James, William
James, William 1842-1910
JAMES’S LONG-TERM SIGNIFICANCE
William James was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, and died in Chocurua, New Hampshire, on August 26, 1910. He was one of the most important and influential American thinkers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and is particularly known for his contributions to the growth of psychology as a scientific field of study and to the school of philosophy known as pragmatism.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY
James came from a distinguished family. His father, Henry James Sr. (1811–1882), was a philosopher and author in his own right and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). His younger brother, Henry James Jr. (1843–1916), became a highly regarded novelist and literary figure. In his early years William James experienced a crisis in deciding on a career. He briefly studied art and painting but was convinced by his father to pursue scientific studies instead. While attending Harvard Medical School in the mid-1860s, James spent a year traveling and studying in Germany, and it was during this time that he was exposed to the research being done in that country on the relationship between physiology and psychology, a direction that would lay the groundwork for the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline.
After returning to Harvard and completing his medical degree, James joined the Harvard faculty in the early 1870s. He served first as an instructor of anatomy and physiology, and then in 1875 began offering a course in psychology based on the ideas he had encountered in Germany. In the same year he established at Boylston Hall one of the first experimental laboratories for psychological research. Among his important early contributions to the field of psychology was his formulation, simultaneous with that of the Danish psychologist Carl Lange (1834–1900), of the James-Lange theory of emotion, which argues that emotion follows, rather than precedes, physiological stimulus. He continued to focus on the study of psychology throughout the 1880s and in 1890 published his great, two-volume work The Principles of Psychology. The work, which had taken him twelve years to write, gained him an international reputation and stands as a landmark in the development of psychology as a scientific field of study.
JAMES AND PRAGMATISM
James’s approach to psychology was based on what he later called (in the preface to The Will to Believe, 1897) “radical empiricism.” In this view, human consciousness resembles a flowing stream of undifferentiated objects or data out of which the mind selects specific items, by virtue of personal interest or need, on which to focus its attention. This theory of the mind, and especially its epistemological implications, led James increasingly to the study of philosophy, in which he first offered courses at Harvard in the 1880s, and in particular to the philosophical ideas of pragmatism.
During his earliest days as a teacher at Harvard, James had been part of a group known as the Metaphysical Club that included among its members Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), considered to be the founder of pragmatic philosophy. After the publication of Principles of Psychology in 1890, as James turned more to the investigation of philosophical and epistemological questions in his work, Peirce’s ideas influenced his direction. The root assumption of pragmatic epistemology is that theoretical ideas ought to be judged in terms of their practical consequences—if some real benefit accrues from holding a particular idea, then it is valuable; if there is no discernable benefit, it can be discarded. In this view, truth should never be viewed as wholly complete or absolute, because one must be prepared to adjust it to accommodate new information and new understandings.
Although James’s best-known discussion of pragmatism appears in the essay collection Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), an earlier collection, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), also offers a good expression of his thought. As these titles suggest, James was by no means strictly an academic philosopher but instead sought to make his ideas accessible to a general audience. To this end his essays, often written originally as public lectures, are both interesting and highly readable, and he demonstrates a particular skill in using examples drawn from everyday life. In one of his best known short essays, “What Pragmatism Means” (in Pragmatism ), he begins with a story about a group of individuals on a camping trip arguing over the position of a squirrel on a tree and then uses this incident as a way to discuss the pragmatic approach to truth. James also felt strongly that philosophy ought to address the significant social and moral issues of the times. In his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” based on a talk he gave at Stanford University in 1906, James argued for a form of organized national service that anticipated the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s as well as later programs such as VISTA and AmeriCorps.
Pragmatism is sometimes seen as a philosophy that destroys any hope of discovering absolute truth and that leads, through its emphasis on “usefulness” as a primary criterion for establishing truth, to moral relativism. James to some degree anticipated these concerns in his work. Pragmatic epistemology, in his view, remains open to the introduction of new information, especially information resulting from new scientific discoveries, and his application of pragmatic principles to the questions of ethics and even to religion led him to hold highly traditional views on both. In essays such as “The Will to Believe” and “Reflex Action and Theism” (in The Will to Believe ) and “Pragmatism and Religion” (in Pragmatism ) he set forth the reasons for believing in a theistic God. In fact the study of religion was a matter of considerable importance to James, and his wide-ranging study of religious experience, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), made a significant contribution to the study of comparative religion.
JAMES’S LONG-TERM SIGNIFICANCE
James’s ideas were extremely significant. They influenced a generation of thinkers who followed him, most notably the great philosopher-educator John Dewey (1859–1952), and they played a role in forming the underlying mind-set—of social experimentation and reform—that characterized the Progressive (1900–1917) and New Deal (1933–1939) periods in U.S. history.
SEE ALSO Emotion; Empiricism; Epistemology; Functionalism; National Service Programs; New Deal, The; Philosophy; Pragmatism; Progressive Movement; Psychology; Religion; Stream of Consciousness; Theory of Mind
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY WORKS
James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt.
James, William. 1897. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green.
James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Modern Library.
James, William. 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green.
SECONDARY WORKS
Cotkin, George. 1990. William James, Public Philosopher. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Crunden, Robert M. 1994. From Anti-Social Darwinism to Pragmatism, 1865–1917. In A Brief History of American Culture, vol. 8, 144–158. New York: Paragon House.
Donnelly, Margaret E., ed. 1992. Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Putnam, Ruth Anna, ed. 1997. The Cambridge Companion to William James. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Simon, Linda. 1998. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Scott Wright