The Dynamic Individualism of William James (review)

William James is undoubtedly a very individualist thinker, but few if any studies have taken on the task of explaining exactly what kind of an individualist he was. Pawelski’s goal in this text is to provide “a careful study of James’s individualism” (xiv). He purports to do this in three major parts; the first explores the dynamic individualism of James; a second section presents an interpretation of that dynamic individualism; and a third section provides the reader with an application of the dynamic individualism—one based upon what Pawelski terms “structured wholeness.”

Pawelski argues that James’s writings reveal three specific contexts in which he takes up the topic of individualism. These are the sociological, the psychological, and the metaphysical/religious. One might think that the most natural progression would be from the innermost (psychological) to the outermost (metaphysical), but Pawelski chooses not to proceed in this manner, beginning instead with the sociological, proceeding to the psychological, and finally arriving at the metaphysical, arguing that for James, “access to the metaphysical is largely through the subconscious” (xv). Hence we “really” proceed from the outermost to the innermost. Overall, Pawelski argues that James’s individual is “diachronically dynamic in that it changes over the course of his career. Second, it is organically dynamic in that it is rooted in his physiology. Third, it is developmentally dynamic in that it has as one of its central concerns the growth of the individual” (xiv).

Beginning with the social context, Pawelski looks at the relations between the individual and the community. He looks at four different communities in James: the scientific, the governmental, the religious, and the academic. His conclusion is that, while individualism remains central to James’s position in each of these, his allegiance to this topic is qualified in each case. He does not defend “sheer individualism” (7). In the world of the academic, for example, the creative genius is dependent upon being selected by the much more communal world of nongeniuses.

Part 2, the psychological, focuses on texts like The Principles, describing consciousness in detail but arguing that there is a nascent tension developing there between the emphasis on continuity, that is, consciousness as “stream,” versus the description of consciousness as selective, that is, more disruptive in nature. This tension is found again in a third part of section 1, the metaphysical/religious realm, with the Varieties emphasizing the perceptual at the expense of the conceptual or selective. In general, Pawelski believes that there is a significant tension in James’s thought, with a sort of “volitional individualism,” emphasizing choice, present in earlier works, and a sort of “perceptual individualism,” emphasizing feeling, present in works like the Varieties—and both of these downplaying the importance of the conceptual. This imbalance can be rectified by reaffirming his position in “Reflex Action and Theism,” where all three elements, perception, conception, and volition, are given equal footing.

Pawelski compares himself with other commentators on James, positioning himself between those who have either stressed the unity of James’s approach or, alternatively, those who have highlighted the importance of “the vague” or emphasized James’s “divided” self. His own approach “will minimize some of the tensions in his individualism” (xvii), offering an “integration thesis” that emphasizes the key role that the reflex arc plays in James’s overall thought—one that stresses both activity and receptivity.

The last part of the volume goes beyond James’s thought per se, applying it to the relatively new area of “epiphanic experience” (xvii). Pawelski argues that human experience “includes both feelings of wholeness . . . and feelings of mundanity” (xvii). He uses his theory of “structured wholeness” to apply James’s “mature individualism to the various phases of epiphanic experience” (xvii).

This is a rich book, clearly written and well argued. Its author definitely has command of the Jamesian corpus. The text is suitable not only for James scholars but for both graduate and...