THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM,
WILLIAM JAMES
(1842-1910) |
"The Essence of Humanism," which
first appeared in The Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology and Scientific Methods, March
2, 1905, was reprinted in The Meaning of
Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism, by William
James (Longmans, Green, and Company, 1909).
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William James was born in New York City on
January 11, 1842, to an affluent, cosmopolitan,
and deeply religious family. His father Henry
dabbled in theology, doted on his five children,
was well connected to literary and philosophical
luminaries of the day, and often took the
family for extended stays in Europe. His
journeys to the continent were primarily
theological and philosophical odysseys intended
to resolve his conflicting spiritual bouts.
His right leg had been amputated after burns
suffered in a boyhood accident failed to
heal. His spirit never quite recovered. A
devoted father, he sought to provide his
children with the sort of education that
might enable them some day to outdistance
their countrymen both in erudition and in
breadth of knowledge. To this end, he enrolled
them in fine schools, obtained for them gifted
tutors, and saw to it that they frequented
museums and attended lectures and the theater
with regularity. William and two of his siblings
would give fruit to their father's liberal
educational efforts. Brother Henry became
one of America's most famed novelists, and
sister Alice acquired a literary reputation
of her own after her diaries were posthumously
published.
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THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM, .
By William James
Humanism is a ferment that has "come
to stay." It is not a single hypothesis
of theorem, and it dwells on no new facts.
It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic
perspective, making things appear as from
a new center of interest or point of sight.
Some writers are strongly conscious of the
shifting, others half unconscious, even though
their own vision may have undergone much
change. The result is no small confusion
in debate, the half-conscious humanists often
taking part against the radical ones, as
if they wished to count upon the other side.
If humanism really be the name for such a
shifting of perspective, it is obvious that
the whole scene of the philosophic stage
will change in some degree if humanism prevails.
The emphasis of things, their foreground
and background distribution, their sizes
and values, will not keep just the same.
If such pervasive consequences be involved
in humanism, it is clear that no pains which
philosophers may take, first in defining
it, and then in furthering, checking, or
steering its progress, will be thrown away.
It suffers badly at present from incomplete
definition. Its most systematic advocates,
Schiller and Dewey, have published fragmentary
programs only; and its bearing on many vital
philosophic problems has not been traced
except by adversaries who, scenting heresies
in advance, have showered blows on doctrines--subjectivism
and skepticism, for example--that no good
humanist finds it necessary to entertain.
By their still greater reticences, the anti-humanists
have, in turn, perplexed the humanists. Much
of the controversy has involved the word
"truth." It is always good in debate
to know your adversary's point of view authentically.
But the critics of humanism never define
exactly what the word "truth" signifies
when they use it themselves. The humanists
have to guess at their view; and the result
has doubtless been much at beating of the
air. Add to all this, great individual differences
in both camps, and it becomes clear that
nothing is so urgently needed, at the stage
which things have reached at present, as
a sharper definition by each side of its
central point of view.
Whoever will contribute any touch of sharpness
will help us to make sure of what's what
and who is who. Anyone can contribute such
a definition, and, without it, no one knows
exactly where he stands. If I offer my own
provisional definition of humanism now and
here, others may improve it, some adversary
may be led to define his own creed more sharply
by the contrast, and a certain quickening
of the crystallization of general opinion
may result.
I
The essential service of humanism, as I conceive
the situation, is to have seen that though
one part of our experience may lean upon
another part to make it what it is in any
one of several aspects in which it may be
considered, experience as a whole is self-containing
and leans on nothing.
Since this formula also expresses the main
contention of transcendental idealism, it
needs abundant explication to make it unambiguous.
It seems, at first sight, to confine itself
to denying theism and pantheism. But, in
fact, it need not deny either; everything
would depend on the exegesis; and if the
formula ever became canonical, it would certainly
develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters.
I myself read humanism theistically and pluralistically.
If there be a God, he is no absolute all-experiencer,
but simply the experiencer of widest actual
conscious span. Read thus, humanism is for
me a religion susceptible of reasoned defence,
though I am well aware how many minds there
are to whom it can appeal religiously only
when it has been monistically translated.
Ethically the pluralistic form of it takes
for me a stronger hold on reality than any
other philosophy I know of--it being essentially
a social philosophy, a philosophy of "co,"
in which conjunctions do the work. But my
primary reason for advocating it is its matchless
intellectual economy. It gets rid, not only
of the standing "problems" that
monism engenders ("problem of evil,"
"problem of freedom," and the like),
but of other metaphysical mysteries and paradoxes
as well.
It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic
controversy, by refusing to entertain the
hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at
all. It gets rid of any need for an absolute
of the Bradleyan type (avowedly sterile for
intellectual purposes) by insisting that
the conjunctive relations found within experience
are faultlessly real. It gets rid of the
need of an absolute of the Roycean type (similarly
sterile) by its pragmatic treatment of the
problem of knowledge. . . . As the views
of knowledge, reality and truth imputed to
humanism have been those so far most fiercely
attacked, it is in regard to these ideas
that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently
required. I proceed therefore to bring the
view which I impute to humanism in these
respects into focus as briefly as I can.
II
If the central humanistic thesis, printed
above in italics, be accepted, it will follow
that, if there be any such thing at all as
knowing, the knower and the object known
must both be portions of experience. One
part of experience must, therefore, either
(1) Know another part of experience--in other
words, parts must, as Professor Woodbridge
says, represent one another instead of representing
realities outside of "consciousness"--this
case is that of conceptual knowledge; or
else
(2) They must simply exist as so many ultimate
thats or facts of being, in the first instance;
an then, as a secondary complication, and
without doubling up its entitative singleness,
any one and the same that must figure alternately
as a thing known and as a knowledge of the
thing, by reason of two divergent kinds of
context into which, in the general course
of experience, it gets woven.
This second case is that of sense-perception.
There is a stage of thought that goes beyond
common sense, and of it I shall say more
presently; but the common-sense stage is
a perfectly definite halting-place of thought,
primarily for the purposes of action; and,
so long as we remain on the common-sense
stage of thought, object and subject fuse
in the fact of "presentation" or
sense-perception--the pen and hand which
I now see writing, for example, are the physical
realities which those words designate. In
this case there is no self-transcendency
implied in the knowing. Humanism, here, is
only a more comminuted Identitasphilosophie.
In case (1), on the contrary, the representative
experience does transcend itself in knowing
the other experience that is its object.
No one can talk of the knowledge of the one
by the other without seeing them as numerically
distinct entities, of which the one lies
beyond the other and away from it, along
some direction and with some interval, that
can be definitely named. But, if the talker
be a humanist, he must also see this distance-interval
concretely and pragmatically, and confess
it to consist of other intervening experiences--of
possible ones, at all events, if not of actual.
To call my present idea of my dog, for example,
cognitive of the real dog means that, as
the actual tissue of experience is constituted,
the idea is capable of leading into a chain
of other experiences on my part that go from
next to next and terminate at last in vivid
sense-perceptions of a jumping, barking,
hairy body. Those are the real dog, the dog's
full presence, for my common sense. If the
supposed talker is a profound philosopher,
although they may not be the real dog for
him, they mean the real dog, are practical
substitutes for the real dog, as the representation
was a practical substitute for them, that
real dog being a lot of atoms, say, or of
mind-stuff, that lie where the sense-perceptions
lie in his experience as well as in my own.
III
The philosopher here stands for the stage
of thought that goes beyond the stage of
common sense; and the difference is simply
that he "interpolates" and "extrapolates,"
where common sense does not. For common sense,
two men see the same identical real dog.
Philosophy, noting actual differences in
their perceptions, points out the duality
of these latter, and interpolates something
between them as a more real terminus--first,
organs, viscera, etc.; next, cells; then,
ultimate atoms; lastly, mind-stuff perhaps.
The original sense-termini of the two men,
instead of coalescing with each other and
with the real dog-object, as at first supposed,
are thus held by philosophers to be separated
by invisible realities with which at most,
they are conterminous.
Abolish, now, one of the percipients, and
the interpolation changes into "extrapolation."
The sense-terminus of the remaining percipient
is regarded by the philosopher as not quite
reaching reality. He has only carried the
procession of experiences, the philosopher
thinks, to a definite, because practical,
halting-place somewhere on the way towards
an absolute truth that lies beyond.
The humanist sees all the time, however,
that there is no absolute transcendency even
about the more absolute realities thus conjectured
or believed in. The viscera and cells are
only possible percepts following upon that
of the outer body. The atoms again, though
we may never attain to human means of perceiving
them, are still defined perceptually. The
mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind
of experience; and it is possible to frame
the hypothesis (such hypotheses can by no
logic be excluded from philosophy) of two
knowers of a piece of mind-stuff and the
mind-stuff itself becoming "confluent"
at the moment at which our imperfect knowing
might pass into knowing of a completed type.
Even so do you and I habitually represent
our two perceptions and the real dog as confluent,
though only provisionally, and for the common-sense
stage of thought. If my pen be inwardly made
of mind-stuff, there is no confluence now
between that mind-stuff and my visual perception
of the pen. But conceivably there might come
to be such confluence; for, in the case of
my hand, the visual sensations and the inward
feelings of the hand, its mind-stuff, so
to speak, are even now as confluent as any
two things can be.
There is, thus, no breach in humanistic epistemology.
Whether knowledge be taken as ideally perfected,
or only as true enough to pass muster for
practice, it is hung on one continuous scheme.
Reality, howsoever remote, is always defined
as a terminus within the general possibilities
of experience; and what knows it is defined
as an experience that "represents"
it, in the sense of being substitutable for
it in our thinking because it leads to the
same associates, or in the sense of "pointing
to it" through a chain of other experiences
that either intervene or may intervene.
Absolute reality here bears the same relation
to sensation as sensation bears to conception
or imagination. Both are provisional or final
termini, sensation being only the terminus
at which the practical man habitually stops,
while the philosopher projects a "beyond"
in the shape of more absolute reality. These
termini, for the practical and the philosophical
stages of thought respectively, are self-supporting.
They are not "true" of anything
else, they simply are, are real. They "lean
on nothing," as my italicized formula
said. Rather does the whole fabric of experience
lean on them, just as the whole fabric of
the solar system, including many relative
positions, leans, for its absolute position
in space, on any one of its constituent stars.
Here, again, one gets a new Identitatsphilosophie
in pluralistic form.
IV
If I have succeeded in making this at all
clear (though I fear that brevity and abstractness
between them may have made me fail), the
reader will see that the "truth"
of our mental operations must always ben
an intra-experiential affair. A conception
is reckoned true by common sense when it
can be made to lead to a sensation. The sensation,
which for common sense is not so much "true"
as "real," is held to be provisionally
true by the philosopher just in so far as
it covers (abuts at, or occupies the place
of) a still more absolutely real experience,
in the possibility of which to come remoter
experient the philosopher finds reason to
believe.
Meanwhile what actually does count for true
to any individual trower, whether he be philosopher
or common man, is always a result of his
apperceptions. If a novel experience, conceptual
or sensible, contradict too emphatically
our pre-existent system of beliefs, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred it is treated as false.
Only when the older and the newer experiences
are congruous enough to mutually apperceive
and modify each other, does what we treat
as an advance in truth result. . . . In no
case, however, need truth consist in a relation
between our experiences and something archetypal
or trans-experiential. Should we ever reach
absolutely terminal experiences, experiences
in which we all agreed, which were superseded
by no revised continuations, these would
not be true, they would be real, they would
simply be, and be indeed the angles, corners,
and linchpins of all reality, on which the
truth of everything else would be stayed.
Only such other things as led to these by
satisfactory conjunctions would be "true."
Satisfactory connection of some sort with
such termini is all that the word "truth"
means. On the common-sense stage of thought
sense-presentations serve as such termini.
Our ideas and concepts and scientific theories
pass for true only so far as they harmoniously
lead back to the world of sense.
I hope that many humanists will endorse this
attempt of mine to trace the more essential
features of that way of viewing things. I
feel almost certain that Messrs. Dewey and
Schiller will do so. If the attackers will
also take some slight account of it, it may
be that discussion will be a little less
wide of the mark than it has hitherto been.
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