William James's Narrative of Habit

Style, Spring, 1999 by Renee Tursi

neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but melioristic rather. The world, it thinks, may be saved, on condition that its parts shall do their best. But shipwreck in detail, or even on the whole, is among the open possibilities. (Some Problems 73)

Adherents to pluralism, explains James, having no "'eternal' edition" to rely on, must always live with a certain degree of insecurity (The Meaning of Truth 124). This open-ended perspective meant he had no patience for rigidly fixed classifications or "systems with pigeon-holes" (qtd. in Perry 2: 700). They violated his sense of the character and expression with which life performs for us. We must take the "continuous transition" of life at face value, says James (Essays in Radical Empiricism 25). That means "first of all to take it just as we feel it" and not bewilder ourselves with disaffected abstractions about it; we must feel it before we can think it.

Thus our craving for explanation, in James's view, is decidedly psychological in nature, not philosophical. Such a conclusion led him to term rationality a "sentiment" rather than an a priori fact. That thought arises in us as a feeling of active agreement rather than passive acceptance establishes the beginning of thinking on the aesthetic, familiarizing level. When we come to understand an idea, James writes in his chapter on "The Sentiment of Rationality" in The Will to Believe, it means that idea has come to feel "at home" in us. If, however, the objective references of our thinking are drained of emotional relevance, as James himself clearly could attest, we are left with a "nameless unheimlichkeit": a condition of psychological homelessness that leaves us with powers, but no motives (71). This condition is the opposite of nightmare, which allows us motives but no powers, yet "when acutely brought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror." To James, certain absolutist theories, such as materialism, which, with their ready-made worlds, deny "reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we most cherish," count among the most objectionable philosophies for their potential to bring about this grievous state. If we concur with such a scheme, a dreadful feeling of homelessness overcomes us at the thought of there being "nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies."

In contrast, James's ever-malleable design for the macrocosm waits for us to engender truths upon it - not vice versa. We fool ourselves into thinking that the world comes to us in a completed form, James explains (using the ideas of the German thinker R. Hermann Lotze), only because once we have the sentiment of rationality about something, when we next recognize it "out there" it feels a priori. His opposition in the 1870s to Herbert Spencer's "spectator theory" of knowledge stems from his conviction that "the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor" (Essays in Philosophy 21).