[MD] Free Will-iam James

[david buchanan]

For anyone who's genuinely interested in a Jamesian analysis of free will...

"...The pragmatic method includes directives for validating a belief, whereas the principle of pure experience includes directives for formulating the belief in experiential terms...He [James] calls on the principle of pure experience, for instance, to demonstrate that if activity is to have any meaning at all, it must be derived from 'some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely pointed out' (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 81). The first step in the investigation must be to seek 'the original type and model of what it means' in the stream of experience." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 318)

"James then develops his concrete description of human activity; 'But in this actual world or ours, as it is given, a part at least of activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal activity comes to birth. (ERE, 81-2) James culls from experience original models for understanding not only action, but causality and freedom.    ..."The experience of activity is then described as it is 'lived through or authentically known' (ERE, 84-5). What activity is 'known-as' is taken from this 'complete activity in its original and first intention.' H goes into detail about the 'ultimate Qualiia' of 'these experiences of process, obstruction,, striving, strain, or release' and concludes that we cannot conceive of it as lived through except 'in the dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome'."  (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 319.)  

"...We want to know whether we are responsible for our activities or are determined by events outside of our knowledge and control. The phenomenal level cannot be superseded if we are even to ask the right questions or frame the experiments correctly. The issue is precisely whether events which we experience as ours are in fact so, or whether they should be reductively attributed to brain cells.     In returning to the metaphysical question James defends the position that the nature, meaning and location of causality can be determined only at the phenomenal level of concrete experience (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 91). It it thus not a metaphysical question at all, but a concrete one, or one answerable within the parameters of radical empiricism. Not only does he show that the metaphysical question must be dropped as unanswerable on its own terms, but taking activity at its face-value, or as we experience it, we also discover 'the very power that makes facts come and be'. In arguing that facts are interactively constituted by us, he has finally explicitly drawn the consequences of his break with the empiricist assumption that our percepts passively mirror reality as it is in itself."  (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 322.) 

"To the objection that our felt activity is only an impression and the facts are to be found elsewhere he responds with the principle of the radically empiricist philosophy according to which anything, to be considered real, must be located within experience. If creative activities are to be found anywhere, 'they must be immediately lived' (ERE, 92). ...What we mean by causing, even if we mislocate it, are activities of 'sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intentions'. For anything to be called a cause, it must be of the sort of activity that resembles this 'creation in its first intention,' this 'causality at work.' To call this phenomenal experience of activity a mere illusion is to prefer a hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation. James, therefore, concludes that 'real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a 'category', if you like, of reality is JUST WHAT WE FEEL IT TO BE, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal." 

"...Therefore, the nature of causality is not to be found in searching for such a transcendental cause of causes, if this means a non-experiential source of what is experienced or some 'more' real, 'unimaginable ontological principle' mysteriously hidden from our investigations. Furthermore, the worth or interest of our investigations of activity does not even consist in discerning the elements of conjunctions of things empirically but 'in the dramatic outcome of the whole process' (ERE, 94). The only reason for investigating activity and causality is to help us understand the course and meaning of life. The pragmatic stance is that we seek to know, not for its own sake, but to enable us to live better."  (Seigfried in "James's Rad Recon", page 323. Emphasis is James's in the original.) 

"It has been the traditional interpretive distinction between a world of subjective experience and the world of objective reality that has generated contemporary attacks on objectivity and verifiability. Such REIFIED distinctions can be dissolved by drawing out the implications of the perspective that 'The world is surely the TOTAL world, including our mental reaction." (Seigfried, 356.)

"James appeals to pure experience to keep us from REIFYING these categories: 'We may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of pure experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux has been framed; and we can play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a different hypothesis' (James, Meaning of Truth, 43).     Imagining a state of pure experience reminds  us that the way the world appears to us, the self-evidenct objectivity of objects, is actually the result of inventive categories by our ancestors that have been found to be useful and therefore preserved and passed on to us through our culture and language. However, we cannot remake the world at our will. As a result of past choices, some possibilities cannot be realized anymore..." (Seigfried, 358.)