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    A Pluralistic Universe
    A Pluralistic Universe
    A Pluralistic Universe
    Ebook272 pages7 hours

    A Pluralistic Universe

    By William James

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    Accessible, common-sense approach to the nature of the universe and the meaning of life. According to Wikipedia: "William James (1842 – 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeltzer Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2018
    ISBN9781455303090
    A Pluralistic Universe
    Author

    William James

    William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher, physician, and psychologist. The brother of novelist Henry James, William James is remembered for his contributions to the fields of pragmatism and functional psychology. 

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      Williams James gave these lectures when aged around 66, just two years before he died. They are a remarkably franked and earnest account of what he believed and how he saw philosophical enquiry. The argument is intriguing, and well-worth reading particularly since it is reasonably short. What other author would present his own work as a paralogism?James sees individual humans as being the component cells of a greater yet still finite unified living entity. This whole explains and justifies its parts rather than vice versa. Because he is not a reductionist, he is content for the capabilities of this divine whole not to be emergent properties. Thus this whole has a greater mind limited in space and time rather than something grander and less intimate. Indeed this divine whole is one of many in a pluralistic community possessing greater minds, extending throughout the cosmos.He explained this viewpoint in a series of eight lectures. He notes that traditional philosophy is groundless and it is tied up in self-imposed knots. Philosophers use personal preference to deliver supposed foundations from analogues of experiential features of the universe. Thus philosophical terms are normally ill defined, abstruse and easily misinterpreted. Philosophers often are uncomfortable with mathematics and nearly always show an aversion to the indeterminate, indefinite or infinite. William James argues in favour of arguments using a revealed empiricism. He asserts that our subjective sometimes-delusional experiences are incommensurate with logic. Therefore, in such circumstances, he suggests we ought to suspend the use of logic. Furthermore he claims that all concepts and definitions are artificial suppositions and therefore can safely be ignored whenever they contradict either subjective experience or deeply felt belief. Thus most scientific knowledge is deemed superficial and misleading. Hence he justifies the inconsistently fickle use of how or when logic is applied by philosophers. Logic is a support act that is entertained only when it gives pleasing results. Life itself is said to violate logic. How can we learn and grow old, and yet still be the same person? Indeed the everyday concepts of rational argument are said to introduce unnecessary barriers. They subdivide reality into concepts perhaps only appropriate to a snapshot in time not the flow of time. They leave the holistic wood obscured by the individual trees.

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    A Pluralistic Universe - William James

    A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE, HIBBERT LECTURES AT MANCHESTER COLLEGE ON THE PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY BY WILLIAM JAMES

    Published by Seltzer Books

    established in 1974, as B&R Samizdat Express

    offering over 14,000 books

    feedback welcome: [email protected]

    The James Brothers, philosophy and psychology by William James and fiction by his brother Henry James, available from Seltzer Books:

    William James, 6 books of philosophy

    Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

    The Will to Believe by William James

    Pragmatism by William James

    Pluralistic Universe by William James

    Henry James, 40 books

    The Golden Bough by Henry James

    The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

    The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

    The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

    1909

    LECTURE I  THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING

      Our age is growing philosophical again, 3. Change of tone since 1860, 4.   Empiricism and Rationalism defined, 7. The process of Philosophizing:   Philosophers choose some part of the world to interpret the whole by, 8.   They seek to make it seem less strange, 11. Their temperamental   differences, 12. Their systems must be reasoned out, 13. Their tendency   to over-technicality, 15. Excess of this in Germany, 17. The type of   vision is the important thing in a philosopher, 20. Primitive thought,   21. Spiritualism and Materialism: Spiritualism shows two types, 23.   Theism and Pantheism, 24. Theism makes a duality of Man and God, and   leaves Man an outsider, 25. Pantheism identifies Man with God, 29. The   contemporary tendency is towards Pantheism, 30. Legitimacy of our demand   to be essential in the Universe, 33. Pluralism versus Monism: The 'each-   form' and the 'all-form' of representing the world, 34. Professor Jacks   quoted, 35. Absolute Idealism characterized, 36. Peculiarities of the   finite consciousness which the Absolute cannot share, 38. The finite   still remains outside of absolute reality, 40.

     LECTURE II  MONISTIC IDEALISM

      Recapitulation, 43. Radical Pluralism is to be the thesis of these   lectures, 44. Most philosophers contemn it, 45. Foreignness to us of   Bradley's Absolute, 46. Spinoza and 'quatenus,'47. Difficulty of   sympathizing with the Absolute, 48. Idealistic attempt to interpret it,   50. Professor Jones quoted, 52. Absolutist refutations of Pluralism, 54.   Criticism of Lotze's proof of Monism by the analysis of what interaction   involves, 55. Vicious intellectualism defined, 60. Royce's alternative:   either the complete disunion or the absolute union of things, 61.   Bradley's dialectic difficulties with relations, 69. Inefficiency of the   Absolute as a rationalizing remedy, 71. Tendency of Rationalists to fly   to extremes, 74. The question of 'external' relations, 79. Transition to   Hegel, 91.

     LECTURE III  HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

      Hegel's influence. 85. The type of his vision is impressionistic, 87.   The 'dialectic' element in reality, 88. Pluralism involves possible   conflicts among things, 90. Hegel explains conflicts by the mutual   contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend   ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things,   95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of   double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of   Hegel's account: it involves vicious intellectualism, 105. Hegel is a   seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and 'God' are two   different notions, 110. Utility of the Absolute in conferring mental   peace, 114. But this is counterbalanced by the peculiar paradoxes which   it introduces into philosophy, 116. Leibnitz and Lotze on the 'fall'   involved in the creation of the finite, 119. Joachim on the fall of   truth into error, 121. The world of the absolutist cannot be perfect,   123. Pluralistic conclusions, 125.

     LECTURE IV  CONCERNING FECHNER

      Superhuman consciousness does not necessarily imply an absolute   mind, 134. Thinness of contemporary absolutism, 135. The   tone of Fechner's empiricist pantheism contrasted with that of the   rationalistic sort, 144. Fechner's life, 145. His vision, the 'daylight   view,' 150. His way of reasoning by analogy, 151. The whole universe   animated, 152. His monistic formula is unessential, 153. The   Earth-Soul, 156. Its differences from our souls, 160. The earth as   an angel, 164. The Plant-Soul, 165. The logic used by Fechner,   168. His theory of immortality, 170. The 'thickness' of his imagination,   173. Inferiority of the ordinary transcendentalist pantheism,   to his vision, 174.

     LECTURE V  THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS   

    The assumption that states of mind may compound themselves, 181. This   assumption is held in common by naturalistic psychology, by   transcendental idealism, and by Fechner, 184. Criticism of it by the   present writer in a former book, 188. Physical combinations, so-called,   cannot be invoked as analogous, 194. Nevertheless, combination must be   postulated among the parts of the Universe, 197. The logical objections   to admitting it, 198. Rationalistic treatment of the question brings us   to an impasse, 208. A radical breach with intellectualism is required,   212. Transition to Bergson's philosophy, 214. Abusive use of concepts,   219.

     LECTURE VI  BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM

    Professor Bergson's personality, 225. Achilles and the tortoise, 228.   Not a sophism, 229. We make motion unintelligible when we treat it by   static concepts, 233. Conceptual treatment is nevertheless of immense   practical use, 235. The traditional rationalism gives an essentially   static universe, 237. Intolerableness of the intellectualist view, 240.   No rationalist account is possible of action, change, or immediate life,   244. The function of concepts is practical rather than theoretical, 247.   Bergson remands us to intuition or sensational experience for the   understanding of how life makes itself go, 252. What Bergson means by   this, 255. Manyness in oneness must be admitted, 256. What really exists   is not things made, but things in the making, 263. Bergson's   originality, 264. Impotence of intellectualist logic to define a   universe where change is continuous, 267. Livingly, things are their   own others, so that there is a sense in which Hegel's logic is true,   270.

     LECTURE VII  THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

      Green's critique of Sensationalism, 278. Relations are as immediately   felt as terms are, 280. The union of things is given in the immediate   flux, not in any conceptual reason that overcomes the flux's aboriginal   incoherence, 282. The minima of experience as vehicles of continuity,   284. Fallacy of the objections to self-compounding, 286. The concrete   units of experience are 'their own others,' 287. Reality is confluent   from next to next, 290. Intellectualism must be sincerely renounced,   291. The Absolute is only an hypothesis, 292. Fechner's God is not the   Absolute, 298. The Absolute solves no intellectualist difficulty, 296.   Does superhuman consciousness probably exist? 298.

     LECTURE VIII  CONCLUSIONS

      Specifically religious experiences occur, 303. Their nature, 304.   They corroborate the notion of a larger life of which we are a part,   308. This life must be finite if we are to escape the paradoxes of   monism, 310. God as a finite being, 311. Empiricism is a better   ally than rationalism, of religion, 313. Empirical proofs of larger   mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection   should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality,   317. In pluralistic empiricism our relation to God remains least   foreign, 318. The word 'rationality' had better be replaced by the   word 'intimacy,' 319. Monism and pluralism distinguished and   defined, 321. Pluralism involves indeterminism, 324. All men use   the 'faith-ladder' in reaching their decision, 328. Conclusion, 330.

     NOTES

     APPENDICES

      A. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

      B. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

      C. ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING

     INDEX

     LECTURE I  THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING

    As these lectures are meant to be public, and so few, I have assumed all very special problems to be excluded, and some topic of general interest required. Fortunately, our age seems to be growing philosophical again--still in the ashes live the wonted fires. Oxford, long the seed-bed, for the english world, of the idealism inspired by Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different way of thinking. Even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest in a controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism. It looks a little as if the ancient english empirism, so long put out of fashion here by nobler sounding germanic formulas, might be repluming itself and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever. It looks as if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.

    Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head. As these heads usually suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the life of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing, and complaints of being misunderstood. But there are signs of clearing up, and, on the whole, less acrimony in discussion, for which both Oxford and Harvard are partly to be thanked. As I look back into the sixties, Mill, Bain, and Hamilton were the only official philosophers in Britain. Spencer, Martineau, and Hodgson were just beginning. In France, the pupils of Cousin were delving into history only, and Renouvier alone had an original system. In Germany, the hegelian impetus had spent itself, and, apart from historical scholarship, nothing but the materialistic controversy remained, with such men as Buechner and Ulrici as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the sole original thinkers, and Fechner was not a professional philosopher at all.

    The general impression made was of crude issues and oppositions, of small subtlety and of a widely spread ignorance. Amateurishness was rampant. Samuel Bailey's 'letters on the philosophy of the human mind,' published in 1855, are one of the ablest expressions of english associationism, and a book of real power. Yet hear how he writes of Kant: 'No one, after reading the extracts, etc., can be surprised to hear of a declaration by men of eminent abilities, that, after years of study, they had not succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the speculations of Kant. I should have been almost surprised if they had. In or about 1818, Lord Grenville, when visiting the Lakes of England, observed to Professor Wilson that, after five years' study of Kant's philosophy, he had not gathered from it one clear idea. Wilberforce, about the same time, made the same confession to another friend of my own. I am endeavoring, exclaims Sir James Mackintosh, in the irritation, evidently, of baffled efforts, to understand this accursed german philosophy.[1]

    What Oxford thinker would dare to print such naif and provincial-sounding citations of authority to-day?

    The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth the flame. The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us english folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long. Ferrier, J.H. Stirling, and, most of all, T.H. Green are to be thanked. If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal change has been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german technicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain vague, and to be, in, the english fashion, devout.

    By the time T.H. Green began at Oxford, the generation seemed to feel as if it had fed on the chopped straw of psychology and of associationism long enough, and as if a little vastness, even though it went with vagueness, as of some moist wind from far away, reminding us of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.

    Green's great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the reigning english sensationalism. Relating was the great intellectual activity for him, and the key to this relating was believed by him to lodge itself at last in what most of you know as Kant's unity of apperception, transformed into a living spirit of the world.

    Hence a monism of a devout kind. In some way we must be fallen angels, one with intelligence as such; and a great disdain for empiricism of the sensationalist sort has always characterized this school of thought, which, on the whole, has reigned supreme at Oxford and in the Scottish universities until the present day.

    But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised empiricism. I confess that I should be glad to see this latest wave prevail; so--the sooner I am frank about it the better--I hope to have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this lecture-course.

    What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.

    Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that originally interfered.

    Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance, and the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white balls in it, of which we guess the quantities only probably, by the frequency with which we experience their egress.

    For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.

    Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them, brute necessities express its character better.

    All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than another's, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they want to think and do?--and I think the history of philosophy largely bears him out, 'The aim of knowledge,' says Hegel,[2] 'is to divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home in it.' Different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world.

    Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which these partialities arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are

     all secondary to this deep agreement. They may be only propensities to emphasize differently. Or one man may care for finality and security more than the other. Or their tastes in language may be different. One may like a universe that lends itself to lofty and exalted characterization. To another this may seem sentimental or rhetorical. One may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary, another a technical or professorial one. A certain old farmer of my acquaintance in America was called a rascal by one of his neighbors. He immediately smote the man, saying,'I won't stand none of your diminutive epithets.' Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the whole, appear to rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently enjoy magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive. But all such differences are minor matters which ought to be subordinated in view of the fact that, whether we be empiricists or rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the same one deep concern in its destinies. We crave alike to feel more truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration. It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest men asunder.

    I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. But if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to our common mother. What troubles me more than this misapprehension is the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged to talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one hearing. But there two pieces, 'zwei stuecke,' as Kant would have said, in every philosophy--the final outlook, belief, or attitude to which it brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and mediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed be true, but that is the least of its requirements. One may be true without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation. What distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is reasoned. Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession. Common men find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. They

     jump into them with both feet, and stand there. Philosophers must do more; they must first get reason's license for them; and to the professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license is usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular beliefs to which the license may give the rights of access. Suppose, for example, that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will. That a common man alongside of him should also share that belief, possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition, does not endear the man to the philosopher at all--he may even be ashamed to be associated with such a man. What interests the philosopher is the particular premises on which the free-will he believes in is established, the sense in which it is taken, the objections it eludes, the difficulties it takes account of, in short the whole form and temper and manner and technical apparatus that goes with the belief in question. A philosopher across the way who should use the same technical apparatus, making the same distinctions, etc., but drawing opposite conclusions and denying free-will entirely, would fascinate the first philosopher far more than would the naif co-believer. Their common technical interests would unite them more than their opposite conclusions separate them. Each would feel an essential consanguinity in the other, would think of him, write at him, care for his good opinion. The simple-minded believer in free-will would be disregarded by either. Neither as ally nor as opponent would his vote be counted.

    In a measure this is doubtless as it should be, but like all professionalism it can go to abusive extremes. The end is after all more than the way, in most things human, and forms and methods may easily frustrate their own purpose. The abuse of technicality is seen in the infrequency with which, in philosophical literature, metaphysical questions are discussed directly and on their own merits. Almost always they are handled as if through a heavy woolen curtain, the veil of previous philosophers' opinions. Alternatives are wrapped in proper names, as if it were indecent for a truth to go naked. The late Professor John Grote of Cambridge has some good remarks about this. 'Thought,' he says,'is not a professional matter, not something for so-called philosophers only or for professed thinkers. The best philosopher is the man who can think most simply. ... I wish that people would consider that thought--and philosophy is no more than good and methodical thought--is a matter intimate to them, a portion of their real selves ... that they would value what they think, and be interested in it.... In my own opinion,' he goes on, 'there is something depressing in this weight of learning, with nothing that can come into one's mind but one is told, Oh, that is the opinion of such and such a person long ago. ... I can conceive of nothing more noxious for students than to get into the habit of saying to themselves about their ordinary philosophic thought, Oh, somebody must have thought it all before.'[3] Yet this is the habit most encouraged at our seats of learning. You must tie your opinion to Aristotle's or Spinoza's; you must define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute your rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and manners. Let me fervently express the hope that

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