphasis, direction, and significance to the latter, and the latter serving as a fecund source of fresh insights and new emphases, and as a potential basis for the correction and revision of previously unquestioned assumptions and commitments. For the first kind of attack on empiricism to be discussed in this chapter, that of Richard Rorty, there is no such thing as uninterpreted or unconceptualized experience, or at least none with cognitive import. All experience for him is shot through with antecedent belief, evaluation, commitment, and theory. Certain aspects of experience, with their conceptualizations, can be called into question only to the extent that they might be seen to conflict with other aspects having their own weight of conceptualization. There is no experience in itself or experience as such to be called into play, no such a thing as relatively pure experience to stand in contrast with the experience of ordinary outlooks and expectations. New concepts can come into being when suggested to the active mind by analogies, conflicts, or other relations with older concepts; when provoked by interactions with proponents of different cultures and worldviews; or when generated by free plays of the creative imagination. But these new concepts or ways of thinking do not have their source in a supposedly independent field of experience relatively free of prior conceptualizations. Empiricism must therefore be jettisoned altogether

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as an epistemological position. Conceptual analysis, criticism, and conversation, often in the form of careful investigations and comparisons of linguistic meanings and practices, must take its place. The second kind of criticism of empiricism I want to examine, that of the philosopher of science Bas C. van Fraassen, takes issue with the idea that empiricism per se contains or can contain any sort of substantive claims about psychological or extra-mental reality. In so doing, this critic urges us to reject most if not all of the empiricisms of the past (presumably including that of James) on the ground that they unconsciously or carelessly conflate empiricism as it ought to be understood with views of empiricism that imply their self-refutation and thus end up like the snake eating its tail or by painting themselves into a corner, that is, in a flagrant and embarrassing reductio ad absurdum. From this critical standpoint, then, empiricism as generally understood is bankrupt. A radically different understanding of empiricism must take its place, and van Fraassen proposes such an understanding. I shall respond to Rorty’s critique of empiricism as such and to van Fraassen’s indictment of what he regards as traditional or generally assumed forms of empiricism by examining the cogency of each of the two criticisms, the extent to which they apply to James’s announced commitment to and understanding of empiricism, and their bearing on his considered views of self, selves, and the world. I have chosen Rorty and van Fraassen for consideration in this chapter because each presents a significant but interestingly different challenge to James’s brand of empiricism, and because exhibiting the kind of response James’s radical empiricism can make to the two lines of criticism helps to bring aspects of the latter more clearly into view. Most importantly, at least in my judgment, this kind of discussion enables us to see why from James’s perspective empiricism itself is far from being either bankrupt and no longer relevant or useful in philosophy, or a mere empty posture or stance with no distinctive content of its own. The discussion is of course critically germane to the whole edifice of James’s empiricist philosophy, which is the main reason for my undertaking it here and for setting the arguments and positions of these other two philosophers into dialogue and contrast with James’s own outlook. Without such a discussion, the arguments and views of this book would be radically incomplete.

Richard Rorty’s Dismissal of Philosophical Empiricism American philosopher Richard Rorty, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, is the example of the kind of resolute and uncompromising anti-empiricist

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to be discussed in this section. Justification of belief, outlook, or conviction on the basis of experience, including experience said to be relatively pure or concept-free, has no meaning for him. He asserts in his magnum opus Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept” and that “there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.” The notion that there is some kind of “permanent neutral matrix” independent of language, history, acculturation, and of what is already thought to be true, on the basis of which we can discriminate between true and false beliefs, he acknowledges as “the philosophical urge” (Rorty 1980: 178–79). But the urge is also for him a mere will-o’-the wisp, a hopeless, though stubbornly persistent delusion blighting the history of philosophy. When it comes to adjudication of belief, assessing the extent of coherence or incoherence among specific existing beliefs is the only recourse. We are pretty much stuck with what we have, but within that context we can strive for greater coherence between and among the items of belief constituting what we have. Such striving for coherence and consequent adjustments and modifications of belief can be motivated and assisted by ongoing conversations with those whose systems of beliefs may differ from our own. What Rorty calls “edifying philosophy” has as its task keeping the conversation going rather than allowing it to be closed off. By so doing, it can guard against the seductive tendency to assume that philosophy has anything to do with a search for “objective” truth or “hypostatization of some privileged set of descriptions” independent of historical circumstances or cultural contexts. Any such endeavor he characterizes as a futile attempt to “escape from humanity,” that is, from the inevitable fallibility, limitation, and situatedness of the human condition (Rorty 1980: 377). All critical reflection and adjudication, guided by its goal of coherence, must be, at best, piecemeal and partial and can never be conducted “by reference to eternal standards” or appeal to any putative source, foundation, or ground thought to be distinct from the striving for greater coherence. This statement requires rejection, among other things, of appeals to “knowledge by acquaintance” (Rorty 1980: 179–80). Particular claims can be put in jeopardy, Rorty acknowledges, but not all claims at once. Particular ones can be assessed only within the holistic fabric of language, tradition, acculturation, and what is already generally accepted as true—and again only by considerations of internal coherence. Experience cannot be separated from this holistic fabric but is deeply embedded within and intricately entangled with it. So it cannot be an independent basis for measuring the adequacy or inadequacy of one or more of the fabric’s parts (Rorty 1980: 174, 180–81).

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Contrary to what we have seen to be James’s firm empiricistic conviction, there is no such thing as even relatively unconceptualized experience for Rorty, and therefore no possibility of a supposed “new experience” putting to a “strain” present patterns of outlook and belief. James gives due consideration to the importance of coherence in systems of belief and allows, with Rorty, that we are typically desirous of saving as much as we can of our old “mass of opinions.” But he assigns to experience, and especially to “new experience,” a critical role for the testing and possible altering of old beliefs that Rorty roundly rejects (see again James 1975: 34–35). Rorty also takes pains to reject the view that the “obduracy” of things or our being “shoved around by physical reality” has anything to do with a supposed “one right way” of describing or coping with reality. It is hugely important, he insists, for us not to fall into the trap of confusing “contact with reality (a causal, nonintentional, non-description-relative relation) with dealing with reality (describing, explaining, predicting, and modifying it—all of the things we do under descriptions)” (Rorty 1980: 375). Contact with the obduracies of reality (or what James characterized as the obduracies of experience), in other words, gives us no independent basis for arriving at descriptions of reality that can be rightly regarded as the one correct way of understanding it. Rorty is not denying that our descriptions should take into account the obduracies of the world. He is only denying that the obduracies can somehow give us direct, unmediated, privileged knowledge of the world, knowledge that can come to us in a manner free of the conditions, constraints, and facilitations of our linguistic and cultural systems. For Rorty, all claims to knowledge are necessarily filtered through our conventional ways of describing, conceptualizing, and evaluating and are therefore entirely captive to and dependent upon those ways. Rorty’s conception of the relation of causal promptings to claims to knowledge is similar to that of the philosopher of science Karl Popper. According to Popper, not even scientific claims can rightly be said to be tested against experience but only against what he calls “basic statements.” And these basic statements, though motivated by experience, cannot on that account be regarded as justified or as providing justifications for the scientific claims. “[T]he decision to accept a basic statement,” Popper writes, “is causally connected with our experiences. . . . But we do not attempt to justify basic statements by these experiences. Experiences can motivate a decision, and hence an acceptance or rejection of a statement, but a basic statement cannot be justified by them—no more than by thumping the table” (Popper 1959: 105; quoted in Haack 2009: 145). As philosopher Susan Haack notes, one reason for Popper’s contending that basic statements cannot be justified

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by experience is his conviction that such statements are themselves thoroughly theory-laden and thus not in that regard distinct from the theories they are called upon to test. High-level theories are thus tested by more fundamental ones, and not by experience itself. The second reason is Popper’s insistence on the familiar distinction between causation and justification (see Haack 2009: 145–46). To remark that Jones was caused to have such and such a belief by certain aspects of his upbringing and environment, for example, is quite different from claiming that he is justified in continuing to adhere to the belief. Thus for Popper, so-called basic statements are occasioned by experiences but cannot be supported or confirmed by them. Rorty seems to be reasoning about the relation of experiences to truth claims in a similar manner. James’s tenacious adherence to the idea of pure experience, on the other hand, provides him with a matrix of potential meanings and truths that is at least relatively independent of, can in some significant manner stand in contrast with, and can sometimes forcefully intrude upon and challenge previously existing beliefs. James is certainly enough of an acknowledged fallabilist to agree with Rorty that there is no one right way or indubitably true way of interpreting the world or any aspect of the world. But he does insist, as against Rorty, that there is a matrix of pure experience, or relatively pure experience, that can on important occasions significantly guide and inform our descriptions of the experienced world. Within the matrix of pure experience, as we have seen, are not just blank resistance and obduracy but constraint and guidance with implicit cognitive import, and the consequent capability of making distinctive contributions to our admittedly fallible knowledge and of pointing the way to needed corrections and redirections in our existing patterns of belief. Rorty, for his part, is intent upon substituting what he calls “epistemological behaviorism” for the empiricism that he rejects, principally for the reason that the latter confuses, in his judgment, explanation with justification (Rorty 1980: 174, 192).1 To observe, for example, that there is some kind of causal condition making it possible for one to make a judgment is something entirely different from assessing the cogency of the judgment itself. My having a pain is not the same thing as my knowing or claiming that I have what can rightly be characterized as a pain or a specific type of pain. The latter requires that I be part of a linguistic and cultural community that enables me to notice the sort of thing pain is, name it as such, and place it within the context of the myriad categories, distinctions, and relations of that community’s existing language games and social practices. Similarly, other kinds of more complicated judgments and justifications need no empirical or ontological

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ground, because the community, with its existing vocabularies, rules, and practices, is the entirely reliable “source of epistemic authority” (Rorty 1980: 188). To understand justification, then, as something distinct from causation, we need only describe the practices of the community, the character of its behavior as it goes about assessing the truth or falsity of given claims. Rorty cites Wilfred Sellars with approval, noting that for the latter as for him, “justification is a matter of social practice, and . . . everything which is not a matter of social practice is of no help in understanding the justification of human knowledge, no matter how helpful it may be in understanding its acquisition.” Whatever the causal conditions underlying a claim to knowledge might be, they are entirely distinct—in this view of the matter—from the actual making of the claim and seeking for its justification. The latter has nothing to do with causation or a putative grounding in preconceptual experience and everything to do with the “epistemic rules” we acquire “when we have entered the community where the game governed by these rules is played” (Rorty 1980: 186–87). With his epistemological behaviorism Rorty intends to dismiss as unwarranted and irrelevant the seeming dark mystery of epistemological questions as wrestled with by traditional philosophy over the years, and to appeal with quiet confidence to descriptions of the actions and reactions of settled communities when it comes to resolving questions of truth and falsity, value and disvalue, justification and falsification.

Bas C. van Fraassen’s Rejection of Empiricism as Commonly Understood Dutch philosopher of science Bas C. van Fraassen devotes his book The Empirical Stance to defense of the claim that traditional or generally assumed forms of empiricism, to the extent that they are committed to claims of any kind about selves or the world, are irredeemably bankrupt. In the place of these traditional forms of empiricism he presents a sustained argument for the idea that philosophical empiricism should not be seen as containing, implying, or resting upon any factual theses of its own, but solely as the endorsement of a stance, posture, or attitude to be taken with respect to all such theses. He lumps such theses or supposedly factual claims about selves and the world under the labels of psychologism and metaphysics. The latter is the more inclusive label for what is to be rejected, according to the version of philosophical empiricism van Fraassen recommends, since it includes assumptions or claims about the character and reality of who and what we humans are as experiencing, thinking, and evaluating beings and about the nature of the extra-mental world. Such assumptions or claims, he argues,

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must not be thought to be implicit in empiricism as such or to be in any way essential to it. Van Fraassen contends that forms of empiricism that contain, imply, or rest upon substantive beliefs of any kind about the self or the world are self-contradictory. Such views he designates as “E+,” the notion that there is always some kind of “plus” involved in empiricism, some set of beliefs to which it is necessarily committed. He calls this notion “Principle Zero.” His basic argument is that empiricism, in order to remain a viable outlook, must reject Principle Zero and thus rid itself, so far as is possible, of any and all factual claims, metaphysical commitments, or specific beliefs. One example of the supposed “plus” that van Fraassen has in mind is the way in which historians of philosophy typically distinguish empiricism from rationalism. Empiricism is said to reject innate ideas (or truths), while rationalism is said to accept them and to rest dependable knowledge upon them. These are theses about human psychology, and once empiricism is lumped with them, then it would be impossible for any criticism of its thesis to be mounted on empiricist grounds. An idea closely associated with this one about the actuality or nonactuality of innate or a priori truths is the conviction that reliable knowledge must rest upon an unshakable foundation of some sort. In accepting the notion that knowledge must rest upon such a foundation, van Fraassen points out, British empiricism tacitly accepted the aim of continental rationalism to find some incorrigible source and basis of knowledge and to locate it in a thesis about the nature of the human psyche. For the rationalists, the purported foundation is innate truths, while for the empiricists the foundation consists of the supposed simple data of sensation and reflection from which all complex knowledge is derived and to which it can be reduced. A final example of the association of empiricism with substantive factual claims is Immanuel Kant’s attempt to rescue Humean empiricism from skepticism, thus allowing reliable experiential claims about the world, by mounting an extensively developed thesis about the structure and functioning of the human mind (see van Fraassen 2002: 34–35, 39–40). But empiricism is also supposed to be an attitude of openness to change, to possible revisions or abandonment of even the most basic and stubbornly held outlooks and beliefs. It is not an expressed or implicit commitment to certain psychological or metaphysical ideas but a willingness to reconsider, criticize, and even to reject all such ideas, if necessary. Empiricism is thus, by this latter interpretation, a critical posture or stance always open to change, always ready to question, revise, or abandon any given set of psychological or metaphysical claims when new evidence or new ways of thinking make this advisable. A reductio ad absurdum haunts any

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version of empiricism that is claimed to rest upon, require, or be necessarily connected with any sort of metaphysical commitment or claim about selves and the world, for then it would also be required to allow for the possibility of a rejection of that same commitment and, with that, to reject itself (van Fraassen 2002: 43, 46). If the empiricist stance is thought to be necessarily dependent upon some kind of supposed empiricist doctrine or dogma, then for van Fraassen the bankruptcy of empiricism is easily exposed. He insists that empiricism can be turned away from this dead end only if the concept of it is entirely separated from metaphysical commitments or substantive factual claims and viewed solely as a stance rather than also as a thesis or set of theses. “Stance and not thesis” is the essence of his radically revised conception of empiricism, a conception reflected in the title of his book. The alternative to Principle Zero that van Fraassen proposes is, then, that we view empiricism as a philosophical position of great importance but refuse to see it as any other than “a stance (attitude, commitment, approach, a cluster of such).” He admits that such a stance “may involve or presuppose some beliefs as well” but alleges that it “cannot be simply equated with having beliefs or making assertions about what there is” (van Fraassen 2002: 47–48). In other words, we can have the “E” without the “+.” It would be interesting to pursue the question of what the presupposed beliefs that might remain in van Fraassen’s version of empiricism would be like, but he quickly leaves this crucial issue behind and does not address it further. He contends that a philosophical position can be simply an approach or attitude and does not have to be a specific set of putatively factual claims or beliefs about what the world is like. He regards empiricism conceived in this revised and restricted manner as an entirely legitimate and defensible philosophical position in its own right. It is itself without content and fully intends to be so, but it is open to critical consideration of various kinds of possible content, including content that may transgress in some manner an existing set of firmly held convictions and beliefs. The essential point is that philosophical empiricism, for van Fraassen, is not itself tied inexorably to any implied, acknowledged, or insistedupon set of factual beliefs. Van Fraassen makes two significant points about the relation of his conception of empiricism to the sciences. One is that the “forms and practices of inquiry” in the sciences should be regarded as the paradigm of empiricism as he views it, but that this empiricism is not tied to or dependent upon any of the specific claims or findings of the sciences. These claims and findings may come and go, as indeed they have in the history of science, but the character and conditions of scientific empiricism remain the same. Empiricism is therefore wider

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than the sciences and thus not restricted to them, even though it is admirably instantiated by the practices of the sciences when they are functioning at their best. Van Fraassen points out in this regard that one may be a resolute empiricist in his sense of the term “while showing little deference to the content of any science per se” (van Fraassen 2002: 63). The second point is that the empirical attitude, including its manifestation in the sciences, is not itself immune to criticism or disagreement but that this criticism or disagreement, when it occurs, must be solely a matter of the questioning of posture or attitude, not belief, because empiricism—properly understood—incorporates no fixed or essential beliefs. The difference between the true scientist and the “crank” van Fraassen observes, following the thought of Paul Feyerabend, lies not so much in the endorsement of beliefs flatly at odds with current scientific claims as in the unwillingness on the part of the crank to subject his or her views, once taken, to continuing investigation and research and potential future modification or falsification. He states the point this way: “A disregard for evidence, a refusal to submit one’s ideas to natural selection by relevant experiment or to engage in vigorous testing when nature does not put one to the test (these are some examples, none of them factual beliefs!) can certainly take one beyond the scientific [and empiricist] pale” (van Fraassen 2002: 48). But the disagreement here is one of the attitude one takes toward one’s beliefs rather than the content of the beliefs themselves. In refusing to accept empiricism, in other words, one does not thereby reject any particular set of beliefs but only rejects an approach to the holding of beliefs, just as in championing empiricism one is not required to accept any particular set of beliefs. For the scientific approach, as for empiricism in general, it is all a matter of attitude or stance. Van Fraassen insists upon recognition of three important aspects of claims to knowledge related to experience. The first is the experience or happening itself. This is the phase of simply having an experience of some sort. The second aspect is interpretation of the meaning or cognitive import of the experience. And the third is the reservoir of systematically related concepts or categories represented by the conceptual or linguistic scheme of the one or ones doing the interpreting—a reservoir upon which their interpretation draws. He uses the example of stumbling over a garden hose to make his case. “I took it to be a snake,” he explains. “I jumped and screamed, so everyone noticed my mistake and laughed at me.” The event of stepping on the hose and noticing that happening is quite different, he notes, “from my response: the judgment that I was stepping on a snake. The two are by no means the same, nor inseparable, whether conceptually or in reality. This is clearest when the judgment is mistaken but equally correct when it is true.” Van

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Fraassen adds that “[i]t was the bane of modern empiricism to have ignored this special status of experience.” And of course the judgment requires drawing upon the conceptual and linguistic resources of the person making the judgment, including utilizing such sorting or categorizing distinctions as that of snake and hose (van Fraassen 2002: 134–36). Having an experience or noticing a happening is distinct, then, from interpreting the significance of the happening and making assertions about its character. Van Fraassen fails to make sufficiently clear in his discussion of this example, however, that the subsequent interpretation of the happening as a hose and not a snake involves further empirical investigation. For example, does the object in question coil as if to strike, does it slither away, does it extend a forked tongue? The interpretation (and the reservoir of sorting categories on which it draws) can be tested empirically and is not just self-authenticating or self-contained. It recalls the original happening and its immediate interpretation but now calls the latter into question on the basis of an appeal to further aspects of experience. Rorty, like van Fraassen, distinguishes the causal stimulus or conditions for making a claim and the claim itself, but he seems not to allow any connection between the two so far as the nature or cogency of the claim itself is concerned. Van Fraassen, on the other hand, seems to be mainly concerned with our noting that the experience alone does not dictate the character of a claim or guarantee its truth or falsity. Experiences, whether initial or subsequent, do not insure by themselves the correctness of claims but they are or can be an important consideration or element in the making of claims. While the empirical posture is not necessarily tied to any particular set of claims, it is for van Fraassen continually open to what our experiences can contribute to the reasonableness and acceptability of our claims. On both of the points of this last sentence, James agrees with van Fraassen and stands opposed to Rorty, at least to Rorty as I understand his thought. But empiricism seems to me to have more substance and content for James than it does for van Fraassen. James is not leery of making factual claims in connection with his conception of empiricism. But he is well aware that all factual claims thought to be tied to or related to the concept of empiricism itself are liable to criticism and disagreement. James’s fundamental allegations concerning the distinctions between pure experience and ordinary experience, and the essential role he assigns to the former, might be considered factual claims. And when he talks, in the second lecture of Pragmatism, of the empiricist attitude as not standing “for any special results” and as being “a method only” (which may sound like van Fraassen’s E without the +), he goes on to state that “[i]t agrees with nominalism . . . in always appealing to

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particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions” (1975: 31–32). He could have added to these considerations his firm conviction that experience exhibits connections and disconnections in its passage or flow. These would seem to be pretty substantial options in the history of philosophical thought, showing that the method of empiricism is not for James without its crucial theoretical commitments. Moreover, the wide significance James allots to his conception of what can count as relevant experiences—for example, the critical cognitive roles he assigns to such factors as memory, anticipation, emotion, and value in assessing various sorts of claim—shows that an assumed or explicitly set forth and defended conception of experience itself is an important aspect of any form of empiricism. And that would have to include van Fraassen’s own view of the character and range of experience. Having drawn the distinction between an experience, event, or happening and the act of judging or interpreting its significance, van Fraassen calls our attention to the fact that experience is sometimes highly ambiguous when it comes to assessing its import. This ambiguity shows clearly that experience alone cannot determine the meaning, or the truth or falsity, of claims. He illustrates this observation with examples from the history of science. It was once thought that the universe is exactly as Isaac Newton describes it, but later it is claimed to be more like what Albert Einstein alleges of it. It is also frequently said that experience confirms Einstein’s vision as over against Newton’s. And in doing so, the mantle of experience is drawn over Einstein’s outlook as confirmation of its superiority to that of Newton. But this interpretation, says van Fraassen, is retroactive and congratulatory. It is attaching experience as a kind of “success word” (van Fraassen 2002: 122, 135, 151–52) or congratulatory term to contemporary outlooks and achievements, and it has a strong tendency to attribute to experience a greater and more finally determinative role than it in fact had in the change from Newtonian physics to that of Einstein and his followers. Such an interpretation also has a strong tendency to overlook the ambiguities lurking in experience, especially so far as comprehensive interpretations of it are concerned. “Nothing trumps experience” in the empirical sciences, van Fraassen readily acknowledges, and “[t]he bottom line is agreement with experimental and observational fact.” But he hastens to add, “in this role there is a true and redeeming ambiguity” (van Fraassen 2002: 152). This ambiguity sometimes permits adherence to settled conclusions, argued to rest firmly upon experience, and at other times it is said to call for new conclusions at odds with the older ones. The appeal to experience can thus be used to endorse either conservation or innovation.

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The ambiguity of such endorsements points to the ambiguity of experience. Recognition of this ambiguity is no basis for skepticism, but it also warns against dogmatic insistence on the finality of presently accepted views. I want to note one more important feature of van Fraassen’s conception of empiricism before leaving this chapter and moving on to a more sustained Jamesian response to him and Rorty. The feature is that van Fraassen fully recognizes, as does James, the frequent and critical role of emotions and values in the drawing of judgments and making decisions about truth and falsity. These judgments and decisions do not and generally cannot always rest strictly or exclusively upon bare reason. This fact is especially apparent when thinking about large-scale changes in conceptions of the world such as the one that occurred at the turn of the past century in physics, or the basic changes the physicist David Bohm called for (unsuccessfully) in the quantum mechanics of his time. Values and emotions at first resisted change in the former case but eventually helped to facilitate it, especially among younger, more forward-looking scientists, while conservative valuative and emotional commitments militated against and successfully prevented change in the second one—in contrast with a supposed entirely firm and unambiguous basis in sensate experience or reason (van Fraassen 2002: 143–44, 151). “[W]e must admit into our epistemology,” van Fraassen concludes, “a place for emotion, or analogues to emotion, in our description of rationally endorsable changes in view” (van Fraassen 2002: 140). His frank recognition of the important role played by emotion and value (as well as of sometimes quasi-arbitrary and debatable decisions) in claims to truth and falsity, on the one hand, and the relative underdetermination of the claims and decisions by frequently ambiguous experiences, on the other, has some affinity with James’s contention that experience itself should be understood as something wider and more diverse than mere sensate experiences and as containing important elements of emotion and value. I will have more to say about this matter in chapters 7 and 8.

Summary Comments I conclude this chapter by offering a brief summary of what I take to be the principal differences between James’s empiricism and the views of empiricism set forth by Rorty and van Fraassen. I begin with Rorty. The holism of which Rorty speaks is different from the outlook of James. James sees our conceptualizations as lying within a larger whole of pure, or relatively pure, experience. This whole surrounds and suffuses our conceptualizations, working as a constant reminder of their inability to capture the depth and fullness of experience: the “and” that “trails after every sentence” and the “ever not quite”

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that “has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness” (James 1996a: 321). The conceptualizations lie within, that is to say, the fringe, penumbra, or halo of a larger field of everflowing experience to which conceptual schemes (or conceptualized experience) may point but which they can never exhaustively capture or convey. This larger field is a potential source of new insights, new emphases, new ways of viewing oneself and the world, and as it dips into and tinctures the conceptualizations designed to access and lay hold of aspects of it, it serves as a constant reminder of what may have been left out, or mistakenly conceived, and of the need for these conceptualizations (or conceptualized experience) to be brought constantly to the test of not only the explicit but also the implicit lessons of the fullness and ever-renewing character of experience. So far as I can determine, Rorty allows for experience no such role, confining his version of a so-called pragmatism to ongoing conversations and considerations of holistic coherence within existing conceptual schemes, established rules, and linguistic games. Turning next to van Fraassen, James would be ready to acknowledge that an appeal to experience is just that, an appeal. But he would insist, and van Fraassen would no doubt agree, that there is no point in making the appeal if no substantive conclusions are to be drawn from it. Both would also agree that for empiricism all such conclusions are defeasible, which is different from saying that they are inadmissible. The conclusions are not part of the appeal itself, to be sure, but they can result, and should be allowed to result, from the appeal. So van Fraassen’s argument in this respect—an argument with which James would concur—comes down to rejecting the conflation of the appeal and its possible conclusions, not against drawing conclusions on the basis of the appeal. Empiricism is indeed primarily a stance and not a fixed set of doctrines, but if no doctrines can be meaningfully based on appeals to experience, then empiricism as a stance would have no point. It has no point for precisely this reason for Rorty, if I understand his position, while for van Fraassen and James it has considerable point. But I find James to be in explicit disagreement with van Fraassen on another issue. This issue is van Fraassen’s claim that the stance of empiricism must not be tied to any specific factual claims relating to the character of the self or the world. Van Fraassen claims that such empiricism would be selfstultifying because it would be unable to question, in the name of experience, any such factual claims upon which empiricism itself is said to rest. This argument goes through, however, only if “said to rest” is interpreted to mean resting dogmatically, inflexibly, and inexorably upon such claims, therefore putting them beyond all possible question, criticism, or modification. I ques-

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tion, first, van Fraassen’s notion that empiricism of any sort, including his own, can be entirely free of presumed beliefs about self or world. He even admits in passing, as we saw earlier in this chapter, that it might contain or be influenced by such beliefs, but unfortunately he does not inquire further in his book into what these beliefs might be. And I question, second, the notion that empiricism as such cannot assume or explicitly endorse factual beliefs as part of its outlook and stance, while at the same time being receptive to a possible need, at some future time, of revising or abandoning one or more of those beliefs upon further reflection and even upon empirical grounds. Empiricism, in this interpretation, would be like the snake eating its tail only if it were required by such a need to abandon all of its assumed or acknowledged factual beliefs at once. Viewed in this manner, “E+” is not necessarily self-contradictory, and we can allow to James and other empiricists tacit or explicit holding to factual beliefs closely related to their empiricism—so long as they are willing to be resolutely and continually critical about particular ones of those beliefs and to engage willingly in critical discussions about their feasibility. Empiricism as a stance need not be empty of such beliefs so long as it is willing to be self-critical about them. With this brief summary in mind and taking into account the context of the present chapter as a whole, I proceed in the next three chapters to examine James’s specific brand of empiricism in more detail.

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CHAPTER SIX

Sensate and Causal Aspects of Experience

[T]he whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The “facts” themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them. —William James (1975: 108)

The “facts” of which James speaks in this quotation are the facts of experience—that is, experience’s constraining, ordering, and facilitating aspects—including the implicit facts of pure experience. These facts, as he notes, are not in themselves true or false. Truth and falsity are operative only with respect to beliefs, not facts. However, James ardently insists that beliefs or claims to truth are crucially dependent upon the facts of experience, both for their origination and for their continual adjudication or testing. Veridical beliefs and networks of beliefs have their source in experience and must continue to be tested (or be testable) and to pass the muster of ongoing, ever-renewing experience. Not all of the facts of experience are explicitly in view at any given time, nor could they ever be. The recognized facts of present and past belief and action are the results of selection and emphasis, for the sake of realizing particular aims and purposes, from within a much larger and more encompassing and continuously evolving field of pure experience. Selected aspects of this

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field can be brought within the purview of beliefs and systems of beliefs and serve as possible validations for those beliefs and systems. But they can also serve, on occasion, to call them or parts of them into question. Beliefs and experiences are in constant interplay in James’s conception of empiricism, the beliefs and their accompanying concepts revealing potential patterns of meaning in the experiences and thus converting them into candidates for truth, and the experiences providing the means for verifying or falsifying the consequent claims to truth. Insistence upon this active dialogue or vigorous dance of beliefs and facts, conceptualizations, and experiences, lies at the heart of James’s empiricism. Fully meaningful experiences are conceptually ordered experiences, with accustomed commitments to factual claims. Pure or relatively nonconceptualized experiences are for him potential sources of new concepts, new ways of interpreting and selecting, and new conceptualizations of experience, including possible thoroughgoing revisions of previously conceptualized experiences and their customary modes of interpretation and selection. McDermott expresses the point well when he states his agreement with James’s conviction “that the extreme fringe of our conscious life is revelatory of possibilities otherwise hidden from view” (McDermott 1976: 109). This “extreme fringe” is none other than pure experience. To paraphrase the familiar dictum of Immanuel Kant, concepts require experience for their content, and experience requires concepts for detection and expression of its implicit meanings.1 This is an old idea, to be sure, but for James it is important and enduringly true. James disagrees with Kant, however, when the latter claims that the most important conceptual forms of experience are prior to experience and are the preconditions of anything’s being thought (see Kant 1958: B126, A94, 126). For James, all concepts are derived from experience, not prior to it. Pure experience contains concepts and conceptual relations in germ, although not yet in actuality. The priority of experience to its conceptual orderings and interpretations is a fundamental feature of Jamesian empiricism, and it is brought to its clearest and most distinctive expression in the role he assigns to pure experience. Moreover, pure experience, as we have seen, is not a function of the mind for James. Rather, the mind or self is a function of pure experience. This notion has some resemblance to Kant’s insistence on the “transcendental unity of apperception” as an encompassing field of awareness and source of unity for all experience that is prior to the distinction between self and world as objects of thought (Kant 1958: A106–A110, 135–38). But we must be careful here. Pure experience is for James just that: a kind of experience. It is a precondition for conceptualized experiences, to be sure, but it is not something antecedent to experience as such. And experience has its own inherent patterns of con-

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nection as well as disconnection. A transcendental, nonexperiential unifier is not needed, as it was for Kant, because experience is not viewed by James, as Kant unquestioningly viewed it, in terms of the isolated and disconnected sensate and reflexive impressions of David Hume. Illustrated in these observations is the need for specific claims and counterclaims about the nature and conditions of experience if one is to be a credible empiricist or to have a fully developed form of philosophical empiricism. Van Fraassen’s idea that philosophical empiricism properly understood ought to be or can be devoid of such assumptions or claims is questionable. I noted in the previous chapter that James’s claim that there is such a thing as pure experience is a case in point. Two other examples are his contentions that self and world are functions inherent within pure experience and that experience exhibits connections as well as disconnections, thus having its own observable patterns of relation and not requiring some external source of relatedness. James assuredly has what van Fraassen describes as an empiricist “stance” as well, but there would seem to be more to his version of philosophical empiricism than a bare stance. James would be not at all embarrassed to admit that his form of empiricism allows for certain tentatively assumed psychological and metaphysical commitments, for these seem to him to be needed for a complete account of how empiricism works and how it can be articulated and defended. He is also not reluctant to make epistemological and metaphysical assertions of other kinds and to argue for them, so long as these claims and arguments are based upon and brought to the test of experience. This is true despite the fact that James’s own epistemological and metaphysical theorizing tends to be more suggestive and open-ended in its overall character than theoretically rigorous or complete. James is not at all adverse, in other words—as van Fraassen pointedly is—to high levels of systematic epistemological or metaphysical investigation mounted on the basis of experience and carried out by empirically minded philosophers. In this regard Rorty is in full agreement with van Fraassen and in full disagreement with James. Van Fraassen seems to have an assumed conception of metaphysics in particular, namely, that it is too far ranging, too systematic, too conclusive, too fixed, too dogmatic, too bold to be consistent with human fallibility. And he sees or tends strongly to see the natural sciences alone as legitimately being in the business of making, defending, or criticizing large-scale claims about reality or developing credible models of reality based in and testable by experience, leaving no place or need for philosophy to do so. I can find no compelling reason to think that all attempts at metaphysical systems in philosophy must be dogmatic or fixed, or lie beyond the bounds of experience, and thus be thought to be immune to critical discussion or empirical evaluation.

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Van Fraassen’s conception of the role of philosophy in relation to that of science seems to me to be artificial and unconvincing, and regrettably reminiscent of a by now discredited logical positivism. Philosophy may be able to address issues not addressed or addressable by science per se—or to address them from a usefully different perspective—and it may be able to make distinctive and credible contributions of its own to conceptions of reality. Philosophy and science can work in concert when it comes to visions of the world; each can provide perspectives complementary to the other, just as each can be a basis for critical reflections on the assumptions and claims of the other. A philosopher who makes a convincing case for this conception of the relation of philosophy and science is process philosopher Ivor Leclerc, in his thoughtful essay “The Necessity Today of the Philosophy of Nature” (Leclerc 1973). James’s empiricism itself is an extensively developed system of thought, incorporating specific claims as parts of its definition or character, as well as allowing for substantive epistemological, metaphysical, and axiological claims to be made in its name—claims James himself makes and defends. His empiricism is not just a vacant posture or attitude. I doubt that there can be such a thing as a posture or attitude that is not accompanied or underlain by at least some important and informing beliefs, however tacit, unrecognized, or unacknowledged they may be. If so, I should think it would be better to try to make such beliefs explicit, thus opening them to philosophical discussion and debate, than to keep them unexpressed and hidden. The fact that James does so is reason for praise, not blame. An issue with regard to which James differs fundamentally from Rorty is that of the relevance of experience to claims to truth. We saw in the previous chapter that Rorty, in agreement with the thought of Karl Popper, denies that causal influences or the obduracies and facilitations of experience can have any bearing on the justifications of claims. For him, as for Popper, justifications (or falsifications) of claims can take place only within a network of concepts and theories, not on the basis of experiences thought to be independent or even relatively independent of the network. Susan Haack calls our attention to the seemingly “incredible” consequence of Popper’s view (and, by implication, Rorty’s) when she remarks that according to this view “scientists’ acceptance of a basic statement like ‘the needle on the dial points to 7’ is in no epistemologically relevant way supported or justified by their seeing the needle on the dial point to 7; scientists’ perceptual experiences are, in fact, completely irrelevant to epistemological issues.” What this amounts to, she continues to observe, is that “there is no reason to suppose that accepted basic statements are true, nor, consequently,

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that a ‘refuted’ or ‘falsified’ theory . . . is false. Science is not, after all, even negatively under the control of experience” (Haack 2009: 146). Where do the basic statements come from and how are they confirmed, then, in Popper’s account? Haack notes that he appeals, although not entirely consistently with other aspects of his philosophy of science, to the “decisions” and “conventions” of the settled scientific community (Haack 2009: 146–47; she cites Popper 1959: 104, 108–11). This appeal to self-contained community consensus and to the coherent relations of basic statements and other scientific statements within that overall consensus is reminiscent of Rorty’s similar appeal. Such an extreme antiempiricist view does seem preposterous and unfounded, and James and other empiricists would appear to be well within their rights in rejecting it. In rejecting it, they can continue convincingly to argue that experience can provide epistemic or cognitive evidence—and not just causal impetus or motivation—that is highly relevant to, and in fact indispensable for, the acceptance or rejection of claims to truth in the sciences, in philosophy, and elsewhere. Let me use some examples to make this point crystal clear. Suppose that a meal is being prepared for me by a famous chef. I am well aware of his fame, because his reputation has been highly touted, not only in the public media, but also in my circle of respected friends. I am therefore strongly motivated to believe that the food he is preparing will be a delight to eat. Moreover, the chef has kindly given me the opportunity to examine the recipe he using for preparation of the meal, and the delectable ingredients it contains reinforce my readiness to think that the repast will be splendid. But it is only when I sit down to actually taste the food that my motivation to have such beliefs can be put to the final test. It can be granted that my final judgment of this matter may be strongly influenced by my prior motivation and belief, but the experience of tasting the various parts of the menu is surely a relevant factor, and in particular cases it may well be and normally will be the decisive factor. In other words, experience plays an important role in justifying or refuting a belief to which I may be causally impelled. So experience need not play a solely causal role, as Rorty wants to claim; it can have and frequently does have a justifying or falsifying role as well. Some familiar examples from the history of science will also help to make this point, whose obviousness hardly requires extensive defense. Galileo Galilei came to believe, and is commonly thought to be justified in believing, that there are four satellites orbiting Jupiter because he observed them through his telescope. And he could invite others to observe them as well. Similarly, he could observe and invite others to observe craters and other

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irregularities on the moon, as well as complete (new, crescent, gibbous, full) phases of the planet Venus. Each of these experiences was something unexpected and new that ran against the grain of some of the most fundamental and unquestioned beliefs of the time, such as those handed down through long tradition by Aristotle and Ptolemy. The experiences did not fit smoothly into the patterns of those beliefs, and the beliefs were called significantly into question by the experiences. Different beliefs took their place over time, to a large extent because of the new experiences made possible by the invention of the telescope. There admittedly are tacit theoretical assumptions underlying reliance on the telescope as an observational instrument, but it nevertheless remains true that seeing is believing, that is, the experience of seeing is an important part of the justification of what in this case has come to be justifiably believed. Suppose, to take another example, we were invited into the laboratory of Michael Faraday in the mid-nineteenth century, and that Faraday told us there are circular lines of force around the two poles of a bar magnet. We would ask him for evidence for this allegation, and in response he would invite us to see what happens when iron filings are scattered on a piece of paper placed over such a magnet. We would be given empirical evidence of the presence of such lines of force, and this evidence would contribute significantly to our belief in his original claim. As a final example, imagine that we are told by Guglielmo Marconi in the early twentieth century that there are such things as radio waves and that these waves can be used for the purposes of communication over long distances wirelessly and through the air. We could contemplate the theories respecting such waves and perhaps be motivated on such grounds to believe in their possibility, but we would also hope to have an empirical confirmation of their reality. That would be supplied by hearing someone’s message transmitted wirelessly across a distance by using the appropriate equipment. These are all quite commonplace examples, and as such they would seem to call into serious question Rorty’s dismissal of the epistemic relevance of experience and his relegating it to a purely causal, and not justificatory, character. Even so exorbitantly theory-laden a quest as the current search for the Higgs Boson, thought in the Standard Model in physics to explain why electrons and quarks possess mass, depends on the empirical verification of the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. James was well aware that our ordinary experience is suffused with prior conceptualization and acculturation, but he also contended that experience has sufficient independence or overbrimming of these factors to play a role in testing or questioning their adequacy in particular situations and in occasioning new ways of thinking and knowing, sometimes in quite unexpected fashion.

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Now that we have these clarifications of James’s empiricism in its relations to Rorty’s outright rejection of empiricism and to van Fraassen’s greatly restricted rendering of empiricism’s basis, scope, and meaning, I want to turn our attention in the remainder of this chapter and in the next two chapters to further analysis of James’s conception of experience itself. I shall do so under four headings: the sensate aspects of experience, its causal aspects, its emotional aspects, and its valuative aspects. The purpose of this analysis is to give more detailed attention to the breadth and richness of James’s conception of experience and to emphasize the fact that for him experience is not a just a pale representation and reflection of a relatively if not wholly remote world but active engagement and intimate involvement with the world.

Sensate Aspects of Experience There has been a strong tendency in modern Western thought, as illustrated in the tradition of British empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond—a tradition much in James’s mind and one with which he was consciously and repeatedly wrestling and taking issue in his writings on empiricism—to restrict the concept of experience to the operations of the five senses and to think of these senses as reflecting, pointing to, or representing discrete and fleeting features of the world. Through its organizing abilities, this view further alleges, the mind is able to build up out of the simple building blocks of particular sensations representations of more complex and enduring factors in the world. By a similar process of organization, but now acting reflexively rather than externally, the mind is said to use similarly separate and discrete inward-directed data to construct representations of the human self and its operations. All of the complex physical or mental things thus modeled in experience are reducible without residue, so far as the experience of them is concerned, to those selfsame simple phenomena, since experience consists, at bottom, of nothing more than particular sensate and reflexive ideas or impressions. But what causes the sensations and their associated inward-directed phenomena to occur? And what is the status in reality of the physical and mental things represented by these phenomena? The answer given by the seventeenthcentury empiricist John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is that there are both physical and mental substances whose powers produce the phenomena that are then able to represent them (Locke 1959: I, 308–9). The existence of the substances can be inferred, given that we naturally suppose that something causes the phenomena to occur, but the nature of that something can never be known as it is in and of itself. Only its representations can

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be directly known and, at best, these point only to particular qualities or traits of the substances, not to their inner nature and being. So an unbridgeable gap or impenetrable barrier was set up by this tradition between the representations and the things they were taken to represent. Locke himself acknowledges this gap and barrier when he speaks of the self as being in a dark room and peering out through the tiny slits of the five senses into a mysterious and largely inaccessible world beyond (Locke 1959: I, 211–12). A menacing threat of skepticism lurks behind this view, and the eighteenthcentury philosopher David Hume brought its skeptical implications into the full light of day in his A Treatise of Human Nature and An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 1980, 1955). If only discrete representations and their organizations into more complex patterns can be known, then the supposed underlying substances, whether physical or mental, can have no standing in knowledge. And to speak of the powers of these substances to produce the appropriate representations in the mind is to speak cryptically of powers of something that cannot itself be known. In other words, the notion of powers or causal influences stemming from these substances and affecting other substances cannot be confirmed any more than the substances themselves can be known. We are left, therefore, with only the phenomena, not with the supposed substances as either their causes or referents. Furthermore, the supposed substantial self with its mind that is said to be the theater of the representations and the organizer of simple phenomena into more complex ones cannot, by this same argument, be known to exist, despite Locke’s affirmation, reminiscent of Descartes, that what we can know with the greatest intuitive certainty is the existence of “some spiritual being within me that sees and hears” (Locke 1959: I, 407). Finally, given that the data to be organized are themselves devoid of any kind of inherent relatedness in this tradition of British empiricism, the patterns into which they are organized, including both the patterns of supposed things in the world and those comprising the self, must be arbitrary and unfounded. An absence of any experience of causal force or necessity reduces causality to mere custom rising from repeated but unexplained correlations of impressions and renders inductive reasoning and predictions of the future without justification or support. In sum, if the things that are supposedly being represented can have no place in our knowledge, then the idea that they are being accurately or even passably represented must be given up. And if the powers of these things must also be set aside, both because they cannot themselves be known and also because the supposed relations of causality or power must also be abandoned since the phenomena have no inherent relatedness of any kind to one another, then experience is left without referents, either to the self or to the world. An empiricist epistemology based solely on discrete and isolated data

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of sensation and the assumed accompanying representations and operations of the mind must soon come, as Hume’s analysis clearly showed, to a dead end. An analogy might help to clarify this point. The picture of experience presented to us by Locke and Hume is like that of a television screen that is turned on but not receiving any signal. All we see is a pulsating, riotous display of disconnected dots of light winking on and off. Cosmologists claim that the dots register the cosmic background radiation resulting from the Big Bang that gave rise to our present universe. But whatever other message or meaning we might seek to find in the teeming mélange of dots will be entirely unwarranted by the dots themselves. The further significance we might claim to find in them will necessarily turn out to have been arbitrarily imposed upon the dots, not discovered in them, for they lack any sort of inherent relations with one another. The situation becomes even more preposterous if we try to think of our own selves as nothing more than flickering dots of fleeting sensations. Who or what then would be doing the looking and imposing? The simple, detached, momentary sensate impressions thought by empiricists such as Locke and Hume to constitute the sole basis of experience are in similar fashion patently inadequate to explain how any empirical knowledge of ourselves and the world could be possible. Hume’s skeptical philosophy acknowledges this fact clearly if regrettably, while Locke’s philosophy fails to recognize it. In place of this indisputably bankrupt empiricist tradition, James establishes his own vision of what an empiricist philosophy must be like if it is to succeed in characterizing and explaining what it is to know oneself, other selves, and the world. In James’s vision, sensation is not the sole source or test of knowledge, although it is unquestionably important. And items of experience for him exhibit inherent connections as well as disconnections. In fact, it is only by acts of discrimination and abstraction that these items can be separated from their inherent relationships, as James makes plain in this characteristic statement from The Principles of Psychology: Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. . . . The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions. (James 1950: I, 224)

Furthermore, as Wilshire makes abundantly clear, for the James of The Principles of Psychology, sensations are experienced as sensations of something; they do not just stand alone apart from their intentions or references. And they take place in the context of a presupposed, taken for granted awareness

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of such “originals” as space, time, and causality. In other words, they are parts of larger wholes to which they make reference and within which they have their characters and meanings. It is in their very nature, as experienced, to be in relation rather than being separate and to be themselves relational entities (Wilshire 1968: 151–54, 162–77, 186–87). By laying emphasis on these and other critical points, James anticipated the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, who was significantly influenced by him. Wilshire exhibits this anticipation in rich detail, although he sees it as developed only inconsistently by James (see Wilshire 1968, especially chapter 7). James would probably have welcomed much of the work of Gestalt psychologists such as Wolfgang Köhler (see Köhler 1970) who did convincing empirical research on the indispensable role of relations in experience as against perceptual atomism, brought squarely into view the significance of meaningful patterns or experienced wholes in contrast to discrete parts and argued for the irreducibility of the former to the latter, explored in great depth figure-ground relations, and emphasized in various ways the significance of fields. In light of the Gestalt movement, James might have found confirmation for the importance of experienced wholes while still not allowing this emphasis to detract from his pluralistic empiricism. He might have found useful support, amplification, and critical perspectives there for views he sought to develop throughout his life, such as the persistent, irreducible integrity and role of holistic patterns, relations, and meanings in experience. James’s position on the direct experience of relations is also compatible with his friend and fellow philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s interpretation of perceptual judgments. These judgments, and they are that for Peirce, are instinctively natural interpretations, and the objects of sensate experience present themselves via those interpretations as well-integrated processive wholes, not as discrete momentary parts. Innis shows that perception for Peirce is a semiotic phenomenon, combining iconical (firstness), indexical (secondness), and symbolical (thirdness) aspects and presenting the perceived object as a “unified manifold” rather than as a loose aggregation of parts. We do not generally have consciously to make such interpretive judgments, Innis observes, because (and here he quotes Peirce) “thirdness pours in on us through every avenue of sense” (Innis 2002: 35–36; Peirce 1958, vol. 5, paragraph 158). This is Peirce’s way, then, of elaborating James’s insistence that we experience sensate parts as aspects of meaningful wholes, or as parts already in relation, and not initially or fundamentally as separate entities in the manner of traditional British empiricism. In addition, James would probably have found to be highly congenial the views of contemporary thinkers such as Evan Thompson and Terrence W.

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Deacon (Thompson 2007; Deacon 2012). These two students of the science and philosophy of life and mind stoutly resist the nominalistic reduction of complex wholes to the distinct, separate properties of their constituent parts and argue in detail that, with the development of hierarchical levels of organization in living beings and in those with emergent mental capacities, radical new properties and capacities of these organizational wholes come into being. These organizational wholes represent intricate patterns of relationship where the integrity and support of the parts is conserved even as they combine to produce wholes whose traits and functionings cannot be accounted for on the basis of simple reduction to those of the parts. The parts in these patterns of relationship remain parts; they are not swallowed up into the wholes. Their distinct traits contribute essentially to the wholes. But the wholes add genuinely new properties while suppressing or leaving behind some, but not all, properties of the parts. The systematic relations of the parts with one another are thus fully real in their own right and produce effects that would not be possible aside from these relations or connections. Both disconnections and connections are thereby acknowledged and affirmed. I shall have more to say in chapter 9 about the emergentist wholism and antireductionism of Thompson and Deacon, and about how they can be related to the thought of James. Their views stand in stark contrast to the reductionistic, atomistic views of the traditional British empiricists with whom James took strenuous issue. In keeping with his insistence on experienced relations, James holds that causal connections and influences are directly experienced and not left to be doubtfully inferred from separate, disconnected phenomena. I’ll say more about this topic in the next section. The inherent connectedness of memory and anticipation (inductive reasoning) can also be confidently affirmed. In addition, James stresses that emotional factors in experience can have important epistemic import, as can experiences of value. Finally, he gives up the idea that the test of claims to truth is whether or not they correspond to things lying beyond the reach of experience itself. Reality for him is experienced reality (or what is experiencable or can be reliably inferred from experience), and inherent aspects of experience and predictions of future experience take the place of correspondences to an allegedly in-itself world. James’s fuller, richer conception of experience thus avoids the awkward and insoluble problems posed by the spare and inadequate conception of experience offered in traditional British empiricism, an earlier form of empiricism to which he frequently adverted. In the next section of this chapter I focus on causation as the second basic aspect of experience affirmed by

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James, and the subsequent two chapters are devoted to the third and fourth aspects: emotion and value.

Causal Aspects of Experience By his emphasis on the powers of objects in the world to produce sensations in the mind, Locke tacitly admits into his theory of knowledge the experience of causality and cause-effect relations. While admitting that certainty is not available concerning the existence of objects in the world, the probability of their existence, he insists, is made abundantly evident by certain kinds of experience and, most notably, by the experience of pain. If someone wishes to ascertain “whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man’s fantasy,” he slyly muses, “by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination” (Locke 1959: I, 333). However, other parts of his Essay inveigh against there being any such real, knowable connections between supposed causes and their effects. For example, he asserts that “to have the idea of cause and effect, it suffices to consider any simple idea or substance as beginning to exist, by the operation of some other, without knowing the manner of that operation” (Locke 1959: I, 435). We can know only the correlation of two events, this is to say, not the actual causal force or power lying in the one that produces effects in the other. In fact, the true manner of causal relations could not be known, in view of Locke’s nominalistic insistence that particular aspects of experience have no inherent relations to one another. Relation, he avers, is “not contained in the real existence of things” but is “something extraneous and superinduced” (Locke 1959: 430). This statement would have to include even the relation of correlation he associates with the idea of causality. His analysis of causality is therefore left in a confused state, and Hume’s subsequent philosophical reflections simply served to make that confusion explicit. For James, however, the experience of active causal powers is an important ingredient in his overall conception of experience. Locke’s example of the pain induced by the glass furnace is not really understood, in James’s view, if we regard it simply as an association of the ideas that represent the furnace with the experience of pain. There is genuine force and power here, a real, sudden, scorching impact of the fierce heat of the furnace on an unfortunate person’s sensitive skin. Similarly, the experienced world is full of obduracies and resistances, as well as of predictable causal relations and regularities, both of which need to be taken into account as we make our decisions and live our lives.

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James distinguishes between a real fire and an imagined fire in a manner similar to Locke’s example of the fiery glass furnace (which James may well have had in mind2) when he observes that “there are some fires that will always burn sticks and always warm our bodies, and . . . there are some waters that will put out fires; while there are other fires and waters that will not act at all.” With such real objects, he comments, “consequences always accrue; and thus the real experiences get sifted from the mental ones, the things from our thoughts of them, and precipitated together as the stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name of the physical world” (1976: 17). The consequences of which he speaks are cause-effect relations that have perceptible effects in the world; effects that cannot be manipulated, called into being, or extinguished by mere acts of the mind; effects that have palpable and predictable properties of force, energy, activity, and resistance that are essential parts of our day-to-day experience. Far more than relations of ideas or impressions are involved here. There is direct and inescapable experience of causal effects and causal regularities, of powers of the world with which we must learn to contend if we expect to thrive and survive. We experience the reality of causal powers not only when we passively experience them acting upon us, but also when we seek actively to produce effects in the world by our exertions of will. James interprets this second kind of experience as our most fundamental type of encounter with the causal powers of the world. In seeking to do something that involves more than the workings of our imagination, we encounter resistance, some specific and obdurate character of experience that we are forced to take into account. And against this resistance we must exert effort and find a path in which our effort can be efficacious. If no such path can be found, our effort will be ineffectual. “If we suppose activities to go on outside of our experience, it is in forms like these that we must suppose them . . . for the word ‘activity’ has no imaginable content whatever save these experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release, ultimate qualia as they are of the life given us to be known” (James 1976: 85). Such experiences, James writes, are for us paradigms of and pointers to the active, ongoing cause-effect relations of the external world: “Here . . . the notion of causal efficacy comes to birth” (James 1976: 83).3 Thus, where James speaks of activity he could just as well have used the term causality. We saw in chapter 2 that James distinguishes self from world largely on the basis of the experienced obduracies, resistances, tendencies, and regularities of the world that mark out that difference. The world is no figment of the mind or self. It has causal interactions and powers of its own that show it to be something distinct from the self, interactions and powers the

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self must learn to acknowledge, comprehend, and cope with if it is to be in effective interaction with the world. Here is no mild pattern of inert ideas or impressions but direct experience of stubborn, implacable, energetic, and quite routine fact. Had Locke and Hume persistently followed out this line of reasoning, they could have ended up with a much more credible conception of causality as a central aspect of experience. The key to such a conception, as we have just seen, is our constant and necessary need to be in active engagement with the world and thus to experience at firsthand its own active and reactive powers. Such experiences show self and world to be bound indissolubly together. They put the lie to Hume’s skeptical conclusions and to Locke’s bleak depiction of the human subject as having to peer from the confines of its dark room at a disappointingly distant and largely inaccessible external world. For James the self as knower is within the world and experiencing its potencies and powers from within, not standing outside it and trying to observe and comprehend it from without. Our embodied selves are extremely complicated systems (or systems within systems) nested within enormously complicated and multiple systems (or systems within systems) that constitute the external world. It is systems all the way up and all the way down, and each of us is a participating, acting, and reacting part of that intricate complex of systems.4 James’s pragmatism is precisely a program of testing and being able to test hypotheses about the world in terms of experiences of the dynamic responses of the world. James does not deny that our daily experiences are deeply infected with the conceptual devices we use to help make them intelligible, nor would he be likely to dispute D. S. Kothari’s contention (also insisted upon by Rorty) that “no measurement, observation, or experiment is possible without a relevant theoretical framework” (Kothari 1975: 5; quoted in Prigogine and Stegners 1984: 293). But he would strongly resist the idea that measurements, observations, and experiments are in complete thrall to antecedent theory. James contends that we encounter recalcitrant aspects of our experiences that do not fit neatly into our presumed concepts and categories, and that we therefore find the need to modify and rethink at least some of those same concepts and categories, even though it would admittedly be impossible to change all of them at once. For him, experiences and conceptualizations work in concert but also in tension with one another, as we have seen. Thus, while it is important to recognize the theory-ladenness of experience, it is also important not to overemphasize it. Rorty’s test of coherence within a linguistic or conceptual system is not sufficient; it must be complemented

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with an ongoing test of adequacy to the allowances and resistances of the causal factors within experience. And for James these allowances and resistances are forcefully and directly experienced, not merely inferred from associations of discrete sensations. O’Donovan-Anderson asserts that the “embodied, active presence of the knowing self in the world doesn’t just account for a level of access to the world, but also allows for a level of confidence in the appropriateness of perceptual knowledge to the world, which sensation alone cannot provide” (O’Donovan-Anderson 1997: 156; the italics are mine). This is a good summary of James’s own position in this regard. Despite his entirely commendable and, I think, quite Jamesian emphasis on the constant causal engagement and intimate “comportment” of individuals with the world, O’Donovan-Anderson misconceives James’s outlook in two significant ways. The first is that he associates James with those who, like Locke and Hume, understand activity in strictly sensate terms, thus failing to give due stress and recognition to the self’s active involvements and direct causal engagements with the world (O’Donovan-Anderson 1997: 63–64). The second is that he accuses pragmatists like James of staying within the bounds of experiences either remembered, presently had, or predicted, and thus failing to “justify a convergent realism,” offering instead a much paler “convergent intersubjective idealism” that gives us no test “for experience’s appropriateness to the world” (O’Donovan-Anderson 1997: 65; see also 58, 63–64). I am endeavoring to show in this section and do so elsewhere in this book that O’Donovan-Anderson’s first claim misses the mark in its restriction of James’s empiricism to sensations. James’s conception of experience is much richer than this and includes direct and cognitively significant experiences of causal conditions and constraints. O’Donovan-Anderson’s second claim mistakenly and without convincing argument alleges that there can be no such thing as a credible pragmatic realism that focuses exclusively on the experienced world rather than a supposed in-itself world and that does not buy into a correspondence theory of truth. His second claim thus begs the question by assuming the very thing that James so consistently and reasonably calls into question. For James, the idea that there either can or must be some kind of additional test to exhibit the appropriateness of experience as a whole to the world can only involve us in an infinite regress, confront us with an ultimate opaqueness and in-principle unknowability of the world, and expose us to an implacable skepticism. I have argued in this chapter that sensation and causation are two extremely important and intimately connected aspects of Jamesian empiricism.

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They are supplemented by two other aspects that are also of great importance: emotions and values. None of the four aspects occur in isolation from the others. In fact, all are in constant dynamic interaction with one another, both within the all-encompassing field of experience James calls pure experience and in the selective awareness of self and world he associates with ordinary experience. In the next chapter I investigate the indispensable and cognitively significant roles James assigns to emotions in his overall conception of experience.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Experience and Emotion

Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in any emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. —William James (1995: 37)

Sensation, causation, emotion, and value: these four interconnected aspects of experience require focused attention and recognition, according to James, if we hope to have an adequate and inclusive conception of experience. In the previous chapter we looked at the first two members of the quartet. The remaining two are the subjects of this and the next chapter.

Emotional Aspects of Experience The sensate and causal aspects of experience, and thus of beliefs based upon experience, are supplemented, in James’s view, by important emotional aspects. According to him these emotional aspects not only have a fundamental role in explaining why we have certain beliefs, they also can have a significant role in the justification of beliefs. The latter claim runs against the grain of those who see emotions as something purely subjective, having nothing to do with objective fact other than possibly barring or inhibiting our access to it. We can be emotionally attached to beliefs, they note, that later turn out to be false or that can be shown on other grounds to be false.

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For these thinkers, emotions can admittedly be factors in explaining why people have certain kinds of belief, but they deny emotions to any positive cognitive significance or justificatory role. Explaining why someone has a belief is different from assessing the truth or falsity of the belief, and for the latter task, emotions must be set resolutely aside and entirely left out of account. The logical positivism of the earlier part of the twentieth century took this position, for example. James dissents from this common view with arguments I shall bring into focus in this section. He presents these arguments in support of the following claims. First, reasons are often so closely connected with emotional predilections and commitments as to make it difficult to separate out what is supposedly purely rational and what is emotional in beliefs. Beliefs and sentiments generally go hand-in-hand. More specifically, without the sentiments the beliefs would probably not exist as such or take the forms they do. Second, emotions have an important role to play in the pragmatic testing of the adequacy of beliefs. Third, emotions help us to take notice of and bring into consideration important facts that we might otherwise overlook. And fourth, emotions can motivate us to bring new facts into the world or to make things true that were not true before. Emotions for James are therefore not only important ingredients in experience, and they not only help explain why people come to have certain kinds of belief, they are also aspects of experience that can have a significant cognitive character and that can help us in discovering, confirming, or producing facts about ourselves and the world. Let us look at each of these arguments in turn.

Sentiments and Reasons In his essay “The Sentiment of Rationality,” James asserts that the search for rational explanations, especially those of the comprehensive type for which philosophers seek, is undergirded by a profound desire for “ease, peace, and rest,” for a transition from a state of puzzlement and confusion to one of “lively relief and pleasure” (James 1995: 20). One characteristic of this desire, at least on its purely theoretical side, is the passionate drive toward unity, closure, and completeness—the attainment of a philosophical vision so final and all-encompassing in character as to bring every aspect of the world within its span. But there is another kind of passion as well that can be equally strong and persistent in its drive for the theoretical thinker, and that is the passion for attention to the concrete, the specific, the particular parts of experience and a strong resistance to and suspicion of wrapping these details up into a comprehensive system of pale abstractions. Thus the

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sentiment of rationality in general is the emotional drive toward intellectual resolution and satisfaction, but that drive incorporates passionate searches for the two aspects of coherence and adequacy. Some theoretical thinkers may yearn for unity and completeness, and for incorporating everything into a sweepingly general scheme of abstract thought. But others may be strongly attracted to the particularities of the world. The latter are most desirous of being able somehow to stay in touch with the discreteness and manysidedness of things—and the multiple possible perspectives from which these things can be viewed—that strongly resist being reduced to the confines of any highly abstract, putatively complete scheme of thought, however elaborate or ingenious that scheme may be. The intense emotional striving for these two goals, and for the feelings of peace, rest, and satisfaction of having achieved them, is what James calls the sentiment of rationality on its theoretical side. He goes on shrewdly to observe that the two aspects of this sentiment, the focus on the universal and all-comprehending, on the one hand, and on the particular and multifarious, on the other, together with the passion that underlies the relative gravitation toward either of the two ends, comprise important characteristics of all philosophical visions and of claims to the truth or falsity of those visions. As such, the sentiment or driving emotion with its two aspects is a factor that we should not fail to include in our overall appraisal of the truth value of such visions. Philosopher “A” may be strongly partial to unity and “B” to plurality, while “C” passionately seeks, but never with complete success, the best balance of the two that can be achieved in philosophical thought. James tells us that Benedict Spinoza, “with his barren union of all things in one substance,” is an example of the first kind of philosopher in its extreme form, and he views David Hume, “with his equally barren ‘looseness and separateness’ of everything,” as an extreme form of the second. He regards his brand of empiricism as an example of the third, and his own emotional predilection and impulse are clearly reflected in his unflattering descriptions of the representatives of the other two he cites. “The only possible philosophy,” he accordingly proclaims, “must be a compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity” (James 1995: 22). Such a compromise he judges to be our best attempt at approximating as fully as we can the twin demands of the sentiment of rationality and of winning a hearing among the general run of thoughtful people. His philosophy of radical empiricism is an attempt at such a compromise. The emotional predilections of which James speaks and the particular characters of their consequent strivings and goals give expression to the

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different personal temperaments of individual thinkers, and these temperaments go a long way toward explaining the fact that “although all men will insist on being spoken to by the universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the same way” (James 1995: 38). The manifest difference of outlook and conclusion among philosophers can thus be at least partly accounted for by their different emotional temperaments. James regards it as “almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination” (James 1995: 40). This does not mean for him that everything comes down to personal preference, temperament, or emotional predisposition, but in calling our attention to this ineliminable factor in theoretical reasoning he is reminding us in this first way of the role that emotions play in our experience and in our cogitations on the experienced world. It is important to note here that James is doing more in this regard than explaining or helping to explain why particular thinkers have certain beliefs or take certain stances toward the world. He is arguing that emotions are a constitutive part of belief, especially of the large-scale outlooks on self and world argued for by philosophers, and that it is therefore impossible entirely to separate sentiment and belief from one another. The notion of being able to attain completely dispassionate reasoning in such outlooks is an illusion. I think that James is correct in these observations. We certainly need to guard against being led astray by our emotions in our thinking, but one way of doing that is to be constantly aware of the necessary role emotions play in our thought. Strong emotions generally lie behind any kind of long-range commitment or enterprise such as a lengthy research program, the development of a comprehensive worldview, or a distinctive path of life; the results that may stem from the commitment or enterprise are made possible partly by the motivation of these emotions. In his Principles of Psychology James makes this telling statement about the role of emotions in contributing credibility and conviction to systems of thought: “That theory will be most generally believed which, besides offering us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers those which are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and active needs” (James 1950: II, 312). We can take notice in this connection of—but just in passing and without further comment because the subject would take us too far afield—the intimate connections neurophysiologists have discovered between the limbic system of the brain, which they associate with emotions and motivations, and the brain’s neocortex, which they associate with high levels of symbolic and theoretical thought. Neurophysiological investiga-

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tions add support from a different angle to James’s analysis of the relations of emotions and reasons in theoretical systems.

Emotions and the Pragmatic Testing of Beliefs According to James, sentiments or emotions are not only a constitutive element in the development of systems of belief viewed solely from a theoretical perspective. They also play a critical role when such systems are put to practical tests and applied to the conditions of everyday life. James identifies two basic conditions that must be satisfied in a philosophy or point of view that is being urged for acceptance. The first is that it be able to give us strong emotional confidence in the future, assurance that the future can unfold with a marked degree of continuity and predictability on the basis of which we can lay plans and seek to live our lives. The second condition is that the philosophy or point of view provide support for our emotional craving to live in a universe where our efforts, strivings, and hopes can make a difference, a universe in which these things matter and can significantly influence the course of events. So it is not just the predictability and dependability of the future and its general continuity with the past that is an important emotional factor in the acceptance of a philosophy or standpoint on the world; it is also our ability to affect future events by our concerted actions that is at stake. We deeply desire not only to be at home in a dependable environment. We just as deeply desire to have a part in the continuing maintenance and improvement of that environment. We do not want to be idle spectators to a relentless and indifferent ongoingness of the world. For James, such outlooks as those of fatalism and mechanistic materialism uphold the first emotional condition but violate the second. Radically nihilistic or pessimistic outlooks on the future fail to uphold either of the two conditions. All such positions are, James avers, hypotheses to be tested in experience and especially over experience in the long term. And such hypotheses are acts of faith, for no final, knockdown, completely consensual proof of any of them is possible. Faith, in its turn, is closely tied to “our emotional interests,” and James insists that “[w]e cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith” (James 1995: 39, 42). The two important practical tests of the acceptability of a worldview, then, turn upon faith and the emotional interests tied to it. It would be foolish, James says, to overlook the importance of such faith in assessing in pragmatic fashion the final adequacy of any point of view. As humans, we cannot help but demand of a worldview “a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match.” We enjoy “reacting with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the

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like,” and we “very unwillingly” react “with fear, disgust, despair or doubt—a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of the latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving” (James 1995: 34). Emotions are therefore not only forceful and pervasive aspects of experience for James. They are also significant factors in the evaluation of systems of thought and outlooks on ourselves and the world, and of the claims to truth that are integral parts of these systems and outlooks. Is James guilty of wishful thinking here? Does just hoping that something is true serve to make it true or even contribute to its being true? James’s response to these two obvious questions is a pragmatic one. The ultimate worth of any comprehensive set of ideas for him is the effects of that set of ideas for practical living. Ideas are not merely self-contained; they are also instruments for action and, for humans, one of the principal ways humans interact with one another and respond to the demands of their physical environments. “It is far too little recognized,” he writes, “how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests.” And he adds that “[c]ognition is . . . incomplete until discharged in act . . . .” While humans admittedly engage in “a vast amount of theoretic activity over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yet . . . the active nature asserts its rights to the end.” We learn this lesson from Darwin’s theory of evolution, he remarks, as well as in other ways (James 1995: 34–35). I can characterize James’s response to the charge of wishful thinking in this way. Our emotional needs, desires, hopes, aspirations, and the like cannot constitute the sole criteria for the acceptance or rejection of encompassing visions of the world. But they are for him a necessary factor in such decisions. Philosophical visions are adequate to the extent that they speak to and include the whole person in their purview. We are not just thinking beings, we are feeling and acting beings, and a philosophical outlook or other comprehensive viewpoint should be adequate to our practical needs and interests. A philosophy that cannot be lived, in other words, and lived with a generous measure of confidence and hope in the face of the threats, dangers, and uncertainties of a precarious world, is in virtue of that fact or at least on prima facie grounds an inadequate philosophy. As Gavin states, all of James’s writings should be seen, in the final analysis, “as ‘directional’—pointing beyond themselves toward life in general” (Gavin 1992: 6). But not only that, they should be seen as pointing the way to possibilities of a fuller and more abundant life. James admits that it might turn out in the long run that such confidence and hope are unjustified, and that the pessimists, nihilists, reductive materialists, and naysayers of every stripe are right. But it is more advisable to work

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with the hypothesis that the confidence and hope—and their accompanying active involvements in the world and attempts to contribute to its betterment—will be justified than to acquiesce in advance to the view that they will not and cannot be. According to James, there is a critical element of risk, uncertainty, and indeterminacy in any worldview, including the ones that are basically optimistic and those that are basically pessimistic. Reason alone cannot tip the balance decisively, conclusively, or certainly in the direction of any of them. “Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing by themselves about concrete reality,” he writes, “we find no proposition ever regarded by anyone as evidently certain that has not either been called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by someone else” (James 1995: 258). Even the adamant policy of restricting one’s outlook to what can be resolutely defended solely on the basis of perspicuous rational evidence, as James’s critic W. K. Clifford insisted on our adhering to in all circumstances, is a policy that has its own underlying even if unrecognized stimulations, influences, and colorings of emotion. Clifford “may be critical of many of his desires and fears,” James observes, but he cannot avoid his horror of being a dupe or his desperate fear of falling into error, “which he slavishly obeys” (James 1995: 261). Moreover, the policy he recommends has its own considerable risk of possibly overlooking factors in our experiences of the world— including the important emotional components of such experiences—that might have critical positive or even saving meaning, truth, and value. Here is how James announces the main thesis of his essay “The Will to Believe”: Our passional nature 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; 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. (James 1995: 256)

Restricting one’s outlook and actions to what can be decided with utter dispassion and complete evidential reasonableness, as Clifford enjoins us to do, is thus, by this reckoning, a futile, foolish, and even flagrantly unreasonable course of action.1 The workings of various kinds of focused attention, willful effort, and emotional predilection will have their say in all such decisions and will inevitably do so, no matter what proposition, belief, general outlook, or worldview is at issue.2 James’s significant insight regarding the role of emotions and other nonrational factors in our most basic beliefs is nicely

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summarized by Suckiel when she says that “our most important questions cannot even be approached if we presuppose a simplistic model of linear intelligence which excludes emotional, practical, and spiritual dimensions of the individual” (Suckiel 1996: 69–70). In chapter 3 I indicated that one criterion of truth recognized by James is that of simplicity. If two outlooks or hypotheses provide equally satisfying explanations on the basis of other relevant criteria, then the simpler of the two is in most cases more likely to be true. I also noted there Gombrich’s pertinent comment, taken from the thought of Popper, that the simpler hypothesis will usually have the advantage of being the one that can more easily be tested for its truth or falsity. But Suckiel is right to insist that the role of the criterion of simplicity (or parsimony) should not be exaggerated. This is especially the case when it comes to the “wider context of the subject’s life as a whole” from which that life must take its meaning and purpose (Suckiel 1996: 69). This wider context is intricate, dense, and multidimensional, and so not amenable to simple analysis or explanation. Clifford’s attempt to sweep away factors of emotion and will that cannot be easily detached or disassociated from the inherent complexity and formidable challenges of the whole of life—an attempt that can be interpreted as an intended application of the principle of parsimony or Ockham’s razor—should therefore be rejected. It does not do the job it sets out to do. Its simplicity is overruled by the more important consideration of the need for adequacy. This is another way of getting at James’s response to Clifford. In view of these quite plausible observations, James’s recommendation of the more optimistic but also more robust and demanding worldview that allows and encourages us to undertake active roles in trying to affect the affairs of the world for good—and that does not view such an action as arbitrary or lacking in reasonableness despite the factors of emotion, volition, and practical advantage that inevitably enter into it—seems to me to be for the most part commendable pragmatic advice. I will have more to say about it when I consider James’s fourth argument for the relevance of emotional factors to claims to truth. I think it appropriate to take note here, however, of a comment Allan makes in personal correspondence that helps to clarify further the issue of whether, in what way, or to what extent wishing something to be so can help to make it so. He writes that what is at stake is “not just wishing but also envisioning: the power of a possibility as specifically imagined can guide, not just motivate, action toward realizing it. A plan of action is a possibility for how to get from where we are to the end we are wishing for. People who can only wish for the end but cannot envision how it might be achieved usually end

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as merely dreamers.” His comment is on target and much in sympathy with the spirit of James’s own observations in this regard. Wishing for something to be so, as Allan says, can in some cases be an important factor in making it so, but only if the wishing is accompanied by suitable envisioning, planning, and acting. To cite a commonplace example, it is one thing to wish to be fresh and clean after a hard day’s labor digging ditches in a blazing sun. It is another to envision the possibility of bathing one’s body in the shower and then to proceed to satisfy the necessary conditions for doing so.

Emotions as Ways of Noticing and Taking into Account Important Facts The identification of facts requires attention and selection. And that attention and selection are aided and motivated by emotions. Emotions can help to bring a fact into focus, while our reasoning powers and conceptual systems help to give it intellectual significance and to place it within the context of related experiences and ideas. “The quality of arousing emotion, of shaking, moving us or inciting to action,” James declares in his Principles of Psychology, “has as much to do with our belief in an object’s reality as the quality of giving pleasure or pain. . . . Speaking generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has” (James 1950: II, 307). In other words, the selective function of emotions not only calls attention to particular objects or, to speak more properly, identifies something in the field of experience as a particular object; this function also helps to confer credibility upon it as having special reality and importance in a given context. Our emotions can perform this function either by way of adversions or aversions. An emotion of affection, delight, or admiration elicited by some aspect of experience can urge us to pay special attention to that aspect, picking it out from a field of other possible concerns and highlighting its importance as a matter of concern. I may take keen delight in the sight of a wagonload of puppies, for example, and have that emotion stir in me associated emotions of reverence for the wonder of life and concern for the well-being of innocent creatures of this earth. The emotion can then help consign its object and what its object represents to the status of distinctive facts well worth sustained attention and consideration. Such emotions may also encourage us to give that particular aspect of experience a prominent and enduring place in a larger skein of related experiences, ideas, and commitments. For example, a particular object of attention may come to embody or represent conceptions, ideals, and manifestations of beauty, sublimity, wonder, stability, contentment, adventure, or dedication as essential constituents of an encompassing

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outlook. Without the emotional attention, the object and its associations may not have been recognized as singularly important parts of a developing stance or system of thought. Our adversive, attractive, or positive emotions can lead to selections from experience that for us constitute significant facts and that may leave indelible marks upon our ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world. Aversive emotions such as fear, distrust, or disgust can also motivate us to pick out aspects of experience for special attention, giving to them the status of important facts. The emotion of fear, for example, helps to alert us to parts of our environment that endanger us, and it can therefore help to safeguard us against them. These parts of the environment then become facts whose presence it would be foolhardy to ignore. James uses the example of a person walking on a curb, as contrasted with that of a person walking on the edge of a high and exposed precipice, to illustrate this idea. The thought of falling when we walk along a curbstone awakens no emotion of dread; so no sense of reality attaches to it, and we are sure we shall not fall. On a precipice’s edge, however, the sickening emotion which the notion of a possible fall engenders makes us believe in the latter’s imminent reality, and quite unfits us to proceed. (James 1950: II, 307)

His point is that the dread of falling is a notable warning of danger on the high precipice; it calls attention to a fact of no mean significance that needs carefully to be acknowledged. On the curb, however, an emotion of fear would have little relevance, unless we are thinking of the danger of stepping from the curb into a busy street. Appropriate caution and fear need to be incorporated into our conception of the world if we are properly to conceive it or be fit to survive in it. An emotion of fear or persistent versions of it—such as gnawing anxieties about possibly impending disappointment, disease, death, or disaster—might also profoundly inform a person’s outlook on the world by giving to that outlook a general, pervasive complexion of fearfulness, dread, or aversion. Such an outlook would be in the main wary, distrustful, and negative rather than confident, trusting, and positive. Experiences of disgust and repulsiveness would have a similar result if allowed to become prominent and governing features of a developed and proclaimed worldview. The title of Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (Sartre 1964) is a vivid label for such a worldview, as is the title A Short History of Decay, chosen by E. M. Cioran for his thoroughly nihilistic book (Cioran 1975). In these works emotions of repulsion and aversion are given a prominent role and have a profound influence on the

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authors’ claims about the nature of the world. These emotions, on the one hand, and the two writers’ allegations of fact and modes of reasoning, on the other, are bound intimately together. Thus, what count as facts and as determinative facts for any person depend to a significant extent upon the character of the emotional experiences, whether conscious or largely unconscious, to which the person gives prominent weight and emphasis. This is James’s view, and it merits careful consideration. Emotions and facts, emotions and reasons, and emotions and credible claims to truth cannot as readily or easily be distinguished from one another as we might uncritically assume. Emotions play a prominent part in our experience and also in the claims about ourselves and the world we find ourselves inclined to make and to have accepted by others. A worldview that ignores or radically downplays the emotional aspects of our being can hardly be adequate or convincing. I can tie this point to my discussion in the previous chapter of the role of causality in our experience by recalling the insistence of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead on the idea that causality comes to us not merely as a blank force, influence, or power but as experience that is “heavy with emotion” (Whitehead 1978: 178). This is to say that our emotions are important and indispensable ways of relating to, being influenced by, and comprehending the world. Our experiences are emotion-laden, just as they are theory-laden, and James—like Whitehead, who was deeply influenced by him—rightly insists on our taking this latter fact fully into account.

Emotions and the Creation of New Truths The fourth way in which emotions relate to truth is the role they can play in bringing new truths into being, making things true that did not exist or were not true before. Such new truths are the outcomes of our actions, and such actions are often motivated and undergirded by strong emotions. The Wright Brothers, for example, were passionately devoted to the idea that it is possible for human beings to build powered, heavier-than-air flying machines. By dint of forceful imagination and sustained effort in the face of formidable obstacles they brought their passion to fulfillment. Airplanes by now are commonplace facts of the world, where before they were just dreams, dreams that were thought by some to be impossible to convert into a practical reality. Without the passion, the new fact of airliner contrails etching the sky in every part of the world would not have been created. The strong desire to accomplish something can lead to that something’s being accomplished, and sometimes against all odds. Much of what we take

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for granted in our complex technological age was created by someone or a group of persons inspired by a vision and intensely motivated to convert the vision into reality. This includes the claims, findings, and systematic interrelations of new scientific theories as well as recent technological inventions. Both must now be taken into account in our interpretive schemes, and both were the results, at least in part, of the excitation and impetus of emotions clamoring for expression and realization. The ever-growing body of literature in each academic discipline is also the outcome, at least in part, of people’s passionate dedication to new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new modes of articulation and expression. The same can be said of startlingly innovative works of art. The world, therefore, is not just a static array of already realized facts. It is oriented to the future, not just to the past. And the future contains possibilities yet to be envisioned or realized. Surprising new accomplishments in this future can result from the motivation of strong emotions, just as other ones—equally surprising at the time—were brought into being in the past. New facts do not come into being out of nowhere; some of the most important of them are produced by intense desire and passionate dedication. Hoping and believing that something can be so are often the keys to its becoming so. James uses a memorable example to illustrate his insistence that emotions have a lot to do with effecting outcomes and bringing new facts and states of affairs into being. He imagines someone climbing in the Alps and finding himself in a position from which the only escape is a terrifying leap. If he tries to make the leap, he may perish in the abyss lying before him. If he does not try, he will also be in great peril, perhaps from exposure and freezing. Hope and confidence in himself may enable the climber to cross the abyss, even though he has no previous knowledge of his being able to do so. Fear and mistrust, on the other hand, may cause him to hesitate, stumble, miss his footing, and tumble into the abyss. Either possibility can become fact, depending upon the character of the emotions that lie behind its actualization (James 1995: 43). James’s point in using this example is that our emotional predilections and convictions make a tremendous difference in our outlook toward the future and in how we conceive of life and the world. Not only that, but these predilections and convictions can affect in decisive ways the actual outcomes of our lives and the character of the world—at least to the extent that we are capable of influencing that character. In James’s words, “There are cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage” (James 1995:

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43). Truths are made in part by the choices we make, and those choices are often motivated by strong emotions that we need to become aware of and bring under critical investigation. Some emotions are to our advantage; others are not. Those that are, can meet the pragmatic test of truth or, in this case, the making of positive, useful, and sustaining truths. We neglect to notice and attend to the role of such emotions at our peril, because some of them can lead to frustrating and unfulfilling—if not disastrous—courses of life. One of the most important tests of a comprehensive outlook or worldview, therefore, is whether it endorses a stance of hope and trust or one of fearfulness and despair. If it does the former, it can help to verify the emotions that lie behind it; if it does the latter, it can also help to verify those emotions. There is a supremely important sense, therefore, in which thinking something to be so can insure that it becomes so. We are not merely talking here of wishful thinking but of a kind of thinking that can determine or at least strongly influence its own outcomes. I think that James is right to emphasize the power of an emotion-girded faith to bring about changes in the future. It took a considerable amount of faith on the part of the founding fathers of the United States, for example to bring about the American revolution, and Abraham Lincoln had to have a large measure of faith in himself, his ideals, and in his country to deal creatively with the menaces of secession and slavery. Mohandas K. Gandhi was another person whose intense faith enabled him to leave an impressive and largely positive mark on human history. But of course faith can be a formidable force for evil as well as good. Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler were scourges of history, but they too were men of faith who set out to change the world in accordance with their visions of what the world ought to become. As James also emphasizes, the world has factors of stubborn obduracy and resistance that can limit what faith is able to accomplish in many situations. The world is not entirely pliable to faith, and faith itself is not just a matter of the will. One cannot easily choose among the emotions or motivations or even the beliefs that might be operative in one’s outlook on the world or in the actions that stem from those emotions, motivations, and beliefs. Some find it much easier to be persons of positive and effective faith than do others. All acts of the will take place in a causal context, and that context is sometimes so powerful and constraining as to tempt us into doing things we do not want in our heart of hearts to do and not believe it at all appropriate to do. We may understand well that it would be best for ourselves and others if we could feel, think, and act in certain ways but find it inordinately difficult to do so, and our most fervent hopes and dreams may be shattered by forces and realities beyond our control. While it is true that the future is open, it is

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also true that it is continuous with and powerfully constrained by the past. Its openness is relative, not absolute. And again, it is more open—and in some cases, much more open—for some than for others, depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves. In short, there is a faint and disturbing air of false or at least insufficiently critical or nuanced optimism in James’s account of how emotions, faith, and the will can empower us to hope for and to work effectively for improvements in ourselves, in our relations to one another, and in the world. James was well aware of the dark powers of mistrust, anxiety, inhibition, and depression that can be at work in the human spirit; he himself was their frequent victim. His fourth way of arguing for the relation of emotions and reasons, and for the play of emotions in outlooks on the world has much of the ring of truth, and it is bracing and valuable for that reason. But it is perhaps at times a bit too sunny and reassuring. His argument needs to be placed more firmly and clearly in the context of the sad lessons of human history, recent and remote, and of all the stubborn forces that can work against the role he sometimes too blithely assigns to positive emotions and to the constructive power of faith. It is undoubtedly advantageous to have the kinds of emotion and faith he eloquently commends, but it may also in many cases be extremely difficult to possess or achieve them. And while James rightly emphasizes that in appropriate situations an intense desire that something extremely difficult to accomplish be true can contribute to its being made true, it is important to note that such situations are relatively rare. Ardently wishing or hoping for something to be so is by itself no guarantee of its being or becoming so, just as fearing something to be so does not automatically mean that it must be as we fear it to be. We have seen so far that experience of the world, as James understands and describes it, is comprised not just of sensations and the mind’s operations upon sensations, nor of isolated bits of experience, but of genuine, directly experienced relations. Causal influences are one of the most important types of these relations for him, and informative, motivating emotions are basic features of his conception of experience as well. James also claims that experience incorporates and brings into view crucial elements of value pertaining to the world. Sensation, causality, emotion, and value are thus four fundamental constituents of James’s view of experience, and these constituents, working in relation with one another, are key factors in his brand of empiricism. In the next chapter, I discuss James’s analysis of the central place of values in the world as we experience it.

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Experience and Value

The only thing that [religion] unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. —William James (1929: 515)

I noted in chapter 2 that James deconstructs with pertinent arguments the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, as Hume had before him. The deconstruction means for James that the rich qualitative aspects of experience need no longer be associated solely with the human subject. A variety of qualities, and not just quantities, can now be located in the world as well as in the self. Among these qualitative aspects of the experienced world are aesthetic, moral, and religious values. In James’s view, we come into contact on a daily basis with various species of aesthetic delight, satisfaction, evocation, frustration, repulsion, and withdrawal. We experience the lures and demands of moral goodness as well as the seductions and potential or actual devastations of moral evil, and we recognize and can become increasingly alert to manifestations of these two principles in ourselves and the world. Finally, we discern in our ongoing experiences powerful and daunting evocations of religious mystery and awe, a compelling urge both toward radical self-transformation and compassionate openness to the needs of others, and the promise of life-altering empowerment and fulfillment through engagement with and commitment to some sort of religious ultimate—or, as James terms it, a “More” that calls to us 105

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hauntingly and provocatively deeply within, and yet somehow also beyond, the bounds of our ordinary experiences. These three kinds of value are not just subsequent overlays or subjective projections upon our experience; they are immediate and integral parts of our experience and essential ways in which we encounter and come to understand the world and our relations to the world.

Aesthetic Values in Experience We saw that James argues in his essay “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience” that we just as easily and properly say that beauty, for example, is characteristic of something in the external world as to say that it is in those who may regard that something as beautiful. In our experience we find that something to be beautiful; we do not have an experience of merely imposing our subjective impression of its beauty upon it. It is a thing of beauty in our experience, then. Or in more exact philosophical terminology and in keeping with James’s descriptions of the intimate connection between world and self, its beauty resides in the relationship of world and self. Admittedly its beauty would not be recognized if there were no self to do the recognizing, but there would be no such recognition did the object itself not elicit and commend it. James’s analysis applies to major or minor aesthetic experiences of various kinds, for example, our day-to-day recognitions of such things as a beautiful sunset, a majestic mountain, a sublime lightning storm, an attractive person, a well-designed house or car, a sleek animal, a lovely flower, and so on. It also applies to recognition or appreciation of deliberately created art objects or artistic performances as having greater or lesser aesthetic significance and value. The aesthetic quality is something we experience to reside in the scenes, events, objects, works of art, and so forth, not just in us. Or more properly, again, it resides in the relation between us and such things. I experience it as there but from my personal perspective here. No crevasse of self-world duality is involved. All of this is just to say that aesthetic values are important parts of experience and of the experienced world, and we can learn how rightly to perceive them. Experiences of beauty, sublimity, serenity, catharsis, dramatic tension, significant form, sonority, grace, and the like, as evoked by aesthetically perceived objects in the world, point us outward toward the world and not just inward toward ourselves as experiencing subjects. As James states the matter, “We discover beauty just as we discover the physical properties of things.” But he rightly reminds us that “training is needed to make us expert

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in either line” (James 1976: 72). This is to say, our aesthetic sensibilities can be refined and improved by education and practice, so that we can learn more fully how to discover and appreciate the aesthetic qualities of aspects of the world, aspects of nonhuman nature as well as art works created by human beings. In personal correspondence, Allan illustrates this fact well as it relates to the hearing of music: “The greater the training of an ear’s sensitivity to pick up the character of a sound or sound pattern (it’s an F, it’s a tonic chord, it’s in the key of G), the greater is the appreciation of what is being heard. A beauty emerges in this awareness of the details of pattern and content that an untrained ear cannot access.” And of course some persons are by nature more deeply sensitive and creative in the aesthetic domain than others, just as some have more talent for discernment and production in other domains such as mechanical engineering or nuclear physics. Let me put this claim about experiences of aesthetic value in another way. I perceive an object. It exhibits a resistance and persistence that mark it as a feature of the extra-mental world. A further characteristic of it, as I perceive it, is its beauty (or some other aesthetic property). That beauty belongs to it, not to me. I experience it as part of the object and part of the world. Not only do I sense the object’s presence as something in the world, I am also enticed by its beauty. I find, perhaps after sufficient and requisite cultivation of my aesthetic sensibilities, that I can no more deny its beauty than I can deny its shape and size. The experience of aesthetic value is an integral part of my experience, and it is part of my experience of the world beyond myself. Can there be disagreements about whether or not important aesthetic qualities reside in objects? Such disagreements can and do occur, and there may be more disagreements here than we typically find in relation to the more conventionally acknowledged traits of external objects. But disagreement does not in itself mean that the qualities are not there, just that it is in some cases more difficult to discover and recognize them or to achieve complete consensus about them. The most perceptive and reliable judgments of aesthetic quality may on particular occasions be those of people especially sensitive to and rigorously trained in such matters. When these people disagree, as they sometimes do, the focus of their disagreement is on the object being perceived and judged, not just on their respective inner feelings. They are talking about objects in the world and their experiences of such objects, not just about themselves. The cognitive import of the arts and of aesthetic significance is emphasized by philosopher Susanne Langer in a manner with which James would,

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I believe, be deeply sympathetic. In her little book Philosophical Sketches she writes, What discursive symbolism—language in its literal use—does for our awareness of things about us and our own relation to them, the arts do for our awareness of subjective reality, feeling and emotion; they give form to inward experiences and thus make them conceivable. The only way we can really envisage vital movement, the stirring and growth and passage of emotion, and ultimately the whole direct sense of human life, is in artistic terms. . . . Self-knowledge, insight into all phases of life and mind, springs from artistic imagination. That is the cognitive value of the arts. (Langer 1964: 83)

In other words, the arts and aesthetic experiences help to give knowable form to our emotions, and often to the deepest levels of our emotional life. In doing so, they help to make us more fully aware of ourselves and our relations to the world and to give us resources and possibilities for dealing with our relations to the world. An aesthetic experience, including one guided and instructed by a work of art, is not only an intensification and clarification of feeling. It is also a distinctive kind of recognition and judgment—a deepening of insight and understanding that can open us to new ways of conceiving the world. Thus, the significance of such an experience is not merely private but public as well. By deepening our sense of the inward, it expands and enriches our sense of the outward, showing the emotional quality of our lives to be a basic way in which we connect to ourselves and to the world beyond ourselves. Langer sums up this crucial point in relation to the arts when she notes that they assimilate “ordinary sights (or sounds, motions, or events) to inward vision,” thereby lending “expressiveness and emotional import to the world.” In this way, they “objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature” (Langer 1964: 83–84). The subjective and the objective are brought into a new kind of relationship by the cognitive resources and powers of aesthetically awakened and heightened feeling. To respond aesthetically to something in the world is to find in it qualities and traits not accessible to mere discursive reasoning. It is to enter into a different way of knowing. Let me illustrate with four familiar examples. William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth makes vivid not only the seductive, almost irresistible allure of overweening ambition but also its potentially tragic, achingly destructive consequences. It does so with profound aesthetic disclosure and evocation of feeling, not by way of bland description or prosaic explication. Giuseppe Verdi’s magnificent opera Rigoletto enables us to experience powerfully even if only vicariously through exquisite music and story the tragic consequence

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of a desperate act of hatred and revenge on the part of a father, despite the pleas of his innocent, loving daughter for mercy toward the callous libertine who is the intended object of that act. “Dramatic art discloses a new breadth and depth of life,” writes the philosopher of symbolic forms Ernst Cassirer. “It conveys an awareness of human things and human destinies, of human greatness and misery, in comparison to which our ordinary existence appears poor and trivial” (Cassirer 1962: 147). Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of a sunflower, a wheat field, a grove of cypress trees, or the night sky make it possible to view such things with invigorated interest and fresh perspectives that stand in sharp contrast with a formerly casual, unfeeling, merely passing notice of them. Experience of them is now overlaid and infused with appreciation of their aesthetic qualities, brought so forcibly into consciousness by van Gogh’s superb paintings. The intoxicating choral fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its exultant libretto excerpted from a poem by Friedrich Schiller, frames and expresses the experience of joyful freedom and brotherhood in a soaring, inimitable, unforgettable manner. It does so, as Cassirer reminds us, against the background of formidable “tragic accents” elsewhere in the symphony (Cassirer 1962: 150). One’s perceptions and sensitivities are transformed by such powerful aesthetic experiences, and aspects of the world one encounters are transformed as well. James, as I read him, would be quite ready to acquiesce in Langer’s and Cassirer’s vision of the essential cognitive role of aesthetic insight and awareness. His style of writing throughout his life in books, essays, lectures, and letters breathes with aesthetic energy and evocativeness, a reflection perhaps of his youthful ambition to become a painter.

Moral Values in Experience There are two significant modes of access to moral values that James discerns. The one can be regarded as more clearly rational in its character, and the other as more sensitive or emotional. My reflective reason comes eventually to recognize, he argues in The Principles of Psychology, that there is no compelling moral difference between myself and others, that is, that there is no rational ground for favoring myself over them when it comes to moral principles and moral choices. My instinctive tendency to put myself and my preferences and needs before others must bow, therefore, to the rational moral principle of regarding and treating others in particular circumstances as I would hope to be regarded and treated in similar circumstances. Equals should be treated equally, and my reason tells me that others are morally equal to me (James 1950: II, 673).

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This rational recognition is undergirded by an emotional one, and here is where concrete experience itself, and not just abstract reason, enters in. James speaks, again in the Principles, of the emotion of sympathy and of how that emotion gives motivation and support to the moral reasoning outlined above. “In man,” he says, “we may lay it down that the sight of suffering or danger to others is a direct exciter of interest, and an immediate stimulus, if no complication hinders, to acts of relief” (James 1950: II, 410–11). John Stuart Mill, whose works exercised a strong influence over James, refers to the impulse or instinct of sympathy, along with that of self-defense, as the two vital motivations to justice and to recognition of moral obligation to others (Mill 1957: 63). This instinct of sympathy finds expression, I submit, in our overpowering tendency to vomit when confronted with an occasion of grave injury to others. Our bodies thus register sympathy with the plight of those others more forcefully and immediately than do our minds. But this kind of experience also shows the intimate connection of body and mind. We have this experience not just because, as some would argue, we instinctively apply others’ loss or pain to ourselves and thus bring to the surface our latent fear of suffering as they do. In my view, it is also because we quite naturally, and on the level of sometimes intense emotion and not mere conception, feel our intimate bond with them as fellow human beings, even though they may be strangers to us. The fact that we are social animals lends credence to this view. Primatologist Frans de Waal observes that “[a]id to others in need would never be internalized as a duty without the fellow-feeling that drives people to take an interest in one another. Moral sentiments come first; moral principles second” (de Waal 1996: 87; quoted in Thompson 2007: 401). Robert Sapolsky, biologist, neurologist, and neurosurgeon, discusses the brain’s involvement in feelings of empathy with the sufferings or pains of others in his New York Times article “This Is Your Brain on Metaphors.” The brain areas he connects with these feelings are the insula and the anterior cingulate, and he suggests that our empathy for the sufferings or pains of others shows our ability to react and think metaphorically. When we see someone else being pricked in the toe with a pin, for example, we instinctively jerk our own foot back. That is, we naturally extend from our own literal or physical experiences of suffering or pain to a metaphorical or psychic identification with the sufferings and pains of others. We exhibit a related kind of instinctive moral reaction and metaphorical extension, Sapolsky asserts, when we witness or learn about instances of flagrant maltreatment and exploitation of innocent, helpless persons and directly experience strong feelings of revulsion and disgust.

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In this case, the insula activates just as it does when we encounter rotten, disgusting food or when we remember something rotten or shameful we may once have done. The anterior cingulate in the frontal cortex is involved in our subjective, evaluative responses to such feelings (see Sapolsky 2010). I do not mean to suggest here that the brain or specific regions of the brain have feelings of any kind. It is as whole persons—as extremely complicated biological organisms in constant interactions with our environments—that we feel. And the brain, complicated as it itself is, is only a part of our total organic makeup. Our feelings and other aspects of our consciousness involve the brain but much more than the brain—a fact I took notice of in chapter 2 when presenting the ideas of W. Teed Rockwell. My point, and I think that this is Sapolsky’s point as well, is rather that there is a strong organic line of connection, which he views as a kind of metaphorical extension, between our personal feelings of suffering, pain, and moral revulsion and our ability to enter into and identify with these features of the experiences of others. I think that James (and Mill) would have welcomed Sapolsky’s research and argument. It does much to strengthen their case. The persistent even if not explicitly announced theme running through James’s essay “A Certain Blindness in Human Beings” is his insistence on our cultivating an attitude of sympathy (or empathy) toward those whose ways of life and conceptions of what is of most importance in life are different from our own. When we fail to do so, we are cut off from sources of insight from which we might derive great value, to say nothing of being alienated from these persons and the things they cherish. But when we try to enter sympathetically into the outlooks and practices of others, our estimations of them can be raised and our sense of closeness to them can be increased. By cultivating the emotion of sympathy we can learn to recognize in others an intrinsic moral worth and a basic likeness to ourselves despite all the differences in their particular outlooks and practices as compared with our own. The emotion of sympathetic openness to the outlooks and experiences of others, and the considerations and lengthy quotations James brings to the fore in his eloquent essay in order to give expression to its importance, issue a solemn warning in regard to “those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us.” The warning is this: “Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands” (James 1995: 337). James does not mean that we should abandon our critical sensibilities in our interactions with others, but he does mean that these critical sensibilities should be balanced and informed by a constant attempt

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to understand the viewpoints of others and to take fully into account whatever logic or reasonableness may lie behind those viewpoints. So once again, the emotion, impulse, or instinct of sympathetic identification with others is a critical source of the recognition and deepening awareness of moral value and responsibility—one that is embedded within our day-to-day experience. If we follow the lead of the instinct of sympathy, and of the moral striving for more intimate and mutually helpful social relations it inspires, it places in our hands one sort of key to the kind of universe in which we live. The other kind of key is acquiescence in a kind of moral nihilism or radical moral selfishness and indifference—a despair of the possibility of any meaningful moral relations or moral obligations in the face of a blank universe that is claimed to be unresponsive to moral striving. “If we try the moral key and it fits, it is a moral lock,” James observes in “The Sentiment of Rationality.” On the other hand, “[i]f we try the unmoral key and it fits, it is an unmoral lock.” He notes that he “cannot possibly conceive of any other sort of evidence or ‘proof’ than this” (James 1995: 51). We must therefore actively put the world to the test to see what kind of lock it affords us, and he is confident that its lock will turn out to be the moral one. Our instinctive commitment to moral sympathy and moral responsibility are aspects of experience whose leanings will be borne out in practice, but only if they are put constantly and deliberately into practice. Moral values and our deep-felt impetus toward their realization are fundamental ingredients in our experience of the world, just as aesthetic ones are. James addresses the topic of moral values from another angle in his essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” He observes that it is characteristic of all forms of consciousness that they have desires. To desire something is also to value it. James goes so far as to say that “nothing can be good or right except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good or thinks it to be right” (James 1995: 304). There is for him no overarching final good; there are only the things judged to be good by each and every conscious being. The “words ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘obligation,’” he states, “mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or anchorage in being, apart from the existence of actually living minds” (James 1995: 307). But the desires or valuations of various beings as they enter into relation with one another are not always compatible. Their respective desires and values can clash, compete, and be at odds with one another. It is the principal task of ethical theorizing, in James’s view, to explore and recommend ways in which as many particular desires, and the demands, ideals, and values implicit in the desires, can be satisfied as possible. It is not to come

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up with some single, final essence of good meant to cover all cases. The abstractness of even the best and most useful theorizing, as well as that of the conventional rules and regulations of any society, will always be in tension with the daunting concreteness of the manifold and ever-changing desires of innumerable conscious minds. What philosopher and classical scholar Martha Nussbaum says of the lover in her discussion of Plato’s dialogue the Symposium is also true for James of the astute moral reasoner in relation to moral theories, however grand, impressive, or all-inclusive some of the latter may appear to be: [P]articular intuitive judgments are prior to any universal rules we may be using to guide us. A lover decides how to respond to his or her lover not on the basis of definitions or general prescriptions, but on the basis of an intuitive sense of the person and the situation, which, although guided by general theories, is not subservient to them. (Nussbaum 1986: 190)

Similarly, in the domain of moral values as elsewhere in James’s philosophy, experience and its specific, down-to-earth disclosures have priority. Concepts and conceptual schemes are subordinate to and interpretive of them, and not the other way around. Loving attention to the particulars of experience is a constant guide in all of his thought. James writes that “every de facto claim creates in so far forth an obligation” (James 1995: 305). This means that each and every desire of each and every conscious being is an object of moral respect and regard. To take conscious beings’ desires and the judgments they base upon their desires seriously, as James emphatically does, is to take the beings themselves seriously and to accord to them intrinsic moral value. His conception of the moral life and moral reasoning turns upon this assumed intrinsic value of concrete beings and their specific desires, judgments, and values. And his model of a just society is one in which as many as possible of these desires, judgments, and values are allowed to be expressed and to flourish. It might seem at first glance that James is endorsing a version of ethical subjectivism, but I think that he is contending that the best way to achieve genuine objectivism in ethical thought is to pay due attention to the fact of many different desires and demands arising within the minds of many different conscious beings, and to do as much justice as we can to that fact. Moral theories should not be spun out of the personal preferences, inclinations, judgments, or desires of individual philosophers but should rather take as fully into account as possible the wide diversity of such outlooks that exists among many different minds, and seek ways in which this diversity can be

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brought to optimal expression. Implicit in this kind of objectivism is the fundamental importance of sympathetic interest in and awareness of the feelings and outlooks of others—an importance stressed in my discussion above of other parts of James’s ruminations on moral values. And, as with aesthetic experience, this interest and awareness should take fully into account the ultimate objectivity of moral values themselves as discernible features of the experienced world—a world to which human subjects are intimately related and to which their judgments and actions are finally responsible—and not just as mere projections of human subjectivity. But what if some of these individual feelings and desires turn out to be evil? For James this would mean that they deliberately create serious disharmony and discord, if not devastation within the social fabric, and that they exhibit a glaring absence of sympathetic moral regard for the intrinsic value of others and, at least prima facie, for the specific desires of others. James is not arguing that individual desires can never be inhibited or overridden by society. To argue that way would be a recipe for chaos. But he is insisting that the ground of ethical (and, by implication, legal) thought and practice must allow as many different feelings and values to be brought to expression as is possible in an ordered society that recognizes and firmly supports the intrinsic value of every person in that society. He is arguing for due recognition of the moral considerability of each person’s desires and for fair and full distribution of opportunities for satisfaction of these desires. He is also inviting ongoing experimentation in finding ways in which this ideal can be best achieved. The proper kind of moral philosopher, James asserts, “knows that he must always vote for the richer universe, for the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole. But which particular universe this is, he cannot know for certain in advance” (James 1995: 316). In emphasizing both the need for constant experimentation and the rootage of value in individual feeling and desire, he is seeking once again to show that moral values have their source, ground, and confirmation in experience and in experience that points beyond the individual self to other selves and the world. To the extent that nonhuman animals are sentient, conscious, or capable of having desires and experiencing pleasure or pain, his analysis applies forcibly to them as well. Now that we have looked at James’s conception of the integral involvements of aesthetic and moral values in experience, we can turn to the third kind of value that, according to his investigations, is an essential part of experience and the experienced world, namely, religious value. Once we have done so, we will have an overview of the fundamental place James accords to values in his brand of empiricism.

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Religious Values in Experience Religious values are rooted in religious experiences, James contends, and intellectual renderings and arguments for them or for versions of them cannot be separated from or substitute for the vital experiences that underlie and give substance and meaning to these values. “Conceptual processes,” he says, “can class [religious] facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling alone can answer for” (James 1929: 445). We do not just abstractly think religious thoughts or calmly entertain religious ideas; we experience crying religious needs and compellingly felt resolutions of those needs in the depths of our souls. James insists that it is a hopeless task for philosophers to try to make religion and its values universally accepted by coercive reasoning. They can only reaffirm “the individual’s experiences in a more generalized vocabulary” (James 1929: 444). This observation is similar to James’s focus on the particular desires of specific individuals in his reflections on morality. Religious values, like moral ones, are primarily felt and experienced; they can be only secondarily reflected upon. James’s magnificent book on religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is principally devoted to making—by reference to a wide variety of testimonials to firsthand religious experiences from religious persons speaking for many different religious outlooks and traditions—a thoroughgoing and exquisitely detailed case for this claim. James holds that there are no exclusively religious feelings or apprehensions but that we experience religious values when aspects of our ordinary experience are centered on religious objects. Distinctively religious love, fear, awe, and joy, for example, can be characterized as such when aroused by and directed toward some sort of religious object. James describes religious objects in general as whatever is considered by persons as “divine” or “godlike.” He asserts that these two terms include such traits as “first in being and power,” “overarching and enveloping” and thus permitting “no escape,” commanding “a total reaction upon life,” and “deeply true.” The religious object evokes a response, he adds, that is solemn and serious not only in its encounters and struggles with evil, but also in its exaltations and joys. This solemnity and seriousness he contrasts with either unremitting gloom or superficial delight (James 1929: 31–32, 35, 38–39). The religious object exposes evil for the sinister and threatening thing that it is, both in the person and in the world, but it also provides the energizing hope and gracious assurance of deliverance from the powers of evil. It awakens in us the sense of something fundamentally “wrong about us as we

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presently stand” but also of a latent higher self that can be developed and brought into full realization. A person then “becomes conscious that this higher self is coterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck” (James 1929: 499). James intends these general descriptions of the divine, the godlike, or the religious MORE to cover nontheistic as well as theistic types of religion. For him they refer as much to Buddhism or Emersonian transcendentalism as to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. In all these cases the descriptions are meant by him to be primarily functional rather than attributive, that is, to designate whatever functions for persons in their individual firsthand experiences as the divine or godlike. He is convinced that the basic experiences, feelings, and values that should be termed religious, as well as the conduct that arises from them, are “the more constant elements” of religion throughout history and across the world, in contrast with the widely varying conceptual schemes that have been built up out of these elements. The “feelings and the conduct . . . are almost always the same,” he avers, “for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives” (James 1929: 494). What these saints and other exemplary religious persons embody and exhibit, therefore, is not unanimity of doctrine but a basic commonality of feelings and their resultant practices, and it is here, for James, that the essence of religion consists. He is himself inconclusive in his own thought about what the precise character or attributes of the object or objects of religious faith and devotion should be considered to be. Religious beliefs, for their part, are not only based upon present religious experience but should also be regarded as sweeping hypotheses relating to future experience. James reflects that “life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion,” that is, what is predicted by these hypotheses. James states the matter somewhat differently when he declares that the only thing that religious experience “unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.” Attainment of this high and ultimately satisfying quality of life would be the religious hypotheses’ confirmations (James 1929: 497, 508, 515). So felt religious values are both the source and the promised outcome of religious beliefs. James is not oblivious, however, to the tragic dimensions of life. These are bound to temper the promise and hope of religion. In the last lecture of Pragmatism he writes,

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I am willing that there should be real loses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the drags are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept. (James 1975: 142)

This to say, there is real suffering, undeniable shipwreck, and perpetual loss in our universe, and these cannot be overlooked in any genuinely useful or credible religious vision. Our approach to the world must be one of melioristic effort and expectation. There are no guarantees, and there can be no such thing as absolute, unmitigated, unqualified wiping out or making insignificant the real tragedies and evils of the world. For James, God, the gods, or any other truly adequate focus of religious commitment must be consistent with this realization and take it fully into account. He underlines this last point when, in the concluding chapter of A Pluralistic Universe and in the last pages of The Varieties he suggests the case for a finite God, a God much larger, more powerful, and more compassionate than any of us, to be sure, but one unable, however willing and well-intentioned this God may be, to eradicate all the sufferings, losses, and evils that have occurred and will continue to occur in the world. I should note the important fact that James does not deplore conceptual renderings of religious experiences, feelings, and values. He only seeks to assign to them their proper place. The conceptual resources of philosophy, he insists, can be “enormously useful” in helping to rid religion of obsolete “historical incrustations” that are of no further use to religion and to “eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous.” Philosophy can also “offer mediation between different believers, and help to bring about . . . consensus of opinion” when appropriate. And philosophy can help to construct and to put to the test religious hypotheses that grow out of religious experience. But in performing these and other functions on behalf of religion, philosophy should “never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum.” It should always remember “that the subtlety of nature lies beyond it and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception [or feeling] something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught” (James 1929: 495–96). This emphasis on the primacy, fullness, and elusiveness of experience and on the constant need for the subservience of conceptualizations to it is typical of James in every area of his thought. And his conception of

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experience reaches beyond sensations to encompass and include experiences of causality, emotion, and value, as this chapter and the previous two have shown. The values implicit in religious conviction, commitment, and conduct are fundamental and indispensable elements in James’s broad and inclusive depiction of the character and scope of human experience. His conception of experience contrasts radically with the view of experience in the early versions of British empiricism and in more recent logical positivism, a view that restricts all relevant and important experience to sensations and reactions to sensations. And he grants to experience in all of its dimensions a much fuller and more determinative role than is allowed for it by either Rorty or van Fraassen. Aesthetic, moral, and religious values as aspects of experience are not, of course, isolated from one another. They are interrelated in a variety of ways. Religious values can provide assurance and hope to undergird moral striving, and the promise of release from pernicious moral evils. Moral values can give practical guidance and direction to religious ones, serving as an important experiential check on or confirmation of claims to religious truth. Aesthetic values can help to motivate moral actions, and they can provide means for expression and reinforcement of deep-lying religious values. All religious traditions have their fund of significant moral principles and exhortations as well as powerful aesthetic symbolizations. Religion provides subject matters for art, and art provides inspiration for religion. And so on. This is not the place to explore all of these interrelations, but I should at least take note of them. More generally, all acts of selection, emphasis, and discrimination are also acts of evaluation. We notice particular things because they are worthy of note in some context of encounter or inquiry. So far from being merely derivative and relatively unimportant insofar as knowledge and understanding are concerned, acts of evaluation are fundamental to all that we think, believe, or say. Alfred North Whitehead points out this fact when he remarks, “Our enjoyment of actuality is a realization of worth, good or bad. It is a value-experience. Its basic expression is—Have a care, here is something that matters!” Furthermore, as Whitehead also indicates, “there is no such independent item in actuality as ‘mere concept.’ The concept is always clothed with emotion, that is to say, with hope, or with fear, or with hatred, or with eager aspiration, or with the pleasure of analysis” (Whitehead 1938: 159, 167). Values and emotions are therefore integral parts of experience and of every act of taking into account and knowing. These observations are ones with which James can heartily agree.

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James’s wide conception of experience coincides with the wide gamut of encounters and concerns we humans must deal with in the course of living our lives, and in doing so it is a more adequate account of experience than one which is narrowly confined to sensations. With this adequacy comes recognition of the daunting complexity of experience in all of its aspects and of the need for vigilant avoidance of too neat and simple notions of what can or should count as empirical verifications or falsifications of tentative claims. The crystal clear things are apt to be the relatively trivial things in our lives, and discrete sensations are more often than not among those crystal clear things. To refer to Whitehead again, he suggests that “the attempt to explain our ultimate insights as merely interpretive of sense-impressions . . . . is analogous to an endeavor to elucidate the sociology of modern civilization as wholly derivative from the traffic-signals on the main roads” (Whitehead 1938: 43). The clear and manageable factors in experience are not usually, if ever, synonymous with the pervasive and profound ones, and James’s elucidations of the fulsome nature of experience make us abundantly aware of this fact. Sensations are undeniably important, but they are far from being all-important.

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CHAPTER NINE

Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism

What a thing is matter! In the formulations of contemporary physics, matter is all vibration, resonance, and inexhaustible potentialities, a music of the cosmos. If this is matter, who needs the immaterial? Who requires a ghost in the machine when the machine itself is a thing of such infinite surprise? The greatest miracle is as close as my next breath. —Chet Raymo (2008: 74)

I share with Chet Raymo his celebration of the inexhaustible potentialities of matter and his endorsement of a materialistic metaphysics. But I take issue with two points of the statement that serves as the epigraph to this chapter. The first is the statement’s implied but perhaps not intended restriction of the theoretical conception of matter to the formulations of contemporary physics. And the second is the use of the metaphor of the machine, leading us to think of matter and the immense varieties of material systems in the world as solely mechanistic in their character and functionings. In this chapter I defend the need for a conception of matter that is deeply informed by but not confined to the descriptions of matter in contemporary physics, a conception that takes into account manifestations, descriptions, and attempted explanations of material phenomena in a wide variety of domains of experience and inquiry. Matter is, I contend, what matter does, and it does many things that are not and cannot be adequately described or exhaustively explained by physics alone. Nor can all of these functions be appropriately alluded to by the

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metaphor of the machine.1 The version of materialism I defend, therefore, is a species of nonreductive materialism. I also register here my disagreement with the version of materialistic metaphysics assumed and rejected by William James and argue that a greatly expanded and enriched view of matter and its functionings can be shown to be fully consistent with his philosophy of radical empiricism. Such a conception of matter is so different from James’s ideas about materialism, and from prevalent views of materialism today, that it can be branded as radical materialism and comfortably paired with James’s radical empiricism, the lineaments of which I laid out in the first eight chapters.

The Need for an Expanded Conception of Matter There is no use denying that organic bodies have thoughts. We are both physical organisms and thinking beings. Philosopher John Searle asserts that “consciousness in the brain is not [a] separate entity or property; it is just the state that the brain is in” (Searle 2004: 146). Even though his statement is too restrictive in seeming to locate consciousness solely in the brain rather than in the whole body (including the brain) in its interactions with the external environment, including the social and cultural environments (see Rockwell 2007; Noë 2009; Gazzaniga 2011), Searle is by all odds right in interpreting consciousness as a bodily function. But unfortunately, as physicist Todd L. Duncan argues, the scientific ways in which we have come to understand the functions of the body—in other words, our tacitly assumed and relatively restrictive models of what count as the exclusive nature, traits, and functions of things physical—have tended subtly to eliminate from consideration or radically to downplay at the outset what is or is capable of being mental in its own right and what might properly be regarded as important properties, functions, or potentialities of matter, especially at highly complex levels of organization (Duncan 1999). An alternative approach would require a greatly revised, enriched, and expanded conception of the physical. Such an approach would enable us to see the nonmental and psychical not as separate kinds of reality but rather as “two different ways in which natural processes occur” (Innis 2009: 151).2 Our current scientific categories and approaches, in contrast, have tended to make the physical a closed, self-contained, allegedly wholly objective procrustean bed into which we have tried without success to force the mental, and especially the conscious aspects of our human experience. The result is not just a hard problem; it is an in-principle intractable problem. What tends to count for us as “matter” in our scientific age is only what physicists recognize as matter or select out as the “essential” or “objective”

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properties of matter. Hence, and not surprisingly, we have great trouble reconciling this restricted conception of matter with anything subjective or mental. We fail to see that conventional so-called scientific materialism, with its seeming exclusion or at least radical demotion of mind, is countenanced not on the basis of straightforward empirical evidence—where matter and mind are clearly tied closely together, as in the obvious interconnections of thoughts, brains, bodies, and world—but on the basis of fiat. The fiat results in too narrow a conception of what can count as matter and as definitive traits and potencies of matter. Philosopher of mind Evan Thompson makes two extremely important points when he notes that the “physical” (as conceived solely by physics) should not be identified with the “bodily.” The latter is an organized system with emergent properties, including those of life and mind. Moreover, as he observes, life itself in all its forms already exhibits an interiority of selfhood and sense-making which is a precursor to the interiority of consciousness. A living being enacts a milieu marked by significance and valence. Exteriority is surmounted by an internal relation of meaning and normativity between the two poles of organism and milieu. . . . As conscious subjects we are not brains in cranial vats; we are neurally enlivened beings in the world. (Thompson 2007: 225, 242)

An adequate conception of matter should thus include all that matter, at whatever stage of organization or development, is known to be capable of doing. That would include living, sensing, noticing, reacting, feeling, thinking, symbolizing, hypothesizing, being aware and self-aware, acting with purpose and intent, creating, enacting, and the like. Robert Innis states this idea well when he notes that for Susanne K. Langer, “The ‘mind’ is a self-organizing matrix of acts, of events, that arises when neural and bodily conditions have reached a certain stage. It is not a thing or substance. It is a way of acting of an organism, and the human species is a symbolic organism” (Innis 2009: 259). Since mind is one of the ways in which matter manifests itself in the world, our concept of matter must be large and inclusive enough to include the indisputable fact of mind. The spirit of this need for an expanded, inclusive, nonreductive conception of matter is given eloquent expression by the ecological writer and cultural historian Thomas Berry: If we know carbon simply as one of the 117 elements, then we have only minimal knowledge of what carbon is. To understand carbon, we must see its central role in molecules, megamolecules, in cellular life, organic life, sense life, and even in intellectual perception, because carbon in a transformed

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context lives and functions in the wide display of all the gorgeous plants and animals of the Earth as well as in the most profound intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experiences of the human. There is a latent spiritual capacity in carbon, just as there is a carbon component to our highest spiritual experience. (Berry 2009: 106)

Most importantly, such a conception of matter and its embodiments would enable us to have a coherent picture of the fact that human organisms are within the world and examining it from within; they do not stand outside it and observe it from without. The meaningful objective world properly and fundamentally conceived is not, therefore, a congeries of bare objects devoid of subjective recognition, interpretation, classification, and awareness, nor are human subjects separate from the world they endeavor to know and understand. It should also be emphasized that the scientific concept of matter is not at all as clear-cut or obvious in contemporary physics as we might think. The nature of matter at the quantum level and at other levels has become increasingly paradoxical and elusive, and physicists are far from having achieved clarity and consensus about it. Quantum physicist Lee Smolin (2007) brings this fact forcefully to our attention when he lists and discusses throughout his book The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of Strong Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next issues he calls “the five great problems in contemporary physics.” These problems are (1) the relation of general relativity to quantum theory; (2) problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics; (3) determination of whether or not the various particles and forces can be brought within the compass of a unifying theory; (4) providing an explanation of how the free constants in the standard model of particle physics are established; and (5) explaining so-called dark matter and dark energy or, alternatively, providing an explanation in the absence of these supposed factors of how and why gravity is modified on large scales. Why the constants of the standard model of cosmology have the values they do is part of this fifth problem. According to Smolin, the concept of matter in physics has a long way to go before it can be regarded as having resolved these problems or as providing a view of it that is entirely satisfying, adequate, or complete. Convincing evidence for this claim about unresolved issues in current physics is also contained in the book Quantum Theory: A Philosopher’s Overview by Salvatore Cannavo. The author exhibits in considerable detail how difficult it is to interpret or understand the ontological significance or relation to ordinary experienced reality of quantum observations and theories that presently have admittedly high mathematical elegance and predictive

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success. So utterly different are quantum theory’s descriptions of traits of the micro-world as compared with those of the macro-world (e.g., waveparticle duality, nonlocality, virtual pair production, indeterminate states and relations, possible multiple dimensions beyond the four familiar to us in everyday experience), and so enigmatic the manner in which the former are converted into the latter by events of detection or measurement, that a new kind of seemingly incoherent and impassible dualism has been set up between the two (Cannavo 2009: 53–55, 69–70, chapters 2 and 3 passim). The inexplicable dualism of micro- and macro-worlds becomes all the more troublesome when we reflect that theories about the former have to be tested and confirmed in the realm of the latter. Cannavo puts the matter this way: “Indeed it is the stubborn stability of experimental and even commonsense observation that serves as the court of ultimate appeal for establishing any kind of reality (i.e., matter of fact) claim” (Cannavo 2009: 63). Such reality claims must include, of course, those referring to the quantum realm. If we assume that all things are ultimately material, as many today do (and I include myself among them), then we should have to strive for a theory of matter able to encompass coherently and explain convincingly all of the following: the quantum level, the ordinary macro-level that includes both life and conscious life, and the levels of cosmology and astronomy. Matter so regarded would not be something stipulated, assumed, or taken for granted in advance of inquiry. Nor would the inquiry be arbitrarily or uncritically confined to only one discipline, method, or approach. Its rootage in and responsiveness to experience in all of its fullness and depth would be in keeping with James’s insistence on experience as the ultimate source and standard for inquiries into what can be reliably regarded as true and real. We are far from having such all-encompassing conceptions of matter today, ones that can be coherently envisioned and subjected to empirical tests—including adequacy to the whole of experience. So we should avoid jumping to the conclusion that natural science has solved, is presently close to solving, or is even capable of solving by itself the issues James addresses with his idea of the primacy of pure experience. We should continue especially to note that the current puzzles relating to consciousness and mind cannot be bracketed or put to the side by an adequate materialistic metaphysics, and that these puzzles are not at bottom any more mysterious or intractable than are those relating to a comprehensive vision of matter as here described. Cannavo makes a provocative case for the need for a radically new theory in physics itself that would be a “total replacement” for current quantum theory. The new theory would incorporate all that is important and enduring in quantum theory but resolve its conundrums and avoid the sharp dualism

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between the micro- and the macro-worlds that it poses in its current form. It would be “a general theory of nature (micro, meso, and macro)” (Cannavo 119 and chapter 9 passim). I am suggesting that an even more desirable range for such a theory (or, stated more properly, set of complementary theories in various domains, including physics) would be an outlook that brings matter and mind as well into a coherent and satisfying explanatory relationship. James’s conception of pure experience as the unitary field lying behind matter and mind (or self and world) emphasizes the need for and points the way toward this kind of explanation and understanding. It does so even though it falls short of the relevant detail that would be needed for such an encompassing perspective. The continuity of life and mind is a thesis staunchly defended by Thompson. “According to this thesis,” he says, “life and mind share a set of basic organizational properties, and the organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. Mind is life-like, and life is mind-like” (Thompson 2007: 128). And since for him life is derived from nonliving matter by autopoietic processes (or self-organization in nonlinear dynamic systems) (Thompson 2007: 138),3 it is important to recognize in matter a capacity for such processes and thus a more basic continuity among nonliving matter, life, and mind than is generally supposed.4 More particularly, Thompson calls for a view of material phenomena that regards them at every level as interrelated processes and fields, not as “a bottom level of basic particulars with intrinsic properties that upwardly determines everything else.” “Everything is processes,” he writes, “all the way ‘down’ and all the way ‘up,’ and processes are irreducibly relational—they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations, or webs” (Thompson 2007: 440). Thompson’s insistence on the basic character of interrelated processes and fields is suggestively akin to the role James assigns to pure experience as the processive field within which conceptual distinctions are drawn, including the distinction between mind and body. Thompson therefore endorses a materialistic metaphysical outlook that is a fitting complement to James’s epistemological view. Thompson’s outlook is informed, at least in significant part, by the development of quantum physics and its exposure of intricately relational, fieldlike processes lying at the heart of matter, a fact that shows how quantum physics can contribute to envisioning the more adequate, inclusive conception of matter indicated above. Such a conception would help greatly to eliminate the barrier between, and rigid separation of, matter and mind. This conception could also take issue with the currently entrenched idea that matter must be metaphysically more basic or real than mind. Thompson contests

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this idea, for example, when he insists that “[p]henomena at all scales are not entities or substances but relatively stable processes, and since processes achieve stability at different levels of complexity, while still interacting with processes at other levels, all are equally real and none has absolute ontological priority” (Thompson 2007: 441; emphasis added). Thompson is inveighing here against any sort of metaphysical reductionism, including the wholesale reduction of mind to the nonmental material processes described in physics. He is also rejecting, as James does, an entitative or substantialist theory of matter as well as mind. His statement opens a path to a greatly revised and radically different conception of the material or physical, one that can encompass and include mind rather than either excluding it or subordinating it to something deemed to be more fundamental. To follow such a path requires that we draw strenuously on the resources of all of the academic disciplines, not just those of the natural sciences. Most particularly, it requires that we take with utmost seriousness the contributions philosophy by its specific nature as a deeply inquiring, inveterately questioning, and wide-ranging discipline can make, in dialogue with the natural sciences and other disciplines, toward a more adequate and encompassing conception of matter and its relations to mind. The expanded conception of matter I am envisioning might be, and in all likelihood would be, comprised of different but complementary perspectives upon what matter is capable of doing and becoming. It need not take the form of a single perspective or of one all-encompassing theory, a so-called theory of everything. Nathaniel Barrett wisely observes that “there is nothing scandalous about theoretical and methodological pluralism, unless one believes that the authority of the sciences rests upon their having a kind of monolithic unity” (Barrett 2010: 237). Also relevant in this regard are two statements of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers: (1) “[T]he microscopic world is governed by laws having a new structure, thereby putting an end once and for all to the hope of discovering a single conceptual scheme common to all levels of description.” (2) “No single theoretical language articulating the variables to which a well-defined value can be attributed can exhaust the physical content of a system. Various possible languages and points of view about the system may be complementary. They all deal with the same reality, but it is impossible to reduce them to a single description” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 222, 225). The “same reality,” as I am viewing it here, would be matter in its various forms or exemplifications (for example, energy, information, fields of force, quantum perturbations, material entities, life forms, minds, ecosystems, stars, planets, black holes, and galaxies).

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In addition to the findings of classical physics, fractal and chaos theories would possibly be involved, along with the functions and outcomes of far-fromequilibrium nonlinear dynamic systems, autopoietic and autocatalytic systems, quantum theories in their various forms, theories relating gravitational forces to the other three fundamental forces of physics, theories concerning so-called dark matter and dark energy, evolutionary and ecological theories, molecular biology, cell biology and neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and so forth. Such complementary theories, or theories having come to be seen in a thoroughgoing complementary manner, would focus on matter in a wide variety of guises but would not introduce or require anything radically different from matter and its relationships as a basis when its diverse forms and manifestations are properly represented, interrelated, and understood. A plurality of complementary perspectives on matter would chime in with James’s constant insistence on the inability of any single point of view to capture the fullness, complexity, and multidimensionality of the experienced world.5 It would also greatly assist us in understanding that matter in all its forms is something active and eventlike, and charged with manifold possibilities in its various types of system and organization, not something inert, passive, or fixed. Prigogine and Stengers note that “the units involved in the static description of [classical] dynamics are not the same as those that have to be introduced to achieve the evolutionary paradigm as expressed by the growth of entropy. This transition leads to a new concept of matter, matter that is ‘active,’ as matter leads to irreversible processes and as irreversible processes organize matter” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: xxix). In James’s view, body melds into mind and mind into body. Neither is adamantly opposed to the other. Both can and do exist in intimate relation to one another. His doctrine of the primacy of pure experience gives expression to this fundamental idea. And although the doctrine itself does not expressly entail the following statements of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, I can find no reason to think that James’s doctrine and their claims are in any way inconsistent with one another, and I have adduced and can continue to find abundant ground for concluding that they can be seen as being in important ways closely related to one another. What we call “mind” is really embodied. There is no true separation of mind and body. These are not two independent entities that somehow come together and couple. The word mental picks out those bodily capacities and performances that constitute our awareness and determine our creative and constructive responses to the situations we encounter. Mind isn’t some abstract entity that we bring to bear on our experience. Rather, mind is part of

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the very structure and fabric of our interactions with the world. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 266)

James explicitly endorses something quite similar to this view when he notes, as he does on many occasions, how fully embodied all of our experiences of ourselves and the world are.6 Charlene Haddock Seigfried observes in this connection James’s crucial insistence on the relation between what may at times be regarded as “objective” or “essential” in the analysis of the characteristics of a thing (for example, matter) and the particular kinds of selection, omission, or emphasis that are operative in such determinations (Seigfried 1978: 16; see James 1950: II, 335–36). The selection, omission, or emphasis of current scientific assumptions about or theories of the nature and capacities of matter, while appropriate in some contexts of inquiry such as those of contemporary physics, may not be appropriate in others. Assuming that these assumptions and theories are appropriate and unqualified in all contexts can be the source of much difficulty and indeed of insurmountable difficulty in seeking to understand how the physical and mental relate to one another. As philosopher of mind Galen Strawson comments, to endorse the idea that “everything concrete, including experience, is physical” is not the same thing as contending that “the fundamental nature of everything concrete can be accounted for in the terms of physics.” Physicalism (or materialism), he insightfully contends, must be distinguished from physicsalism (Strawson 2010: 327).7 It might be objected that James’s philosophy cannot be regarded as endorsing any form of metaphysical monism because he insists upon a pluralistic metaphysics rather than a monistic one, and because materialism (or physicalism) must be seen as a type of metaphysical monism.8 For example, in the essay “The Thing and Its Relations,” where James takes strong issue with F. H. Bradley’s monistic idealism, he says, “It is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology” (James 1976: 54; my emphasis). But if, as I suggest, matter is what matter does, it certainly does an astoundingly wide variety of things and has given rise to an amazing variety of new possibilities and new actualities. This is pluralism of a sort, with all kinds of real and irreducible distinctions at various levels of organization and through successive phases of ongoing change, evolution, and development. My wanting to refer to all of this as manifestations of matter in its many guises or as multiple variations within a materialistic metaphysics may seem initially to go against the grain of James’s own explicitly expressed pluralistic—and not monistic—ontology in this passage and perhaps elsewhere.

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But the statement of James I quoted earlier amounts primarily to a plea for the bedrock reality of external as well as internal relations, a plea that is entirely consistent with materialism as I interpret and understand it—a materialism that is multiple, dynamic, and open rather than monolithic, static, and closed. I will have more to say about this point in the next section. I do not think, therefore, that the materialistic metaphysics I am sketching and endorsing here can be dismissed out of hand as an impossible or illegitimate building upon what James emphasizes in his own ontological outlook, especially in light of the metaphysical possibilities and implications resident in the much more complex and richly developed sciences of today as contrasted with the sciences of his own time. We can think about James’s overall position as follows. The world for us humans is a world in relation. It is a combination of mind and body, subject and object. For us there would be no world of meaning without experience, and there would be no dependable experience without a meaningful world. Scientific entities beyond the reach of ordinary sensate recognition, for example, subatomic particles or far-off galactic systems, are creatures of conscious inference and theory, and belief in their existence is often dependent upon consciously designed, assumedly highly accurate instrumentation. Accounts of the cosmic, geological, biological, or human past are based upon painstaking collections of data and conscious reflections upon those data by means of sophisticated instruments and theories and with carefully constructed interpretive narratives. We are entitled to believe in the existence of dinosaurs, for example, because—based upon the available and relevant evidence—we have reason to think that if we were transported millions of years into the past, we would be able to experience their existence as we presently imagine them. Thus, what counts as the world is what is experienced or what could in principle be experienced or inferred on the basis of experience. We should also take careful note of the central importance of human interests, purposes, and needs in an adequate account of the processes of experience and inference, a point often emphasized by James. Seigfried writes that, for James, “we actively organize the world according to purposes and . . . to try to understand the world abstractly apart from this organizing center can only result in misunderstanding” (Seigfried 1990: 363). Her statement ties in with my indication in chapter 2 that James regards truth (and therefore what counts for us as reality) as the outcome of specific kinds of experientially based investigation and inquiry, not as something antecedent to them.

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James’s Rejection of Materialism All of this is well and good, someone might object, but does James not roundly reject materialism at some places in his writings? How, then, can it be argued that materialism is consistent with his radical empiricism? My response to these objections is that what James rejects is something quite different from the radical materialism whose outlines and prospects I am sketching here. He objects to a reductionistic, deterministic, single-visioned version of materialism—rooted in a now outmoded Newtonian physics— which gives short shrift to crucial issues relating to mind, spirit, freedom, and plurality. I am proposing a conception of matter and materialism that objects just as fervently to this rendering of a materialistic metaphysics. Let us consider James’s views in relation to this topic in more detail, in order to see how they connect with the radical materialism that is the focus of this chapter. In A Pluralistic Universe James asserts that a materialistic philosophy defines “the world so as to leave man’s soul upon it as a sort of outside passenger or alien.” What is left is nature in its more external, indifferent, and “brutal” aspects (James 1996a: 23). A bit further on he observes that “[t]he word ‘intimacy’ probably covers the difference” between a materialistic and a more “spiritualistic” view of the world. “Materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and lasting, it sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy” (James 1996a: 31). He clearly here has in mind a much more restricted view of matter than the one I am describing in this chapter, a view that excludes or radically marginalizes the human self and mind, and their distinctive experiences and concerns. The latter are then either swallowed up into blind and indifferent material processes or set over against them in dualistic fashion as aspects of an entirely separate domain. Neither of these notions is consistent with James’s radical empiricism as described in this book. But if materialism is viewed differently, in the radical fashion I am championing here, this objection to materialism can be put aside. In Pragmatism James objects to what he calls materialism on a somewhat different ground. He sets it in opposition to a spiritualism he there identifies with theism and argues that materialism gives us a vision of the universe in which “blind force” rather than “seeing force runs things,” destroying any confidence we might have concerning the future, and especially the far distant future. We have no assurance that our fondest values and deepest hopes have support from the universe or from some sort of power and presence within the universe. We have no confirmation of our yearning for a moral universe where our efforts can count to make the universe better over time.

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We can expect only that the universe will finally undo and redissolve everything it has once produced as its relentless mechanical processes have finally worked their predetermined way, and that no final differences will be anywhere registered or remain of the whole history of human hopes, efforts, and accomplishments. Theism or spiritualism, James contends, “has at least this practical superiority” in relation to materialism that “it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved” (James 1975: 59, 55). Here James is bringing to front stage the moral and religious values he finds to be ingredient in experience, and he is claiming that materialism gives no support to those values. The materialism of which he speaks is closely affiliated with the restriction of experience to sensate experiences, and implicit within it is the primary-secondary quality distinction which, as we have seen, James rejects. The radical materialism I have in mind, however, does not automatically preempt the values and concerns on which James focuses. It allows for consciousness and mind an irreducible place in the multiple orders of an experienced nature, along with the purposes and goals, the confidences and efforts, the aspirations and achievements associated with consciousness and mind. And while it rejects any sort of mind-body dualism, including that of a purely spiritual God or gods set over against a material nature, it does not necessarily set aside the possibility of some sort of divine agency or power operating within and among the multiple orders of nature. It admittedly does not require this possibility, but it is consistent with it. James himself endorses the idea of “God as the indwelling divine rather than the external creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep reality” (James 1996a: 30). This statement suggests the idea of an embodied God (or gods) rather than the more traditional Western one of God as a disembodied and wholly separate or radically transcendent pure spirit. James takes pains to dismiss the latter conception as one that lacks an appropriate intimacy and connection with the exigencies of human experience and human life. As we saw in chapter 8, however, he is willing to countenance a notion of God (or gods) as finite, as a kind of primus inter pares which, like all else in nature, has an external environment which God not only affects but on which God is crucially dependent (James 1975: 143; 1996a: 318–19). God for James, in other words, is in the world and profoundly affected by what takes place in the world. This God is also able to give continual enlightenment, support, and motivation, on the basis of a superior power and more encompassing perspective, to those who strive to make the world a better place. It is a conception of God that fits nicely with James’s meliorism as well as with his pluralism. There is no in-principle conflict between this notion of God (or

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gods) and radical materialism, but James rightly contrasts it with an old-style Newtonian, scientistic materialism. I must confess as an aside that I, as a proponent of what I call Religion of Nature, feel no need for such a God and find deep and adequate fulfillment of my religious needs, hopes, and values in nature itself, properly conceived (see Crosby 2002, 2008, 2013). But if I were to believe in God, it would be closely akin to the kind of deity James describes, a God intimately within the world rather than existing starkly outside it and having no essential need of it, a God or divine presence and power that relies on us just as we must rely on God or the divine. Another important aspect of the kind of materialism that James rightly rejects is its connection with causal determinism or what today is often referred to as the causal closure of the physical. In Talks to Teachers, for example, James connects his rejection of a mechanical or materialist view of mind with his ardent affirmation of indeterminacy and freedom of action (James 1958: 128–29). If we accept causal determinism, as assumed in the kind of Newtonian mechanistic materialism with which James was contending, then we are left with only two recourses. Either we regard novelty and freedom as delusions or we consign them to some domain other than the physical. If we make them delusions, then we have great difficulty accounting for our deeplying conviction of responsibility and freedom in at least many of our actions, and even more perplexingly, we are not able to give a convincing account of how we can freely think and reason, considering available alternative explanations and deciding upon one of them as over against the others. This thinking and reasoning is presumably antecedent to the conclusion that determinism is true, and yet its truth would make the antecedent thinking and reasoning delusional. It would do so because to be predetermined to arrive at a conclusion—including the conclusion that determinism is true—is not the same thing as being led to it by a process of inquiry that presupposes our ability freely to examine and evaluate reasons for or against it. I weigh in, as James would have, with Oliver’s statement: “For some of us, it is just laughingly obvious that extreme ‘eliminative’ materialists are out of touch with the very realities betrayed by their own activity in the world” (Oliver 2001: 16). If, on the other hand, we consign novelty and freedom to some domain other than the physical, however broadly the latter is conceived, then we have departed from materialism as such, including the radical materialism I am defending here. James of course is an ardent advocate of the concepts of chance and freedom. “Free will,” he says, “pragmatically means novelties in the world” and the conviction that, whereas “the general ‘uniformity of nature’ is presupposed

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by every lesser law,” nature is “only approximately uniform” (James 1975: 60). This statement is consistent with James’s contention that experience exhibits not a “through and through” unity but a “concatenated one,” a unity combined with disunity, with disconnections as well as connections (James 1975: 52). Belief in free will, like the belief in a world with spiritual and moral significance, has the pragmatic import of giving effective character to our choices and assuring us of the possibility of their having melioristic impacts on an ever-evolving world. Everything is not fixed or foreordained. The past does not tell the whole story of the future. The future is open, at least to a significant extent, to the differences that can be made in it by our real choices. The doctrine of the causal closure of the physical continues to be persistently upheld in much of science, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind, so it is by no means restricted to Newtonian science. With it, more often than not, goes a reductive approach to operations of the mind, including explanations on the basis of reasons such as “I did x for the reason y” or “I believe x for the reason y.” The extremely reductive approach takes these mental operations and all others, including consciousness itself, to be epiphenomenal, that is, nothing more at bottom than the blind and inexorable causal workings of neuronal machinery. Philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker comments concerning the prevalent doctrine of the causal closure of the physical that “[m]uch of contemporary philosophy simply assumes the adequacy of a metaphysical picture, and then takes the task of philosophers to be to determine what fits in and where it belongs in the picture. . . . Anything that resists such packaging is deemed unreal or illusory. But who said that reality had to be tidy?” Her question at the end of this statement is in the spirit of James’s pluralistic conviction that the experienced world exhibits a concatenated unity rather than a seamless and causally closed one. Baker goes on to make a statement with which James would no doubt agree and with which I strongly concur, namely, that “our grounds for the claims that reasons sometimes explain behavior are much stronger than any grounds for a metaphysical premise that would lead to a contrary conclusion” (Baker 2003: 94–95). She is an opponent of the kind of physicalism or materialism that is wholly reductive in its character and that assumes the causal closure of the physical. Another philosopher who provides important lines of argument in favor of James’s rejection of reductionism and the causal closure of the physical is John Dupré. He argues in the final chapter of his book Human Nature and the Limits of Science against reduction of more complex phenomena to simpler ones on the ground that “as objects are united into integrated wholes

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they acquire new causal properties (perhaps that is precisely what it is for a whole to be—more or less—integrated).” He continues, “I see no reason why these higher-level wholes should not have causal properties just as real as those of lower-level wholes out of which they are constructed” (Dupré 2001: 162–63). Resistance to this idea and the strong propensity toward reduction of higher to lower levels is rooted, Dupré contends, in an unquestioned assumption of what he calls “causal completeness” (Dupré 2001: 163), namely, the notion that the whole universe is a causally determined system. In such a system, there can be no allowance for even relatively independent events or autonomous actions at any level. Every event or action throughout the whole universe is nothing more than a link in a causal chain, and there are no breaks anywhere in the chain. Dupré argues that there is no convincing evidence for this picture of the universe. It is an extreme idea and requires satisfaction of an extremely heavy burden of proof. So many variables would have to be taken into account to justify it that its empirical confirmation would be impossible. He points out that even moving beyond a two-body problem to a three-body one in Newtonian physics, as is well known, imposes a level of complexity beyond calculation, to say nothing of trying to demonstrate that everything without exception in the universe is necessarily connected to everything else in a “seamless causal nexus” (Dupré 2001: 165–66, 178). Far more likely, in Dupré’s considered judgment, is a view of the universe with multiple wholes, each of which has some amount of causal efficacy in its own right. Causal order, then, is something special rather than universal. The operation of such loci of special causal order and relatively self-contained causal efficacy can be most convincingly seen in the ability of human beings to act with significant degrees of reflection and autonomy in their environmental and cultural contexts. Dupré points out that humans are able to act, not just as external or low-level bodily causes of various sorts might incline them to act, but in light of principles and reasons, resources made available to them as conscious cultural and social beings in possession of language. Their actions can be explained, therefore, not just on the basis of their environmental influences or the cause-effect relations of the simplest physical components of their bodies taken separately, but on the basis of the organic functioning of their bodies viewed as whole systems and with the self-initiating causal powers appropriate to them as complex living systems. Dupré sees a close connection between the idea of universal causal determinism and the model of the universe as a machine. He does not deny that some aspects of the universe as we experience it are machine-like. Many parts of humans, for examples, have the characteristics of machines, and

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some insects are remarkably machinelike in their modes of behavior. But more complex organisms, taken as whole systems, are not mere machines. They exhibit a capacity for autonomous behavior and action that machines lack. Humanly constructed machines, he observes, are hardly adequate models for such complex organisms. The former “are not sources of causal autonomy; they are, at most, instruments for furthering the causal autonomy of their users” (Dupré 2001: 174). In the case of human beings, in particular, Dupré observes that they, unlike machines designed for human use, have no controls. This is to say, they are self-controlling and thus exhibit the autonomous actions of free will.9 Dupré’s rejection of causal completeness or of an unbroken, universal chain of causal connections throughout the universe in favor of innumerable distinct and local holistic systems, each with its own measure of causal efficacy, is similar to James’s notion of the universe as a system of connections and disconnections or of external as well as internal relations. Dupré’s dismissal of the putative adequacy of the model of the machine to describe the universe as a whole or to emulate its more complex, organic aspects with their capacity for autonomous self-direction also chimes in with James’s insistence on the reality of human freedom. In keeping with my defense of materialism and of its consistency with a Jamesian outlook on humans and the world, Dupré affirms in another one of his books a nonreductionist, nonmechanistic kind of naturalistic materialism that holds no brief for the Cartesian notion of mental substance or for the belief that God, angels, the afterlife, and so on are made of some other kind of “stuff” than matter. But he is anxious to insist that this affirmation does not amount to a kind of monism that reductively suppresses the wide variety of types of metaphysically real things existing in the world. Because he wants to do justice to the multiple forms of matter and not only to the universally underlying stuff of matter, Dupré prefers to term his version of materialism “compositional materialism” (Dupré 1995: 92–93). James expresses a similar idea to this one in the concluding chapter of A Pluralistic Universe although he does not relate it to materialism, when he describes the “each-form,” in contrast with the “all-form,” kind of monism (or monistic pluralism) to which he subscribes. His is a “manyness in oneness” outlook, he declares, or a “multiverse” that can still rightly be termed a “universe.” It is a universe or pluralistic version of metaphysical monism of a “strung-along,” “concatenated” type. It combines the intimate relatedness of a monistic vision with the fact of multiple, genuinely distinct events, experiences, and things in the world (James 1996a: 324–25).

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An important difference between Dupré’s version of materialism and my own, however, is that he tends to give relatively small emphasis to the nature of matter, preferring to focus on its forms, while I am stressing the need for a much richer conception of matter itself as a way of allowing for the kind of pluralism for which I, along with Dupré and James, am pleading. It is the issue of the amenability of matter to the multiple forms of it we observe throughout the universe that is my main concern. Matter as described in physics alone cannot fill this bill, and we ought to challenge the common reductionist assumption that it can. A fuller, more adequate, more complete conception of matter is needed, and we need to draw on the resources of many different disciplines in our search for such a conception. The focus of this conception should not be on reduction but on inclusion, and that means not only inclusion of matter’s diverse forms but of the various disciplines responsible for inquiring into those forms. Dupré’s observations in his book The Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology are apropos: The sciences offer us a diverse group of practices with a diverse set of partially overlapping virtues. Some encompass large ranges of empirical facts; others enable us to predict or control natural events; others again provide theoretical equipment for thinking more clearly about complex phenomena; and so on. But some of these virtues also characterize the traditional non-sciences. History is an essential repository and organizer of empirical fact; studies of the Arts provide us with insight into aspects of human life that are still far removed from the more mechanical approaches of psychology or the social sciences; even philosophy provides us with tools for thinking about the natural world; and so on. What is most valuable about this picture of diverse and overlapping projects of enquiry is that it makes unsurprising what seems empirically to be the case, that complex phenomena are far more likely to be understood if a variety of distinct but complementary approaches are brought to bear on them. (Dupré 2012: 38)

The conception of matter appropriate to an adequate materialistic metaphysics must encompass and include all the dimensions of the experienced world of which Dupré speaks. And it must take into account all the areas of thought and expression related to these multiple dimensions. The conception of matter James had in mind led him to reject materialism, and he was right to object to that kind of materialism. Similarly, the conceptions of matter now prevalent in science and philosophy tend to lack sufficient richness, resilience, and coherence—as I have previously shown— to provide an adequate basis for a comprehensive and convincing materialistic metaphysics. To rethink and revise these conceptions and to recognize

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the need to strive for a radical materialism of the sort I am sketching in this chapter can help immeasurably, in my view, to prevent the kinds of mechanistic reductionism and peremptory denial of real chance and freedom that are widely assumed to go along with materialism in today’s world. We need to attend vigorously, therefore, not only to the pervasive, profuse forms of matter in the world but with equal vigor to the multifaceted character of matter or matter-energy as the basic stuff out of which all things are constituted. With these ideas in mind, let me return to James’s concept of human freedom. His most basic and fully developed argument for freedom is contained in his essay “The Dilemma of Determinism.” If determinism is objectively true, he argues here, we must be profound pessimists about the character of the universe as a whole. Whatever happens, happens as it was predetermined to happen. In such a universe, regret about even the most heinous human crimes has no point because it could not have been otherwise. In similar fashion, feelings of responsibility for one’s actions are given no support; one acts always as one is determined to act. If determinism is subjectively supposed to be true, then one is given license to acquiesce in any course of action to which one feels inclined. One can thus live the life of a libertine or unrestrained devotee of sensual pleasures, seeking and enjoying them to the fullest possible extent with no need to consider their immediate or eventual effects upon oneself or others. What happens, happens, and it could not have been otherwise. Personal responsibility for one’s actions flies out the window. Moral striving ceases to have any meaning. What James devotes himself primarily to in this essay is a defense of chance, of the idea that possibilities can outrun actualities, that is, that there were more real possible outcomes of a given decision than the outcome decided upon. This defense of chance is critical to the defense of human freedom, as James emphasizes, because unless there is some looseness of the parts of the universe in relation to the whole of the universe, some concatenated rather than through and through unity, some availability of genuine alternative possibilities for choice in a present situation, then freedom of the will is impossible. And without freedom of the will, James is convinced, moral and religious values cease to have meaning, as does any hope of our being able to think or act purposively or intentionally. Chance or novelty is the precondition for freedom, even though it is not the same thing as freedom (see James 1995: 270–97). An act of freedom is one in which novel possibilities in existing situations are brought under purposeful, intentional, goal-oriented direction and control. An essential feature of the type of materialism I am defending in this chapter is its allowance for novelty and human freedom. The downward cau-

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sation, conditioning, or evaluating of the free acts of a complexly organized embodied self supplements and acts in concert with an upward causation, constraint, and facilitation of more elemental physical relations and systems. A sustained argument for the thesis that complex systems can significantly influence and direct the functionings of their constituent elements, and not just be totally directed and controlled by them, is set forth in the book by Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. “There is a spectrum,” the authors argue, “from purely mechanical causation through the purposive behavior of primitive organisms, the intelligent goal seeking of higher animals, and finally to the reason-guided teleological action of humans.” With increasing orders of complexity of biological systems—and especially the biological systems of human beings functioning within elaborate cultural and linguistic contexts—an ever “wider repertoire of behavioral possibilities” emerges, and “additional levels of supervisory systems” are developed for selection and direction among these possibilities (Murphy and Brown 2009: 304–5). Neurophysiologist Terrence Deacon develops this idea in exquisite detail in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. “Morphodynamic” (spontaneous order generating and sustaining) systems and processes of varying degrees of complexity build on but also constrain and reverse “thermodynamic” ones that tend inexorably toward disorder. These two, working together, give rise to over time and provide the basis for the “teleodynamic” (end-seeking, consequence-oriented, final-causal) systems and processes of life and mind. The living world and human self are, by Deacon’s reckoning, to a significant extent “incomplete” because of their orientations toward and functionings with regard to that which is absent or is not—not functioning as simple dynamics (i.e., ordinary physics and chemistry); not the simplest self-ordering systems such as crystals or convection columns in shallow, evenly heated liquids but more complex, more dynamic, more innovative far-from-equilibrium systems; not mere brute particulars but abstract generals or universals; not something presently realized but something remembered from the past or intended for the future; and not an unchanging self-substance but a mentally modeled, open-ended, processive self. Deacon’s emphasis on what the higher levels of organization are not, or what he calls the concept of “absentialism” or “the efficacy of absence” (Deacon 2012: 42–45) highlights the fact that some of the traits of lower levels must be negated or left behind, at least for the time in which the higher levels endure, in order that genuinely new traits can emerge and be brought into play.

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For Deacon, the multiple lower levels of organization that make primitive forms of life possible support and underlie newer, different, higher levels of organization that make possible, in their turn, ever more developed forms of life, including those with increasingly sophisticated mental capabilities. Among these emergent capabilities are self-awareness, self-agency, creativity, and freedom. The higher levels are not reducible to the lower ones, even though they are dependent upon them for their functioning. They have their own distinctive properties and powers that are unique to them and cannot be relegated to the properties and powers of the lower levels. Deacon’s theory of emergence as he works it out in his lengthy book means that genuinely new properties and powers can come from more complex types of organization building on less complex ones. In all such cases, there is no need for the introduction of anything disembodied or immaterial. In all of them, surprising potencies of matter-energy at more complex levels of organization are made manifest. Current computational, supervenient, and eliminative approaches in philosophy of mind, as Deacon argues, tend uncritically, unconvincingly, and abortively to assume that matter as described or portrayed in contemporary physics is somehow presently adequate in and of itself to account for the full range of mental phenomena. He takes contemporary physics seriously and discusses it at length, but his discussion of mind and its relations to varied systems and forms of material embodiment is by no means confined to the descriptions of matter in the discipline of physics. I think that his approach is sound, and I endorse it heartily. More often than not, however, Deacon is content simply to indicate or describe processes and developments involved in the origins of life and mind without venturing to explain how they can do so. By indicating what these processes and developments are and how they relate to one another, he makes a distinctive contribution. But precisely in what specific ways they are able to function as they do to produce life and mind is left mostly unanalyzed and unaccounted for. There is much work remaining to be done in both of these areas but especially in the latter one. Without a causal context, freedom would be meaningless because there would be no possibility of envisioning and executing our choices in a generally lawlike, predictable world. But if the causal context is everything and swamps the possibility of genuine freedom of action, then we are no longer in command of our actions. We become puppets of blind forces beyond our control. Deacon comments trenchantly on the implications of such a view when he says, “If the most fundamental features of human experience are considered somehow illusory and irrelevant to the physical goings-on of the world, then we, along with our aspirations and values, are effectively rendered un-

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real as well” (Deacon 2012: 12). One of these “fundamental features” is, as James rightly insists, the experience of effective agency and freedom. Another way of understanding the relations of causality and freedom is opened up for us if we consider the very idea of cause-effect relationships and the essential role of chance or novelty in them. These relationships have no meaning if we are unable to distinguish the effect from its cause. We cannot draw this distinction unless the present in which the effect resides can be rightly construed as something different from the past in which the cause resides. But to distinguish the present from the past requires that there be something novel or new in the present, something not already contained in the past. Otherwise, the present collapses into the past, and cause and effect become one and the same. In that event, the whole notion of causeeffect relations becomes hopelessly muddled. So the concept of cause-effect relations relies on the distinction of the present from the past, and that distinction relies, in its turn, on there being something in the present that is novel, something that is genuinely its own that characterizes it as being at least partially distinct and new. The possibility of genuine change rests upon similar assumptions. Time, causality, and change are all unintelligible in the absence of novelty. Seeing all of this, we are in a position to reconsider the idea of universal causal determinism and, with it, the idea that humans are not ultimately or genuinely free. Causality and novelty go necessarily together, and neither can be derived from the other. The element of indeterminacy in the world is not just an occasional interruption of pervasive, generally closed, implacable causality. Instead, it is essential to our understanding of cause-effect relations themselves. The relative roles of causality and novelty can vary widely with changes in particular situations, but neither factor is ever entirely absent. This idea is closely connected with James’s view of the experienced self and the experienced world as concatenated unities. In light of the understanding of cause-effect relations I have outlined— one that is in keeping with James’s own views—we are also in a position to reject the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical that has for so long been a stubborn and persistent barrier to belief in a noncompatibilist conception of human freedom and to an understanding of the relations of mind and body in general.10 The indeterminacy and statistical character of events at the quantum level, as viewed in today’s physics, suggests one way in which an understanding of matter in this domain can contribute to a broader understanding of cause-effect relations among material events in general and even to a better understanding of how genuinely free acts can be possible within a wholly physical conception of selves and world.11

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Conclusion To be true is to be true in relation, and the indispensable relation is between consciousness and its experienced or inferred objects in the world. This conception of truth is in keeping with James’s notion that all that can qualify as reality—including the reality of individual selves and extramental reality—is contained within the orbit of pure experience, which means within all of what is or could possibly be experienced directly or indirectly. Thompson makes a similar point when he says, “From a phenomenological perspective, objects are disclosed in the way they are—as complex structured manifolds of appearance—thanks to certain essential formal laws under which experience necessarily operates so as to disclose a meaningful world. Consciousness considered in this way is a condition of possibility for there being any appearances at all” (Thompson 2007: 239–40). What Thompson argues for consciousness, namely, that it is the transcendental condition for a meaningful world, James argues for pure experience as the even more basic precondition for both conscious minds and their nonmental objects. This is a reasonable reading of James’s claim that so-called pure experience is the epistemic basis of both the mental and the material worlds, and that neither is prior to the other. His philosophy of mind, with its starting point of pure experience, does not fit easily into preconceived molds but invites consideration in its own terms and on its own merits. I have tried to demonstrate that we need not view it as in any way inconsistent with a wholly materialistic conception of mind and world, so long as the nature of matter is freshly investigated and reconceived in the greatly enriched and inclusive sense I have called for in this chapter. The concept of matter envisioned and supported here jibes with a Jamesian sense of the deeply stirring mystery, preciousness, and promise of all embodied and ephemeral forms of life and of the whole surrounding universe of intricately complex material processes and entities from which life emerges. This concept resonates with James’s musing in the midst of his book Pragmatism: To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life’s purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter’s possibilities. (James 1975: 50)

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Seen from this perspective, the universe as a whole and all that is in it— including you and me, our loved ones, all of humanity, and the entire community of living creatures—can be reverently and gratefully acknowledged as an incarnation, as material through and through but unabashedly and wholeheartedly beloved. There is no compelling reason to think that materiality and spirituality, or materiality and the deepest intimations, yearnings, and ideals of the human soul, are flatly opposed to one another. In thinking philosophically about the terms materialism or materialistic we should dismiss from our minds the derogatory and misleading influences of such common connotations of these terms as mere blind, mechanical, lifeless forces and entities, or as an entrenched stance of coarse self-centered acquisitiveness. The whole range of matter as we experience it in its multiple systems and manifestations, living and nonliving, mental and nonmental, is awesomely creative, suffused with value, and deeply spiritual. This remains so even though we should not fail to acknowledge the ambiguities of material nature. The blessings of material existence are its bright side, while its vulnerabilities and limits are its darker side, and the former cannot make us immune to the latter. Nature gives birth to us humans as it does all living creatures on the earth, and for a span of time it sustains us in being. But it does not focus on us. We are a tiny part of an immense system whose fertile and supportive but also sometimes conflicting and undermining forces must be taken fully into account. Creativity and destructiveness go hand-in-hand in a restless, volatile world where stability and order are combined with inescapable aspects of precariousness and unpredictability. To be material and alive is to be finite, to be faced with the limits and uncertainties of finite existence, and to expect to pay at some future time the ultimate price of our own death and the death of those we love. The joys of life cannot be separated from its sorrows.12 Matter and its multifarious forms are endlessly fecund and elusive. The concept of matter is in need of much more deeply thought-out and comprehensive development than we have hitherto tended to acknowledge or allow for it, as I have tried to show. The resources of all the dimensions of human thought and experience—science, philosophy, the arts, morality, history, religion, to say nothing of the largely taken-for-granted ingredients of daily life—need to be drawn upon for its ongoing and increasingly adequate exploration and understanding. Matter’s potential forms and expressions in an ever-evolving, astonishingly creative nature are far from being restricted to those that have already taken place—wondrous and numinous as these diverse forms and expressions assuredly are.

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As I see them, the principal advantages or values of James’s outlook as a promising basis for continuing progress and innovation in the philosophy of mind and its relations to the world—as well as for philosophy of life in general—are that his outlook • is nondualistic and requires no separate spiritual self; • portrays self and world at their deepest levels as processive and dynamic, rather than as static and substantial; • makes room for a thoroughgoing materialism, but not of the outworn, mechanistic sort James rightly rejects; • allows for a noneliminative, nonreductive materialism that acknowledges genuinely new emergent processes, systems, and realities including those of life and mind; • is thoroughly empirical, but does not restrict experience to sensation; • is not narrowly scientistic but instead is open to what all areas of human life and thought can contribute, such as those of art, morality, philosophy, and religion; • affirms an open future and gives high priority to the role of chance or novelty and to the reality and constructive possibilities of purposive freedom; • is eminently livable and shows the way toward, although it cannot by its nature guarantee, a generally confident, hopeful, fulfilling human life. All of these points are major strengths of James’s philosophy that need to be borne constantly in mind in the ongoing search for ways of understanding and explaining the emergence of life and mind from earlier forms of matter. And they can serve as important criteria for assessing the adequacy of attempts to account for and unravel the mystery of consciousness, explaining not only its emergence in beings such as ourselves but also the full range of its character and capabilities as shown in every aspect of our lives. The provocative and innovative ideas of the few truly great thinkers of human history—in whose number I unhesitatingly include scientist, psychologist, philosopher, sparkling stylist, and humane man of letters William James—invite not only untiring attempts at more adequate interpretations of the original meaning of those ideas but also continuous efforts at imaginative adaptations and appropriations of them to the circumstances, challenges, and possibilities of changing times. I have made such attempts and efforts in this book. What I have had to say is intended to be open-ended and suggestive rather than uncompromising and definitive.

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I make no pretense in these pages of having adequately or conclusively addressed such formidable topics as the evolutionary transformations and emergences of matter, the nature of mind and its interactions with the world, the precise character of a self with genuine freedom of thought and action, or the actual and potential meaning of human life. Nor did James. But I believe that his highly original and strikingly pertinent ideas can point the way to promising avenues of continuing thought, investigation, and research. I have sought to support this allegation by laying out, expanding upon, critically analyzing, and defending some of the most important of these remarkable ideas in what I have written here. I hope that these attempts at useful interpretations and promising lines of appropriation can contribute in some small way to a deeper and more appreciative understanding of the thoughts and their potential for present and future thinking of the man whom Alfred North Whitehead—himself a thinker of no small stature in Western intellectual history—affectionately and aptly describes as “that adorable genius, William James” (Whitehead 1967: 2). Bruce Wilshire admiringly says of James, “In spite of the racy surface of his style, he is often an obscure and head-cracking writer. It is not hard to understand why he had such strong appeal for major thinkers like Husserl, Dewey, Bergson, and the later Wittgenstein, and why he is so cavalierly dismissed by thinkers of lesser rank” (Wilshire 1968: 180). In keeping with the elusive, volatile experience of self and world he sought to describe, James’s ideas were in constant ferment. He strained tirelessly for more inclusive, more adequate, more satisfying ways of probing and disclosing the depths of experience, ways that for all our best efforts as finite beings in an extraordinarily complex, dynamic world must remain “ever not quite.”

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Preface 1. When I speak of James’s conception of the self throughout this book, I have mainly in mind what he calls the “spiritual self,” as contrasted with the “material self” and the “social self,” in his The Principles of Psychology. He describes the spiritual self variously as a person’s “inner or subjective being,” the “psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely,” “the central active self” of a person, and “the innermost self which is most vividly felt” (James 1950, I: 296, 299, 305).

Chapter 1: The Role of Pure Experience 1. This image of the rocks and the stream was suggested to me by James’s essay “Bergson and Intellectualism,” contained in his book A Pluralistic Universe. Bergson’s philosophy shows, James says, that our particular conceptual or discursive forms of understanding “let us jump over life instead of wading through it” (James 1996a: 272). For an interesting discussion of ways in which different languages influence different ways of responding to, conceptualizing, ordering, and making sense out of the world, see the article “How Language Shapes Thought” by cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky. Each linguistic system, the author argues, “provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors” (Boroditsky 2011: 65). 2. See Aristotle Categories 1b25–4b19; Metaphysics Z, 1028a10–1028b8; in Aristotle 1941: 8–14, 783–84.

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3. Here, having given the matter further thought, I take issue with a view I once espoused. For statements of my earlier view, see Crosby and Viney 1992: 102 and Crosby 1996: 69.

Chapter 2: Distinguishing Self from World 1. Wayne Viney brought this passage to my attention. 2. We should distinguish this point from the one noted earlier about the relative obduracy, hardness, or resistance of experiences James associates with experiences of the world. A felt hardness in an object such as a rock or piece of metal is only one kind of experience of nonmanipulability or forceful efficacy in some aspect of experience. Moreover, there can be experience of an object such as a pillow that is experience of something soft. But the soft object still has its own kind of obduracy, that is, integrity, steadiness, and constraint that mark it, for James, as something in the external world. The obduracy of certain kinds of experience that James has generally in mind thus has a much broader arena of associations and meanings than that of touching or handling something and finding it to be hard (or soft) to the feel. 3. The fuzziness or inexactitude of the boundaries between self and world is reflected in the relations of organisms to their environments. Not only do the permeable membranes of organisms allow for their constant exchanges with their environments, each influencing the other; it is also a fact of the evolutionary history of organisms that they were not simply manipulated in mechanical ways by their environments but were also active in transforming those environments. A familiar example is the high percentage of oxygen in earth’s atmosphere which was made possible by the evolution of photosynthesizing organisms and then allowed for the evolution of aerobic, oxygen-breathing ones. Robert M. Hazen, a professor of earth science at George Mason University, points out that more than half of the mineral species currently on the earth did not exist prior to the evolution of life, and he explains how these minerals owe their existence to the emergence of life. The life forms, therefore, were not merely passively shaped by their environments but also actively contributed to the shaping of those environments (Hazen 2010). Numerous other examples of this infusive, interactive process of organisms and their environments could be cited. It is an interesting question to ask at what evolutionary point in this interactive process feeling arose in organisms as a registration of their intimate relations to their environments and, with that registration, the beginnings of what Susanne K. Langer describes as the distinction between “what is felt as impact and what is felt as autonomous act” (Langer 1967: 425). A similar phrase is contained in the second volume of this work of Langer, which bears the same title (Langer 1972: 342). Langer’s phrases are reminiscent of James’s way of distinguishing the functions of self and world. She also notes, however, as he does, that the distinction is not always felt or perceived with complete clarity or exactitude (Langer 1972: 354). 4. I am indebted for this way of putting the matter to Karl Britton (Britton 1969, chapter 6 passim and especially 148–49). Christine Skarda makes a similar point

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when she notes that “[a]n object can only exist in relation to a subject, and, correlatively, nothing can be a subject except in relation to something objective” (Skarda 1999: 92). There is also a large measure of truth, even if perhaps not the whole truth, in Susanne Langer’s contention, defended throughout her works, that “[s]ociety, like the spatiotemporal world itself, is a creation of man’s specialized modes of feeling— perception, imagination, conceptual thought and the understanding of language” (Langer 1972: 355). The world of human beings, in other words, is a world perceived, felt, conceived, recollected, and anticipated from a distinctly human perspective. 5. In his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty readily acknowledges that there is a marked difference in ordinary language between truth and justification, but he denies that this difference has any deep philosophical significance (Rorty 1980: 280–84). I agree with Rorty that we should not take the admitted linguistic difference between truth and justification to be a philosophical ground for arguing that truth and justification cannot be conflated in the manner James describes. See my essay “Was William James a Closet Nihilist?” for further confirmation of this claim (Crosby 1994). 6. Thompson endorses a similar view when he remarks that “[t]he brain is an organ, not an organism, and it is the organism, animal, or person that has conscious access to the world” (Thompson 2007: 242). Alva Noë also develops a version of this position in his appropriately titled Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Noë 2009). 7. I owe this way of putting the matter to Robert Innis (Innis 2009–2010: 19). 8. James also uses the example of reading to illustrate the primacy of pure experience in his essay (originally a journal article) “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience.” He writes, “Let the reader arrest himself in the act of reading this article now. Now this is a pure experience, a phenomenon, or datum, a mere that or content of fact. ‘Reading’ simply is, is there; and whether there for some one’s consciousness or there for physical nature, is a question not yet put” (James 1976: 73). 9. The routine confusion of conceptual abstractions and their ideal relations with the flux of concrete particulars in ordinary, day-to-day experience is what James calls “vicious intellectualism” (James 1996a: 60, 218).

Chapter 3: Knowledge of a Common World 1. For a discussion of the close connections between the concepts of consciousness and of freedom of action, see Crosby 2005: 75–79. 2. Pragmatism was first published in 1907, two years after the first publication of Essay IV in Essays in Radical Empiricism, with its introspective analysis of the relations of knower and known. What I am calling criteria 1, 3, and 4 are summarized on page 102 and discussed in preceding pages. Criterion 5 is noted on page 104 and connected with an assertion of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Criterion 2 is implicit throughout Lecture VI of Pragmatism and elsewhere in that volume by James’s use of the first-person plural in most of the strategic places where he is talking about the

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nature of truth and its confirmations. The second criterion is more explicitly asserted on page 102, where he says that “we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse.” A possible and certainly relevant sixth criterion, not mentioned in what I say here, is that it would be desirable for a putative truth to have heuristic significance, that is, to provide a basis for investigations into further truths. I do not find an explicit statement of this criterion in James’s writings, but I think that it is implicit in his notion of established background knowledge as providing a context for testing claims to new knowledge. Gombrich, following the thought of Karl Popper, makes an interesting observation about the criterion of simplicity when he states that we are justified in proceeding from simple assumptions in our inquiries not because “a simple assumption is more probably right but because it is most easily refuted and modified” (Gombrich 1969: 272). Gombrich’s observation is in keeping with the orientation toward the future of James’s pragmatism, which I shall emphasize shortly. 3. On workability and truth, see James 1975: 99, 104, and 112. 4. On the idea of “leading” see, among other places, the second essay of Essays in Radical Empiricism: “A World of Pure Experience.” James points out here that we can be either actually or virtually led by a veridical idea to its predicted terminus. Such leading can also take place in purely mental calculations, as when a series of calculations arrives or is capable of arriving at an expected result. The essay was first published in September and October, 1904. 5. James 1976: 121. This ninth essay was first published on April 27, 1905, while the fourth one first appeared on March 30 of that same year. James apparently changed his interpretation of Kierkegaard’s saying at some time within this period, first noting it with approval and later taking issue with it, as he initially should have. In the fourth essay he seems to have been unduly influenced by Shadworth Hodgson who, as James remarks, “laid great stress on the fact that the minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings, of which the second retrospects the first” (the italics are mine). See James 1976: 132, n. 6.

Chapter 4: Islands of Awareness 1. John J. McDermott asserts that “[t]he social psychologists and the social anthropologists are correct. We are creatures formed in the cauldron of the other” and “other” includes the powerful, inescapable influences of other selves. “James,” he observes, “failed to stress sufficiently this context of other.” While “Marx, Durkheim, Mead, Dewey, have it right” in insisting that “the self is a social construct,” James was also right in claiming that “[i]t is the personally idiosyncratic seeker of relations who puts a distinctive cast on the world. Marx tells us that institutions condition consciousness, but who more than Marx himself intruded his personal version of the world on these very same institutions. The social and communal are intrusive, but so too is the personal” (McDermott 1987: 57).

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2. George Allan suggested to me the example of the twins. 3. On the body as the “center” of our experience of the world—“center of vision, center of action, center of interest,” see James 1976: 85–86, n. 8. This long note shows how thoroughly embodied James’s vision of self and the world is. See also James 1950: I, 242, where James asserts that “as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking.” See also I, 299–302 of this work. The chapter “The Emotions” in The Principles of Psychology presents the view that the emotions are feelings of muscular, glandular, or neural activity within the body. James alleges that “we feel sorry because we cry” and “afraid because we tremble,” for example, and not the other way around (James 1950: II, 450). 4. Gale also mistakenly accuses James of being “a closet Cartesian,” partly because of “his use of the Cartesian argument from analogy for the existence of other minds” (Gale in Stuhr 2010: 119).

Chapter 5: The Alleged Bankruptcy of Traditional Empiricisms 1. Rorty also asserts that his epistemological behaviorism “might be called simply ‘pragmatism,’ were this term not a bit overladen” (Rorty 1980: 176). But if it is a species of pragmatism, it is quite different from the pragmatism of James. Rorty’s “pragmatism” admittedly appeals to practice, namely, the practices of cultural communities and linguistic systems and games, but not to experience as James conceives it. James, on the other hand, gives a central role to experience as the principal source and guide for claims to knowledge.

Chapter 6: Sensate and Causal Aspects of Experience 1. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant asserts, “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding, no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, [sensible] intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant 1958: A51, 93). 2. James quotes the passage about the fiery glass furnace in Locke’s Essay in his Principles of Psychology (1950: II, 306–7, second note). 3. Locke reasons similarly to James on this point when he tells us that the mind receives “its idea of active power clearer from reflection on its own operations, than it doth from any external sensation,” that is, from its sensate experiences of external substances (Locke 1950: I, 313). 4. For extensive development of this idea, see George Allan’s lucid and arresting book The Patterns of the Present: Interpreting the Authority of Form. The book’s well-argued thesis is that “everything is a system or a feature of a system” (Allan 2001: 288).

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Chapter 7: Experience and Emotion 1. A sustained defense of James’s views against the charge of wishful thinking and arbitrary subjective choice which has often been leveled against him, and of his response to his contemporary W. K. Clifford’s insistence on restricting all claims, beliefs, and commitments to what can be asserted on the basis of decisive, compelling, exclusively rational evidence, is contained in Hunter Brown’s William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion (Brown 2000). My discussion of James’s views in this section has been aided and influenced by Brown’s well-reasoned exposition of James’s thought, and especially by pages 45–46 and 133–36 of his book. 2. An interesting and convincing discussion of the role of emotion or affect in belief stances is offered by Gavin when he contrasts Charles Sanders Peirce’s firm belief and “cheerful hope” that the investigations of scientists operating relentlessly in accordance with the pragmatic method will finally arrive at complete consensus and therefore ultimate truth, with James’s own equally firm view that no theory can provide a complete description of reality and that there can be no such thing as a final, indisputable truth. The difference between the two men, Gavin argues, can be explained only if we take into account the crucial role of affect or emotion in their respective views, contrary to Peirce’s insistence on a radical separation of the conceptual from the affective in reliable theorizing. Peirce “chooses a different ‘belief’ than does James,” Gavin concludes, “but his choice is made ultimately in the same way.” This is to say, Peirce’s position can be fully understood “only if it is admitted that an extralogical dimension is involved” (Gavin 1992: 106; see 103–6). Seen in this way, Peirce’s belief stance regarding epistemology is a graphic example of what James termed “the will to believe.” Gavin goes on to demonstrate the important affective aspect in Peirce’s agapastic evolutionary metaphysics, in addition to that of his epistemology (106–7).

Chapter 9: Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism 1. In another place in his book, Raymo at first states, in referring to Francis Crick’s co-discovery of the DNA double helix, that “we are biochemical machines.” But then he demurs, admitting that “perhaps ‘machines’ is not the right word, because no machine yet invented is remotely as complex as the human body. Even a single human cell, this one, here at my fingertip, one of billions, too far to see with the naked eye—makes a Boeing Dreamliner, say, look like a child’s toy.” He celebrates the usefulness of the metaphor of the machine in an extended passage but finally has to acknowledge that “[t]he mechanical metaphor does not exhaust the world’s meaning” and that “the universe sings beyond any metaphor we employ to understand it” (Raymo 2008: 87, 139–41). I regard the metaphor as generally more misleading than useful. 2. Innis makes this comment in talking about the thought of Susanne K. Langer, as developed in the first volume of her trilogy Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Langer 1967).

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3. An interesting discussion of the growth of understanding of autocatalytic and self-organizing processes in far-from-equilibrium nonlinear dynamic systems is contained in part 1 of Mike Sandbothe’s book The Temporalization of Time: Basic Tendencies in Modern Debate on Time in Philosophy and Science (Sandbothe 2001). Recognition and continuing study of such systems, and of their crucial role in the development and functioning of life forms, owes a great deal to the work of Ilya Prigogine. As Sandbothe’s discussion shows, Prigogine’s investigations and those of others have brought into view capacities of matter at certain levels of internal organization and interaction with external environments that had previously been little appreciated or understood in physics—especially so long as the thinking of physicists was dominated, at first by uncritical assumption of the reversibility of all physical processes, and then by a rather simple and unquestioned conception of the role of the second law of thermodynamics. Sandbothe’s discussion illustrates how important it is to bring standard interpretations of the nature and capacities of matter in physics at any given time into critical relation with other perspectives, both within and beyond physics itself. 4. I strongly agree with Langer’s statement that “[t]he misconception leading us into sterile theories of mind is the notion of feeling as a separate sort of entity, ontologically distinct from physical entities and therefore belonging to a different order or constituting a different ‘realm’” (Langer 1964: 16). 5. An example of James’s pluralistic perspectivism is his statement in his preface to The Will to Believe and Other Essays, “There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact” (James 1962: 331; James’s statement is contained in the appendix to the 1962 collection of essays). Another example is his declaration in A Pluralistic Universe, “We have so many different businesses with nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing grasp” (James 1996a: 32). 6. See chapter 4, note 3. 7. A vivid expression of the reductionistic outlook Strawson calls “physicsalism” is set forth by Albert Einstein: “[T]he general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacities of the human intellect” (Einstein 1954: 225–26; quoted in Prigogine and Stegners 1984: 53). 8. Viney ventured this possible criticism of my argument that James’s philosophy is consistent with the version of materialism (radical materialism) I am advocating in this book. 9. Philosopher William Bechtel argues, in contrast with Dupré, that the machine model is not only appropriate but essential in dealing with all the phenomena of the world, including the whole range of biological organisms including human beings. Mechanisms of sufficient high levels of complexity inclusive of many types of lowerorder mechanisms cannot only function as autonomous systems with the ability to act so as to sustain themselves in existence and to exert significant influences on

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their environments. They are also able in some cases to function as minds or what he calls “mental mechanisms,” with all the capabilities associated with minds. Such mental mechanisms have evolved, and like other evolved capacities and traits they are means for enabling organisms to maintain themselves in their far-from-equilibrium states and to interact with and survive in their environments. According to Bechtel, concepts such as those of mechanism, purpose, value, and freedom are quite consistent with one another. See Bechtel 2008, especially chapter 7, “Confronting Mechanism’s Critics.” I agree with Dupré, and for the reasons he adduces, that the master metaphor of the machine is more misleading than helpful in this context. Aside from the metaphor, however, there are many interesting points in common between Bechtel’s and Dupré’s holistic, nonreductive analyses of biological organisms and their autonomous actions, including the activities of mind. Bechtel develops these points in comprehensive and skillful detail. I thank philosopher Donald Dryden for bringing my attention to the works of Dupré and Bechtel, works that are highly relevant to the main theme of this chapter. 10. I explore these ideas at greater length in Crosby 2005 and Crosby 2009. A noncompatibilist conception of human freedom is one that denies a compatible or consistent relation between causal determinism and genuine freedom. Freedom always takes place within a causal context, according to this position, but it is not totally determined by that context. A free act is an instance of novelty, but it is, as I have already indicated, novelty brought under conscious intentionality and control, showing it to be distinct from mere chance. It is a free action as distinct from a chance event. 11. Some interesting suggestions along this line are contained in John Searle’s book Mind: A Brief Introduction. See his discussion of “indeterminism and the quantum brain” (Searle 2004: 161–64). 12. For development of this observation and its religious implications see my book Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil (Crosby 2008).

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_______. 1982. Consequences of pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ruf, Frederick J. 1991. The creation of chaos: William James and the stylistic making of a disorderly world. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sandbothe, Mike. 2001. The temporalization of time: Basic tendencies in modern debate on time in philosophy and science, trans. Andrew Inkpin. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Sapolsky, Robert. 2010. This is your brain on metaphors. The Stone, New York Times Opinionator, November 14. Sarte, John Paul. 1964. Nausea. New York: New Directions Publishing. Searle, John R. 2004. Mind: A brief introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1978. Chaos and context: A study in William James. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin Printing Company. _______. 1990. William James’s radical reconstruction of philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Skarda, Christine A. 1999. The perceptual form of life. In Rafael Núñez and Walter J. Freeman, eds. Reclaiming cognition: The primacy of action, intention and emotion. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, Imprint Academic: 79–93. Smolin, Lee. 2007. The trouble with physics: The rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Strawson, Galen. 2010. Mental reality, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stuhr, John J., ed. 2010. 100 years of pragmatism: William James’s revolutionary philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Suckiel, Ellen Kappy. 1984. The pragmatic philosophy of William James. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. _______. 1996. Heaven’s champion: William James’s philosophy of religion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thornton, Stephen P. 2007. Solipsism and the problem of other minds. In The internet encyclopedia of philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/solipsis.htm. Accessed 8/3/2007. Waal, de, Frans. 1996. Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weyl, Herman. 1949. Philosophy of mathematics and natural science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1938. Modes of thought. New York: Capricorn Books. _______. 1967. Science and the modern world. New York: The Free Press. _______. 1978. Process and reality: An essay in cosmology: Corrected edition, eds. David A. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press Wilshire, Bruce. 1968. William James and phenomenology: A study of “The Principles of Psychology.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Index

absentialism, 139 acculturation, role of, 7, 8, 48, 56–57, 62, 64–65 advantages or values of James’s outlook, 144 Allan, George, xiv, 98–99, 107, 151 American revolution, 103 analogy as mode of access to other minds, 46–49, 54–55 anti-reductionism, 85 appropriation, 32, 41–42, 45 autocatalysis, 128, 153 autopoiesis, 126, 128, 153 Barrett, Nathaniel, 127 basic statements, 63–64 Baker, Lynn Rudder, 134 Bechtel, William, 153–54 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 109 Bergson, Henri, 147 Berkeley, George, 23 Berry, Thomas, 123–24 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 103 Boroditsky, Lera, 147

Bradley, F. H., 23 brain: and emotions, 94–95, 110–11; an organ, not an organism, 149; workings of, 56 Britton, Karl, 148 Brown, Hunter, 152 Brown, Warren S., 139 Cannavo, Salvatore, 124–26 Cassirer, Ernst, 109 causality, 80–89; causal closure of the physical, ix, 133–41; chance (or novelty), 138, 140; direct experience of, 85, 87–88, 89; downward and upward, 138–39; efficacy of in the world, 16–17; no experience of force of, 82; and justification of claims, 63–65, 78–80; necessarily related to chance or novelty, 141; necessary aspect of causality, 140; relation to quantum indeterminacy, 141 Cioran, E. M., 100 Clifford, W. K., 97, 98, 152 cognitive science, 52

161

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162 •

Index

concatenated unity, 134, 136 concepts: discerning relations of as a kind of experience, 29; obduracy of, 28–30; relations of as ideal, 29–30 consciousness, 83; not confined to the brain, xiii, 27–28, 122; and freedom, 34–35, 149; extreme importance of for study of mind, 51–53; mystery of, 144; prereflective bodily, 2, 11 Crosby, Pamela, xiv, 6 Deacon, Terrence W., 84–85, 139–41 Descartes, René, 23, 47, 54–56, 82, 151 Dewey, John, 9, 150 Dryden, Donald, xiv, 154 dualism, mind-body, 13, 132 Duncan, Todd L., 122 Dupré, John, 134–37, 153, 154 Durkheim, Emile, 150 each-form vs. all-form monism, 136 Edie, James M., 33–34 edifying philosophy, 62 Einstein, Albert, 70, 153 emergentism, xiii, 85, 133–37, 139–40, 144 emotions: adversive and aversive, 99–100; and analogy of climbing in the Alps, 102; and analogy of walking on a curb or precipice, 100; constitutive part of beliefs, 94, 152; as feelings of the body, 151, 153; and justification of beliefs, 91–92; and limbic system of the brain, 94; obduracy of, 23; and the pragmatic testing of beliefs, 93–99; relation to theoretical reasoning, 92–99; selective and noting function of, 99–101; as ways of knowing, xii, 23 empirical attitude not immune to criticism, 68 empiricism: British, 66, 82, 85, 118; credibility and feasibility of, xii,

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xiii, 41, 57; as epistemological program, x, xiii; James’s strong commitment to, 9; radical, x, 13, 131; sciences as paradigm of, 67; as a stance with no content or thesis, 65–68; not a vacant posture or attitude, 78; wider than the sciences, 67–68 epistemology, 77 experience: aesthetic (see values, aesthetic); alleged bankruptcy of, 57, 59–73; ambiguity of affective, 22–24; ambiguity of in general, 70–71; basis of truth, 75; causal aspects of, 86–89; connections and disconnections of, 70, 83; in constant interplay with belief and conceptualization, 76, 88; and creation of new truths, 101–4; does not require a prior experiencer, xii, 20–24, 28, 37; double-barreled, 18; embodied, 56, 129; emotions and, 71, 85, 91–104; emotionladen, 101; encompasses more than sensations, 13, 16; epistemic role of, 57, 59–61; epistemological behaviorism, 64; extreme width of, 13; inquiry into its overall cause nonsensical, 9–10; moral (see values, moral); new, as putting to strain old ideas, 30, 63; obduracy of certain kinds of clarified, 148; ordinary, x, 59, 69; patterns of connection and disconnection within, 76–77; relevance to claims to truth, 78–80; religious (see values, religious); sensate aspects of, 81–85; a success word, 70; three basic features in James’s view of, 13; not a veil cast over the world, 9; ultimate source and basis for all explanation, 10, 130; values and, 71, 85 (see values); wider than

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Index •

sensations, 71, 119, 132; extreme width of, 13 faith, 95, 102, 103, 104; can be a force for evil as well as good, 103; sometimes creates its own verification, 102 Faraday, Michael, 80 fatalism, 95–96 Feyerabend, Paul, 68 Flanagan, Owen, 36–37, 52–53 Fontinell, Eugene, 34 foundationalism, 66 Fraassen, van, Bas C., 61, 65–73, 77–78, 81, 118 freedom, 33, 133–41; and chance or novelty, 138, 154; conditioned and constrained, 16, 103–104; a fundamental feature of human life, 140; meaningless without a causal context, 140; mystery of connected with mystery of consciousness, 34–35, 149; non-compatibilist view of, xiii, 154; and quantum indeterminacy, 141, 154 future, only relatively open, 104 Gale, Richard M., 40–41, 151 Galileo, Galilei, 23, 79–80 Gandhi, Mohandas, 103 Gavin, William Joseph, 35, 96, 152 Gazzaniga, Michael S., xiii, 122 Gestalt psychology, 84 glass furnace, example of, 86, 87, 151 God, 132–33; as finite, indwelling, embodied, 132 Gombrich, E. H., 3, 150 Gough, Vincent van, 109 Haack, Susan, 63–64, 78–79 habit, 33 Hansen, Jennifer, xiv Hazen, Robert M., 148

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163

Higgs Boson, 80 history, sad lessons of, 104 Hitler, Adolf, 103 Hodgson, Shadworth, 150 Hume, David, 23–24, 66, 82, 83, 86, 89, 93 Husserl, Edmund, 84 indeterminism, xiii, 133–41 inductive reasoning, 85 Innis, Robert E., xiv, 48, 122, 123, 149, 152 introspection, 37–38 Johnson, Mark, 128–29 Kant, Immanuel, 66, 76–77, 151 Kierkegaard, Søren, 36, 39, 150 knower and known, 32–41 knowledge: by acquaintance, 62; of a common world, 41–44, 46, 51, 54; of other minds, 45–57; three aspects of claims to empirical knowledge, 68–69 Köhler, Wolfgang, 84 Kothari, D. S.¸ 88 Lakoff, George, 128–29 Lamberth, David C., 11, 40 Langer, Susanne K., 48, 107–8, 109, 123, 148, 149, 152, 153 Language: cognitive role of, 48; holistic fabric of, 62; medium of public communication, 47–49; shapes thought, 147 Leclerc, Ivor, 78 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 103 Lincoln, Abraham, 103 Locke, John, 23, 81–83, 89, 151 Marconi, Guglielmo, 80 Marx, Karl, 150 Maxwell, James Clerk, 149

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materialism: compositional, 136; mechanistic, 95–96, 121–22, 135–36, 152, 153–54; non-reductive, 122, 127, 137, 154; or physicalism, distinct from physicsalism, 129, 153; prevalent views of today, 122, 123; radical, xii, 13,122, 131, 122–30, 132, 136, 138 matter: amenability to multiple forms, 137; emergentist view of, 123; expanded conception of needed, 122–30,143; is what it does, xii, xiii, 121, 123; multidisciplinary approach to the nature of, xiii, 125, 127–28; paradoxical and elusive current conception of, 123–26; preceded mind chronologically, 24, 27; seat of mind, 55–56, 151 McDermott, John J., 6, 7, 11, 13, 76, 150 Mead, George Herbert, 150 Meliorism, 132 metaphysics, 65–66, 77, 134; everything that exists is interrelated processes and fields, 126–27; not immune to critical discussion and empirical evaluation, 77; monistic or pluralistic, 129–30, 134; and quantum theory, 124–25; systems all the way up and all the way down, 126 Mill, John Stuart, 110 Mind: not centered merely in the brain, 27–28, 149; continuity with life, 126; not less real than matter, 127; one manifestation of the powers of matter, 123–24; ineluctable privacy of individual minds, 49–54; not a thing or substance, 123 Murphy, Nancey, 139 neurophysiology, ix, xiii, 52, 94–95, 139 Newton, Isaac, 70 Noë, Alva, xiii, 122, 149 nominalism, 69–70, 85, 86

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obduracies of physical reality, 63 O’Donovan-Anderson, Michael, 16, 89 Oliver, Phil, 44, 54, 133 organisms, as active in transforming their environments, 148 pain, experience of, 86 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 84, 152 perception as a semiotic phenomenon, 84 perspectivism, 33, 111–12, 128, 153 philosophy, role of, 52; must be capable of being lived, 96; relation to science, 78 physics: contemporary, xiii; Einsteinian, 70; Newtonian, ix, 70, 131, 133, 134 physicsalism vs. physicalism, 129, 153 Platonists, logical and mathematical, 29 pluralism, 129–30, 134, 153 Popper, Karl, 63–64, 78–79, 150 positivism, 70, 78, 118 Prigogine, Ilya, 127, 128, 153 primary-secondary quality distinction, 23–24, 105, 132 Principle Zero, 66–67 psychologism, 65–66 pure experience, x, xi, 1–13, 46, 50–51, 59–61, 64, 69, 71–72, 77, 126, 142; and chaos, 11; contains concepts and conceptual relations in germ, 76; distinct from its conceptualizations, 1; epistemological, not metaphysical, xii, 10–13, 31; implicit structures and characters within, 5; leaf analogy, 5; optical analogy, 4; painting analogy, 4; A Piece of Cake (Robinson) analogy, 18–19; primacy of, 128, 142, 149; and radical materialism, xii; radio wave analogy, 4–5; reading as example of, 149; and reality, xi; rocks in a turbulent river analogy, 7; room analogy, 17–18; selections within, 6–7; self and world

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Index •

as functions of, 16–20; not a single reservoir or undivided estate, xii, 43–44, 51; transcendental condition for all knowledge, 2, 11, 56 qualia, 51 Raymo, Chet, 121, 152 realism, pragmatic, 89 reality, 17, 130 reflective equilibrium of phenomenological experience, neuroscience, and cognitive science, 52 Religion of Nature, 133 religious ultimate,105–6 retrospection, 37, 39, 150 Richardson, Robert, 40 Robinson, Derek, 18 Rockwell, W. Teed, xiii, 27–28, 122 Rorty, Richard, 59–65, 69, 71–72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 88, 118, 149; epistemological behaviorism of, 151; holism of, 62, 71; pragmatism of, 72, 151 Ruf, Frederick J., 11 Russell, John E., 26 Sandbothe, Mike, 153 Sapolsky, Robert, 110–11 Sartre, Jean Paul, 100 sciences, 77: as paradigms of empiricism, 67; relation to philosophy, 78 Searle, John, 47, 51–52, 122, 154 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 11, 129, 130 selection and emphasis, 75–76, 129; as acts of evaluation, 118 self, human: as bound to objects and world, 54, 56, 88, 142, 149; as constructive agent, 34; as in a dark room, 82; distinction from world, 15–30; as function of pure

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165

experience, 16–20, 46, 76, 77; as incarnate, 142–43; greatest intuitive certainty of, 82; models of, 36–37; puts a distinctive cast on the world, 150; and its relations, ix, xi–xii, 12; as a social construct, 150; “spiritual,” in contrast with “material” and “social,” 147; as stream of consciousness, 11, 32–36; problem of its ability to choose and act, 32–36; sensory deprivation, 8; and world as systems within systems, 88 Sellars, Wilfred, 65 sensation, 54; analogy of flickering dots on a television screen, 83; aspect of experience, 81–85; connections and disconnections of, 85; intentions or references of, 83; part of larger wholes, 84; and reflection, 66; always in relation, not separate, 84; result of discriminative attention, 83; not the sole source or test of knowledge, 83 Shakespeare, William, 108 Skarda, Christine A., 28, 148–49 skepticism, 66, 82 Smolin, Lee, 124 Spinoza, Benedict, 93 Stengers, Isabelle, 127, 128 substance, physical and mental, 81–82; cannot be known in themselves, 81–82; powers of, 81–82 Suckiel, Ellen Kappy, 7, 98 Systems: far-from-equilibrium, 128, 139, 153, 154; morphodynamic, 139; thermodynamic, 139; teleodynamic, 139 temperaments, different, 33–34, 93 theory-ladenness of experience, 56–57, 88 Thompson, Evan, xiii, 11, 84–85, 123, 126–27, 142, 149 Thornton, Stephen P., 55–56

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thought transference, 50 transcendental unity of apperception, 76 truth, 17; based in experience, 75, 130; coherence as test of, 62, 79, 88; correspondence theory of, 25–26, 85; happens to an idea, 26; innate, 66; and justification, 149; and “leading,” 39, 150; made by relations in time, 26; as outcome of purposive inquiry, 25, 130; pragmatic criteria of, 37–39, 40, 47, 48, 149–50; pragmatic test of, 96; pragmatic theory of, 25–27, 88; produced in some cases by our actions, 33; relational character of, 142; simplicity as one test of, 98, 150; and workability, 38, 150 utilitarianism, 70

of sympathy, 110–12; nihilism, 112; no overarching final moral good, 112–13; and perspectivism, 111–12; rational access to, 109; sentiments prior to moral principles, 110, 113 values, religious, 115–18, 132; and deliverance from evil, 115–16, 117, 118; fundamental and indispensable aspects of experience, 118; objects of, in experience of, 115–16; philosophy’s role in relation to, 115, 117; rooted in religious experiences, 115; source and outcome of religious beliefs, 116; and tragic dimensions of life, 116–17 Verdi, Giuseppe, 108–9 vicious intellectualism, 149 Viney, Wayne, v, xiii–xiv, 8, 20, 148, 153

values, aesthetic, 106–9; cognitive import of, 107–9; connect us with self and world, 108; disagreements about, 107; discovered in experienced world, 106; experiences of not mere subjective projections, 106; impart knowable form to our emotions, 108; importance of training sensibility for, 106–7; integral part of experience, 106–7; objectify subjective reality, 108; open us to new ways of experiencing the world, 108; reside in relation of subject and object, 106; interrelations of aesthetic, moral, and religious, 118 values, moral, 109–14, 132; as adjustment to varied claimants and their desires, 113–14; emotional access to, 110; evils, 114; experimentation, 114; and instinct

Waal, de, Frans, 110 Weyl, Herman, 53 Whitehead, Alfred North, 9, 101, 118, 119, 145 will, efforts of, 87–88 will to believe, xii, 152 Wilshire, Bruce, 3, 12, 83–84, 145 wishing for something to be so, 98–99, 103, 104 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 150 world: ambiguities of, 143; as bound to self, 54, 56, 88; causal efficacy of, 16–17; distinction from self, 15–30; as function of pure experience, 16–20, 77; as incarnate, 142–43; as process, 36; always in relation to subjects, 23, 88, 130; what is experienced, experiencable, or inferable from experience, 130 Wright brothers, 101

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