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HSL Review, from Process Studies, 37.1, 199-202.

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
by Robert D. Richardson

Empiricism is merely a theory for most philosophers, but for William James, it was a way of life. His undogmatic openness to experience made him extraordinarily receptive to diverse people, places and perspectives. A democrat in epistemology as well as in politics, James was prepared to listen to practically everybody: to tough-minded positivists and tender-minded idealists, to subtle savants and God-intoxicated mystics; to obscure bards as well as celebrated sages; to the experts of the New World, and the mandarins of the Old. "Never reject anything," James once told his erstwhile pupil Gertrude Stein; and Stein's teacher practiced what he preached. So opposed was James to a priori fiats, so keenly did he seek out novelty, and so willing was he to fish for inspiration anywhere—be it the Amazon or the Charles, an earthquake or an essay, a séance or a lab—that he richly deserves to be remembered as the patron saint of empiricists.

It is a pleasure to report that Robert D. Richardson's intellectual biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, does full justice to James' insatiable, Ulysses-like thirst for experience. But this, I hasten to add, is only one of the book's many merits. By the time the reader reaches the end of this scholarly tome—90 chapters, over 500 pages of text, approximately 100 additional pages of endnotes and references—she will no doubt have learned much about James' life, times, milieu, and achievements. But she will also have been royally entertained and—dare I say it—edified. As readers of Thoreau: the Life of the Mind (1986) and Emerson: A Mind on Fire (1995) already know, Richardson is an able writer. His prose is appealingly lean; his descriptions of scenes and people are evocative, even moving his summaries of abstract ideas are pithy and apt; and he has an undeniable talent for story-telling. Even better, the dramatic tale he tells in this volume is thoroughly worthy of his gifts.

In its broadest outlines, that tale is tolerably familiar: how William, eldest son of the redoubtable Henry James, Senior, overcame various youthful afflictions—neurasthenia, angst self-doubt, ill-health, and melancholy—to make hugely influential contributions to three fields: philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. As the plot of this complex Bildungsroman unfolds, we meet not one James, but many, and each shades off by degrees into its legatee and successor. There is the peripatetic American child, pulled willy-nilly around Europe by a restless father; the talented teenage painter of Newport, who threw over art for science; the young man drudging away for his Harvard M.D.; the member of the fabled Metaphysical Club; the professor of physiology who threw over science for psychology and philosophy; the Emersonian moralist and giver of lay sermons; the sympathetic student of religious experience; the conscientious phychical researcher; the champion of radical empiricism; the propagandist of pragmatism; and, finally, the staunch individualist who, more than anyone else, came to represent the elite institution of Harvard both at home and abroad.

Richardson describes this vertiginous sequence of metamorphoses with sympathy, wit, and insight. Along the way he introduces us to a host of notable characters plucked from a "Who's Who" of yesteryear: Henry and Alice James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz Oliver Wendell Holmes, C.S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, F.H. Bradley, Bertrand Russell, Ernst Mach, Henri Bergson, Henry Adams, John Dewey, WE.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, H.G. Wells, Helen Keller, John D. Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung (to name only a few). Plutocrats and metaphysicians, scientists and bellettrists, presidents and Supreme Court justices—the cosmopolitan and ebullient James met and mixed with them all. And yet readers will not find this difficult to credit, so vividly does Richardson depict the many-sided character of the man.

While this is neither a book of philosophy nor a book about philosophy (i.e., an exegetical or critical study), it is definitely a book for philosophers—among others. However, what a particular philosopher takes from a book notoriously depends on what she brings to it: her preexistent allegiances, presuppositions, and interests. With that in mind, here are three features of Richardson's biography which will likely be of special interest to philosophers and theologians working in the tradition of process thought.

(1) Many commentators treat James mainly as an exponent of pragmatism. Not Richardson: his James is a philosopher of process every bit as much as he is a pragmatist. As the sworn foe of stasis and fixity, James was disposed to regard everything—from consciousness to truth to the cosmos itself—as fluid and moving and forever in the making. Consequently, Richardson observes, James came to repudiate the procrustean dualisms embedded in Cartesianism as he opted for a bold and nuanced alternativ—namely, "what we can call process philosophy" (450).

(2) An illuminating chapter is devoted to comparing James with another pre-Whiteheadian apostle of process: Henri Bergson. Convinced that our concepts cannot catch or fully fix the flux found in experience, Bergson and James agree that conceptual categories are not God-given mirrors, but mind-forged tools; not reproductions of a ready-made reality, but instruments to be used in coping with a wild and mutable world. In other words, Richardson's anti-Platonist duo traced the logical implications of a metaphysics of becoming and thereby discovered a new path in philosophy—a path leading from process to pragmatism.

(3) Finally, there is Richardson's own undisguised enthusiasm for process philosophy, a “still vibrant line of thought” (427) which he regards as a philosophical expression of modernism. His verdict is not merely enthusiastic, however; it is also informed by the study of Alfred North Whitehead's writings, with which he is evidently well acquainted. Indeed, Richardson cites Whitehead approvingly on a wide range of topics: education (xv, 166), literary style (248), old-fashioned empiricism (466), the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (143), and—last but not least—the great merits of James's mature philosophy (xiv, 202, 304, 322, 450).

The book is not without weaknesses. Those who read for plot may detect the odd longueur, or find places where the pace of the narrative lags behind that of the life; those preoccupied with philosophy may have reservations about Richardson's impressionistic characterizations of pragmatism, idealism, and radical empiricism; and those concerned with intellectual history may wonder whether modernism truly looms as large in the book as it does in the title. However, these peccadilloes—for they areno more than that—are barely worth a mention. Richardson makes James real for the reader—sure proof that our biographer is an artist as well as a scrupulous scholar. It is salutary to remember that in the year William James celebrated his twelfth birthday, Thoreau was bemoaning the fact that there were no longer any philosophers, only professors of philosophy. Here, as elsewhere, James was to prove the great exception; for, unlike the bulk of his academic confreres, he actually embodied the philosophy he professed. Anyone eager to understand how this happened—to know what made it possible, as well as what made it necessary—must read William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernis. It is an uncommonly fine monument to a still-vital and beguiling figure.