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William James as Most Influential in Psychology This essay is dedicated to famous psychologist and philosopher William James and his contribution in science. I wanted to start this paper from the short biographical introduction because it helps me to understand better his ideas and the way of thinking. Lifestyle in many ways explains the ones ideas and thoughts. William James was born in New York in 1842. His father was a philosopher Henry James, Sr. and novelist Henry James was his brother.
William James studied medicine at Harvard University and then went to Germany where he completed his education. He returned to America in 1867 and he taught at Harvard, later, for short periods, at Columbia University and at Stanford. He is considered as founder of movement known as Pragmatism, which not only spread throughout America, but also over Europe as the fashionable philosophy for more than twenty years. (The Philosophy of William James) At Harvard William James had been a member of "The Metaphysical Club, " an informal group that met to discuss philosophy and included Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. , and Chauncey Wright, all of whom were to become well known in the pragmatist movement. (The Philosophy of William James) In 1873 he accepted and appointment as instructor in anatomy and physiology at Harvard and two years later he started teaching psychology and later in 1879 philosophy. On the way of James early thinking great influence had works of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill.
William James during his youth wanted to become a painter and his early study of painting was not just waste of time because he derived from it his pictorial manner of philosophizing. Such blending of scientific sagacity with artistic sensibility, such psychological perspicacity, enriched and refined by his previous study of art, and disciplined by scientific training, are characteristics of James's brilliant lectures and writing, and the cause of his great success. His gifts became known to the public in 1890 when his Principles of Psychology appeared, marking a new period in this special branch of science and foreshadowing his turn to philosophy. (The Philosophy of William James) So why William James' approach to consciousness (and also physiological processing) is the most influential idea in psychology? Lets try to find an answer through the investigation of development of psychology. In order to understand James approach to consciousness we must examined it from the point of the heir of the older moral philosophy. His god-father and a close friend was the great Concord sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) who in Representative Men: Seven Lectures preached an intuitive psychology of character formation and borrowed heavily from Henry James Sr. 's interpretations of the religious mystic Emanuel Swedenborg in order to define transcendentalism as the realization of higher consciousness within the individual personality. (Biological Consciousness and the Experience of the Transcendent: William James and American Functional Psychology) And that is why William James became at first the defender of consciousness as an efficacious force in the biological evolution of the species.
Just imagine young medical student (who he was in that late 1860 s) who sided with the Darwinians at Harvard and wrote about the effects of natural selection on mental life. William James observed that consciousness obeys the laws of variation and selection. Eugene Taylor writes Intuitive types, prone to emotional up rushes, who produce art and literature, geniuses whose mind is in constant ferment so they can see analogies that others miss, original thinkers whose associations are unfettered, all represent consciousness as a field of awareness that contains the largest number of ideas to choose from. Rationality and the empirical dictates of the sensory world then select out what is adaptive and what is not. In this manner experience as a whole counts as a potent force in the preservation of the race. (Biological Consciousness and the Experience of the Transcendent: William James and American Functional Psychology) It was a moment when James artistic nature shows itself. Maybe due to that nature his treatment of moral, epistemological, and metaphysical problems became a revolt of the spirit of immediate concrete experience against the intellectualistic idealism.
According to James experience consists of radical empiricism, which maintains the plurality of the real units. All this against all known (for that time) harmonizing or simplifying monism. James him self defines his empiricism as pragmatism and exactly pragmatism become of immense consequence in modern thinking. Later, when he became a professor at Harvard, he in his studies managed to anchor the study of consciousness to experimental physiology.
With the help of his friends and scientists Henry Pickering Bowditch and James Jackson Putnam James reproduced ideas of Meynert and Fritsch and Hitzig. If to say more precisely he managed to settle certain problems in the controversy over the localization of function. James also extended the work of Bain and the British associations on ideo-motor activity. According to Eugene Taylor He articulated a biologically grounded theory of instincts and linked these with the psychological development of emotion and habit. Going beyond the psychophysics of Helmholtz and Wundt, he linked the physiological understanding of perception to realms of symbolic meaning when he claimed from an evolutionary standpoint that when we are confronted with the blooming, buzzing mass of confusion before us, attention to outward stimuli is largely a function of personal interest. (Biological Consciousness and the Experience of the Transcendent: William James and American Functional Psychology) As we can easily see William James always had something to work on. He was really interested in what he studied and that is why his findings were and still are very valuable.
James became a master of modern dynamic psychology of the subconscious while others examined the pathological working of the subconscious in the social sphere. If we will examine James ideas about consciousness we will find a lot of interesting and progressive thoughts. For example he states that that experience contains more than just waking awareness and some blurry realm called the unconscious. Rather, personality was an ultimate plurality of states. Waking consciousness was but one state out of many, its significance being only for survival of the biological organism in the external world. Other realms of human experience at different levels of the person also existed simultaneously alongside waking consciousness. (Biological Consciousness and the Experience of the Transcendent: William James and American Functional Psychology) James imagines consciousness as a field with focus and margin.
The object in the center of attention remains the same, while the very ground of perception may become radically altered through fatigue, traumatic shock, or intra psychic conflict in ways that the standard scientific explanations of perception had not accounted for. (Biological Consciousness and the Experience of the Transcendent: William James and American Functional Psychology) Later these findings became the basis for James conception of science. When I first read James ideas about consciousness it was hard to me to believe that it was published in 1904. The novelty of approach, the construction of idea itself, the language was like the excerpt from some modern magazine. I was deeply impressed by his article Does 'Consciousness' Exist? which was first published in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1. He wrote, I believe that 'consciousness, ' when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether.
It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy. For twenty years past I have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity; []To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably 'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. (Does 'Consciousness' Exist? ) James discovered the subconscious mind and this great contribution to psychology made him world-known.
It also was a bursting point for this branch of science and many future psychologists explore subconscious mind. James helped to understand the mere possibility of the existing of subconscious mind but we cannot fully accept his doctrine that the highest spiritual values originate in the subconscious mind, for the subconscious mind is irrational and therefore the highest spiritual values would be founded on irrationality. It makes no sense therefore I understand what James meant and why this statement is opposite to the basic statement of his pragmatism. And that creates a certain paradox. It appears so that James statement about subconscious doesnt have any practical meaning and doesnt solve something.
It only leads to some abstract supreme reality, which can be found in analyzing of psychological emotions. It appears that Christian dogma disappears and can be replaced by the subjective exigencies of each individual. And each individual can create his own religion and own truth. All in all it leads to the total moral anarchy, because no order can exist when each individual decide for himself what is right and what is wrong. I want to say, that as many scientist of his time William James find himself in the trap of self-created paradox. Bibliography: William James, Does 'Consciousness' Exist.
First published in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1, 477 - 491. , Classics in the History of Psychology. < web > The Philosophy of William James. web Eugene Taylor, Harvard University Medical School, Biological Consciousness and the Experience of the Transcendent: William James and American Functional Psychology, October 26, 1998. < web >
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