[MD] Free Will-iam James

[david buchanan]

Charlene wrote: 
"...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.)
dmb comments:
Seigfried is explaining James and quoting James. And she is telling us that concrete experience - as opposed to abstract thought - is the only place to look for the meaning of our activity. To find out what words like freedom and causality mean, the first thing to do is return to the stream of experience to see what they are in the originally felt and lived experience. That is where our concepts and abstractions come from and that's where they are tried and tested. That's what our ideas are about; life as it's lived. 


Charlene wrote:
"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.    ...He 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.) 

dmb says:
Here Seigfried makes good use of James's literary talents. The man really knew how to choose the right words to express a kind of phenomenology of causality and freedom. In other words, he's carefully describing what it's like to feel the push and pull of the immediate flux of life, the perceptual flow, or as Pirsig calls it, direct everyday experience and the primary empirical reality. Notice what James says right off the top? "This actual world of ours comes with a definite sense of direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal," he says. Doesn't that sound a lot like the dim apprehension that leads us on, as Whitehead is quoted in Lila? I think so. But more specifically, James is saying the idea of causal forces comes from the lived and felt resistances offered by concrete experience. He's saying that the idea of freedom comes from the concrete experience of overcoming this through effort and striving. On this view, the laws of cause and effect are abstractions that grow out of the simple concrete fact that some events consistently follow other events. Time is a fancy idea for the simple fact that one event follows another without any such causal connection. Subjects and objects are also abstracted from experience in this way. And so it is with all our conceptual categories. We add them to experience for our own benefit. But, as Emerson said, Man should not be subdued by his instruments.  

Charlene wrote:
"...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.)

dmb says:
At this point it becomes very clear that she is talking about free will and determinism. That's what we want to know about our activities; whether we are responsible or determined. The metaphysical question must be dropped, she quotes James saying, for the meaning of causality can only be found by returning to actual, concrete experience. Causal relations are not built into the fabric of the cosmos such that our conception corresponds to that objective fact. Instead, The laws of cause and effect are answerable to the original concrete experiences from which they were derived in the first place. 
 

Charlene wrote:
"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 Radical Reconstruction", page 323. Emphasis is James's in the original.) 

dmb says:
To say that the feeling of free will is an illusion, she says, is to prefer unknowable ontological principles over actual, verifiable experiences. This is what James calls "vicious abstractionism", wherein the products of reflection are taken to be more real than the empirical flux of reality from which they were abstracted in the first place. Or, as Pirsig phrases this complaint, this is the subordination of Quality to intellect. Pirsig and James both push back against this other-worldly Platonism, insisting that the point and purpose of our ideas is to serve life, not to unlock the secret riddle of the universe. And that's why we want to know about responsibility and determinism, because of the practical effects it has in human life. It's a human question, not a metaphysical mystery. 
Interestingly, Charlene was only using this issue to shed light on the relationship between James's pragmatism and his radical empiricism. That's what I was looking into when I found this analysis of the free will business. But she goes on to apply these ideas to the issue of SOM and to the existence of physical objects as such. In both cases James appeals to pure experience to keep us from reifying these concepts. And it is applicable to any concept you'd care to name. As concepts, they have been tried and tested and they've worked well enough to get passed on generation after generation. As metaphysical or ontological categories, however, they become the source of endless confusion.

Charlene wrote: 
"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.)


dmb says:
I also wanted to post these quotes because the first one describes subject-object metaphysics as a reified distinction and the second one says that the objectivity of objects is also a concept - one that has become reified. She also adds a cautionary note: these concepts can be demoted from their metaphysical rank and recognized as the human constructs that they are BUT that does NOT mean we can remake these concepts at will. If you want to communicate with your fellow human beings, the commonly inherited language and its thought categories are indispensable. Or, as Pirsig puts it, definitions are the foundation of reason. The names Cain and Abel may have been decidedly arbitrarily but now that they've been established, James says, we must not confuse the two lest we cut ourselves off from the culture and the language. Or, as Pirsig puts it, if you think you can go outside the mythos, then you don't understand what the mythos is. To go outside the mythos is go insane. That might be somebody's idea of fun but it doesn't work very well in a philosophical discussion group. Or in rush-hour traffic.