The Thought Experimenter (Page 5)

James's intellectual openness had political implications. In "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," he had written of how difficult and important it was for people (including himself) to cultivate awareness of other people's inner lives--especially of that vital center of being that gave them meaning and purpose. A pluralistic foreign policy would sanction multiple vital centers, granting legitimacy to local aspirations even among "backward" peoples; an imperial foreign policy, by contrast, denied those aspirations in the name of progress. After the Spanish-American War, the extension of the American empire to the Philippines required the brutal suppression of the Filipinos' own independence movement, while imperialists brayed at home about democracy and self-determination. James was livid: "What an absolute savage and pirate the passion of military conquest always is," he wrote in the Boston Transcript. Detesting "mere bigness," he recoiled from the coming world of corporations and mega-states.

James did have one thing in common with imperialists like Roosevelt: a longing for regeneration. It sparked James's quest for a "moral equivalent of war" to counteract Roosevelt's belligerence. But James moved beyond morality to a fascination with energy itself. Part of the appeal of mind-cure and other therapies preaching a "Gospel of Relaxation" was that they offered to reawaken us to new life and power. James was interested in any idea, religious or secular, that unleashed energy and moved us to effective action.

James's growing preoccupation with tapping into unseen powers linked him with Modernist thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. The taxonomies and determinisms of positivist science were giving way to more fluid and indeterminate conceptions of nature. As Richardson writes: "Einstein's equation for the equivalence of mass and energy, and James's assertion of the equivalence of thought and thinker, forged, together with modern art and modern music, a new world, a world James both lived in and helped bring about."

Like other Modernist thinkers, James replaced subject-object dualism with an emphasis on the mind in constant dialogue with the world. The origins of Modernist "process philosophy" can be traced to the brilliant chapter in the Principles, "The Stream of Thought." As James wrote, our mental life, "like a bird's life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings." Previously philosophers had paid attention only to the perchings. James's great transatlantic ally was the vitalist Henri Bergson, whose ideas were very close to what James was cooking up himself at about this time: "a philosophy of pure experience." Like the late novels of Henry James, the late philosophy of William James 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." Life was in the transitions as much as in the terms connected.

This was not relativism, as Richardson notes, but relationism. Though he does not elaborate on the term, it suggests the largest significance of James's philosophy--his capacity to conceive the immersion of all thought in the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of "pure experience," without losing the active role of mind in moving from percept to concept. James preferred "both-and" to "either-or." No wonder contemporary theorists of consciousness, resisting the reductionism of Dennett and Dawkins, have begun to rediscover William James. His radical empiricism may yet prove more durable than his pragmatism.

Richardson implies as much by making James's pragmatism little more than an afterthought to his absorption in the intellectual ferment of Modernism. There is good reason for this. The vaunted "pragmatic method," articulated by the logician Charles Peirce, was appropriated by James for his own idiosyncratic purposes. Pragmatists all argued that ideas should be judged by their actual consequences. For many, including John Dewey, good consequences were those that promoted enlightened public policy. This benign but implicitly utilitarian perspective promoted the assimilation of pragmatism into managerial liberalism. But James detached pragmatism from conventional criteria of utility ("what works"). For him, the consequences of ideas could be as personal as getting out of bed in the morning, or stepping out of a sadness to meet someone. Even everyday acts could require a quiet heroism. We can only be grateful that James managed to keep summoning it.

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