Source of book: I own this.
Where to start with this book? Maybe with the author.
William James is perhaps a bit less well known than his brother, novelist Henry James. On the one hand, I understand this, because I am (I have been told) a big fanboy of Henry James - probably true. However, William was no slouch himself. William James was a luminary in two disciplines. He wrote a hugely influential book on human psychology, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890, when the discipline was just starting to form itself into a separate area of study and practice. A 1991 survey in American Psychologist ranked him as the second most influential psychologist ever, more so than Freud or Jung. This is probably correct from a practical point of view, as his ideas have aged rather well.
Okay, so, a great writer and thinking about psychology. What else? Oh, he is also regarded as one of the preeminent thinkers of the second half of the 19th Century, one of the greatest American philosophers, and a brilliant educator who taught such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein at Harvard.
A Pluralistic Universe is one of James’ philosophical works, consisting of a series of lectures given at Manchester College. In it, James lays out his philosophy of “radical empiricism,” the idea that we do not experience reality as a stream of data or a sequence of points, but instead as a full picture of things, their connections, their meanings, and their values. This ties in with James’ main philosophical school, Pragmatism, which refocuses the center of philosophy in real-life experience, not in pure reasoning about abstract concepts. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but you can get the basic idea.
I have known for some time that the philosophical school that my own beliefs were closest to was indeed Pragmatism. Not that I can say I fit neatly into any particular school, but much of Pragmatist philosophy resonates with me. Pragmatism also seems to me to be a much-needed corrective to Fundamentalist ways of thinking, which intentionally disregard experience and practical effects as not merely useless, but indeed the means the devil uses to deceive us - doctrine always trumps reality.
I’ll explore a bit of these ideas in this post, but I will, of necessity, just hit a few highlights and leave a lot of ideas out. I do recommend reading the book, but also spending a bit of time learning the basic philosophical schools, because understanding what James talks about in this book requires an understanding of the other philosophers he cites and debates within the lectures. (Specifically, Hegel, Bradley, Fechner, and Bergson, but others too.)
Philosophy itself is, in my opinion, best understood as a conversation, not a static area of knowledge or debate. To understand Aristotle, you have to understand Plato and Socrates, because Aristotle debates with them. And before that, you have the earlier schools. The conversation starts when humans start thinking about ethics, morality, and meaning. And when they start thinking, they start talking and discussing and debating.
For those of us raised in the West, our tradition is mostly the Western tradition, starting with the Greeks. There are, obviously, other traditions, most notably the various Eastern traditions. These threads started to dialogue in modern times mostly, and by the time I was born, many traditions had influenced the culture. I haven’t spent as much time in Eastern traditions, but you can read my thoughts on the Tao Te Ching here.
For understanding Western philosophy, I highly recommend finding a copy of Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy by Samuel Enoch Stumpf, a classic from 1966 that has been updated regularly. I have the 6th Edition in my library, and used hardbacks are easy to find. One reason I love this book is because philosophers are rarely particularly lucid writers. Some are downright incomprehensible (hello there, Hegel!), and even the best - like William James - are wordy. Stumpf clarifies and distills things down so that it is easy - or at least easier - to understand the gist of the conversation over the last 2500 years. I first read it in my 20s, and refer to it pretty often.
Back to William James and A Pluralistic Universe. James in this book is responding to the problem of intellectualization: the tendency to treat truth and ultimate reality as intellectual concepts rather than actual things. In the most extreme examples he quotes (from other philosophers), the belief is either that “everything is connected to everything else” or “everything is separate and thus not connected.” As James points out, both fail to match reality. For example, I have a variety of friends - they are connected to me. But not all of those friends know each other - they are not connected to each other. And that is the way the universe works. Things are connected, but there are not direct connections between everything, but rather a messy reality - as James puts it, the universe isn’t Monistic, but Pluralistic.
Another thing I should mention about James is that he spent a lot of time thinking about religion as well - arguably his best-known work is The Varieties of Religious Experience - and, while he wasn’t a fundamentalist by any stretch, he treats religion with a great deal of respect. Indeed, he considered religious experiences to be as “real” as any other experience, and thus part of the pluralistic experience of reality. He also argued that we should study experiences rather than institutions and doctrines - the latter were merely human inventions surrounding the experiences themselves. At the conclusion of this book, he specifically argues that leaving religious experience out will lead to missing key parts of reality.
This is why it seems to me that the logical understanding, working in abstraction from such specifically religious experiences, will always omit something, and fail to reach completely adequate conclusions. Death and failure, it will always say, are death and failure simply, and can nevermore be one with life; so religious experience, peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete philosophy.
Well, let’s dive into the book a bit. James starts by examining some different approaches to philosophy.
Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them, brute necessities express its character better.
All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogues are with some one or other of the universe’s subdivisions. Everyone is nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better be avowed as such; for one man’s vision may be much more valuable than another’s, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they want to think and do? - and I think the history of philosophy bears him out.
As I mentioned, so much of this book seems to speak directly to the Fundamentalist worldview, and this quote is no exception. The whole of the Fundamentalist project is to claim that their beliefs are the only possible right ones, that they are necessary conclusions. Which is baloney. As James puts it, they are “accidents more or less of personal vision” and we should treat them as such. They may be interesting, but they are neither binding nor exclusively true. (Side note: this applies to the personal visions of the writers of the Bible too. There is nothing inevitable or exclusive about their viewpoints either.)
But also, James is correct: our reason and our philosophy - and our doctrines - are creations to justify to ourselves (and others) the things that we want to do. Which is why doctrines developed by white men who enslaved other humans will tend to be hierarchical and justify brutality. Which is why if you tell me your theology, political ideology, or philosophy, I learn less about your beliefs and more about what you wish to justify.
Let me repeat once more that a man’s vision is the great fact about him. Who cares for Carlyle’s reasons, or Schopenhauer’s or Spencer’s? A philosophy is the expression of a man’s infinite character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.
James eventually gets into a question of religion. I was very much raised in a “dualistic” tradition, where “god” and “creation” were so very separate, so very different, so very - as James puts it - alienated, that there seemed to be this vast gulf. In practice, this was great for maintaining authoritarianism, but difficult to reconcile with an actual religious experience of communion with the Divine. Throughout history, there seems to be an ongoing battle between the authoritarians with their rigid doctrines (or philosophies) and the mystics with their elevation of experience and ecstasy over intellect. James address at length the problem that dualism creates both on a religious and a philosophical level, to say nothing of the conflict that such ideas create (unnecessarily) with science.
It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag and handicap on christian thought. Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some people a more worthy conception of than God as external creator. So conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fantasy.
James also criticises the “intellectualization” of everything. By asserting grand theories of the universe and trying to cram reality into the neat theories, intellectualism ends up creating absurdity. This goes beyond a belief in science or in a rational universe to the idea that the universe must conform to the theory, rather than the other way around. Again, this is the calling card of Fundamentalism.
Next we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and that only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth be found.
James addresses a few different writers popular at the time (although less so today) regarding their caricatures of pluralistic philosophy. In the process, he indicts not just Fundamentalists, but also the critics of that time of “socialism.” Which, come to think of it, sounds rather familiar today.
Professor Taylor is so naif in this habit of thinking only in extremes that he charges the pluralists with cutting the ground from under their own feet in not consistently following it themselves. What pluralists say is that a universe really connected loosely, after the pattern of our daily experience, is possible, and that for certain reasons it is the hypotheses to be preferred. What Professor Taylor thinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort of universe is logically impossible, and that a totality of things interrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis that can be seriously thought out at all. Meanwhile, no sensible pluralist ever flies or wants to fly to this dogmatic extreme.
…
If chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe, absolutists interpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown out of a dice box as double sixes are...This habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me of what Mr. Wells says of the current objections to socialism, in his wonderful little book, “New worlds for old.” The commonist vice of the human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black or white, its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades. So, the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of socialism, and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat, Socialism abolishes property, abolishes the family, and the rest. The method, Mr. Wells continues, is always the same: It is to assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit of qualification, - for socialist read pluralist and the parallel holds good, - it is to imagine that whatever proposal is made by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to the simple-minded person in doubt - “this is socialism” - or pluralism, as the case may be. “Surely! - SURELY! you don’t want this!”
Mic drop. I mean, that is exactly what the Right is doing right now. Anything that might possibly result in greater political or economic equality is labeled “socialist,” followed by a caricature of what “socialism” means. (And actual socialism is rarely involved, actually.) So, for example, “We should have free tuition at state universities like we did in the 1970s.” “That’s socialism - and we know that leads to the Gulags.” Ditto for pluralism of all forms, of course. “If you permit gays to marry, next thing you know people will be bonking goats in the middle of the street.” Some things...never seem to change.
James spends an entire lecture talking about Hegel. To even try to explain is difficult. James is of the opinion that Hegel’s dialectic is a way of trying to bridge the gap created by dualism, and to even get into the argument is to examine more of Hegel than the mere “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” dialectical method. James himself acknowledges the challenge. (And anyone who has tried to read Hegel knows exactly what he means…) He starts off with some deserved praise, but can’t help a few digs.
Great injustice is done to Hegel by treating him as primarily a reasoner. He is in reality a naively observant man, only beset with a perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon. He plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression of what happens. His mind is in very truth impressionistic; and his thought, when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it, is the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow...But if Hegel’s central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult to follow. His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences, his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful vocabulary, calling what completes a thing its “negation,” for example; his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking logic or physics or psychology, his whole deliberately adopted policy of ambiguity and vagueness, in short: all these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair - or his - out in desperation.
What James sees as the central vision of Hegel is a way of resolving the inherent instability of reality - things do not seem to be stable and explicable very often, which is one reason Fundamentalists cling so tightly to explanations that don’t work in the real world - the alternative for them is existential terror.
The impression that any naif person gets who plants himself innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance. Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but provisional. Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian equilibrium with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical, break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life and in their civic and professional relations. Intellectual enigmas frustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as sacred. Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite for destruction, of the large system of history in which it stood for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone.
No shit. “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”
James takes some exception to the Hegel’s belief in final certainty - and authority - as well - another Fundamentalist problem.
Hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on everyone, and certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. “I have never doubted,” a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, one and whole and complete. Advance in thinking, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than may be, which are all that empiricists can use.
Man, that difference between “must be” and “may be” really sums up the difference. Empiricism, Pragmatism, and the progressive forms of religion that are compatible with them understand that the most we humans can ever say is “may be.” Certainty, as Peter Enns puts it, is a sin - a sin of the mind which harms others whose experiences may be different.
James next turns to discuss Gustav Fechner. I will admit I had no idea who Fechner was before this, but it turns out that he too was a famous psychologist, who did influential work related to sensory experience, from the non-linear relationship of stimulus to sensation to early work on synesthesia. Fechner also dabbled in philosophy, and James discusses his ideas in a full chapter. A few passages stood out to me, including the introduction to the lecture.
The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands. The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portrains which its best court--painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme; and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with it all is well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise to its external point of view, it yields no relief whatever. It introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should have heard.
But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness than our consciousnesses? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship, to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with incorrigibly social and imaginative minds?
Such a negative conclusion would, I believe, be desperately hasty, a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath.
I think James touches again here on the problem raised by what he calls the “absolute” - that is, the problem that omnipotent monotheism cannot avoid - the problem of evil. It is all well and good to claim that “all is well” on some higher plane, but it sure gives cold comfort here on earth. And yet, James is unwilling to disregard religious experience - and man’s desire for transcendence and communion with the divine - as mere delusion and imagination. Your mileage may vary, but I agree with him on that.
This chapter also digs a little more into the problem of “certainty,” and again James rebuts Joachim’s claim of having never doubted. Here is a bit of that discussion.
The whole monistic pyramid, resting on points as thin as these, seems to me to be a machtspruch, a product of will far more than one of reason. Unity is good, therefore things shall cohere; they shall be one; there shall be categories to make them one, no matter what empirical disjunctions may appear.
Later, James ties these two issues together using Fechner’s almost animistic belief in the immanence of the divine. I think James identifies the problems raised by the Fundamentalist view of soul/body dualism as rooted in the stark separation between the universe and the divine. (Emotionally, I believe this stems not so much from theology, but from a deep disgust for the body, particularly its sexual function - I could be wrong, but this has been my experience within the subculture.)
The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks into a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has live is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.
And how about this?
Fechner likens our individual persons on earth unto so many sense-organs of the earth’s soul. We add to its perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. It absorbs our perceptions, just as they occur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the other data there. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that have spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new relations and develop throughout our whole finite life.
In a later chapter, James discusses Henri Bergson, who was practically a cultic figure in the first half of the 20th Century, before fading in popularity. James draws on Bergson’s idea that immediate experience and intuition are more “real” than abstract logic for some of his argument about how we perceive connections along with facts. Again, there are some fascinating passages here.
Professor Bergson thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrine absolutely. Instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder, he calls it the more superficial. Instead of being the only adequate knowledge, it is grossly inadequate, and its only superiority is the practical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experience and thereby to save time. The one thing it cannot do is to reveal the nature of things - which last remark, if not clear already, will become clearer as I proceed. Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson tells us, if you wish to know reality, that flux which Platonism, in its strange belief that only the immutable is excellent, has always spurned; turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing which rationalism has always loaded with abuse. - This, you see, is exactly the opposite remedy from that of looking forward into the absolute, which our idealistic contemporaries prescribe. It violates our mental habits, being a kind of passive and receptive listening quite contrary to that effort to react noisily and verbally on everything, which is our usual intellectual pose.
This is yet another instance where James sounds so relevant today. Likewise, the conclusion of the lecture nails the problem of intellectualization to the exclusion of experience - again, a fundamental error of Fundamentalism.
We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson calls them, comes very hard. It is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason. But difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way, I believe, to the possession of reality.
Likewise, in the concluding lecture, James challenges both naturalism and dualistic theism as missing the basic lessons of experience.
One may therefore plead, I think, that Fechner’s ideas [about the reality of religious experience] are not without direct empirical verification. There is at any rate one side of life which would be easily explicable if those ideas were true, but of which there appears no clear explanation so long as we assume either with naturalism that human consciousness is the highest consciousness there is, or with dualistic theism that there is a higher mind in the cosmos, but that it is discontinuous with our own.
James continues with some ideas that sound to me very much like Open Theism - a viewpoint that has fascinated me for some time, in part for the very reason James notes.
The line of least resistance, then, as it seems to me, both in theology and in philosophy, is to accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power in in knowledge, or in both at once. These, I need hardly tell you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with God; and the monistic perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds operating in distans upon conceptual substitutes for him alone.
That idea that in practice our active experience of God is more like James describes it resonates. And not just my experience either - the whole freaking Old Testament (and much of the New!) treats God this way, as somehow bound by time, subject to changing his mind, and surprised by the way the world unfolds. The “absolute” as James puts it, is really more of a Greek concept forced on our theology by those “professorial minds” dealing with conceptual substitutes for the reality of experience. James goes on:
Compromise and mediation are inseparable from the pluralistic philosophy. Only monistic dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses, “It is either that or nothing; take it or leave it just as it stands.” The type of monism prevalent at Oxford has kept this steep and brittle attitude, partly through the proverbial academic preference for thin and elegant logical solutions, partly from a mistaken notion that the only solidly grounded basis for religion was along those lines.
James wraps up the final lecture with a call to incorporate pluralistic experience into philosophy as an alternative to pure intellectualism.
Owing possibly to the fact that Plato and Aristotle, with their intellectualism, are the basis of philosophic study here, the Oxford brand of transcendentalism seems to me to have confined itself to exclusively to thin logical considerations, that would hold good in all conceivable worlds, worlds of an empirical constitution entirely different from ours. It is as if the actual peculiarities of the world that is were entirely irrelevant to the content of truth. But they cannot be irrelevant; and the philosophy of the future must imitate the sciences in taking them more and more elaborately into account.
This is a call to theology too. The Fundamentalist project is exactly that: treating the actual world we live in as “entirely irrelevant to the content of truth.” But that is unsustainable. Truth is what we experience, not what we declare it to be. This goes back to a disagreement I had with my former pastor, who believes that “what works” is irrelevant to “what is right.” While the fact that something “works” in some sense doesn’t make it true, when something obviously does not work, it is by definition not true. The fact that I can build a bookshelf based on a flat earth hypothesis does not make a flat earth the truth. But the fact that you cannot build the Golden Gate Bridge without taking into account the earth’s curvature makes it clear that a flat earth is not true at all. When we realize that something is not working - and especially when it is not working for people different from us - we need to consider that what we claim is “true” may in fact not be, and is certainly not true in every situation.
James includes three appendices to his lecture series, consisting of three articles on related topics previously published. These are actually pretty fascinating as exercises in philosophical thinking. The first is “The Thing and its Relation,” and looks at the intellectualist idea that things are either all related or all unrelated. There are a couple of great lines in it. For example:
Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at all.
There is also a great analogy for why a single one thing can have multiple relations. James asks us to imagine a piece of paper sitting on his desk, with a pen on top of that. The paper can both be “on the table” and “under the pen as I write” without being two pieces of paper. The relationships are distinct, but the object is a unity. And we experience that unity along with the various pluralistic relationships at the same time.
Also good is the article entitled “The Experience of Activity,” where James argues that activity - change, motion, etc. - are all experienced as a continual sensation, not a series of different points along the way. In it, he also notes the problem with claiming that reality as experienced is somehow just a veneer on a deeper principle.
To treat this offhand as the bare illusory surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of thinking, only animism in another shape. You explain your given fact by your “principle,” but the principle itself, when you look clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one and only kind of fact in your mind, considering causality, can never get.
There is so much more in this book, of course. These are just things I jotted down as I read it, but I truly found the rest of it to be fascinating. While James isn’t the easiest to read, he is pretty lucid for a philosopher, and certainly less obtuse than many writers of his time. In fact, I was surprised how relevant so much of his ideas seem these days. The conversation he was having with both the materialists and the intellectualists of his day seem in retrospect to be prescient as to the Fundamentalist Catastrophe, the unnecessary break between science and religion, and the way that Fundamentalists would take the worst intellectual practices of the Enlightenment and combined them with a rejection of experience and reality.
James argues for a more holistic approach to philosophy, theology, and psychology. In practice, experience drives our beliefs - and indeed should. Our beliefs should be useful to us - they should match with reality, and make our lives and the lives of others better. Beliefs were created to serve humanity, not the other way around. (Hey, I think someone famous said that about the sabbath!) We use ideals and ideas and abstractions to help us understand and predict things, but experience came first. And improving our ideas requires not that we think harder, but that we incorporate additional and better information that we gain through experience.
I am definitely looking forward to reading more of William James in the future, probably starting with Pragmatism.
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Just for fun, I ran across this article about William and Henry James. They appear to have gotten on okay with each other, despite not being into each other’s areas of brilliance themselves. Particularly hilarious is William’s description of Henry’s late writing style. And Henry’s wry claim to have had difficulty understanding William’s philosophy.
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