Experience, Reason, and the Virtues: On William James’s Reinstatement of the Vague
I. Introduction
According to Hilary Putnam, “attention to James’s ethical intentions is essential to an understanding of him . . . [and] understanding both his pragmatism and his radical empiricism.”1 This essay develops Putnam’s insight concerning James’s work through an introduction to the ways in which James’s ethical intentions are essential to his radical empiricism as well as his understanding of how inquiry works. I show that James actually fits within the tradition of virtue theory, asserting that one’s character and disposition make a real difference for inquiry. For example, James suggests that both “patience” and “submission” are necessary “virtues” for “the experimental method” to work (I use the word “humility” instead of “submission”): we need to display humility concerning how much we determine the world, and we need to practice patience regarding what we can know about the world. In short: I argue that James remains a humanist in the sense that the human knower contributes to the knowledge of the world, but his humanism is predicated upon our relationship with the world being a virtuous one.
For the purposes of this essay, I limit myself solely to an investigation of James’s The Principles of Psychology—with some reference, for the sake of clarification and development, to his Psychology: A Briefer Course. The Principles of Psychology was a monumental achievement for psychology as a discipline in the American academy.2 It is now published as two volumes, totaling 1,377 pages. The specific aspect of James’s Principles that deserves our attention here is his argument concerning the reinstatement of the vague.3 According [End Page 243] to James, both philosophy and psychology need to appeal to the category of vagueness for fruitful next steps within their respective disciplines.4
James’s reinstatement of the vague is couched within his long debates with both empiricism and rationalism, though the empiricisms of Hume and Locke receive the most attention from James—and, therefore, merit our close consideration here.
II. The Reinstatement of the Vague
Throughout The Principles of Psychology, James continually offers a kind of realist critique of David Hume’s empiricism. He argues that Hume’s empiricism cannot (and admittedly does not) account for the reality of relations in thought and constructs his argument for “the stream of thought” in order to offer a nonatomistic, realistic understanding of thought itself.5 Further, he argues that Hume’s empiricism starkly denies the reality of relations in the world as well.6 Though he does not mention it, he must have in mind here Hume’s argument that causation can be reduced to certain habits of the mind. James displays deep concern for atomization,7 which results in the “division”8 between [End Page 244] objects in the world and the objects of thought. Though he has been called a nominalist many times, in this first volume of The Principles of Psychology, James constructs a realist theory that accounts for both objects in the world and objects of thought, and for the relation of objects in the world as well as the relation of objects of thought.
In his chapter entitled “The Stream of Thought,” James develops an account of “thought” that prioritizes the whole over the parts, generals over particulars. He seems to think that empiricism itself will break down if empiricists continue to work with the opposite assumption.9 Individual thoughts are only intelligible, according to James, if they are part of a “personal consciousness” that takes the form of a sensible continuum.10 After entertaining the words “chain” and “train,” James uses the metaphor of “stream” in order to describe this continuum. Neither chain nor train will do because the continuum is not “jointed,” as the former metaphors suggest, but rather “flows” like a “river” or a “stream.” James settles on “stream” and develops his argument for “the stream of thought” thereafter.
Three sentences from James’s chapter deserve reflection:11 “Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it.”12 “The awareness that our definite thought has come to a stop is an entirely different thing from the awareness that our thought is definitively completed.”13 “Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its relations.”14 From these sentences, we gather the following about the stream of thought.
First: If there is a “definite image in the mind,” then it is a part of the stream of thought in a determinate and necessary way. That is, definite images are only intelligible as part of the greater stream. No stream, no image.
Second: Simply because we think a thought comes “to a stop” does not mean [End Page 245] that the same thought “is definitively completed.” Thoughts coming to a stop differ from thoughts being “completed.” Because the stream itself determines the development of our thoughts, thoughts really can never be completed. But we can be aware that they are no longer practical or relevant within the stream, and this is what James means by coming to a stop.
Third: Knowledge is neither solely subjective nor objective; rather, knowledge is the result of coming into relation with objects. Knowledge happens. It consists not only in the relations between subject and object, knower and known, but also in the object’s relations with other objects. It is here where we find James’s reformulation of realism located. Most important is his observation that it is the relation between objects and thought where knowledge is found—not strictly in the objects, on their own, or in thought, on its own.
The importance of James’s description of the stream of thought cannot be overemphasized.15 Not only does his development of it offer a corrective to Hume’s empiricism, according to James, but also to Locke’s. James’s first critique of Locke is simply that he asks the wrong set of questions! He lists these questions in the following manner: “Are not the sensations we get from the same object, for example, always the same? Does not the same piano key, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same way? Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne?”16 These questions are the wrong ones, for James, not because there is no answer to them but rather because it “seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not” is the correct answer to them.17 Rather, “close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.”18 Therefore, according to James, there is no proof for Locke’s empiricism.
James contends that this sort of questioning represents that part of Locke’s empiricism that preserves the argument that the “same bodily sensation” remains “unchanged amid the flow.”19 But if bodily sensations change based on where they are in “the flow” (as it is for James), then Locke’s empiricism maintains the epistemological tendency “of simply using them [sensations] as [End Page 246] stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal.”20 However, for James, sensations are not “stepping-stones.” If they were, then they would remain unchanged and could be “got by us twice.” Indeed if they did serve as “stepping-stones,” there would be some kind of concrete and tangible “proof” that they remain unchanged. Yet the “entire history of Sensation is a commentary on our inability to tell whether two sensations received apart are exactly alike.”21 The comment that Sensation has a “history” in itself suggests that Sensations cannot be “got by us twice” in the sense that they are constantly and continually flowing—like a stream, of course.
James argues instead: “What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain.”22 The difference between James and Locke can be described, again, as consisting in the former’s realism. This time he says as much when he states that the “realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us . . . to suppose that our ‘ideas’ of them are the same ideas.”23 With this sentence, James makes explicit the difference between himself and Locke: Locke supposed that it is our “ideas” (“simple ideas,” to be exact, in Locke’s empiricism) received from the objects and not the objects themselves that remain constant.
Though a kind of realism is being emphasized, the point James makes here is less about the objects themselves and more about the importance and necessity of the role of the stream for shaping both ideas and sensations—that is, the different ways “in which the same things look and sound and smell at different distances and under different circumstances.”24 Both ideas and sensations are going to be different depending upon where they are in the stream of thought. Because they depend on the stream of thought, they cannot be immutable or unchanging.
The reason that Locke maintains the immutability of ideas is that they need to be “clear and determinate” in order to have any significance at all. In order for them to be “clear and determinate,” they need to be able to be tested. They are tested by correctly conforming “to the things to which they refer”—that is, the “objects.” How does one know if the conforming is correct or proper? The ideas themselves will be the same every time. [End Page 247]
Prima facie Locke’s reasoning here is not bad, and it answers a question concerning how we have assurance of the accuracy of our ideas in relation to the objects they are supposed to represent. However, it is this reasoning that James thinks leads to the problematic set of questions listed above. Also, it is our desire—displayed and made explicit in Locke’s reasoning—to want assurance of the accuracy of our ideas that leads James to the conviction (as a safeguard against the most harmful effects of such a desire) that it is time to reinstate “the vague.”
When James reinstates the vague, he claims that he is “anxious” to reinstate it “to its proper place in our mental life.”25 Given the importance of what it is that he is proposing and how and why he proposes it, I offer the full quotation here: “Now what I contend for . . . is that ‘tendencies’ are not only descriptions from without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all. It is, in short, the reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.”26 Moreover, in order to make sense of this passage, I refer also to the paragraph before this one where he observes: “Some will interpret . . . facts by calling them all cases in which certain images, by laws of association, awaken others so very rapidly that we think afterwards we felt the very tendencies of the nascent images to arise, before they were actually there. For this school the only possible materials of consciousness are images of a perfectly definite nature. Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside psychologist rather than for the subject of the observation. The tendency is thus a psychical zero; only its results are felt.”27
Finally, in the shorter version of The Principles of Psychology, entitled Psychology: The Briefer Course, James offers a more concise version of his proposal: “It is . . . the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.”28 He continues, quite poetically, to explain: “Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the [End Page 248] dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or pneumbra that surrounds and escorts it,—or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.”29
Why does he reinstate the vague? To change the way philosophers and psychologists consider the role of human tendencies within thinking: for modern empiricism and psychology, human tendencies are merely “results” and are determined objectively through scientific observation rather than by the subject. James thinks this view is erroneous, and his problem with it is that it takes the human knower out of the equation. It makes human tendencies a “psychical zero”—that is, practically meaningless. Therefore, at a very basic level, the reinstatement of the vague is James’s way to account for the significance of the human knower—of subjective thought—for the determination both of “facts” and of our knowledge of them.30
How does he reinstate the vague into our intellectual life? Human tendencies are not external to the stream of thought but rather “are among the objects of the stream.” That is, they are internal to the stream itself. These tendencies shape awareness of objects only from within the stream—as such, they are not external to it in any way. The objects that we describe as part of our experience are determined by what our “feelings of tendency” are. James makes clear that these “feelings of tendencies” are vague. But if they are in the stream of thought with the objects, then the objects too are vague.31 The objects are vague before they enter into relation to subjects, and their vagueness affects the relation between subject and object because they are difficult to know and name. Indeed, both the objects and tendencies are “so vague that we are unable to name them at all.” Vagueness is thus a property of both objects and thought, of the stream [End Page 249] itself.32 Because vagueness is a property of both objects and thought, it affects our abilities to know and name at all.
Therefore, there are two salient consequences of James’s discussion on vagueness from these chapters (the chapter from Principles and the chapter from Psychology). (1) The objects themselves are vague, and this vagueness enhances the stream of thought because it increases our awareness of the relations of the objects (“from within”). Contra Hume: there is causality because there are real relations between objects, but causality (as real relations) remains necessarily vague. (2) Because of the vagueness of the objects, our ability to know and name—that is, to individuate—objects in the stream has its severe limitations (“unable to name them at all”). This latter point is not a problem for James, as he makes clear in the quotation from Psychology: The Briefer Course: the “significance” of images in the mind is exactly that they are “steeped and dyed in the fine water that flows around it.” Contra Locke: the objects in the stream have more constancy in their relations to each other (more constancy than our “sensations” do) while the images themselves are made anew and are “freshly understood” in their relations to the objects.
What is the overall result of the three passages quoted above? The result is a complete re-evaluation of vagueness and a thorough rethinking of the relationship between objects and subjects.33 James reframes our understanding of the word “vagueness” by not talking about it in the pejorative—that is, vagueness is not a problem. By showing how vagueness actually enhances our experience of the objects in the stream, James helps us to comprehend it as a positive feature of thought. While our experience is enhanced by the reinstatement of the vague, in doing so, James also places some significant limitations on our knowledge.34 [End Page 250]
III. Experience, Reason, and the Virtues
The way that William James sees it, his reinstatement of the vague supplies the crucial distinction between his own empiricism and that of Hume’s and Locke’s. Neither Hume’s “simple impressions” nor Locke’s “simple ideas” represent phenomena that are or can be “realized in experience.”35 “Experience, from the very first,” James remarks, “presents us with concrete objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world which envelopes them in space and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements and parts.”36 In this definition, James makes explicit his perspective on the indeterminacy or vagueness of objects. Presented to us in experience are objects that are “vaguely continuous.” Concrete objects are enveloped in space and time. As such, they are necessarily vague. As vague, they are “potentially divisible into inward elements and parts”—that is, they are presented to us in experience as both necessarily whole and possibly separable.37
In this context, experience is not owned or possessed by an individual. It is not within our control, and we do not provide its meaning and truth. Experience, rather, is the result of bumping into objects and names the range of possibilities for what might happen when we bump up against concrete objects.38 It is [End Page 251] what mediates between “concrete objects” and “us.” Here, James’s appeal to experience is related to George Berkeley’s use of “perception” in several ways. James transforms Berkeley’s argument that to be is to be perceived into one that asserts: to be known is to be experienced. James differs from Berkeley in stipulating the role that the perceiver or subject plays. For Berkeley, perception is an active feature of the subject’s interaction with objects. Berkeley’s empiricism differs from both Hume’s and Locke’s exactly at this point: it posits a very active knower or perceiver whereas Hume’s and Locke’s empiricisms involve somewhat of a passive knower.39 James’s knower is also active, like Berkeley’s, but not in the same sense that it is for Berkeley. For James, this activity comes into play to determine what happens within the relationship that experience makes possible: what do we do with the objects mediated to us by experience?
While we are active knowers (as with Berkeley), the objects remain determinate within our experience (as different from Berkeley). According to James, “we break asunder and reunite” objects of experience.40 James’s criteria for how we select what we “break asunder” is simply what our interests are: “The noticing of any part whatever of our object is an act of discrimination,”41 and acts of discrimination are our doing (not something determined by the objects in and of themselves) and are always based on our “interests.” Moreover, it is not any and all interests for James that count here but rather both our aesthetic and practical interests. James does not address his understanding of “interests” in this chapter. Instead, he develops his account of aesthetic and practical interests elsewhere, in his chapter on “Reasoning” in The Principles of Psychology.42
Within that chapter, James makes a distinction between “empirical thinking” and “reasoning”: “whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive.”43 An empirical thinker, according to James, is one who is a “‘rule-of-thumb’ thinker”—that is, one who “can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior and associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar.”44 On the other hand, [End Page 252] reasoning is what 0we use to find our way through and get “out of unprecedented situations.”45 James offers what he considers to be an “exact definition” of his use of reasoning: the “ability to deal with novel data [is] the technical differentia of reasoning,” and this ability marks “it out from common associative thinking” and therefore allows us to locate “what peculiarity it contains.”46 In short, then, the ability to reason for James is the ability “to deal with novel data.” How is this possible? Where does this novel data come from?
Reasoning, for James, is defined further “as the substitution of parts and their implications or consequences for wholes.”47 The art of reasoning, then, consists of “two stages”: “First, sagacity, or the ability to discover what part”; and “Second, learning, or the ability to recall promptly . . . consequences, concomitants, or implications.”48 What James calls “learning” here refers to “the ability to seize fresh aspects in concrete things [which is] rarer than the ability to learn old rules.” On James’s account, “in most actual cases of reasoning,” it is what he identifies as “the minor premise, or the way of conceiving the subject,” that produces this freshness and “makes the novel step in thought” possible.49 This, the act of learning, for James, is not a matter of acquiring information; rather it is a discerning of how information seizes “fresh aspects in concrete things”—consequently, novelty is required for learning. Moreover, we have not genuinely or truly learned if we have not applied or used that information toward some end or to achieve some good.50 This application and use is not reductive or utilitarian in James’s view but rather creative and imaginative. In summary, the act of learning always involves some kind of novelty; novelty enables seizing “fresh aspects” of some concrete object, and this is a process always shaped by interests. What we also might say here is that learning is not acquiring information but developing skills for reasoning.
James’s understanding of “sagacity” is explained by the following: “To reason, then, we must be able to extract characters,—not any characters, but the right characters for our conclusion.”51 James puts this question to himself: “How are characters extracted, and why does it require the advent of a genius in [End Page 253] many cases before the fitting character is brought to light?”52 In order to answer this question, James asserts, “we must begin a new research, and see how our insight into facts naturally grows.”53 What is this “new research”? It is nothing other than the inquiry that precipitated James’s reinstatement of the vague into his theory of reasoning.
Concerning the possibility for extracting the right characters, he says:
All our knowledge at first is vague. When we say that a thing is vague, we mean that is has no subdivisions ab intra, nor precise limitations ab extra; but still all the forms of thought may apply to it. It may have unity, reality, externality, extent, and what not—thinghood, in a word, but thinghood only as a whole. In this vague way, probably, does the room appear to the babe who first begins to be conscious of it as something other than his moving nurse. It has no subdivisions in his mind, unless, perhaps, the window is able to attract his separate notice. In this vague way, certainly, does every entirely new experience appear to the adult. A library, a museum, a machine-shop, are mere confused wholes to the uninstructed, but the machinist, the antiquary, and the bookworm perhaps hardly notice the whole at all, so eager are they to pounce upon the details. Familiarity has in them bred discrimination. Such vague terms as “grass,” “mould,” and “meat” do not exist for the botanist or the anatomist. They know too much about grasses, moulds, and muscles.54
Vagueness is an initial and necessary part of all of our knowledge. Becoming an authority through professionalization, in James’s view, leads to forgetfulness of how the vague is a necessary aspect of knowledge. The perception of vagueness, and thus also the experience of novelty, become impossible for professionals within their specialized discipline or field. In such cases, the process of “extracting the right characters” becomes determined strictly by “our practical or instinctive interests” and not at all by “our aesthetic interests.”55 But this process is one that, ultimately, depends on both aesthetic and practical interests if the extraction is to do its proper work. Therefore, our “aesthetic [End Page 254] interests” ought always to be a part of our reasoning.56 It is only when they are that novelty remains a genuine possibility.57 James concludes: “The diverse interests lead . . . to a diversification of experiences.”58 Once again, these diverse interests are primarily our aesthetic and practical ones and not simply any and all interests. Engaging these interests results in the “diversification,” or multiplication, “of experiences” while also accounting for their newness or novelty.
So in the process of reasoning we “break asunder” objects based on our interests. The effects of vagueness are discernible in this process because, for James, “all our knowledge at first is vague.” We ought again to note that there are two important aspects to vagueness on his account: not only does all of our knowledge come with an element of vagueness, but the concrete objects that we come to know through experience are themselves not completely determinate.
James’s observation here should not be misconstrued as an argument for radical skepticism. Rather, the achievement of some measure of clarity requires waiting.59 Interestingly, his use of the phrase “blooming, buzzing confusion” comes on the next page after the definition of “experience” we have been discussing. 60 He says that although impressions “separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves . . ., distinct nerves are not an unconditional ground of their discrimination. . . . The baby [for example], assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”61 James uses this example to reinstate the vague into his understanding of “impressions” (and thus marks his difference with Hume’s use of the word). But he does not want his reinstatement of the vague to lead to a kind of Cartesian skepticism in the sense that merely because one “feels” this way about the world one ought to distrust those feelings completely concerning whether they create the possibility for knowledge. [End Page 255]
We might say that for James, then, Cartesian skepticism is not so much wrong as it is problematic because it works on the assumption of the vice of impatience. That is, the problem of Cartesian skepticism in particular and the quest for clear and distinct ideas in general is not only an epistemological problem for James. It is also a moral problem of not appreciating the limits of human knowledge and not waiting to learn how the complexities of the world enhance our knowledge through experience.62 Cartesian rationalism and the modern empiricisms of Hume and Locke all assume the vices of impatience and pride as normative for epistemology—that is, as necessarily involved in producing our knowledge of the world: impatience because the knower does not wait for experience of the world to unfold more impressions, and pride because the knower does not display the proper humility concerning what we might find in the world.63
Unlike some philosophical versions of “humanism,” James’s is not one that seeks for humans to control and overdetermine the world. Rather, he observes our place in the world in a way that allows and encourages the world to shape human experience.64 We also actively shape the world, but this relationship remains reciprocal in quite radical ways for James.65 In addition to engaging the world based on our interests, we respond to it with humility and patience, hoping that both our activity and our virtue will add layers of significance to our experience of the world. [End Page 256]
It is in this sense that we also “reunite” those objects that we initially “break asunder.” Unlike the vast majority of other modern empiricists, “experience” for James includes generals or objects in their unity.66 We “break asunder,” then, strictly for the purpose of attempting to make the world seem less blooming and buzzing and to reduce the confusion. Yet in an ongoing fashion, we also “reunite” the concrete objects of the world as we gain more impressions. It is at this point that James’s epistemology, in the terms of the argument given here, calls for the virtues of humility and patience; these virtues are needed to facilitate the transition between our breaking asunder and our uniting.67
Because our impressions are necessarily vague (exemplified by the way the baby “feels” the world as a “blooming, buzzing confusion”), what we need are not acts of impatience and pride but rather an ability to wait as we accumulate more impressions of the world; this requires that we develop the virtue of patience. The vagueness of our experience (of our impressions and of our knowledge) as well as the real indeterminacy of concrete objects will not ever be overcome, but this is not a problem for James. The reinstatement of the vague simultaneously limits what we can know about the world (requiring the cultivation of humility) and enhances the concrete objects of the world (by underscoring their continuity with other aspects of the stream of thought).
Discerning the importance of the virtues of humility and patience for human knowing, therefore, results from a careful inspection of some of the nuances of James’s epistemology. James himself recognized that the task of understanding required particular dispositions in order for inquiry to work properly.68 The claim of this essay is not that James’s account of the virtues is complete, or that his theory of inquiry can be conflated with moral deliberations. Rather, both within his development of the reinstatement of the vague and in his understanding of how knowledge is produced, James employs—and encourages the cultivation [End Page 257] of—the virtues of humility and patience.69 The significance of this claim is that, from a Jamesean perspective, one’s character and moral dispositions make a real difference for determining the path of inquiry and how we come to know the world. Understanding James’s epistemology in terms of these virtues helps us to appreciate exactly how his humanism is predicated upon our relationship with the world being a virtuous one.70 [End Page 258]
Jacob L. Goodson is Visiting Professor of Religious Ethics at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Writing his dissertation on William James’s radical empiricism and its implications for contemporary narrative theology, he is completing his PhD in philosophical theology at the University of Virginia. He is the general editor for The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, and he has published articles in Contemporary Pragmatism and The Streams of William James.
Footnotes
1. Hilary Putnam, with Ruth Anna Putnam, “William James’s Ideas,” in Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 217.
2. For one example of many, see the account given by the intellectual historian Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).
3. Joan Richardson argues that the reinstatement of the vague is the “aim” of the whole of James’s The Principles of Psychology: “The adaptation of this frame [natural history] to consider the numinous, a central aspect of the “vague,” the “reinstatement” of which “to its proper place in intellectual life” James had earlier announced as the aim of his Principles, is not surprising given his expressed desire in Principles and elsewhere “to embrace the Darwinian facts” and unfold their implications in considering the evolution of the mind” (Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 101).
4. William Gavin focuses on James’s reinstatement of the vague as one of James’s most important contributions to the American philosophical and theological tradition; see Gavin, “William James, 1842–1910,” in The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, ed. Armen T. Marsoobian & John Ryder (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 101–116.
5. See, for one example of many, William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 237 (cited as PP, 1.237 hereafter): “the Humian doctrine that our thought is composed of separate independent parts and is not a sensibly continuous stream.”
6. See James, PP, 1.244–45: “Hume . . . [has] gone so far as to deny the reality of most relations out of the mind as well as in it.”
7. His deep concern for it stems from the fact that he sees it as the easy assumption to make. Comparing it to arguments found within geometry and physics, he argues: “No doubt it is often convenient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas.” Then the comparison comes: “It is convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed of straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids” (James, PP, 1.236).
8. He calls it also “breach” and “crack” (see James, PP, 1.237). He does not deny “divisions,” but he does not take them to be normative. He says, “The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions . . . or . . . breaks in the quality, or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no connection whatever with the one that went before.” James discusses how this works in his argument that we both “break asunder” and “reunite” objects of experience. This argument receives attention later in this essay.
9. The key word here is assumption. James’s exact argument concerning this question is addressed later in this essay. For now, we might say that the problem of Hume’s empiricism (for James) is that it makes the priority of particulars over generals necessary within empiricism.
10. See James, PP, 1.225ff.
11. When William Gavin takes up James’s description of “the stream of thought,” he offers words or phrases for an apt description of James’s “stream”: “‘ extension,’ ‘profusion,’ ‘continuously changing,’ ‘overflows,’ ‘manyness in oneness,’ ‘experience . . . can grow,’ ‘fringed by a “more,’” [and] ‘concatenated,’” which all describe “the richness of experience” determined and found in “the stream of thought” (Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague [Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992], 17). This is a common strategy Gavin employs throughout his book on James’s reinstatement of the vague.
12. James, PP, 1.255.
13. Ibid., 1.256.
14. Ibid., 1.259.
15. This is true both in the Principles itself but also in the entirety of James’s work. For this latter case, see, for example, Russell Goodman, “James on the Nonconceptual,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 28 (2004): 137–48.
16. James, PP, 1.231.
17. See Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 1.230.
20. Ibid., 1.231.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.; emphasis added.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 1.254.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, 32 (cited as PBC hereafter); emphasis added.
29. Ibid.
30. More than anyone in contemporary philosophy, Hilary Putnam has developed (in spirit and tone) this aspect of James’s reinstatement of the vague; for one example among many, see Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
31. According to Putnam, those who do not have a role for the human knower (who he calls “metaphysical realists”) cannot conceive of objects being vague: “On the metaphysical realist view there are vague conceptions, vague ways of talking, but not vague objects.” Why? Because “on this picture,” “there is no such thing as an “object’s ‘vaguely’ bearing a relation to another object.” For the metaphysical realist, an object either is or is not independent of other objects as well as human knowers or subjects. See Putnam, “Vagueness and Alternative Logic,” in Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 273.
32. I therefore strongly disagree with M. Gail Hamner’s descriptions of James’s reinstatement of the vague when she says: “vagueness in James remains a mental concept, a way of accounting for actual mental events that willfully affect the present moment of consciousness without being in that moment” (Hamner, American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], 140). One of the problems with Hamner’s account of James’s reinstatement of the vague is that she spends no time on the context of James’s reinstatement as I have done here.
33. Without using the same words developed here, Eugene Fontinell takes a similar approach to what follows here: “James’s desire to reinstate the “vague and inarticulate” is . . . an effort to describe our experience as rigorously as possible and to avoid any procrustean cutting of experience so as to fit neatly into what can be named and conceptualized” (Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesean Investigation, [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986], 64). I use the words enhancement to get at describing “our experience as rigorously as possible” and limitation to get at avoiding “any procrustean cutting of experience so as to fit neatly into what can be named and conceptualizes.”
34. It seems odd that James uses the word “reinstated,” which suggests that he is recovering an aspect of philosophy and psychology that has been lost within modern philosophy and psychology. Even though I cannot take the time to develop the connections in the present essay, I think that James (like his friend Charles Peirce explicitly says about his own work) sees himself as recovering strands and versions of premodern empiricism and realism but doing so within the context and developments of modern science.
35. James, PP, 1.487. James argues that both Hume’s “simple impression” and Locke’s “simple idea” are unnecessary “abstractions.”
36. Ibid.; emphasis added. Interestingly, in Principles: The Briefer Course, this quote begins with the word “life” instead of “experience” thus reading “Life, from the very first, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world which envelopes them in space and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements and parts” (PBC, 111).
37. Some parts of this section are published in Jacob Goodson, “Repressing Novelty?: William James and the Reasoning of Scriptural Reasoning,” in The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 8, no. 2 (2008): http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/ssr/issues/volume8/number2/ssr08_02_e04.htm.
38. In this sense, at least in his radical empiricism, James’s use of “experience” is (surprisingly) not a part of the philosophical and theological tradition of what George Lindbeck labels as “experiential-expressivism” (see Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age [Louisville, KY: WJK Press, 1984], 21): “thinkers of this tradition all locate ultimately significant contact with whatever is finally important to religion in the prereflective experiential depths of the self and regard the public or outer features of religion as expressive or evocative objectifications (i.e. nondiscursive symbols) of internal experience.” Perhaps most importantly concerning James’s relation to Lindbeck’s criticism here is the necessary role of “habit” in James’s understanding of experience: “what is called our ‘experience’ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention” (James, PBC, 39).
39. While it is true (I think) that Hume’s and Locke’s empiricisms require more passivity than Berkeley’s, it needs to be noted that their notions of associating and compounding ideas requires the activity of the mind. However, Hume’s theatre metaphors for the mind and Locke’s arguments for the mind as a “blank slate” suggest that the mind of the knower is passive—at least, initially in engaging objects in the world—whereas Berkeley never assumes this kind of passivity.
40. See James, PP, 1.487.
41. Ibid.
42. See Ibid., 1.402–58.
43. Ibid., 2.330; also James, PBC, 219.
44. James, PP, 2.330; PBC, 219.
45. James, PP, 2.330; PBC, 219.
46. James, PP, 2.330; PBC, 220.
47. James, PP, 2.330; PBC, 220.
48. James, PP, 2.331; PBC, 220.
49. James, PP, 2.332; PBC, 221.
50. James backs off his boldness a bit in his caveat: “This is, to be sure, not always the case: for the fact that M carries P with it may also be unfamiliar and now formulated for the first time” (PP, 332; PBC, 221).
51. James, PP, 2.343; James, PBC, 229.
52. James, PP, 2.343; PBC, 229. James develops his understanding of what constitutes a “genius” in his chapter on “Attention” in the Principles: “Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention. In most of them, it is to be feared, the so-called ‘power’ is of the passive sort. Their ideas coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt. But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them” (PP, 1.423).
53. James, PP, 2.343; PBC, 229.
54. James, PP, 2.343–344; PBC, 229–30.
55. James, PP, 2.344; PBC, 230.
56. For James, “aesthetic interests” should remain both (a) necessary for reasoning and (b) distinct from “practical interests”—that is, refuse to collapse into the practical or the “pragma.”
57. See James, PBC, 231.
58. James, PP, 2.345; PBC, 231.
59. While I find Gavin’s treatment of James’s reinstatement of the vague both important and interesting, the choice that he gives us between “vagueness” and “false clarity”—rather than a choice between vagueness and clarity—leaves no room for the place of waiting within James’s epistemology.
60. See James, PP, 1.487.
61. Ibid., 1.488; emphasis added.
62. It is in this sense, as mentioned in the introduction, that I am substantiating Putnam’s claim concerning James: “attention to James’s ethical intentions is essential to an understanding of him . . . [and] understanding both his pragmatism and his radical empiricism” (Putnam, with Ruth Anna Putnam, “William James’s Ideas,” 217).
63. See James, PP, 1.192–93. James suggests that both “patience” and “submission” are necessary “virtues” for “the experimental method” to work. Because of wanting to understand James’s place within the tradition of virtue theory, I use the word “humility” instead of “submission” since there is a tradition of speaking of the virtue of humility. Also in the chapter on “Attention,” he explicitly connects the virtue of patience with seeking more “impressions”: “patience soon give[s] us command of the impression[s] we seek” (Ibid., 1.455).
64. See, for example, Russell Goodman’s understanding of James’s “humanism” in his American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 86–87: while Goodman notes James’s extremely active metaphors and verbs to describe how it is that humans shape the world (see 86), he also wants to hold that “part of our experience— sensation and relations—as coming ‘without the human touch’” (87).
65. Though not in reference to James’s work, John Milbank captures this reciprocity well: “to construct is also further to notice; to compose is to listen better; to create is to contemplate more deeply. And the reverse naturally.” (John Milbank, “The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics,” in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009], 166). Milbank describes his own “paradoxical” epistemology in this passage (see 160–76), but he might as well be describing James’s radical empiricism.
66. One example of many, taken from the same part of Principles that we have been discussing, for how this works within “experience,” is: “any number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind, WHICH HAS NOT YET EXPERIENCED THEM SEPARATELY, will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind” (James, PP, 1.487–88).
67. “We must treat them in both ways [broken asunder and reunited] for our knowledge of them [concrete objects] to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which way preponderates” (Ibid., 1.487).
68. The closest account of James on how inquiry works to the one developed here is found in Linda Zabzebski’s Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 152–54. My use of the virtues of humility and patience map onto Zagzebski’s argument that in James’s Principles he develops notions of “learning the extent of proper doubt” (humility) and “proper inquiry” (patience).
69. Interestingly, the virtues of humility and patience place James more in the Thomist (Christian) tradition of the virtues than the Aristotelian (pagan) one. Alasdair MacIntyre describes this difference well:
Aquinas in his treatise on the virtues treats them in terms of what had become the conventional scheme of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage) and the trio of theological virtues [faith, hope, love]. But what of then of, for example, patience? Aquinas quotes the Epistle of St. James: ‘Patience has its perfect work’ . . . and considers whether patience should not therefore be listed as a principal virtue. But then Cicero is quoted against St. James, and it is argued that all the other virtues are contained within the four cardinal virtues. Yet if this is so Aquinas cannot of course mean by the Latin names of the cardinal virtues entirely what Aristotle meant by their Greek equivalents, since one or more of the cardinal virtues must contain within itself both patience and another biblical virtue which Aquinas explicitly acknowledges, namely humility. Yet in the only place in Aristotle’s account of the virtues where anything resembling humility is mentioned, it is a vice, and patience is not mentioned at all by Aristotle.
(MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007], 177)
The claim of the present essay is not that James’s account of the virtues is as systematic as Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s, but rather that the actual virtues that arise within his epistemology, as well as the ones he recommends for inquiry to work, stand more in continuity with Aquinas’s “biblical” conception of the virtues.Without using the specific terms of humility and patience, Bernard Brennan concurs with this assessment: “James was vitally concerned with the construction of . . . ethical ideals which would not be equated with the so-called ‘ideals’ of the ‘strong man.’ . . . [T]he Christian saint, with his renunciation and self-sacrifice and charity, embodies the highest moral ideals of James’s pragmatism; Nietzsche’s representation of saints as degenerates par excellence and men of insufficient vitality, is not implied at all in James’s pragmatism” (Bernard P. Brennan, The Ethics of William James [Pittsburgh, PA: Rose Dog Books, 2004], 1). Brennan further develops James’s understanding of the “ideals” and “virtues” of the Christian saints (see Brennan, The Ethics of William James, 72–86).Brennan emphasizes the virtue of prudence within James’s philosophy. I have no disagreements with Brennan’s argument (in fact, I find it quite compelling!), but I find that the virtues of humility and patience result from a more organic understanding of James’s epistemology.
70. Peter Ochs, Stanley Hauerwas, and Russell Goodman gave me substantial comments on this work; the seriousness with which they take my work is undeserved and deeply appreciated. Tom Burke, Brian Butler, Michael Eldridge, Bill Elkins, David LoConto, and Jayne Tristan provided advice and suggestions on different parts of the essay; I am always grateful for our time together as the “Atlantic Coast Pragmatists.” Finally, Michael Raposa made the essay much more readable; his advice, encouragement, and enthusiasm rendered the completion of this essay more of a pleasure than a task. Errors remain my responsibility.
