Introduction.

To be a speculative empiricist is to accept certain metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and experience. These are as follows:

1. A cosmological shift away from ontological foundations, such as materialism and idealism, towards a dynamic universe of experience, concern, and feeling. Including an emphasis on events, occurrences, and becoming over substance, stability, and being.
2. Every aspect of experience must be accounted for, not merely high-grade forms of perceptual subjectivity. This is to say that experience runs all the way down, and that intentional consciousness presupposes, and is parasitic upon, more elemental configurations of subject-object relations. Thus, without levelling the hierarchy of distinctions between the bewildering complexity of experiences that constitute reality, a certain commonality with nature can be affirmed where subjectivity differs by degree, not in kind.
3. The objective of thinking should be orientated not be motivated by describing matters of fact but in discovering the conditions through which something new is invented and enters the world, of deepening the possibilities immanent in an existing situation. As such, disciplines such as art, philosophy, and science are simply different means of expressing, explaining, and organising reality in the flux of becoming. Art is the qualitative expression of the world through sensation and sentiment, philosophy explains the reality through the application and exercise of reason and logic, and science theoretically organises actuality through experimentation and observation.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the work of William James with the intention of explicating speculative empiricism as an attitude towards lived experience and a approach to philosophy.

The Human Being as a Self-Seeking Subject.

A human being is characterized by what William James termed in The Principles of Psychology as self-seeking. This is to say, that beyond the basic “alimentation and (defense)” of self-preservation, the human subject is concerned and motivated with “providing for the future as distinguished from maintaining the present” (PP1, p307).

Thus, in hierarchical order of importance, the human subject endeavours to augment, extend, and aggrandize its being in the following manner (See PP1, p313):

1) Personally, by developing capabilities and potential through self-improvement to enhance the quality of life while realizing dreams and aspirations.

2) Materially and Socially, through the production, acquisition, and consumption of goods, products, and assets, as well as the development of interpersonal relationships that facilitate the participation in shared identities, norms, meanings, and values.

3) Bodily, in the provision and satisfaction of basic biological needs and wants.

However, this is not a rational process as the human individual is a multiplicity of competing and often contradictory intentions, needs, wants, and desires. As James notes in a passage worth quoting at length:

Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. (PP1, p309–310, his emphasis)

As a being motivated by a desire for external projection, expression, and identification within the world, the self-esteem of a human individual is radically contingent upon the correspondence of their actual achievements and accomplishments with their intended aspirations and pretensions. Thus, “our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do” (PP1, p310). Affections such as “pride, conceit, vanity, self-esteem, arrogance, vainglory, on the one hand; and on the other modesty, humility, confusion, diffidence, shame, mortification, contrition, the sense of obloquy and personal despair” are produced the success or failure of an individual to extend their self into the world (PP1, p306). Or, in James’ words: “the normal provocative of self-feeling is one’s actual success or failure, and the good or bad actual position one holds in the world” (Ibid).

In finding their desires and attempts frustrated, and individual must be careful not to develop a narrow and unsympathetic character through which project their inferiority and failure onto an external scapegoat. As James notes:

All narrow people intrench their Me, they retract it, — from the region of what they cannot securely possess. People who don’t resemble them, or who treat them with indifference, people over whom they gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however meritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chill negation, if not with positive hate. (PP1, p312)

Instead of a narrow and unsympathetic disposition, it is better and wiser to proceed through life with a sympathetic attitude of expansion and inclusion. Thus, the individual resolve themselves by saying: “Let them despise this little person of mine, and treat me like a dog, I shall not negate them so long as I have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as I am” (Ibid).

Creatures of Habit: Human Plasticity in Behaviour and Thought.

In his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, William James asserts that “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits, — practical, emotional, and intellectual, — systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be” (TTPSSL, Ch.VIII). Habit, for him, is located at the juncture between nature and nurture, instinct and learning.

Elsewhere, in Psychology: The Briefer Course, James explains that: “An acquired habit, from the physiological point of view, is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents ever after tend to escape” (P-TBC, p1, his italics). Habitual developments are intrinsic to the mutability of organic life, of which human beings are the peak of adaptability and expression. Or, as James affirms in a proposition: “the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic material of which their bodies are composed” (P-TBC, p2, his emphasis). Such plasticity, “means the possession of structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once” (Ibid). However, “Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made arrangements in his nerve-centres…If practice did not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of nervous muscular energy, he would be in a sorry plight” (P-TBC, p5)

The tectonics of habit are formed by modifications in nervous pathways through which “currents, once in, must find a way out” (P-TBC, p4). This is because “in getting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take” (Ibid). New currents can either cut new nervous pathways to the brain’s nerve centres or follow old ones. Over time and through age, a tendency towards the latter becomes predominant. Thus, “Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions which we have once become familiar, and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on…Genius, in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way” (P-TBC , p195).

For James, habit does not merely affect behaviour but thought too. At the elementary perceptual level of consciousness, habit permits the preperceptual observation and identification of objects more efficiently. As James explains:

Men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern…In short, the only things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive, and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world. (PP1, p443–444)

Habit accounts for much of human subconscious activity, liberating the mind to focus on other interests and pursuits. As James states: “actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things” (PP1, p5). Thus, the “more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work” (PP1, p122).

In the process of conceptualisation, habit is also active in the association of ideas. As impressions are constantly being synthesised into new constellations of ideas, habit can assist by banishing “something of the mystery by formulating the process in simpler terms” (PP1, p550). Given that “objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when any one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence or coexistence as before” (PP1, p561, his emphasis), habit introduces considerations from experience. While mental association by contiguity is helpful in the quotidian circumstances of everyday life, as James notes in Talks to Teachers, it is also the product of “dry and prosaic minds” with mental sequences flowing along the “line of habitual routine repetition and suggestion” (TT, Ch.9).

With “witty, imaginative minds” however, which emphasise mental association by similarity, “routine is broken through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human thinking it bad never once before been coupled” (Ibid). Such thinking has produced geniuses including Newton and Darwin with whom the “flash of similarity between an apple and the moon, between the rivalry for food in nature and the rivalry for man’s selection, was too recondite to have occurred to any but exceptional minds. Genius, then…is identical with the possession of similar association to an extreme degree” (PP2, p360, his emphasis).

Writing in The Principles of Psychology, James attests that “Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent” (PP1, P121). As an antidote premature Old-Fogyism, James provides four maxims for life:

1) The first, citing Professor Bain’s The Moral Habits, is that “in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible” (PP1, p123, his emphasis). The beginning crucial, as the human must choose the most favourable circumstances to embark upon experimenting with a new technique of being.

2) The second is “Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like letting fall a ball of string which one is carefully winding up” (Ibid, his emphasis). Thus, it is advisable to make a transition as abrupt and uncompromising as possible.

3) The third is “Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of habits you aspire to gain” (PP1, p124, his italics). It is important for the subject not to lose itself in good intentions but to embrace every presentable opportunity for resolute action in line with a new technique of being. Indulging in sentimentality and idealism can be fatal to the transition.

4) The fourth is “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day” (PP1, p126, his emphasis). Effort is the basis of human freedom. The surest insurance against the servitude of habit is asceticism in the trivial actions and gestures that constitute everyday life.

According to James, in the transformative process of overcoming detrimental habits, the crucial element is to “to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy…For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague” (PP1, p122).

Living Forward: The Existential Imperative of Radical Empiricism.

Critiquing intellectualism in the sixth lecture of A Pluralistic Universe, William James made the following reference to Soren Kierkegaard regarding the notion that existence and life should be understood as a process of becoming:

(L)ogic, giving primarily the relations between concepts as such, and the relations between natural facts only secondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified with concepts and defined by them, must of course stand or fall with the conceptual method. But the conceptual method is a transformation which the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory. We live forward, we understand backward, said a (D)anish writer; and to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other. This treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective and post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and project them into the future. (PU, p55)

The aphorism in question, is of course the now (in)famous statement that: “It is perfectly true, as philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards” (KPJ, p161).

As James admits in his Essays in Radical Empiricism, such “Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of a rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type’ (ERE, p80). Therefore, by focusing upon the “immediate flux of life…Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding the world forwards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life” (ERE, p33/80).

In explicating his Radical Empiricism, which is a postulate, a statement of fact and a conclusion, William James stated that: “The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience” (MT, p3). It is through this postulate that James examined what he considered the undifferentiated experiential integrity beneath linguistic and conceptual expression.

Regarding the logic of identity, in the fifth lecture of A Pluralistic Universe, James declares that:

I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly and squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, life, expedience, concreteness, immediacy, use what words you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. (PU, LV).

James’s quibble here is not with concepts and logic as such, but their application and efficacy. For him concepts and logic are but a “map which the mind frames out” (SPP, p73), with their utility dependent upon their ability to describe and order our immediate environment. In his Principles of Psychology, he writes that “the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conceptions are purely teleological weapons of the mind” (PP2, p335, his italics). Concepts are merely reflexive constructs of a given aspect of reality captured by our intentionality within space and time, though they are indispensable for the codifying and transmission of experience and information.

For James, concepts cannot encapsulate what they seek to describe in any absolute sense. There is always another means of scrutiny and categorisation, another way in which a thing can come to presence. As he himself states: “All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all, are equally true ways. There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes an very inessential feature upon another” (PP2, p333, his italics). Thus concepts “characterise us more than they characterise the thing” (PP2, p334, his italics).

Philosophy for James goes awry when we confuse our conceptual cartography for the actual topography of reality. As Alan Watts wrote in his Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety; “We suffer from the delusion that the entire Universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold onto them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.” (WI, p100–101).

In The Thing and Its Relations, while criticising the ultra-rationalism of F.H Bradley, James contends that:

When a common man analyzes certain whats from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness as thus isolated. But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other as originally experienced in the concrete, or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which they recur as ‘the same.’ Returning into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, and thats and abstract whats, grow confluent again, and the word ‘is’ names all these experiences of conjunction.’ (ERE, p39).

Concepts are not only deficient in apprehending the vividness of the world as it is experienced phenomenally. But also, the individuality of each conscious state and the object of cognition. As James writes in Some Problems of Philosophy:

(N)ovelty finds no representation in the conceptual method, for concepts are abstracted from experience already seen or given, and he who uses them to divine the new can never do so but in ready-made and ancient terms. Whatever actual novelty the future may contain (and the singularity and individuality of each moment makes it novel) escapes conceptual treatment altogether. Properly speaking, concepts are post-mortem preparations; and when we use them to define the universe prospectively we ought to realize that they can give only a bare abstract outline or approximate sketch, in the filling out of which perception must be invoked’ (SPP p98).

Conceptual analysis is deficient on two counts.

1) It can never portray the vividness of life and the world as becoming.

2) As generalisations, concepts fail to account for the particularity and difference of individual things and affairs.

To (mis)apply Wittgenstein’s expression in Philosophical Investigations, by valorising conceptual notions above concrete lived experience, humanity falls prey to “the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language” (PI, S109, p52).

Willing to Take on Anything: Creativity, Novelty, and Pespectivism.

In What Pragmatism Means, William James defined his sort of thinker as someone who “is willing to take on anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences” (P, p39). As he adds later in Pragmatism and Humanism, rather than comprehending the world as “perfect, finished,” it is to adopt an attitude that “all is process; that world is timeless” (P, p116). While in a world where “possibilities obtain…crimes and horrors are regrettable,” in a “totalised world regret obtains not, for ‘the existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the perfection of the eternal order.’” (P, p116–117, his emphasis).

Writing in Pragmatism and Religion, James asserted that his type of philosopher must “incline toward meliorism” (P, p125). This is not to say that the universe is inexorable directed towards perfectibility, but that salvation should “become an accomplished reality” (Ibid) through trial and error, discussion and disagreement. In short, through the process of living. Ethical disputes cannot be settled by simple appeals to some overarching moral truth, but instead the world must lend itself to many competing interpretations. As James explains in The Philosopher and the Moral Life, featured in The Will to Believe:

(T)there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. (WB, p65)

Elsewhere in Pragmatism and Religion, James draws a religious distinction between those “who insist that the world must and shall be saved, and those who are contented with believing that the world may be, saved” (P, p123). James tends to identify religion with the sick-minded and moralism with the healthy-minded, but “(o)f course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next” (P, p129). Yet, as James recognises in Talks to Teachers, caution should be exercised so as not to fall into absolutism and dogmatism:

No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep. (TTPSSL, p174)

William James had no love for a-priori categories. As he writes in Pragmatism and Humanism:

Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results. (P, p106)

As far as he is concerned: “What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it” (P, p108). Sensations and relations in themselves reveal nothing, it is the knowing subject who speaks for them. While interests and values guide the progress of knowledge, as reality cannot be known in advance of experience, truth claims can only be justified only as the fulfilment of experimentally determined conditions. Though experience comes as given, creative control can be exercised over the perceptive process:

Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field’s extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves. (Ibid)

Reality is received by the perceptual faculties as a flux of sensation which are “neither true nor false; they simply are” (P, p107). The conceptual faculties then take account of the relations that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds” (Ibid, his emphasis). Finally, the volitional faculties measure “the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account” (Ibid, his emphasis). Thus, every experience “has immediately to become humanized in the sense of being squared, assimilated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass already there” (P, p109). While “(e)very hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of sensation and relation,” these perceptions are always measured and evaluated by past truths (P, p108). Through a constant shuffling of perceptions, there is not an aspect of reality that is not “flagrantly man-made” (P, p108).

Even while reality comes “peptonized and cooked for our consumption” (P, p109), as James explains in Talks to Teachers, there is always the potential for novelty in experience:

Now life abounds in these (new experiences), and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experiences that they change a man’s whole scale of values and system of ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and, if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up in him a new or regenerate ‘nature.’ (TTPSSL, p62)

Conclusion.

To summarise, the considerations of the above discussion will be distilled into a set of five principles which inform the speculative empiricist attitude towards lived experience and approach to philosophy.

1. The truth of being is becoming. The world as it is disclosed to human experience is one of becoming and constant flux. All entities and systems exist with a framework of change and evolution. Natural laws and processes are the products of probability rather than necessity. This is not to say that the cosmos is capricious and arbitrary as regularities can be observed, measured, and utilised to the benefit of humanity through the methods of science. At the level of lived experience, this acknowledgement of contingency encourages a belief in freedom and positive action through which real differences and progress can be made in the world. It also recognises a humility before the universe with an acceptance that knowledge is always subject to improvement and revision.
2. Practical activity determines mental activity. As adaptive, dynamic, and responsive organisms, human beings are subjects of action before they are agents of thought. Knowledge is the product of human beings engaged in the act of living and realising purpose. To live well and do good does not require the possession and comprehension of truth, but simply the enactment of practical beliefs and principles to facilitate and guide activity. In this sense, the truth of life is in the beauty of living.
3. Lived existence is irrevocably embodied. There is a primal and irreducible affectivity between the embodied subject and its environment. This perceptual reality is an indeterminate actuality which evades the artificial and sanitised impositions of the conceptual and volitional faculties. Simply put, the structure and content of consciousness is predicated upon the nature of its embeddedness within a given environment. At the same time, however, the structure and content of consciousness informs the way the environment is presented and disclosed to consciousness. Thus, there can be no high-altitude perspective on reality, only a presentation and interpretation from a temporally and spatially congingent and unique frame of reference. Even the most rational and ostensibly neutral equiries are predicated upon a foundation of inherited meanings and established practises. Furthermore, this is supplemented by the personal interests, prejudices, and sentiments of the dynamic subject in its interactive engagement with the lived environment of which it is both producer and product.
4. Human beings are social animals. Social interaction is an indispensable medium for the sharing of knowledge and creation of norms, meanings, and values. It is through culture, language, and technology that human beings express, identify, and project themselves within the world. Social interaction provides the contrast needed for individuals to fully understand themselves as living characters capable of personal development and growth. Democracy is not merely a political system but an aesthetic and ethical way of being.
5. All existence is experimentation. Given that the truth of being is becoming, all beings and entities, even the universe itself, can be seen as acts of experimentation. This actuality is evident in biological evolution, cultural and social change, political reform, and technological evolution. The various beings, entities, systems, and processes constituting the really existing cosmos are merely different ways of organising and expressing experience. The malleable and experiemental nature of the universe means that the world is open to betterment and that human activity and intent can have a positive and lasting effect in making a difference and improvement to the experience of reality.

Sources.

~(TTPSSL) Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Henry Holt and

Company, 1925) by William James.

~(P-TBC) Psychology: The Briefer Course (Dover, 2017) by William James.

~(PP1) The Principles of Psychology: Volume One (Dover, 2000) by William James.

~(PP2) The Principles of Psychology: Volume Two (Dover, 2000) by William James.

~(PU) A Pluralistic Universe (CreateSpace, 2015) by William James.

~(KPJ) Papers and Journals: A Selection (Penguin, 1996) by Soren Kierkegaard.

~(ERE) Essays in Radical Empiricism (CreateSpace, 2017) by William James.

~(MT) The Meaning of Truth (CreateSpace, 2017) by William James.

~(SPP) Some Problems in Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction in Philosophy (UNP, 1996).

~(WI) Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (Rider, 1987) by Alan Watts.

~(PI) Philosophical Investigations (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) by Ludwig Wittgenstein.