On William James

Process Philosophy

William James (1842-1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. He was the first to offer a psychology course in the United States and considered by some to be the, “Father of American psychology”. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, they both founded the philosophical school known as pragmatism and James himself developed the philosophical perspective called radical empiricism. James wrote voluminously throughout his life producing a bibliography that is 47 pages long. His first widespread recognition was The Principles of Psychology (1890), which took twelve years to complete. Notable works such as: The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and The Meaning of Truth. 

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that seeks to both define truth and resolve metaphysical issues. From C.S. Pierce, we get the pragmatic maxim: the meaning of a concept is the sensory effect of its object. William James makes use of this with a famous example of a human circling a tree attempting to chase a squirrel, however, no matter how fast the human circles the tree the squirrel is always out of sight. At all moments, the tree is right smack in the middle of the squirrel and the human – the tree acting as a kind of mediating agent in which the human never sees the squirrel. The metaphysical question here becomes: Does the man go round the squirrel? William James answers that we need to make a distinction between practical meaning, that is, in how we differ between meanings in round: does it mean that the human go round the squirrel as in occupy the space directly north, east, south, and then west of the squirrel; or does it does it mean that the human goes round the squirrel as in occupy the space facing the squirrel’s belly, back, and then sides. Problems and disagreements such as in these two metaphysical arguments (geospatially, or spatially, rounding the squirrel) come about due not from reality, but from specific words that are used to describe reality. In fact, according to James, questions like this have less to do with actual reality and more to do with useful truths. In other words, a functional set of beliefs that someone can have that have nothing to do with what is true or what is reality, but becomes a kind of useful model. 

“On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true… The problem is to build it out and determine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths.” William James 

The squirrel example is famous for James because from it he derives the definition of the pragmatic method: to settle metaphysical disputes, one must simply make a distinction of practical consequences between notions, then, the answer is either clear or the “dispute is in idle”. A clear conception is that in its entire set of practical consequences, it must have some sort of relation to a collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions and be useful. How truthful an idea is, is how useful it is to us – that is, whether it functions as expected according to a subjective-aim or original purpose. If a belief does not contradict something that we already know and is properly useful at explaining how things are in such a way that can accurately prejudice the future in our benefit, then it can be considered truth. However, this is not truth as some sort of noun, but truth as an adjective describing a particular human experience (through qualities). 

“True ideas are those which we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those which we cannot. That is the practical difference for us to have true ideas. That, therefore, is the meaning of truth for that is all truth is known as. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it, truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process namely of verifying itself. Its validity is the process of its validation.” William James

An idea is a true idea insofar that it gives us a particular useful or functional human experience. In this same way, a particular artwork might be beautiful to us because it gives us a particular experience that we refer to as beautiful. However, definitions like what defines a bachelor or a triangle are not true, but are cases. When we speak of truth then, all we can discuss is our human experience of some event. Your belief becomes your truth, your living truth, as long as it is useful and functional to you. William James gives us the following 3 criteria for a belief to be justifiable:

1. Evidence in favor: the belief needs to have evidence in favor of it, something that we can point to as to why this is a good idea. Majority favor rules evaluated from the given evidence in a particular time period. 

2. Counter-Arguments: the belief needs to be able to stand up against counter arguments and hold its ground versus strong criticism

3. Stands the test of time: the belief has to continuously hold up over time, withstanding the inflow of new evidence and arguments to keep proving useful consistently 

“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness. Whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Radical Empiricism (What is Real?)

We wish to engulf ourselves in a radical empiricist framework in which we can reject transcendence of a belief in an essence of things existing in the world of forms and accept immanence or flux of reality (the Real). Deleuze shows us with Kuhn that we can paradigmatically address philosophical frameworks as systems. However, these systems are not objectively true, we simply think of them as glimpses of reality or snapshots. No system can ever completely grasp reality, but each provides a unique vantage point. This allows us to approach the history of philosophy as a collection of created unique concepts or artifacts. Deleuze is not trying to validate whether a proposition is objectively true, instead he shows us that philosophers in history have communicated systems that contain Ontology as a process of creation rather than discovery. Philosophical system, as concepts on top of an ontological framework that consists of three parts: content, which is the concept themselves; the structures that make up the very planes of immanence that the concepts rest or can be said to exist on; and finally the conceptual persona or the mask of authority worn in the system. The stability of a concept to be true, historically, has been linked by philosophers to a sort of representational power, or an ability for a concept to represent reality as opposed to mere expectation. To overcome this, Deleuze says to focus on difference, rather than identity. 

Everything that is, and all things that exist are processes. These are processes that are struggling in space and time not to disappear to the background, or to become undifferentiated (read as annihilated) through entropy. Will differentiates entropy and overcomes it, if only momentarily, to become, to exist. However, the human act of reducing the world to logical operators to totally know and totally understand it is a conceited act of negation. Negations do not exist in nature but only exist in impositions in logic that are transformed into values. The difference between a fact-proposition and a value-proposition is that a fact has value objectively (that is, outside the act of valuing), which you need God or universal moral law for. Unfortunately the death of God has ceased any notion of a plane of transcendence from which we could construct fact-propositions, all that remains on the planes of immanence are values. Fact-propositions erodes as they depend on value-propositions, and value is an act of creation (a will-to-power). Things, therefore, are not just things but moments of value, and values are always different. This is pure difference as a kind of sea of pluralism, or multiplicity, instead of identity. Difference constitutes identity, not the other way around. 

From Nietzsche we get the beautiful concept of Genealogy that Deleuze constructs even further. From it we get a concept of value where Nietzsche declares that Kant did not go far enough in his critiques because he did not pose the problem of critique in terms of values. Nietzsche gives us a framework from which to perch ourselves in this Kantian blunder, a Nietzschean Philosophy of Values. This is to philosophize with a hammer where a notion of value implies a critical reversal: values given as principles, where evaluation presupposes values on the basis of which phenomena are appraised; and values that presuppose evaluations, or “perspectives of appraisal” from which their own value is derived. The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, that of creation. Evaluation is thus defined as the differential element of corresponding values, an element which is both critical and creative. The differential element is thus the mediating factor between two values, this differential element though is not a value, it is an evaluation. Evaluations are modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis for which they judge. To Nietzsche, this is why we have the belief, feelings, or thoughts that we deserve, or that gives our style of life (being). There are things that can be said, felt, or conceived, and values which can be adhered to, on condition of base evaluation, base living, or base thinking. High and low, noble and base, these are not values but represent the differential elements from which the value of values themselves derive. 

Nietzsche surmises his surroundings and declares that critical philosophy contains two inseparable moments: Philosophical Laborers, or the referring back of all things and any kind of origin-to-values, like Kant’s removal of value from criticism, and Schopenhauer’s criticism in the name of established values; and Philosophical Utility, or the referring back of these values to something which is their origin and determining their value, like Utilitarians deriving values from single facts making them some kind of objective fact. In both of these cases, philosophy moves in the indifferent element of the valuable-in-itself or valuable for all. Nietzsche attacks both the high ideas of foundation which leaves values indifferent to their own origin, and the idea of a simple causal derivation or smooth beginning which suggests an indifferent origin for values. The philosopher is now the Genealogist, not a Kantian tribunal judge, or a utilitarian mechanic. Nietzsche substitutes the pathos of difference or distance (differential element) for both the Kantian principle of universality and the principle of resemblance of the utilitarian. From Genealogy, and Will-to-Power, we gain our necessary tools from Nietzsche for proper Radical Empiricism and possibly even some Transcendental Empiricism. This is an approach to reality or ontology as a process, and using our perceptions as fodder. 

“An infinite multiplicity becomings variously colored, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere the same, invariably colorless.” Bergson (CM, Perception of Change)

Nomadic Notes: Bergsonism

For Bergson, the flux is our direct experience with reality and a flux of feeling gives us access to reality. If we were to instead of reconstructing things ideally, confined ourselves purely and simply to what is given to us by experience, we would think in a very different way. Like a never ending movie theater, one that of the Shakespere variety – as a way of facilitating the needs/demands of social life and linguistic communication, we have produced a ‘cinematographic’ model of the real: which is to say, we reconstitute and compose the mobility of the real in terms of a series of juxtaposed and successive immobilities, and so generate for ourselves the illusion of continuity. The real moving continuity of the whole is concealed from us (buddha-nature), therefore by our very habits of representation, which are largely spatial. For us, movement is something impersonal, mechanical, abstract and simple. There is a good reason for the congruence between our knowledge of the operations of nature and its practical effectiveness. This is because of the ‘cinematographical character of our adaptation to them’, or why an actor is on stage and how well he adapts to that night’s crowd. If our body is related to other bodies in terms of an arrangement that is like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope, we say that each time the kaleidoscope is given a shake what we detect or decode is not the shake in and for itself but rather only the new picture that has emerged from the transformation. In short, it is owing to the practical character of our understanding and intellect that there is generated the illusion that change is an illusion. For us, change is decomposable, almost at will, into states, and out of this decomposition we produce a movement from out of a series of immobilities. 

Reality, as William James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. He sees a distinction between: our intelligence’s habits, that are economical and strictly proportioned to their cause; and nature’s habits, which are extravagant and put into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary (too much of everything). Like actors on a stage, each actor has carefully crafted lines, clear cut plot lines, clear ending to conversations, everything economical and minimal (usually) to eliminate any confusion of the message (happy or tragic). However in real life we observe the opposite: a multitude of useless things said, unnecessary and superfluous gestures made that confuse the point, no sharply drawn situations, no beginnings or ends, overlapping scenes, etc. For James, real life in its fluctuating relations and fluid things presents us with things and facts through real relations that are as directly observable as the things and facts themselves – and this experience is not incoherent. This is vastly different from the dry universe constructed by the philosophers with elements that are clear-cut, well-arranged (like actors on a stage in a play), where each part is not only linked to another part, as experience shows us, but also as our reason would have it is coordinated to the whole. 

Pluralism

The Pluralism of William James declared two habits in the history of philosophy: the philosophies of antiquity conceived of nature as having a shutting off, arresting, or finite quality to it; the philosophies of the moderns conceive of nature as being infinite. Pluralism, takes the position of pure experience, or of Radical Empiricism, where reality is now indefinite rather than infinite or finite. Reality flows without our being able to say whether it is in a single direction, or even whether it is always and throughout the same river flowing. In doing so, the whole of the human becomes unlocked, rather than just its intelligence. This does not diminish intelligence, but brings it to the level of the other two capacities, that of will and sensibility. Human’s naturally perform a blunder by extending their reason beyond our data of experience out into the universe, we do so out of the way of generalization to make up for the fact that we are very small and will not see much of the universe relatively. In doing so, we surround ourselves with a world of pure ideas in which our sensibility can no longer enlighten us or inform us of insight because we have relegated it beneath that of intelligence. With intelligence we make what light there is to see, but in doing so we diminish or completely stamp out our senses and feelings (our body). James thinks most philosophies restrict our experience of feeling and will, and give primacy to thought. What James asks through his philosophy is not to add too much experience through hypothetical considerations, and not to mutilate it into its solid elements. We can only be absolutely sure of what experience gives us, but we should accept experience wholly, and our feelings are part of it by the same right as our perceptions, consequently, by the same right of things. The whole human counts for William James: the will, the feelings, and the thoughts. 

“We bathe in an atmosphere traversed by great spiritual currents. Some resist, while others allow themselves to be carried. Certain souls open as wide as possible to the breeze, these are the mystic souls.” The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James

In this atmosphere traversed by great spiritual currents, if any of us resist, others allow themselves to be carried along. The things and facts which make up our experience constitute for us a human world, which is connected with others but is so far removed from them and so close to us that we must consider it in practice, as sufficient for humans and sufficient unto itself. We, or all that we are conscious of being, are an integral part of these things and these events. The affects or intensities that we feel deep inside of us as powerful stirs of feelings are as real as the forces which interest the physicist. Humans do not create these affects that occur at special moments, anymore than we create heat or light from the sun. Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly uplifted and seemingly carried away: why could they not enable us to experience directly, as in a scientific experiment, this uplifting and exalting force? This is the inspiring origin of the idea of Pragmatism of William James. For him, those truths it is more important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought. 

What is real, is any determined fact taking place at any point in space and time, it is singular and it is always changing. When we attempt to make affirmations (creation of false problem alert), we do so generally and in a way that implies a certain stability on the part of the object of focus. For example, the fact ‘heat expands bodies’: we could photograph a piece of metal, like an iron bar, being subjected to heat and be able to observe it expanding. But a truth that is applied to all bodies, without utilizing any that I have seen in particular, copies nor reproduces anything, in my experience. To solve this, ancient philosophy constructed a transcendental space beyond space and time where affirmation could be measured against how faithful they ‘copied’ these eternal truths (above Plato’s divided line). However, modern philosophy has solved this in a different manner by bringing this eternal truth down from the heavens onto Earth; but they still see in it something which is pre-existent to our affirmations. In this way, modern philosophy lodges truth into things and facts: our modern science seeks truth in these things and facts, draws them out of their hiding place, and exposes them to the light of day. The affirmation such as, ‘heat expands bodies’, is a law governing the facts which is enthroned if not above, then at least in their midst – a law that is contained in our experience, all we are to do then is to extract it. Kant’s philosophy insists that all scientific truth is relative to the human mind, and in this way considers true affirmations as being given in advance in human experience. Once that experience is organized by human thought in general, all science is then to do is pierce the resisting shell of facts, that inside lies truth, like a needle in a haystack. 

If we picture reality as a perfectly coherent and systemized whole that is sustained by some sort of logical framework, then it is only natural for our minds to conceive of truth as being the logical framework itself that science simply rediscovers. William James confines himself to experience, and experience alone. Experience presents us with a flow of phenomena that we then take into our perception system. If a certain affirmation relating to one of these phenomena enables us to gain insight into future phenomena, then we say it is true. A proposition such as, ‘heat expands bodies’, that could be suggested by observing a particular body expand from heat, means that we can use this experience to foresee how other bodies might act in the same way when exposed to similar heat conditions. This gives us a certain capacity to help us proceed from a past experience into new experiences, like clues or heuristics. Reality flows and we flow with it, but by using clues we can flow with reality more in harmony and gain favorable conditions for acting. This conception of truth is vastly different from what we ordinarily define as truth: ordinarily it is used as a conformity to what already exists, however with James it is defined by its relation to what does not yet exist. The truth, according to James, does not copy something which has been, or is now – it announces what will be, or rather prepares our action for what will be. 

“Philosophy has a natural tendency to have truth look backward: for William James, it looks ahead.” On the Pragmatism of William James, Bergson

Other philosophical doctrines conceive of truth as something that comes before the clearly-determined act of the person who formulates it for the first time. In this way, America was waiting for Christopher Columbus – he was the first to see it, and it was just waiting on him to discover it. Something hides it from our view, or our veil of perception, and we must uncover it through various methods. William James conceives of truth as quite different, he does not deny that reality is independent of what we say of it, or think of it; but the truth which can be attached only to what we affirm about reality, is for him, created by our affirmation. 

“We invent the truth to utilize reality, as we create mechanical devices to utilize the force of nature. It seems to me one could sum up all that is essential in the pragmatic conception of truth in a formula such as this: while for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention.” Bergson

This does not mean that truth is arbitrary. A mechanical invention’s value is defined solely by its practical usefulness – in the same way that an affirmation, being true, should increase our mastery over things. Truth is no less the creation of a certain individual mind, and it is no more pre-existent to the effort of the mind, than say the iPhone existed before Steve Jobs. The engineers under Jobs had to study reality to create the iPhone, but then the iPhone was superadded to reality and became something absolutely new, and may have never been produced if not Jobs had not existed. Thus we find that a truth, if it is to endure, should have its roots in realities; but these realities are only the ground in which that truth grows, and flourishes. Other flowers could just as well have grown there if the wind or other circumstances had given rise to different conditions. 

According to pragmatism, truth comes little by little, drop by drop, into being – thanks to individual contributions of a great number of inventors. If these inventors had not existed, or others had been in their place, then we would reach an entirely different body of truth. Reality would remain approximately the same, but quite different would have been the paths we took to trace reality in our aim of finding our way about it. This is not only the case for scientific truths, but even the most basic facts of experience. For example, when I say, “my pencil has fallen under the table”, I don’t have to be describing the experience, for what I saw in particular was my hand dropping the pencil, and what I felt was my hand letting go, not the pencil actually going under the table. Someone long before us ventured to make a hypothesis of invariability and independence which we adopt every time we use a substantive (forms of essences), and adjectives (qualities) to capture states and relate these to movement. Our grammar may have been different if that someone, or someone else long ago, would have adopted alternative hypotheses of another kind in the course of our evolution.

The structure of our mind, therefore, is to a great extent a product of our own work, or at least the work of some of us. In this way, pragmatism continues Kantianism: Kant has said that truth depends upon the general structure of the human mind. Pragmatism adds that the structure of the human mind is the effect of the free initiative of a certain number of individual minds. This, however, does not mean that truth depends upon each one of us: maybe any one of us could have invented the iPhone. Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are some to which we could have an entirely different turn if our attention had been oriented in a different direction, or if we had aimed it at a different utility; on the contrary, some of these paths traced through reality correspond to currents of reality itself. These currents depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are free to go against the current, or follow it, and even if we follow it we can variously divert it – simultaneously being associated with the current and submitted to the force within it. Make no mistake though, these currents of reality are not created by us; they are part and parcel of reality. Pragmatism thus results in a kind of reversal of order in which we are accustomed to place the various kinds of truth: apart from truths which translate mere sensations, it is truths of feeling which pushes their roots deepest into reality. If we say that all truth is invention, then we must establish between truths of feelings and scientific truths the same kind of difference between, for example, a sail-boat and a steam-boat. In this example, both the sail-boat and steam-boat are human inventions; but the first makes use of artificial means only slightly, taking the direction of the wind to allow the natural force it utilizes. However for the steam-boat, the artificial mechanism holds the most important place; it covers or hides the force it puts into play and assigns it a direction from which we choose. 

William James’s definition of truth, therefore, is integral to his conception of reality. If reality is not that economic (like the actors on stage), and is not systematic (in its wholeness) like our intellect likes to imagine, then intellectual truth is solely a human invention whose effect is to utilize reality, rather than to enable us to penetrate it. And if reality does not form a single whole, if it is multiple, mobile, and consisting of multiple cross-currents, truth can only arise from contact with one of these currents. Truth is felt before it is conceived (physical prehension versus conceptual prehension a la Whitehead) and is more capable of seizing and storing up reality than truth that is merely thought. Again, for James, reality is not infinite, or finite, but indefinite; and truth does not look backwards, but looks ahead.

“William James went from science to science, from anatomy to physiology to psychology, from psychology to philosophy, tense over great problems, heedless of anything else, forgetful of himself. All his life he observed, experimented, meditated. And as if he had not done enough, he still dreamed, as he fell into his last slumber, of extraordinary experiments and superhuman efforts by which he could continue even beyond death to work with us for the greater good of science, and the great glory of truth.” Bergson

Sources:

• The Creative Mind: On the Pragmatism of William James, Henri Bergson

• The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James

• Pragmatism, William James