Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Here is a classic pragmatic problem, familiar to Holmes, made much use of by James, and highlighted by Menand. Assume that a friend tells you something but in the strictest confidence. Later, in discussions with a second friend, you discover two things. One, that he or she isn’t aware of the confidence that has been shared with you; and second, that he is, in your opinion, about to make a bad mistake which could be avoided if he knew what you know. What do you do? Do you stay loyal to your first friend and keep the confidence? Or do you break the confidence to help out the second friend, so that he avoids injury or embarrassment? James said that the outcome might well depend on which friend you actually preferred, and that was part of his point. The romantics had said that the ‘true’ self was to be found within, but James was saying that, even in a simple situation like this, there were several selves within – or none at all. In fact, he preferred to say that, until one chose a particular course of action, until one behaved, one didn’t know which self one was. ‘In the end, you will do what you believe is right but “rightness” will be, in effect, the compliment you give to the outcome of your deliberations.’⁵⁷ We can only really understand thinking, said James, if we understand its relationship to behaviour. ‘Deciding to order lobster in a restaurant helps us determine that we have a taste for lobster; deciding that the defendant is guilty helps us establish the standard of justice that applies in this case; choosing to keep a confidence helps us make honesty a principle and choosing to betray it helps confirm the value we put on friendship.’

⁵⁸ Self grows out of behaviour, not the other way round. This directly contradicts romanticism.

James was eager to say that this approach didn’t make life arbitrary or that someone’s motivation was always self-serving. ‘Most of us don’t feel that we are always being selfish in our decisions regarding, say, our moral life.’ He thought that what we do carry within us is an imperfect set of assumptions about ourselves and our behaviour in the past, and about others and their behaviour, which informs every judgement we make.⁵⁹

According to James, truth is circular: ‘There is no noncircular set of criteria for knowing whether a particular belief is true, no appeal to some standard outside the process of coming to the belief itself. For thinking just is a circular process, in which some end, some imagined outcome, is already present at the start of any train of thought . . . Truth happens to an idea, it

becomes true, is made true by events.’⁶⁰

At about the time James was having these ideas, there was a remarkable development in the so-called New [Experimental] Psychology. Edward Thorndike, at Berkeley, had placed chickens in a box which had a door that could be opened if the animals pecked at a lever. In this way, the chickens were given access to a supply of food pellets, out through the door. Thorndike observed ‘that although at first many actions were tried, apparently unsystematically (i.e., at random), only successful actions performed by chickens who were hungry were learned’.⁶¹ James wasn’t exactly surprised by this, but it confirmed his view, albeit in a mundane way. The chickens had learned that if they pecked at the lever the door would open, leading to food, a reward. James went one step further. To all intents and purposes, he said, the chickens believed that if they pecked at the lever the door would open. As he put it, ‘Their beliefs were rules for action.’ And he thought that such rules applied more generally. ‘If behaving as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true . . . “The truth” is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.’⁶² In other words, and most subversively, truth is not ‘out there’, it has nothing to do with ‘the way things really are’. This is not why we have minds, James said. Minds are adaptive in a Darwinian sense: they help us to get by, which involves being consistent, between thinking and behaviour.