Applying a technique that should be
turned into the theme of a website to rival the "Causes of Death
of Philosophers"-page (Stiv Fleishman, Hugh Mellor), Richard M. Gale
summarizes his interpretation of William James’ philosophy by making up the
advertisement that James would have put in the ‘Personals’ section of his local
newspaper, if there had been such a section in James’ time: "Harvard
Professor, equally at home in a Norfolk Jacket or a backwoodsman’s outfit,
doing science or leading the morally strenuous life.  Desperately seeking to
penetrate to the inner conscious life of others. Animals and fishes okay. No
kooks please."

The "divided self" of the
man presented in this ad — William James in Norfolk Jacket and backwoodsman’s
outfit, as a scientist and moralist, promethean pragmatist and passive mystic
— is the main interpretive principle of Richard Gale’s The Philosophy of
William James: An Introduction, which is a shorter, less technical version
of the author’s acclaimed 1999 study The Divided Self of William James. 
Neither the content nor the style of that book have changed much.  Both texts
are organized into two parts, "Part I: The Promethean Pragmatist" and
"Part II: The Passive Mystic". The chapter structure and titles have
been left largely untouched. The original appendix criticizing Dewey’s
naturalistic distortion of James has been omitted in the follow-up publication,
and some references went missing. Still, The Philosophy of William James
is a well written, boldly argued, comprehensive and funny book that is indeed
about a third shorter than its predecessor.

Gale’s main point (as reflected in
the organization of the book) is that most commentators have failed to give due
weight to the mysticism of James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience
and A Pluralistic Universe, either by simply ignoring it, or by
subsuming it under James’ pragmatism. Indeed it is all too tempting to
assimilate James’ penchant for mystical experiences to other desires, all
describable and assessable on the basis of his consequentialist ethics and
instrumentalist views of truth. James-the-mystic, one may think, is just one
James among others; a host of different selves all striving towards their
respective goals and forming their respective beliefs correspondingly.

But if Gale is right, then the
quest for intimacy and union so prominent in The Varieties of Religious
Experience cannot be understood alongside just any old desire. Mystical
experiences are radically different from everyday perceptions of the empirical
world. They are nonconceptual, "nonsensory perceptions" involving the
flow of "spiritual energy" (p. 184). They do not involve the kind of
belief-formation that James, the pragmatist, assimilates to free, willful
intentional actions. The mystical self displaces the active will by "a
willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts
of God" (James, VRE, p. 46).  By mushing together what
James-the-pragmatist keeps conceptually separate, James-the-mystic gets to
embrace not only panpsychism, but spiritualism and idealism as well (p. 216-7).

Gale does a great job in
reconstructing the philosophical views constitutive of both fundamental selves
of William James as resting on appealing premises and convincing arguments. We
firstly get to know the Promethean pragmatist as holding himself obligated to
form and maintain beliefs in a manner that maximizes desire-satisfaction. This
in turn is presented as a reason to accept that a proposition is true when
believing it maximizes desire-satisfaction (via the "Truth
Syllogism", p. 94). From there, it looks but a small step to James’
account of conceptual content and his ontological relativism — even though
Gale is always explicit about his own contributions to the clear-cut,
unambiguous, valid arguments that he sees as lying at the heart of James’
pragmatism. "The William James that I present is my William James",
he states in the Preface, and there are a handful of occasions when he simply
states that James "waffles" on important issues.

The final chapter of the book —
"An Attempt at a One World Interpretation of James" — provides one
last illustration of Gale’s bold interpretive stance. Here Gale attempts to
relieve the tension that has built up throughout the book as a result of the
fundamental opposition of the pragmatist and mystic worldviews. He ultimately
does so, however, not by working with what James actually said on the matter —
these attempts he finds "inadequate". Instead the book finishes by
fading interpretation into "what-James-ought-to-have-said-but-didn’t"
(p. 223). It speaks for the overall quality and systematic relevance of Gale’s Jamesian
arguments that at this point, such a shot at a systematic solution is precisely
what the reader is looking for.

By the way, if the ‘Causes of Death
of Philosophers’ website has got it right, then James died a Promethean
pragmatist rather than a passive mystic: the cause of James’ death was his
"will to leave".

© 2005 Dominique Kuenzle

Dominique Kuenzle is a PhD
candidate at the University of Sheffield.  He works on pragmatist accounts
of conceptual content and is interested in rational, discursive and epistemic normativity,
its ‘continental’ critics and rationalist defenses.

Categories: Philosophical