The Excitable Membrane

On the Preface to “The Principles”:

James seems like that beautiful-soul-of-a-friend you knew in college who was thoughtful and generous and way smarter than you, and whose relentless self deprecation would have been annoying if it wasn’t so articulate and tinged with real sadness. He knows it’s a hell of an ask to invite the reader on a fourteen hundred page scientific tour of the human mind, and also one that isn’t without some hubris. “In spite of the “exclusion of the important subjects of pleasure and pain,” he tells us, “the work has grown to a length which no one can regret more than the writer himself.” His first order of business in the preface is to casually mention the 11 chapters we can safely skip, and he apologizes for Chapter 20, on Space Perception, being “a terrible thing.” The tone is much more folksy and humble than anything you’d see in a modern textbook. 

For all his humility, though, he clearly still has huge ambitions. He sets the stage of inquiry as “natural science”, and gives us a bullet-point list of what our objects of study are, as Psychologists. These are: 1) thoughts and feelings, 2) the physical world in which these phenomena evidently occur, and 3) the knowing of this physical world through thought and feeling. It’s a remarkable inventory, and stakes out some bold metaphysical turf. I can think of very few psychologists today who’d have the cojones to say they’re working on something as slippery and mysterious as “knowing”. Even “consciousness” seems somehow less intimidating, and more operationalizable to me. Consciousness can be tamed and defanged with various kinds of verbal magic that equate it to something measurable like ‘attention’, or ‘awareness’…. But ‘knowing’? Jesus. 

After declaring the scope of study, he tells us who he’ll be doing battle with throughout:  the “spiritualists” and “the associationists.”  We’ll hear a lot more about them soon, but I kind of think of them like literary foils – enchanters who are always ready with bad but tempting ideas about how the mind works. Basically they’re both guilty of reasoning about the mind from starting conceptions that are far too idealized and transcendent. Thought is hardly something pristine on James’ view – rather, it’s jagged, constrained, earthly, and above all, evolved. In addition to suffering from a variety of metaphysical delusions, James thinks the spiritualists and associationists are basically just unhelpful in the endeavor of trying to give a scientific account of minds in the world. In fact, James thinks his own ‘positivistic’ rejection of spiritualism and associationism is “the only feature” of his book for which he feels “tempted to claim originality.” The irony here, though, is that most of contemporary psychology is far more positivistic than James ever dared to be in his project. Psychology today makes no pretensions that it’s studying the strange state-of-affairs that is “knowing”. Instead, the idea is to try to box in the mind by sticking with what’s measurable: collecting sweat, clocking reaction times. I sometimes wonder whether James would see this as the fulfillment of his project, or as a change of terms that would sadden him.