What Wittgenstein Learned from William James

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What Wittgenstein Learned from William James Author(s): Russell B. Goodman Source: History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Jul., 1994), pp. 339-354Published by: on behalf of University of Illinois Press North American Philosophical

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History of Philosophy Quarterly Volume 11, Number 3, July 1994

WHAT WITTGENSTEIN LEARNED FROM WILLIAM JAMES

Russell B. Goodman

I

LONG

neglected by analytic philosophers, the thought of William James has received newly respectful attention, particularly in recent writings by

Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty.1 Putnam aligns James's thought with doctrines of the later Wittgenstein which have for some time been orthodox, or at least widely accepted, within Anglo-American philosophy, suggesting that we

allow that William James might have had something 'new' to say?something new

to us, not just new to his own time?or, at least, might have had a program for

philosophy that is, in part, the right program, even if it has not been properly worked out yet...; if we allow that Husserl and Wittgenstein and Austin may have shared something of the same program, even if they too, in their different ways, failed to state it properly; then there is still something new, something unfinished and important to say about reality and truth. And that is what I believe.2

In The Many Faces of Realism, Putnam uses both James and Wittgenstein to

develop the "internal realism" he had argued for in Reason, Truth,and His

tory.3 Finding James and Wittgenstein together in a "neo-Kantian tradition" of writers "who claim that commonsense tables and chairs and sensations and electrons are equally real. . .,"4 Putnam fastens on, and savors, James's

"humanist" claim that "the trail of the human serpent is over everything." In his even more recent Realism with a Human Face Putnam interprets James's

radical empiricism as taking off from Moore's question whether sense-data are

parts of the surfaces of physical objects; and he shows how James's doctrine that truth is a species of the good can be used to advantage in thinking about the fact/value distinction and the nature of rationality.

Although James may today seem a newly "contemporary" philosopher, and

a writer some of whose doctrines are surprisingly assimilable to those of

Wittgenstein, he is of course the earlier figure. If there were, for example, any historical influence the direction of causation would run from James to

Wittgenstein rather than the reverse. Did Wittgenstein derive his so-called "idealism"5 or internal realism from James's "humanism" or "pragmatism?"

Might he have learned anything about philosophical method from James? Did he even read the works of William James, and with what sort of attention? In what follows I shall say something about this question of historical influence,

339



340 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

but I shall concentrate on trying to get a clear view of some of the confluences of and oppositions between James's and Wittgenstein's thought.

James's writing was well known in Britain during his lifetime (1842-1910). He was a regular contributor to Mind, where his books were reviewed and

discussed. He gave the Gifford lectures on Varieties of Religious Experience in Edinburgh in 1901-2, and delivered his lectures on "the current situation in

philosophy," subsequently published as A Pluralistic Universe, to overflow audiences at Oxford in 1907. The Principles of Psychology was required reading for the psychology course at Cambridge, and Benjamin Ward's long article on psychology in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica

makes extensive use of James's work. In Oxford F. C. S. Schiller lectured on

pragmatism, and developed his own "humanism."

But the direction in which the currents of thought were moving is indicated

by the review o? Pragmatism G. E. Moore published in Mind in 1908.6 Moore raised three basic objections to James's views, objections which clearly seemed to him devastating. In the first place, with regard to James's definition of truth,

Moore argued that according to James, if it were useful to believe in William James's existence "this belief would be true, even if he didn't exist."7 Secondly, with regard to what James (and especially his follower Schiller) called his

"humanism," Moore argued that James confuses our human role in producing true beliefs with our role in making those beliefs true.8 Finally, Moore argues that James passes from the unexceptionable claims that reality is mutable and that a sentence can change its truth value to the indefensible claim that the same idea (or proposition) can be true at one time and false at another, so that "this idea that Julius Caesar was murdered in the Senate-House, though true

now, may, at some future time cease to be true, if it should be more profitable to the lives of future generations to believe that he died in his bed_"9 It would be profitable to consider the arguments (such as Putnam's) that can now be advanced to counter Moore's and to consider the difference between the way

James's doctrines appear to us now in 1993 and the way they appeared to Moore in 1908, but this is an enterprise for another occasion.

For now, we can go on with the thought that although some ideas important for mainstream analytic philosophy can be found in James (e.g. Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by descrip tion), Russell, Moore, and most of those following in their footsteps?that is, the philosophers who worked with and were taught by Wittgenstein?found little use for James as a serious philosopher. James has mostly been dismissed as a thinker lacking rigor and as one who, like the idealists he opposed, confused logic with psychology.

But Wittgenstein is a different case. In one way or another he relied on James

throughout his philosophical career. In 1912, after two terms of study at

Cambridge, he wrote Russell that reading Varieties of Religious Experience had done him "a lot of good."10 Considering Wittgenstein's intense preoccupation with both "logic and his sins," one supposes initially that what did Wittgenstein



WITTGENSTEIN AND WILLIAM JAMES 341

a lot of good were James's depictions of the forms of religious life, particularly those more complex varieties he discussed in his chapters on "the sick soul." But along with these descriptions Wittgenstein would have come across dis cussions of pragmatism in Varieties, and the application of pragmatic princi ples to religious questions and positions. In James's chapter on "Philosophy,"

for example, he would have come across the statement that "man's thinking is

organically connected with his conduct."11

Wittgenstein's 1912 letter to Russell at least establishes Wittgenstein's favorable attitude towards Varieties of Religious Experience and the likeli hood that he read the book carefully. We also know that Wittgenstein's interest in Varieties was by no means to end in 1912, for it was one of the few books

Wittgenstein insisted his friend M. O'C. Drury read. He told Drury in 1930 that James was a good philosopher because he was "a real human being."12 Note

that Wittgenstein did not say that James was a psychologist, but that he was a philosopher and a good one. Wittgenstein's standards for application of the term "philosopher" were, as is well known, quite stringent.

Wittgenstein also read James's magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology, and wrestled with it in his notebooks of the 1930s and in his lectures after the Second World War. He refers to James's Psychology at several points in the

Investigations and in such writings as Remarks on the Philosophy of Psy chology. At one point James's Psychology was the only book on Wittgenstein's shelf.13 In 1967, Christopher Coope, Peter Geach et. al. published a detailed list of parallel passages from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and

James's Principles of Psychology in their Wittgenstein Workbook, arranged according to such topics as thought without language, the ownership of expe rience, emotions and bodily feelings, personal identity, and the will.14 As a recent commentator, Stephen Hilmy, notes, "such persistent refocussing on the

views of a single author is very rare in Wittgenstein's writings."15

The impact of James on Wittgenstein's later philosophy has not escaped such commentators as Hallett, Baker and Hacker, and Hilmy.16 But because

Wittgenstein so often disagrees with or questions James, the predominant opinion in these commentaries is that James's influence on Wittgenstein was

basically negative, that James was a source of clearly stated fundamental

philosophical errors that Wittgenstein spent much of his later career counter

acting. We can begin to see how deeply this view is mistaken by a passage not from the Psychology, nor from Pragmatism (where Putnam finds much to admire but which there is no evidence that Wittgenstein read), but from

Varieties of Religious Experience. As Hallett notes, Wittgenstein's crucial notion of family resemblances is anticipated by James in this passage?the opening of Varieties' second chapter.171 cite the first paragraph of the passage, numbering each sentence for convenience in the commentary to follow.

(1) Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. (2) Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough




to enumerate any of them to you now. (3) Meanwhile the very fact that they are so

many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word 'religion' cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name.

(4) The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. (5) This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both

philosophy and religion have been infested. (6) Let us not fall immediately into a

one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we

may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternatively be equally important in religion. (7) If we should enquire for the essence of

'government,' for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submis

sion, another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of

laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. (8) The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. (9) Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more mislead

ing than enlightening. (10) And why may not religion be a conception equally complex?

In the first three sentences of this passage James raises questions of essence

and definition. (1) links essence with definition by speaking of "a precise definition of what [religion's] essence consists of," and (3) concludes that

because there are many (appropriate) definitions of religion there cannot be a

"single principle or essence." Although James is by no means a "linguistic philosopher" like Russell or Wittgenstein (i. e. one for whom traditional prob lems of philosophy can be attacked via analyses of language), he here ap

proaches the ontological question of essence from a linguistic point of view.

(1) is about beginnings?of a book or an enquiry or, as philosophers say,

foundations. James is willing to begin without a definition or foundation, i. e., to make use of results gained without the clarity a definition or some other absolute starting point might seem to afford. James's pragmatism furnishes a

justification for this attitude, for according to it the meaning of an idea is established by its results rather than by its origins or analysis. As he put it in

the "Philosophy" chapter of Varieties: "To develop a thought's meaning we

need. . .only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-dis tinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a

possible difference of practice."18

(2) implies that definitions are not useless, for they "may possibly come

before us" later in James's book. Whether they will do so as items to be refuted or criticized, or as devices for summarizing important aspects of his subject,

James does not say in (2), although (3) suggests the latter. However, the

disutility of definitions, particularly at the beginning of his enterprise, is

suggested by James's remark in (2) that it would be "pedantic," (i.e., "unduly

emphasizing minutiae"19) "to enumerate any of them to you now." James is not

against definition; it is not as if he wants to throw definitions out in favor of some inexplicable intuition (as did his friend Henri Bergson). Rather, he wants

to place definitions in their appropriate place, for example, as summaries of

patterns among the manifold material he presents in his book about the




"varieties" of religious experience, rather than as insights into essences arrived at by some process more authoritative than human experience.

In (3), James stands back from the "many," "different" definitions to make the metalinguistic and metaphysical point that "the word 'religion' cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name." This

sentence can be said to express, if not the idea of anti- or non-essentialism, at

least an opposition to the idea of a single essence. (It does not yet contain the idea of family resemblances because it doesn't discuss resemblances at all; only the idea of a collection, not the principles of its organization.) Among the points to note about this extraordinary sentence are these: (i) James is clearly talking about language ("the word 'religion'") and his formulation captures the "use

mention distinction" so important for analytic philosophy; (ii) a claim about

language, i.e., that there are so many definitions of religion is said to entail a

claim about that which the language refers to or connotes, i.e., that religion

has no "single principle or essence;" (iii) James leaves it open that religion has a multiple rather than a single essence, or a set of principles; (iv) James bases his conclusion on a survey of actual religious practice and experience, actual

uses of the term "religion" (what Wittgenstein might have called description as opposed to explanation, a survey or "clear view" of some landscape);20 (v)

but no more than Wittgenstein is James offering merely a compilation of

human practices or linguistic usages; his descriptions, like Wittgenstein's, "get their importance" from a philosophical project.

If (3) posits a linguistic level (the word "religion") and an objective level (that for which the word religion "standfs]"), and implicitly a position from which

the relation of these two levels is discussed, then (4) introduces yet another

level of analysis, where the motives and tendencies of the "theorizing mind"

that observes these relationships come under discussion. As background to

James's claim that "the theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials," one should consider his many reminders in The Principles of

Psychology of the ways "in which a man will be blinded by a priori theories to

the most flagrant facts."21 Although he admired much about Hume, for exam

ple,22 James castigates him for his preconceptions about what mental life must

be like: a series of discrete, repeatable units of sensations and ideas. In

contrast, James maintains, no mental state is identical with any other, and all

states include diffused and at times inchoate blendings rather than mere

accumulations of discrete ideas. "A good third of our psychic life," James writes, "consists in rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate."23 Again, for James "every definite image in the mind is steeped and

dyed in the free water that flows around it,"24 whereas in its search for clarity and order, psychology treats the stream of thought as nothing more than so

many "pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful" of water.

If we consider James's stance toward the tendencies of what he calls the

"theorizing mind," we find that although he complains about them in others, whether empiricists like Hume or rationalists like Bradley, he also regards




them as tendencies in himself. "Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of the subject," he writes in (6), acknowledging (in "us") the tendency to

over-simplification warned of in (4), yet at the same time encouraging us to work against it. His stance toward his own philosophical temptations is thus

parallel to the stance Wittgenstein displays when he enjoins us to look "into the workings of our language.. .in despite of an urge to misunderstand them."25

Whereas James speaks of oversimplification, Wittgenstein, sounding more

Kantian, speaks of a false "ideal" of clarity or precision after which we strive.

For example, in discussing meaning Wittgenstein writes: "The sense of a

sentence?one would like to say?may, of course, leave this or that open, but

the sentence must nevertheless have a definite sense. An indefinite sense?

that would really not be a sense at all."26 It is as if Hume were to say to James: "an indefinite mental experience would really be no experience at all," with

James replying that his very task as a psychologist is to "reinstate the vague to its proper place in our mental life. . . ,"27 Note that James wants only to

reinstate the vague to its proper place, not to say that everything is vague. For James some things are vague and some are not, and those that are may be

vague in perfectly distinct ways (e.g., in peripheral vision, with regard to color or shape).

Returning to our passage from Varieties, we can see that in (5), James

connects his project with the history of philosophy, seeing the battle against oversimplification as part of the battle against traditional religious and philo sophical "absolutism and one-sided dogmatism." Humble as James seems to be

with his abandonment of traditional searches for clarity, definitions, and absolute starting points, he is in fact?like critical philosophers from Kant to

Wittgenstein?attacking a predominant tradition of Western metaphysics.

James's sentence (6) is the most obvious source in the paragraph for Wittgen stein's idea of family resemblances.28 The phrase "alternatively be equally important" conveys the idea that the collection of characters shifts its charac

ter, as first one of the collection, then another, assumes great importance.29 This is exactly the point Wittgenstein makes about family resemblances: as one looks at family members first one character?the ears, say?assumes

prominence, then another?say, a way of smiling or walking. What links all the

members of the family is not one thing, but several or many things, some more

important for some linkages, others important for different linkages. Wittgen stein shows this pattern of logical relationship not only among families, but

among numbers and games: "Look for example at board-games, with their

multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many cor

respondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and

others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is

retained, but much is lost."30 In James's words, "many characters. . .may

alternatively be equally important."

Sentence (7) brings out the temporality of the concepts James (and Wittgen stein) examines. Discussing government, which, like religion, has no one




character present in all its instances, James writes that one character is "more

important at one moment and others at another." This entails that concepts

such as government or religion cannot reveal their (full) nature in just one moment. If they had an essence, it could perhaps be stated in a brief definition or revealed in a characteristic case. But, James insists, religion or government

is not that way. An epistemological point follows from the fact that the nature of religion or government is temporal in the way described here, viz., that

understanding the concept of religion or government?or, speaking de re,

understanding religion or government?cannot occur in just one moment. Our

understanding of these things requires a variety of moments that does not

merely repeat a pattern engrained in the first instance.31

We are far from the "Platonic" concepts championed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (whose "objects" were atemporal and "indestructible"),32 or from

James's contemporary Frege, who held that a definition "unambiguously deter

mine^], as regards any object, whether or not it falls under the concept... ."33

For concepts so understood one will have determined all their instances in the moment of defining them, or grasped their nature from a particular case,

whereas for the sort of concept James discusses the varieties of instances (and

the various definitions that may seem useful at different moments) require a succession of "views."

Did any of this discussion in James's Varieties have an impact on Wittgen stein's later views of language? The answer to this question is not known. But

it is known that in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations concepts and

meanings become, like "religion" and "government" for James, essentially

temporal, emerging from practice or use: from human activities, forms of life and language games. According to Wittgenstein, one's understanding is re

vealed not in a flash of insight or an image but in "knowing how to go on," and in going on in various ways. Although one may suddenly understand some

thing, i.e., come to understand it in a particular moment, one's understanding,

Wittgenstein insists, is still grammatically or criterially related to knowing how to go on. And he holds that nothing in the consciousness or physiology of one's state of sudden understanding reveals the understanding itself.34

Wittgenstein is quite clear about the temporality of language, writing that "we are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not

about some non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm."35 James never developed

anything greatly resembling the theory of, or approach to, meaning that

Wittgenstein did in the Investigations, and Wittgenstein attacked James for

psychologizing meaning. Nevertheless, despite the important differences be tween them to which many commentators have been sensitive, James prepared the way for Wittgenstein's theory of meaning by temporalizing definitions, essences, and concepts.

James's paragraphs (8) and (9) concern knowledge, including both the more

particular "acquaintance" (9) and the more extensive "knowing governments most completely" (9). (8) provides a reason for James's denigration of d?fini




tions by undercutting one reason definitions might be thought important: namely, that they help us know things. The knowledge in question, James is

saying, lies in our acquaintance with the "particularities" of religion or govern

ment, and an overly abstract or general definition becomes "a thing more

misleading than enlightening." It is, to borrow one of Wittgenstein's examples that seems naturally to apply here, as if one tried to define "tool" by saying that "all tools serve to modify something." If to the objection that rulers or nails are also tools one argued that the definition is nevertheless correct because the ruler modifies our knowledge of the length of something and the nails its solidity, one

would only have exposed the definition's inadequacy and one's own obsessive

pursuit of an ideal. One could rightly ask, along with Wittgenstein, the prag matic question: "Is anything gained by this assimilation of expressions?"36

In Pragmatism, James describes two temperaments in philosophy, one

rationalist, one (his own) pragmatist. "The rationalist mind," he writes,

is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the phrase 'must be' is ever on its

lips. The belly-band of its universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature. If he had to live in a tub like

Diogenes he wouldn't mind at all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun?7

The Wittgenstein who emerged on the philosophical scene in the teens and twenties is, like any flesh and blood philosopher, too complex to discuss exclu

sively in the categories James sets out (James acknowledges this). Yet we can use James's categories in the practical way he meant them to be employed, and

can isolate certain features of Wittgenstein's thought. We can easily say that

if we had to apply one of the labels?pragmatist or rationalist?to Wittgen stein's early work and one to the later that the earlier work is rationalist and

the later pragmatic. Indeed, Wittgenstein's own thinking supports such an

interpretation, for he writes in On Certainty: "So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism."38 (And one would certainly want to know why

Wittgenstein suggests what he says only "sounds like pragmatism." Perhaps

it is because he takes skepticism more seriously than the pragmatists.)

In concluding this first section let us note the irony of the more rationalist

Wittgenstein reading and loving James's pragmatic book Varieties of Religious Experience at just the time that he was developing the doctrines that he would later fault for their rationalist ("crystalline") and dogmatic ("one-sided") char acter. So even before Wittgenstein was developing his Tractarian philosophy he was assimilating ideas and methods of James that were to serve as its

antidote, ideas and methods that lay dormant until Wittgenstein had produced the philosophical work to which they could be fruitfully applied.

II

The Principles of Psychology is an intellectual masterpiece of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and human nature that James published in 1890 after more than a decade of work. Wittgenstein discussed the Principles many times




in his notebooks and classes during the thirties and forties. His students remember classes focusing on one or two sentences from the book, for example,

"I am the same...as yesterday."

The Principles of Psychology has been correctly taken by many critics as a source of errors which Wittgenstein labored to correct.40 The famous "Stream of Thought" chapter, for example, contains James's notorious postulation of

feelings of "if," "by" and "and," as explanations of the meanings of those words.

And in a passage easy to ridicule from James's chapter on "The Consciousness

of Self* he writes that "the 'Self of selves,' when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or

between the head and throat."41 But side by side with such objectionable statements about language and mind James takes an anti-mentalistic and

anti-imagistic stance reminiscent of the later Wittgenstein. Consider the fol

lowing passage, also from "The Stream of Thought:"

An exceptionally intelligent friend informs me that he can frame no image what ever of the appearance of his breakfast-table. When asked how he then remembers

it at all, he says he simply 'knows* that it seated four people, and was covered with a white cloth on which were a butter-dish, a coffee-pot, radishes, and so forth. The mind-stuff of which this 'knowing* is made seems to be verbal images exclusively.42

James resists the urge to say that there must have been an unconscious

"spiritual" knowing, as the idealists might have, or a set of unseen images, as

an empiricist might have; rather, he both restricts himself to the observed "facts" of consciousness and presses this restriction on the reader's attention.

James claims that such apparent facts as the ability to answer that the breakfast table seated four people, are all that thinking amounts to in these cases. The "mind-stuff here "seems to be verbal images exclusively," James

writes; i.e., mind is at times nothing but words in use.

Thinking does not require some inaccessible "mental domain," James main

tains. Although some thoughts are known to no one but the person thinking them, thinking may as easily occur more or less publicly, in language. Language as James depicts it works not by "standing for ideas" which are then "trans ferred" from one person to another, but as something intertwined with the activities of daily life. So "if the words 'coffee,' 'bacon,' 'muffins,' and 'eggs' lead a man to speak to his cook, to pay his bills, and to take measures for the morrow's meal exactly as visual and gustatory memories would, why are they

not, for all practical intents and purposes, as good a kind of material in which to think?"43 Or as Wittgenstein was to put it: "When I think in language, there aren't 'meanings'going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought."44 James may have seemed to

Wittgenstein to have made many mistakes, but it is clear that he also antici

pates two of Wittgenstein's central ideas: that thinking may be manifested

publicly, viz. in language; and that rather than "standing" for "objects," lan

guage is at work in the stream of thought and life, a matter as James says of

"practical intents and purposes"?getting the eggs cooked or paying bills.




The limitations of viewing James merely as a target of Wittgenstein's criti

cisms are illustrated by the discussion of James in Hilmy's book, The Later

Wittgenstein.45Hi\my aligns James with C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (whose The Meaning of Meaning Wittgenstein effectively criticized), and with Ber trand Russell (whom he more than once says James "inspired"),46 in two

projects which Wittgenstein clearly opposed: the attempt to construct a scien tific philosophy, and the attempt to explain the meaning of a word by some

psychological fact, or state. "There is no finer collection of psychologistic gems of 'scientific' explanation of language," Hilmy writes, than the chapter on

association in James's Principles of Psychology ,47 Yet there are places in the

Principles, which Hilmy does not discuss, where James himself attacks not

just particular explanations of language or mentality, but the very idea of such

explanations. In fact, some of the passages Hilmy uses to demonstrate that

James's and Wittgenstein's positions are "wholly antithetical" in fact reveal an

intricate pattern both of divergence and of overlapping thought.

Take the following paragraph, cited by Hilmy, from Wittgenstein's notebooks of the early nineteen thirties:

How needed is the work of philosophy is shown by James's psychology. Psychology, he says, is a science, but he discusses almost no scientific questions. His movements are merely (so many) attempts to extricate himself from the cobwebs of metaphysics in which he is caught. He cannot yet walk, or fly at all he only wriggles. Not that

that isn't interesting. Only it is not a scientific activity.48

Although this passage portrays James as in need of "the work of philosophy"? of what Wittgenstein would later call philosophical therapy?it not only shows

considerable appreciation and respect for James, but focuses on a non-scientific

"activity" that he undertakes. Wittgenstein finds James's "wrigglings" in the course of this activity "interesting," an evaluation that sets James off from

Russell, Ogden, and Richards, for whom Wittgenstein frequently expresses

contempt.49

Returning to Wittgenstein's statement, consider the resemblance of Wittgen stein's depiction of James as an interesting wriggler to Wittgenstein's depiction of his own aim (the task of philosophy) in the Investigations: to show "the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."50 Wittgenstein saw James as struggling to "free himself from the cobwebs of metaphysics," not blindly but happily staying there, as perhaps Russell and Ogden did. This struggle, of course, is something in which Wittgenstein himself enlists. James interests Wittgenstein, then, not

only for the errors he commits, but for his only partially comprehended at

tempts to overcome them.

A final point to note about Wittgenstein's statement is his accurate percep tion of the distance between James's official doctrine that he is a scientist?a

psychologist?and his actual practice. (Hilmy, by way of contrast, simply takes James to be a representative of the scientific world-view to which Wittgenstein stood clearly opposed,51 writing as if that world view were shared indifferently by Russell, Carnap, and James). James is not, Wittgenstein insists, practicing




science at all, and this is, from Wittgenstein's point of view, a good thing. ("It was true to say," Wittgenstein wrote in the Investigations, "that our consid erations could not be scientific ones."52) Indeed, James is deeply ambivalent to science in the Principles. On the one hand, he is officially doing science

("psychology," not metaphysics or philosophy), yet on the other he treats

philosophical positions, some of which anticipate his own later philosophies of radical empiricism and pragmatism. Even within James's many philosophi cal discussions, there is an oscillation among a more "scientific" or materialistic

metaphysics (on which Hilmy reports), traditional dualism, and James's own

newly emerging "phenomenological," or as he would later call it, "pure experi

ence" or "radical empiricism" theory.

Ill

As we have seen in part I of this essay, James portrays himself in Varieties of Religious Experience as a fighter against philosophical idealization. It can be shown how deeply engrained in his thought this approach is by continuing to look at The Principles of Psychology, published some twelve years earlier than Varieties and a work that Wittgenstein clearly read as part of his philosophical investigations. In the paragraph we examined from Varieties James's targets

were mistaken ideals o? definition-, in the earlier Principles, his targets are

ideals o? psychological explanation. These twin concerns are of course central

to Wittgenstein's Investigations. In approaching James as a source for

Wittgenstein, we should keep in mind Wittgenstein's emphasis on description rather than explanation; his attack on what is hidden, particularly if posited as an explanation or ground of what is apparent; his observation that philoso phers'theorizing takes the form of demands that require treatment rather than

refutation; and his dissolution of traditional "ghostly" notions of the mind into the everyday phenomena of language and experience that constitute such forms of human life as remembering, feeling, hoping, and thinking. "When we do philosophy," Wittgenstein writes, "we should like to hypostatize feelings where there are none. They serve to explain our thoughts to us."

What Wittgenstein calls the "demand" for the hypostatization of feelings is countered by his reminders of the character of our ordinary experience:

Asked "Did you recognize your desk when you entered your room this morning?"?I should no doubt say "Certainly!" And yet it would be misleading to say that an act of recognition had taken place. Of course the desk was not strange to me; I was not

surprised to see it, as I should have been if another one had been standing there, or some unfamiliar kind of object.54

Philosophy, Wittgenstein writes, "only states what everyone admits,"55 and the

practice of philosophy therefore depends on much of importance lying "open to view." It requires understanding that sometimes "there is nothing to explain.

For what is hidden...is of no interest to us."56 This movement against what lies

hidden and towards that which lies in plain view, we shall now see, is equally characteristic of James.




Consider an early chapter from The Principles of Psychology entitled "The

Mind-Stuff Theory, where James launches a series of attacks on the theory of

"mind-dust" or "mind-stufF favored by idealists from Kant through Greene. He

describes the idea of unconscious mental processes as "pure mythology," but

diagnoses a compulsion to assert their existence anyway?a tendency on the

part of philosophers to say that certain mental processes "must" be there. The

idealist, James writes, considers "the difference between a sensation which we

simply have and one which we attend to" and argues that although "[ajttention

gives results that seem like fresh creations...yet the feelings and elements of

feeling which it reveals must have been already there?in an unconscious

state."57 James calls such reasoning a "tissue of confusion,"58 and tries to

correct it by attending to the uniqueness of each pulse of experience. He coins

the phrase "psychologist's fallacy" to describe the general tendency to project one's theory about the data back onto the data themselves: to confuse one's

"own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his

report."59 The "psychologist's fallacy" is in fact a form of what Wittgenstein would come to see as an illness o? philosophers: the postulation of the hidden

in an attempt to explain what can only receive, or only requires, a better

description. No less than Kant and Wittgenstein, James works to counter

philosophers' temptations to metaphysical construction.

That the positing of hidden mental processes takes the form of a demand or

a need is the thrust of James's discussion in another chapter of the Principles, entitled "The Consciousness of Self." There he discusses the common-sense

"insistence]" on the unity of the self, on our "personal identity."60 "It is," he

writes "with the word Soul as with the word Substance in general. To say that

phenomena inhere in a substance is at bottom only to record one's protest

against the notion that the bare existence of the phenomena is the total

truth."61 We are led astray by such protests or demands, James asserts, into

bad philosophical theory: "The 'Soul' of Metaphysics and the "Transcendental

Ego' of the Kantian Philosophy," he writes, "are...but attempts to satisfy this

urgent demand. . . ,"62 We must resist this demand, James counsels, turning

back towards "the bare existence of the phenomena."

The demands James counters are demands for explanation. Part of James's

complaint is that the explanations don't work: "Kant's way of describing the

facts is mythological. . . .But even were all the mythology true, the process of

synthesis would in no whit be explained by calling the inside of the mind its

seat."63 And, again: "It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in our

knowledge is in no whit explained by making it the deed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who is out of time. The agency of phenomenal

thought coming and going in time is just as easy to understand. "64 It is not just that they don't explain, for in this last sentence, and in his earlier charac

terization of "the bare existence of the phenomena [as] the total truth," James

is saying that some phenomena, or "phenomena in general" need no explana




tion; if so, then desires for such explanations are themselves misleading. "Phenomenal thought coming and going in time," James asserts, is just as easy to uunderstandn as any hidden cause.

James implicitly questions the nature of understanding. The sort of under

standing he isolates here takes the form both of widespread acquaintance and

of a kind of acceptance of the phenomena. Sometimes, although certainly not

always, there are no advantages apart from a spurious orderliness to be gained

by positing explanatory processes with which we are not acquainted. James is not so much replacing one (defective) explanation with another as teaching a

lesson about controlling our use of explanation. Sometimes, as Wittgenstein was to say, "the real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping

doing philosophy when I want to."65 James is concerned to discover how and

why to stop doing the sort of metaphysics to which Kant and other philosophers are attracted.

Like Wittgenstein, James tolerated and appreciated the messiness of ordi

nary experience. He was a master at depicting its varieties?from getting out

of bed in the morning, to having a word on the tip of one's tongue, to the deep sense a person may have of the whole universe as friendly or foreign. Some

times, as in his discussion of the will, James uses his talent for description as

a reminder to help us counter the theorizing urge. We would insist, for example, that an act of will must take place before any human action occurs. But, James

writes, "I do not write for the pleasure of the writing, but simply because I have once begun, and being in a state of intellectual excitement which keeps venting itself in that way, find that I am writing still."66 And again: "I sit at table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish

and eating them."67 By reminding us of our ordinary life, these examples serve

to counter the urge to require an act of will for everything we do.

The Principles of Psychology is an album of contending philosophical de

mands, with the voice of James giving guidance over the fray. We can find places in the Principles where Wittgenstein strongly and deeply disagrees with

James, and also some places from which Wittgenstein may have derived some

important ideas of his later philosophy. But equally important is what one

might call the character of William James (what James would have called his

"temperament") and the philosophical method or practice in which it is ex

pressed. With its "many-sided diet" of material and its non-fanaticism, James's work on "psychology," written by a man Wittgenstein considered a good phi losopher because he was "a real human being," gave Wittgenstein a sustaining

and encouraging model of philosophy as he struggled to redo his way of

thinking in the nineteen thirties and forties.

The University of New Mexico

Received December 2, 1993




NOTES

1. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987)

(hereafter cited as MF), Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1989), and Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer

sity Press, 1992); Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: Univer

sity of Minnesota Press, 1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philo

sophical Papers, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Gerald

Myers, William James, His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1986), Graham Bird, William James (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1986), Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, Vol I (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1989), and Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). An

earlier, if not particularly reliable, account of James by an analytic philosopher is A. J.

Ayer's Origins of Pragmatism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1968). I am grateful to

Brian McGuinness and to audiences at the University of Venice, the University of St.

Andrews, University College, London, and the University of New Mexico for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Research for this paper was supported by a travel to

collections grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

2. MF, p. 17.

3. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1981). In this earlier work Putnam discusses Peirce but neither James nor Dewey. 4. MF, p. 12.

5. See Bernard Williams, "Wittgenstein and Idealism," in Godfrey Vesey, ed., Under

standing Wittgenstein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 76-95.

6. "William James, "Pragmatism," Reprinted in G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), pp. 97-146.

7. Ibid., p. 145.

8. Ibid., pp. 141-42.

9. Ibid., p. 138.

10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore, G. H. von Wright, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 10.

11. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA and London:

Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 349; hereafter cited as Varieties. Although Prag matism did not appear until 1907, James already listed "pragmatism" in his 1902 index

for Varieties.

12. M. O'C. Drury, "Conversations with Wittgenstein," in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, Rush Rhees, ed. (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981),

p. 68.

13. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, p. 428, cited in Garth Hallett,

Wittgenstein's Doctrine of Meaning as Use (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 186.

14. Christopher Coope, Peter Geach, Timothy Potts, and Roger White, A Wittgenstein Workbook (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967).

15. S. Stephen Hilmy, The Later Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 207.

16. Garth Hallett, op. cit., and A Companion to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Inves

tigations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), hereafter cited as Companion; G. P.

Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, Vol. I (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1980).

17. Companion, p. 40.

18. James, Varieties, p. 351.




19. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. 20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans.

(New York: Macmillan, 1958), Preface, 125, 133. Unless otherwise indicated, all refer

ences to the Investigations are to the numbered paragraphs; hereafter cited as PI.

21. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA and London:

Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 692; hereafter cited as PP.

22. James, Varieties, p. 350.

23. PP, p. 245.

24. PP, p. 246.

25. PI, 109.

26. PI, 99.

27. PP, p. 246.

28. PI, 67.

29. As the stream of thought shifts its point of view. Cf. James's discussion of "The

pack of cards is on the table" in PP, p. 272.

30. PI, 66.

31. I reserve a fuller investigation of the nature of concepts and understanding in

Wittgenstein for another paper. Such an investigation would take up the differences

between such concepts as games, and numbers or colors, and the role of temporality in

Wittgenstein's analysis of the "duck-rabbit" and other ambiguous figures, and in what

Wittgenstein calls "experiencing the meaning of a word." Cf. PI, pp. 193 f?.

32. PI, 56.

33. Hallett, Companion, p. 153.

34. Cf. Malcolm Budd, "Wittgenstein on Meaning, Interpretation, and Rules," Syn

these, vol. 58 (1984), pp. 303-23, and Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

35. PI, 108.

36. PI, 14.

37. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),

p. 124.

38. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), paragraph 422.

39. Personal communication from G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach.

40. See Coope and Geach, Hallett, Companion, and Hilmy. 41. PP, p. 288.

42. PP, p. 256.

43. Ibid.

44. PI, 329.

45. See note 15.

46. E.g., pp. 124, 196.

47. Hilmy, p. 198.

48. Hilmy, pp. 196-97.

49. Although Wittgenstein thought that Russell and Ogden no less than James made

important mistakes, he did not find them alive enough philosophically to interest him

in the thirties and forties. He did not, as he did with James, read and reread their texts

in the course of working out his own ideas or dwell on single sentences from their texts

in the lectures he gave. Wittgenstein's lack of interest in Russell and Ogden is indicated

by his indictment of Russell as a philosopher who suffered from "loss of problems" (a remark unlike any he ever made of James), and his writing to Ogden after reading his

book on meaning that "I believe that you have not quite caught the problems I was at

in my book. . . .," Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1967), paragraph 456; Hilmy, p. 112.)




50. PI, 309.

51. See the Preface to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, Rush Rhees,

ed., R. Hargreaves and R. White, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).

52. PI, 109.

53. PI, 598.

54. PI, 601-2.

55. PI, 599.

56. PI, 126.

57. PP, p. 172.

58. PP, p. 173.

59. PP, p. 195.

60. PP, p. 320.

61. PP, p. 328.

62. PP, p. 321. The similarity of these demands of common sense to the claims of the

ideas of reason discussed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason is striking. Also worth

examination is the issue?particularly for Wittgenstein?of the relevance of such de

mands arising from common sense to the question of philosophy's naturalness.

63. PP, p. 344. See Budd, op. cit.

64. PP, p. 348.

65. PI, 133.

66. PP, p. 1158.

67. PP, p. 1131.



What Wittgenstein Learned from William James

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