William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the “Principles of Psychology” by Bruce Wilshire (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 495 Russell's rebuttal of traditional philosophy lies in his abhorrence of the excesses of idealism and of the use of philosophy to justify ethical or religious preconceptions. The next three chapters discuss in detail the analytical, empirical, and realistic components of this conception of philosophy. The author concludes by noting the leading criticisms of Russell's thought by his contemporaries , with rejoinders by Russell. The volume is a highly competent and lucidly written expose of the thought of Bertrand Russell. Mrs. Eames' sympathetic reading of Russell does not blind her to the difficulties in his position. Some of these difficulties would seem to point to the failure of empiricism and hence to invite a critique of empiricism itself. For example, when Russell's shrinking empirical base becomes so small that he must introduce non-empirical postulates to keep himself afloat, one wonders why he does not simply scuttle the ship. To stay aboard is a Pyrrhic kind of consistency. Yet Mrs. Eames' intent has not been to evaluate empiricism but to present a comprehensive survey of a major exponent of that position. What emerges is a picture of a philosopher in via, whose failures are as constructive as his successes. Thus Mrs. Eames' study could well become the basis for a comprehensive evaluation of empiricism itself. Graduate School of Religion Duke University Durham, North Carolina DoNALD E. BYRNE, JR. William Jarmes and Phenomenology: A Study of the" Principles of Psychology ." By BRUCE WILSHIRE. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1968. Pp. ~15. $10.50. William Barrett In his foreword to this book quotes Wittgenstein as saying that psychology, for all its experimental techniques, cannot advance without a clarification of its "conceptual confusion." He cites this as the reason for studies such as that of Wilshire. In the author's own introduction he contends that James, precisely because he was a radical empiricist, was not a functionalist, a behaviorist, or an introspectionist, but a phenomenologist . Functionalism eschews the point of view of the conscious organism itself; behaviorism avoids reference to consciousness and intentional behavior; introspectionism does not ground itself on the intentional mind-world relation. (p. 8) 496 BOOK REVIEWS Phenomenology, however, does so ground itself, and hence begins with the most thorough empiricism, since it is this mind-world relation which is first in our experience. The value of phenomenology, then, is that it prompts us to reconsider the scientific and cultural value of what has seemed to be the core of our consciousness: that relational and referential opening onto the world-that peryading sense of what the u·orld means to us. (p. 9) The author quotes John Dewey as writing: There is a double strain in the Principles of Psychology of William James. One strain is official acceptance of epistemological dualism. . . . According to the (other) strain, subject and object do not stand for separate orders or kinds of existence but at most for certain di<;tinctions made for a definite purpose within experience. (quoted on p. 177) He believes that Dewey was quite correct in detecting this double strand in the Principles, and he interprets this as a struggle on James' part to break through to a non-dualistic phenomenology, a struggle which was never completely successful but which had an important influence on Husser!, in whose work phenomenology clearly emerged. The author's thesis is well summed up in the following paragraph: The Principles of Psychology is an important work at odds with itself. As we look back over it we discern the lines of internal struggle. On the one hand, we see the manifest thesis which attempts to treat thought as a psychical existent specifiable in its own terms, that is, independently of its Object, and which attempts to correlate this straightway with a psychical state of the brain. On the other hand, we see the latent strand: James' growing realization that he cannot correlate until he has specified, and his efforts at specification which land him in an involved and incompletely carried out analysis of thought's Object; the upshot of this is to throw him out into the lived-world and to cast doubt on the very notion of thought as a psychical existent. The traditional psychophysical dualism, whether it takes the interactionist or parallelistic form, is imperiled; no correlation of existents seems possible. We face the prosped of a wholly different dualism----