William James: “The inmost nature of reality is congenial to the powers that you possess.” Photograph: Corbis/Bettmann Collection

The political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli once described his affection for certain classical philosophers in a letter to a friend:

When evening has come I return home and enter my study, and at the threshold I take off those everyday clothes, full of mud and mire, and I put on garments regal and courtly, and re-clothed appropriately I enter those ancient courts where received with affection, I feed on that food for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to speak with them [the writers of the past], and I ask them the reasons for their actions, and they in their humanity answer me.

Five hundred years later, Machiavelli’s cozy reverie resonates deeply with me (the garments regal and courtly, less so). Like anyone who has loved philosophy, there are for me philosophers who transcend narrow academic interest and serve as cornerstones in my life. Some of these individuals I continue to read because, even though I feel little kinship with them personally, much of what they wrote rings true (I think of Thomas Hobbes). Others, whose personalities I like as much as their ideas, have become mentors, even friends. That is certainly the case with William James.

My affection for James (1842–1910) accounts for a pilgrimage I made several years ago to a sprawling farmhouse overlooking the clear, black waters of Lake Chocorua in New Hampshire. The house was James’s summer retreat, which he purchased in 1886. Asked by his sister, Alice, for details about the place, he responded: “It’s the most delightful house you ever saw; it has 14 doors all opening outside.” James composed much of The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Pragmatism (1907) seated at an oak table in front of the French doors of the study, from which one can see the sharp peak of Mount Chocorua. I sat at that desk, and I toured the house, looking out at the mountain through his doors (remodeling has reduced their number to 11, of which seven face the mountain). Each vista, like Cezanne’s multiple perspectives on Mount St. Victoire, introduced nuances of light and contour, the slightly different angles altering the mountain in surprising fashion.

This same sort of interplay between perspective and openness is the key to James’s philosophy, set forth in Pragmatism. He believed that all we see is necessarily perspectival and that our intellectual perceptions are shaped and limited by frames analogous to those doorways—by unspoken conceptual systems, language, and cultural premises. Lacking an absolute, frame-less point of view, James concluded we ought to consider our theories as “provisional resting places,” staging areas for new inquiries, rather than as fixed and certain truths. He saw no reason for despair in the discovery of our limits. Relativists, he claimed, were disappointed absolutists. Frustrated in their quests for certitude, they prefer a comfortable skepticism to the complex, humble, and useful pursuit of properly human truths.

With Pascal as his mentor, James stressed that philosophy’s task is to “take our compass,” to learn our range. We are intermediate beings, neither gods nor unreflecting animals. Our knowledge is incomplete and always subject to revision, but we nevertheless do seem to make progress. Our lives are not exhausted by their enclosure within some limited perspective, for each such perspective, however narrow, is still an opening to reality. Moreover, we can shift perspectives and frames, and can share others’ points of view. In this way we acquire the capacity to recognize and articulate our limits, to spell out this condition of living in a world of shifting and subjective perspectives. According to James, to articulate a limit is already to transcend it.
James believed that the greatness of the human spirit lies in its power to consider its own situated, finite status. We learn to reckon with our contingent situation in the universe and thus acquire the humor, irony, and tragic sense that differentiate us from other species.

Like Aristotle, James defined intelligence, or “sagacity,” as the capacity to discern the essential from the accidental. He was more troubled than Aristotle by the possibility that our knowing apparatus might not be perfectly tuned to the world’s essential structures. But he believed it was futile to suppose seriously that our knowledge utterly misrepresents the world, and to attempt to determine with complete accuracy the fit between the two. If our cognitive antennae distort what they register, then they surely also distort attempts to correct those distortions. He proposed, therefore, as a “postulate of rationality” that “the inmost nature of reality is congenial to the powers that you possess.” Our mode of knowing seems to combine interpretive creativity and receptive discovery. Reality, in turn, seems to be malleable enough to sustain different interpretations and yet resistant to wild or arbitrary constructions.

With pragmatism, therefore, James rejected what he termed a “static relation of ‘correspondence’ . . . between our minds and reality.” He defined truth as a “process” that generates “progressive, harmonious, and satisfactory” connections and transitions. This concept surely has its critics. Many commentators have pointed out—rightly, I think—that this analysis blurs the distinction between truth and its discovery or verification. And James sometimes indulged in rhetorical excesses, such as his comment that pragmatism looks only to the “cash value” of ideas. (I suspect he enjoyed shocking European readers with crass American terminology.) At any rate, he said we should think of truth as a largely unattainable but nonetheless motivating goal. The notion of perfect alignment between truth and our perceptions must remain our ideal.

I admire how James avoided the comfortable and insouciant skepticism of more recent pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty (1931–2007), who explicitly reduced truth to the consensus among members of the reigning intellectual establishment. James wanted to loosen up the idea of truth, to make it more human, to detach it from notions of certitude, but not to give up altogether on the ideal of truth. He observed that his postulate of rationality seemed to be justified by the progress of the sciences, and by the coherence of our network of everyday meanings. But there will always be loose ends, surds, pockets of irrationality. And, as he put it, the “bottom of being is left logically opaque to us.”

In Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James professed to be wary of the “exalted emotional sensibility” of many religious geniuses and mystics, and to suspect the darker visions of others whose “misery threshold was too low.” Yet in The Will to Believe, published five years earlier, he had made a subtle and passionate defense of the legitimacy of various forms of belief. James’s own religious commitment was a timid hope rather than a sure conviction. In a letter to his dying father he wrote, ” As for the other side [James’s term for the afterlife], . . . and our all possibly meeting, I can’t say anything. More than ever at this moment, I do feel that if that were true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you goodbye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note.”

Such is the spirit of my friend William James.

Richard Cobb-Stevens ’59, taught philosophy at Boston College for 38 years. This essay is drawn from his retirement lecture, “Some Philosophers I’ve Come to Love,” the fourth and final Albert J. Fitzgibbons Lecture of 2009.