William James

Born: 1842

Died: 1910, at the age of 68

Country of origin: United States

• Areas of focus: Psychology,
  
  
• Major Books written by William James:
  
  
  • "The Principles of Psychology" (1890)
    
  • "Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine" (1897)
    
  • "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature" (1902)
    
  • "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking" (1907)
    
  • "A Pluralistic Universe" (1909)
    
  • "The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to 'Pragmatism'" (1909)
  
  
• Cocktail summary of William James' main ideas:
  
  
  William James was one of the primary disciples of Pragmatism, being the argument that what matters is not so much the content of an idea but rather its practical results, its usefulness, and its personal effects. Pragmatism asks of an idea "What use is it?", rather than "Is it true?" James once wrote, "Truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief."
  
  William James was a Psychologist (whose brother was the novelist Henry James) and spent his entire career at the University of Harvard, during the time that Psychology was maturing as a science in its own right. He developed standardized techniques for experimental psychology, applying a Behaviorist approach to gathering data, focusing less on cause than on effect.
  
  While he developed many early ideas on the nature of emotions and on the biological roots of many psychological disorders, he is perhaps most famous for his work on the psychology of Religion and his connection of Religion to psychoactive drugs. He spent many years studying the psychological effects of religious belief, and published his observations in the widely-read book "The Varieties of Religious Experience". The main thrust of this book is that, in order to understand religion (as well as much of Philosophy) one must focus on the mystical experience rather than on the institution or doctrine that has inherited that experience. How a person is affected by the experience of mysticism is the key to understanding the power of religious belief, James argued.
  
  James made no distinction between types of religious experiences, treating the serene monk praying the Rosary and the Voodoo priestess dancing ecstatically around a fire in a sweating frenzy as all different expressions of the same basic experience. He considered the root of all religions to be a person somewhere in history who has experienced an intense, perhaps pathological, rush of emotionally-charged insights or ideas. These rushes could be either focused on a specific idea, like the teachings of Jesus or Buddha, or they could be purely content-less and emotional in nature, like a Native American ingesting a peyote plant in the desert and experiencing intense hallucinations. All subsequent rituals and doctrines are simply the after-effects of these initial surges of pathology. James considered these pathological experiences to be inherently healthy, normal expressions of human psychology.
  
  James was so interested in the intense experiences of the mystic, which he suggested were rooted in chemical reactions in the brain, that he tried to induce them in himself and then recorded the effects. He personally took several psychoactive drugs, including the gas Nitrous Oxide ("Laughing Gas") and the plant Peyote, and as a result experienced intense rushes of emotions and "streams of consciousness" (a term he coined). He noted that, once the effects of the drugs wore off, he had forgotten most of the ideas he had during his fast-rushing streams of consciousness induced by the drugs. Of these experiences he famously wrote, "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
  
  James argued that this kind of experience was identical to the experience of the religious mystic, with the mystic undergoing the experience without any external chemical triggers. This was an idea that was taken very much to heart by the later 1960's psychedelic Counter Culture, but James' focus was primarily the subjective observation of the psychological effects of these experiences, and their positive effects on a person's sense of well-being. He basically believed in the positive effect of illusions. Illusions, delusions, fanciful ideas, lies: James argued that all of these can have positive effects on psychological health. If believing a lie makes a person more happy than knowing the truth, then the lie is the healthier option.
  
  James was one of the first to subsitute the word "true" with the word "useful" in Philosophy, a trend which has come to define much of 20th Century Pragmatism. Ask not what is true, rather ask what is of practical use. Pragmatism, James argued, is the only approach worth pursuing in a world of ideas that can never be firmly grounded in objective reality.
  
  
• William James praised & criticized:
  
  
  • James was heralded as a pioneer in Psychology by studying the presumed chemical basis for religious experience. But this also gained him a wide array of critics. Many of his professional peers considered him reckless regarding his personal use of psychoactive drugs, and many religious people resented their beliefs about objective truth being reduced to little more than side-effects of chemical reactions.
    
    The results of academic studies combining religious belief and drugs is littered with the remains of failed careers and personal tragedies, and is therefore a field which has largely been abandoned by professional Psychology. Religion and psychoactive chemistry are primarily two independent fields of study, but James defined much of 20th century popular pseudo-philosophy by their joint study, for better or worse.
  
  
• Notable Facts about William James:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    William James spent a large part of his life deeply interested in religion, but it was from the perspective of a Psychologist studying its effects on the mind. He focused primarily on the experiences of religious mystics and he studied the psychological effects of nitrous oxide and peyote by taking these substances himself, since their side-effects produced very mystical-like experiences (being sort of an early fore-runner of Timothy Leary). But he did not personally practice any religion. He once wrote, "I believe myself to be (probably) permanently incapable of believing the Christian Scheme of vicarious salvation, and wedded to a more continuously evolutionary thought."
    
    He had little interest in the institutions of religion, which he expressed in his book "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by writing, "In these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch [of religion] entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple." The closest he appears to have developed a personal religious practice was from reading the French philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier, who stressed the reality of subjective experience over unknowable absolutes like an infinite God. It is the personal experience which is of primary importance, regardless of its grounding in objective fact or not. James took this to heart and approached religion as psychologically healthy, without bothering about any questions of doctrine.
    
    James was often accused of practicing a schizophrenic approach to religion, both defending it and explaining it away at the same time. His reply to this criticism was that it was the mystical experience that mattered, not ritual or doctrine. He once wrote:
    
    
    "The mother-sea and fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed; and the experiences which make such flexible combinations with the intellectual prepossessions of their subjects, that one may almost say that they have no proper intellectual deliverance of their own, but belong to a region deeper, & more vital and practical, than that which the intellect inhabits. For this they are also indestructible by intellectual arguments and criticisms...
    
    Philosophy and Theology give their conceptual interpretations of this experiential life. The farther margin of the subliminal field being unknown, it can be treated as by Transcendental Idealism, as an Absolute mind with a part of which we coalesce, or by Christian theology, as a distinct deity acting on us. Something, not our immediate self, does act on our life! So I seem doubtless to my audience to be blowing hot & cold, explaining away Christianity, yet defending the general basis from which I say it proceeds."
    
    
  • At the age of 28, James fell into a deep depression and contemplated suicide. But he came out of his doldrums by choosing to believe in free will, whether or not free will actually existed. At the end of this crisis he wrote:
    
    
    "I think yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's 2nd Essay and saw no reason why his definition of free will - "The sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts" - need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate I will assume for the present - until next year - that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation & contemplative in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting."
    
    This decision formed the basis of his growing perspective on life, that what mattered most was how a person chose to act and believe, rather than worrying about whether or not a choice or an idea was objectively true or not.
    
    
  • As a child, James' family regularly moved back and forth between America and Europe. For a while, William James studied Art in Geneva, with the goal of becoming a painter. But he later decided that Medicine better suited his temperament."
    
    
  • Two of James' pupils were the authors Gertrude Stein and George Santayana.
    
    
  • William James died of heart failure at his summer-home in New Hampshire in 1910. He was cremated, with his ashes scattered over a stream in the mountains near Chocorua, New Hampshire.
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • "There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers."
    
    
  • "An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation."
    
    
  • "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
    
    
  • "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely re-arranging their prejudices."
    
    
  • "Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."
    
    
  • "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
    
    
  • Some observations written while under the effects of psychoactive drugs:
    
    
    • "What's mistake but a kind of take? What's nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -unk , astonishment. Agreement, disagreement!! Emotion-motion!!! Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same! Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! It escapes, it escapes! But, what escapes, what escapes?"
      
      
    • "Thought deeper than speech! Oh my God, oh God, oh God!"
      
      
    • "No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is other. Incoherent, coherent - same. And it fades! And it's infinite! And it's infinite!"
      
      
    • "Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity? Constantly opposites united! The same me telling you to write and not to write! Extreme, extreme, extreme! Something, and other than that thing! Intoxication, and otherness than intoxication. Every attempt at betterment, every attempt at otherment is a... It fades forever and forever as we move."
      
      
  • "Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us that, amid the wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands upright, that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one commandment, but that one supreme, saying, Thou shalt not be a Theist."
    
    
  • "One cannot criticize the vision of a mystic--one can but pass it by, or else accept it as having some amount of evidential weight."
    
    
  • "Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case."
    
    
  • "The difference between a good man and a bad man is the choice of cause."
    
    
  • "If you want a quality, act as if you already had it."
    
    
  • "As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."
    
    
  • "Nature and life have unfitted me for any affectionate relations with other individuals."
    
    
  • "Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
    
    
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