JAMES, WILLIAM

(b. New York, New York, 11 January 1842; d. Chocorua, New Hampshire, 26 August 1910),

psychology, philosophy. For the original article on James see DSB, vol. 7.

James is widely known as the father of American psychology, and he is fondly remembered as a public intellectual with the clarity and insight to create usable popularizations of complex academic and scientific work. His major professional contribution to psychology was to remind his fellows in the field of the worlds of mind and behavior that lie beyond the grasp of even the most elegant theories. His chief philosophical contribution was his unblinking attention to the concreteness of experience in psychological events and feelings, religious beliefs, scientific inquiry, and the philosophy of empiricism itself. Although he had often been dismissed as a mere popularizer in the decades after his death in 1910, recent work on James has stimulated a steadily growing appreciation for his substantial contributions. Clarity has been no vice as he helped to shape humanistic orientations, process thinking, and phenomenology in psychology, philosophy, and religious studies. In fact, in the early twenty-first century there is wide recognition of his transdisciplinary significance for his pioneering critique of overreliance on scientific authority, for his anticipations of neuroscience, for his rhetorical gifts, for his spirituality, and for his prophetic warnings about a culture dominated by corporate institutions and commodified values.

Background and Upbringing . William James’s upbringing, in the household of a Swedenborgian radical and in the context of growing scientific authority in the middle-to-late nineteenth century, shaped his life, temperament, and work. He taught, wrote, and lectured on the borderland of science and religion, gravitating toward mediation of these fields, with all their kindred associations, in his psychology, philosophy, and religious thought.

Because the spirituality of his father, the elder Henry James (to distinguish him from his second son, the novelist), included endorsement of the empirical spirituality of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century mystic popular in Romantic cultural circles, the religious training that the oldest son, William, received was open to the study of nature. By age nineteen, with his father’s encouragement, he went to the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, where he met a brand of science shaped by the professional demands for rigorous empiricism. He studied chemistry, anatomy, and physiology before transferring to the Harvard Medical School; this succession of studies reflected his temperamental ambivalence and contributed to his vocational indecision. These and related troubles with depression, eye and back ailments, philosophical uncertainty, and hesitancy to marry—precisely because he dreaded passing on his troubles to a next generation— plunged him into a period of indecision and personal crisis, which prolonged his formative years and postponed the beginning of his working life.

Crisis and Construction of Worldview . James is perhaps as famous for this period of crisis as for his mature theories, in part because many of those ideas first began to emerge in his youthful drama of pain and recovery. The very paths he took while struggling in his youth showed not only the first stirrings of his mature ideas, but also their roots in the scientific and religious commitments of his early adulthood. While he found it difficult to accept his father’s ideas directly, he gravitated toward theories and cultural experiences that, similarly, expressed the immaterial factors of life (including spirituality and consciousness) within the natural world rather than in orthodox references to incomprehensible factors or another world. In particular, he was attracted to the pre-Christian ancients, sectarian medicine, humanistic psychology, and voluntaristic philosophy. Just as Henry Sr. approached nature “as if it had some life in it” (in William’s words), so the son, now on a professional path in his thirties, inquired into the experiences of the natural world and human nature, noticing the role of immaterial factors to

complement the emerging understanding of nature in terms of physics and chemistry as assumed by most modern professional science (Correspondence, vol. 4, p. 227). William endorsed the work of modern science, benefiting deeply from the latest research in his own profession, most notably in his landmark Principles of Psychology (1890). However, he maintained an impulse to pull his profession toward a “program of the future of science” that would be less wedded to a materialistic philosophy, such as the automaton theory of consciousness, which he noticed to be a frequent accompaniment of professional science but an unnecessary stowaway on the path of inquiry. He offered wry praise for the scientific enthusiasm of his times as “a temporarily useful excentricity” (1902, p. 395).

A Psychology of Philosophizing . Despite materialist and positivist enthusiasms for Darwinism swiftly spreading in influence from the 1860s, when James first studied science, he noticed its hypothetical and probabilistic qualities. This type of thinking shaped his theory of “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), in which he proposed that the motivation to philosophize stemmed from the craving for explanatory sufficiency in clarity or simplicity that shaped human thinking in general, even in science.

Openness to experience unconstrained by the abstractions of theory—whether scientific, philosophical, or religious—took his work out of the mainstream profession of scientific psychology and into philosophical and religious studies. He was also concerned about the overreliance on experimental method in the psychological laboratory. In Pragmatism (1907) he emphasized the usefulness of theories as instruments of inquiry, but he also insisted that we should not confuse these directional tools for the whole forest of experience. In “The Will to Believe” (1895) he proposed that when evaluating a belief—in science or religion—it is more important to pursue the prospective possibilities in experience itself rather than remain in fear of crossing abstract boundaries of prior theory formation. This essay, and his many accompanying “essays in popular philosophy,” never called for rejection of scientific inquiry, but for a continuation of its methods into religion and other spheres conventionally segregated from science. He even called his research into Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) a “science of religions” with which he explored personal religious experiences that generally underlie institutional structures; finding evidence of “the more” in human psychology, he proposed that it served as the basis for orthodox religious affiliations. Toward the end of his life, James called his emphasis on pure experience unadorned by abstraction “radical empiricism,” and his essays in elaboration of this philosophy were collected posthumously.

James was not particularly concerned with the specialized discourses of psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and science studies that today claim pieces of his corpus. He contributed to each of these fields as they now stand, but his own personal and intellectual motivations were more broadly based. Of course, he lived in a time when educational institutions were only beginning to specialize; in fact, he remarked that the first lecture he ever heard in psychology was his own. In addition, the very indecisiveness that troubled him, and that has encouraged much of the psychological scrutiny of James himself, actually contributed to his appetite to work in all these fields. He knew the pain of choice, and its necessity when selecting paths forward, but he was also attentive to the tyranny of choices that ruled out other important factors in life, hence his insistence on recognizing the “ever not quite” factors in our knowledge of all fields.

Meliorism, a Hope in the Making . His hopes were hard won, and this lent his philosophy an authentic and experience-chastened quality that catapulted his work onto a public stage, where he became popular beyond the appeal of most academics. Perhaps his most alluring mediation was between pessimism and optimism. Why endorse an outlook that is explicitly against one’s own good? Yet at the same time, how turn away from the truly tragic and burdensome facts of life? His answer was to adopt neither, but instead to endorse what he called “meliorism,” the commitment to hoping and working for the best. This gritty buoyancy is at the heart of James’s commitment and a reason for the enduring appeal of his words even decades after his death in 1910. Characteristically, he was scientific enough to doubt the orthodox claims for an afterlife, but he was religious enough to notice their power to motivate and their plausibility in the depths of “psychic experiences.” Besides, after decades of committed search into the natural world and human psyche, and with a sharp sense that human experience involved both bodily and mental factors, he faced death with the wistful realization that “I’m just getting fit to live” (Letters, vol. 2, p. 214).

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY JAMES

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longman, Green, 1902.

The Works of William James. Edited by Fredson Bowers and

Frederick H. Burkhardt. 19 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–1988. There are many editions of James’s writings; this collection and the Correspondence below are the most authoritative. Works includes all of James’s published books and collections of many of his unpublished notes, lectures, and essays thoroughly annotated and contextualized.

The Correspondence of William James. Edited by Ignas K.

Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. 12 vols.

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004. A collection of correspondence to and from James, including 70 percent of the 9,300 known letters that he wrote in his lifetime, with the remaining calendared for ease of reference.

OTHER SOURCES

Bjork, Daniel. William James: The Center of His Vision. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Provides a detailed account of James’s life, especially in his relations with his wife, Alice Howe Gibbens James, and emphasizes William James’s exuberant, distinctive genius in dealing with knotty psychological and philosophical questions.

Cotkin, George. William James, Public Philosopher. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. A historical account of the cultural and political position of James, especially in his adult life.

Croce, Paul Jerome. Science and Religion in the Era of William James. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995 (Vol. 1) and forthcoming (Vol. 2). Sets James in his personal and cultural contexts and emphasizes the intermingling of mind and body in his work.

Donnelly, Margaret E., ed. Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992. A collection of essays by psychologists in evaluation of the meaning and legacy of James’s psychological theories, written from the perspective of pluralism, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, and history and with attention to theories of the self, emotions, clinical work, free will, and parapsychology.

Feinstein, Howard M. Becoming William James. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1984. A psychobiography that evaluates the young man in relation to family dynamics.

Levinson, Henry Samuel. The Religious Investigations of William James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

A religious studies evaluation of his development of a science of religions.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. A highly readable narrative synthesis of recent scholarship on James in relation to other founders of pragmatism—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey—and in the context of countless stories of American social and cultural history.

Myers, Gerald E. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Covers much more thought than life, with an emphasis on his philosophical psychology.

Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Presents James’s philosophical development toward a postmodern view of the constructed character of knowledge.

Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1999. Offers a biographical overview with more attention to social context and personal issues than to theory formation.

Taylor, Eugene. William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Challenges the conventions in the history of psychology that James abandoned psychology after 1890 with evidence that his experimental psychopathology was directed toward an alternative psychology.

Townsend, Kim. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. New York: Norton, 1996. Examines James’s ambivalence in terms of gender and finds the popular philosopher both subject to a strong and brittle masculinity and intelligently rising above it.

Paul Jerome Croce