Abstract
It has been more than two decades since a renewed and vigorous interest in the philosophy of James began to emerge among those American scholars concerned with the phenomenological movement. And it is to be noted that as early as in 1943 Gordon Allport had already remarked with good reason, “Radical empiricism had never become integrated with modern psychology. It might have served as the foundations for an American school of phenomenology, but it did not. Instead, the examination of the intent and constitution of experience was left largely to Husserl and his associates in Germany.”1 Later scholarship on James has abundantly substantiated the legitimacy of Allport’s contention.
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Notes
Gordon Allport, “The Productive Paradoxes of William James,” quoted in Hans Linschoten, On the Way toward a Phenomenological Psychology: Psychology of William James (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1968; the original Dutch published in 1959 and a German edition in 1961), p. 31.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), vol. I, p. 114.
For example, James Edie writes in a passage in William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987) where he discusses the original features of James’ understanding of the intentionality of consciousness in comparison with that of Brentano, “we are required to say both that he effected the transcendental turn (in Husserl’s sense) and that he remained `on the way toward a phenomenological psychology’ an initiator and explorer who did not himself enter the promised land he had discovered,” p. 31.
In this vein, the work by the co-authorship of Patrick Bourgeois and Sandra Rosenthal, The Thematic Studies in Phenomenology and Pragmatism (Amsterdam: B.R. Gruener Publishing Co., 1983), would be considered significant since it proposes reinterpretations of the general doctrines of the classical American Pragmatists, though not James’ Radical Empiricism in particular, in comparison primarily with the “existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger.”
Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 167 (abbreviated in the following as S).
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 130. Abbreviated in the following as V. IV.
Ibid., p. 147.
James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), pp. 23–24. Abbreviated in the following as E.R.E.
Cf. Ralph Barton Perry, Thought and Character of William James(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1935 ). Abbreviated in the following as Perry.
E.R.E., p. 9.
Perry., vol. II, p. 373.
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (London: Cambridge University Press), p. 143.
Merleau-Ponty, Primacy of Perception, trans. James Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 41–42. Abbreviated in the following as P.P.
V. IV., p. 147.
One of the possible ways to dissolve this problem would be not to take the meaning of the “real” of “logical realism” in the strict sense of the term, and to take it in the sense James suggests when he argues as follows: “What is it to be `real’? The best definition I know is that which the pragmatist rule gives: `anything is real of which we find ourselves obliged to take account in any way.’ Concepts are thus as real as percepts, for we cannot live a moment without taking account of them.” Some Problems in Philosophy (N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Company, 1911), p. 101. Abbreviated in the following as S.P.PH.
S.P.PH., p. viii.
Ibid., p. 106.
V. IV., pp. 237–238.
Ibid., p. 153.
S.P.PH., p. 58.
James, Principles of Psychology (N.Y.: Henry Holt Co., 1890), vol. I, p. 459 (abbreviated in the following as P.PYCH).
Quoted in Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. I, p. 113.
P.PYCH., vol. I, p. 459.
Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century( N.Y.: Random House, Inc., 1982 ), p. 79.
Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968 ), p. 170.
A note for the seminar in the year of 1895–1896, quoted in Perry, vol. II, p. 365.
A note for the seminar in the year of 1897–1898, quoted in Perry, vol. II, p. 369.
Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970 ), p. 264.
V. IV., p. 271.
Ibid., p. 195.
Ibid., p. 205.
Cf. Perry, vol. II, p. 370. James mentions a “restlessness” that afflicts the “phenomenist view,” and states: “In it one never gets out of the conception of flux, or process; although it might well seem that all the actual found its place in the flux.”
P. PYCH., vol. I, p. 243.
Perry, vol. II, p. 381.
V. IV., p. 205, p. 238.
Cf. E.R.E., p. 153: We read, “Our body itself is the palmary instance of the ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body purely as a part of outer nature. Sometimes, again, I think of it as `mine,’ I sort it with the `me,’ and then certain local changes and determinations in it pass for spiritual happenings.” Also, in p. 170, “The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the `field of consciousness’) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. The body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train.” And, in A Pluralistic Universe, p. 288, “My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades into a subconscious more.
S., p. 119.
Cf. especially the chapter of the “Stream of Thought” in P. PYCH.
E.R.E., pp. 42–43.
Ibid., pp. 46–47.
Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neil (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), p. 134.
Ibid., p. 135.
E.R.E., p. 49.
Ibid., p. 73.
S.P.PH., p. 79. In this vein, he writes: “Whether our concepts live by returning to the perceptual world or not, they live by having come from it. It is the nourishing ground from which their sap is drawn” (ibid., p. 80). Or again: “Use concepts when they help, and drop them when they hinder understanding; and take reality bodily and integrally up into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape in which it comes” (ibid., p. 95).
James, A Pluralistic Universe (David Mckay Company, 1912), p. 3.
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., pp. 52–53. Further ahead in the same book, James tries to have the point conveyed in his characteristically vivid and metaphoric way as follows: “The world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible, except by theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the contributions of intellect from those of sense. They are wrapt and rolled together as a gunshot in the mountains is wrapt and rolled in fold on fold of echo and reverberative clamor. Even so do intellectual reverberations enlarge and prolong the perceptual experience which they envelop, associating it with remoter parts of existence. And the ideas of these in turn work like those resonators that pick out partial tones in complex sounds,” p. 108.
Ibid., p. 52.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 101.
Ibid.
P. PYCH., vol. II, p. 287.
E.R.E., p. 194.
We are reminded, in particular, of Alfred Schutz on the “Multiple Realities,” George Herbert Mead on the “Social Selves,” Nelson Goodman on The Ways of the World-Making, Erving Goffman on Frame Analysis, or Kenneth Burke on Attitude toward History.
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Kazashi, N. (1998). On the “Horizon”: Where James and Merleau-Ponty Meet. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Matsuba, S. (eds) Immersing in the Concrete. Analecta Husserliana, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1830-1_4
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