How William James offended the English mind

On the centenary of James's death, is there now more appetite for his pragmatic cherishing of beliefs that are good for life?
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Today, in Oxford, a group of academics are trying to right something of a wrong. Meeting in the Rothermere American Institute, they are discussing the work of William James, the psychologist and philosopher whose centenary of death falls this year.

He is well celebrated on the other side of the Atlantic, commentators and academics alike routinely citing him. And he is eminently quotable. In one letter to HG Wells he reflected on "the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success". We are indebted to him for expressions such as "stream of consciousness" too. Some have said he was a better writer than his brother, the novelist Henry James.

But in Europe he's far less visible, which is arguably an oversight, even injustice. It's this argument that the academics in Oxford will be pursuing today.

Why is this so? We can turn to Bertrand Russell for a possible explanation. In his A History of Western Philosophy, Russell records how James was universally loved as a person. "His religious feelings were very Protestant, very democratic, and very full of the warmth of human kindness," Russell writes. "He refused altogether to follow his brother Henry into fastidious snobbishness." But if Russell is generous about the man, he is less so about the man's philosophy.

James was a tremendous populariser of the philosophy of pragmatism. The principle of pragmatism is, roughly, that something can be said to be true if it works. James wrote: "We cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it." This led him to the conclusion that "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief". He argued that there is a bridge between our ideas about reality and reality itself, and that our notions about what is true can provide us with the bridge. This is what he meant by what works. So, again, he writes: "Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are true of them."

There is something about this way of thinking that is offensive to the English mind, and Russell was quick to spot it. He pointed out that the veracity of some truths do not depend upon their efficacy at all. Did not Columbus sail across the Atlantic in 1492? The truth of the date does not depend upon whether his voyage turned out to be good for humanity. But James can defend himself against that retort, since he also argued that the principle of pragmatism comes into its own when there isn't enough evidence to decide whether something is true.

Russell had another line of attack, though, and it was particularly pointed in relation to James's theological views. Religious beliefs are the quintessential case for which there's not enough evidence to decide. The sceptical mind of Russell looks at the evidence for belief in God and, while seeing it's not conclusive, decides that he does not want to believe in God for fear of believing in an error. James, though, has a different thought. He looks at the evidence for belief in God and, while seeing it's not conclusive, feels the force of the duty to believe what's true as well as the duty to avoid error. The sceptic ignores the first part of that duty, which James also called the "will to believe". He noted that while both believer and nonbeliever run the risk of being duped, he thought it was better to be duped "through hope" than "through fear".

Russell was not convinced. "James's doctrine is an attempt to build a superstructure of belief upon a foundation of scepticism," he concluded, "and like all such attempts it is dependent on fallacies."

Identify a fallacy, and the English mind moves swiftly on. It was a principle that shaped much of 20th-century philosophy on this side of the Atlantic: the logical positivists thought that much of what had passed as philosophy in history was, in fact, meaningless – not least in the realm of metaphysics – and they sought to drop it as a result. It was more Russell's century over here, than James's.

Has the mood now changed? Is there today more scope for Jamesian modesty – a preparedness to run with a belief because it is good for life, and not to drop it simply because the human mind cannot master it? Pragmatically, in James's deeper sense, he would commend that attitude to us. After all, as he added, "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

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