Everyman’s philosopher

“HE was born,” German philosopher Martin Heidegger once said in a lecture about Aristotle. “He thought. He died.” So much for the biographical details. Everything else was gossip: entertaining but meaningless and, in any case, unworthy of serious philosophical attention. In this, Heidegger’s attitude was by no means unusual. (Although someone who closed his lectures with “Heil Hitler!” -- as Heidegger did for a while in the 1930s -- might have a vested interest in keeping biographers in their place.) There are many ways of “doing philosophy,” and it would be reckless to generalize too broadly. But one thing nearly all philosophers agree on is that concepts and arguments must be analyzed on their own terms, rather than as manifestations of personality.

Biographers, nonetheless, go about their business of drawing direct connections between life and thought. There is always a ready market for the gossip of eternity. And, to be fair, there are a few philosophers -- a very few -- whose work might give biographers some encouragement in their labors.

At the top of the list would be William James (1842-1910), who once described the history of philosophy as the record of a “certain clash of human temperaments” -- a long-standing conflict between personality types conducted at a suitably high level of abstraction. On the one hand, he said, there were “tender-minded” thinkers, prone to regarding the universe as one big, rational system whose principles we can (in principle at least) comprehend. On the other, there were the “tough-minded,” who emphasized the reality of physical sensation and the limitations of human understanding before the world’s swarming complexity.

A philosopher capable of making such a distinction has already halfway justified the efforts of his biographer; he’s hinting that his theories are connected somehow to his personality, rather than securing the border between them. As Robert D. Richardson makes clear in “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism,” that suggestion was not just a casual aside -- a tossed-off remark, unconnected to the main body of his work. The idea that profound philosophical differences are ultimately rooted in fundamental contrasts in individual psychology might sound like common sense. But ever since Socrates, common sense is something professional philosophers have wanted us to check at the door. What made James such a revolutionary thinker is that he brought that idea into the discussion in a way that had to be taken seriously by his peers (even if most of them ultimately rejected it).

Richardson is the author of highly respected biographies of Emerson and Thoreau, and in turning to William James, he has the advantage of writing about the one American philosopher whose place in literary history is assured. Nor is this simply a matter of being the older brother of author and critic Henry James. That was a complicated bit of luck in any case -- for “Harry” (as the novelist is disconcertingly called throughout the book, to distinguish him from their father, also named Henry) found his way to international literary eminence when he was barely out of adolescence, while the high-strung older brother spent much of his 20s in search of a definite vocation. The agonizing process of “finding himself” was complicated by James’ tendency to have regular and devastating periods of total inner collapse -- what today would likely be diagnosed as bouts of clinical depression.

James became one of the first American professors of the new discipline known as “psychology.” In 1890, at age 48, he published a two-volume synthesis of laboratory research and systematic theory called “Principles of Psychology” that soon became one of the definitive works in the field. His descriptions of how we experience the process of thought -- how individual awareness does not simply reflect the outside world but also seems to move under its own inner pressure -- anticipates the European philosophical school later called phenomenology.

But where phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre tended to couch their analyses of consciousness in highly technical language, James created a prose style that was clear, sharp and accessible. He coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” and dozens more besides. (“Time-line,” “the moral equivalent of war” and “the bitch-goddess success” were all his.) Someone once remarked about Shakespeare that it is surprising just how many great quotations his work contains; the same applies to William James.

“He used examples, anecdotes, jokes, anything to impart narrative dash and energy to the page,” Richardson writes. “And there are many places where, standing on the arid plain of experimental data, James turns to face the reader, reaching outward through his own experience to us, in prose that can stand comparison to anyone’s.”

The same quality -- a blend of vigor, clarity and attention to nuance that creates a distinct voice speaking directly to the reader -- is evident in nearly all of James’ work. A handful of his papers are written in the sort of prose only a fellow specialist can love. But Richardson hints (quite plausibly) that James did this intentionally, just to show academic colleagues that he could.

One rather paradoxical effect of James’ accessibility is that it can sometimes be difficult to grasp just how original -- and, in many ways, startling -- his work actually was. In a series of lectures and essays, he introduced the general public to an approach called “pragmatism.” The word started out as a bit of jargon derived from 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant. In James’ usage, pragmatism was a new way of defining “truth” that emerged, in part, under the influence of Charles Darwin. It meant taking into account the reality that we seek to understand the world in order to survive.

Pragmatism was also a rejection of the neo-Hegelian doctrine of “Absolute Knowledge” -- a sort of god’s-eye view of the universe toward which humanity is moving. The concept was extremely influential at the time, and it annoyed James considerably. Richardson does a deft job of summing up James’ frustration with the neo-Hegelians and of suggesting how his later position (called “radical empiricism”) went beyond his famous explanations of pragmatism.

But now, of course, it proves difficult for a layman to appreciate the epistemological implications of these ideas. To the average person, pragmatism suggests not a theory of knowledge but rather the attitude of not having a theory about anything and just doing whatever works. This is not a total distortion of James’ thinking, but it does suggest that maybe he was a little too successful at popularizing the word.

The grace with which Richardson handles the more daunting aspects of James’ philosophy -- sketching the context in intellectual history, then letting the force of the ideas come into view through judicious quotation from James’ lucid explanations -- makes this a very good book for anyone whose previous exposure to his thought has been limited to, say, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902).

If James had written nothing else, his place in U.S. cultural history would be assured by that book alone. It was a study in comparative religion that examined not doctrines or institutions but the range of states of consciousness usually lumped together under the broad heading “belief.” Richardson reminds us of how innovative that approach was -- but also of how much it reflected the Jamesian pragmatic sense that questions of “truth” were questions about how we live and make meaning in the world.

Although James made a firm distinction between “tough-minded” and “tender-minded,” he was a bit of both. That is a matter not of indecisiveness but of complexity, which he often managed to conceal by writing so fluently. He has long been an appealing subject for biographers, and there are a number of excellent accounts of his life. The publisher is billing this one as “definitive,” which is an overstatement. It is, however, an admirable work -- conveying vividly the sense of a man struggling with both philosophy and the “blooming, buzzing confusion” (to use another Jamesian phrase) of life itself. *