Somewhere in his writing, I have forgotten where, William James makes a slighting reference to John Stuart Mill.
It has stuck in my mind for years.
James is discussing how books, plays, paintings etc. that we saw as a young person and see/experience again as an older person can offer a surprisingly novel experience, leaving us asking "how did I MISS this?". He is making broader points about the continuity (or not) of personal identity IIRC.
This brings us to the shot at JSM. James says that one can come back as a mature man to Mill's writings and wonder what ever did I think was so "weighty" about them in the first place.
There are several ideas of J.S. Mill's that James might at some point in his philosophic development have found enlightening. For example, Mill famously said that matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation." That comment incorporates what is valuable about George Berkeley's criticism of ideas of matter, while retaining the common sense idea that the biomass we call the tree in the Quad is still in position at 2AM while all students are asleep in their dorms and no one is perceiving the tree. Still, the possibility that they will when they wake up still exists, and may still be localized to that spot. This is a very pragmatic understanding of matter that may well have seemed weighty to James.
It is also possible that Mill's work no longer seemed so weighty to James later in life for a number of reasons. Perhaps he became sufficiently settled in his pragmatic way of seeing the world that he merely nodded in passing "of course" at such passages. Whereas at one earlier time he would have sat up straight and said "by George that's RIGHT!"
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ReplyDeleteJames dedicated PRAGMATISM "To the Memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day."
ReplyDeleteTrue. Much earlier, while in his 20s, James wrote a sympathetic review of Mill's book, THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN (1869). Mill was a world-famous sage at that point, James a young man on the rise in the world, perhaps in the process of learning "openness of mind," after having paid to much attention to his father's dogmatic opining for too long. I wish I could locate the passage I remember about Mill turning out not to be so weighty when one comes back to him, it might help flesh out James intellectual biography....
DeleteTo my fellow free thinkers,
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Why would James have found Berkeley's criticism of ideas of matter "valuable"?
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