William James, Unstuck In Time

William James is the archetypal masked villain of American academia.

Seldom seen on curricula, mentioned in hushed tones, his finger is seen on every subject from linguistics to comparative government. His ideological foes curse his philosophical ideas as self-evident and foolish, but few have been around him long enough to even know what they’re denouncing.

In his ambitious book on James, biographer Robert Richardson illuminates the life and ideas of this oft-cited father of pragmatism with unprecedented clarity, though many of his attempts to legitimate James’ thought only deepen the subject’s shadowy reputation.

In aiming to prove James’ relevance to contemporary Western intellectual culture, Richardson frequently shows the tell-tale symptoms of what we might call “Reckless Allusion Syndrome” (RAS), in which all eras and aspects of knowledge become fair game for a textual shout-out, regardless of any deep affiliation to the subject.

Hints that an author may be suffering from RAS include abrupt transitions to fictional works that James could not plausibly have read; one page in the prologue offers up tidy gems from Sartre and the “great Hasidic masters.”

With respect to James’ reaction to the death of his father, isn’t it a trifle much to call his preoccupation with the bare emptiness of life “half a premonition of Allen Ginsberg”? At least a reference to similar expressions in the works of Nietzsche could have claimed some contextual basis; both James and Nietzsche were concerned with many of the same problems during the same time period.

Perhaps this tendency, seen everywhere from popular magazines to university course catalogs, represents an upswing of eclecticism in the wake of post-modern academic approaches, or an effort to fulfill the Wikipedian dream of connecting all knowledge, however tenuously.

Maybe it’s all a futile effort to fulfill the promise of the exhilarating subtitle—“In the Maelstrom of American Modernism”—in a biography of a man who died in 1910, well before what we call “modernism” was much more than a premonition.

This bold statement about James’ place in the history of ideas is not only a fairly obvious publisher’s appeal to horn-rimmed graduate students of comparative literature who wouldn’t dare touch a book dealing with hopelessly unemancipated “pre-modern” thought—it’s really not all that true.

James was far more associated with late-Victorian schools of psychology and philosophy than those of the modern era, and though his studies of pragmatism and consciousness were foundational in their fields, a group of chatting Harvard professors does not a maelstrom make. While he may be the source of the term “stream of consciousness” as applied to mental processes, James had little patience for formal innovations in art and literature, even scorning much of his brother Henry’s work as overly experimental.

Despite these flaws, Richardson’s book will occupy a comfortable place at the center of contemporary James biographies for years to come.

Richardson is especially good at tracing particular James theories from their first gestations to their eventual appearance in published form.

As Richardson puts it, while it may seem that James’ later philosophical framework was formulated far after his early interest in psychology, many of his later themes—religious experience, the meaning and use of “truth,” and the benefits of pluralism—are clearly indicated in James’ writing even before the publication of his major work, almost as if it “couldn’t itself go forward until certain religious and philosophical problems had been faced and resolved.”

By painstakingly illuminating James’ mind at work resolving these problems, Richardson does students of American ideas a great service, his pretenses to avant-garde chic notwithstanding.

—Reviewer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.