BIOGRAPHY

William James was born into one of the leading families of New York City. His grandfather, a strict Calvinist and also named William, was an Irish immigrant who had amassed a fortune in real estate. His father, Henry, rejected the grandfather's religion and became an unorthodox mystic. His mother, Mary, was also a child of wealth, and his brother, Henry Jr., became a famous novelist. The life of the James family was one of creative anarchy. Their dinner table was animated with lively debate in which the children were expected to hold their own with such guests as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. To encourage intellectual freedom, and to avoid the rigidity of his own joyless upbringing, Henry Sr. put his children into as many different schools as possible. The family moved often, restlessly wandering back and forth across the Atlantic, alighting temporarily in London, Paris, New York, Geneva, Newport, Bonn, and Albany.

William James reflected his family's wanderlust in his academic pursuits. He studied art for a time before joining an expedition to the Amazon basin as an apprentice naturalist. He then traveled to Germany to study physiology, before returning to the United States to complete a degree in medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1869. In 1872, James was appointed to teach physiology and anatomy at Harvard. His intellectual roving and his unwillingness to be bound by the usual academic disciplines continued when he moved in 1875 to psychology and later to philosophy. He subsequently marveled at his audacity:

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction and the first lecture on psychology I ever heard was the first one I ever gave.

In 1878, James married Alice Howe Gibbens, and they had five children. Although James had experienced ill health as a young man (including smallpox contracted in Brazil), his strength seemed to improve following marriage.

In 1890, William James published his first major work, The Principles of Psychology. A two-volume work, Principles was one of the first attempts to treat psychology as a legitimate, experimental science, and it quickly became the standard work in the field. James did intense philosophical research over the next seventeen years and published his results: The Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897), Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907). During this period, he continued to teach at Harvard and to lecture throughout the United States and Europe. Resigning from Harvard in 1907, James gave a series of lectures published as A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and The Meaning of Truth (1909). James died in 1910, and his last complete work, Essays in Radical Empiricism, was published posthumously.

At the time of his death, James was considered the embodiment of American philosophy. All accounts indicate that in addition to his large intellect and breadth of learning, James was a generous, open-minded, and sociable person. One historian of philosophy went so far as to describe him as "one of the sweetest men who ever lived."

BASIC THOUGHT

James has often been called the common person's philosopher. What his thought may lack in technical precision, it makes up for in both expressiveness and concern for common problems. Yet James's engaging style and lack of jargon left him open to charges of imprecision and carelessness.

James's popular style is apparent in an address he gave to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in 1891. In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" James argues that the most universal ethical principle is "that the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand ... demand ... for anything under the sun." Demands are never intrinsically "good" or "bad." In fact, "good" and "bad" have no "absolute natures." Such terms are only "objects of feeling and desire which have no foothold or anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds." Although James acknowledges that there might be a divine mind that established a stable and systematic moral universe based on divine desires, our knowledge of such a universe will always be fragmentary and incomplete. James concludes that "The ethical philosopher, therefore, whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on no essentially different level from the common man."

In his most famous work, the series of lectures published as Pragmatism, James begins by distinguishing between two human temperaments: the tough-minded and the tender-minded. The tough-minded are those who are empirically oriented--those who "go by facts." By contrast, the tender-minded are rationalists who "go by principles." According to James, the history of philosophy is largely the story of the clash between these two attitudes: "The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and softheads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal." The tough-minded approach to philosophy has the virtue of being connected to "facts," but it tends to exclude religion. The tender-minded approach allows for religion but is unconnected to the realities of everyday life. The result is that for the ordinary person, "Empiricist writers give him materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion 'actual things are blank.'"

James believes that pragmatism is a method that reconciles these opposing temperaments. Borrowing from Charles Sanders Peirce, James develops pragmatism as "a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable." As a theory of meaning, pragmatism asks what practical effects a belief has, whether that belief is tough- or tender-minded. To discover what a belief means is to find what difference such a belief makes "in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen." The proper goal of philosophy is to discover "what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one."

But James went further than Peirce and claims that pragmatism provides a theory of truth as well as of meaning. Peirce had continued to hold a traditional correspondence theory of truth: An assertion was true if it corresponded with a fact. Instead, James says that an idea becomes true if it allows the individual to gain "satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience." These relations are not fixed--they are dynamic, just as our experience is dynamic. As James puts it,

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas, that therefore is the meaning of truth....

Though it was written earlier, James's famous essay on religion, "The Will to Believe," anticipated elements of his mature pragmatism. Defining a genuine option as one that is living, forced, and momentous, James argues that there is no reason not to make such a choice for religious belief. Those who would argue that one should withhold religious beliefs until there is sensible proof are "telling us ... that to yield to our fear of it being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true." Instead, says James, we have the "right to believe"--even if the data are inconclusive.

Critics have pointed out that James's "will to believe" could lead to virtually any conclusion one considers living, forced, and momentous. Furthermore, his theory of pragmatism could be used to make any belief true--provided it produced beneficial results. As H.S. Thayer pointed out, "Standards of veracity thus go slack on the very occasions in which, ordinarily, they need the tightest rein, where passion and personal interests are most in play."(1) This fact, along with a number of other objections, led Peirce to change the name of his philosophy to "pragmaticism," to distinguish it from James's thought. For his part, James claimed that he was only presenting a way of discovering truth, not redefining it. It was left to others such as John Dewey to reformulate the pragmatic theory of truth more precisely.

Footnote:

1 H.S. Thayer, "Pragmatism," in D.J. O'Connor, ed., A Critical History of Western Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 451.

By Forrest Baird ©2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume IV