Okay, I’m writing these by order of request. Miss L, Mr. M, and the other Mr. M each either submitted a question to me directly or diverted conversation in a way that made me think “well gosh, that would make one wing-ding of a post.” Those words exactly, I’m sure.
Either way, Miss L. has been, I assume, very patient. So she is first on the docket. The other two gents submitted their questions three and five days ago respectively, so they will be put on the back burner. I have the day off tomorrow though, so I might come on during a study break as I am today. We’ll roll the dice and see what happens.
So! William James. Miss L is a great admirer of his and wanted to know why I find his legacy to be so abhorrent. Thankfully, we share a common disdain for psychological theorists, but apparently I tripped a landmine when I mercilessly leaped at him.
While William James is no Sigmund Freud in terms of fame, he is known for four large contributions to the worlds of philosophy and psychology. I will briefly describe them here:
1. Pragmatism- The philosophical school of thought that stresses the value of belief is not its relation to objective truth, but instead the result of the belief’s application.
Taking things to an extreme level, in James’ economy, if a striped elephant God motivates me to live, work, and contribute to society, then he it is more worthy than, Judaism.
2. Psychological Functionalism- Mental states and functions are defined by their practical application.
3. The James-Lange Theory of Emotion- The idea that human emotion is largely derived from physiological conditions.
4. Radical Empiricism- The notion that one is born with a blank slate and that their worldview is determined by way of sense experience. It differs from older notions of empiricism in that the empiricists of the Enlightenment typically admitted that the rationalists had something right with individuals interpreting the world around them with their own mental structure that determines meaning.
To be far less elegant, James took empiricism and surgically removed whatever remained of the cerebrum.
It’s human nature to obscure, redefine, or retool the idea of truth. That is, by and large, the common thread running through all four of James’ philosophical contributions. Meaning, to him, came from the things that were most immediate to what the individual experienced and what they experienced as a result of the manipulation of their surroundings. Much like other thinkers of his time too, he attempted to construct a new form of meaning from the ashes of the old.
James, like Friedrich Nietzsche, is a two-sided coin. On one side we see the “triumph” of the individual over truth, religion, and tradition. The future is theirs to take.
The other side of the coin is a bit more ugly. Any honest thinker knows that a people need unity and diversity. When diversity has been established the question then is how to arrive at a unity of purpose so as to allow for things to function. How can the wiser among structure “society” to ensure that experiences are similar and lead to a unity of purpose.
James’ answer was the The Moral Equivalent of War . While war itself was undesirable to James, martial style mobilization was considered a moral good. Here is an excerpt:
In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
This was more than a mere fringe component of Pragmatism, but an almost central aspect of it. Indeed, when authentic truth is deemed either dead or an enemy to a people, the state is often the apparatus that fills the gap; teaching values and giving meaning to experience.
Take the moral wars our country has undergone in the last century alone. The “War on Poverty” “War on Racism” and “War on Drugs” are three very popular examples. They are activities undertaken by the government to cure social ills that would have been rectified and regulated by traditional culture and religion in previous ages.
Furthermore, the sort of martial organization called for by James does not always avoid war as James would like. It makes going to war all the more easy.
I realize this is another chicken and egg sort of discussion, but for an aggressor nation, war fervor often predates war itself. Mussolini didn’t wake up one day and say to himself “well, I think I ought to organize society in a militaristic fashion so as to help Hitler fight a war.” No, the martial spirit was first seen as a means by which the government could see that the trains run on time. Going to war seemed only natural though when the time came to attack the British and French in Africa.
I hasten to add that Mussolini was a disciple of Georges Sorel who had a certain fondness for the uglier side of pragmatism. His reverence for James was as such that even Mussolini claimed James as one of his top three favorite philosophers, often referring to himself as philosophical pragmatist.
James apologists will make the point that James did not create an internally consistent political philosophy and that such a thing was antithetical to his openly individualistic pluralism. Furthermore, James could not help the fact that fascists took his philosophy and ran with it.
There is some merit to the latter argument as decent men cannot always control the evil things people do with their ideas. Incidentally, I think if we were to sit William James down, he would likely assert that he does not want to live in a Mussolini sort of world so much as he wants to live in a Theodore Roosevelt sort of world.
At the end of the day though, William James’ influence was more destructive than it was constructive. His psychological and philosophical theories formed a clever and total rejection of a transcendent moral order, giving self-proclaimed elites license to decide such things for others. This was not an implication that James was totally blind to or one that he adequately spoke out against.
Should his works be studied and taken seriously? Absolutely. But revered? Absolutely not.
The Civilized Frontier 
Haha, thanks for remembering to write this! Though your points against him suggest to me that you haven’t actually read his most seminal works (The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to Believe) but have taken some sort of summary of his philosophy from someone else?
The four bullets and the summaries you’ve provided for his contributions are more than a little off … especially 1 and 4.
I mean — if James and his ‘contributions’ are indeed as you have described above, I wouldn’t revere him either. I’d also think of his legacy, as you put it, “abhorrent”.
But his ideas are so unlike what you have described and argued against!
I’ll let my favorite professor (who is a scholar of W. James) defend him:
“William James was a democracy-lover, even in his metaphysics; I can’t imagine why he’d be considered sympathetic to Fascism or any other totalitarian or totalistic ideology. It’s more often ultra-conservatives who view James as dangerous because he gives so much scope to freedom of thought, to the point of risking relativism.
He gave every benefit of doubt to personal religious experience. He remained the unsurpassed defender of religious experience against theories that reduce the religious impulse to something else, whether a disorder of the psyche or the spleen, a quirk of evolutionary biology or a cultural construction.
His piecemeal supernaturalism is an improvement on the tepid antisupernaturalism of much religious liberalism, though it’s no match for fully realized expressions of faith.
In his first Gifford lecture he argued that the meaning of a religious experience should be sought in its “fruits for life” rather than in the peculiar circumstances (a mind-bending drug, a brush with death) that may have triggered it. “Immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, moral helpfulness”—these were the criteria he proposed for testing the staying power and validity of a religious experience.
He knew all too well what it was like to seek refuge in a higher power when crushed by depression and “panic fear,” but he also realized that such experience was not enough to create a lasting faith. The traditional route to saving truth was blocked for you, so in its place he put pragmatism: judge all beliefs by their consequences, test all experiences by the degree to which they make one fit for life.
Composing his Gifford Lectures in the sickbed where he tried to rally his ailing heart and fragile nerves, he naturally tended to equate religious experience with healing and recovery. This was its “cash value.” Yet his pragmatism was not a new form of skepticism but an old form of practical wisdom—the wisdom practiced by masters of spiritual discernment from Cassian to Teresa of Ávila to Jonathan Edwards, who understand that one must test everything and hold fast to what is good.”
You can read more of her defense here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/03/william-jamesthe-varieties-of-religious-experience
The traditional route to saving truth was blocked for him*
re: “At the end of the day though, William James’ influence was more destructive than it was constructive. His psychological and philosophical theories formed a clever and total rejection of a transcendent moral order, giving self-proclaimed elites license to decide such things for others. This was not an implication that James was totally blind to or one that he adequately spoke out against.”
He’s nothing like that
I find it really sad that you think all this about someone who’s actually really great and I really don’t think you’ve read his works or you’d be unable to say that.
You haven’t provided an accurate portrayal of him or his ideas and instead have merely made a blanket, polemical argument against a straw W. James. It’d make sense if you argued against him on actual philosophical grounds and took a critical approach of his actual ideas (instead of the exaggerated and rather wrong summaries of his contributions!) and then said, this is why I don’t like W. James. But you haven’t done that at all.
Your reasons for finding his legacy abhorrent / not finding him worthy of admiration are like that of the people who mock Christianity. I mean, if someone were to say that the Bible/Christianity is bad/dangerous because it allows incest, encourages wars, and perpetuates slavery and so many wars have been fought in the name of it … you’d be like, what? dude, you’ve completely missed the point …, right?
Yeah, how I feel right now.
the real W. James in a nutshell: “James fails to appreciate fully ecclesial forms of faith, but at least he never definitively rules them out. His great contribution is to make religion a live option for those estranged from traditional faith. Never at home in the Christianity of his ancestors, James nonetheless manages in the Varieties to keep the door open for orthodoxy, for supernaturalism, for moral conviction, and for the kinds of religious engagement that make a real difference in the public square. ”
Again, why are you so against James? What is your motivation for disliking and attacking him?