Time Out with William James and The Principles of Psychology

In a course I teach with a philosopher, we’ve reached a long stretch of William James’ Principles of Psychology. My philosopher friend has never read much James and not The Principles. He found James a little maddening. James picks, chooses, and then quotes certain long passages in different philosophers without bothering too much with their larger positions. In a given chapter, for example, Locke and Spinoza might come off thick as thieves if you didn’t know any better. Nearly all of our students don’t know any better, nor should they be required to know any better, so we decided to ignore that problem. We worked on getting James rather than excavating the many positions underneath his creative interventions in philosophical debates. For reasons like these, The Principles of Psychology works for different kinds of readers. It’s an especially involved textbook for students and a serious philosophical work at the same time.[1]

For reasons of temperament, I was less bothered by James’ highly selective borrowing than my philosopher friend. Better informed and probably better read than Ralph Waldo Emerson, James’ creative borrowings and crazy-quilt constructions lend The Principles charm where in Emerson they give me pause. I’m not sure why this is. Psychology was exciting in the late nineteenth century I guess. This is not to say James doesn’t oppose certain philosophical positions. With the possible exception of Hegel, James opposes positions, not philosophers. He sets himself against schools of thought, not individual thinkers necessarily. He borrows from specific thinkers when he likes what they say about a particular thing, simple as that. He’s a free-range thinker. In The Principles, James does battle against schools of thought he calls sometimes “Sensationalist” and “Intellectualist,” which resembles what we in intellectual history would call empiricists and idealists/rationalists. He quotes Locke or Kant approvingly when he likes what they say. He also quotes them disapprovingly when he doesn’t like what they say.

James thinks both schools, Sensationalist and Intellectualist, make the mistake of accounting for the relations between discrete objects of sense as purely mental phenomena. By “relations” James means the phenomena that hold the world together, the rich context, so to speak, for our being-in-the-world. In temporal terms this means the feeling of the whole of a particular event.  In some “specious present”—our sense of “now”—a thought or feeling is inseparable from what came immediately before it and the dawning sense of something coming after it. In James’ influential “Stream of Thought” chapter in The Principles, he uses the experience of thunder to build up to this larger point: “Into the awareness of thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps in and continues; for when we hear thunder crashing, it is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.”[2]

In the same way, “relations” in space might mean contrast, between, say, colors in our visual field. The experience allowing sighted people to distinguish between separate physical objects we perceive in space is hardly separable from the objects themselves.  In his chapter on sensation, James concludes that we directly experience contrast between objects or colors. Contrasts are “real” in this sense, both for us and for the world experienced.

“[I]s it not manifest that the relations are part of the ‘content’ of consciousness, part of the ‘object’ just as much as the sensations are? Why ascribe the former exclusively to the knower and the latter to the known? The knower is in every case a unique pulse of thought corresponding to a unique reaction of the brain upon its conditions. All that the facts of contrast show us is that the same real thing may give us quite different sensations when the conditions alter, and that we must therefore be careful which one to select as the thing’s truest representative.”[3]

The feeling of immediately-before, the sense of coming-up, the experience of contrasting-with—these are just some of the words one might use to describe what James calls “relations.” So James, as some have rightly concluded, is a phenomenologist of a kind in The Principles. He means to get at what our being-in-the-world is like. Notions of permanently existing discrete objects or ideas are a fiction conjured up after the fact, restricting the full range what we actually experience in the world.

Sensationalists think discrete objects of sense, or what Locke called “simple ideas,” are ultimately real, and only through repeated experiences “outside” of us does our blank-slate mind begin to associate them. For Sensationalists, much of what James calls “relations,” are something the mind does, not a reflection of the reality outside as such, but a kind of fiction. Intellectualists, in James’ view, make a similar mistake because, while they think relations are real, they conjure up some idea of transcendence, “absolute” or universal “mind” to account for how the world hangs together in its various relations. James wants to add to the limited catalogue of things Sensationalists believe is really real, and he wants to subtract from the catalogue of things Intellectualists believe universal or transcendent “mind” uses to order reality itself. Maybe we can see why James sees the same problem in two positions that seem at first very different. At the crux of the debate is merely a disagreement over what reality is. Either “mind” or “spirit” orders reality itself in the way it hangs together for us (Intellectualist), or reality is already a certain way and the mind adds all sorts of imagined connections to fill it out for us (Sensationalist).

James thinks we experience relations directly and immediately, everything always and everywhere steeped in ever-changing contexts. In fact, the physiology of our brain is constantly changing as we are “in” an immediate experience of felt relations. The brain is actively changing as it reacts to the relations experienced, as we have thoughts.  So the physiology of the brain is in the world in its relations in the same way the objects we think about are in the world in its relations, and it all happens in the same rolling “stream” of thought or consciousness. He partly means to collapse the traditional distinctions philosophers had made up to that point between a knowing subject “in here” and the known object “out there.” It’s an open question how successful James is with this, and whether or not, despite his protests to the contrary, he seems to be doing a different form of idealism by means of some very creative physiological end-arounds.

Time Out, Bill

James works really hard only to come off the rails sometimes. His chapter on “The Perception of Reality,” a magnificently weird one, ends with Emersonian lapses of judgment that could easily make a person believe the mind orders reality in the most extreme, nigh-solipsistic way possible. It’s as if, in a fit of impulsiveness, he decided to burn down all of that careful, even convincing work he had done leading up to the chapter, the painstaking work of putting knower and known back together in their being-in-the-world. Moments like this are why James is so frustrating and so wonderful.

In “The Perception of Reality” James argues that felt relations and contexts must mean that, for us, reality is a complex system of beliefs about the world, which is itself shot through with our emotional reactions to the phenomena we experience. James’ romantic tendencies get the best of him at times in Principles. He contributes meaningfully to technical problems in philosophy, and now and again he offers advice for how to cope. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t:

A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till then left us cold. ” I realize for the first time,” we then say, “what that means!” This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will.

[Okay, Bill, I’m still with you I think.]

But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief (Vol. II, 321).

[Time Out!]

[NO!! This sounds like “The Secret.” Stop it Bill! Stop it!!!]

William James will drive you nuts. He made me want to do intellectual history. He’s a seat-of-the-pants, breakneck explorer of longstanding philosophical problems. The ups and downs are amazing. Unique, frankly beautiful descriptions and reports from the field are everywhere. And when he’s really wrong, he’s gloriously wrong.

Time Out with Bill

When our class read the chapter “On the Perception of Time” we tried out something James describes there. The “specious present” for James is a “saddleback” upon which we sit. The present is “specious” because it disappears once we try to isolate it. (Nietzsche describes this as the always-already-having-been.) It’s a “saddleback” because nonetheless we have a sense of “the now” with certain observable limits. Our brains can only attend to the now for a certain amount of time. At that point, most parts of our rolling experience fall off the back end of the “saddleback” never to be heard from again as we move through the world in time, perched. The kept parts become memories. Here James calls upon the experimental psychology of his time, where some comically dedicated Germans spent an inordinate amount of time testing attention. How long can we hold our attention before a different brain state intervenes? How long is “the now” in terms of duration? Can we feel its passage? (Scheisse! We must measure this!) James mentions that hearing a constant tone is a good way to test the length of “the now.”

We tried it out. One of our students pulled out his laptop and called up a monotone for one minute. To prepare, or attempt something like lab conditions, we turned off the lights just beforehand. We had students shut their eyes, and we enforced total quiet for a one minute duration. We asked students to concentrate on that single note and see if they could sense a shift in consciousness as the outer limits of “the now” were reached. The time elapsed, we turned the lights back on, and most every student said they felt it.

A certain artificiality troubles experiments like these. James knew this. Some students probably felt it intensely because they wanted to feel it. They were predisposed to feel the shift. Yet it’s definitely there. We feel something, if only at different times and in different ways and in different intensities. We experience time subjectively. There’s no escaping this. It flies, or it slows, and so on. We had already discussed the useful fiction of time by the clock. What does one minute mean anyway?

I hope for them this minute was worth committing to memory, however it all works. It was memorable for me.

Next time out, I’ll discuss some ways of tightening up James’ idea of reality. We’re following The Principles of Psychology with Freud and the “reality principle.”

[1] James is hip to this. In his Preface, he suggests what chapters beginners should omit the first time through, even charts out a “wise order.” I mixed it up and ignored some of his directions. One day I hope to read all of it with students. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it all, and I can’t imagine how to read it all with students.

[2] William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume One, (Dover, 1950 [1890]), 240.

[3] Principles, Volume Two, 28.