James and the Rationality of Determinism

James and the Rationality of Determinism ROBERT W. BEARD VERY LITTLEHAS APPEAREDin philosophic literature about James's essay, "The Dilemma of Determinism." The reason surely cannot be that the determinism-indeterminism controversy is no longer of interest, nor that the structure and details of James's paper are so readily apparent to the careful reader that no exegetic comments are called for. Professor Hyslop once complained, ... the difficulty always with Professor James was to determine technically what he meant by his language on a crucial point. As a popular writer he was clear enough, but the moment he touched on technical problems you could never be sure that his language had the accepted meaning of history.1 Imprecision in literary style does not, of course, entail the absence of rigorous thought, though it may make the thread of the latter harder to lay open for inspection . Failure to see the logical structure of James's essays has led some philosophers to say, as Santayana did, that James suffered from "a pathological repugnance to the processes of exact thought." 2 The most effective reply to this sort of charge would be an explication of the logical essentials of at least one of James's philosophic essays, and this is the primary task of the present paper. The question of determinism was not one of mere casual interest for James. He had abandoned the Swedenborgian brand of mysticism bequeathed to him by his father, since it flatly denied morality in the name of religion. But the empiricist alternative that so strongly appealed to James seemed hardly an improvement, since it denied morality in the name of truth: I'm swamped in an empirical philosophy. I feel that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws; and yet, notwithstanding, we are en rapport with reason. How to conceive it. Who knows? I'm convinced that the defensive tactics of the French "spiritualists" fighting a steady retreat before materialism will never do anything. It is not that we are all nature but some point which is reason, but that all is nature and all is reason, too. We shall see, damn it, we shall see!3 How to retain all three, morality, religion, and science--this was his problem. With the publication of "The Dilemma of Determinism" in 1884,4 he thought he Quoted without reference in F. C. S. Schiller, Must Philosophers Disagree? (London: Macmillan , 1934),p. 217. Character and Opinion in the United ~tates (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), p. 66. 8Letter to James Ward, March (?), 1869,in Letters o] William James, ed. by his son Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920),I, 152-153. Unitarian Review, XXII (1884), 193-224. Repr. (omitting introductory paragraph) in The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898),pp. 145-183. [149] 150 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY had solved the main difficulty. Science, religion, and morality can be simultaneously retained provided we assume a pluralistic rather than a monistic universe, an indeterminism rather than a determinism. There are, I think, three main divisions in the essay. The first comprises a brief discussion of James's criterion of rationality. In the second, he argues that the question of determinism versus indeterminism cannot be decided empirically. And finally, he draws out the consequences of determinism for the purpose of showing how the position fails to satisfy the requirements for a rational view of the universe. I One of the key notions--if not the key--that James employs is that of "rationality ." The whole of his last major work, A Pluralistic Universe, is devoted to showing, not that Absolute Idealism or any other sort of monism is false, but simply that a universe of the sort posited by such philosophies would be less rational than a pluralistic one. On a smaller scale, this is the strategy of "The Dilemma of Determinism ." Is a universe with chance more rational or less so than a deterministic one? But unfortunately James says very little in the shorter essay about his criterion of rationality: The arguments I am about...