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William
James Presidential Address Philadelphia: December 2002
John J. McDermott |
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| Abstract.
This, the first Presidential Address, was presented at a meeting of the
William James Society. Its intent and style is more gently hortatory than
strictly academic. Since the date of this "Address," 2002, The Correspondence,
has been completed, in 2004, which yields 31 volumes of critically edited
published and unpublished writings of William James. |
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| I.
Historical Preamblings |
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My introduction to William James occurred
in the early 1950's and came 'serendipitously' and through the back door.
R. C. Pollock: McDermott, your head is in German Phenomenology (Max
Scheler) and your heart is in the subway—that is, America.
McDermott: What should I do about that?
Pollock: Read William James.
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So I picked up the one-volume edition of R. B. Perry
and read it on a bench in the sweat-stenched locker room in the gymnasium
of an up-the downstairs school in the hard-tack neighborhood of Long Island
City, New York.
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When reading this book on William James, I recall
saying to myself—I can understand this as in Verstehen or as in James
himself, knowledge by acquaintance. So I wrote a dissertation on the history
of the notion of experience in American thought so as to figure out what
James meant by his cardinal devotion to a philosophy of experience. (From
that day to this, with many interstices, permutations and seeming—though
not actually so—detours, the meaning of experience is still my personal
and philosophical focus.)
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Some years later, in a second event of good fortune,
I was to meet Herman Shapiro, who in turn, set up an appointment with Morris
Philipson, Senior Editor at Knopf and the Modern Library. I brought a prospectus
for an historical, multi-cultural, multi-discipline reader in American thought.
As this was the mid 1960's, he did not bite. This book was to begin with
the Indians and the Puritans. We were 20 years ahead of receptivity. Philipson
said do you have anything else. In the first of two 'blurts' that are central
to the publication of the Critical Editions, I said, William James, I can
do that. Now what 'that' was, I did not have the slightest idea, nor of
what was ahead—namely, Big problems. |
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First, upon scouring the extant editions of James,
I found only a rag-tag, poorly edited, disconnected series of odds and ends.
In 1953-1954 when I was the night reference librarian at the Duane Library
of Fordham University, I was struck by the 'girth' present in the philosophy
section. Many of the European philosophers had collected editions, some
multi-volume, for example, Descartes, Kant, Ortega, and many in preparation,
for example Husserl. The American philosophers, by contrast, presented themselves
as if they were at a fire sale in Filene's basement, or for New Yorkers,
the bottom of the escalator in Gimbels. This impression of textual shabbiness
and the complete absence of girth was a lasting impression on me and served
to fuel decisions that resulted in the publication of the scholarly editions
of James, Dewey and Royce and my early involvement with Jo-Ann Boydston
for the Critical Edition of Dewey, with Max Fisch for the Critical Edition
of Peirce and with Herman Saatkamp for the Critical Edition of George Santayana.
Also, more directly, this impression was active in my co-founding with Frederick
Burkhardt the Critical Edition of The Works of William James. So
too, more recently, with the Critical Edition of The Correspondence of
William James. |
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Second, having decided that in terms of textual
presence, the thought of James had been obsolete, I set out to create a
comprehensive edition which would signal both the depth and the range
of his work. But before proceeding, I had to secure permissions. Only those
of us who have had to maneuver in this hoary underworld know its perils.
I tracked the rights to an independent literary agency. In a bizarre telephone
call, this person said OK—you can have the rights for $3,000. Not
having $3,000, I said I'll take it.
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Third, when I took the manuscript to the Modern
Library, the new editor Berenice Hoffman was horrified by its size and by
the printing expense of the Annotated Bibliography which I rescued
from a long out-of-print edition by R.B. Perry in 1920. Corrected and adumbrated
until 1967, this was a formidable publication by itself. When Berenice looked
aghast at the suitcase size of this manuscript, I thought of Henry Holt
confronting the gigantic manuscript of The Principles of Psychology
when all he expected was a small book in the American Century Science Series.
Nonetheless, to the undying gratitude of all students of William James,
she not only decided to publish this manuscript but arranged for the first
edition to be in the famous Random House series: Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics,
Augustine, Aquinas—and finally James. |
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We move now to the founding of the two Critical
Editions of James, The Works and The Correspondence.
In 1971, I was one of three faculty members of a search committee for the
presidency of Queens College, C.U.N.Y. The Chair was Frederick Burkhardt,
chairman of the Board of Higher Education for New York City. After the first
meeting, Burkhardt leaned over the conference table and said how much he
enjoyed and appreciated The Writings of William James. Without forethought,
obviously, for I again 'blurted', Let's do all of it—that is, all
the published and unpublished writings in a Critical Edition. Burkhardt
responded, Yes, let's do it. We met subsequently at The Century Club to
plan the edition. (The only other time I had been invited to The Century
Club was also due to William James. In 1967, after the publication of The
Writings of William James, I had a note from Julius Bixler, then the
President of Colby College in Maine. The library at Colby, incidentally,
was a repository of many letters in James's corresponding history, which
I read in a major blizzard. The reason for the note from Bixler was not
only praise for the Writings but gratitude that I cited his long-forgotten
work, Religion in the Philosophy of William James (1926). It is of
note also, that Bixler is the original author of the cited observation,
mutatis mutandis: "The isolated reference from James is always unreliable."
As instance, Of course I am a realist, over against, I am a realist except
for my radical empiricism, wherein I "squint towards Idealism" (Corr.
vol. 11, p. 455).)
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Returning to the conversation with Burkhardt, my
insistence on a Critical Edition, appropriately sealed by the Center for
Editions of American Authors, Modern Language Association of America, had
two beddings for the fons et origo. First, just a year prior, in
1969, appeared the first volume of the Critical Edition of The Works
of John Dewey. I was very taken with the importance of such extraordinary
scholarly care for every possibility extant in providing for an accurate
rendition of the originating holograph, or whatever textual source remained
for scouring, verifying, correcting and locating within the full corpus.
Second, when doing research in the mid 1960's at the Houghton Library of
Harvard University, wherein most of James's papers are located, I stumbled
on a small but symbolically and philosophically major editorial intrusion
as set between holograph and text. |
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In a notebook entry, written when William James
was 61 in 1903, James discusses Naturalism. I had known of this text from
Perry, Thought and Character, Volume II, 699 ff. While reading the
original, hand written entry in the Houghton Library, I was astonished by
the first line. In Perry, it reads "How can I . . . justify
the strong antithesis I feel," followed by a discussion of the tension between
an epistemological constructivism and the objectivity given in the "Temperament
of Nature." In fact, holographically the opening reads, "How can I, being
a Deweyite," and then continues as above. Obviously Perry, no fan of Dewey
and with an advanced philosophical agenda of his own could not abide William
James's fealty to Dewey. There is another omission later in the line, where
James states that 'nature itself' and subjective constructivism are radically
opposed, but then adds that "one's higher indignations are nourished by
the opposition." This is vintage James and in concert with what some of
us take to be his not so covert epistemological relativism or euphemistically
his pragmatic idealism. |
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I thought to myself, How many more of these editorially
invasive elisions exist? And how many of his letters have been bowdlerized
or simply hidden from view? It became clear—the edition has to be
critically edited with no written stone unturned. |
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The second issue was whether to do all of it. When
moving through the archival collection, bMS 1092, as I did with only a pencil
allowed for taking notes, I was struck by the extensive number of manuscript
drafts, unpublished lectures and very detailed written reflections on philosophical
issues, witness here the notebooks known as the "Miller-Bode Objections."
This material made it clear that behind the often breezy prose of much of
William James's published work, there remained a bedding, a working structure
that served as the granite behind his inimitable metaphorical philosophical
language. So, we decided to publish 'all of it' (for example, Manuscript
Essays and Notes, Vol 18 of the Works, wherein the "Miller-Bode
Objections" take up 64 pages of published text as well as many pages of
"Textual Apparatus".) |
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The first step we took turned out to be deflating. Burkhardt
took the project to the Executive Board of the American Philosophical Association
and requested financial support. Predictably, the result was a rousing rejection,
with only one vote, that from Maurice Mandelbaum, coming our way. The reasons
were also predictable, given the climate of the early 1970's. William James
was said to be antediluvian, bypassed, irrelevant and, on behalf to the
then reigning cliché, not mainstream. I explained to Burkhardt that this
was a deadbeat route and we had to seek other sources of funding. He was
not only shocked and dismayed, but angry as well. Consequently, he took
fiduciary responsibility for the project into his own place of responsibility,
the American Council of Learned Societies, of which he was the President.
The illustrious Fredson Bowers was chosen as the Textual Editor and I brought
Ignas Skruskelis to the project as Associate Editor. We chose an Advisory
Board, whose primary role was to choose and vet the introductions. Frederick
Burkhardt, as General Editor, began to request funds from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. |
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In 1974, the first grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities was awarded. Also, we received a grant-in-aid from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 1975, publication began with the Critical
Editions of Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. The nineteen
volumes of the Edition were completed with the publication of Manuscript
Lectures in 1988. |
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One last issue here. It was decided to publish the
Edition with the major published works coming first, the gathering of loose
essays second and the unpublished material last. Consequently, this was
not done chronologically, for which some scholars have chastised
us. The Critical Edition of The Works of John Dewey was done chronologically
and the Critical Edition of Charles Sanders Peirce is being done
chronologically. In the case of Dewey, the evolution of his thought is remarkably
apparent because of the chronology. But several classic volumes, for example,
The Influence of Darwin, do not appear as such and the cohesive character
of that signal work is rendered scattered. With regard to Peirce, the obstacles
are formidable, for all extant material has to be found and dated before
the project can be laid out chronologically. The Critical Edition of George
Santayana is akin to that of William James, with several major published
works coming out first, for example, The Last Puritan. In the middle
of the Santayana project, the letters are being published chronologically.
Each approach has both merit and demerit. |
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I turn now to the Critical Edition of The Correspondence
of William James. During the research for the Works, it became
apparent that the extraordinary written quality of the letters written by
William James was only hinted in the previous, truncated editions of his
long and thick epistolary history. In conversation with the National Endowment
for the Humanities, they made it clear that they would support only a Critical
Edition, a stipulation with which I agreed. |
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In consultation with the editorial staff of the
Works, it was agreed that I would become General Editor, Project
Director and Principal Investigator for a twelve-volume edition of The
Correspondence. Ignas Skrupskelis was chosen as Editor and Elizabeth
Berkeley became Associate Editor. In truth, it is they who are responsible
for the 'work' of the Correspondence: transcriptions, database, editing,
back matter and thousands of details which emerged seriatim. My task,
primarily, was to oversee the introductions and to raise the money. |
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I wrote the prospectus for the first grant which
was prepared by Patricia McDermott with the technical computer section provided
by the kindness of my colleague Herman Saatkamp. (It is of note that the
Works were completed earlier without major computer assistance).
The grant was awarded and the first volume was published in 1992. There
was a tangle over the decision to make the first three volumes The Correspondence
of William and Henry. I objected, because I wanted the entire twelve
volumes to be chronological. I lost. But when the intention was to publish
the next four volumes as family friends and professional correspondence,
I objected again and this time prevailed. Consequently, volume four begins
with a letter from William James in 1856, when he was fourteen, "to Edgar
van Winkle, from and about London," and continues chronologically through
the twelfth and final volume, published in 2004. The last letter is from
William James to Thomas Mitchell Shackelford on August 21, 1910, five days
before his death. |
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The need to sustain the Correspondence financially
was not without its perils. As you know, NEH went through some very treacherous
funding times and our project was rendered precarious on a number of occasions.
At one very perilous time, we were rescued by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
who responded to our matching grant from NEH and enabled us not to lock
the door to the project office. We also raised significant matching funds,
directly or indirectly from several members of the Advisory Council. Our
fiduciary home, the American Council of Learned Societies, our editorial
home, the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, and our publication
home, the University Press of Virginia were each understanding, cooperative
and supportive through some very lean periods. |
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Over the decades there have been many cheering and
depressing events, anecdotes, vignettes and running stories. I tell you
just two small ones for reasons of flavor. |
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The first is a story pertaining to a letter written
from Chocorua, N.H., by William James to Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) on February
20, 1906. We knew the letter was written but did not have a copy. (In researching
and transcribing correspondence one is led to many byways, names of persons,
places and things had, once had, wanted to have, that is, in letters written
but not within our possession.) After the collapse of the penultimate revolution
in Russia, 1905, the anti-Tsarist activist, Maxim Gorky, was imprisoned
for a time in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Forced to leave Russia, Gorky
came to America in the spring of 1906, hoping to raise funds for a subsequent
revolution. He came with his 'mistress' and was summarily bounced out of
a hotel in New York City. John and Alice Dewey learned of this affront and
made a public announcement to wit: For those who are looking for Maxim Gorky
and his 'friend', they are staying at the home of John and Alice Dewey,
431 Riverside Drive. Suffice to say that Dewey was egregiously pilloried
for this magnanimity. |
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In time, Gorky arranged a visit to Glenmore, New
York, where he was scheduled to meet William James at the Martin residence.
No cigar—James left the day before Gorky arrived. |
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Now to the letter from William James to Maxim Gorky.
After Boris Yeltsin stood on the tank and the curtain began to lift, the
Gorky archives were accessible. A kind and willing professor of Soviet Studies
at the University of Virginia offered to search for us. He told me to write
a letter of request and sign it with as many official titles as are truthful.
I did so. He found the letter, which is a hand-written, dictated seven pages
of praise for Gorky—but no invitation at that time. A paraphrase,
by John J. McDermott, emotively rendered, comes over as: wonderful Gorky,
courageous Gorky, brilliant writer Gorky, you get America right Gorky and
best to you and 'Mrs. Gorky' (that is, the Russian Actress Madame Andreeva),
and in your next visit (mirabile dictu egad) drop by, Mrs. James
and I would love to see you. |
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The second anecdote involves money. Through
the good effort of an Advisory Council member, we came upon an elderly woman
whose family had known William James. She was, as they say, partial to his
memory and offered to help us. And she did, writing a check for $5,000 which,
as I trust you know, when matched by the NEH gave us $10,000. I was deeply
grateful and to show that gratitude I sent her all of the nine volumes that
had been published. There came back to me a cry of alarm. Tell that James
man, that is McDermott, to stop sending these gigantic books. I have a very
small apartment and since they arrived I can hardly walk around. Stop! |
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Now some rhetorical questions: What is the
future of these Textual Editions, for example Josiah Royce? Where is the
funding? Where are the text editors? Where is the commitment to a project
that takes virtually a life time? Where is the support from publishers,
libraries and the mysterious, elusive intelligent public? Critical and difficult
questions—I am not sanguine regarding answers. |
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Yet, for us and I trust for you and for others,
it has been worth doing and I can say that it has been done well. Praise
for the Correspondence has been unstinting, glowing and planetary
in scope. Volume six won the Morton N. Cohen Award from the Modern Language
Association, holding that the Edition "is in itself a work of literature."
The citation reads that "the editorial apparatus is outstanding and includes
a number of features that any scholar will greet with delight . . .
This beautifully laid out edition enables readers to watch a fertile, brilliant
and affectionate mind at work and play." Were he to know, I trust that William
James would be pleased at the rendition of his work. |
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On Reading William James |
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Given that vastness of the publication enterprise
just detailed, I offer a few aperçu as a way into the text of William
James. In the homage to William James upon his death in August of 1910,
John Dewey wrote: "Our greatest act of piety to him to whom we owe so much
is to accept from him some rekindling of a human faith in the human significance
of philosophy." Dewey's choice of the word piety is instructive and
telling for that is the word he used in the first edition of Experience
and Nature to convey his urging upon us a 'reconstruction of philosophy.'
Quite simply, Dewey wrote that 'we should have piety toward experience.'
It is precisely the diagnosis of the 'streams of experience' which is so
central to the bequest of William James. And it is due to James on experience
that the line from Jonathan Edwards, through Emerson and on to Dewey has
such vertebral strength, inverting a two-millennium long deprecation of
the experiential as the point of departure for philosophical inquiry. |
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William James lamented, publicly, his fidelity
to the squashy popular lecture style, vowing to do something more strengwissenschaftlich.
The publication of his notebooks and manuscript drafts fulfilled that vow,
posthumously. Also, the spate of highly sophisticated monographs beginning
with Gerald Myers, Charlene Seigfried, and on through David Lamberth, Wesley
Cooper and Richard Gale among many others, has put to rest permanently the
assumption that James was a casual or 'just' a popular philosopher. Of course,
for those of us who long ago were familiar with the James-Bradley letters
or the secondary literature appearing in the first two decades of the 20th
century, focused on the complexity of James's philosophy, this 'popular
appellation' has always been a canard. |
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Still, we have to be careful here, for James
abhorred what I call 'conceptual incest,' that is words, concepts, or philosophical
labels conjugating without embodiment, without feet, without grounding in
our experiential flow. He wrote to a student who had finished a dissertation
on his work, praising the industry but lamenting the disconnection from
what he thought he was 'up to,' comparing it to an ant on top of an ant
hill. To another student, he wrote "that the whole Ph.D. industry of building
up an author's meaning out of separate texts leads nowhere, unless you have
first grasped his centre of vision, by an act of imagination." I take these
reproaches seriously and I believe that they sit behind his philosophical
mantra: "Let me repeat once more that a person's vision is the great fact
about them" (gender edited). I note here that this 'vision' of James is
not that of Descartes or of Husserl. Rather it is James the physiologist
speaking, namely, to see is to be seen. Vision as all of the human senses
for James, is double-barreled, like life, experience and history. The senses
are interest oriented and they are prehensile. The question before us can
be put as follows: if it is true that where there is no vision, the people
perish, and I think that to be so, than James's call for our gestating a
vision as the 'great fact' about us becomes of paramount importance. |
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On behalf of William James, I offer here,
in cameo, a few of those philosophical DNA strands in the multiple helixing
of our own vision. The text from which I take my departure is found in the
aforementioned notebook (cf. McDermott, "Afterword," Correspondence,
vol. 12, p. 579). |
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All neat schematisms with permanent and absolute
distinctions, classifications with absolute pretensions, systems with pigeon-holes,
etc., have this character. All 'classic,' clean, cut and dried, 'noble,'
fixed, 'eternal,' weltanschauungen seem to me to violate the character with
which life concretely comes and the expression which it bears of being,
or at least involving, a muddle and a struggle, with an 'ever not quite'
to all our formulas, and novelty and possibility leaking in. |
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Last fall I was privileged to speak about
William James to the Texas Chautauqua. My audience was mostly senior citizens
and when I read this text to them, they glowed, nodded and, in effect, said,
Yeah! In addition to James's devastating dismissal of absolutes, clarity—that
is, the baleful bequest of the Cartesian heritage—notice as well,
his affirmation of novelty and possibility. Closure is verboten,
whether it be personal or cosmic, and the vaunted claims of epistemological
certitude are shrouded by an attitude made famous by Maria Montessori—all
takes of importance have the character of 'un tentativo.' |
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His aversion to closure is tied to his stress
on possibility. Unacknowledged but nevertheless an inheritance from Emerson,
possibility is not only potentially fructifying, it is also personally necessary.
Without possibility the soul shrivels. Without possibility we live our lives,
cornered, trapped and in time we become that person dangerous to ourselves
and to others—that is, we become one of Royce's 'detached individuals.'
Put differently, possibility is what gives the "Will to Believe" its viability.
In that essay, he calls possibility by the phrase, a 'live option.' I prefer
to keep possibility for that entails the dreaded companion impossibility.
The possibility of possibility requires that novelty can occur. Novelty
here is not a trinket in Woolworth's, nor is it a 'gizmo' on an automobile
or a bicycle. For James, novelty is an eruption in the allegedly ascertained
flow, one which forces us to reconnoiter, regather, regroup and reconstruct.
Obviously, novelty can be for ill or for good or as yet to have its cash
value, namely the consequences. He holds that novelty and possibility 'leaks
in,' thereby stressing the subtly quotidian character of these eruptions,
disruptions or more likely, slight but significant permutations in our stream
of consciousness. |
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Yet what of consequences. Because of the
row over the bold claims of pragmatic epistemology and allied commitments
to consequentialist ethics, James's understanding of consequences has been
blurred. For James propositions are not declarative sentences; they are
probes. Percepts lead, concepts follow. Concepts function as blankets, mostly
wet and stultifying. If James knew some medieval theology, he would have
followed Scotus Erigena, holding that ideas were energies and not restricted
to what he calls knowledge 'about,' involving rather 'knowledge by acquaintance,'
that is, read experience. |
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If you understand propositions to be probes
and if you read novelty as surprise then I believe that you have what James
means. In sticking out my neck, I come upon possibilities undreamt, heretofore
unknown and given to me if and only if I take a chance. On the other hand,
if I lead with any form of a categorical schema, the 'surprises'
will show up in a familiar, preconceived garb and their bite will be lost
to me, until it is too late. We then say, "who would have thought," "how
could that happen," or revealingly, "I had no idea." After all, for William
James, 'What has been concluded than can be concluded?' |
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Our last cameo is the first in importance
and I trust that this audience is well apprised of its lineament, if not
its etymology. None of James holds if we do not embrace his radical empiricism.
This goes for The Will to Believe, Pragmatism and The Meaning
of Truth. Quite simply, consciousness is not a container but a stream,
objects are mock-ups, relations are not mere logical connectors but affectively
undergone and the human self is an activity, in peril of disappearing at
any time. By this I mean who I am is how I do. If I bury myself in
names, concepts, clarity, devotion and salutes to the obvious, I am driven
to living a second-hand life, that is, I become an imitatio of Ivan
Ilych. |
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Among the many reflective gifts bequeathed
to us by William James, I regard the most signal of them to be his maxim
that 'philosophy is the habit of always seeking an alternative.' If I follow
that advice, then I am open to novelty, to possibility and, above all, to
the juvenescing presence of surprise. With that attitude, I do not close
down until the day I die. Following Dewey I continue to be a live creature
and as a person I grow until cut off once and for all. Can we ask for any
more than that? I do not! |
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Department of Philosophy
Texas A&M University
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