Happy Darwin Day!
Charles Renouvier is not remembered as a giant of western philosophy, but for William James he was a life-saver. WJ 4
We’ve talked about ego and self-hood, especially in the light of Buddhist critiques that trace much human suffering to the stubborn insistence on preserving its centrality. But the James survival strategy– that’s not an overstatement– turned on his embrace of the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world that Renouvier’s definition of free will inspired young James to act on. The strategy seems to have been vindicated, for James, pragmatically speaking.
An insightful observation by James that would turn up two decades later in the ground-breaking Principles of Psychology dates to this period: by working our stint day by day on the one line we have chosen, without looking ahead or thinking much of the final result, we are sure of waking some fine morning, experts in our particular branch… Could this be the full fruit and flower of what it means to live in the present?
This is also the period in which James and a small coterie of friends including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and Chauncey Wright, formed an informal discussion group, thoroughly chronicled by Louis Menand, called “The Metaphysical Club.” It would have been an extraordinary group in any age, by any standard… The era and the place were charged to the muzzle with new beginnings, not least the startling new ideas of (now bi-centenarian) Charles Darwin. (Menand enlists John Dewey, author of “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” as an honorary member of the club.)
Darwin said “there were enough brilliant minds at the American Cambridge in the 1860s to furnish all the universities of England. He wouldn’t probably have known of James, then, but he definitely knew Wright, the intellectual-boxing master of Peirce, Holmes, and James, and William’s most influential teacher. When Wright visited Darwin in England in 1872, Darwin asked him to give some thought to the problem of will. The result was “The Evolution of Self-Consciousness” in 1873.
C.S. Peirce was the other world-class philosopher of James’s generation whose ideas the “club” would incubate. James later tried to give his flagging career a boost by crediting him with the original idea of contemporary pragmatism (in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results“). Peirce, displaying characteristic prickliness and ingratitude, refused the honor and re-named his own thought “pragmaticism”– a name he hoped would be too ugly to “steal.” But he deserves lasting credit for insisting that we not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. His pragmatic maxim reflects this insistence: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we might conceive the object of our conception to have. That’s what we will and should understand the object to be, Peirce proposed. Our ideas won’t be clear if we don’t know how to apply them. The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is, how to make our ideas clear; and a most important one it is, depreciated only by minds who stand in need of it. To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought…
Peirce concluded “Fixation of Belief” with a clarion “ethics of belief” statement of principle: what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief… to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous. [Arisbe PhilDic]
Peirce, like James and all classic American philosophers, was hugely influenced by Darwin. He identified three fundamental forms of evolution, tychistic (evolution by fortuitous variation), arancastic (evolution by mechanical necessity), and agapastic (evolution by creative love). For a hard-headed, practical-minded realist, Peirce’s metaphysics is exceptionally romantic. And just in time for Valentine’s Day.
According to Peirce, the most fundamental engine of the evolutionary process is not struggle, strife, greed, or competition. Rather it is nurturing love, in which an entity is prepared to sacrifice its own perfection for the sake of the wellbeing of its neighbor… SEP
In later years Peirce fell on hard times. James saved him, financially and emotionally. After James’s death Peirce called himself “a mere table of contents, so abstract,” compared to James, “so concrete, so living.”
As this week’s installment closes, William James has begun to settle into his vocation. He’s teaching anatomy and physiology, and getting some things published.
One of my favorite James essays, on the importance of vacations, appears at about this time. In it he contrasts our busy-ness with the artful approach to life practiced elsewhere, inviting us to consider “the shopkeeper in Germany, who for five or six months of the year spends a good part of every Sunday in the open air, sitting with his family for hours under green trees over coffee or beer and Pumpernickel, and who breaks into Achs and Wunderschons all the week as he recalls it.” His “contentment in the fine weather, and the leaves, and the air, and himself as a part of it all” is a springboard of renewal that propels him cheerfully back to work, back, as we say, to “reality.” But he knows that his recreation is at least as real as his work (which would suffer as surely as he would without his springboard). We could learn from that shopkeeper. This was the germ of James’s thinking about what he would eventually dub “moral holidays.” (For more on this, see Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy. Seriously.)
Another of James’s lifelong quirks surfaces now: he’s beginning to mess around with “spiritualism,” looking for “a force of some sort not dreamed of in our philosophy.” He never found it, but he never stopped looking. He’s already a radical empiricist.
Up@dawn 