In November 1907 William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard, received an invitation from Oxford. It came from Manchester College – now Harris Manchester and a college of the university, but then an autonomous dissenting institution with a strong Unitarian character, recently relocated from London: its business was to cater to Nonconformist students who were still barred from Oxford. The college asked James for eight lectures that dealt with ‘the religious aspect of your Philosophy’; but, accepting the invitation a few days later, he offered as his title ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’. When he delivered the lectures the following year they were a tremendous success: reportedly five hundred people came to the first one, so the later lectures had to be moved from Manchester library to a bigger venue, and the principal was pleased to report ‘an audience far larger, I believe, than any philosophical lectures ever given before in Oxford’. James sort of enjoyed himself, though almost no one seems to have talked to him about his lectures, and he found ‘the dinner & lunch parties with no real familiar talk … deadly tiresome’. The highlight seems to have been seeking out the reclusive philosophical eminence F.H. Bradley, who took time to show him around Merton College.
After his Oxford stay, William went to see his brother Henry in Rye, where he was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up which he climbed in the hope of getting a sighting. He was unsuccessful, but they did meet subsequently during the visit, and even took tea, and although, as James reported, Chesterton merely ‘gurgled and giggled’, he apparently came across as ‘lovable’.
Getting a glimpse of Chesterton was irresistible partly, no doubt, because he was enormously, legendarily, fat. Rather more respectably, however, James had long admired him, he told Henry, as a ‘tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradoxes’; he was especially taken by his book Heretics (1905). To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals, but you can certainly see what James would have warmed to in Chesterton’s exuberant, if somewhat remorseless, celebration of the ordinary world, a world unconstrained by what Chesterton called ‘modern intellectualism’. We must resist the corrosive influence of such intellectualism, Chesterton says, and accept ‘this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face … We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.’ He commended to his followers ‘the fact that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy’ – precisely the sort of instinctive apprehension that was lost on someone like George Bernard Shaw, who, equipped as he was with an all-encompassing theory of the world, ‘has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human’. Shaw was typical of the heresy of sterile intellectualism: ‘all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character,’ Chesterton says. ‘They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy.’ It is only ‘very great artists’, he claims, who ‘are able to be ordinary men – men like Shakespeare or Browning’.
No wonder James was slightly surprised that this buoyant life force of ‘the huge impossible universe’ should have merely ‘gurgled and giggled’ in person. James is never quite so exhausting, but the lectures he gave at Oxford were full of a vindication of ordinary worldly experience of which Chesterton would have thoroughly approved. ‘The whole process of life is due to life’s violation of our logical axioms,’ James told his Oxford audience. ‘Real life laughs at logic’s veto.’ Consequently, we should abandon the long tradition that emphasises ‘discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth’ and instead ‘fall back on raw unverbalised life’. ‘It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds,’ he said, describing the sort of counter-philosophical position of which he approved. ‘It tells of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought.’ Perhaps it is not so surprising that the dons were reluctant to have a chat about lectures in which dusty-minded professors were pronounced guilty of what, in robust Chestertonian spirit, James called ‘the vice of intellectualism’: they might reasonably have thought it not quite the right tone. But the bracing note of evangelism, a Chestertonian ‘strange courage’, is a vital part of the performance. James knew that he was saying the tactless thing, but there was much at stake: ‘the most practical and important thing about a man is … his view of the universe,’ as Chesterton had said, words James had quoted approvingly on the opening page of an earlier book, Pragmatism (1907). It is not about ontological rigour: it is about wellbeing. One of the highest terms of approval in James’s vocabulary was ‘healthy-mindedness’.
What was ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’? Two things about it were striking: first, it had to change, and there were promising signs that it was starting to; and, second, everything that was wrong with it was down to Oxford – and, most especially, to the hospitable Bradley, who, given the vigour of James’s attack on him, comes out of the story rather well. The philosophy that James wished to see the back of was in origin Hegelian, ‘absolute idealism’, and therefore a version of ‘monism’. Monism, in James’s formulation, depicts what he calls a ‘co-implicated “through-and-through” world’, a world that is ‘one great all-inclusive fact outside of which is nothing – nothing is its only alternative.’ What feels like the diverse life of our experience is only an appearance beyond which we can just about intuit the unity that is really all that matters. And this is indeed very much the world of Bradley, whom James thought ‘the pattern champion of this philosophy in extremis’. Bradley is always saying things like: ‘the universe is one in this sense that its differences exist harmoniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing.’
It is to this monistic view, the view that the world is not really real if it is not regarded in what James calls its ‘all-form’, that he opposes his own view, which he calls the ‘pluralistic’ view. If the monist, committed to allness, oneness and totality, conceives of the world as real only insofar as it realises its absolute unity, then the pluralist is ‘willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected’. In short, in the pluralist’s view of things, all you ever have, or could want to have, is what James calls ‘the each-form’, and not the ‘all-form’, ‘which is our human way of experiencing the world’. ‘“Can a plurality of reals be possible?” Mr Bradley asks, and answers, “No, impossible.”’ ‘He shows an intolerance to pluralism so extreme,’ James comments, ‘that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share it.’ James published his lectures under the title A Pluralistic Universe. He is, of course, quite conscious that calling such an explicitly multifarious place a ‘universe’, with the implication of something unitary to it, is something of a paradox: he is happy, in fact, to call it a ‘multiverse’ instead, but he still thinks its multiplicity possesses a kind of rough-and-ready cohesive life, so that, as he puts it, ‘each part hangs together with its very next neighbours in inextricable interfusion’ in what he calls a ‘strung-along type’ of connection. (He would have agreed with Henry that ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere.’) Such a ‘strung-along’ universe would certainly not have satisfied Mr Bradley of Merton. James’s is, William E. Connolly says, ‘the philosophy of a messy universe’.
His critics have often thought of James as more of a literary than a philosophical figure, which is not a distinction that would have greatly troubled him. One of his biographers duly remarks that ‘his feeling for and intuition about the infinite variety of the world’ showed ‘the sensibility of a poet’; but it is more useful to say that it is a particular sort of sensibility that is at stake. The sensibility in question is the literary companion of the immense 19th-century transformation in attitudes that Isaiah Berlin spent so much of his genius explicating and, on the whole, celebrating: the modern movement in Western thought that he characterised as Romanticism. Put simply: the Romantics turned upside down the centuries-old belief that ‘One is good, Many – diversity – is bad.’ Diversity, the plurality of things, is the new good.
It is, in these terms, a Romantic sensibility that Chesterton revered in Browning, that great poet who also managed to be an ordinary man. Browning was full, the paradoxical Chesterton said, of ‘the glory of the obvious’. ‘He becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary,’ an advocacy that expresses itself in his ‘singular vitality, curiosity and interest in details’. If, Chesterton speculated, you had asked Browning ‘Is life worth living?’ and asked him to give ‘the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul’, then Browning would have said, ‘as likely as not: “Crimson toadstools in Hampshire”’. Chesterton sounds quite mad, but he is thinking of some lines from Browning’s ‘By the Fire-Side’:
By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged
Last evening – nay, in to-day’s first dew
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