A Life in Two Contexts and Concepts: William James, Freedom, and Truth
The philosopher and psychologist Willam James perhaps remains as one of the most influential intellectuals to come from the United States; but as with old-dead-white-guys, a reevaluation is necessary in 2021. Most of the research and thinking about James I did about 10 years ago. After reading over again, I found something very striking about James’s relationship with science of the day and his own freedom and free-will, and thus I began to rethink about what his life could tell us about the pandemic world and how people view their own freedom within the realities of the material world (i.e. the realties of a virus that does not follow the human realities of law, social norms, or other social constructions). Moreover, I was stunned by the level of privilege James had his whole life, and began to think how the two concepts of “privilege” and “freedom” are very much closely linked semantically; but, how both concepts exist within our social dialogue as two different debates, or perhaps even as weapons employed on opposite sides of the political spectrum (particularly in the U.S.). John Kaag in his recent book on James also notices the privilege: James’s story mirrors “the psychic fracturing that has come to define many lives of contemporary privilege.”1 It seems that both the concepts of privilege and freedom tie into how people think about their own identity, and whether or not they have control over their own life's meaning, which is precisely what Willam James was so preoccupied with his entire life.
One of James’s most famous or infamous ideas is the “will to believe,” built around an epistemology of Pragmatism, in which what is “true” is what works or is useful in practice, roughly. The technicalities of James’s epistemology are, of course, problematic (he also avoided systematizing his philosophy)—but his views seem to provide a clue into the development of American belief systems, in ways that mirror the history of the United States’s dominance and mastery over the industrial, environmental, and economic worlds. What strikes me today is the paradox of America’s response to COVID: that we have personal mastery over our own destinies within the material world, but a lack of mastery over our collective behavior, which is very much apart of the material world (social and behavioral scientists study this aspect of the physical world). Therefore, it is a tension between “freedom” and “truth,” part and parcel of the wider tensions of religion vs science, normative vs non-normative, meaning vs fact. In 2020 and 2021, we were and are all facing a personal crisis within a public and collective crisis, while coming to terms with our lack of control over the natural world— therefore our own destinies. It is also other people’s choices that are also getting in the way. “Follow the Science” is often mentioned within the political debates around the pandemic; but what is usually not very well clarified is which science we should follow—the biological science or behavioral science. Do Americans think that behavior can’t be predicted because we have free-will and freedom? So, the story of “American Freedom” seems to be much more complex than the usual narrative of Political and Natural Rights (i.e freedom and liberty, right?). So how can James’s story help us understand where this tension and paradox about “freedom” came from? Well, James’s story begins with a virus.
The twenty-three year old William James felt a new rejuvenation when he recovered from varioloid (a mild form of smallpox, but usually associated with what we now call a "breakthrough" infection after vaccination) while in Rio de Janeiro in June 1865. After deciding to pursue medicine as a form of vocation, the young James joined an expedition to Brazil organized by Louis Agassiz, a naturalist and researcher, to collect specimens of a zoological exhibit for Harvard. After arriving in Rio, James took to the bed for two weeks and suffered from temporary blindness. Feeling better enticed James to write to his family: “ My coming was a mistake… I find that by staying I shall learn next to nothing of natural history as I care about learning it.”2 Though James remained in Brazil to finish the expedition through the Amazon, he returned to the United States with a clear distaste for the active role of investigating the material world. However, James did not stop his medical studies after returning, thus showing the tension within his self between the material sciences and the abstract vocation of philosophy that continued for the rest of his life.3
What was this discord within James’s soul that kept him from finally engaging in his philosophical pursuits until he was practically sixty years old? Coming from an upper middle to high-class and intellectual family situated James in a context between family and the specific cultural transitions happening in the later nineteenth century. Of these transitions, Darwinism and the turn toward positivism had major implications on the intellectuals of mid to late 1800s. James represented both a universal and unique case of the intellectual crisis: coming to terms with the deterministic forces expounded by the new sciences and American Imperialism, while also coming to terms with a looming father and successful brother. The philosophy of pragmatism that James finally developed illustrates in literary and logical form his solution to these two problems simultaneously. Those who may use and enjoy James’s philosophy may gain some insight into its complexity and meaning by digging into James’s life and where it sits between the two poles of culture and family, as well as free-will and scientific truth. Therefore, the departure for this biographical study finds William James in a world where family, science, culture, and politics came together to create a person who reacted to all these pressures, either at the same or at different points in time. A focus on James between the intimate and the public creates a more nuanced picture of a person, who like many, live in a world with a blurred distinction between the private self and the public self.
The connection between a thinker’s work and a thinker’s life creates a plethora of scholarly interest. These philosophers and thinkers write much about many complex and controversial social, religious, metaphysical, and experiential problems. William James’s philosophy remains disputed about the consistency and cohesiveness of its varied parts. Richard Gale’s analysis posits James’s thought has a conflicted and irresolvable tension between what he calls the “Promethean pragmatist” (having the power to make ourselves and the world) and the “Anti-Promethean Mystic” (one who seeks peace by establishing an emphatic rapport with all around him). Others see that James resolved this dualism in a nuanced way; nevertheless, what is important here is the fact that James’s philosophy reads as a clash of dualisms, making his own personal psychology an interesting subject.4
James’s depressive years of 1867-78 give biographers ample material to question where his “Divided Self” theories came from. Joseph Thomas reads James’s writing as performing a kind of self-creation. His vocational trouble vis-à-vis his father or decision to believe in free will really did not have much to do with a creation of a Spiritual/ Scientific dualism as was his courtship of Alice Howe Gibbens, who gave him active answering faith that the material world could not give.5 Other scholars place James in a direct conflict either with his philosopher father or with the James family as a whole. Henry James Sr. had an immense influence on William, not in the particulars but in a shared conviction that providential action in the universe was embedded within the natural world and within humankind. Still, even if it is the father who pushes the child to do what he wants in the Victorian period (whereas today the mother has more import), William smarted from his mother’s open favoritism to her son Henry, who gained fame first—William may have been jealous. In this context, Cushing Stout places James’s “Twice-born sick soul” within the process of how James came to terms with his family while also dealing with the intellectual determinism of the age. James made the self, personal experience the center of reality through the conduit of his father and family, but remained “tough minded” about resistance to the struggle with evil and scientific and theological monism that was enhanced by a deterministic worldview.6
James, however, lived in a richer and more complex social and cultural environment. Recent scholarship situates James in a public and political context that places his philosophy and his life in a symbiotic relationship that cannot be ignored. Reacting to the American imperialist sign of the times as well as other social problems shows that James was not only a philosopher reacting to his own psyche, but a public philosopher and a political radical.7 Again, the departure for this biographical study finds William James in a world where family, science, culture, and politics came together to create a person who reacted to all these pressures. James lived in a world with a blurred distinction between the private self and the public self. Modern life is blurred even more with the use of media and technology. In order to trace the interplay between these two contexts and to find meaning in modern life, this study departs from a direct chronological narrative; however, three periods of his life will be analyzed in turn in both the private and public contexts.
The James family was a powerful force. Henry James Sr. portrayed the intellectual life and acquainted himself with the prominent intellectuals of the time: Emerson, Thoreau, O.W. Holmes, and H. Greenly were just a few. Born January 11, 1842, William James budded from a very Victorian plant (The roots: James’s grandfather, an immigrant from Ireland, became extremely wealthy as a merchant and banker, insuring the aristocratic life for his heirs). Estate financing enabled Henry Sr. to move his family around multiple times across Europe in search for the perfect environment to school his children, especially William and his brother Henry. Henry Sr. was relentless and stubborn in the education of his children, hiring and firing countless tutors who did not fit his exacting pedagogical standards. The amount of times the boys were put in a formal school and subsequently removed numbered roughly to the years William and Henry were in primary and secondary schooling (if they even made it through the semester or year).8
The looming hand of control and influence was evident for William, Henry, Wilky, Bob, and Alice (born 1848). William became inundated with the pressures of trying to please his father who seemed continuously unpleased with their education, which had to culminate into some respectable vocation in his mind. But Henry Sr. was not irrational; he maintained a clear philosophical vision of what a growing person’s place in this sinful world was supposed to be; moreover, Henry Sr. believed that the way an offspring developed in the world reflected the strength of one’s influence on others and therefore the measure of a man. In a letter to William, Henry Sr. wrote about Emerson, “He is an uncommonly sharp detective, but a detective he is and nothing more…The proof of all this is that he breeds no love of nature in his intellectual offspring.”9 Henry Sr.’s image of man corresponded even further with Man’s relation to society: perpetual endangerment of sin until through truth and self-realization, man can control social arrangements to, in turn, protect man. He believed his children were constantly in a sphere of sinful influence; they must be protected.
William James fumbled through the quest for a vocation. Nevertheless, the grip of his father cannot explain the fullness of what an elite-class sibling endured during the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars writing about American males and their vocations have argued that earlier generations before the early 1800s “did not have to face a bewilderingly varied set of career options.” Tradition, social hierarchy and scarcity of careers lessened the tribulations of deciding a vocation. By 1840, the economic and industrial revolution pushed forward in the face of all young Americans, offering a whole new set of vocational opportunities.10 The defining feature of James’s generation, participating in the Civil War, marks the point where many youths overcame their vocational struggle. William James did not participate in the Civil War. As a creature of his generation, James lived during this vocational crisis but did not have the participatory power in the War to fix this crisis. Again, we must move away from the public James back to the private James to understand.
Before the War Between the States broke out, James convinced his father to let him study to be a painter and drawer. To his surprise, his father acquiesced and James began to study in Paris under Cogniet and then William Hunt. Though this venture lasted for a few years off and on, it did not last. James gave up painting after continued criticism from his Father. Though his father’s letters are missing at this time, James’s return letters clearly expressed his understanding of his father’s distaste for the life of the artist: “What I wanted to ask you for…were the reasons why I should not be an “artist”? I could not fully make out from your talk…what were exactly the causes of your disappointment at my late resolve…the ideal of my devoting myself to it should be so repugnant to you.”11 But James, embedded with doubt, questioned art and soon agreed with his father that there was nothing worse than a bad artist, which he might as well be. In perfect accord with his father, James decided to enroll in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in September 1861. The respectable vocation of medicine and science would mirror his father’s belief that man should work for his society in the most pure and rigorous way—but was James’s choice an autonomous choice? This psychological perspective reaches beyond the scope of this analysis; however, a deeper look into the influence of James’s father can reveal the familial context in which James made his vocational choices.
The answer turns toward the negative in light of James and his brother’s earnest attempt to enroll as a ninety-day volunteer in the Newport Artillery Company days after President Lincoln’s call for volunteers. However, Henry James Sr. made a clear attempt to hold onto the “coat tails of my Willy and Harry, who both vituperate me beyond measure because I won’t let them go [into military service]…the scamps pull so hard.”12 The influence of James’s father in withholding his eldest sons from participating in the war had a clear impact, but biographers of James have disagreed about the main causes of his noninvolvement. Gay Wilson Allen argued that James and his brother were too sick and frail to engage in physical combat, while others have suggested James’s severe character flaw: his inability to commit and make a decision on his own. While all these reasons have merit, James’s father remained the looming and domineering figure throughout James’s childhood. One cannot determine causality of course, (James’s letters during this period do not exist relating to the war) but James placed in both the public and private contexts reveals a man who was in search for a purpose like others in his generation, and would have participated if it was not for his father.13 For one, Henry Sr. proposed that James could enroll into Lawrence as an alternative of enlisting in the war.
James’s prolonged battle with illness, depression and neurosis began with his trip to Brazil. Though his illness in Rio stemmed most likely from travel in close proximity with others on the sea, a distinct pattern began to occur during James’s practice and experience with science and medicine, what some faculty at Lawrence considered a “delicacy of nervous constitution.”14 He clearly had distaste for rigorous study of the material world but remained fixated in the continuation of his studies in the field. By 1866, James met Chauncey Wright and Charles Pierce at Harvard, who engaged with him in meaningful philosophic inquiry. James’s own insecurities clashed with his drive for philosophical discourse because of his deep felt lack of logic and a mobile temperament.15 Other comrades, like Pierce, would go on to write extensively in philosophy and become a professor and the first noted “pragmatist” thinkers (though only recognized much later for it). What was important, however, was the level of philosophic study James began during medical studies—medical studies that he did not enjoy but believed in his mind to be the proper vocation within the context of society. In 1869, James completed a thesis on the effects of cold on the body and passed his medical examinations. James, however, never practiced medicine during his life. James’s family continued to reinforce his behavior, while also reinforcing his depression.
A crisis and onset of depression through vocational uncertainty was also coupled for James in his relationships with the opposite sex. In this context, James’s family remains the proper lens for analysis. Henry Sr. instilled in William a typical Victorian ideology of gender equality: women were intellectually inferior to men but spiritually purer.16 While in Brazil, James encountered many indigenous women that in his eyes were quite beautiful. At one point, he and Agassiz convinced three Brazilian women to pose nude for a few photographs for “scientific research,”—yet James remained unable to express his emotions in any of his writings. When he did write, emotions were negative and calculating; while back in Cambridge the next year, James writes to his brother Bob that he has resolved “never to marry for fear of passing nervous disabilities on to his children.”17 Deeper psychological troubles in James cannot be ignored here, but the familial context in which James articulated his sexual feelings is important. Along with his father’s enumeration of the male and female relationship, Mary Walsh James, William’s mother, exemplified the cold and acquiescent woman who followed her husband’s every move. The “pure spirit” that James assumed existed in all women did not exude from his mother. The love that Mrs. James gave was received by Henry, which forced William to increase his human bond with his father (which, for him, naturally meant an intellectual male bond). Again, James’s relationship with the material world straddled two poles: the tedious, materialism contradictorily exemplified by his religious father, and the emotional and spiritual world non-existent from any female in his life.
The philosophic output of James culminated toward the end of his life, creating the majority of his work with the last ten years of his life. His preoccupation with belief, action, and choice began much earlier. Zooming out of the context of James’s family and fatherly influence, a refocus on the cultural milieu situates James in a world of a changing paradigm: Darwinism and Positivism. After reading Spencer, Fiske and Renouvier, James wrote in his diary for April 30, 1870:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.18
The philosophic problem of freewill became a driving force within the intellectual culture by the 1860s and 1870s. This conflict had at its roots the more pressing binary battle between Science and Religion. It is important to note that the term “educated class” more frequently existed in the language of the 19th century, for there was a less self-aware intellectual elitism during this period. Moreover, the term “agnosticism and “pessimism” were not fully employed until the mid-1800s—the idea that there was a blind operation of natural laws radiated a crisis into the minds of the educated class. William James directly confronted this Victorian crisis, manifesting the crisis into his own mind. To deeply worry about the possibility of non-freewill would not have been extraordinary during James’s time; the fact that he became ill within the context of this philosophic crisis was quite extraordinary for any period.19
James’s philosophic battles and eventual solution to these deterministic and materialist quandaries had ground and meaning within his socio-linguistic milieu; however, his courtship with Alice Howe Gibbens seems to have likely given him a clear emotional datum in order to guide him out of the dark perils of meaninglessness. Mark Schwehn argued in 1982, that in “James’s own reckoning, his relationship with Alice, not his discovery of Charles Renouvier in 1870 or his decision to believe in free will nor even his choice of vocation, had made him a healthy man.”20 The perspective of James’s previous inabilities with women and relations with his family supports Schewehn’s proposal. The solution to James’s depression and doubt with the uncertainties of the material world came like a shining light with the support and love of a female companion. Alice Gibbens, who grew up in a small town of Massachusetts in which several of her previous generations had lived, became a schoolteacher for girls in Boston. After meeting her through a mutual friend, Thomas Davidson, James wrote to his brother Wilky the next day saying that he had met his future wife. This new and rare assuredness and degree of certain would echo throughout the rest of James’s life. James’s son, Henry, who later edited a collection of letters from his father, expressed his belief that marriage to his mother worked “an abiding transformation in James’s health and spirits…during the twenty-one years that immediately followed his marriage he accomplished an amount of teaching…reading writing, original research, lecturing…that would have astonished anyone who had known him only during the early seventies.”21
James’s certainty with Alice did not pass untouched by his father. Alice and Henry Sr. met early in 1876 at a Radical Club meeting in Boston before his son did. In fact, on returning home from the meeting, James’s father announced that he had seen his son’s future wife. Henry Sr. soon would give James his blessing and encouragement to marry Miss Gibbens, who clearly saw the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual compliments of his son in Alice. The fact that the Radical Club was a meeting to work out the abolishment of all supernaturalism in Christianity situated Alice and James Sr. as equal members in the fight to save humanity and society. Although the courtship of Alice and William would prove to be troubling and uneasy, once the two married, William’s level of productivity and health, as expounded by his son, would improve unrestricted.22
While James’s ascent from depression found its bedding in his personal and private life, his professional life also created a context in which he continued to have purpose and creation. By the fall of 1874, James taught comparative vertebrate anatomy and physiology at Harvard. Within the next couple of years, James received permission to teach a graduate course of the relationship between physiology and psychology, which included the first laboratory work in psychology in the United States. The esteem in which James was awarded in his studies of psychology came to crucial point when Henry Holt and Company offered a contract for James to write a text on psychology (published in 1890 as The Principles of Psychology—became one of the first landmark text in the new field of psychology). James began his work on the monumental text during his honeymoon with Alice Gibbens, which created a positive symmetrical existence within the public and private for James to feel healthy. For that point on, James began his work as public thinker and philosopher. Though he was technically employed as a scientist, James continued to read widely in philosophy and published articles in respectable philosophical journals, the first few of which he submitted unsigned.23 By 1885, James became a full professor of philosophy and psychology, earning a salary of $4,000 and soon popular clubs and lecture series offered him opportunities to talk and give lectures. The esteem the intellectual community (and perhaps some of general public) gave James became clear: the Boston Daily Advertiser frequently made announcements of his lectures and even called him a “distinguished metaphysician.”24 The title as “metaphysician” versus just a “philosopher” has important import for the public; James was more than just a scholar but a physician who worked on very deep and meaningful problems for society.25 The problems and solutions of determinism and positivism remained poised in James’s intellectual output, but a new consciousness emerged in his mind and writing: using psychology and philosophy to respond to the social problems of the day.
A crisis in faith vis-à-vis science was not the only American social transformation that James worried about; for one, the bureaucratization of American life during the late 1800s caused a new estrangement especially for the elite and upper middle class. Historians have argued that in the late nineteenth century and the second industrial revolution, the “demands of modern business civilization seemed to undermine the autonomy of the individual, who became little more than a cog in the vast machinery of ordered, rational business progress.”26 Reconstruction life was a time of increased class pressures and when the life of business brought down social and human relations to a mechanical and market controlled game. As James continued to write and think about the relations of the human mind and the way a social psychology may be created, he articulated philosophies for particular audiences to help them in their plight against the factors of a transforming society. James’s solutions, like his own spiritual crisis, revolved around renewing people’s faith in a religious reality that contained more meaning than the mechanical surface of modern American life. A collection of essays and talks to various audiences became published as The Will to Believe in 1897. Within these essays, James addressed to the intellectual class that they must make a moral stand and defend religious belief while still engaging in their empirical quest for certainty. A “live choice,” for James argued, happens when a genuine feeling of emotion and importance pervades the chooser when confronted with an option. When “pure logic” cannot answer how one should choose, the correct choice for that person forces itself upon them. These “beliefs,” usually religious in nature, are justified so believed James. Along with the religious sentimentality, James positioned himself to champion the individual. Individual people, for James, are in control of their own destinies; and truth is only truth when it has truthful effects on one’s own life.27
In the political sphere, James as a public philosopher created the intellectual viewpoint in which to combat imperialism. Ralph Perry pointed out that “the root of James’s practical politics is to be found not in his ethics and philosophy, but in the fact that be belonged to the educated class, and accepted on the account a peculiar role and a peculiar responsibility.”28 James’s socio-economic status undoubtedly positioned James as a visible and responsible politico; on the other hand, James’s peculiar brand of philosophical expressions had a social and political context. After the Venezuelan controversy of 1895 and the subsequent Spanish-American War, James found himself directly in opposition to the policies of the Cleveland and McKinley administrations. James’s opposition to monism, scientific abstractionism, and rationalism in the epistemological sense also translated to a rejection of absolutism and rationalism in the political sense: the “imperial” desire was to make a rationally ordered world in which the diversity of truth and freedom did not exist. George Cotkin argued that James’s pragmatism undermined American’s imperialist domination in the Philippines; for in contrast, “the rationalist believed that a ‘respectable’ world would be one where Filipinos were ruled by their superior and protectors, a world of white man’s burden.”29 Though James’s radical and activist modalities where limited to his lectures, speeches, and editorials, he responded to the political and social problems of his time in the way that he knew how: philosophy.
The focus on belief, action, and the individual became central for James in his mature philosophy, written and developed within the last ten years of his life. After the publication of The Will to Believe, James “was accused of encouraging willfulness or wantonness of belief, or of advocating belief for belief’s sake…”30 Though this philosophical dispute continues, scholars have tended to make the point that James was only trying to justify belief in the things that are forced upon us to be true. In Pragmatism (1907), James dealt directly with conceptions of truth that met the challenges of his critics who thought of James as advocating the argument of believing in X even if X turns out not to be true. The depth of James’s philosophy, in the balance of the tough-minded belief in action and the sensitivity to faith, came to life from more than just his reaction to societies’ ills—James’s relations with his father also clarifies and re-contextualizes the ebbs and flows of his mature philosophy.
William James made a promise to his dying father that his literary remains would not disappear. Henry James Sr. died on December 18, 1882 and left a massive collection of books and his own unpublished writings in both Cambridge and in Europe. James and his brother, Henry, soon decided to collect all of their father’s unpublished writings and published them in a one volume, 471 page Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1885), introduced extensively (137 pages) by William himself. Although James did not fully espouse his father’s religious convictions and theology, he admired his spirit and felt for his “poor Father, struggling so alone all his life, and so destitute of every worldly or literary ambition, [and] was yet a great writer.”31 About their father, Henry wrote that, “We took his ‘writing’ infinitely for granted—we had always so taken it, and the sense of him…at his table…seems to me the most constant fact…among all our breaks and variations.”32 For the boys, their father’s writing and theological pursuits defined their sense of being around him. The philosophical connection between William and his father began with a shared crisis in questioning what they previously believed and understood of the world. Both men battled with depression and even thought of suicide until a clear spiritualism gripped their souls. James reacted similarly to his father in his later elaboration of the importance of finding in reality a deeper essence than what was proposed by materialism and science. Religion, for James, upheld the personal nature of reality. Religion, for Henry Sr., did not eliminate the natural world—the natural world created the experiential stuff of spirit and God. The influence of James’s father became even clear to James himself—in the long introduction to Literary Remains, James distances himself from his father but concludes he is indebted to his father’s thought.33
Where James departed from his father, was his espousal of pluralism versus religious and scientific monism, which his father championed. A rejection of elements of a domineering father’s beliefs puts James in a perspective that is not uncommon for many sons and daughters. Psychological analysis aside, James’s father symbolized the dogmatic monism and epistemology that pervaded Nineteenth Century intellectual discourse. In Pragmatism, James outlined a concept of truth to help clarify what is meant by “Truth”. According to James: “truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good…the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”34 This conception directly combated against the representationalist thinking that made truth as correspondence, in which reality is accurately described or not.35
William James died on August 18, 1910 of heart failure at his summer home in New Hampshire during the height of his publishing career; but what was left made a lasting impression on the fields of psychology, philosophy, and especially religious studies. Pluralism as a framework for understanding the diversity of religious experience and modalities became an international project in many universities. At James’s Alma matter, Harvard, professor Diana Eck continued to direct the Pluralism project in the Religious Studies Department. William Paden, a religious studies scholar, declares, “Religion, like the world, is not an object that we have access to apart from our descriptions of it, but an object already formed by our definitions of it.”36 This formulation sees religious phenomena the same as James saw reality and truth.
Where James’s version of truth really hits a snag, though, is with the scientific version of truth which seeks to give an objective description and explanation of the corresponding world, out there. It is difficult to square the belief that you have the free- will to believe in anything that has to do with personal meaning, with the uncontrollable forces of nature that just happen and just are— so that you just believe without trying to believe (think of a belief/action in which you touch something hot—you are not at that time a deep philosophical skeptic asking “Hmmm, is this really ’hot’?). What some contemporary philosophers of truth might distinguish today are the different kinds of truth that might exist in different domains (like science and religion). These are modern “Pluralists.” However, it is difficult to see that James distinguished truth domains, the plural truths he stressed started from the personal perspective, and used C.S. Pierce’s notion that collective truth was what would eventually be believed (by everyone) if inquiry ended or was finished in an ideal limit setting. As Burgess notes, “James does not satisfactorily explain how utility, or any feature that only claimed to hold ‘in the long run and for the most part,’ could be definitive of truth.”37 Moreover, James’s lasting influence on much of the modern culture of the U.S. is this focus on combining personal freedom and choice to select your own truth (in all domains, even science and public health).
That lasting influence of James’s thought flows from the public context in which he lived and wrote. However, where the public James ended and the private began remains unclear when James’s life is seen as a whole. Within the private context, James’s father became the looming hand of influence that would shape all of his future manifestations. Within the public, James’s reaction to the new emerging science, determinism, business, the bureaucratization of life, and imperialism contextualizes his depression, rooted with his father, and mature thinking as an exemplar of his generation in articulating their solutions. Revisiting James’s life in two contexts sketches an interpretation of his life that upholds his own pluralist vision: there is not one truth of a reality, a person exists through the instrument in which we use. During the lectures that would become his seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James, dealing with the issue of classifying religious persons as pathological, explained,
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado to apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing”, it would say; “ I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”38
Perhaps James would have wanted to be viewed as the crab, who was himself alone and evaded categorization. Still, James believed there was not one way to describe reality; so therefore, there is no single way to describe William James. A description and analysis of James’s as it existed between and public and private remains as just two possible perspectives of his life; as a testament to his philosophy, there are more ways of looking.
Bibliography
Primary sources:
Boston Daily Advertiser, February 1880 – February 1891
Dupee, Fredrick, ed. Henry James: Autobiography. New York: Criterion Books, 1956.
James, Henry, ed. The Letters of William James, 2 vols. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. 1920.
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Kuklick, Bruce, ed. William James: Writings 1902 – 1910. New York: The Library of Ameican, 1987.
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Skrupskelis, I and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds. William and Henry James: selected letters Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Skrupskelis, Ignas and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds. The Correspondence of William James,16 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.
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Garrison, George R., and Edward Madden. “William James – Warts and All.” American Quarterly 29 (summer, 1977): 207-221.
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Kaag, John. Sick Souls, Health Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford. 2020.
Meyer, D. H. “American Intellectual and the Victorian Crisis of Faith.” American Quarterly 27 (December 1975): 585-603.
Murphy, John P. Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson, Oxford: Westview Press, 1990.
Paden, William E., Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion, Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
Pawelski, James O. “William James and the Journey toward Unification.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 40 (Fall 2004): 787-802.
Perry, Ralph Barton, The Thought and Character of William James, Nashville: 1948 Vanderbilt University Press.
Skrupskelis, Ignas. “The Ashes of Usucly: Reflections after Editing William James” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43 (2007): 250 –275.
Simon, Linda. Genuine reality: A Life of William James, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.
Strout, Cushing. “William James and the Twice-Born Sick Soul.” Daedalus 97 (Summer 1968): 1062-82.
Thomas, Joseph M. “Figures of Habit in William James.” New England Quarterly 66 (March 1993): 3-26.
1 Kaag, John. Sick Souls, Health Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. (Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford) 2020, p. 17.↩
2 William James to Henry James, Sr., June 3, 1865, in James, Henry, ed. The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. 1920), 61.↩
3 Cushing Strout, “William James and the Twice-Born Sick Soul.” Daedalus 97 (Summer 1968): 1062-82.↩
4 Gale, Richard M. The Divided Self of William James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Pawelski, James O. “William James and the Journey Toward Unification” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. 40. (Fall 2004): 787-802.↩
5 Thomas, Joseph M. “Figures of Habit in William James.” New England Quarterly 66 (March 1993): 3-26.↩
6 Croce, Paul J. “Mankind’s Own Providence: For Swednborgian Philosophy of Use to William James’s Pragmatism.” Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society. 43 (3) (2007): 490 – 510; Strout, “William James,” 1062-82.↩
7 Cotkin, George William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Coon, Deborah J. “’One Moment in the World’s Salvation’: Anarchism and the Radicalization of William James.” The Journal of American History, 83 (June 1996): 70-99.↩
8 Linda Simon, Genuine reality: A life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998), 44-73.↩
9 Henry James Sr. to William James, March 18, 1868, in Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of William James, 16 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 4:267.↩
10 Cotkin, William James, 23.↩
11 William James to Henry James, Sr., August 24, 1860, Correspondence, 4: 39-40.↩
12 Quoted in Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography, (New York: The Viking Press, 1967), 71.↩
13 Ibid., 71-72; Cotkin, William James, 31.↩
14 James, introduction to Letters of William James, 1:32.↩
15 Simon, Genuine Reality, 97.↩
16 Ibid., 97.↩
17 William James to Bob James, November 1869, in Bruce Kuklick, ed., William James: Writings 1902 – 1910, (New York: The Library of American, 1987), 1328.↩
18 William James, diary April 30, 1870, in John J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 7.↩
19 D. H. Meyer, “American Intellectual and the Victorian Crisis of Faith.” American Quarterly 27 (December 1975): 585-603↩
20 Quoted in Thomas, “Figures of Habit in William James,” 5.↩
21 Henry James, introduction to Letters of William James, 1:192-193.↩
22 Allen, William James, 214-216; Cotkin, William James, 62-63. While Allen describes in detail the meeting between Henry James Sr. and Alice Gibbens and his influence on William, Cotkin argues that scholars, including Allen, have all disagreed over how to prioritize the reasons or elements in James’s recovery, and demonstrates how crucial James’s father was in orchestrating the decline and rise of his son mental health.↩
23 Kuklick, ed. William James: Writings, 1330.↩
24 Boston Daily Advertiser, January 19, 1891.↩
25 The term ‘metaphysics’ has it likely origination by an early editor of Aristotle, whose metaphysics came after his physics. It would seem the proper label for a person who does metaphysics is a “metaphysicists,” though this coinage did not stick. For the general pubic in the late 19th century to think of a metaphysician as like a physician working on problems of ultimate concern, to use Tillich’s terminology, was common.↩
26 Cotkin, William James, 75; Thomas, “Figures of Habit”, 6.↩
27 William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, (New York: Longmans, Green and Company), 1911.↩
28 Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1948), 215.↩
29 Cotkin, William James, 157.↩
30 Perry, Character of William James, 238.↩
31 Quoted from Wilson. William James, 275.↩
32 Henry James, in Fredrick, Dupree, ed. Henry James: Autobiography, (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), 330.↩
33 Strout, “William James,” 1075; Croce, “Mankind’s Own Providence,” 497-498.↩
34 James in Kuklick, ed. William James: Writings, 520.↩
35 ohn P. Murphy, Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson, (Oxford: Westview Press, 1990). This version of truth has a tradition that begins with Plato (Truth, Good, Beauty). ↩
36 William Paden, Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 126.↩
37 Burgess A.G. & Burgess J.P. Truth. Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford. 2011.↩
38 ames in Kuklick, ed., William James: Writings, 17↩
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