The Excitable Membrane

(A recap of some big picture ideas from Chapters 1 and 2. I’m summarizing pretty densely here, and for my own later reference, but if you’ve read the posts up to here this should all be sensible).

I. James’ project is strongly rooted in ideas about evolution and natural history. He’s very interested in the constraints on mental life implied by neuroanatomy, and sees brains as scrappy, imperfect, and shaped by a history of adaptation. This squeezes out extreme versions of both rationalism (the school of “the spiritualists”) and empiricism (“the associationists”), which he sees as two different ways of being overly idealistic. Cartesian-style rationalists/spiritualists go wrong by treating the soul as “a detached existent, sufficient unto itself”. In other words, they propose one-big-soul that handles the mysterious act of knowing, and which does this quasi-miraculously. The empiricists/associationists also invoke a miracle, they just break it up into a lot of small pieces called ‘simple ideas’ that aggregate and cohere through laws of association. You can draw a little circle called ‘red’, connect it to other little circles labeled ‘fruit’, and ‘sweet’, but this doesn’t really explain anything about an apple (or redness, fruitiness, and sweetness, for that matter).

II. While James is on-board with Darwinism, it’s a version of Darwinism that can accommodate a notion of progress, as well as a kind of soft teleology. He doesn’t think behaviors have big, capital-R Reasons, but he centers his work on the idea of behaviors being “appropriate” for the attainment of a goal. The whole work can be seen as an exercise in threading the needle between not running afoul of Darwinism, while also not plunging into complete nihilism about the pointlessness of it all (a dilemma that is still very much with us!). The capacity for ‘appropriate’ behavior is the signature of mental life, and implies the existence of three faculties: 1) a faculty of discernment/preference (knowing what it is you want in the first place); 2) a faculty of memory (remembering that you actually do want/not want the thing before you); and 3) a faculty of will (something that propels a “means for attainment”). I think he sees these phenomena as graded along the evolutionary axis. Animals that are basically just a spinal cord have simple preferences, memories, and wills. Animals with more developed brains have these things to a greater degree. With new brains come newer forms of consciousness that may actively “eject” the consciousness of the lower centers, presumably via some form of top-down inhibition.

III.James is at his best when he’s critiquing other scholars, or trying to chart an intermediate position between two schools of thought. As a writer, he’s rarely polemical, and instead lets us in on his process of navigating toward his own beliefs. The “associationist vs. spiritualist” critique was described above, but other ideas that find their way into his philosophical crosshairs include Spencer’s view of “mind as correspondence”, and Meynert’s reflexological scheme (in which behavior is just the sum of various reflexes strung together). James seems to find much of the Meynert scheme to be on the right track, and will call upon it later in developing his ideas about habit. But he also thinks the idea of cortex as sitting around passively and merely waiting for reflexive behaviors to act upon is wrong. James wants cortex to be an originator of ideas.