As early as 1907, the American philosopher William James had been planning a book he would call Essays in Radical Empiricism. After his death in 1910, some of the essays and articles that he had planned to put in that book were collected together, along with some other pertinent articles (mostly responses to critics, that expanded on the themes and issues of previous essays). The lot of them were published under James's projected title in 1912, by New York publishers Longmans, Green, and Co.
This book presents James's metaphysics, a perspective he variously calls "radical empiricism" or "humanism".* This "pragmatist"** perspective takes as its foundation a level of reality that James calls "pure experience". James describes reality as, in the first place, a chaos or flux, tentatively cobbled into blocs of concomitant phenomena – shapes and colors and tastes and textures and sounds that occur together. These experiences are logically anterior to subject and object; the latter two beings are identified on the basis of how pure experiences relate to one another. Everything else that is done to it is an operation of mind – mind itself being part of the content of the field of experience.
A "pure" experience is just that: anything we can identify as being an element of our experience, considered only with regard to its relationship with other elements of experience – and notably without regard for its place inside or outside the subject. James also calls these elements "facts". As James puts it, "It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that." (23) This "that" can include sense impressions – a color, a contour, a tone, an amplitude, a texture, a temperature, an itch, a tickle, an ache, a chill, a burn, a fragrance, saltiness, bitterness, sweetness, the feeling of being sick or upside down or prone or standing. But it can also include anything delivered to the mind by the faculties – associations, phantasms, deductions, inductions, memories. If there can be said to be a "stuff" of which reality is made, James says, it can only be this pluralistic stuff, a pure heterogeneity of contrasts and differences. As James says:
[T]here is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: "It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not." (26-27)
Pure experiences distribute themselves in a "field", the field of "pure present". This is reality considered at its point of richest saturation; the field of present is a mosaic in which every momentary sensation and every fleeting thought presents itself. Different elements have different force, and are subject to different emphases; it is on the basis of these differences that things are organized into discrete entities.
Perhaps the most daring claim that James puts forward in this text is that there is no need for any kind of non-empirical principle to explain the order and connection of experiences. There is no need for anything that isn't empirical in his conception of empiricism. The elements of our experience are ordered and connected in all sorts of ways. Radical empiricism treats those conjunctions and relationships as elements of experience in their own right. This, James says, is what makes his empiricism "radical":
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophical arrangement. (42, emph. sic)
In other words, every moment of experience contains the momentum that pulls it into the next, and contains the memory that explains what it was before. No further principle is necessary – nor, so far as James was concerned, would it be particularly welcome. "According to my view," James tells us,
experience as a whole is a process in time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate. (62)
Thus, experience coordinates itself.
James does not consider this philosophy to be inimical to scientific method, because science occupies itself with those very conjunctive relations that James insists upon. But if we take radical empiricism seriously, our understanding of science will be quite different. Nature can no longer be understood as a space in which logically anterior noumena swish about. Rather, James tells us, "Nature exhibits only changes, which habitually coincide with one another so that their habits are describable in simple 'laws.'" (148) The regular sequence of natural changes, as they appear in our own empirical fields and in the fields of others, can be used to generate a complete referential plan for experience generally. And of course, the usefulness of science is that it shows exactly how any given experience contains the germ of its next moment.
Above all, James's governing postulate is: esse est percipi, to "be" means to be perceived. For James, this means two things. First, it is meaningless to talk of anything that doesn't exist which also doesn't play any role in our experiential field. But second, it is equally meaningless to talk of anything in the experiential field that doesn't have reality. Anything we perceive has reality ipso facto. It is the burden of philosophy to articulate the terms of this reality, giving meticulous respect to whatever order is presented to us in experience.
This is a good book by a great thinker. There are few things for which we might criticize James. Most of what there is, is fairly trivial. For example, in his discussion of Spinoza in "La notion de conscience", it is clear that James doesn't quite catch what an attribute represents. James tries to make Spinoza an early dualist, whereas in fact, Spinoza insisted that the difference between mind and body was strictly one of the context in which one considered something – but this is also a key principle in James's radical empiricism. So James presents as an enemy the most sympathetic figure in the canon. But of course, this is hardly a criticism of James at all; not of his philosophy, nor, considering the figure in question, of his intelligence.
But let us move to a more substantial criticism. James is shamelessly difficult to pin down, but there is one thing he stands by: that what order is present in the change from one present moment to the next, is purely a function of what is present in that momentary experience, and not anything that transcends it or is hidden underneath it or is otherwise in any way not a part of the content of that moment. What this requires is that everything in reality already be fully disclosed. This is not to say that we have to immediately understand the role to be played by any component of our experience – that, surely, would be asking too much, since not all experience need be mental or conscious experience – but it does mean that every experience would have, in principle, to be able to be rendered mental or conscious.
This seems to stretch credibility just that little bit too far. This postulate doesn't let us ask which elements of experience are going to be correlated, or in what ways, because it requires that either they explain it of themselves or else we leave it unexplained. But this attitude is not characteristic of how we act, or how we treat our experiences, on an everyday level. For example, we take for granted that there are principles according to which we can change the experience presented to us into another experience. When we act, we expect a response, because we are engaging reality on a level that underlies existence as it is presented. More generally, there is a throb of reality that constantly surprises us, for better or worse; James only permits us to talk about this throb insofar as we experience it, but the most critical feature of our experience of it is that we aren't conscious of the whole of it. It seems to me that by denying this vitality immanent to the experiential field, James leaves his empiricism notably impoverished.
Be all this as it may, Essays in radical empiricism represents a significant and distinctly American contribution to early 20th century philosophy, and really highlights something telling in the intellectual culture of the time. James's pragmatism stands alongside existentialism, phenomenology, process philosophy,*** and post-structuralism as foremost influences in the development of a characteristic trend in contemporary thought.
The chapters of Essays in radical empiricism are as follows:
- Does 'consciousness' exist?
- A world of pure experience
- The thing and its relations
- How two minds can know one thing
- The place of affectional facts in a world of pure experience
- The experience of activity
- The essence of humanism
- La notion de conscience
- Is radical empricisim solipsistic?
- Mr. Pitkin's refutation of 'radical empiricism'
- Humanism and truth once more
- Absolutism and empiricism
The original edition ran 283 pages and included an index, as well as a 9-page preface by the editor, Ralph Barton Perry. It was printed in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The book is still in print (or at least, in print again, if it ever dropped out); a number of editions are out, since the book is now in public domain. You can order it through your favorite channel. For this writeup, I was working from an original edition I found at my school library:
James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Ralph Barton Perry, ed. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912.
* This is 'humanism' in the sense that, as Protagoras said, "Man is the measure of all things; of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not." It means that reality has its unity in the experience of human beings, not in some principle that transcends that experience.
** James believed that radical empiricism was a pragmatist doctrine, but not all pragmatists need be radical empiricists. Technically speaking, "pragmatism" is a method; it is the attitude from which James saw his metaphysical doctrines springing. When offered different interpretations or evaluations of the objects of consciousness, we should consider what the difference would be in terms of how we act toward, or what we say about, the objects under consideration. If there's no difference, there's no point to trying to choose between the two offered perspectives. James believed that this applied even to the choice of whether to treat something as a subjective phenomenon or an objective one. Because we can treat any object of cognition or perception as an objective thing (a chair, say), or as an interpretation of objective things (a chair as an interpretation of electromagnetic behavior), or as sense-impressions, or as a form – because we can treat it in any and all of these ways in different circumstances, the truth of the matter must support all of these treatments. In order to articulate a vocabulary in which we could talk about existence such that it could be so flexible, James developed radical empiricism.
*** The generally acknowledged father of process philosophy was Alfred North Whitehead, who, in his key metaphysical text Process and Reality, described himself as basically carrying on the lines of thought suggested by James and by Henri Bergson.