[MD] From Psychology to Empiricism

[david buchanan]

"...As he faced up to the criticism of two philosophical colleagues, ..and to perceived inconsistencies between his own work and that of Lotze, Royce, Fechner, Woodbridge, Dewey and Bergson, James began, in late November and early December of 1905, to fill a pair of notebooks with his thoughts on the problem.The dilemma involved a serious discrepancy between his account of experience in THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY and his current understanding of experience, his new doctrine of 'pure experience'. In the PRINCIPLES James had argued that every part of our experience is a unique and unrepeatable bit of the ceaseless flow of the river of consciousness. He could say this because he then believed that there was an objective world 'out there' that we as individuals could never know. Now, however, James had dropped the old dualism of subject and object and was arguing that experience is all there is."  (Robert Richardson in WILLIAM JAMES, PP. 465-6.)

"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'.this was not a wholly new idea for James. Indeed, he specifically refers back to his PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY, published 14 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 on another which portions of pure experience may enter'.As Russell would later summarize it, James held that 'there are 'thoughts' which preform 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.' ...The result of James's radical empiricism is to move the modern mind away from seventeenth-century Cartesian dualism and toward what we might 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', cut and dried, 'noble', 'fixed', 'eternal' WELTANSHAUUNGEN (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'." (Richardson, pp 448-51)