William James‘s existential pragmatism

“Modern experience—an ambiguous enough term, to be sure, and one that will require subsequent definition—is the bond among these philosophers. The roster of names we have given is hardly complete, but surely sufficient to indicate that Existentialism is not a passing fad or a mere philosophic mood of the postwar period but a major movement of human thought that lies directly in the main stream of modern history. Over the past hundred years the development of philosophy has shown a remarkable enlargement of content, a progressive orientation toward the immediate and qualitative, the existent and the actual—toward “concreteness and adequacy,” to use the words that A. N. Whitehead borrowed from William James. Philosophers can no longer attempt, as the British empiricists Locke and Hume attempted, to construct human experience out of simple ideas and elementary sensations. The psychic life of man is not a mosaic of such mental atoms, and philosophers were able to cling to this belief so long only because they had put their own abstractions in place of concrete experience. Thus Whitehead himself, who as a Platonist can scarcely be lumped with the Existentialists, nevertheless shares in this general existential trend within modern philosophy when he describes philosophy itself as “the critique of abstractions”—the endless effort to drag the balloon of the mind back to the earth of actual experience. Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. Indeed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist than a Pragmatist. What remains of American Pragmatism today is forced to think of him as the black sheep of the movement. Pragmatists nowadays acknowledge James’s genius but are embarrassed by his extremes: by the unashamedly personal tone of his philosophizing, his willingness to give psychology the final voice over logic where the two seem in conflict, and his belief in the revelatory value of religious experience. There are pages in James that could have been written by Kierkegaard, and the Epilogue to Varieties of Religious Experience puts the case for the primacy of personal experience over abstraction as strongly as any of the Existentialists has ever done. James’s vituperation of rationalism is so passionate that latter-day Pragmatists see their own residual rationalism of scientific method thereby put in question. And it is not merely a matter of tone, but of principle, that places James among the Existentialists: he plumped for a world which contained contingency, discontinuity, and in which the centers of experience were irreducibly plural and personal, as against a “block” universe that could be enclosed in a single rational system. Pragmatism meant something more and different for James than it did for Charles Sanders Peirce or John Dewey. The contrast between James and Dewey, particularly, sheds light on the precise point at which Pragmatism, in the strict sense, ends and Existentialism begins. A comparison between the earlier and the later writings of Dewey is almost equally illuminating on the same point. Dewey is moving in the general existential direction of modern philosophy with his insistence that the modern philosopher must break with the whole classical tradition of thought. He sees the “negative” and destructive side of philosophy (with which Existentialism has been so heavily taxed by its critics): every thinker, Dewey tells us, puts some portion of the stable world in danger as soon as he begins to think. The genial inspiration that lies behind his whole rather gangling and loose-jointed philosophy is the belief that in all departments of human experience things do not fall from heaven but grow up out of the earth. Thinking itself is only the halting and fumbling effort of a thoroughly biological creature to cope with his environment. The image of man as an earthbound and time-bound creature permeates Dewey’s writings as it does that of the Existentialists—up to a point. Beyond that point he moves in a direction that is the very opposite of Existentialism. What Dewey never calls into question is the thing he labels Intelligence, which in his last writings came to mean simply Scientific Method. Dewey places the human person securely within his biological and social context, but he never goes past this context into that deepest center of the human person where fear and trembling start. Any examination of inner experience—really inner experience—would have seemed to Dewey to take the philosopher too far away from nature in the direction of the theological. We have to remind ourselves here of the provincial and overtheologized atmosphere of the America in which Dewey started his work, and against which he had to struggle so hard to establish the validity of a secular intelligence. Given Dewey’s emphasis upon the biological and sociological contexts as ultimate, however, together with his interpretation of human thought as basically an effort to transform the environment, we end with the picture of man as essentially homo faber, the technological animal. This belief in technique is still a supreme article of the American faith. Dewey grew up in a period in which America was still wrestling with its frontier, and the mood of his writings is unshaken optimism at the expansion of our technical mastery over nature. Ultimately, the difference between Dewey and the Existentialists is the difference between America and Europe. The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.” — Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett

Win a victory

It’s the birthday of Horace Mann, born in Franklin, Massachusetts (1796). He was the first great American advocate of public education. He believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal. He was fiercely opposed to slavery, and toward the end of his life, he was the president of Antioch College, a new institution committed to coeducation and equal opportunity for all students, black and white. Two months before he died, he said in a speech to the graduating class: “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-monday-may-4-2026/

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Summer rerun season is already here, evidently. https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Rebecca Solnit, grateful meliorist

A more-than-perfunctory acknowledgments section: “I’m grateful to everyone who refused to surrender in advance. To those who persevered when the future seemed dark, who saw the night as the time in which we dream and grow, who became torches or North Stars when we needed illumination or direction. To all the visionary souls and heroes who made the changes this book tries to describe. To all those making the shifts toward a better world now, the ones just coming into focus or that we’ll see clearly in ten or fifty or a hundred years, the ones that make the news and the ones that happen in secret and touch one life or protect one place. To everyone who keeps looking, hoping, working. To those who know that while we can’t save everything, everything we can save matters.” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit https://a.co/05UCr0gN

Vitalism

"...The celebration of animal spirits can descend into triviality or worse — a fascist cult of violence. But it has more serious and valuable meanings as a reverence for life itself, as well as a broader connection with the recognition that the universe is alive. As a way of being in the world, vitalism has inspired thinkers from Walt Whitman to William James to Aldo Leopold. Not to mention Ludwig Wittgenstein, who sought to cultivate “the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.”
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/opinion/donald-trump-animal-spirits.html?smid=em-share

Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything - The Ezra Klein Show

At 87, Stewart says, self-maintenance is nearly a full-time job. 

Stewart Brand might be the most influential philosopher of the internet – at least in its more idealistic era. In the 1960s, Brand was the central bridge figure between the San Francisco counterculture and the emerging technology scene. He created the legendary Trips Festival with Ken Kesey in 1966, and was there at “the mother of all demos” in 1968. And he created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation” and “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.” 

Brand has seen Silicon Valley evolve in the decades since. And along the way, he has written many brilliant books about our relationship to technology, the built environment and the natural world. His latest book is “Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One.” 

In this conversation, we discuss everything from dropping acid to the genesis of the Whole Earth Catalog, what he thinks A.I. will reveal about humanity, the 40 years he’s spent living on a tugboat and the importance of maintenance in a culture that prizes novelty and disposability.

Mentioned:

Ezra is moderating a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California gubernatorial candidates. The event is on Friday, May 8, in Oakland, CA. You can buy tickets here. Use the code EKSHOWfor 20 percent off your order.

Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand

“We Didn’t Ask for This Internet” with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu, The Ezra Klein Show

I And Thou by Martin Buber

Book Recommendations:

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester

The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447

William James on selfhood

Dr. Dianda’s Lyceum address was excellent, effectively making the Jamesian point that a complex and multi-relational self is rarely “fractured” beyond repair. https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mjuygvzmjk2b

MTSU’s April 17 Applied Philosophy Lyceum speaker to explore the ‘fractured self’

Some fractured facts in this story: we did not begin as "two separate departments," the Dept of Philosophy added Religious Studies to its title and mission a few years ago. Previously, there was no Department of Religious Studies at MTSU. Their speaker series is called a Colloquium, not a Lyceum, a name which has its specific roots in the ancient Athenian school of Aristotle called the Lyceum.

But we're grateful for the publicity. All good. Looking forward to the event.

https://mtsunews.com/dianda-philosophy-lyceum-dianda-2026/

I Am An American Philosopher: Scott Pratt – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-scott-pratt/

The More You Study Consciousness, the Weirder It Gets

Weirder and more wondrous…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/eza-klein-podcast-michael-pollan.html?context=audio&smid=nytcore-ios-share