Pragmatism, Experience, and William James's Politics of Blindness

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2011Copyright © 2011 Th e Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Pragmatism, Experience, and William James’s Politics of Blindness

Paul Stob

Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, one might have begun an essay about the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric by lamenting the dearth of scholarship on the subject. Today, no such lamentations are needed. Th e past decade has seen an explosion of interest in the way pragmatism and rhetoric can profi tably inform each other. Off ering everything from formu-lations of pragmatist rhetorical theory (Mailloux 1998; Schollmeier 2002; Danisch 2007; Crick 2010) to explorations of pragmatist methodology in the study of rhetorical texts (Stroud 2009a; Stroud 2010) to analyses of what individual pragmatists have contributed to the history of rhetoric (Asen and Brouwer 2003; Asen 2003; Finnegan 2003; Greene 2003; Stob 2005), scholars have demonstrated that pragmatism is a rich storehouse for thinking about rhetoric.

Despite this explosion of interest in pragmatism and rhetoric, it is curious that William James—the one who fi rst made pragmatism part of America’s intellectual vernacular—has received considerably less attention than other thinkers in the tradition, most notably John Dewey. Th is is not to say that scholars have completely overlooked James’s potential contribu-tions to our understanding of rhetoric (Brigance 1935; Brinton 1982; Danisch 2007; Stob 2008). But it is to say that James’s place at the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric has yet to be made clear.

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Th e real question, however, is why. Why has James’s place yet to be made clear? Th ere are numerous possibilities, but one likely reason is the way James’s philosophy is often portrayed. Among the early pragma-tists, the story goes, James was the individualist, “captivated by the ideal of absolutely unentangled and unfettered individuality” (Otto 1943, 189). Because rhetoric is largely a social aff air, dealing with the way symbols cre-ate connections between people, James’s individualism may be off putting. As Cornel West sees the situation, James outdid even Emerson in directing philosophical energy “away from the community and back to the individual person” (1989, 54). James was, West continues, “an authentic American intel-lectual frontiersman, not so much staking land in a wilderness but rather, like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, expanding the moral possibilities of individuals on a raft that fl oats near land and society yet never really banks for long” (1989, 55). If we are interested in the study of rhetoric—which is, if anything, a study of “land and society,” to borrow West’s phrase—perhaps James’s individualism is not the place to turn.

Th ere is another likely reason that James’s place at the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric has not yet been made clear, and this reason is potentially more problematic—not just for James but for many of the early pragmatists. Pragmatism was built on the primacy of “experience”; we might even call it a “cult of experience” ( Jay 2005, 261). But in recent years the idea of experience has fallen on hard times (Pickering 1997; Ireland 2004). Especially in the wake of the linguistic turn, the concept can appear antiquated, misdirected, and troublesome (Scott 1991). Th is may be partic-ularly unfortunate in James’s case because experience was, according to one biographer, his “salvation, his religion” (Simon 1998, xxii). For scholars of rhetoric, the problem with James’s work is that he relied too extensively on the idea of individual experience without understanding the importance of symbols and society and the way they structure experience (Danisch 2007, 25).

Th ose interested in the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric thus have a potential problem on their hands. Given James’s role in founding pragmatism, and given the centrality of experience in the pragmatist tra-dition, important questions arise: What are we to make of the claim that James was a rugged individualist with little concern for symbols and soci-ety? Is experience an outmoded modernist idea, misleading now after the linguistic turn? More specifi cally, does James’s discussion of experience have anything to off er our understanding of rhetoric? If we are to continue to


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pursue the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric, these questions deserve at least provisional answers.

My aim in this article is to provide some provisional answers. Building on the work of those who have begun to mine the pragmatist notion of experience for its rhetorical implications (Crick 2004; Stroud 2008; Stroud 2009a; Bergman 2009), I focus specifi cally on James’s discussion of experi-ence, showing how his ideas are much more fruitful for the study of rheto-ric than scholars have yet realized. My overall claim is that James eff ectively demonstrates the social, political, and rhetorical consequences of a pragma-tist notion of experience. In response to the argument that he did “not test his philosophical positions in political aff airs” (Danisch 2007, 27), I argue that he not only explicated the philosophical relationship between experi-ence and rhetoric but also demonstrated how experience could function rhetorically to facilitate political judgments. My evidence comes primarily from two sources—James’s work on radical empiricism, which was part of his overall pragmatist project, and his widely heralded lecture “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” which deployed a pragmatist notion of experience in response to one of the most pressing political controversies of the time: American imperialism. 1 James’s extended appeal to experience in “On a Certain Blindness” created what we might call a “politics of blind-ness” attuned to foreign policy debates at the turn of the twentieth century.

My analysis proceeds in three parts. Before turning to James’s radical empiricism, it is necessary to explore “experience” in the pragmatist tra-dition and the way many have criticized it over the years. We then turn to James’s discussion of radical empiricism, a social philosophy attuned to the way experience can build bridges and erect barriers between indi-viduals, groups, and even nations. Radical empiricism, I argue, illustrates the need for rhetoric in an experientially based world. Finally, we turn to “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” a lecture in which James demonstrated the rhetorical consequences of his notion of experience by confronting American imperialism.

PRAGMATISM AND THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE James Kloppenberg (1998) has already described the importance of expe-rience among the early pragmatists and how their use of the concept resulted in a number of philosophical problems in subsequent decades. As a result, there is no need to rehash the history at great length. However, to


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understand how James’s work avoids prominent criticisms of the pragmatist notion of experience and renders it rhetorically signifi cant, it is necessary to understand the tenuous relationship between pragmatism and experience that spanned the twentieth century.

Part of what distinguished the pragmatist tradition, especially in its early years, was not the presence of the idea of experience, for experience has “played a role in virtually every systematic body of thought” since the Greeks ( Jay 2005, 4). What distinguished pragmatism was the extent to which experience permeated the philosophy. Th e early pragmatists talked about experience with abandon, extending and amplifying many of the ideas that had come before, which was at least one of the reasons that James called pragmatism a “new name for some old ways of thinking” (1975 [1907]). Th e hope, writes John McDermott, was to warn us “against the intellectualizing of our situation to the extent that we cut ourselves off from the richer and unfettered immediacies of living” (1976, 9).

Both Peirce and James grounded pragmatism in the idea of experience, though they emphasized it in diff erent ways. For Peirce, experience was best seen as a communal aff air. He noted that “the inquirer more or less vaguely identifi es himself in the sentiment with a Community of which he is a member, . . . and he speaks of the resultant cognitive compulsions of the course of life of that community as Our Experience” (1958 [1900], 76). By focusing on experience as a communal aff air, Peirce helped explain how the meaning of experience is inexorably bound to the society of which we are a part (Bergman 2009). James followed Peirce’s lead in affi rming the centrality of experience, but he went further than Peirce in positioning experience as a matter of constant evolution and negotiation. Th e “stream of experience” was particularly important in this regard, as it signaled the state of ongoing change that accompanied the project of meaning making. As James explained, experience “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fi tly as it presents itself in the fi rst instance. It is nothing jointed; it fl ows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described” (1981 [1890], 233). James’s understanding of the dynamic character of experience shaped his later description of the pragmatic method: “You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your expe-rience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed ” (1975 [1907], 31–32).



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Dewey followed the lead of Peirce and James, emphasizing both James’s evolutionary perspective and Peirce’s communal perspective. “Like its congeners, life and history,” Dewey explained, experience “includes what men do and suff er, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suff er, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine—in short, processes of experiencing ” (1981 [1925], 18). Part of what Dewey added to James’s and Peirce’s work, and part of the reason he holds a place of prominence among rheto-ric scholars, was an extended, explicit discussion of how experience went hand in hand with communication. As he saw it, “Failure to recognize that this world of inner experience is dependent upon an extension of language which is a social product and operation led to the subjectivis-tic, solipsistic and egotistic strain in modern thought. . . . Language is a natural function of human association; and its consequences react upon other events, physical and human, giving them meaning and signifi cance” (1981 [1925], 137).

Taken together, Peirce, James, and Dewey advanced a notion of experi-ence that was communally focused, based on an ever-evolving world, and linked closely to the art of human communication. Yet it would be a mis-take to present their views as unifi ed and consistent. Many of the early debates about pragmatism centered on the idea of experience (Kloppen-berg 1998, 85–90; Jay 2005, 284–98), and at least one of the three, Dewey, came to have signifi cant doubts about the effi cacy of the concept. Th ose familiar with Experience and Nature , fi rst published in 1925, are likely famil-iar with Dewey’s subsequent frustration with the title. When he was work-ing on a revised version of the book in 1951, he explained that if he were to write it over again, he would call it “ Culture and Nature and the treat-ment of specifi c subject-matters would be correspondingly modifi ed.” He continued: “I would abandon the term ‘experience’ because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of ‘experience’ are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable” (1981 [1925], 361). In Dewey’s eyes, the term had become too problematic, and he would rather substitute “culture” than cling to something that had outlived its usefulness.

Letting go of experience was a pragmatic move for Dewey, one that raises an important question: What was the source of his frustration? According to some accounts, World War II made all the diff erence. John Patrick Diggins explains the turning point:


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America’s encounter with so unprecedented a phenomenon as Nazism raises a question as old as the study of history itself: can a novel event be dealt with by experience? When Dewey drew upon the experiences of the past to deal with the problems of the pres-ent, it was as though he had now discovered essential truths that must be heeded regardless of consequences. Th is curiously unprag-matic position, which appears now to affi rm the absolute character of things and events, suggests the limits of historical knowledge based upon the presumed lessons of experience, especially an expe-rience drawn from a comparison of two discrete and incomparable situations. (1994, 275)

In Diggins’s account, the failure of experience during the war signaled the inadequacy of pragmatism itself. Dewey himself seemed to have felt this way, at least in part, as he emerged from the confl ict convinced that talking about experience was no longer fruitful.

Dewey was not alone at this time in questioning the value of expe-rience. In fact, many began investigating the “crisis of experience” that seemed to bedevil the Western world ( Jay 2005, 312–400). Not every thinker of this generation was responding to the pragmatist notion of experience, of course, but it is true that the philosophical backlash against experience coincided with pragmatism’s growing disrepute (Kloppenberg 1998, 89–91).

Of all those who came to question the philosophical value of experi-ence during the second half of the twentieth century, the most problematic for the legacy of the early pragmatists was Richard Rorty, whose Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) attempted to move pragmatism away from experience and toward language. Over time, Rorty came to see experience and language as adversarial ideas that divided the early pragmatists from the neopragmatists. Th e twentieth century, he believed, demonstrated the need to talk “about sentences a lot” while saying little “about ideas or expe-riences” (1998, 291). As a result, Rorty sided with those who “have dropped the term ‘experience’” (1998, 297). He faulted James in particular for run-ning together “sentences with experiences—linguistic entities with psychi-cal ones” (1998, 295). In contrast to James and his ilk, Rorty argued that we ought to embrace “the increasing prominence of Language as a topic, accompanied by an increasing recognition that one can describe the same thing in diff erent ways for diff erent purposes” (1998, 306).

Rorty’s criticism, which was particularly disruptive because he donned pragmatist garb, was essentially that the early pragmatists clung



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to experience instead of to language, failing to see that language was the determining factor of our lives and our world. His solution was to drop experience and make pragmatism a philosophy of language. What is tell-ing about this critique, however, is that it reinforced the same separation between experience and language that Rorty had faulted the early prag-matists for promoting. Th e diff erence was that James, Dewey, and Peirce privileged experience while Rorty privileged language. For those interested in the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric, this critique is especially challenging. Rorty’s abiding concern with language—a concern shared by those who study rhetoric (Horne 1993; Renegar and Sowards 2003)—suggests that once we recognize the constitutive nature of language, we can leave discussions of experience behind. After we realize that our identities, perceptions, and statuses are discursive products, it becomes important to talk more about symbols and less about anyone’s idea of what “experience” really is. Given that rhetoric is concerned with the work of symbols in society, the centrality of experience among the early pragmatists becomes, under Rorty’s direction, an obstacle to the creation of a pragmatist rhetoric.

Of course, Rorty’s work is not the only way to understand the relation-ship between experience and language, nor is it the only way to approach the pragmatist tradition. Put simply, the prominence of experience among the early pragmatists need not be an obstacle to the creation of a pragmatist rhetoric, for experience and language were much more interconnected in the writings of the early pragmatists than Rorty recognized. Some scholars of rhetoric have already begun to explore the rhetorical implications of a pragmatist notion of experience. Scott Stroud, for example, has turned to Dewey’s work in Art as Experience and has argued for a model of aesthetic communicative experience that “ attends to means and ends as integrally connected” and that “ values means and ends in a connected fashion” (2008, 164). In Stroud’s account, the key to aesthetic communicative experience is the individual’s orientation: “If one cultivates a way of attending to and valuing the present communicative moves, then that process and activity can be rendered aesthetic, and the produced utterances of self and others will possess a true expressiveness” (2008, 167). Working from a slightly dif-ferent perspective, Robert Danisch positions experience as an important conceptual link between the early pragmatists and the ancient rhetorical tradition. Th e link is particularly evident, Danisch writes, when comparing James and Gorgias, both of whom “reject the idea of a fi xed and absolute real world accessible by humans in favor of a world of uncertainty, plural-ity, and change regulated by human experience” (2007, 25). Even though


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James failed to engage the work of language suffi ciently, and even though he failed to extend his work politically, Danisch argues, his focus on experi-ence can “provide the theoretical groundwork for an American philosophy of rhetoric” (2007, 20).

Both Stroud and Danisch help answer the question of how experience and language can work together in a pragmatist rhetorical project. Danisch, in particular, helps focus attention on James’s place at the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric. But James’s signifi cance in this regard goes far beyond what Danisch acknowledges. What James off ers the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric is a demonstration of how experience can func-tion rhetorically, how it can draw people together in a shared perspective of common problems. But before we can understand James’s deployment of the pragmatist notion of experience, it is necessary to turn to his work on radical empiricism, which contains his fullest explication of experience and its relation to the art of rhetoric. Radical empiricism stands as a striking counterpoint to those who argue that James failed to appreciate the work of language in society, as it addresses the question of how communication can help bridge the gaps among individuals (Russill 2005). It also presents a philosophy of collective experience that sets the stage for a pragmatic polit-ical critique—one that remains instructive even after the linguistic turn.

JAMES ON EXPERIENCE AND RADICAL EMPIRICISM Th e word “empiricism” in the title of James’s philosophy can be mislead-ing, at least if we associate it with the type of scientifi c empiricism that became prominent during the twentieth century. “Empiricism,” for James, was really a matter of experience. “To be radical,” he explained, “an empir-icism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real ’ as anything else in the system ” (1976 [1912], 22).

For the purposes of this article, what is crucial about radical empiricism is the way it relies on experience to build a social philosophy, addressing the bridges and barriers that bring people together and keep them apart. Th is should give pause to those who argue that James was essentially an individualistic thinker (Kuklick 1977, 306–14; Commager 1950, 98–100). He did, of course, often turn his attention to the individual, but think-ing about the individual’s predicament necessarily entailed thinking about



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social relations. Th us focusing on the individual never came at the expense of social, even political, concerns (Miller 1997; Bordogna 2008).

Th e social character of radical empiricism can best be seen by under-standing what James considered to be the elements of experience—or, better, the intermixing layers of experience that defi ne life. For James, the bottom layer, the most basic sort of experience, was “pure experience,” which referred to an indeterminate, ever-evolving totality running through every aspect of the world. He explained that pure experience “is only vir-tually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualifi ed actuality or existence, a simple that ” (1976 [1912], 13). But experience does not remain a “simple that” for long, as we direct and manipulate it depending upon our current purposes (1976 [1912], 21–44). Experience is thus “double-barreled,” separating subject and object only after the fact, by way of addition, as we defi ne our environment according to our undertakings (1976 [1912], 6–7).

On top of this “pure experience” James described another layer of expe-rience—one that consisted of our defi nitions and terminological “perches” (1981 [1890], 236). He discussed this aspect of experience most fully in terms of the interplay of “percepts” and “concepts” (1979 [1911], 31–60). For James, percepts are the pulses of experience that come to us fi rst, before we pro-cess and manage them; they are aspects of experience that we notice (as opposed to “pure experience,” which consists of what we notice as well as what we do not). Concepts, conversely, are abstractions from the stream—the marks and noises that help make experience meaningful. At fi rst blush, James’s distinction between “percepts” and “concepts” would seem to imply a strict separation between experience and language, and James did some-times seem to separate the two (1981 [1890], 434–56). But, most often, he was quick to point out that concepts intermix with percepts to the point where they become more or less indistinguishable. Th e “salient parts” of experience, James explained, “become identifi ed and fi xed and abstracted; so that experience now fl ows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, mean-ing the proposed amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embod-ies” (1976 [1912], 46). Th e result, James believed, was a practical project of learning to manage the interplay of percepts and concepts: “Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at all” (1976 [1912], 49). Th e task was to return “to the stream of life whence all the meaning of [concepts] came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them” (1976 [1912], 52).


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Th us far, there may be nothing particularly social about radical empiricism. Managing the interplay of percepts and concepts is a subjective project, one might say, defi ned by individual interpretations of the stream. Yet James repeatedly insisted that, the vast majority of the time, interpreta-tion is a communal aff air—and on this point he was much closer to Peirce and Dewey than many scholars have recognized. How we choose to defi ne subjects and objects most often depends, James said, on how our commu-nities have defi ned subjects and objects in the past. Relying on communal conceptions to make sense of what we confront, we follow the ready-made “paths that run through conceptual experiences”—that is to say, the paths that have been cut for us—which is “far more labor-saving” than interpret-ing the world anew ( James 1976 [1912], 32). We can, of course, choose to alter these defi nitions, but the vast majority of the time we push forward with the concepts around us ( James 1975 [1907], 100). “As each experience runs by cognitive tradition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a colli-sion with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact,” James explained, “we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure” (1976 [1912], 34).

Radical empiricism is thus an account of communal meaning making. Living in the world means building terminological relationships with our environment, and these relationships become part of experience itself. “Whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content,” James explained, our rela-tionships “are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate. What the nature of the event called ‘superseding’ signifi es, depends altogether on the kind of transition that obtains” (1976 [1912], 31–32). In James’s account, forming conjunc-tive and disjunctive relations means building bridges with some and con-structing barriers between ourselves and others. We cannot understand our place in the world without understanding how we relate to others in our society and, indeed, how our society relates to other societies. Th is is precisely the reason James included essays on humanism in his book on radical empiricism; humanism, like radical empiricism, was “essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of ‘ co ,’ in which conjunctions do the work” (1976 [1912], 99).

As a philosophy of communal meaning making in the ever-unfolding relations of experience, radical empiricism speaks directly to James’s place at the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric. Not only does James deal far more extensively with the relationship between symbols and society than he is typically given credit for, but his understanding of experience



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points to the necessity of rhetoric in democratic culture. Experience, for James, is the core of life, but it teems with diverse meanings and diff erent vectors of interpretation. A radically empirical world is a world of polyse-mic experience. “When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another,” James wrote, “they agree in function. But the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents itself as in a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from next to next by a great many possible paths” (1976 [1912], 32). Th ere was, for James, no one right way to engage the world—hence his insistence on a pluralistic universe ( James 1977 [1909]).

Th e reality of a pluralistic universe, however, leads directly to the need for rhetoric. Although James rarely used the word “rhetoric” in his writings, he did envision a social reality defi ned by arguments, counterarguments, suasory eff orts, and attempts to shape the perceptions of those around us. Our task, James believed, is to throw our interpretations of the world into “the bubbling vat of publicity where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it will eventually either disappear from notice, or else, if better luck befall it, quietly subside to the profundities, and serve as a possible ferment of new growth or a nucleus of new crystallization” (1976, 22). Th e process of jostling and tearing captures the antagonistic nature of the marketplace of ideas, wherein something like the art of rhetoric—though James never labeled it as such—is required to work through our diff erences. Because the world is ambiguous and uncertain, defi ned by tenuous relationships, we are left in a position where we must argue, persuade, declaim, and debate, as well as tear at the interpretations of our neighbors. In a radically empirical world, rhetoric becomes a tool for collective negotiation and experimentation.

Th is is not to suggest that radical empiricism was fundamentally about rhetoric and communication. James was working on philosophical prob-lems in these writings, and it would be a mistake to conclude that he was concerned above all with public discourse. But in lauding the process of jos-tling and tearing, he did affi rm rhetoric’s role in moving ideas, knowledge, even truth, forward. Moreover, in stressing the need for argumentation and debate, he pictured a social reality in which experience and language work profi tably together, helping us negotiate our constantly evolving relation-ships. James’s notion of experience thus makes sense even in the wake of the linguistic turn, as it points to the adversarial arena in which concepts compete for the status of truth. His notion of experience also is such that


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any attempt to impose a single interpretation on the world violates the pluralistic character of reality, denying the opportunity for rhetoric to help us negotiate the terms with which we move forward.

At an abstract level, James’s musings on the social character of experi-ence and the role of rhetoric are all well and good. But being a good prag-matist, James was never content with abstractions alone. Th e real test of his philosophy was how it could help people work through the problems they faced. Interested in extending his notion of experience, James turned to one of the most pressing political problems of the turn of the twentieth century. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” I argue, relied on a rhetoric of experience to promote a collective judgment of America’s imperialist foreign policy. In that regard, it off ers a window into the sociopolitical char-acter of James’s work and into the way a pragmatist notion of experience can be deployed in rhetorical situations.

A POLITICS OF BLINDNESS “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” was delivered October 20, 1898, at the Episcopal Th eological School of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 2000, 442). Th is was likely the only oral pre-sentation of the lecture. Yet James’s words ended up reaching hundreds of thousands of people over subsequent years. Believing the lecture one of the most important he ever delivered (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 2000, 517, 521–522), James included it in the wildly successful Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals ( James 1983 [1899]). Th e lecture fi t well thematically with other pieces in the book—particularly with “What Makes a Life Signifi cant,” which was another of his “talks to students” that rounded out the volume. But “On a Certain Blindness” began not with the publication of this book—it only ended up there after James realized he needed material to pad out his “talks to teachers.” It began with the political crisis he observed in the summer and fall of 1898. 2 James acknowledged as much in the preface to the book when he chastised “the pretension of our nation to infl ict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals” (1983 [1899], 4).

Th us far, scholars have generally overlooked the political character of “On a Certain Blindness.” Many who have studied the lecture have used it as a springboard for discussing how James himself was “blind” in some respect. Max Otto, for example, used the title to argue that James was an individualist blind to the socioeconomic structures that defi ne modern life.



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According to Otto, James wrongly endorsed “the fi xity of social classes” and taught “that the lower-placed individual can make the most of himself by” simply adopting a positive outlook (1943, 187). Allan Shields similarly turns the idea of “blindness” back on James and argues that James was blind with respect to aesthetics, believing that “aesthetics is futile, the aesthetic experi-ence insuperably personal and subjective, the aesthetic response issues in a ‘fl ush’ that is the ultimate criterion” (1968, 27). Others argue that James was blind to the plight of women (Seigfried 1996, 6), or that he was blind to suf-fering around him, particularly the suff ering of his sister (Edel 1999, 14–16).

While exposing James’s own blindness is important—and something that James himself would have applauded—pointing out irony can obscure the real contribution of the lecture. To be sure, “On a Certain Blindness” operated on a number of levels, and it now admits multiple interpretations. Larry Miller (1979), for example, sees it as laying philosophical ground-work for a pervasive, liberal, cultural pluralism. Approaching the lecture from a much diff erent perspective, Scott Stroud has shown how James’s melioristic orientation promotes a form of business ethics that balances means with ideals (Stroud 2009b). For all the scholarly discussion of “On a Certain Blindness,” however, we lack an account of how the lecture func-tioned within its historical moment. Only by turning to this moment can we understand how James demonstrated the rhetorical implications of his notion of experience, crafting a powerful argument against America’s desire to dominate other lands.

American imperialism began rearing its head in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Hoping to spread the blessings of republicanism and Christianity to less fortunate nations in the Western hemisphere, the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations committed U.S. troops to Hawaii, Venezuela, Cuba, the Philippines, and elsewhere (Tompkins 1970). Manifest destiny spread boldly beyond the nation’s boarders, and many Americans cheered what Albert Beveridge called “the march of the fl ag” (Reid and Klumpp 2005, 673–78). It was a radically new direction for inter-national relations, perhaps even more radical than the land grab that led to the Mexican War. But for many Americans, expanding beyond the conti-nent was necessary for the nation to fulfi ll its divinely sanctioned mission (Nugent 2008).

Many other Americans, however, lamented the unapologetic way a former colony had become a colonial power. It seemed as though the nation had forsaken the spirit of its birth. At least it seemed that way to William James. Over the years, James went to great lengths to oppose imperialism.


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His fi rst step was joining the New England Anti-Imperialist League, founded on June 15, 1898, in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. James was present at the league’s fi rst meeting (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 2000, 373), which took place only a few months before he delivered “On a Certain Blindness.” Over subsequent years, James would remain committed to anti-imperialist politics, serving as vice president of the Cambridge chapter of the league and helping to publicize its activities to the Harvard community (Skrup-skelis and Berkeley 2000, 515). He published several writings in opposi-tion of American foreign policy—writings that turned out to be the most explicitly political of his life ( James 1987, 151–69). But it was with “On a Certain Blindness” that he fi rst made his anti-imperialist mark, crafting a philosophical rationale for opposition to America’s pursuits abroad.

In general, the lecture was a statement on human nature that culmi-nated in a powerful political message. Human intolerance, or what James called “a certain blindness,” resulted from our inability to experience the world as others experience it. At a personal level, James believed, blindness could lead to prejudice and bigotry. At a national level, the problems of blindness were multiplied in countless ways, including disastrous foreign policies. And just as all individuals had to recognize and manage their personal blindness, communities, societies, and nations had to stop them-selves from acting blindly. James, however, had to be careful about how he crafted the political point. Because he was speaking in a philosophical forum, he needed to avoid seeming too much a partisan; blatant parti-sanship could have repelled many listeners at the Episcopal Th eological School and many readers of Talks to Teachers . Accordingly, he chose to address the political crisis in a roundabout way, allowing the audience to reach the anti-imperial conclusion on their own. His job was to give them the tools for doing so.

James opened the lecture by establishing the terms and ideas that would lead to a confrontation with America’s colonial aspirations. His focus, he told the audience, would be on how people come to “judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little.” He continued: “Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling.” For James, judgment was inseparable from the dynamic currents of experience; as he put it, “If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valu-able or signifi cant than any other.” Having foregrounded two of the central



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ideas of the text—judgment and experience—James moved to the issue of blindness, which he positioned as a personal and a social phenomenon. He stated that his concern in the lecture was with “the blindness with which we are all affl icted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people diff erent from ourselves.” In particular, he was concerned with “the signifi cance of alien lives” (1983 [1899], 132). James followed this mention of “alien lives”—a term with multiple meanings, one of which is foreign lives—with a brief anecdote about “African savages” and an American traveler (1983 [1899], 133). His aim was to focus the audience’s attention on the diffi culty of judg-ing the lives of others, especially in international contexts.

After the introduction, James began to provide the experiential evidence that would undergird the lecture. If one was unfamiliar with the sociopolitical dynamics of the turn of the twentieth century, one might well conclude that James was simply reciting story after story about how people experience the world diff erently. He was, of course, doing that; but within the context of American imperialism, his experiential evidence took on another dimension altogether. Th e fi rst piece of evidence came from James’s own life—in particular, from a vacation he took in August 1891 in the mountains of North Carolina (Richardson 2006, 318–20). On the vaca-tion, James and a guide visited a group of settlers who had cleared away portions of the mountainside and had built their homes on the barren land. After seeing what the settlers had done, James was overcome by a sense of “unmitigated squalor,” as he explained to lecture attendees and readers (1983 [1899], 133). “Th e forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artifi cial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty.” A privileged, elite Bostonian, James was shocked by the world of the mountain settlers. “No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimen-tariness and denudation” (1983 [1899], 134).

It was at this point that James’s experience as a privileged elite ran up against the reality of life for many Americans. He had missed the “whole inward signifi cance of the situation.” When the settlers looked on their work, he said, they saw not an ulcer but a “personal victory. Th e chips, the girdled trees and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and fi nal reward. . . . [It was] a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle, and success.” James realized that he had been “blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge” (1983 [1899], 134).


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At this stage in the lecture, James’s point was about the limits of personal vision. Th e story of his vacation to North Carolina was a story of how his experience ran up against other people’s experience, resulting in an epiphany about the diffi culty in judging the lives of others. Argumen-tatively, his experience served as a representative anecdote of the limits of experience in general.

For much of the rest of the lecture, James tried to demonstrate the same point over and again, using the experiences of others to show that blindness was endemic to human life. He drew on fi ctional accounts, bio-graphical accounts, accounts from the past and from the present from people in America, England, and other countries. He turned fi rst to Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “Th e Lantern-Bearers,” quoting Stevenson for three full pages in order to make the same point he had made about his experience in North Carolina. Even though Stevenson’s story consisted of fi ctional experience and James’s story was autobiographical, the experiential evidence functioned in the same way. “We are but fi nite,” James concluded after quoting Stevenson, “and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own.” Because of our fi nitude, he said, our experience can only travel so far before we run up against our limits, at which point we realize just how precarious our judgments are. “Th e vast world of inner life beyond us, so diff erent from that of outer seeming,” James explained, “illuminates our mind. Th en the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fl y to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found” (1983 [1899], 138).

After quoting Stevenson, James continued to pile on the experiential evidence, drawing on rich and varied sources. He quoted from his friend and neighbor Josiah Royce, who off ered a philosophical explanation of the limits of experience. He cited Emerson’s thoughts on the way the expe-rience of love can lead to new perspectives. He quoted from the novel Obermann , then from Wordsworth and Shelley, before quoting a full para-graph from Richard Jeff eries’s autobiographical work Th e Story of My Heart . To be sure, James’s sources represented very diff erent perspectives—fi ction, philosophy, poetry, and autobiography, each of which spoke about experi-ence in a diff erent way. But it was the diversity of the sources that gave James’s evidence its force, allowing him to demonstrate how experience functioned generically; it was simultaneously the source of meaning in our lives and the marker of our inability to see the world as others see it. Th e lesson was that we must be exceedingly careful about judging the worth of other people’s lives.



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Th is was precisely the lesson of Walt Whitman’s experience on the Brooklyn ferry, which James quoted at length. He hoped to show that out-siders were incapable of pronouncing a fi nal judgment on the lives of oth-ers. In Whitman’s case, “loafi ng” around and experiencing the mundane aspects of life was a source of insight, despite the fact that others would have considered such loafi ng to be a waste of time. James explained: “Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less—Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?” (1983 [1899], 144). James turned to Carlyle, Schopenhauer, Benvenuto Cellini, Tolstoi, and Emerson to make the same point.

With a mountain of experiential evidence before the audience, James fi nally turned his attention to the sociopolitical dynamics at hand. He did so by juxtaposing “we of the highly educated classes (so called)” with those who were closer to “Nature” (1983 [1899], 146). One could read this statement as a reference to American elites, such as James, and poorer Americans, such as those whom he encountered in the mountains of North Carolina. But he had a more specifi c comparison in mind: “We are stuff ed with abstract conceptions”—conceptions like democracy and the American way of life—“and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life’s more elementary and general goods and joys.” He then elaborated:

Th e remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more pro-found and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even them-selves out. Th e good of all the artifi cial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and dar-ing and doing with one’s body, grows and grows. Th e savages and children of nature to whom we deem ourselves so much superior certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive


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lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. (1983 [1899], 146–47)

Th e reference to “savages” and “children of nature”—the same terms being applied to those on the receiving end of imperial aggression—brought international politics to the forefront. 3 Th e reality of personal blindness had led to the conclusion that Americans’ “impatience for improvement” made them blind to the wider world. Th e nation’s “artifi cial schemes,” he indicated, represented the limits of the American experience. And because of such limits—because the world is pluralistic and composed of an endless variety of experiences—the United States cannot and should not demand that other nations mimic America’s way of life. Th e “children of nature” had found experiential value all their own. Running into our limits as a nation meant that we had to step back and try to understand foreign lands before occupying them and trying to improve them out of existence. We had to build proper experiential relations with other countries before moving for-ward heedlessly.

In some ways, James’s reference to “savages” and “children of nature” called up images of the romantic savage, as though James was telling his audience to go out and live like “savages” and reconnect with “nature.” But the lecture’s overall theme of blindness had less to do with prescriptive action for the American people and more to do with the limits of judg-ment. He was trying to explain what America should not do because of the pluralistic tissue of experience that connected people, communities, and nations. At the same time, James was using the idea of experience to enter the political fray, to grapple with imperialists in the bubbling vat of public-ity, and to show why there was a strong philosophical, pragmatic reason for Americans to oppose colonial expansion. Of course, he was being subtle with this point, refusing to launch into a blatant political diatribe. But sub-tlety and the artistry of his experiential evidence made the argument all the more powerful. James gave the audience the necessary terms—judgment, experience, blindness, alien lives, abstract conceptions, artifi cial schemes, children of nature, impatience for improvement, and others—for making the anti-imperial argument on their own. Th e fi nal conclusion was theirs; James just facilitated a shared perspective on a common problem. And the rhetoric of experience was his tool for doing so.

However, to ensure that the audience would join him in condemning imperialism, James concluded the lecture by rehashing his overall argu-ment. After explaining that the “children of nature” had something to teach



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the glib educated classes, he quoted from W. H. Hudson’s autobiographical work Idle Days in Patagonia . According to James, Hudson had enriched himself by reconnecting with nature in a foreign land . “I had undoubtedly gone back ,” James said, quoting Hudson, “and that state of intense watchful-ness, or alertness rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory perceptions]; he is in per-fect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him” (1983 [1899], 149). To be sure, Hudson’s insistence that “savages” think and rea-son “little,” instead spending their time preying on wild animals, was both untrue and problematic. James, however, wanted to turn Hudson’s words back on the very Western intellectual chauvinism they represented. In a political context, getting in “harmony with nature” meant stopping the war. It meant not imposing America’s will on the “children of nature.” Hudson’s ability to reconnect with nature thus contained “an importance that unut-terably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity” (1983 [1899], 149). Th e point was not that all Americans had to run out and live like “savages”; the point was that the nature of experience demanded tolerance at a national level.

Yet if the point was not crystal clear, James tried to make it so in the fi nal paragraph: the reality of blindness “absolutely forbids us to be for-ward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off : neither the whole of truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any single observer” (1983 [1899], 149). However unintelligible Venezuelans, Cubans, and Filipinos were to Ameri-cans, the reality of national blindness must prohibit an imperial conquest. Having established a politics of blindness, he argued for a foreign policy of “hands off .”

CONCLUSION Both James’s radical empiricism and the politics of blindness he developed in “On a Certain Blindness” further reveal the rhetorical implications of a pragmatist notion of experience. Not only did James off er a theoretically rich


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discussion of how experience necessitated a robust culture of argumentation and persuasion, he also demonstrated how the idea of experience could function rhetorically. Eff ectively resisting the separation of experience and language, he set experience to work within his text, tapping into its politi-cal value given America’s pursuits abroad. Ultimately, he endeavored to describe the social fabric of experience, wherein people and nations had to be ever mindful of the character and quality of the relationships they were building with their neighbors.

“On a Certain Blindness” is particularly instructive of James’s place at the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric. An astute rhetorician in addi-tion to an innovative philosopher, James often performed his ideas. In this instance, his lecture to the Episcopal Th eological School, which was then published and widely read in one of his most popular books, showed how experience could direct political judgments. In fact, James created some-thing of a general framework for political judgment whose application is not limited to his time. Stomping out forms of experience alien to our own, he explained, means harming ourselves, for in so doing we cut ourselves off from the novelty and possibility that make life meaningful. Moreover, building destructive relationships in the world means the creation of a destructive society, for the quality of our experiential connections aff ect us just as much as they aff ect others. In James’s schema, the character of our connections—the types of terminological conjunctions we create—is a central element of experience itself. So if we extend our nation violently, we come to inhabit a place of violence, and we reap what we sow. 4

For those interested in the constitutive power of language, James’s work demonstrates how experience can create common ground between people and nations who are often blind to each other’s ways. For those interested in the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric, James’s work sits at the nexus of theory and practice. Indeed, in extending his notion of experience to perhaps the most pressing political issue at the turn of the twentieth century, James did what pragmatism required: he showed how ideas could make a practical diff erence.

Department of Communication Studies Vanderbilt University



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NOTES 1. At one point in his career, James insisted that there was no necessary logical

connection between pragmatism and radical empiricism (1975 [1907], 6). But that did not stop him from affi rming pragmatism and radical empiricism as twin components of his overall philosophy. He often discussed radical empiricism and pragmatism as bound together, especially when he spoke about pragmatism at Wellesley College, the University of Chicago, and the Glenmore Institute ( James 1975 [1907], 277–98).

2. For a history of the creation of Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals , see James (1983 [1899], 234–44).

3. Th e terms “savages” and “children of nature” point to the very complex racial dynamics that permeated the debate over imperialism. Both imperialists and anti- imperialists contributed to the racist character of the debate, throwing around the terms to which James referred. For an overview of the racial dynamics, see Lasch 1958 and Welch 1969.

4. For one of James’s many discussions of how imperial aggression abroad would harm Americans at home, see William James to William Mackintire Salter, 18 November 1898 (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 2000, 454–55).

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Pragmatism, Experience, and William James's Politics of Blindness

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