Paddling in the Stream of Consciousness: Describing the Movement of Jamesian Inquiry

I. The Morning of Painful Hypotheses

"Five, you're late!"

A racing shell seats eight oarsmen front-to-back. In the flurry of practice, the names of the crewmen are lost and replaced by their respective seat numbers—one through eight. The coxswain, the navigator of the boat, shouts direction not by name, but by number. The terms "early" and "late" refer to the tempo and timing of the rowers' sweep. "Early" means that you are ahead of the collective stroke. "Late" means that you are falling behind. I was a novice crewman. I was fifth-seat. I did not know it yet, but I was "late."

"Five, you're late!"

Six-seat's oar handle struck my spine with a solid thump and quickly gave meaning to the coxswain's direction: I was really behind the stroke and needed to pick it up. I came to know my rowing self as I have come to know most things—through a painful process of trial and error.

No amount of yelling or explaining could have imparted the lesson of tempo and pacing. My back had to feel the lesson in practice. Athletics are only, and always, learned by heart, by the muscles. Coaches and coxswains seem to recognize this fact. They unstiffen our bodies, limber them up, and set them to work. It is in the bodily work of sport that we learn the technique and jargon of the game: I have never forgotten the meaning of being "late."

William James asserts that experience is situated at the heart of any higher forms of understanding. The challenge of explaining how experience is situated in relation to human understanding is, in many respects, the principal challenge of American pragmatism. This fact is reflected in the "Present Dilemma in Philosophy," when James notes that the dilemma that pragmatism faces is the task of reconciling two hitherto incompatible mindsets. The first "mental make-up" he describes is the "tough-minded," defined by its commitment to empiricism, sensationalism (referring to the bodily senses), experientialism, and pluralism. The second he describes is the "tender-minded," characterized by its rationalism, idealism, intellectualism, and monism. According to James, "most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line" (1907a, 13). Unlike "most of us," however, the pragmatists "are more than mere laymen in philosophy" and refuse to randomly attend to the best of both worlds (14). Instead, a cohesive philosophy is sought to unify aspects of the empiricist and rationalist tendencies. James is not careless in his word choice on this topic: "We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibilities from opposite sides of the line" (14). The project of pragmatism is to illustrate how these tendencies or temperaments are not necessarily "incompatible," and indeed, how they co-emerge in the process of human inquiry.

James maintains that inquiry must begin on the ground of human sensation, with a personal intimacy with the "facts" of the world. He parts company with the traditional empiricist, however, in his insistence that the experience of these facts is, in some way, continuous. James does not simply dismiss the notion of cohesive principles, but rather proposes a kind of principled process that is both driven and contained by experience. According to James, "The world of concrete personal experiences . . . is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed," and, just like the first painful day of practice, is inseparable from a more cohesive understanding or athletic mastery (1907b, 179). He would agree with the sportsman that a youngster cannot learn the principles of rowing, throwing, or jumping without rowing, throwing, or jumping—without a sore back, shoulder, or leg.

Pragmatism assumes the sportsman's common sense by insisting that the truths of philosophy be "world-ready." Truth, like the physical body through which it is enacted, is exposed to the elements of nature, put through the practice of the real world, and bumped...