Essays in Radical Intuition

In the first essay in Essays in Radical Empiricism, “Does Consciousness Exist?” William James argues that there is no such thing as consciousness. His argument is clear, cogent, and logical. I’m sure if anyone wanted to take the time to convert his points into syllogisms they would find it fairly straightforward to convert is 19^th Century prose into outline form, something I admit, I have little interest in tackling.

At the end of the chapter, he addresses what he expects will be the strongest opposition, that, that others will say, “our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you” (37-38). At that point he deserts his logic to reply, “I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them (37-38).

In other words, he admits at the end that his logic isn’t his means of establishing the certainty of his claim, but simply supporting it. In 21^st Century terms, he has become the blonde (of either gender; I’m fine with being a melaninist, but not a sexist) sitting in the back of the class who raises their hand and says, “Everyone has their own opinion. Why get so bent out of shape about it?” His argument is no stronger than this: I have my opinion and you have yours. And thus, the question as he presents it has nothing to do with empiricism at all, but with “How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?”

It strikes me that, while intuitions can be productive, even creative, obeying intuitions may be the most dangerous move a philosopher can make. 

James, William, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Essays in radical empiricism. Vol. 3. Harvard University Press, 1976.

“But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers. “All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity,” they will say, “but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God has put asunder.”
My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.

William James and Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Idea, is a world dominated by strife, by the struggle between the two terms that inhabit that world. Will and Idea are borrowed from Plato, though . . . 

For Schopenhauer, life is a matter of strife, of constant struggle between will and idea. The tragedy of this struggle, as Schopenhauer describes it is that it is a zero sum game. He tells us that “They,”  a group that includes his reader, “wish, they know what they wish, and they strive after it, with sufficient success to keep them from despair, and sufficient failure to keep them from ennui and its consequences” (422). In this struggle, neither success nor failure offers any escape, which is the eventual goal of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

While I am willing to accept Schopenhauer’s description of life as ongoing strife between will and idea, I would suggest a different interpretation of his scheme that would change a single word. I suggest we replace strife, which occurs often enough in Schopenhauer that it becomes a pivotal, or following Burke’s terminology, a “God term” with the word balance a simple enough change that immediately rewrites the world Schopenhauer describes by changing the relationships between without changing the elements at all. 

I wish to make a minor change to Schopenhauer’s terminology; actually, I cannot resist making this change. The urge comes so naturally to me that I do not pretend it comes from any philosophical or critical impulse. It is simply impulsive, irresistibly impulsive. Admitting the pathos that fuels that impulse does not place it outside the philosophical. At least I have William James to assist me in doing so.

James makes a sideways critique of philosophy’s claim to objectivity when he writes that a philosopher “trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it” (Pragmatism 8). So, yes, I want a universe that suits my temperament. And consequently, I reject a universe that suits Schopenhauer’s. Let him live in his universe and I live in [mind].

(Okay, the bracket word above is a result of spellcheck helping my clumsy fingers create a real word on the screen rather than the near-word it actually created. But, the typo works as well or better than what I wanted to write there. So, it stays.)   

What does this change do to Schopenhauer’s philosophy?

“What is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief.” Charles Sanders Peirce

I would love to let this statement stand on its own. Yet, I know that sound bites don't incline us to to any sort of complex thinking. And as short at it is; this sentence is very complex.

Sound bites allow too much room for interpretation, they take the words, not only out of the context of the surrounding words, but out of the context of the writer's ideas and into any unexplored context that fits only tangentially. A couple of examples of re-contextualization might suffice to show what I mean. 

George Santayana’s succinct and oft (too oft) quoted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (The Life of Reason 1 284) is usually interpreted as referring to history. Those who cannot remember the Holocaust are in danger of repeating similar atrocities. Those who cannot remember Trump may be convinced by another demagogue. As true as these statements might be, they couldn't be further from the point Santayana was trying to make. In The Life of Reason, he was writing a history, it is true, but about a history of reason, of ideas, and of the progress of philosophy. There are moments that it feels like he is writing a progressivist evolution of rationality--from Plato to Hume to Kant, Parmenides and Heraclitus to Russell (a bit of irony, there). There are other moments, and this is what I think he was really saying in this quotation, when it feels like he is writing about the give and take of pluralism and monism, realism and idealism, and cautioning us against ignoring previous thinkers lest we simply repeat their words rather than add to the conversation. He cautioned us against constantly starting over. To remember the past means to know what Kant thinks so we can build on those ideas, take the conversation a little further.

“The exception that proves the rule.” I’m going to let Mental Floss handle this one. Sure this online newsletter has articles like, “10 Fascinating Facts about Airplane Bathrooms.” But its categories, “Change Matters,” “Science,” and “History,” can be entertaining as well as informative, without playing to the lowest common denominator, which admittedly, can be quite low on the internet. http://mentalfloss.com/article/52698/how-does-exception-prove-rule The explanation on this site is essentially what Hegel argues in An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. It occurs to me that the explanation found in Hegel and Mental Floss applies well to cultural rules, but that the opposite explanation, that an exception proves the rule is flawed and needs to be revised, applies well to natural rules, that is, science.

So, back to Peirce's statement. If we don't take his words out of context, what can we do with the idea that, "What is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief"?

We could start with "particular beliefs" since that part of the sentence seems self evident, and thus is suspect. We all know what beliefs are. Those are ideas, concepts, data, facts, that we accept, sometimes without question, often as being self evident, or at least believed for so long that we have lost track of how and why we believed them; we simply do. Often, those beliefs, the origins of which we've lost track of, are inherited. Our reason for believing them traces back, if we could trace them back, to being told by a parent, teacher, or other authority, and rests on nothing else.

Sometimes these beliefs rest comfortably at the conclusion of a lengthy chain of propositions or data. All too often, our propositions have been constructed after we already believe as a way of rationalizing this belief. (Though Bertrand Russell doesn't make this connection himself, in "On Propositions" his term "telescoped beliefs" refers to propositions which move from premise to conclusion without any intervening steps, a visible marker of accepted/rationalized belief.) Further causing difficulty is that any belief may trace back to an accepted belief, even though we can now claim logical reasons for that belief. Even a belief in logic as an acceptable tool for testing beliefs is itself a belief. Thus, the whole idea of beliefs gets rather murky. We need another way of testing beliefs than that we actually have them and can in some way defend them.

For Peirce, so immersed as he was in science, we might simply identify science and the logical precepts of science as a means of establishing the integrity of a belief. Of course, if we're going to follow the syntax of Peirce's statement, and Peirce was always precise in his statements (not always easy to read, but for anyone who is willing to invest the time, precise), he's not talking about integrity of a particular belief, but integrity of belief itself as a concept, or perhaps in the vein of pragmatism, belief as a method.

Perhaps this is where integrity of beliefs comes in, as a means of testing, if not the validity of believes, the value of beliefs. For a belief to have integrity, we must have a clear concept of several aspects of that belief:

First, we must have some idea of the why of that belief, at least in terms of why we hold that belief. Logical support isn't sufficient, since logic has to do with the validity rather than value.

Second, what we gain from that belief, James's much quoted (misquoted) "cash value." Many of our beliefs are self-serving, so much so that it's difficult to find a belief that is not. A more important question, at least in terms of integrity, is this: What sort of person might I become over time as a result of believing that particular belief? What self-conceptions, what strength or weakness of character might result from that belief and the actions and consequences of that belief? Integrity of belief forces us to question the causality between belief and character as the most significant consequence of any belief. Can we clearly trace causality between the two, or are they intertwined, reciprocal in a way suggested by the word ethos? Integrity of belief requires us to at least consider these questions even if they do not have a clear answer.

Third, how do these beliefs affect other beliefs? This is a key point James goes over often enough that I need not belabor it here. I'll only quote James once: "The truth of ‘God’ has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have been straightened themselves out together” (Pragmatism 52).

From my perspective, and I admit how personal this perspective is (another marker of integrity of belief,) I don't see us ever straightening all beliefs out. A perspective that leads us to the final, and perhaps most important aspect of integrity of beliefs, understanding my own fallibility. This is a critical concept in pragmatism, one that answers Russell's early complaints against it, that just as I conceive of myself as capable of thoughtful belief, I must see the other person as just as thoughtful, just as capable, and remember that I am as fallible as anyone, and temper my beliefs against my fallibility rather than someone else's.