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Book
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| The Dynamic Individualism of William James. By James Pawelski, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007, Pp.i-xiii, 1-185.
$60.00. |
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James
Pawelski's The Dynamic Individualism of
William James is a refreshing invitation to read William James as a
reasonable thinker interested in bringing the various features of human
experience into working concert. Pawelski does not suggest that James attempts
to "clean up the litter" found in his philosophical endeavors. The litter is,
after all, an important feature of our experience itself. But he does resist
the various attempts to fragment James's thought—and James
himself—into compartmentalized warring factions. The compartmentalized or
"divided" James story has a long history and Pawelski addresses several of the
prominent versions including those of Julius Bixler's 1926 Religion in the Philosophy of William James and Richard Gale's more
recent The Divided Self of William James.
In the former, Bixler insists that James is caught between what he calls
"moralism" and genuine religious experience. In the latter, Gale argues that
James is caught between trying to be a Promethean pragmatist and an experiential
mystic. Ironically, as Pawelski notes, the divided, compartmentalized James
stories are highly analytic and systematic, and are constructed out of the very
sharp sorts of dividing lines whose deployment James routinely resisted.
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The
virtue of Pawelski's approach is his own receptivity to James's texts and his
willingness to take seriously James's suggestion that philosophers seek to
express a vision in their work, even when they do not articulate a carefully
closed system of thought. In short, Pawelski listens carefully to James's
words before offering interpretation. Unlike Gale, Richard Rorty, and others,
he does not set out on a mission to advise James concerning what he ought to
have said or thought. In contrast, consider by way of example Gale's claim
that "James would be well advised to abandon this attempt to placate the
realist and openly admit that his morally based analysis of epistemological
concepts is highly revisionary of our common sense concepts and beliefs
concerning belief-acceptance and truth" (Gale, p. 12). Indeed, the giving of
the advice in this instance suggests a rather strong misreading of James's quasi-Peircean
understanding of truth as a developing relation. In Pawelski's work there is
less flippancy and more respectful consideration of the texts at hand.
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The
structure of Pawelski's argument is pretty straightforward. He takes the image
of the psychological reflex action model, to which he believes James is
committed, as a guide to his Jamesian story. The reflex model is constituted of
three moments that stand in relations of reciprocal dependence to each other:
perception, conception, and volition. Pawelski uses the model to argue that the
various compartmentalized-James theses derive from attending to one or two of
these moments to the exclusion of the others. Indeed, Pawelski acknowledges
that, especially in his early work, James often focuses on one of these moments
to a degree that the others might seem eliminable. For example, the will to
believe angle seems to champion volition to the exclusion of intellectual,
conceptual activity. In The Varieties of
Religious Experience, on the other hand, we find a dramatic emphasis on the
perceptual, where religious geniuses neither need to will their beliefs nor
bother to conceptualize them. After establishing the various forms of
opposition of the moments over the course of the middle chapters of the book,
Pawelski turns to what he calls his "integrative thesis" of James's
individualism. Bringing a variety of texts to bear on the issue, he tries to
show that especially in his later years James intentionally worked to bring the
three moments of the reflex action model into a working relationship. Pawelski
begins by rejecting the dichotomizing readings of James. Versus Gale's
"divided self blues" he suggests that "the interplay of the Promethean and the
mystical . . . is not only possible but also necessary for human flourishing"
(p. 130). He concludes by developing an exemplary story of how perception,
conception, and will all play roles in mediating the real but distinct human
experiences of epiphany—insightful instances of experience--and
mundanity—habituated everyday conduct. The upshot is that Jamesian
individualism is not perceptual solipsism, political rugged individualism, nor
ontological isolationism. Rather, James's radical empiricism and pluralistic
panpsychism place the individual in a relational context that reaches out
beyond the merely personal. This context includes history so that individuality
is always dynamic and developing. But this relational context, in being
pluralistic, falls short of the various forms of scientistic and religious
absolutism that would consume the individual. Pawelski's James, in short, is
not bi-polar, but is contingently and fruitfully triadic and mediating. Not an
absolute either/or, but a tentative and working both/and. "The individualism
that arises from James's integrated self," he maintains, "brings together the
volitional individualism of the Will to
Believe and Principles and the
perceptual individualism of Varieties"
(p. 125).
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There
are occasional moments in the text where Pawelski himself is tempted by the
sorts of discrete categories proposed by Bixler and Gale. And there are moments
when he stretches texts in directions he would like them to go. But on the
whole he remains sensitive to James's own sense of receptivity, and he does not
try to dominate the Jamesian texts. The story he tells is not seamless, nor is
it meant to be. He reveals the tensions with which James ultimately seems
willing to live, but he does not let these tensions slide into bifurcations of
a more radical sort in ways that James himself did not authorize. |
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The Dynamic Individualism of William James starts off slowly—a bit mechanical and methodical. In the middle sections
the prose becomes more animated as Pawelski takes on what he takes to be some
serious misreadings of James. The final chapters are, I think, even livelier as
Pawelski works to explicate and explore his own vision of Jamesian
individualism. In the course of this exploration, he comes to his previously
noted distinction between the epiphanic and the mundane. The distinction is
useful for describing the kind of mediating position Pawelski has to offer. But
it is suggestive of more. In working this distinction off-handedly through the
history of western thought, Pawelski reveals that he has more to say in this
direction and that James, at this juncture, is a vehicle for his own thinking.
In showing the kind of work James's individualism can achieve, Pawelski also
suggests that one might take this individualism well beyond James into a
variety of issues concerning the conduct of life. Thus, as good as this book
is in carefully presenting a vision of James as integrating the strands of his
work and interests, one hopes that Pawelski might, in some subsequent work,
kick away the Jamesian ladder and develop his own mediation of the epiphanic
and the mundane. |
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Work
Cited
Gale, Richard M.. The
Divided Self of William James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. |
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Doug Anderson
Department of Philosophy
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
dra3@siu.edu |
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