My William James

A few years ago I wanted to offer an optional course on William James for the undergraduate programme in the School of Psychology, but my line manager wouldn't let me. He said it was peripheral to a syllabus that had to be accredited by the British Psychological Society, and in attracting only a few students, would be costly per head. It was, he assured me, purely a 'pragmatic' decision. William James (1842-1910) was history.

He was probably right to think James wouldn't have fitted in. James himself never much wanted to. He hated institutionalisation and bureaucracy, and the way they defeated individualism and what he called 'wild facts'. He did not believe in the whole growing industry of academe – 'vicious intellectualism' – with its separate disciplines, specialist languages, and over-professionalised ways of thinking. And yet this was the Harvard professor who was one of the founders of psychology itself, as a subject of study.

Widening the range of possibility

I hope James would have been ruefully amused by my manager's unthinking use of the word 'pragmatic'. He meant by it rational and practical, which to me meant working within the easy limits of what was possible and expedient. But it was ironic that he should unthinkingly use the very word that James himself used to describe his own philosophy. 

His American Pragmatism was the vital converse: to him, it meant widening the range of possibility, trying out what might work, finding what was useful to human beings in the midst of things, without absolute principles or final outcomes set up rigidly in advance. What is more, for William James it was one of the great failures of a second-rate society to forget its past meanings, its first founding thoughts and thinkers, and its original purposes.
  
He knew how evolution itself encouraged this amnesia. Ideas become so taken for granted, he noted in a manuscript, 'that we never think of them as the positive historic achievements they really must have been'. Of course, there is something genuinely helpful in that economy: the advantage gained by the useful ability to summarise and simplify and label, deploying the knowledge that has been previously established, without having to rediscover it personally every time. 

But James loved imaginatively trying to remember what it might have felt like for our early ancestors to live in a dangerous world that at every moment seemed unrecognisable and contingent. How wonderful then it would be to move into a second more secure world; one that through the developing resources of memory and reasoning became more predictable, on the basis of knowing what had gone before. The first sense of discovery, wrote James, was the raw feeling of 'the same again': we had this before, and probably it will return in future.

And yet what begins as our evolutionary friend becomes our developmental foe when a useful habit turns into sheer rigidification. James knew that and understood the psychology of it. And that is why I wanted students of psychology to remember James: because he himself remembered and kept re-creating what his colleague C.S. Peirce called 'firstness'. 

What James valued was the sudden re-discovery of an idea that had fossilised: it never mattered if something had been thought before; what mattered was that it was being thought again now as if for the first time again. That was the true meaning of originality, not novelty but a new young sense of an old idea. It was that renewed mental vitality that James sought as itself a weapon against his own lifelong disposition towards depression.

Excitingly wayward

Life, James believed, was more like a verb than a noun. But we kept trying to stop it from happening; our educational system too often existed to turn it back into a verbal label in the service of inert and boring explanation. By the post-mortem act of naming, he writes in the great two-volumed Principles of Psychology (1890), 'the continuous flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its place, an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, is preached'. It is like saying 'that cyanide of potassium kills because it is a "poison", or that it is cold tonight because it is "winter", or that we have five fingers because we are "pentadactyls".'

He understood why we would want secondary consolidation, our ready-made ideas and standard diagnoses, everything we now know as data reduction. But in a psychology always close to physiology and to what has become neuroscience, James understood that human thinking was richer, subtler and more excitingly wayward than humans themselves often wanted to suppose:

Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of contemplative rest.

(Principles of Psychology, vol 1, chapter 9, 'The Stream of Thought')

These achieved 'resting places' are what James called the 'substantive parts' of psychological grammar: the nouns and concepts and outcomes achieved. But the 'places of flight' are the verbs, the 'transitive [or transitional] places' in the very process of thought. The basic aim of thinking is practical and teleological, to get from one landing place to another. 

We cannot stay forever on the wing in mid-air, and it is in our nature to want to get somewhere, to land a solid result. But only some of what was rich potential within the means gets released into the specific outcome any particular time round. So much depends, therefore, on how far those mental perchings can incorporate what went into the flight towards them. Because it is the flight that contains all the quick, tiny movements of living thought – and those implicit moments too often get lost in the temporary conclusions they give way to. James called it thought 'in the making'.

In its making there is, says James, 'a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but' just as much as a feeling of blue or cold or anger. 'The word "or",' he writes, 'names a genuine reality.' These little basic words signal vital micro-movements in the very contour and direction, the shape and syntax of human psychology in action. We begin by pointing to 'the mere that of life' and then try to work out 'what' it is. In that effort, these linguistic twists and turns, struggling towards meaning, show that there is always an unnamed excess of sub-conscious quality and feeling, what James called 'the more' or 'the fringe' of meaning awaiting further realisation at another time. Psychologists, for him, should be the first to respect the deep psychology of such thinking.

Ideas as instruments

Back at the macro level, we have our solid categories and reassuring frameworks; but a Jamesian pragmatist would always ask: what real difference do they make in the world? For James, they are never pure and lofty truths, they are rather to be 'unstiffened' in the melting pot of every new situation. From top-down ideas, they are to be turned back into working thoughts again, to be tested and applied at ground level, in relation to the human messiness that James himself relished. 

That is why psychology was never for him separable from philosophy in realising the new worldview it was beginning to create. It is not as it has been classically thought for centuries, said James, that the highest thinking is the most general, the most permanent:

Why, from Plato to Aristotle downwards, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and that the things of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new truths about individual things. The restriction of one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires even more complicated brain-processes than its extension to all the instances of a kind . . .
(Principles of Psychology, vol 1, chapter 11)

When I read that, with its revolutionary change of framework, am I alone in feeling suddenly different, turned around, freed in mind, and somehow therapeutically better? Ideas become in James not prescriptions to be proved or obeyed but instruments to try out and to ride upon, to see how far in any individual venture they can get you.

'I am a motor', said James.  This is why I had to write a book, My William James, when I couldn't give the course: out of a belief that, with his help, thinking can activate lost potential and add excitement; that intellectual moments involve psychological releases. The motor force in him says this to us, for starters:

All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it.

(The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, lecture 9)

An education in psychology would say – and James does say, because so much of his writing was originally given in the form of lectures – Can you see the hot spots compared to the cooler defaults and colder norms? Could you turn the dead feelings and ideas back into live ones, rather than the other way round? Do you know when a nascent thought seems to say Yes, and offer a way forward you cannot quite make out yet? As James's colleague John Dewey put it in Philosophy and Civilization (1931):

Different ideas have their different 'feels', their immediate qualitative aspect, just as much as anything else. One who is thinking his way through a complicated problem finds direction in his way by means of this property of ideas. Their qualities stop him when he enters the wrong path and send him ahead when he hits the right one. They are signs of an intellectual 'Stop and go'. 

Stop or go, warm or cold: one thought may feel itself the host and successor of another, helping to carry it forward into another clause or sentence; but equally, it may feel misled from behind, or blocked in front. For James, different mental elements were 'cognizant' of each other, greeting or rejecting each other's vibrations along various cross-cutting lines of direction in the brain, which sentences themselves mirrored in their shape and rhythm. Writing was to be the brain and mind live on the page.

James doesn't begin like Freud with mental illness. What he wants is more life and better vitality, without being simplistically healthy-minded or determinedly positive. What he offers is a response to that human call which he thought was the psychological origin for the existence of religion: the cry 'Help, help!' Not that by the beginning of the 20th century he feels he can offer a final religious end, a heaven above, a definite faith and object for hope. 

But rather, instead, his is a secularised method for mind to sense some way forward, with risk and uncertainty. It is a horizontal awareness of the world, modelled in his own thrusting sentences, such that faith or hope or courage are not states, so much as neuro-excitements intrinsic to the act and process of thinking something, trying something, being moved by something. 

Then it feels (to use another of James's linguistic instruments) as if there is something more in it, more to it, whatever 'it' is. That's pretty vague, you may say. But that is what I have sought, James retorts: to put the vagueness back into a too narrow and literal-minded world.

Because: 'A degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility' (Principles of Psychology, vol 1 chapter 1). Fertility there means that 'the more' is a semi-conscious thought looking for a future for itself – not perhaps some grand future, but a sudden intimation, just ahead, that another word, or another sentence, or a tiny variation of action wants to have life, can become conscious and possible. 

'As if' there were sudden purpose, 'as if' there could be some new breakthrough, instead of stuckness, repetitiveness or depression. And that 'as if' makes and finds a chink of possibility because of its risky excitement of emotion. 'Your mistrust of life has removed whatever your own enduring existence of life might have given it,' he writes with that characteristic looping shape of syntax of his, in his essay 'Is Life Worth Living?': 'Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.' 

For James wanting to believe is much closer to belief itself than we suppose. Human psychology, he thought, will not for long allow any religion or philosophy that utterly denies or decries human wants – it will somehow, involuntarily, still have to insist on its needs:

Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies.

('The Sentiment of Rationality')

Molecular mental forces

A human being joys in reacting 'with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness' but is very unhappy to have to react 'with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt': any human system that would seek to legitimate the latter at the expense of the former can never survive, says James, because it does not fit with what we are and need to be. 

And that is what thought is in him at its triumphant best – the sudden surprised sense of a pragmatic 'fit' between something out there and something in me here. When to some book or sight or influence, 'something in me makes admiring response', it is because 'no doubt there is a germ in me of something similar'. That is how the 'me', which James thought deeper than 'I', is excitingly discovered.

The 'me' of thought, mind, consciousness exist for James as a middle area in human beings, interposed between incoming sensations and an outgoing discharge. That middle department, preventing automaticity, however momentarily and under pressure, can reflect, delay, alter, refuse, welcome and enhance – just as human individuals exist to interrupt the automatic flow of the world. Psychology for James existed to further that possibility of intervention.

Hence his famous letter:

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such . . .

My William James is one of those individuals, refusing any fixed barrier between psychology, philosophy and religion by transmitting molecular mental forces through the act of writing. Writing, which in William James is as much literature as is that of his younger brother, the novelist Henry James. My Reading – the Oxford University Press series to which my book belongs and which I co-edit – is not about institutionalised practices or closed categories: it is about the psychological transmission of vital messages, the passing on of books and authors from individual to individual.

Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool where he was Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS). [email protected]