1 Western analytic philosophers who interpret William James tend to ignore his tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism and to focus instead on just his pragmatism. [1] In a recent review of James on a “Science of Religions,” the late Richard Rorty proclaimed, for instance, that James’s pragmatism was sufficient to consider, but his noetic pluralism and his radical empiricism made no sense, and could therefore safely be ignored. [2] Rorty, at least, appeared to have read James’s Pragmatism (1907). Still, his penchant was to interpret James through the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey instead of dealing with James solely in his own context before taking up the other two philosophers. We see this trend carried over into the philosophy of religion, such as in the work of Wayne Proudfoot, who gives a fine philosophical analysis of James on religion, but based on only a partial reading of James’s work. [3] Menand would be another example of ignoring James in his own right and interpreting him instead through Dewey, Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. [4]

2 The first question to address then, is, what is James’s tripartite metaphysics? Let me state in abbreviated form my suspicion that James’s tripartite formula was a statement of his own unique philosophy but couched in the manner of Peirce’s three categories. Aristotle had proposed a list of the basic and irreducible categories of existence; Kant, whom Peirce had studied intensely in the 1860s, had produced his own list. In 1867, Peirce himself delivered “On a new list of categories,” as one of the papers celebrating his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at the young age of 26. [5] Peirce’s categories [6] have been described by philosophers as Firstness, a stage in which a sign is realized as something in itself, self-existent, a pure irreducible psychic state; Secondness, a stage in which two signs can be related through opposition or through acting and reacting, a condition where the original undifferentiated state is separated into the perceiver and the object known; and Thirdness, a stage in which the betweeness or mediation of a dyadic relationship becomes apparent, the object is given a name, and the name then comes to stand for the original thing it relates to. These are the irreducible ontological categories of reality. [7]

3 Peirce, however, was dealing with ideas, logic, and language. His central focus was on semiotics--the manner in which language evolves from raw perception to signs and symbols. [8] He achieved this through the method of logic, and so considered the evolution of signs free of introspection, or any interpretation from that vantage point. [9] James, on the other hand, was talking in terms of experience, its internal noetic quality for the person, and the relation of one’s internal beliefs to one’s outward environment insofar as one’s ideals were a living reality. Both Peirce and James, however, had in mind the essential relationship between subject and object. For Peirce, it was expressed in terms of the logic of signs, for James in terms of experience as a whole.

4 James’s tripartite metaphysics was made up of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism, if we take them in the approximate order of their unveiling. [10] Radical empiricism, the core of his metaphysics, was pure experience in the immediate moment before the differentiation of subject and object. It is that precise moment when an object comes into our field of perception but before we have paid any attention to it. [11] It comes from the “blooming buzzing confusion” of events in our immediate milieu but it has not become fully differentiated as a distinct object of perception. Naming it automatically establishes a relation between ourselves as the subject and the thing cognized as the object. From then on, the name we have given it calls it forth.

5 But perception, James said in The Principles of Psychology (1890), is always based on interest. In this recognition of things known before, we give the present thing a name, and it becomes associated with all the impressions, cognitions, and memories, bound up in our belief systems about the nature of ourselves and the world. The original state remains the very ground of consciousness within which objects remain undifferentiated. Its end product, which is where most of us keep our awareness most of the time, is the application of our beliefs held within that guide our thoughts and actions in the world.

6 The most important evidence we have of the relation between Peirce’s categories to James’s tripartite metaphysics comes from the well known account of James’s appropriation of Peirce’s pragmatism. It was historic, and generated some monumental influences, though as cofounders of a movement their interpretations of the pragmatic maxim were radically different, creating totally different lines of effect.

7 “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” [12] That was Peirce.

8 Now: “Consider what effect of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve—what sensation we are to expect from it, and what reaction we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.” [13] That was James.

9 Peirce says, if you want to be completely logical about a thought, you should consider the effects of that thought as far as its outcome is concerned. You do not necessarily have to see the actual outcome, you only have to consider its effects. James, meanwhile, interjects what the practical effect is, in terms of expectation and reaction. This is our entire conception of the object insofar as it means something to us, in other words, insofar as it leads somewhere. There is a payoff. So he uses the image of the “cash value” of an idea.

10 This was a big difference between the two. Nevertheless, both appeared to be focused on the same thing, the relation between the subject and the object. For Peirce it became the differentiation of phenomena into subject and object and the way in which we call upon words to represent various classes of ideas; for James it became a doctrine of intersubjectivity; that is, the manner in which the subject and object operate equally within the same larger theater of experience, and thus the inference that can be made between internal beliefs and external actions.

The Chronology

11 To understand the influence of Peirce on James with regard to James’s metaphysics, one must hark back to the beginning of their relationship and see it brought forward. In essence, we see Peirce, the precocious logician and philosopher of science, befriended by James as a result of which Peirce draws James into the literature and ideas around, among other subjects, the German experimental Laboratory tradition, excoriates him for his lack of logical thinking, and proceeds to lay out his theories for James’s edification, though James ends up appropriating these in his own way, much to Peirce’s feigned consternation, in my opinion. [14]

12 Peirce, meanwhile, was drawn ever closer into the James family circle, when William goes off to the Amazon with Agassiz in 1865, during which time Peirce frequently wandered over to the Jameses’ house after spending the morning studying Kant, only to spend afternoons with the eccentric Swedenborgian philosopher, Henry James Sr., father to William and Henry. [15]The contrasting philosophies could not have been more strikingly different. It was James Sr.’s position, for instance, that Kant had reduced philosophy “to nothing more than a pious hiccup.” So the teachings of the morning and the afternoon were quite different. They had long conversations about Swedenborg’s science, the application of love and wisdom to useful purposes, the opening of Reason to the intuitive, Henry James Sr.’s conception of the Divine Natural Humanity, and the idea that the natural word is derived from the spiritual world, and not the other way around. Peirce went out of his way to embrace the loving atmosphere, which he so lacked at home, and was moved to write reviews of Henry James Sr.’s self published books in the philosophical literature of the time.

13 It is somewhat of a complicated story that I have recounted in detail elsewhere. [16] Briefly, William James had befriended Peirce in the 1860s and as their friendship developed, Henry James Sr. brought Peirce more into the James family orbit. The essence of the father’s legacy was what he variously called “The Physics of Creation,” and “The Divine Natural Humanity.” The essential question was, ‘What could God have had in mind, to create a science so devoid of himself?’ His answer was that science was not the point of God’s creation but a tool to understand it. The real purpose of it all was the union of Love and Wisdom through the Doctrine of Use. We develop a self, for the purpose of achieving a state of its utter abnigation, leaving us with the only reason to live, and that is in a life of service to others, what he called the Divine Natural Humanity, being the love of God through human relationships.

14 Henry James Sr. could handle the metaphysical parts, but he needed William to actualize the scientific portion of the legacy. Conflicted, William abandoned painting and enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard through his father’s connections to the Saturday Club and committed himself to the study of first chemistry and then medicine. But the psychological effect of Henry James Sr’s religious metaphysics on the young William James became excruciating, and William used his relation to Charles Peirce and to Chauncey Wright to escape into the epistemology of reductionistic positivism, which rejected all iconography of the transcendent.

15 James hid there for a half dozen years, pathetically embracing an epistemology that was not really his, but viewing science from that vantage point nonetheless. In those years he trained to become a scientist. Finally, he succumbed to a crisis of personal belief and around 1867 or 1868 went through a near suicidal episode. Retreating to his father’s house he remained a half-broken man for several years, until he began to pull out of a deep depression by reading Renouvier on the will, by which James was empowered to exercise his own, and by devotion to the poems of Coleridge, uplifting in their beauty as they lashed out against reductionistic materialism. He began to believe that it is possible to believe in free will.

16 He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1869 and his mother, by working on President Eliot, secured him a job teaching anatomy and physiology to Harvard undergraduates. James went on from there with his good friends and classmates at Harvard Medical School, Henry Pickering Bowditch and James Jackson Putnam, to help found the laboratories devoted to mental science at Harvard. They began in Bowditch’s laboratory of experimental physiology at the medical school, and from there branched out. Putnam founded the laboratory of neuropathology at Harvard, at first in his own home, and James launched the first laboratory in the world devoted to experimental psychology, for purposes of student instruction in rooms over in Harvard College associated with Agassiz’s Lawrence Scientific School.

17 Meanwhile, James had begun meetings of the so-called Metaphysical Club in Cambridge with Peirce, Wright, and others, out of which would later come the American philosophical movement of pragmatism.

18 James’s new strength was that his escape into positivism and his eventual rejection of it as a personal philosophy had allowed him to reconcile himself both with Wright’s ultra orthodox position and also the Christian monism of Henry James Sr.’s religious metaphysics. James would be a pluralist because monism could always be one of his options, and his understanding of positivism he was able to accept as provisional rather than absolute, until a better epistemology presented itself. The rest of his career was a search for this new epistemology, which we have said became his tripartite doctrine of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism. [17]

19 Peirce, meanwhile, continued the construction of his great archetechtonic theories about reason, ontology, cosmology, and epistemology. Personally, however, he had been converted to Henry James Sr’s, wildcat brand of Swedenborgianism. [18] He became convinced that James Sr. had found the everlasting solution to the problem of evil. Peirce fused James, Sr.’s conception of the Divine Natural Humanity with Royce’s hope of the great community to formulate his own scientific conception of the relation between individual thought, truth, and communities of interpretation made up of other human beings. [19]

20 We know that at many points in his own career, William James’s ideas were a retailed version, often in slight but important variation, of Peirce’s more cryptic philosophy. Peirce probably introduced James to the logic and literature of German experimental psychology in the 1860s. During that period, he and James and Wright had all responded to Darwin’s invitation to write on the application of natural selection to language. Each created their own statement. Peirce participated with James in the meetings of the Metaphysical Club in the 1870s. In the 1880s, Peirce was working on the biographies of geniuses in science while at Johns Hopkins, while James was writing about the consciousness of the Genius in the context of the Darwinian hypothesis of natural selection in Cambridge. In the late 1890s it was James who launched Peirce’s Pragmatism as an international movement in philosophy and also became his patron thereafter. Peirce reviewed James’s major books, and when James’s article “Does Consciousness Exist?” came out in 1904, one of the seminal papers on radical empiricism left to us, in their correspondence, James and Peirce argued over the meaning of phenomenology. James claimed it was foundational to psychology, which Peirce denied. The two at least agreed that it was foundational to science in general, however. Also, toward the end of his career James aspired but did not complete a fully detailed elaboration of his metaphysics. As a result, his tripartite system remained his unfinished arch. Nevertheless, we see in their initial articulation the outlines of a Peircean triad.

21 To understand any one of James’s constructs, then, one has to view them in their dynamic relation to each other. One cannot study just one and then presume to be in possession of the whole of James’s philosophy.

The Varieties and James’s Tripartite Metaphysics

22 As we have said, James did not live long enough to make a complete statement about the foundations of his philosophical system. But when we look back over his attempts to finish that arch, it is clear that The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was written at a time when each one of the three constructs was well enough developed in his mind to find a significant place in the underlying epistemology of that work.

23 We see the idea of noetic pluralism in his introduction in two important ways. First, he told his audience that he would be approaching his subject as a psychologist of religion. He did not say as a philosopher of religion, or as a scholar of religious traditions. His approach was to be psychological. He then declared that his data base would be experiential [read ‘phenomenological’]. By this he meant he would be focusing on the different ways in which individuals have reported on their experiences within different religious traditions across different cultures. These reports he referred to as “the documents humains,” that is, living human documents—first-person accounts of what each person said had actually happened to them.

24 Second, he made sure the focus remained on the individual in his definition of religion. Religion, he said, was what went on inside the person. It was not the history of the churches or the denominations, or the priesthood, or the scriptural teachings, or even a focus on the different traditions themselves or the personalities of their respective Gods. It was on the immediate experience of the individual. In this, he was equating the concept of religion with the idea of a generic dimension of spirituality within each person. This was the capacity to experience the transcendent, whether someone had ever actually experienced such a state or not.

25 James’s conception of pure experience within the context of noetic pluralism can be found most cogently in his chapter on “Mysticism.” He opened by describing the four characteristics of mystical experiences: they are ineffable, noetic, transient, and come unbidden. How can we describe a symphony to one who has never heard one? Mystical awakening is like that. We do not usually spend a lifetime in the mystical state, however (though there are examples of permanent theopathic absorption, possibly rare in the too analytically oriented traditions of the West, though quite common in Asian cultures). [20] Rather, they occur in an instant or they may last just minutes, even hours, or sometimes days. Finally, they come unbidden. There is nothing that can be done to guarantee that they will come. One might engage in ascetic practices, do yoga, penance, or prayer, or meditate in the desert. But none of these will definitely bring a mystical awakening, though they may alter the conditions for their coming. Rather, mystical states come unbidden, and when they arrive they demand an immediate surrender, a complete giving up of any control, because we feel we are swept up in a force so much more powerful than the individual alone.

26 From the standpoint of noetic pluralism, each individual is capable of experiencing such states the majority of which may even be described as a universal sense of one-ness. The only problem for those who are theological monists, however, is that such states of one-ness may actually be different from person to person. They are noetic because they impart visionary knowledge, yet they may remain idiosyncratic to the person who has them, which the person might interpret in no communal or denominational context.

27 At the same time, regarding pure experience, religious scholars are fond of superimposing the categories of apophatic or cataphatic onto such transcendent experiences, apophatic in the present discussion meaning full of content and cataphatic referring to states of complete emptiness of content. James himself did not adopt these categories, but elsewhere he did give the example of the highest state of consciousness, pure consciousness (purusha) as opposed to lifeless inert matter (prakrti), in the Samkhya yoga tradition of Hindu philosophy. [21] Thus, he equated the experience of a transcendent state of consciousness as identical to his own conception of pure experience in his metaphysic of radical empiricism. Pure experience then is the summum bonum, the beginning, the experience of consciousness before the differentiation of subject and object, and the end, in the sense of the highest state of pure consciousness (asamprajnatasamadhi in the Yoga texts) that is possible for human beings to experience.

28 So far as his pragmatism was concerned, James made it clear in The Varieties that the strength and power to transform personality by way of mystical states is measured, not by their roots, but by their fruits; that is, by their visible effects on enhancing the moral and aesthetic qualities of daily living. Here, beliefs are based on the depth, breadth, and height of the transcendent mystical states one has experienced, not solely on the rational internalization of outward laws of conformity. The self-actualizing type of person, Abraham Maslow once also said regarding this same issue, conforms generally to the prevailing mores and folkways of the culture in which that person finds themselves, but is quite capable of opposing the status quo in an instant when issues of evil and injustice arise. [22]

29 Thus, James and Peirce were joined at the hip with regard to certain general principles throughout the course of their respective lifetimes. Pragmatism was the most cogent example of the parallelism between Peirce’s categories and James’s tripartite metaphysics, though they differed so radically on the meaning of that term. Peirce had laid out the blueprint for his categories early in his career. James, for his part, was very late. He progressed but slowly, being constantly distracted by illness, his family concerns, his teaching duties, his international network of friends and colleagues, voluminous writing projects that only grew in international scope after he was fifty and were all crammed into the last 21 years of his life, alas only to be partly undone at the end because he had not finished. The insight mentioned earlier in this paper still holds with regard to contemporary authors, however: James had a tripartite metaphysics and if any given author does not acknowledge that fact and then continues to write on just one or the other construct without regard to the others, and then proceeds to overgeneralizes their conclusions to James’s life, work, and influence, then that author’s ideas must be counted as but remnants of the past.