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Durham Research Online Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 13 November 2018 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Dunham, J. (2020) 'On the experience of activity : William James's late metaphysics and the inuence of nineteenth-century French spiritualism.', Journal of the history of philosophy., 58 (2). pp. 267-291. Further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2020.0039 Publisher's copyright statement: Copyright c 2020 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This article rst appeared in Dunham, J. (2020). On the Experience of Activity: William James's Late Metaphysics and the Inuence of Nineteenth-Century French Spiritualism. Journal of the History of Philosophy 58(2): 267-291. Additional information: Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk On the Experience of Activity William James’s Late Metaphysics and the Influence of Nineteenth-Century French Spiritualism Jeremy Dunham (University of Durham) Is there a particular experience-type associated with the exercise of agency? This question was subject to lively philosophical debate in Nineteenth-Century France. William James paid close attention to these debates, and for most of his academic life argued that the answer was “no”. However, in this article, I show that a few years before the end of his life, under the influence of the French spiritualist tradition, he changed his mind. I argue that this change led to a global shift in his philosophical thinking. One major consequence of this is that he modified his philosophy so that it allowed a greater role for ‘objective’ reality, and was consequently at less risk of the charge of ‘solipsism’ directed at him by his critics. After this shift, James’s philosophy could stand on much firmer ground. Is it possible to have a first-person experience of our own agency? In nineteenth-century France, this question was subject to intense philosophical debate. The two figures primarily associated with each side of the debate were Maine de Biran (1766-1824) and Charles Renouvier (1815-1903). Biran developed powerful objections to Hume’s arguments that purported to prove the impossibility of the experience of one’s inner causal force. These objections formed the match that lit this philosophical fire, and resulted in Biran being recognized as the father of the spiritualist school of French philosophy; a school that included Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900), Jules Lachelier (1832-1918), Émile Boutroux (1845- 1921) and Henri Bergson (1859-1941). 1 Renouvier, who found Biran’s arguments unconvincing, developed an opposed school of philosophy that brought together pluralism, phenomenalism, and Kantianism. William James followed these debates from 1 Stebbing wrote that in Bergson’s philosophy ‘we see the continuation of the current of French thought that proceeds from Maine de Biran through Ravaisson and Boutroux. It would perhaps be hardly necessary to point this out—for no philosopher springs from the void—were it not that, to the English-speaking world at least, Bergson’s views came with such force of novelty that he seemed to have no roots in the past’ (1914: 35-36). Despite the existence of English language works on the ‘roots’ of Bergson’s philosophy (see Lovejoy, 1913, and Scharfstein, 1943), this perception of Bergson as having ‘no roots in the past’ among Anglo-American commentators has hardly changed (although, a recent (2018) article by Sinclair is a pleasing exception). In a discussion of Bergson’s theory of intuition, Moore (2012: 407) claims that Bergson’s own pronouncement that his theory is not original is ‘wild’ and that there is nothing else like it in the whole history of philosophy. Even scholars with better knowledge of the history of French philosophy overemphasize Bergson’s originality, see Moore (1996, xi). 1 across the Atlantic and, for the most part of his philosophical career (from at least 1885 to 1905), associated himself with Renouvier’s neo-critical side. However, at some point between 1906 and 1908, James changed sides. James scholarship has been more or less silent on this shift. Perhaps because it seems like a slight modification—a minor change to his psychology. One of this article’s central aims is to show that such a judgment would be wrong. In fact, this change of mind led to a global shift in his thinking, and to major and— most crucially—positive changes, not only to his psychology, but also to his metaphysics, and pragmatism. James was vocal about the developments to his metaphysics. In his A Pluralistic Universe lectures, he attributed the changes to his reading of Bergson’s 1907 L'Évolution créatrice and its critique of intellectualism (the belief that we can understand the underlying nature of the world by means of static intellectual concepts).2 This is because James had become concerned with the problem of how two different minds can come to know the same one thing. Over time, he realised that this was only a problem if one accepts intellectualism. Bergson provided him with good reasons not to do so. The critique of intellectualism, therefore, helped him to dissolve the problem. So far, James scholarship on the change to his late philosophy has focused on this critique, and on what this convinced James to reject.3 For this reason, commentators have underemphasised how radical the changes James made to his metaphysics in 1908 were,4 and many have even argued that his claim to have undergone a ‘Bergsonian conversion’ is overblown.5 This article aims to show that if we focus not on what the problem of two minds seeing the same thing caused James to reject but rather on what the problem inspired him to accept, a different picture emerges. The problem inspired him to reject intellectualism, but 2 See PU 1909, 101-124 3 See Bernstein, PU, xxiv; Moller 1997, 2001, and 2008; Sprigge 1993: 165-169; Taylor, 1996: 135-137. 4 Moller (1997, 2001, and 2008) claims that there has been a radical change, but that the change is that after 1908 James adopts a panpsychist position. However, I agree with Ford, (1982), Sprigge (1993), and Lamberth (1999) that he had taken up a panpsychist position from much earlier, so this cannot be the right story about the change. That James defended some form of panpsychism earlier than 1908 is clear in the Many and the One manuscript to which Moller makes explicit reference (See MEN 1903-4, 6). 5 Ralph Perry played down the Bergson influence citing a statement from Bergson himself where he highlights (correctly) the significant difference between James’s understanding of the ‘stream of thought’ and his own ‘durée réelle’. Bergson writes that ‘the “Bergsonian” influence counts for nothing in the development of his philosophy’ (Bergson, 1905, cited in Perry 1935: 600). At the time when Bergson wrote this, he was right to make this claim. The “Bergsonian” influence comes later, and the influence pushes James away from his ‘stream of thought’ position to something closer to Bergson’s durée réelle. Bernstein (PU, 1997, v-xxxviv), Čapek (1950), Myers (1986), and Townsend (1997) also play down the importance of this change. Lamberth (1999: 182) refers to it as a mere ‘refinement’. Flournoy (1917: 198-206) and Stebbing (1914: 25-26, 37-38, and 123-124) carefully and perceptively point out some crucial differences between the metaphysics of the two philosophers. Boutroux (1912) thinks that James recognized that Bergson’s arguments ‘lend support’ to his already existing views. 2 this rejection must be understood in tandem with his acceptance of a claim that he had long denied: we can experience our own genuine activity, or causal agency. The reason why this change of mind was so important for James, I argue, is that it represents a crucial shift in his methodology, specifically in the way that he analyses experience. Once James changed his methodology, he recognised that significant changes to his philosophy had to follow. Since the conversion was underway before 1907, i.e., before the publication of L'Évolution créatrice, it is not quite right to call James’s conversion simply a ‘Bergsonian’ one (although his work was a significant factor). The arguments that James uses to express his acceptance of activity as a psychological and metaphysical principle have a heritage that go back to Biran. Therefore, we are better off calling James’s late change his ‘spiritualist’ conversion. My case will develop in four stages. First, I present the French debate over the first-person experience of causal force. I start with the arguments in its favour made by Biran. Then I address Renouvier and James’s objections and show them to be wanting. Second, I examine James’s earlier (pre-1906) understanding of experience, his phenomenenalism, and the methodology that led him to these objections. Third, I focus on what forced James to change his views and the arguments that he developed to make this shift palatable.
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