William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 656 pages
• Published by: Mariner Books
• Edition: 1st Edition September 14, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0618919899
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0618919895
• Book Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.1 x 1.9 inches
• Weighs: 1.6 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Justin KaplanIn William James, Robert D. Richardson, biographer of Thoreau and Emerson, has chosen as his subject one of the most radiant of American lives. Author, philosopher, scientist, psychologist, longtime Harvard professor, James (1842–1910) had set out to be a painter, but discouraged from this by his father, instead followed a wandering but ultimately consistent career path. He trained as a medical doctor but never practiced medicine; served as a naturalist and accompanied Louis Agassiz on an expedition to the upper reaches of the Amazon; broke new ground as a physiologist and psychologist; studied religion and psychic phenomena; lectured extensively; and wrote three classic books, Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism. Richardson's book opens in April 1906, with the 64-year-old James, then a visiting professor at Stanford, shaken from his bed by the 48-second shock of the San Francisco earthquake. His immediate response typified his lifelong openness to experience and risk taking (including, we're told, personal encounters with previously untested drugs and gases). Instead of fear he experienced "glee," "admiration," "delight" and an exhilarating sense of "welcome." For James, Richardson writes, this was a moment of "unhesitating, fierce, joyful embrace of the awful force of nature of contact with elemental reality." William James was the dutiful but often resistant son of a mercurial Swedenborgian philosopher who, on either whim or principled decision but always supported by more than ample money, moved the members of his large family from place to place on both sides of the Atlantic, virtually transforming them into a tribe of nomads and hotel children. William's sister was the diarist Alice, fully as remarkable but not so publicly fulfilled as her famous elder siblings. William and the novelist Henry coexisted on often competitive but ultimately affectionate terms. One of the most poignant of the 32 pages of illustrations shows the brothers, both in their 60s, standing side by side, with William's arm around the younger Henry's shoulder in a gesture of protection and intimacy. Previous biographers of William James have focused on his thought and character, others on the events of his life, which was often marked by doubt, depression and physical ailments. But no one has managed, as Richardson does so brilliantly, to intertwine the two and account for each with equal authority, penetration and narrative coherence. James's progression from the gently idealizing intellectual climate of Ralph Waldo Emerson to what Richardson calls "the maelstrom of American modernism" makes for a gripping and often inspiring story of intellectual and spiritual adventure. Richardson's enthusiasm for what he calls "the matchless incandescent spirit" of William James is contagious. (Nov. 9)Justin Kaplan is the author of When the Astors Owned New York (Viking, 2006).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
William James is honored as the first great American psychologist, an important philosopher and a pioneer of modern religious thought. But his lifelong engagement with the really significant questions -- those focused on how we should live in this world -- marks him as, above all, a classic moralist. It thus makes perfect sense that Robert D. Richardson, the outstanding biographer of Thoreau and Emerson, should devote the past ten years to an intensive study of the intellectual life of this revered thinker, a master-spirit of the age and a teacher who counted among his students such luminaries as George Santayana, W.E.B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein.

The result is, no surprise, a awesome biography, written with ease and panache, replete with quotation, careful exegesis and useful commentary and suffused with a well-judged admiration for its subject. Nonetheless, the reader will need to pay steady attention, for James's thought can be dense in places, and his style, while famously memorable and even aphoristic, can't always make transparent everything in his more scientific or speculative pages. Still, it's easy to understand why James, who coined such vivid phrases as "the bitch-goddess success," "the moral equivalent of war" and "the sick soul" was once described as writing philosophy as if it were fiction -- just as his brother Henry often seemed to be writing fiction as if it were philosophy.

William James (1842-1910) was the eldest son of Henry James Sr., one of those homegrown American religious philosophers and, from the quotations in this biography, quite a writer in his own colorful way: "The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and every obscene bird of night chatters." Since Henry Sr. had inherited a substantial fortune, his five children enjoyed the privileges of European travel, weekly visits to theaters and museums, home tutoring and membership in the all-important James family. Spiritual unhappiness, however, seems to have been a less welcome legacy: William, for all his bonhomie in the classroom, once said that inside he felt as though he were "chained to a dead man"; Henry, in one of his most moving letters, confessed that loneliness was the key to his life; and the single daughter, Alice, underwent a spiritual crisis in her teens that left her, she said, feeling like a corpse long before she died in her early 40s. As for brothers Wilky and Bob, well, the one ended an alcoholic philanderer, the other a broken-down dreamer, victim of his schemes for getting rich through Florida real estate.

The eldest son, William, possessed one of those richly talented natures that don't settle readily into any pigeonhole. After toying with the notion of becoming a painter, he turned his attentions to medicine, earning a degree from Harvard Medical School, even if he hadn't much real interest in doctoring. Though he was knowledgeable about comparative anatomy, he was also a passionate reader of novels and poetry and increasingly drawn to ethical and metaphysical questions. So he floundered about, like many a young man before and since, feeling demoralized, confused and uncertain about what to do with himself. Nonetheless, James grew close to some of the most original minds of his generation -- in particular, the future jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes and the brilliant (and frequently destitute) philosopher Charles S. Peirce, the founder of semiotics (the study of signs). In his early 20s, he even traveled to Brazil on a five-month collecting expedition with the eminent Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz.

At the age of 30, though, William James was offered a job teaching physiology (and later psychology, and eventually philosophy) at Harvard, resulting in a more settled outward life. He married, kept up with his siblings through letters, began to deliver public lectures on subjects as various as determinism and the moral life. Only at the age of 48 did he finally publish a book: the three-volume The Principles of Psychology (1890), shortly followed by an abridged textbook version for teachers, which made him quite well off. The interest in pedagogy blossomed further in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1899).

By contrast with Freud's investigations, James's psychology deals largely with the function of consciousness. He insists that the mind is active, a participant and shaper of our lives, not just a looker-on. As he writes, consciousness enables us to select and "choose out of the manifold experiences present to it at a given time some one for particular accentuation, and to ignore the rest." This notion that we craft reality by our attitudes toward it gave rise to what has become known as the James-Lange theory of emotions: This holds that "we do not cry because we are sad, or run because we are frightened, but that we are sad because we cry, and afraid because we run."

In Talks to Teachers, this forceful approach to how we make our lives leads to some highly prescriptive, take-charge advice about education and character-building. James emphasizes, for example, the importance of developing good habits and tells us how to do this; proffers advice on successful test-taking (hit the books hard, then stop studying completely a full day before the exam); and recommends that once we make a decision we avoid stewing about the consequences. James throws out apothegms that sound almost like Dale Carnegie or a self-help seminar: "There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision." "Sow an action, and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny."

But while some of James's "essays in popular psychology" can sometimes seem a little jejune, they nonetheless reflect his willingness to address the concerns of ordinary people. Indeed, Richardson emphasizes that James refused to confine his thinking to accepted, scholarly paths. For instance, he experimented with nitrous oxide and drugs, regularly attended seances and helped found the American Society for Psychical Research. In his later years, he relied on injections made from bull testicles and other elixirs for relief from fatigue, eye strain and angina. Above all, though, he began to think hard about the other-worldly visions and mystical trances that are so common in the history of religious experience. It is here that James grows truly profound and haunting.

Haunting? Yes. After finishing Richardson's chapters about James's masterpiece, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), I reread much of it, as well as the related essay "Is Life Worth Living?" Both offer passages that describe a familiar existential angst:

"Mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion."

"The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the goods of nature."

Religious belief addresses this pervasive sense "that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," and it tells us that "we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers." But are these supranatural inclinations true? Maybe, maybe not, James says. But "no fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance." And, as James says in another essay ("Rationality, Activity and Faith"), "all that the human heart wants is its chance."

"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case . . . the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and . . . you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself."

In the end, then, James views spiritual practice not as a matter of churches and dogmas but as a private and pragmatic experience, a kind of "working hypothesis." If faith gives your life meaning, it must be good. As he frequently says, "By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots." In Talks to Teachers, he writes, "The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold of vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal identity seem relatively insignificant."

Robert Richardson's biography covers much more than I've even hinted at, starting with the development of James's philosophy of pragmatism but also including the thinker's opposition to American imperialism, his tendency to flirt with young women (to his wife's distress) and his seemingly callous way of ignoring his wife and children to go off to Europe for months at a time. He was not always a secular saint, but he could sometimes be a witty one. When an admirer placed him in the company of Isaiah and Saint Paul, James replied: "Why drag in Saint Paul and Isaiah?"

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Hardcover) "When a thing is new, people say: 'It is not true'. Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: 'It's not important.' Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say 'Anyway, it's not new.'" William James Well, I admit to being completely fascinated with great early experimental psychologists like William James and Gustav Fechner. While modern psychology honors these thinkers, they usually neglect to look deeply into their great experimental and non-experimental ideas. I hope that this remarkable and important book gets the attention it deserves, and I hope that my generation will discover the brilliance of William James. Richardson has brought James, his world, and his genius to life, along with the fascinating origins of modern psychological and metaphysical thought. Today, psychological science, philosophy, and the science of consciousness have come full circle, so James is as relevant today as 100 years ago. In the preface of "William James; In the Maelstrom of American Modernism," Robert D. Richardson states that "This is an intellectual biography of William James. That is to say, it seeks to understand his life through his work, not the other way around. It is primarily narrative, aiming more to present his life than to analyze or explain it." With this humble thesis statement, Richardson understates one of the crowning achievements of his book. The book succeeds in portraying James' multifaceted, vibrant, and strong personality, thus explaining the great and passionate ideas that emanated from this source. Toward the end of the book (p. 473; California Dreaming), Richardson discusses James' 4-part personality, referring to Barton Perry's (1935) analysis of James. "In some intricate way, James appears to have been, at bottom, both healthy-minded and a sick soul, both tender and tough-minded. Ralph Barton Perry, James' student and biographer, closes his splendid account by identifying four William Jameses. There was first of all `the neurasthenic James.' Then there was `the radiant James, vivid, gay, loving, compassionate, and sensitive.' To this Perry adds a third James, for whom he has no easy label but who might be considered as the conditional James or the ever-not-quite James, whose important qualities of live are `active tension, uncertainty, predictability, extemporized adaptation, risk, change, anarchy, unpretentiousness, and naturalness." The fourth James, Perry says, was "the James of experience and discipline ... the man of the world.' Cosmopolitan James, perhaps." I was struck by the fact that, while Perry's important work discussed the personalities, it was Richardson who has presented these personalities with a vividness that implies a deep analysis and understanding of James' psyche. "...The fundamental condition of his life was, now [at sixty] and always, torn-to-pieces-hood. But the pieces were never just thrown to the winds. They remained loosely if oddly clumped together, never completely unified, but all on the same shelf. Perhaps Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, said it best: `The world which [William James] perceived was a multitudinous one. He never lost the sense of the thing, and yet never lost himself in it. So he became the richest interpreter of that of which he was so rich a part." Richardson's deep analysis of James emerges throughout the book. Richardson's empathy with James - his ability see and think as James once did - is a second crowning achievement of this book. Like many biographers, Richardson has read what James wrote and said, including letters and other correspondences. But Richardson has made a point to read what James read, to fully understand the ideas that captured James' imagination. Furthermore, he has written biographies of Emerson and Thoreau, two great authors who influenced James significantly. Perhaps a third, and related, crowning achievement of this book is its ability to put James' ideas in historical context; to link the ideas to themes that pervaded the 19th and 20th centuries. For instance, "He took as his starting point the feeling with which everyone is familiar: `Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked,' Whatever this subject should be called in clinical psychology - James called it dynamogenics - it is the long-standing American interest in awakening to new life and new power, the great theme of Thoreau and Emerson and whitman, the great theme too of Jonathan Edwards, now carried to the new American century by William James." (p. 489) I had hoped to read about James' interactions with some of his great students (e.g., Thorndike, who conducted his famous puzzle-box experiments in James' house). But I found much of what I hoped for. I was especially interested in reading about James' interpretations of Gustav Fechner's work. Although James seems to have dismissed Fechner's psychophysical laws as "too mechanical" (along with laws of thermodynamics, among other things), his fascination with Fechner's ideas is explained toward the end of the book. There are some other recent sources on James that are worth noting. To be sure, James' deceptively stern visage can be found in modern books on the history of psychology, and these books often include a brief summary of James' work and ideas. Gerald Myers (1986) offers "William James: His life and thought" is another relatively recent "must read." Take a look at Emory University's online resources featuring James. You'll find plenty of materials, including quite a few interesting articles and pictures (e.g., Albert Bandura on James's stay at Stanford). Ken Wilber (of Integral Psychology fame) and B. Alan Wallace (Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies; Mind and Life Institute) have written and spoken extensively in recent years about James' metaphysical ideas. Wallace has just published a book entitled "Contemplative Science" which features James prominently. So... I highly recommend this intellectual biography of William James. I loved this book!