Enemy Of the Absolute
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William James was a great categorizer, an inventor of rubrics that still inform the way we talk about religion, philosophy, and psychology, nearly a century after his death. The faithful, he wrote in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” could be divided into two classes. The once-born are those spirits who feel naturally at home in the world, who “when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it”: Rousseau, Emerson, and Whitman are among James’s examples of this fortunate tribe. The twice-born, on the other hand, come to religion out of a “persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence.” For such spirits, James writes, “mankind is … 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.” Only a conversion experience, a rebirth in faith, is dramatic enough to rescue them from despair.
The inventor of these categories, however, did not fall neatly into either of them. William James, one might say, was born one and a half times — an appropriate fate for a man who, intellectually and personally, was always a jagged fraction among contented integers. He certainly never enjoyed the native trust in the universe that is the birthright of the once-born. Until he was in his mid-30s, he was never far from spiritual and physical collapse. Depression, self-doubt, uncertainty about his career, and an endless series of ailments prodded him to the verge of madness.
Later in life, he wrote an account of the moment in 1870, when he was 28 years old, that marked his closest approach to mental collapse. In his new biography, “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism” (Houghton Mifflin, 640 pages, $30), Robert D. Richardson quotes the famous passage: “There arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a blackhaired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches…. This shape am I,” James suddenly felt. “Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.”
For a different man — or for James himself, had he been born in a different age — this moment of horror, which he describes with almost novelistic relish, might have been the pivot of a religious conversion, a zero point from which a second birth was the only escape. Instead, it helped to make of James, not a saint, but a scholar of saintliness. His first passion was painting, and his only university degree was an M.D., but it was as a psychologist and philosopher of belief that James would exercise his enormous gifts. In taking a scientific approach to religious matters, in combining the concepts of Charles Darwin with the insights of Jonathan Edwards, James created a unique and unclassifiable place for himself in the history of thought. If he is remembered as the most American of thinkers — the founder of pragmatism, the one distinctively American contribution to philosophy — it is because he incarnated both of the country’s warring geniuses: the ardent credulity of the Burned-Over District and the hard-nosed materialism of the Show-Me State.
To make sense of such a man is beyond the powers of most biographers. Perhaps not even Henry James, his still more gifted brother, could have made William live on the page. Mr. Richardson, who has previously written biographies of Emerson and Thoreau, makes a valiant effort, but even he seems bewildered by the sheer number of directions in which his subject’s life might carry him. There is William James the son, whose notorious father, Henry Sr., churned out a series of visionary tracts that perhaps only William, of all human beings then or since, could claim to have read from beginning to end. The chaos, practical, and intellectual, that Henry Sr. created in the James family — constantly dragging his children from school to school and from continent to continent — may help to explain why, of his five children, three were geniuses and three were utter failures. (Alice James, whose brilliant mind seemed to take revenge on her ruined body, counts in both categories.)
Then there is William the brother, oldest of the five James children, who did not come into his full powers until long after Henry was famous, and who stayed home in Cambridge as Wilky and Bob were serving heroically in the Union army. There is William the passionate, inattentive husband, whose bizarre courtship of Alice Gibbens is one of the most vivid chapters in Mr. Richardson’s book. (“I will feed on death and the negation of me in one place shall be the affirmation of me in a better,” he wrote to Alice, who married him anyway.) There is William the Harvard professor, whose life of committee meetings and endowed lectures and sabbaticals and academic feuds is not much different from that of a professor today. There is even William the public intellectual, writing letters to the newspapers against the Spanish American War.
If William James never quite emerges in these pages as a unified, credible character, that may be only appropriate for a convinced pluralist, who always denied the existence of the Absolute. Mr. Richardson does a good job of conveying what James called his Zerissenheit, his torn-to-pieces-ness. But he does not elucidate the connection between this frantic multiplicity and James’s unconquerable anxiety, or between his nervous temperament and his philosophical discomfort with final answers and definitive truths. Nor does he dwell on the fact, which nonetheless cries out from his pages, that James and his great Harvard colleagues — Josiah Royce, Charles Peirce, George Santayana — all seemed to suffer from a deep-seated maladjustment, a neurosis born of being intellectuals in the Gilded Age.
Yet it is exactly here, in analyzing James’s social and intellectual milieu, that Mr. Richardson disappoints. He deals with James’s work by summarizing each essay or lecture as it is written, usually on a fairly superficial level, as though uncertain of how much philosophy his readership is willing to take. Not only does this method make it hard to see the thematic connections between James’s work in physiology, psychology, and philosophy; it occludes the intellectual milieu in which he was writing, the ongoing problems and debates in which he was taking part. As a result, when the world of philosophy starts to reject James’s later work — “Many see pragmatism as a joke,” Royce told him — it is never clear exactly why.
Indeed, a closer engagement with the weaknesses or limitations of James’s work is what Mr. Richardson’s biography is most clearly missing. Like Emerson, James can seem oblivious to the evils that his radical skepticism and relativism might license. Both men were New Englanders, products of the most civilized and conscientious region of the Western Hemisphere, and it seems never to have occurred to them that the trust they repose in the individual and his instincts might be abused. “The true,” James wrote in his clearest definition of pragmatism, “is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”
Nietzsche might have said the same thing, except that he would not so easily have elided the difference between “good”and “effective,”or forgotten that power is the power to do evil as well as good. James’s blitheness about such questions is what makes him, contrary to Mr. Richardson’s subtitle, feel less “modern”than his German contemporary. Despite himself, Mr. Richardson leaves the reader convinced that William James is a thinker better argued with than admired.