Recombinant ANW: Appetites of Words

Recombinant ANW:

Appetites of Words

In opening Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead invokes "that adorable genius, William James" as a prime instance of the "modern mind," citing an observation James made to his brother Henry while, Whitehead notes, "he was finishing his great treatise on the Principles of Psychology": "I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts," James wrote. Whitehead, repeating, splicing James's phrase into one of his own sentences, continues:

This new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. . . . It is a union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society. . . . This balance of mind has now become part of the tradition which infects cultivated thought.

"My theme," he concludes, "is the energising of a state of mind in the modern world, its broad generalisations, and its impact upon other spiritual forces."¹

Whitehead's setting out of his theme within the frame of James's description of struggling with facts to find words and to shape sentences is especially useful in thinking about the particular accidents of time and space occasioning the moves in the American language game that, as I demonstrate in a volume just out, evolve into the habit of mind we know as pragmatism. My subjects are Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom shared two important characteristics: a ministerial function in wanting to provide in their language a vehicle adequate to belief of some kind—"spiritual force"—and an active interest in understanding, insofar as possible, the natural-historical and scientific facts of their moments, and in using that information in shaping the "more than rational distortion[s]" of their styles, their thinking.²

My working title for this volume, The Fact of Feeling: A Natural History of Pragmatism,³ points to why I would have been sent back to Whitehead with the profound attention he gave, in describing his organism, both to the connection between scientific information and the contours of civilizations, and to that between "the environment of electromagnetic occasions" and "each" individual "occasion" which "takes its initial form from the character of its [immediate, local] environment."⁴ In addition, Whitehead continued, centrally, to theorize the perception of language articulated by James, most specifically in his seminal chapter "The Stream of Thought" in The Principles of Psychology (1890; retitled "The Stream of Consciousness" for the later teaching text, Psychology: Briefer Course [1892]), a perception that James himself derived from his deep immersion in the work of Emerson and Darwin, both of whom had realized language in its reciprocal relation to thinking, to consciousness, as a life form, an organism like any other, active and changing in response to "the exquisite environment of fact."⁵ In the course of demonstrating the reciprocal relation of language and thinking in Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), Whitehead observes: "why do we say that the word 'tree'—spoken or written—is a symbol to us for trees? Both the word itself and trees themselves enter into our experience on equal terms; and it would be just as sensible, viewing the question abstractedly, for trees to symbolize the word 'tree' as for the word to symbolize the trees."⁶ Notably, as I shall discuss in the following pages, Whitehead's development of James's work in elaborating the relation between language and thinking provides, in turn, a framework for considering the most recent investigations into the nature and behavior of thinking and consciousness offered by, among others, the neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, Giulio Tononi, Antonio Damasio, Francis Crick, and Christof Koch, each of whom equally acknowledges his debt to James.⁷

My title for this essay means to direct attention to two aspects of Whitehead's signal contribution that serve well to underpin the habit of mind...