S t r e a m s o f W i l l i a m J a m e s · 2014. 3. 10. · self in unisson with the cosmic inner...

The Newsletter of William James SocietyVolume 2 • Issue 2 • Summer 2000

o fW i l l i a m J a m e s

S t r e a m s

Advisory Board:

Jason Gary HornChair, Humanities Division, Gordon College

Jonathan LevinAssoc. Professor of English, Columbia University

Frank PajaresProfessor, Education Division, Emory University

William James in Brazil, 1865

Advisory Board:D. Micah Hester

Asst. Prof. of Biomedical Ethics, School of Medicine,Mercer University

Jason Gary HornChair, Humanities Division,Gordon College

Jonathan LevinAssoc. Professor of English,Columbia University

Frank PajaresProf., Education Division,Emory University

John ShookAssist. Prof. of Philosophy, Oklahoma State University

The Newsletter of William James SocietyVolume 2 • Issue 2 • Summer 2000

Randall H. Albright, Editor423 Marlborough St. • Boston, MA 02115 • USAe-mail = [email protected]/societies/william_james.htm

S t r e a m so fW i l l i a m J a m e s

Table of Contents

William James Society WebSite ............................... inside cover

by Randall Albright

Polysemiality, Style, and Arationality...................................... 1

by Michel Weber

A View of Yosemite.................................................................. 5

by William James

Cards from California.......................................................... 6-7

from William James

Simultaneous Worlds .............................................................. 8

quotes from William James

The Meaning of Truth draft manuscript page.......................... 9

by William James, later released in book form in 1909

Nørretranders and James ...................................................... 10

by Randall Albright

My Stroll with William James and Jacques Barzun ............... 11

by David Dannenbaum

A Writer for a Common Reader ............................................ 14

by Patrizia Vallascas

Orvieto’s Well........................................................................ 17


Truth and the Fender Stratocaster ........................................ 18

By Greg Stone

An Advocate ......................................................................... 19

by Greg Stone

WJ and the Pragmatic Method: Potent and Plural................ 20

by Chris Peterson

Discovering James................................................................. 22

by Phil Oliver

Membership Information ...................................................... 22

© 2000 William James Society

c/o Randall Albright • 423 Marlborough Street • Boston, MA 02115 • USA

e-mail = [email protected] • http://world.std.com/~albright/james.html

www.pragmatism.org/societies/william_james.htm

Streams of William James

is the newsletter of William James Society, a non-profit organization in theCommonwealth of Massachusetts sponsored by Randall Albright and an Advisory Board. The con-tributions to this newsletter are copyrighted by each creator of the text or visual imagery, exceptfor the following:

•

WJ taken in Brazil after attack of small pox (standing)

and

p. 16 from The Meaning of Truthmanuscript

[both fMS Am 1092] are used by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard Univer-sity, and Bay James.

• The letters and cards are printed from a copy of the originals provided by and used with per-mission of Bay James that were sent from William to his son Alexander.

•

U.S. Cavalry Officer in Campaign Dress

(circa 1890) watercolor by Frederic Remington isused by permission of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.

All rights reserved.

William James Society WebSite

by Randall Albright

John Shook, WebMaster of thewww.pragmatism.orgis currently also running the official

William James Society

WebSite:www.pragmatism.org/societies/william_james.htm

Anybody can currently do the following:• download a version of our current Adobe

Acrobat flier;• click on the subpage for

Streams of Will-iam James

and see the Table of Contents frompublished issues; and

• click on a subpage for

Membership

.

I would like to see a more extensive Web pres-ence for the Society in the near future. My owngoals include non-profit incorporation, whichwould then allow people to join the Society witha credit card through a “secure site” on theWebSite, sale of T-shirts based on either theback cover of Vol. 1, #1 or the front cover of Vol.2, #1 through the secure site to raise money forfuture activities, and creation of feedback formsabout the WebSite or the newsletter. Other sug-gestions are welcome.

Anyone that is interested in helping withWeb development, please contact both Johnand me at: and. Thanks!

Polysemiality, Style, and Arationality by Michel Weber

Polysemiality, Style, and Arationalityby Michel Weber

Our first contributions have culminated in the the-sis that James’ pure experience structures itself in acontiguum (see “James’ Contiguism of ‘Pure Experi-ence’”1). Three major heuristic mile-stones haveunderlined our argument—the concepts of polysemial-ity, style, and arationality—; let us now examine thisAriadne’s clew for itself.

I.A polysemial concept—or “polyseme”—is simply a

concept that carries various meanings. Instead of hav-ing a one-to-one relationship between the signifier andthe signified, there is a one-to-many correspondence.One can speak of the leg of a human being, of a horse,of a table, or of a cooked lamb lying on one’s plate,without generating much confusion. Polysemiality isindeed a very common—and harmless—feature of nat-ural language as it is currently used (i.e., in everydaylife): the contextualization of the actual utterances usu-ally prevents any difficulties. But in philosophy, polyse-miality requires some argument to ground itsharmlessness, not speaking of its possible usefulness.The difficulty here, by definition, is far more abstract:the current contextual use of semantic associationswithin one single language has to be broadened toquestion the semantic power of language itself: howdoes it make sense, signify, direct our sight towardsfully fledged concreteness while granting at the sametime the possibility of abstract modelizations. This ismade obvious with the help, e.g., of comparative stud-ies: whereas some natural language use the word“salmon” to designate a whole set of fishes sharing amore or less obvious “family resemblance”, the sameset is carefully discriminated in another language—say, the language of an ethnic group relying heavily onfishing for its own survival, or marine biologists. Thephilosopher has to question why the referential modethat is fully acceptable in one case, is not in the otherone—and the answer cannot be anymore purely prag-matic (in the non-technical sense of the word: what

works here does not work there for obvious contingentreasons).

We have seen that the concept of “pure experi-ence” is factually used by James to signify various com-plementary experiential facets; the history ofphilosophy is full of similar examples, the most famousone being perhaps the polysemy exhibited by theGreek concept of “logos”. Without claiming for exhaus-tiveness or even systematicity, let us pin point the fol-lowing disseminated meanings2: (i) anything said orwritten, story or narrative; (ii) discussion, debate, the-sis; (iii) cause, reason, argument, to give an explana-tion for something; (iv) calculus, measure, number,correspondence, relation, proportion ; (v) worth,esteem, reputation; (vi) general principle or rule, uni-versal order; (vii) the faculty of reason, holding a con-versation with oneself; (viii) definition, idea, formulaeexpressing the essential nature of the facts, the truth ofthe matter. Each occurrence of the concept carries,willy nilly, the entire semantic nebulae, thereby dis-closing the basic Greek ontological horizon. Now, par-ticular speculations have both exploited that brutewealth of meaning and enriched it to meet the system-atic requirements of philosophy. For instance, in thecase of Heraclitus, the technical meaning of “logos” ismainly linked with the idea of measure, calculus andproportion. When used to understand the Whole, itsketches an harmonious universal picture. Further-more, since the logos that frames everything alsoinhabits the human mind, it is not a mystery that therationality of the latter understands the order of theformer. There is a coalescence of the concrete and theabstract. On the top of it, the metaphor of the “univer-sal fire” reminds us that the concept designates theontological ground of beings as well as its immanentlaw of unrest. Reality’s mode of being and becoming islogical (“kata logon”). To understand the logos, or toact with measure, is thus nothing less than putting one-self in unisson with the cosmic inner activity.

Reading James confronts the philosopher with aparticular form of the hermeneutical problem: how tomake sense out of texts that champion polysemiality?The wager that has given the impetus to our interpreta-tion is fairly simple: to give a true speculative weight toeach occurrences of the debated concept (“pure expe-rience”), and this requires first the gathering togetherof similar semantic occurrences under a given heading(“subjective”, “objective”, “unitive”), and second thesystematization of the meanings organically linkingthese various headings—with the result that whatappeared point-blank as a mere multiplicity totally blur-

1. Streams of William James, Vol. I, N°3. Errata: please read, (i) inthe text: “asubstantialism” instead of “a substantials”; “into theontological” instead of “into ethnological”; “involving no real mod-ification of either” instead of “involving no of either”; “analogon”instead of “analog on”; “naive” instead of “nave” —and (ii) in thefootnotes: Werner Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze. Gesprachein Umkreis ser Atomphysik, Munchen, Piper Verlag, 1959; KitaroNishida, Zen no Kenkyu, 1911); Cf. Keiji Nishitani, NishidaKitaro...

2. Cf., e.g., William Keith Chambers Guthrie, A History of Greek Phi-losophy. Volume I. The Earlier Presocratics and the Pithagoreans,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 420-424.

Streams of William James • Volume 2 • Issue 2 • Summer 2000 Page 1


ring the supposed univocality of the concept, is now atight web made of the different semantic guises of thesame signifier. Let us further notice that such hier-archized network makes sense, properly speaking, ifand only if it generates a movement of overtaking, i.e.,zeros in on some experience. In other words, a poly-seme acts as a semantic cluster focused on one privi-leged experience synthesising “in the flesh” all thepartial meanings constituting the cluster. There is amovement of overtaking, from the hierarchy of the var-ious meanings to a “primordial” experience that is theauthor’s one, as purified (universalized, i.e., rational-ized) from its personal contingencies as possible. Thatraw experience is, quite obviously, richer than the par-tial converging meanings: it embodies the ontologicalexcess, or surplus, that lies at the centre of the cluster,constituting its nucleus. Solely the beatings of thisexperiential heart can nourish the hierarchized net-work’s dynamism.

Polysemiality occurs at the conceptual or lexicallevel. Of course, communication does not happen withthe occasional uttering of single words, whose intrinsicrichness would be sufficient to trigger the manifesta-tion of an entire worldview. (This being perhaps thecase in most animal forms of communication.) A simi-lar semantic overtaking mechanism takes place at thepropositional or syntactical level. It is embodied bywhat Quine calls the “interanimation of sentences”.3

The discursive concatenation of sentences introducesa semantic vitality that opens the text to the concrete(or at least to a “meta” level). There is, in other words,a prismatic virtue of propositional chains that explainshow intentionality imposes itself so to speak intersti-tially.4 We have here the perfect transition with ournext step.

II.So far, we have evoked the conceptual and proposi-

tional levels; there is, from our simplified perspective,one last overlapping level: the level of the categorealsystem as a whole and of its exposition. It thus remainsto be seen how the peculiar use of the polysemial andinteranimative potentials generates what can be calledthe “philosophical style” of an author. Two main fea-tures can characterize James’ style: circumambulationand constructive discrimination. Uphill, we find his

radical empiricism—every single experience shouldfind its interpretation within the speculative system—;and downhill, his non dogmatism—he does not pretendto impose a definitive scheme, only the best possibleone given the present civilization’s state of affairs. Thepoint is not to push rationality to the hilt, but to seehow far we can go without endangering the meaning ofexistence. James, like Plato or Whitehead, is willingonly to tell “the most likely tale”. The tale’s complexityis due to its innumerable experiential characters; itssimplicity lies in the ultimacy of experience itself. Radi-cal empiricism and panexperientialism are definitelynot accidentally related.

We call circumambulation the fact that the unfold-ing of his texts is not linear but circular and converg-ing: if he constantly carves waves of new concepts andstarts again and again the argument, each time from a(slightly) different perspective, it is in the hope thatthe reader will come each time closer to his personalintuitive vision. The only thing that tempers this con-ceptual inflation is precisely the polysemiality of hisconcepts and the interanimative movement he mas-terly imposes on them. Moreover, James continuallywavers between phenomenological descriptions andrational requirements, between “knowledge byacquaintance” and “knowledge about”.

Constructive discrimination refers to the holisticway he carves his concepts: the motto of true specula-tive philosophers is indeed “to distinguish in order tobetter unite”. (Destructive discrimination would be apartition of concreteness forgetful of the primacy ofthe organic whole.) Hence the idea of an included mid-dle: bare disjunctions mislead thought by suggestingrigid categories destructive to the cosmic fluency. “Ofcourse this sounds self-contradictory, —Jamesremarks—but as the immediate fact don’t sound at all,but simply are, until we conceptualize and name themvocally, the contradiction results only from the concep-tual or discursive form being substituted for the realform.”5 Nature has nothing like static watertight com-partments, and since the whole point of speculativephilosophy is to take the risk of adequacy, what wehave to look for are “fluid concepts” (Bergson’s term).It goes without saying that such plasticity is preciselywhat is offered by polysemial concepts.

The two principles reinforce each other. Construc-tive discriminative conceptual carving is practisedwithin the overall circumambulatory impulse; and theconverging movement towards concreteness but-tresses itself on the repeated creation of holistic con-

3. Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object, Cambridge, Massa-chusetts - London, The Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPress, 1960. See also Ivor Armstrong Richards, The Philosophy ofRhetoric. The Mary Flexner Lectures on the Humanities III, Deliv-ered at Bryn Mawr College, February and March 1936, NewYork, Oxford University Press, 1965.

4. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde. Texte établi etprésenté par Claude Lefort, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1992, pp.46-47 and 61-62.

5. William James, A Pluralistic Universe. Hibbert Lectures atManchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy,Edited by Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Introductionby Richard J. Bernstein, Cambridge (Massachusetts), HarvardUniversity Press, 1977, p. 121.



cepts. To multiply the polysemic concepts, to put theminto networks, to hierarchize these networks and tooperationalize them through adventurous stylisticinnovations intend to preserve the ontological surplus;it is the baroque response given by the philosopher tothe redundance, overabundance and even wasteful-ness of nature.

III.Polysemiality, interanimation and style have been

described as parts of a global convergent movementtowards the bare factuality of experience. The pointwas to suggest how language can open itself to some-thing that remains, to a significant extent, foreign to it.Asking how does language prismatize the ever-chang-ing complexity of reality is to ask how its intentionalityworks, or: how, after all, can it be a prism—or a vec-tor—rather than a screen? That latter question is not,as we shall soon see, purely rhetorical: language canbe used in a moebian, self-referential, way that short-circuits its constitutive intentionality. It is time now toname the experiential pole that lures the three overlap-ping mechanisms evoked. Quite often philosophershave claimed that experience is purely rational, or, onthe contrary, that it is intrinsically reluctant to a totalrationalization. The concept of “a-rationality” enablesus to make these incisive distinctions more supple.However, it is fruitful only if one reads in it the conflu-ence of two meanings.

On the one hand, the prefix “a-” displays that weare talking about something incommensurable withreason. The distinction between rational, irrational andarational (introduced in our previous discussion) ishere enlightening: since the immediacy of lived experi-ence is such that its enjoyment will necessarily remainbeyond any rational system, it cannot be simply quali-fied as irrational (a contingent judgment). To improvethe applicability of our trinomial, a supplemental dis-tinction can be introduced between rational and rea-sonable, i.e., between to convince and to persuade: onecan be completely convinced by an argument, i.e., rec-ognize its pure rationality, and nevertheless not beingpersuaded at all of its immediate implications for one-self. In such a case, the universal validity of the argu-ment is acknowledged, but it is rejected on the basis ofits irrelevance.

On the other hand, the presence of the term “-rational” insinuates that there is a minimal rationalexpressibility of that foreignty, that there is an “adher-ence” of experience to reason—or better: that a tal-ented use of reason can put the reader on the road ofthe ineffable. The dialectic of the three levels of inten-tionality exposed earlier strikes back at this stage, car-rying with itself an additional twofold difficulty. One, ithas been said that a given language is simply a particu-lar way of “cutting” reality, of imposing tags on the per-

petual flux of events that is disclosed by sense-experience; how far is this a fair epistemo-linguisticaccount? Two, could it be the case that these linguisticcategories are somewhat “prior” to the categories ofthought?

To sketch an answer to these correlated puzzlesrequires a definition of language. Let us claim that alanguage is an organic system of signs investing thephonic substance with the intention to signify—andespecially to communicate these significations—bydrawing sets’ outlines through the opacity of events.6 Aword belonging to a natural language, or a philosophi-cal concept stratified in a categoreal scheme, does notreproduce the concrete eventfulness, but classifies it bynaming some of its recognizable features. It is thusmore cautious to speak of “filtering through classifica-tion” rather than mere “cutting out”. Language rein-vents the world, it does not picture it. With regard tothe possible determination (in the strong sense) ofthought by language (cf. Sapir-Whorf), no decisive evi-dence seems to be available. For instance, Aristotle’sontological categories have been hypotheticallydeduced from some characteristics of the Greek lan-guage (cf. Trendelenburg), but such a feat of skill isquite obviously reductionistic. Discussing that issue,Derrida shows, among other things, that if the expres-sion of philosophical thought heavily relies upon natu-ral language, the philosopher implements choices,reappropriations, and conceptual creation.7 What wecan say does not totally circumscribe or organise whatwe can think; first-class speculations always stretchlanguage in a very imaginative way.

In conclusion, one last point has to be mentioned.Directly relevant to this paradoxical a-rational bipolar-ity is the question of the status of presuppositions inphilosophical systems. Presuppositions are the condi-tions of possibility of the institution of the speculativeendeavours; now, it can be shown that they are neitherentirely explainable nor justifiable within the consid-ered system.8 To make explicit its own presupposi-tions, a scheme should be capable of a total self-reflexiveness, i.e., each presupposition should becomea meaningful proposition within the scheme. Alas, byreason of the structure of experience itself, this is

6. Definition adapted from Claude Hagège, L'homme de paroles. Con-tribution linguistique aux sciences humaines, Paris, Gallimard1986, pp. 131, 143, 202.

7. See esp. Emile Benveniste, “Catégories de pensée et catégories delangue”, in Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, Paris, Gallimard,1966, pp. 63-74); and Jacques, Derrida, “Le supplément de cop-ule”, in Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit,1972, pp. 209-246.

8. Jean Ladrière, “Langage scientifique et langage spéculatif”, RevuePhilosophique de Louvain, tome 69, n° 2, 1971, pp. 93-132 & 250-282.



definitively impossible. From this perspective, what wehave called “arationality” is the opening of the originalhorizon of comprehension, it is the ontological attrac-tor that makes possible the transgression of the imme-diate giveness systematically operated by speculativephilosophy. It is the place of a pristine donation, trulyreachable only through “pure experience” (or “sympa-thy”, or “metaphysical illumination”, or “theoria”...),but whose structure is thinkable according to therequirements of reason.

IV.The implications of our linguistico-ontological pil-

grimage are various. It is be especially interesting tosay a quick word of the differences existing betweenthe “speculative” and the “scientific” use of language.Although the distinction between “continental” and“analytic” philosophy is actually tremendously difficultto manipulate, from the perspective of the scanning ofthe meaning levels previously envisaged, one couldcautiously argue the following. With regard to poly-seme: the former is not bothered by polysemiality—iteven actively uses it—, whereas the latter adopts asone of its major goal the logical destruction of everypossible ambiguity. To the question “how to read textsthat champion polysemiality?”, they answer that thesetexts—if they mean anything at all—will speak onlywhen straightened by logical analysis. With regard tointeranimation: according to the analytical stream, thegoal is the rigid articulation of purely transparent con-cepts; there is no need for a mysterious synergybetween ambiguous concepts. With regard to style: cir-cumambulation is replaced by linearisation, and con-structive discrimination by destructive discrimination.Uphill, radical empiricism becomes pure empiricism;and non dogmatism normative imperialism. Accord-ingly, arationality is forgotten to the profit of irrational-ity on the point of rationalization.

Each linguistic usage has its pros and cons; insu-perable hermeneutical problems occurs only when onephalanx intends to impose its usage to the other. Spec-ulative language is not glossolalia, it makes the most ofwhat one has to transform the emotional vividness ofexperience into the concreteness of a shared world.The ideal of purification, clarification, pure transpar-ency through analysis (if not mathematization) is ofcourse coming from the successful scientific paradigmof the 19th century. Science strives for univocity, in itsmathematico-experimental discourses, as well as in itspossible global utterings. Having said this, we shouldnot forget these two phalanxes have common roots inthe emergence of Greek philosophy, that managed tokeep room for physical and metaphysical mathematicallucidity.

Natural language is intrinsically ambiguous andintentional; it is far from being a pure logical entity, and

indeed, its countless equivocities have been very oftendisparaged. Of course, it is worth distinguishing thefaculty of language (that can actualize itself in gestures,postures, screams, etc.) from orality, and orality fromliterature, and, within the literary corpus, prose frompoetry... (A Porphyrian tree that can be reformed andcomplexified as one could wish). The same linguisticconstraints do not hang over living speech andweighted writing. The former is truly eventful, its con-stitutive temporality explains its linearity (that can beof course modulated through repetitions and otherrhetorical patterns). This paper has been mainly con-cerned with the latter, which is like the systematicthunder after the experiential lightning. Writing facili-tates reflection, analysis, abstractions of all sorts. Mak-ing possible a very technical and variegated use ofstyle, writing somewhat drags language away from tem-porality and linearity. Its multifarious semantic poten-tial are directly correlated with the stylistic managingof polysemiality and interanimation. In other words,out of the three degrees of freedom that have beensketched on their way towards concreteness, stylestands out as the catalyst of the semantic process.Solely style can make the reader fall under the author’sspell and thereby lead him/her at the outskirts of anintuitive vision that remains nevertheless private. Theintentionality opening the propositional entanglementto the world shields language from the danger of bar-ren coherence. For instance, dictionary does not, prop-erly speaking, define anything; it is just a tissue ofmutual cross-references. To the contrary, the efficacityof language comes from its self-effacing ability in frontof what it lures us. The organization of a conceptualnetwork revealing the ontological surplus asks a pecu-liar gesture made of invocatory repetitions and daringcrosscheckings; eventually, it is an art of the void thatis requested. That evocative capacity is a sort of implo-sive capacity: language has to die to give birth to mean-ing. If it remains there, like an apathetic screen,meaning has not been conveyed. The intuitive grasp-ing of the power of language is a nocturnal experiencethat sees the revelation of its faculty of making thingsrise from their absence. Semantic, the function of lan-guage is also apophantic, power of manifestation oftotal anthropo-cosmic experiences9.

—Michel Weber’s e-mail address [email protected]

9. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tubingen, Niemeyer, 1927, p. 33(on the concept of “apophansis”).


Streams of William James • Volume 2 • Issue 2 • Summer 2000

(enclosed with the card for Glacier Point at left)

Berkeley, Cal.Aug. 28- [18]98

Darling Old Cherubini:See how brave this girl and boy are

in the Yosemite Valley! I saw a moving sight the other

morning before breakfast in a littlehotel where I slept in the dusty fields.The young man of the house had shota little wolf called a coyote in the earlymorning. The heroic little animal layon the ground, with his big furry ears,and his clean white teeth, and his jollycheerful little body, but his brave littlelife was gone. It made me think howbrave all these living things are. Herelittle coyote was, without any clothesor house or books or anything, withnothing but his own naked self to payhis way with, and risking his life socheerfully — and losing it — just tosee if he could pick up a meal near thehotel. He was doing his Coyote-busi-ness like a hero, and you must do yourboy-business, and I my man-businessbravely too, or else we won’t be worthas much as that little coyote. Yourmother can find a picture of him inthose green books of animals, and Iwant you to copy it.

Your loving Dad.

Note: An interpretation of this letter exists on on p. 54-55in The Renewal of Literature, Emersonian Reflections byRichard Poirier (London and Boston: faber and faber, 1987)

—RHA

A View of Yosemiteby William James

Page 5


Cards from California

from William James

Dearest Tweedy — I am in California, 2000 miles away, and havebeen camping in the mountains with Mr. Bakewell and a guide namedJohn Sax. I rode a mule called Kelly, and later a horse named Chip-munk. The others were called Boston, Jake, and Chinkapin, which lastis named after a kind of bush that grows here, the Chinkapin bush. Thetrees are tremendous. When a dead one lies on the ground, a tall mancan’t see over the trunk, and if you walk along the top of it as it liesthere, it is as long a walk as from the hole between our hedge and thefence, to the Royce’s fence, or even longer. What do you think of that for atree? — Our horses stood with lank necks and hanging heads, and highpeaked saddles, with all sorts of things tied on to them, just like thehorses in Frederic Remington’s pictures, which you must learn to know.The stars at night were the same as your stars, & strange to say, seemedjust as near. Good bye dear.

—William James to his youngest son Alexander postmarked August 1898 (?) — RHA

WJ sent this with two business cards from San Francisco (see next page)

Frederic Remingtonby Randall Albright

This watercolor byFrederic Remington of aU.S. Cavalry Officer InCampaign Dress (circa1890) is an example ofthe sort of picture whichWJ had in mind when hewrote this note.


Simultaneous Worlds

quotes from William James

While I talk and the flies buzz, asea-gull catches a fish at the mouth ofthe Amazon, a tree falls in the Adiron-dack wilderness, a man sneezes inGermany, a horse dies in Tartary, andtwins are born in France.

—from a footnote in the “Necessary Truthsand the Effects of Experience” chapter,

The Princi-ples of Psychology

[1890] (1983 Harvard UP re-printedition) p. 1232

Note:

Frederick J. Ruf offers an interesting view of this quote in

The Creation of Chaos: William James and the StylisticMaking of a Disorderly World

(Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1991), p. 103

The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize witheach other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, ‘convergence of characters,’ as M.Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimina-tion. Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as char-acteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonize with this....

Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneouspossibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, andthe suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and mostelaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the massoffered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simplermaterial, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on hisblock of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different onesbeside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world ofeach of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos ofsensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently.

— William James, from “The Stream of Thought” chapter,

The Principles of Psychology

[1890] (1983 Harvard UPedition) p. 276-77


The Meaning of Truth draft manuscript page by William James, later released in book form in 1909


Nørretranders and James by Randall Albright

Nørretranders and James

by Randall Albright

In reading

The User Illusion

(Penguin 1999) by TorNørretranders, I am often struck by similarities with whatWilliam James talked about.

Nørretranders pays homage to

The Principles of Psy-chology,

which

“have a powerful contemporary ring, evenafter a hundred years. Against the background of the fer-tile period of the birth of psychology in the second half ofthe nineteenth century, James was able to describe a num-ber of facets of the human mind that behaviorism and pos-itivism removed from the psychological agenda for half acentury” (UI, 176).

Nørretranders defends Gestalt psychology, which“had a tough time of it during the domination of the behav-iorists at the start of the century, but today is recoveringits honor and dignity, because it has become clear thatsight can be understood only along lines of wholeness andhypotheses” (UI, 186). If Humpty Dumpty had a big fall, toput it metaphorically, it is hard to see what “HumptyDumpty” once

was

or could have been seen

as.

Jamestalked about what one may call “Gestalt” issues in

ThePrinciples,

such as this apex in the “Sensation” chapter:

There are many other facts beside the phenomena of con-trast

which prove that

when two objects act together on usthe sensation which either would give alone becomes adifferent sensation

(PP, 676).

Nørretranders counters “determinism” with “existen-tialism,” in which he names Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jas-pers, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Jean-PaulSartre (UI, 260). He describes these people as believingthat man “is regarded as fundamentally

a maker of choices,

defined by his freedom, so to speak.” James clearlybelongs in this company, too.

A few pages later in

The User Illusion,

when I readthat “All the toil and labor behind a great performance isdue to training, rehearsal, discipline....” as well as hear ofthe difference between the “I” and the “Me” that per forms(UI, 265), I find myself thinking of both the “Habit” and“Self” chapters in

The Principles

. It is not surprising to me to read this statement in

“The Nonlinear Line” chapter: “There are practically nostraight lines in nature” (UI, 377). “A raindrop on its waydown a mountain will not follow a straight line. Of course,from an abstract point of view it will, because gravity willtug at it; but there is more in the world than the earth’sgravity. There is also the earth’s surface--and that is irreg-ular” (UI, 378). James’s disdain for out-of-touch, cold,abstract thinking seems reinforced by a quote that Nørre-tranders takes from Benoit B. Mandelbrot:

“Why is geometry often described as ‘cold’ and ‘dry’?One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of acloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree. Clouds are notspheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not cir-

cles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in astraight line. More generally, I claim that many patterns ofNature are so irregular and fragmented that, comparedwith Euclid, Nature exhibits not simply a higher degreebut an altogether different level of complexity.”

—Benoit B. Mandelbrot,

The Fractal Geometry ofNature

(New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983 [orig. 1977]), p.1, quoted on p. 380 of UI

As James wrote in the “Novelty and the Infinite” chap-ter of

Some Problems of Philosophy

about a master mathe-matician:

Mr. Bertrand Russell (whom I do not accuse of mystifica-tion, for Heaven knows he tries to make things clear!)treats the Achilles-puzzle as if the difficulty lay only inseeing how the paths traversed....

It seems to me however that Mr. Russell’s statementsdodge the real difficulty, which concerns the ‘growing’variety of infinity exclusively, and not the ‘standing’ vari-ety, which is all that he envisages when he assumes thatthe race already to have been run and thinks that the onlyproblem that remains is that of numerically equating thepaths (SPP, 179-181).

In “The Sublime” chapter, Nørretranders says that“Many tiny activities in the right direction led to an enor-mous emergent transformation. Suddenly we dared tobelieve that nuclear war was unthinkable. And it becameso” (UI, 405). He goes on to say that this is naive, but “notnecessarily wrong.” Instead, he asks: “What is the conse-quence of this naive view?” (UI, 406) Nørretranders con-curs with Niels Bohr that “we must have the courage tosay naive things; do naive things, persistently and amica-bly over the decades, simply because we believe they areright and feel they are right and conscious that they areright” (UI, 407). “Experiencing the state of the planet cangenerate angst and disquiet,” he warns, but also asks that“we dare take our own experience seriously.... daring toexperience what is, even if it is unpleasant” (UI, 415). Tobring this back to James:

Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternalmoral order; let our suffering have an immortal signifi-cance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities paytheir visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere whichman breathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stirwith prospects, they thrill with remoter values (VRE, from“The Sick Soul,” 141).

—Randall Albright = [email protected]

BibliographyUI

: Tor Nørretranders,

The User Illusion, Cutting ConsciousnessDown to Size

(Eng. trans. by Jonathan Sydenham, Penguin 1999)

PP

:

William James,

The Principles of Psychology

(1890) [1983 Har-vard UP edition]

VRE

: William James,

The Varieties of Religious Experience

(1902)[Penguin 1982 edition]

SPP

: William James,

Some Problems of Philosophy

(1911) [1996 U ofNebraska edition]

My Stroll with William James and Jacques Barzun by David Dannenbaum

My Stroll with William James and Jacques Barzunby David Dannenbaum

You may have read Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll WithWilliam James1, so I hope it is not presumptuous of meto encourage you to read Barzun’s other works. Bar-zun’s writings cover cultural history, education, andcritical methods, and his essay, “William James and theClue to Art”2, led me to James’s Principles of Psychology,which in turn led me to The Varieties of Religious Expe-rience, Essays on Pragmatism, Talks to Teachers…, andother works in the Jamesian canon. That essay also ledme to Barzun’s The Use and Abuse of Art, Darwin,Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, Teacher in Amer-ica, and his essays in a variety of collections, maga-zines, and newspapers.

As the dustcover on my copy of Stroll reports, Bar-zun was born in France in 1907 and came to the UnitedStates in 1920. He absorbed American language andculture quickly, according to his friend and colleague,Lionel Trilling: “Jacques … entered Columbia Collegeafter two years of American high school, preceded byanother year of tutoring with an American school-teacher. There was in his speech no trace of an‘accent.’ In his bearing, in what one American sociolo-gist calls ‘the presentation of self,’ there doubtless wassomething that … might be called the intention of pre-cision.”2

Barzun’s family life in France resembled James’sin America. Both were filled with a joyful and livelyintellectualism. E. W. Emerson recalled a visit to theJames home in Newport in 1860 or 1861:

“The adipose and affectionate Wilkie,” as his fathercalled him, would say something and be instantly cor-rected or disputed by the little cock-sparrow Bob, theyoungest, but good-naturedly defend his statement,and then Henry (Junior) would emerge from hissilence in defense of Wilkie. Then Bob would be moreimpertinently insistent, and Mr. James [Senior] wouldadvance as moderator, and William, the eldest, wouldjoin in. The voice of the moderator would presently bedrowned by the combatants and he soon came downvigorously into the arena, and when, in the excitedargument, the dinner knives might not be absent fromeagerly gesticulating hands, Mrs. James, more con-ventional, but bright as well as motherly, would lookat me, laughingly reassuring, saying, “Don’t be dis-turbed, Edward, they won’t stab each other. This isusual when the boys come home.”3

Compare that to Barzun’s growing up in Parisforty or so years later:

To be born near the beginning of the decade before thefirst world war and at the center of the then mostadvanced artistic activity in Paris is an accident boundto have irreversible consequences on the mind. Thefirst pictures seen: Cubist; the first music heard:Stravinsky’s Sacre; the first poetry and drama: Futur-ist, Simultanist, “experimental”…. Anything butstrange, the sights and sounds and ideas that wouldlater make the bourgeois howl were seen as the usualdomestic occupations of family and friends; it wasApollonaire interspersing his critical arguments for thegrownups with stories for the child; …Archipenkomaking Léger roar with laughter, Delaunay and Ozen-fany debating. … On view at close range were alsoEzra Pound, Cocteau, Severini, Berard, Kandinsky,Copeau …. Unquestionably, art and the discussion ofart were the sole concern of all who counted in thatparticular universe.4

Art and the lively discussion of art continued intoBarzun’s teaching. At Columbia College, Barzun andTrilling led a colloquium on selected great books of themodern period. According to Barzun, “[Trilling] wasdeeply interested in the great deterministic systems ofMarx and Freud,… [while I] inclined to the radicalempiricism of William James. [I] was finding in James,Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Whitehead—the PragmaticRevolution generally—a set of ideas by which to recon-cile respect for natural science with a watchful sense ofits limitations, and to discern in all materialisms anddeterminisms the illicit jump from empirical fact toarbitrary metaphysics.”5 Their method—what Barzuncalls a “methodless method”—defied classification.Trilling and Barzun dubbed it cultural criticism, which“…arose from a lively sense of the force of circum-stances, balanced by an equally strong sense of thefree life that ideas lead when hatched. It seemed clearto us that in order to know what books and works ofart, philosophies and movements of opinion intend,one must learn their antecedents and concomitants ofwhatever kind; and to know how ideas thrive andchange, one must trace their consequences. …Theeffort was a work of the sturdiest imagination—theimagination which springs from fact and is hedged inby possibility, the literal imagination, the imaginationof the real.”6

“Antecedents,” “concomitants,” “consequences”—those are the raw materials of ideas thriving andchanging. Or as James put it, the raw material of expe-rience in transition.

That one moment of [Experience] proliferates into thenext by transitions which, conjunctive or disjunctive,continue the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, bedenied. Life is in the transitions … as if our spurts andsallies forward were the real firing line of the battle;



were like the thin line of flame advancing across thedry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn.In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospec-tively. It is ‘of’ the past, inasmuch as it comesexpressly as the past’s continuation; it is ‘of’ the futurein so far as it comes as the past’s continuance; it is ‘of’the future in so far as the future, when it comes, willhave continued it.7

I first encountered Barzun’s imagination of thereal about twenty years ago as I prowled through theopen stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library in search ofsome diverting, but substantive, summer reading. Myeyes fell on The Energies of Art. That title intrigued me,so I flipped through a few pages to sample the writingof this (to me) unknown writer. In his introductoryessay, “The Critic’s Task Today,” he wrote: “Chaos inthe world and art is in truth Criticism’s opportunity toshine. For chaos has causes; confusion has clues; his-tory is not an impenetrable riddle, and if one can for amoment rise above the anxious fret of the personal,one will discover at least some namable sources of pub-lic dismay.”8

Then, “Who are we in the stream of time and West-ern thought? Supplying an answer to this question isthe critic’s task today, and the best excuse for his exist-ence. For my part, I am willing to be judged by this testfor venturing to use up paper and print on ‘mere’ criti-cism.”9

I was surprised by the clarity of Barzun’s writing—surprised because the last few critical works I had readwere jumbled mixtures of puns and quotations pomp-ously declaring themselves deconstructions of texts.So I flipped to the last essay of the book, “WilliamJames and the Clue to Art,” and found this:

A … way … of showing the relevance of James’s psy-chology to art is to sample its abundant evidence forthe view that the mind is the original artist, who hard-ens into a geometrician only by special effort or dullroutine. James’s radical new view itself resembles anartistic revolution in that, displacing from the fore-ground as ready-made all ideas and objects, it restoresprimacy to sensation and will. Objects are alwaysclear, hard, unyielding things that remain ever them-selves as they recur, whereas will and sensation fluctu-ate. The Jamesian mind is thus the innovator’s—bathed in sensation, individual, free, and confident ofits power to shape the congenial material of its own

perceptions.10

I checked out the book, and began my stroll withthese two great teachers.

In The Book of J, Harold Bloom wrote, “As we readany literary work, we necessarily create a fiction or

metaphor of its author.”11 In my fiction William Jamesand Jacques Barzun are my teachers, with whom Istroll through the Grove of Academe. They point outfads posing as breakthroughs and clichés disguised astenets; they teach me that the giving and the taking ofmeaning is not automatic; and they profess the virtueof clarity. Then they usher me to the gate between thegrove and agora and push me into the marketplacewhere, “jostled by rivals and torn by critics”12 I empiri-cally test what I have learned.

Winded and sweaty, I return to the grove13 withthe test results, and James and Barzun remind me thatthe grove is as arduous as the agora, and that enliv-ened minds keep the gate between them open. Theyalso point to other teachers who can cool me off.Teachers such as Charles Sanders Pierce, WalterBagehot, Henri Bergson, and John Jay Chapman, whoin turn point me in the direction of Lionel Trilling,Richard Rorty, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom. Mydistinguished faculty all repeat Bunyan’s great warningagainst “Knowledge not attended with doing.” So Ireturn to the agora again, ready to converse with myfellow citizens.

About conversation and its concomitant, medita-tion, Barzun writes:

Culture in whatever form—art, thought, history, reli-gion—is for meditation and conversation. Both arenecessary sequels to the experience. Cultivation doesnot come automatically after exposure to the goodthings as health follows a dose of the right drug. If itdid, orchestra players would be the most cultured peo-ple musically and copy editors the finest judges of lit-erature. Nor does ‘reading up’ on art suffice unless itspurs meditation and conversation. Both are actions ofthe mind along the path of finesse. No one can imaginea systematic conversation.

As for true meditation, it excludes nothing; its virtueis to comprehend—in both senses: to understand andto take in the fullest view. Both are actions of themind-and-heart, and therefore charged with the stron-gest feelings. Indeed both interior monologue and spo-ken dialogue aim at discerning which feelings and towhat degree of each belong to an idea or an image.That is how culture reshapes the personality: it devel-ops the self by offering the vicarious experience andthought; it puts experience in order.14

Culture is not a diversion for the idle or the pas-sive, though many believe it to be. James alerts us tothis tendency in his essay, “The Social Value of the Col-lege Bred:”

We of colleges must eradicate a curious notion whichnumbers of good people have about such ancient seatsof learning as Harvard. To many ignorant outsiders,



that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilizedconceit and incapacity for being pleased. … In EdithWyatt’s exquisite book of Chicago sketches called“Every One his Own Way” there is a couple who standfor culture in the sense of exclusiveness, RichardElliot and his feminine counterpart—feeble carica-tures of mankind, unable to know any good thingwhen they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless aprinted label gives them leave. Possible this type ofculture may exist near Cambridge and Boston, theremay be specimens there, for priggishness is just likepainter’s colic or any other trade disease. … Real cul-ture lives by sympathies and admirations—under allmisleading wrappings it pounces unerringly on thehuman core.15

We get the words culture and cultivated from Latin:to till, to plow a field. Preparing a plot of land for a cropis no more sweaty an activity than cultivating one’smind. As tools for cultivation, James’s “sympathies andadmirations” go well with Barzun’s “meditation andconversation,” and together they open the gate of ourimagination of the real, so we can put our experience inorder.

As a teacher of remedial writing and English as asecond language, I work with people whose native lan-guages have no verb “to be,” whose adjectives follownouns, and whose interrogatives are distinguishablefrom their declaratives only by a sentence’s last sylla-ble. By appealing to my students’ imaginations of thereal, I show them meaning behind sounds that reverseexpected word order and alter the way they look at theworld. I show them how to move from the grove oftranslation dictionaries to the agora of conversation sothat they can, in English, negotiate contracts, discusspoetry and politics, and otherwise put their experiencein order. This work requires of both teacher and stu-dent knowledge attended by doing.

Daily, I encounter cultures—history, religion, art,thought—different from mine. Because the giving andtaking of meaning is not automatic, it is imperative forme to walk about the student’s grove—Murasaki andMishima, Goethe and Grass, Molina and Márquez—if Iexpect the student to join me in my agora—Shakes-peare and Shaw, Strunk and White, James and Barzun.It is a delicate task requiring tact and vigor. Occasion-ally I get hot and winded, but my students leave theclassroom speaking more English than they did whenthey arrived.

The grove, the agora, and the gate are real, and mystroll with James and Barzun continues.16

—David Dannenbaum lives in Hell’s Kitchen, NewYork City. His e-mail address is [email protected]

Notes 1. Jacques Barzun, A Stroll With William James (Harper and Row,

1983)2. Jacques Barzun, “Personal Memoir,” unfinished essay by Lionel

Trilling who died before he could complete it. It was published, ashe left it, in From Parnassus: Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun,eds. Dora B. Weiner and William R. Keylor, Harper and Row, 1976.This collection also contains a bibliography of Barzun’s works,published before 1976.

3. In Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of WilliamJames (Briefer Version), (Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 43)

4. Jacques Barzun, “The Critic’s Task Today,” in The Energies of Art,(Harper Brothers, 1956, pp 5-6) Available in reprint from Green-wood Press,1975.

5. Jacques Barzun, “The Imagination of the Real,” in Art, Politics andWill: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling, eds. Quentin Anderson,Stephen Donadio, and Steven Marcus (Basic Books, 1977, p. 3.)

6. “Imagination,” pp. 4-5. 7. William James, “A World of Pure Experience” (1904), in William

James: Writings 1902-1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Library of Amer-ica, 1987, p 1181.)

8. Energies (Harper and Brothers, 1956; reprinted by GreenwoodPress, 1975., p. 3.)

9. Energies, p. 4.10. Energies, p. 326.11. The Book of J, translated by David Rosenberg and interpreted by

Harold Bloom (Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, p. 18.)12. James, “Experience,” p. 1159.13. In another arboreal metaphor, James described the work of phi-

losophers and poets as blazing a trail through a forest: “Philoso-phers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. Whateveryone can feel, what everyone can know in the bone and mar-row of him, they sometimes can find words for and express. Thewords and thoughts of the philosophers are not exactly the wordsand thoughts of the poets—worse luck. Both alike have the samefunction. They are, if I may use a simile, so many spots, orblazes,—blazes made by the axe of human intelligence on thetrees of an otherwise trackless forest of human experience. Theygive you somewhere to go from. They give you a direction and aplace to reach. They do not give you the integral forest with all itssunlit glories and its moonlit witcheries and wonders. Ferny dells,and mossy waterfalls, and secret magic nooks escape you, ownedonly by the wild things to whom the region is at home. Happy theywithout the need of blazes! But to us the blazes give a sort of own-ership. We can now use the forest, wend across it with compan-ions, and enjoy its quality. It is no longer a place merely to get lostin and never to return. The poet’s words and the philosopher’sphrases thus are helps of the most genuine sort, giving to all of ushereafter the freedom of the trails they made.” from “Philosophi-cal Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898), in William James:Writings 1878-1899 (ed. Gerald E. Myers, Library of America,1992, p. 1078).

14. Jacques Barzun, “Culture, High and Dry,” in The Culture WeDeserve, ed. Arthur Krystal (Wesleyan University Press, 1989, pp20-21.)

15. William James, “The Social Value of the College Bred” (1908), inWilliam James: Writings 1902-1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Library ofAmerica, 1987, p 1247).

16. HarperCollins is publishing Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence inMay, 2000. See Edward Rothstein, “A Sojouner in the PastRetraces His Steps,” The New York Times (April 15, 2000, p B7).


A Writer for a Common Reader by Patrizia Vallascas

A Writer for a Common Readerby Patrizia Vallascas

My first experience with a pragmatist was withJohn Dewey. It was not a spontaneous impulse but ascholastic duty. In the introduction of an Italian releaseof an anthology of his works, William James, “il verofondatore del pragmatismo”1 (the true founder of prag-matism) appears as the important figure for Dewey’sthought. But Dewey seemed too committed to democ-racy, education, and science. I despaired at the possibil-ity of a human solution. In his efforts with practical life,I could see only an overwhelming theory that didn’tmove any chord within me. Perhaps I had been skepti-cal because I didn’t keep a good record of the other phi-losophers that I had studied at high school.

I am not alone with this spot in my formative years.I share it even with philosophers. Here is an Englishtranslation of an excerpt of an article of a newspaperfrom a page on philosophy:

…I am still haunted by the incubus of the philosophythey [teachers] taught in that absurd program. Whohasn't had the feeling that philosophy teachers explainthe theories of village idiots? Bewildered, at our desks,we listen to their performances: one claims that thenon-existent does not exist; another, that all is water;another still, that the monad has neither doors nor win-dows. Finally, there is the one who insists that abso-lutely everything, from a volcano to a keyboard,functions according to the inevitable process of thesis,

antithesis, and synthesis.2

This was enough for me to carefully avoid anyinvolvement with writers who plainly claimed them-selves to be philosophers. My door was closed for them.But I later found that the word “pragmatism” appearedin some books I cared much about, and since I neededto know their origin (though this is rather impossible toobtain), I began to conceive the idea of reading moreabout what should be, more or less, according to my

1. Lamberto Borghi, “Introduzione” in John Dewey Il Mio Credo Ped-agogico, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1954, p. viii

2. “…Faccio fatica a liberarmi dell’incubo dell’insegnamento dellafilosofia che ho dovuto soffrire per via dell’assurdo. Chi non haavuto l’impressione che ci insegnassero le teorie dei matti del vil-laggio? Attoniti dai banchi di scuola abbiamo assistito all’entrata inscena di quello che dice che il non essere non è, poi di un altroche grida che tutto è acqua, di un altro ancora stando al quale lanomade non ha né porte né finestre, di un ultimo per cui tutto, maproprio tutto, dal vulcano al pianoforte funziona grazie ad un pro-cesso inarrestabile di tesi, antitesi e sintesi.” —Roberto Casati, “La filosofia ha qualcosa da insegnare?”,Domenica, Il Sole 24 Ore, 2 April 2000, p. 31.

Streams of William James • Volume 2 • Issue 2 • Summe

point of view a “practical discipline,” probably too practi-cal for my culture and sensitivity.

I found the involvement of pragmatism with literarycriticism particularly intriguing. Though pragmatism isnot famous in Italy, “where pragmatism—notwithstand-ing a good reception at the beginning with Vailati andPapini—actually never put roots”3, you can easily andoddly find it in literary criticism.

I decided to open, a little, and no more, my door to“il vero fondatore del pragmatismo”, William James. Ihad read in the same page of the article quoted abovethat there were some translations of James’s works thatwere not easy to find, but I would not have believed thatin my town it was impossible to find a book by WilliamJames, even in English.

I found the lack of availability of writings by Jamesto be intriguing. When I finally obtained a copy of TheVarieties of Religious Experience4 (VRE), I decided tokeep my resistance strong enough that I would be ableto disagree. However, I had a discovery: for me, a com-mon reader, with lukewarm interest in philosophy, thishas been amazing.

I couldn’t believe, and still I wonder how it can be,that James was considered the father or one of thefathers of the philosophy of the “Yankees.” He seemedto me nearer European Romantic thought and art.

After closing the book, I then returned to the pas-sages about change. VRE suggests that in being able tochange and submit to its risks is the richness of life.“Life changes”—James says—if we have “gifts”, our pas-sions, that depend “almost always upon non-logical,often on organic conditions” (VRE, 141). I returned towhat seemed to me a romantic vision of the world:

the practically real world for each one of us, the effec-tive world of the individual, is the compound world, thephysical facts and emotional values in indistinguishablecombination (VRE, 141).

Who was William James? Is his thought irrationaland “debole” (weak)? Is his thought less “practical”, lessdefinite, but more amusing among the fathers of Ameri-can philosophy? I was baffled by James’s discourse andI had been waiting so long for the moment I would havefound dryness. I relaxed. His stress on life, change,doubt and imperfection fascinated me. He seemed apeculiar philosopher. In fact, his need to find the bound-aries of our real world is not a way to find “good”, or atleast it is not the first task; rather, it is to suggest how to

3. Armando Massarenti, “Pragmatismo, Oggettività e Democrazia”,Domenica, Il Sole 24 Ore, 22 August 1999, p. 26; “dove il pragma-tismo – nonostante il buon inizio di Vailati e Papini—non ha maiveramente attecchito”

4. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature inLibrary of America: William James, Writings 1902-1910

r 2000 Page 14

A Writer for a Common Reader

achieve a way to live a richer life.The whole book is impregnated by a critical dis-

tance that every one of us should be able to build withour own nuances of irrationalism, empiricism, natural-ism, and whatever else make a pluralistic universe of us.

Yet the book is hard to swallow. It is rather bitter forone who has grown up with Catholic education. I sup-pose it is in me as the milk I sucked from my mother thefirst days of my life. Oddly the book is sad but alsoenjoyable, awfully honest in putting under its lens thewhole human being:

The beauty of war…is that it is so congruous with ordi-nary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us allpotential warriors; so the most insignificant individual,when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned fromwhatever excess of tenderness towards his precious per-son he may bring with him, and may easily develop intoa monster of insensibility (VRE, 331-332).

This passage compelled me to consider my ownstiffness and my “childish” fascination for people with adeep faith. I still believe that people with a deep faith arethis way because they have “a direct personal commun-ion with the divine” (VRE, 35) for me.

I do not know how but VRE gives me peace,because it seems to open a possibility towards a path tofollow for everyone and especially the ones who can’tfind a nourishment in what they have been brought up.VRE claims the right to live a powerful religious life inthis world, beginning in this moment.

I am perfectly aware, as James was, that the goalcan be far—“to-morrow it must be, or to-morrow, or to-morrow; and pretty surely death will overtake me erethe promise is fulfilled.”5

VRE reminds me of the fascination I had for nuns,especially the ones living closed in their monasteries,having left the puzzling outside world forever. I used tothink that they spent enchanted ordered life of greatvalue. They spent every moment of their life to glorifygod. I looked for their transfigured faces. I loved listen-ing to their crystalline voices and looking at their facesand hands, they are so white and smooth as if made ofmarble.

Generally, the oldest nun of the monastery isallowed to speak with people coming to buy their fruits,vegetables, and marmalades. The one I met had clearlyforgotten the outside world; to speak with people wholived beyond the gate was a strenuous effort for her.She did it only to glorify her god. The old nun had wrin-kles but they didn’t seem to disturb the smoothness ofher face as if even time couldn’t touch her.

She was like a sort of soldier controlling the outside

5. “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” in Library ofAmerica: William James, Writings 1878-1899, p. 1079

Streams of William James • Volume 2 • Issue 2 • Summer


world so that it would not merge with the life of themonastery; and at the same time her sacrifice was use-ful for the youngest, the weakest, the ones I had noticedpraying into the dark church, sometimes. She seemedheroic:

We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unincum-bered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing totoss that up at any moment when the cause commandshim, he is the representative of unhampered freedom inideal directions (VRE, 291).

The Catholic Church is full of symbols taken frommilitary life. The sacrament of confirmation indicatesalso that a Catholic becomes a soldier of Christ. In fact,the sign with the oil symbolizes also the seal that s/hebelongs to god. Once the soldiers (and the slaves) had avisible mark of their master impressed on their bodythat claimed this possession. I must say that, for me, it isnot easy to be such a kind of soldier. Who can enduresuch a task?

The nuns reminded me of the statue of St. Teresaby Bernini. She had been a heroine of mine during myschool days. She was so lifeless though devoted, sotransfigured by love though so inhuman:

…in the main her [St. Teresa] idea of religious seems tohave been that of an endless amatory flirtation—if onemay say so without irreverence —between the devoteeand the deity, and apart from helping younger nuns togo in this direction by the inspiration of her exampleand instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her,or sign of any general human interest (VRE, 316).

I often went to the monastery. My mother loved it.She was almost blind, but shadows, lights, and silenceshave a peculiar degree within such monasteries. Theyare, somehow, the places of strange presences. Youmust go there to get them.

Sometimes I thought how much stronger I wouldbe if I could have gotten the strongest presence of themonastery. This meant hard work: to re-vitalize one ofmy oldest over-beliefs that seemed dead within me.

I used to go, alone, into their little church. PerhapsI expected a miracle. Nobody from the outside worldwas allowed in the church while a nun was praying. Per-haps I was because I was rather nun-like, and nobodynoticed me. More than one time, I saw them as they laystretched on the cold marbled floor, like fleshly crosses,praying. It was difficult to notice them; they weremotionless and colorless on the marbled floor. Then,suddenly, they got up and flew away! Their whirlings lefta sort of chill. I saw how far I was from my old Church:

The dominant Church notion of perfection is of coursethe negative one of avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds fromconcupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal pas-

2000 Page 15

A Writer for a Common Reader by Patrizia Vallascas

sions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensu-ality in all its forms, and the loves of the worldlyexcitement and possession (VRE, 278).

Those colorless, cold butterflies had faith, a strong,deep faith. I felt as an intruder. Where was the path thatallowed me to participate in the glory of such a powerfulgod?

James’s words can be more helpful than the visionof those colorless cold butterflies. He recognizes that areligious life is important and that our life will always beours, even if we glorify a god. We must find a way for a“melioristic” life. Moreover, James points out that thereare many paths to follow and every path is worth walk-ing. So even to look at the transfigured nuns was notidle.

In fact now I am aware that I can’t and do not wantto be a soldier of any god, notwithstanding in truth togive up absolutes is not easy when your culture andyour first religious life has been built upon them.

Another topic that has drawn my attention has beendisease. I have been struck by James’s words. A hun-dred years ago he wrote what is still hard to be acceptednowadays. He thought that a disease was not a punish-ment or a bad mark. He recognized even a value to a dis-ease, how it can help to reach a richer life with a higherspirituality.

James clearly points out that “few of us are not insome way infirm, or even diseased; and our infirmitieshelp us unexpectedly” (VRE, 30). They can help us toachieve the depths of prayer. James’s view is that“[p]rayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real reli-gion” (VRE, 416). But what is really fascinating in Jamesis his honesty, his openness to the point of almost anaiveté, and his strong grasp in powerful insights:

In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that theattempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processesthe truth of the deliverances of direct religious experi-ence is absolutely hopeless (VRE, 408).

His view is not narrowed by this admission; on thecontrary, he is not afraid to merge philosophy with reli-gion and both with science:

[...] over-beliefs in various directions are absolutelyindispensable…we should treat them with tendernessand tolerance so long as they are not intolerant them-selves. As I have elsewhere written, the most and valu-able things about a man are usually his over-beliefs(VRE, 460).

I need over-beliefs to achieve a religious life; I needsomething that is beyond what I am able to demonstrate“by purely intellectual processes”. James tries to explainwhy these are at the base of a real religious life. Over-beliefs are enclosed words of “collective name” (VRE,

Streams of William James • Volume 2 • Issue 2 • Summe

33) that live in me and help me to live. With the expres-sion of a collective name, James draws my attention toits link with “the primordial thing” (VRE, 35) that hasbeen characterizing the essence of the varieties of reli-gious experience which began ages ago, since the firststeps of evolution. In this way, an over-belief, as theexistence of god, becomes an impulse that urges mefrom within. It is pragmatically true because “in onesense [it] is a part of ourselves and in another sense isnot ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises ourcentre of personal energy, and produces regenerativeeffects unattainable in other ways” (VRE, 467).

For James there is also another important thing toconsider as part of our life: evil. “Evil facts” – he says –“are a genuine portion of reality” (VRE, 152). As a mat-ter of fact our life is made of everything, even disorderand chaos. It is within this blurred reality that he nevergot tired of underlining how our religious impulses canmake one able to build a key that opens the door towhere “there is actually and literally more life in ourtotal soul than we are at any time aware of” (VRE, 457).

James doesn’t hide that sometimes the key fadesaway or that sometimes it no longer opens the door.James never opens the door for us. He knows he can’t.For him “philosophers are after all like poets. They arepath-finders. What everyone can feel, what everyonecan know in the bone and marrow of him, they some-times can find words for and express”6. James neverblurs his identity. He doesn’t show his own transfiguredface. He is “only” a human being with the gift of words.He is not ashamed of living upon his own fears and joys.He suggests to me that I do the same. He believes thatperfection is not the goal but life, “a larger, richer, moresatisfying life” (VRE, 453) and this should be also “theend of religion” (VRE, 453).

James is not giving me a new theology or cosmol-ogy; he doesn’t give us new beliefs to believe, they arestrictly personal. So there is no contradiction in James,even when he must admit that “I can’t possibly pray—Ifeel foolish and artificial”7.

And so, instead of concluding, let me begin: itseems to me that James sometimes is dazzling as a poet,and that it is ridiculous to label him as a founder ofAmerican philosophy. He seems first of all a writer for acommon reader or, rather, a writer for me.

—Patrizia Vallascas lives in Viterbo, Italy. Her e-mail address is [email protected]

6. “Philosophical Conceptions,” p. 10787. William James Writings, 1902-1910, p. 1185

r 2000 Page 16


Orvieto’s Well


In the Spring of 1905, William James visited theartesian well in Orvieto, known originally as Pozzodella Rocca. By that time, it was known by the name ofPozzo di San Patrizio. I would like to add some histori-cal context to the well that James saw, and also shareinformation that would have been available to him as atourist at the time.

In 1527 Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane, one of thegreatest architects of Italian Renaissance, was commis-sioned by pope Clement VII to create a well near a for-tress, la Rocca, to provide the town of sufficient waterin case of an attack by the army of Charles V. Romehad been sacked in 1525. These were troublesomeyears for the power of the Catholic Church.

As an artist of his time, wanting to express some-thing alive, Antonio da Sangallo built inside the well aserpentine structure—two staircases going like spiralsdown towards the water, carved inside the well.

This artistic aspect of the well also had a practicalvalue. The people and animals carrying water couldclimb down the 248 steps to the wooden bridge andthen climb up the other side.

The Latin inscription above one of the twoentrances celebrates the difficulty of this work, andsuggests that man can improve upon merely found“nature,” a theme that also runs through James’s work:

QUOD NATURA MUNIMENTO INVIDERAT INDUSTRIA ADIECIT

(What nature refused to supply, human industry added)

The well became known as Pozzo di San Patrizio,the name of a famous and miraculous cave in Irelandthat, according to the legend, had been revealed byChrist to Saint Patrick. This name began to appear inthe popular 18

th

and 19

th

century guidebooks:

Al nord della Rocca, in prossimità della rupe, vedesi ilfamoso Pozzo di S. Patrizio, così detto, per analogiaalla caverna che fu un tempo aperta per miracolo, alle

preghiere di S. Patrizio.

1

(To the north of the fortress, near the cliff, you can seethe famous Well of Saint Patrick, so-called by analogyto the cavern that was once opened miraculously,according to legend, by the prayer of Saint Patrick.)

Another guide from 1891, edited by the municipal-ity of Orvieto, reports:

In tempi molto più tardi si usò chiamare il nostropozzo pozzo di San Patrizio, gareggiando in celebritàcon quello di San Patrizio in Irlanda…, di cui si spac-

ciarono tante cose favolose….

2

(Long after, our well used to be called “the well ofSaint Patrick,” contending for celebrity with the oneof Saint Patrick in Ireland…of which many fables havebeen passed down….)

The reference to Saint Patrick placed a fabuloushalo around the well, and some Italian proverbialexpressions

3

grew up around it. “Essere come il pozzodi S. Patrizio” (to be like the Pozzo of Saint Patrick) caninfer one who has a great appetite for food or knowl-edge, one that can never be satisfied. It also impliesthat one can be an endless resource.

The most important resource that the well gavewas clean drinking water. The coin for the celebrationof the well that Clement VII had commissioned to Ben-venuto Cellini insists on water as a holy symbol. Oneside of the coin illustrates the passage of the book ofExodus (17:6) in which Moses, striking the stone withhis rod, makes the water spring. It has also the Latininscription:

UT BIBAT POPULUS

(For people to drink)

James called the Pozzo of S. Patrizio an “extraordi-nary well” and, having seen the well myself, I agreethat it is extraordinary, linking art with practical lifeand religious belief.

Some statistics of the well include:

Period of realization:

1527-1537;

Height:

58 meters;

Height outside the earth:

4.85 meters;

Depth:

53.15 meters;

Diameter, outside:

12.21 meters;

Diameter, inside:

4.65 meters;

Steps:

248 from one side and 247 from the other side;

Windows:

72.

1.

Piccolomini Adami Tommaso,

Guida Storico Artistica

della cittàdi Orvieto e suoi contorni. Preceduta da cenni storici, cronologicie dalla topografia della città, Tip. all’ins. Di S. Bernardino, Siena,1883, p. 233.

2.

Fumi Luigi,

Orvieto Note Storiche e Biografiche

, Tipografia delloStabilimento di S. Lapi, Città di Castello, 1891, p. 191.

3.

For more references “Battaglia”,

Grande Dizionario della LinguaItaliana

, UTET, Torino, 1961, vol. XIII.

Truth and the Fender Stratocaster by Greg Stone

Truth and the Fender Stratocasterby Greg Stone

So I feel there is a center in truth’s forest where I havenever been: to track it out and get there is the secretspring of all my poor life’s philosophic efforts; atmoments I almost strike into the final valley, there is agleam of the end, a sense of certainty, but always therecomes still another ridge, so my blazes merely circletowards the true direction; and although now, if ever,would be the fit occasion, yet I cannot take you to thewondrous hidden spot today. To-morrow it must be, orto-morrow, or to-morrow; and pretty surely death willovertake me ere the promise is fulfilled.

—William James1

In late 1966 Jimi Hendrix moved to England andbegan to play clubs. Jeff Beck related the experience ofhearing Hendrix for the first time. He, Eric Clapton, andJimmy Page went together to see Hendrix play a club inLondon. He explained that this was strange to beginwith, since the three of them never did things together.They were so shattered by the experience that theywere inseparable for the next two weeks, a kind ofimpromptu support group. In essence, the force of themusical reality that Hendrix created made them feel likethe survivors of a world that had just been over-whelmed and destroyed.

A short time later Jeff Beck would be named byHendrix, in a Rolling Stone interview, as the best guitar-ist in England. Eric Clapton was “god”. These guys wereIT. They were on the cutting edge. They were cele-brated and adored. In the eyes of their fans, they hadreached the pinnacle of musical truth.

...the poets and philosophers themselves know as noone else knows that what their formulas express leavesunexpressed almost everything that they organically

divine and feel.2

Then they saw Hendrix, and they realized that theyhad been playing with toys. Their use of feedback andstring bending was merely a new twist in an old game.Here was a guy with a brand new game. He was IT. Thetruth had been revealed.

No one like the path-finder himself knows the immen-sity of the forest, or knows the accidentality of his own

trails.3

The quest for truth, and for Hendrix the truth of hislife and the truth of his music were one, is a lonely andinsecure business. Despite his success in the eyes of hispeers, Hendrix was consumed with failure. Even hisremarkable technique was not up to his musical vision.Most of his studio tapes were unusable due to errors inhis playing. The very fact that his vision drove him tothe edge of what was possible, constituted his enduringgreatness. I’m reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright whosevision was so compelling that his customers were will-ing to overlook the fact that, because his vision wasahead of what was technologically possible, their roofsleaked.

The one-way chain of causality, like Euclidian geom-etry, is a useful abstraction, but cannot be found in thereal world. Recursion is the rule, and vision can feed ontechnique. Just before coming to England, Hendrix sawthe Mothers of Invention. Frank Zappa was using a wahwah pedal and loaned it to Hendrix. It’s possible thatHendrix perceived a missing piece of his vision, but it’salso possible that he was simply intrigued by Zappa’sexpert use of this device and wanted to experiment withit. Probably it was both. The wah wah became Hendrix’sfirst regular “effect” and an integral part of his sound.

The visionary is a romantic. He perceives a truthand struggles to bring it to fruition in the world. Hebecomes a technician solely in service to his vision. Inthe early days of PC’s, I read many accounts of scien-tists who, in struggling to solve a problem, suddenlybecame aware of the applicability of a PC, promptlybought one and became expert programmers.

The pure technician is a strict rationalist. I’veknown many musicians that could play a seeminglyexact copy of a Hendrix, or Clapton, or Beck piece, butwere unable to create their own unique voice/vision/truth. Hendrix did have an advantage in getting people’sattention with his impressive technique. A group ofinnovative techniques strung together randomly isnoise, in support of a “higher order” of coherence, it’smusic. If Hendrix hadn’t drawn listeners into his musi-cal vision, he would have made no lasting impression.

Just as music ruled by technique is meaninglessnoise, so within a philosophy ruled by rationalists or apsychology ruled by biologists, we humans are so muchdeterministic meat. Pragmatic truth is valued in humanterms. Radical empiricism is human experience. Will-iam James places the locus on the truth-relation, butwhile he insists on the existence of the object, I stillcan’t see why this is necessary to pragmatism or radicalempiricism. Pragmatically, it doesn’t seem to matterwhether there is an objective reality or not. Since every-thing is based on our experience, what matter whetherit is reflecting an objective reality or is self-contained?We are creating reality out of the inexpressible, regard-less of whether the inexpressible is an internal or exter-nal phenomenon. It hardly matters whether spiritualperceptions come from God, the collective unconscious

1. “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (1898) inLibrary of America: William James, Writings 1878-1899, p. 1078-9

2. Ibid, p. 10783. Ibid


Truth and the Fender Stratocaster by Greg Stone

or our DNA. William James believed in free will,believed in God, believed in human potential; hebelieved all these romantic notions, quite simply,because he needed to.

Jimi Hendrix attracts us. When he held the inani-mate matter of a guitar in his hands, his powerful cre-ative spirit infused it with life as God did when Hebreathed life into the clay. Hendrix brought forth tor-

rents of beauty as God did when He painted the skywith stars. Either the power of creation is within us andwe can struggle to build heaven or we are damned to adeterministic hell. I stand with Hendrix and James inaffirming free-will and the power of human creativity. Ihave no other meaningful choice, it’s the only game intown.


WJ and the Pragmatic Method: Potent and Pluralby Chris Peterson

William James is a “potent” thinker: expressiveand creative in his thoughts rather than logically rigor-ous or systematically coherent. Unfortunately, it is thelater two characteristics which are privileged in philos-ophy rather than the former. The history of philosophyhas a knack for reducing thinkers and thoughts towhat is most sterile and basic, and this is particularlytrue of James and his pragmatism. To this extent, let uslook at pragmatism from a different purview, one thatdoes justice to James’s potency.

Where does James articulate his initial and explicitunderstanding of “pragmatism”? Curiously, it is not atHarvard, his psychological and philosophical home onthe East coast. James traveled out west, to the sym-bolic end of western civilization, giving a lecture atBerkeley, California. In 1898 he ushered in pragma-tism, not with his familiar colleagues from Harvard,but with new westward friends at Berkeley. His lecture,entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and PracticalResults,” came to be recognized, by friends and foesalike, as the beginning of a profound philosophicalmovement with a uniquely American flavor. James sug-gests as much when he says, “Believing in philosophymyself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of newdawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled,per fas aut nefas [right or wrong], to try to impart toyou some news of the situation.”1 This new dawn ispragmatism, which can be understood broadly as bothan experiential and experimental philosophy. First, onan abstract level, pragmatism is a method by which“Truth,” “Reason” and other such lofty capitalizedterms are to be understood as “of this world;” as hav-ing an experiential quality inherent within them, thatis, having a capacity to affect (us) and be affected (byus). Second, at a more concrete level, pragmatisminvites individuals to experiment with their own experi-ences so as to bring about difference, change, andgrowth: be it through their analyses, writings, relation-ships with others, activism, etc. It would seem that thesecond characteristic of pragmatism presupposes thefirst: insofar as one experiments, the only fabric fromwhich any experimentation is made possible is drawnfrom the very folds of experience itself. James echoesthis open sentiment suggesting that, “pragmatism iswilling to take anything, to follow either logic or thesenses and to count the humblest and most personal

experiences. She will [even] count mystical experi-ences if they have practical consequences.”2

One of James’ favorite descriptions of pragmatismis that it does not stand for any particular results; thatthis curious “philosophy of consequences” stands fornone at the outset. There is no specific doctrine nordogma that one has to uphold, adhere to, or attempt torealize. Rather, there is only a method of approach, anethos. What then is the method of pragmatism? It con-sists of a certain attitude of orientation, which can beunderstood as a new type of philosophical visibility, “oflooking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’supposed necessities; and of looking towards lastthings, fruits, consequences, facts.”3 Pragmatism con-sists in the transition away from the abstract (“firstthings”) towards the concrete (“last things”)—lookingforward rather than backward. James also describespragmatism as a reorganization or transvaluation ofmany “inveterate habits” dear to professional philoso-phy: “[The pragmatist] turns away from abstractionand insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a pri-ori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, andpretended absolutes and origins. He turns towardsconcreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towardsaction and towards power.”4 The pragmatic attitudewholly rejects any static conceptualizations wheretruth, subjectivity, or knowledge could be locked into aperfect and motionless order, and instead resideswithin the flux and movement of such terms: truth ascreated, subjectivity as becoming, and knowledge asfallible. Hence, the pragmati

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