76. The Modern Moment: Radical Empiricism

THE MANY AND THE ONE was indeed a doomed project, but something else was already rising out of the depths. Even as he was complaining to his friend the Polish philosopher Lutoslawski, in late May 1904, about having written only thirty-two pages of The One and the Many, James had come to the leading edge of a period of astonishing creativity, what John McDermott calls an “explosion” in his thought. Between the end of May 1904 and February 1905 James wrote the eight pieces that form the core of his project on radical empiricism.¹

One cannot say with certainty what it was exactly that sparked the explosion, but a number of favorable conditions came together just as the school year drew to a close. James’s health improved dramatically; he started taking the Roberts-Hawley lymph injections again after an eighteen-month hiatus. He found he could walk for as much as four hours at a stretch. The end of classes brought a sense of relief; he shook off Cambridge, going first to Chocorua, then to western Massachusetts to see friends.

On June 21, 1904, he wrote a short introduction to Gustav Fechner’s Little Book of Life After Death, praising what he called Fechner’s “daylight view—the view that the entire material universe, instead of being dead, is inwardly alive and consciously animated... in divers spans and wave-lengths, inclusions and envelopments.”² Fechner was an intellectual wild man; his work clearly excited James, whose introduction is a liberating, radical, imaginative flight. “Once we grasp the idealistic notion that inner experience is the reality,” James wrote, “and that matter is but a form in which inner experiences may appear to one another when they affect each other from outside, it is easy to believe that consciousness or inner experience never originated, or developed, out of the unconscious, but that it and the physical universe are co-eternal aspects of one self-same reality, much as concave and convex are aspects of one curve.” This is, incidentally, as good a statement of the one and the many as James ever achieved.³

On June 24 his close friend Sarah Whitman, the Boston artist, died; James’s last letter to her arrived too late and was returned to him. He went to the funeral. Whitman had been just his own age, and her death italicized his own mortality. “I wish George Dorr to be one of my pallbearers,” he wrote Alice. Compunctions welled up, as always. “I think I have been a little hard on Mrs W,” he told her, explaining in another letter, “I sometimes resented the way in which her individual friendships seemed mere elements in the great social ‘business’ which she kept going so extraordinarily.” But his last comment on Sarah Whitman, to John Jay Chapman, has a gallant, and one feels appropriate, salute. “Dear Mrs. Whitman’s death will make Boston seem a different city. It was like her life, spirited and triumphant. Out she went, gracefully and rapidly, on deck to the last, and taking all her secrets with her.”⁴

A fierce drought this year left New Hampshire roads six inches deep in dust by late June. Another arid event of the summer was the huge and complicated International Congress of Arts and Science being organized by Hugo Münsterberg, the “results” of which were to be issued in twenty-four volumes and in three languages. James begged off, telling Münsterberg he had nothing appropriate for the congress. This was no doubt true, but the casual disclaimer only masks what was really going on with James, which was a tumultuous confluence of philosophic streams of energy. His seminars, all on metaphysics since his return from Edinburgh, were being devoted to broad philosophical questions, and his notes show him contending in these seminars with Royce, Lotze, Bradley, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, the Cairds, Mach, LeRoy, Peirce, Renouvier, Zeno, Hegel, and, occasionally, Aristotle. Playing over this large field of ideas was James’s current focus on Bergson, Dewey, Emerson, and Schiller, whose work he was defending in spirited letters to F. H. Bradley: “I believe that humanism, whether with or without the Absolute container, is a ‘true’ account of our finite knowing and I suspect that methodically and morally it will prove full of regenerating power.”⁵

He was also reading John Ruskin’s letters to Charles Eliot Norton as they came out in the Atlantic Monthly this year. Ruskin had died in 1900; the best of the letters were from the early 1860s, when Ruskin was wrestling with a Tolstoy-like turn to social and moral issues. Ruskin’s corrosive self-doubt, articulated with titanic self-assurance, and his unconcealed yearning for radical change, made him a deeply sympathetic figure for James. James may also have shared Ruskin’s feeling that the late nineteenth century had let him down in large ways. “I looked for another world,” Ruskin wrote Norton, “and find there is only this, and that is past for me; what message I have given is all wrong; has to be all re-said, in another way, and is, so said, almost too terrible to be serviceable.”⁶

James himself was filled with regenerative energy, caught up in what was more like a maelstrom than a stately confluence. Out of all these tendencies and influences came, in June and July, an epoch-making pair of essays, the twin anchor points of James’s philosophy of radical empiricism, “Does Consciousness Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.”

In “Does Consciousness Exist?,” which Bertrand Russell claimed “startled the world,” James says the answer is no. “Consciousness is the name of a non-entity.” As we generally conceive of it, consciousness is the “faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.” If we were to speak precisely, James says, consciousness is “only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experiences is known” The reason James makes this explicit break is because he has in his sights the old and comfortable dualisms of subject and object, spirit and nature, mind and matter. James argues that instead of dueling entities there is only process. “I mean only to deny that the word [consciousness] stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.”⁷

This was not a wholly new idea for James. Indeed, he specifically refers back to his Principles of Psychology, published fourteen years earlier, in which, he reminds his readers, “I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the ‘passing thought.’” His thesis now is that “if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience’ then knowing can be explained as a particular sort of relation toward one another which portions of pure experience may enter.” As Russell would later summarize it, James held that “there are ‘thoughts’ which perform the function of ‘knowing,’ but these thoughts are not made of any different ‘stuff’ from that of which material objects are made.” James’s own conclusion is that “‘consciousness’ is fictitious while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.”⁸

“Does Consciousness Exist?” was ready by late July. James followed it at once with “A World of Pure Experience,” in which he tried to specify (the title giving the provisional answer) what that one stuff of which things and thoughts are both made might be. What is required, James argues, is an approach he calls radical empiricism. Empiricism, he insists, is the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts. “Empiricism on the contrary lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection, and the universal as an abstraction. To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.”⁹

This sounds like a description of Henry James’s later novels, perhaps because the level of significant detail (to exactly what level of detail must you ascend in order to grasp or render something as significant?) was the same for both brothers. William, like Henry, thought of “the organization of the Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfillments and disappointments.” And philosophy for William, like fiction for Henry, “has always turned on grammatical particles. ‘With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my,’—these words designate types of conjunctive relations arranged in a roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness.”

It is the relations that matter, not the objects. Indeed, objects are bundles of relations. “In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify. Wherever such transitions are felt, the first experience knows the last one... Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience.”¹⁰

To the question What exactly is experience? James gives what would now be called a phenomenological reply. “Is it not time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to act like one is to be one?” Life is in the living, not the having lived. Like surfboard riders, “we live as it were upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path.” We cannot speak of mind or personal consciousness except as process, as “the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions.”¹¹

The conclusion has overtones of both Emerson and Bergson. “Life,” says James, “is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often indeed it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field.” It is as though our old language, with its structure of subject, verb, and object, were to be thrown out for a language of all verbs.¹² “Use” and “surprise,” “surface” and “dream” can be nouns, or we can live them as verbs.

This is not easy stuff. James recognized as much when he described his two radical-empiricism essays to his friend Giovanni Papini as “highly technical, polemical, abstract and unnatural for the most part.” For James, the resort to technical language was an admission of failure, but even if flawed or partly failed in the expression, James’s radical empiricism is important.¹³ Bertrand Russell thought James “was right on this matter, and would on this ground alone, deserve a high place among philosophers.”¹⁴ Alfred North Whitehead attributed to James “the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy,” and he explicitly contrasted “Does Consciousness Exist?” to Descartes’ Discourse on Method: “James clears the stage of the old paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its lighting.”¹⁵

James’s radical empiricism was an integral part of the early-twentieth-century revolution that swept through politics, thought, and sensibility. Technical and abstract though the two essays may be, they mark the modern abandonment of certain aspects of classical Western philosophy. James transfers our attention from substance to process, from a concept of self to the process of selving, from the concept of truth to the process of truing (as a carpenter with a plane “trues” or “trues up” a board), from a trust in concepts to an interest in percepts or perceptions.¹⁶ James is arguing that it is relations between things that matter, not objects or subjects as such. If by relativism we mean evaluating things by their relations to other things, then this is relativism, though the better term is relationism.

The result of James’s radical empiricism is to move the modern mind away from seventeenth-century Cartesian dualism and toward what we can call process philosophy; to wean us away from falling back on conceptions and to encourage us to trust our perceptions; to admit feelings to full standing, along with ideas, as aspects of rationality. It does not seem too much to call this a revolution—not a Copernican kind of revolution, but a modernist revolution. And if the exact steps by which radical empiricism emerged for James are not fully clear, it is clear that it happened during the first half of 1904. Sometime after the first of December 1903, James wrote in his notes for his seminar: “All ‘classic,’ ‘clean,’ cut and dried, ‘noble,’ ‘fixed,’ ‘eternal’ Weltanschauungen [worldviews] seem to me to violate the character with which life concretely comes and the expression which it bears, of being, or at least of involving a muddle and a struggle, with an ‘ever not quite’ to all our formulas, and novelty and possibility forever leaking in.”¹⁷

What James did in early 1904 was to convert the problem, as here stated, into the answer. The classicists, the formalists, the monists, the Hegelians, and the Royceans were finding more order and unity than the world we experience can warrant. Where Bishop Berkeley had claimed matter to be a fiction and David Hume had shown mind to be a fiction, William James now claimed that both matter and mind were aspects of experience—not fictions but realities, not fundamentally opposed but fundamentally linked.

“In the order of existence, behind the facts, for us there is nothing,” James wrote. It is his mature, considered challenge to Plato. “When you strike at a king you must kill him,” Emerson had told the young Wendell Holmes. Now James was striking to kill. What radical empiricism says is, there is no eternal order of ideas.