In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable hypothesis. Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to be.
—William James, On Hegelisms
Intro
William James lived during a time of upheaval. A confluence of forces found in the Civil War, the rise of industrialism, a challenge of Darwinianism to old forms of seemingly dogmatic faith, and waves of new immigration situated him at the crossroads of science, religion, and philosophy. This portrayed him as a therapeutic thinker whose central mission was to make sense of these competing worldviews that troubled individual minds and the culture at large. He was, after all, America’s most influential philosopher at one point in time. Reflected in his thought is an American experience; his leading significance is in a “pragmatism” best fit for a young, pluralistic, action-orientated demos. James’s pragmatism offered a faith which rejected the absolute pessimism or optimism offered previously in favor of the belief that the world is changeable for the better through human effort. Specifically, that in the face of totalizing worldviews, the actual existence of evil and ambiguity is an integral part of what makes faith significant in the first place. He also provided a philosophy which opposed rigid, “monolithic” systems of thought. Embracing a “pluralistic universe” where multiple perspectives could coexist (as long as they cashed out in practical benefits), this mirrored the American ideal (if not always the practice) of integrating diverse peoples and ideas into a New Atlantis. Conceived of this way, James can be said to have been a key architect of a distinctively American culture of thought. He championed an intellectual style which was accessible, grounded in the concrete modes of life, and deliberately spoke to a broad public sociality. Philosophy for him was framed as a vital set of tools for addressing life’s concrete problems, as opposed to a technical puzzle for specialists, or in other words, philosophy is “what works” for individuals and society in navigating a world which they face. His ideas were what in part became embedded in America’s conscious self-conception, from progressive education, to the experimental ethos of the New Deal, to literature. All in all, he is the defining philosopher of American spirit during America’s transition to modernity. Therefore, James’s pragmatism is not to be understood as just a theory of truth, but as a therapeutic tool for a particular America in the past which opposed any perceived imposition - be it dogmatic religion, scientific materialism, or the Absolute Idealism of Hegel - that neglected the concrete, immediate ‘precepts’ of being, in favor of abstract, totalizing explanations. His entire philosophy can be seen as a project to rescue and vindicate the “given” percept.
The mission to rescue the precept surely wasn’t an abstract academic choice for James (as it would be contrary to his philosophy of pragmatism), it was an outgrowth of a personal history encountered in the neglected given itself. Two foundational experiences were what compelled his project to take the shape that it did. The first is a Swedenborgian upbringing that treated spiritual reality as a concrete fact. The second is a mystical encounter under nitrous oxide that delivered an overwhelming “tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination” where “every opposition… vanished in a higher unity” and “the ego and its objects… are one”. Considering he was the son of a devout follower of Emanuel Swedenborg, Henry James Sr., familial inheritance can also be included in the former. Swedenborg presented his visions as detailed empirical reports; a descriptive science of the afterlife, angelic societies, and the correspondence between spiritual and natural laws. Growing up in this environment, it lends one to treat spiritual reality as a concrete dimension of experience to be investigated and described, and the attitude which incites an aversion to systems that would dismiss certain phenomena as an illusion. Thus, his later philosophical mission to expand empiricism to its radical limits, embracing all that is experienced, can be seen as a secularization and philosophic grounding of a Swedenborgian sensibility absorbed in youth.
The personal experimentation with nitrous oxide inspired an illumination in him, not unlike those who, in modern day, who take psychedelics and come away with some or other profound realization of the world. The most fundamental oppositions of subject and object, self and the world, and thinking and being dissolved in a “higher unity” as a direct overwhelming precept of unity- a raw, undeniable feeling of coalescence that was beamed right into his consciousness. For a committed empiricist and critic of Hegelianism, this was a disorientating event. It presented a brute fact of experience that his existing intellectual systems could not explain away. Such an experience became the test case for his emerging philosophy in asking, “how could thought do justice to such a powerful, noetic, yet at the same time transient and ineffable moment of experienced being?”. His entire project in The Varieties of Religious Experience and the development of Radical Empiricism can be read as an attempt to build a philosophical system which can accommodate this kind of pre and post [Hegelian] conceptual revelation without reducing it in some way to either pathology, some lower order of something purely logical, or dismissing it outright as nonsense.
His commitment to the concrete precept led James into the dimly lit parlors of parapsychological research. Active participation in seances and his foundational role in establishing the American Society for Psychical Research are the rational extension of his radical empiricism, despite what some might claim. For James, reports of telepathy, clairvoyance, mediumship, etc. were empirical claims about the human experience which demanded rigorous investigation. Even famously studying the medium Leonora Piper for years, becoming convinced that certain phenomena, particularly telepathy, pointed to genuine, if poorly understood, connections between minds that transcended the ordinary channels of sense, he went as far as to claim that the future will corroborate the existence of telepathy. This work exemplifies a core philosophical courage in following the data of experience wherever it leads, even to the fringes of accepted science, and to defend the integrity of the precept.
Note: Another famous figure associated with therapy also did research on telepathy: Sigmund Freud.
Primacy
Having established James’s life and experience and briefly giving an overview of his pragmatism, we can now begin to describe the novelty of his view. Often grounded under the banner of “pragmatism”, James’s system (which is more accurately termed Radical Empiricism) diverges from the “pragmatism” of his peers. For Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, or pragmaticism, as he later called it, the meaning of a concept lay in the conceivable practical effects of its object, a rule for clarifying thought and inquiry within a community of scientists. The focus of Peirce was in formal logic and semiotics, depriving truth of its grounding and placing it onto the opinion of an infinite scientific community. Later, positivistic interpretations would reduce pragmatism to the embarrassing “verification principle”, where “what works” is synonymous with “what is empirically measurable”. However, for James, pragmatism was never simply a theory of meaning or a handmaiden to laboratory science. His pragmatism was the servant of the full stream of immediate experience. The “practical” and “what works” is judged in the far more expansive criterion of a belief or concept being validated by its ability to do justice to and enrich the content put forth to consciousness. Does a belief in free will, in the spiritual significance of a mystical event, or in the moral texture of the universe help an individual connect more vitally, act more courageously, and make richer sense of the palpable, “jolting” quality of life? If so, it has pragmatic truth. Consequently, where other pragmatisms might dismiss religious or moral experiences as subjective epiphenomena, James’s radical empiricism demanded that they be included as constitutive parts of the world to be explained. At core, James’s philosophy of pragmatism is the defense of the dignity and ontological weight of the precept, known as raw and indeterminate observed being, against any system that would reduce or exclude it. This commitment finds its completion in his critique of Hegelianism (or rather the Hegelians of his day). James readily acknowledged the shared philosophical desire to show that the ideal is real, his objection was to the methodological violence perceived in Hegel’s system. The actual delivery of reality to consciousness is not a smooth, logical emanation, but something far more primal and disruptive. “The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us”, James writes. “Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous—are the adjectives by which we are tempted to describe it.” This “jolt” is the hallmark of the pure precept, the unmediated givenness of things before the intellect goes to work. Hegelianism, for James, in achieving its elegant and totalizing rationality, must “butcher” a great part of the world’s contents, forcibly relegating the qualitative richness of immediate experience to the dust-bin labelled Maya, only to be subjugated to the Hegelian Concept.
This is the crux of James’s departure from what he would term “monolithic” idealism. He does not deny the human drive for unity or ideal comprehension, instead insisting that such unity must be discovered within the concrete floe of relations between percepts, rather than being imposed upon them by a logical schema. The ideal for him is the connective tissue found in the “great continua” of space, time, and personal consciousness that provide a “common table” for the world’s diverse elements. This leads to his famous pluralistic metaphor: The universe is not an Absolute, but a “Republican Banquet” where the myriad “qualities of being respect one another’s personal sacredness” while partaking in shared relations. In this model, the precept retains its “sacred” integrity. James’s pragmatism then is the tool to navigate a precept-laden world, making it work for man. It is a pragmatism where truth successfully connects one percept to another within the spectacle of experience.
The Precept’s Destiny
James’s critique of Hegelianism correctly identifies the violence of a philosophy that, in its drive for total thinking immanence and coherence, must dissolve the immediate, indeterminate data of consciousness as a moment of logical system. In defending this realm, James performs the invaluable service of forcing philosophy to contend with the primacy of the percept, the unmediated encounter that is the necessary starting point for all knowledge, and what all systems of knowledge must confront. Rightly protesting against a rationalism that would dismiss the concrete, qualitative being of the world, as an overcoming by some higher logic or principle, his rebellion is justified and essential.
However, for all its rebellious power, this pragmatism inverts the Hegelian “neglect” and fails to provide an account of the very precept it seeks to defend by asserting the primacy of the precept over the concept. By situating the percept’s validity within a pluralistic psychological economy of what “works” for the individual, he inadvertently reduces it. In his system, the percept is a terminal point; it is a brute and opaque fact whose meaning is determined by its subsequent utility in the stream of subjective experience. While its reality is confirmed by moral and practical value, its intrinsic ontological significance remains less than unexplored. It is externally-determined and unfree. The flaw of this perspective sees that precept and concept are not two independent entities, one is primary, and one is secondary. They are inseparable poles of a unified generative/creative act. The concept is not applied to the precept from the outside. It is the active inward force through which the percept’s latent meaning is awakened and realized. Green is not intelligible as “foliage” because of a practical association, it becomes intelligible because the spiritual activity of thinking actively brings the idea of the plant into relationship with the sensory impression; in the act of thought, concepts are arrived at and realized as the unifying principle which brings coherence to a manifold of sense impression. Therefore, James is right that Hegel’s system, in its majestic sweep, can trample the particularity of the precept. But he is wrong to believe the precept can stand alone as self-sufficient. By making the precept primary, he leaves it fundamentally unintelligible on its own terms. He defends its existence, but at the same time severs it from the very power that gives it meaning.
On a final note, the defining truth of William James lies in his unshakeable commitment to an expansive reality. James’s radical empiricism performs the essential work of shattering the idealist philosopher’s veto on what constitutes legitimate experience. By insisting that the full spectrum of the “given” - including but not limited to moral urgency, telepathy, and sense perception - he establishes the percept in all its varieties as philosophically inviolable. There is a transformation of the immediate, indeterminate being of the world brought to consciousness from a problem to be solved, into a mandate for any true ontology to actually confront and connect with on unbiased terms. This radical empiricism finds a strong alliance with the precept of Steiner, who asserts that the immediate presentation of the world, whether it be in a leaf, or a thought, is not an illusion to be explained away by the mineralistic and natural sciences, but the content of which is the starting point of true knowledge of things. The concrete, then, is not physical. It is the total, rich content of encounter, before it is infringed upon by theory. It is quite admirable that the pragmatic insistence on the concrete is not entirely wrong to the extent that it honors the sovereignty of the “moment of truth”. What any given thing is supposed to do is found in its concrete being-in-the-world. Any declared intention or pre-existing theory is washed away by a radical fidelity to the observable fact of the matter, and in fact this “fact” is proof of the concept in question. Likewise, the precept is the output of a deeper ideality or system, and in order to understand that system (whether it is the thinking of Nature, or the thinking of Spirit), an indispensability of the output must be established. The defense of such a moment takes the form of a foundational element of the American philosophic character; William James is the pragmatic spirit insistent on the authority of the concrete, and oriented toward truths borne of action and proven on their own merits. Therefore, the significance to be extracted from James is in the imperative which seeks comprehension by first humbling oneself towards what is given, for only then does one earn the right to speak on the truth of a matter.
Header: The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins (1875)