James, William

제임스

Early life and education

Interest in Psychology.

Interest in religion

Career in philosophy.

Significance and influence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

제임스

제임스 (William James). 1842. 1. 11 뉴욕 시~1910. 8. 26 뉴햄프셔 셔코러와. 미국의 철학자·심리학자. 실용주의 철학 운동과 기능주의 심리학 운동의 주도자이다.

Early life and education

James was the eldest son of Henry James, an idiosyncratic and voluble man whose philosophical interests attracted him to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. One of William's brothers was the novelist Henry James. The elder Henry James held an "antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years." Both his physical and his spiritual life were marked by restlessness and wanderings, largely in Europe, that affected the training of his children at school and their education at home. Building upon the works of Swedenborg, which had been proffered as a revelation from God for a new age of truth and reason in religion, the elder James had constructed a system of his own that seems to have served him as a vision of spiritual life. This philosophy provided the permanent intellectual atmosphere of William's home life, to some degree compensating for the undisciplined irregularity of his schooling, which ranged from New York to Boulogne, Fr., and to Geneva and back. The habits acquired in dealing with his father's views at dinner and at tea carried over into the extraordinarily sympathetic yet critical manner that William displayed in dealing with anybody's views on any occasion.

헨리 제임스의 장남으로 태어났다. 헨리 제임스는 특이한 기질의 유창한 말솜씨를 가진 사람으로 톡 쏘는 재치를 보였고 활달한 문체를 잘 구사했다. 또한 철학에도 관심이 있어 스베덴보리의 신학을 연구했다. 윌리엄 제임스의 동생 헨리 제임스는 소설가·비평가로서 영어 사용권에서 소설이론에 가장 큰 영향을 끼친 사람들 중 한 사람이다. 아버지 헨리 제임스는 신학생으로 출발했지만, 프린스턴 신학교에서 교회중심주의에 대해 반감을 갖게 되었다. 이 교회중심주의는 그의 후기 저작에서 줄곧 수많은 경멸과 풍자의 대상이 되었다. 그의 육체적·정신적 삶 모두는 주로 유럽에서의 쉼 없는 활동과 여행으로 점철되어 있는데, 이는 학교와 가정에서 자식들 교육에 많은 영향을 주었다. 아버지 헨리 제임스는 종교에서 진리와 이성의 새 시대를 열라는 신의 계시를 보여준다고 생각한 스베덴보리의 저작을 바탕으로 자신의 체계를 구축했다. 이 체계는 그의 영적 삶의 견인차 역할을 한 듯하다. 아버지의 철학은 윌리엄 제임스의 가정생활에 지속적으로 지적 분위기를 마련해주었으며, 뉴욕에서 프랑스의 불로뉴로, 스위스의 제네바로, 다시 뉴욕으로 이어지는 그의 불규칙적인 학교 교육을 상당한 정도로 보충해주었다. 식사를 하거나 차를 마시면서 아버지의 견해를 놓고 의견을 주고받을 때 얻은 습관 덕분에 제임스는 다른 사람의 견해를 논의하는 어떤 경우에도 언제나 매우 호의적이면서 동시에 비판적인 태도를 견지할 수 있었다.

When James was 18 years of age he tried his hand at studying art, under the tutelage of William M. Hunt, an American painter of religious subjects. But he soon tired of it and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University. From courses in chemistry, anatomy, and similar subjects there, he went to the study of medicine in the Harvard Medical School; but he interrupted this study in order to accompany the eminent naturalist Louis Agassiz, in the capacity of assistant, on an expedition to the Amazon. There James's health failed, and his duties irked him. He returned to the medical school for a term and then during 1867-68 went to Germany for courses with the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who formulated the law of the conservation of energy; with Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist; with Claude Bernard, the foremost experimentalist of 19th-century medicine; and with others. At the same time he read widely in the psychology and philosophy then current, especially the writings of Charles Renouvier, a Kantian Idealist and relativist.

The acquaintance with Renouvier was a focal point in James's personal and intellectual history. He seems from adolescence to have been a delicate boy, always ailing, and at this period of his stay in Germany he suffered a breakdown, with thoughts of suicide. When he returned home in November 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still ill. Though he took the degree of M.D. at the Harvard Medical School in June 1869, he was unable to begin practice. Between that date and 1872 he lived in a state of semi-invalidism in his father's house, doing nothing but reading and writing an occasional review. Early in this period he experienced a sort of phobic panic, which persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved, according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier on free will and the decision that "my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." The decision carried with it the abandonment of all determinisms--both the scientific kind that his training had established for him and that seems to have had some relation to his neurosis and the theological, metaphysical kind that he later opposed in the notion of "the block universe." His revolutionary discoveries in psychology and philosophy, his views concerning the methods of science, the qualities of men, and the nature of reality all seem to have received a definite propulsion from this resolution of his poignant personal problem.

Interest in Psychology.

In 1872 James was appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard College, in which capacity he served until 1876. But he could not be diverted from his ruling passion, and the step from teaching physiology to teaching psychology--not the traditional "mental science" but physiological psychology--was as inevitable as it was revolutionary. It meant a challenge to the vested interests of the mind, mainly theological, that were entrenched in the colleges and universities of the United States; and it meant a definite break with what Santayana called "the genteel tradition." Psychology ceased to be mental philosophy and became a laboratory science. Philosophy ceased to be an exercise in the grammar of assent and became an adventure in methodological invention and metaphysical discovery.

심리학에 대한 관심

1872년 하버드대학교 생리학 전임 강사로 임명되어 1876년까지 재직했다. 그러나 자신을 지배하는 열정을 벗어버릴 수 없었다. 그래서 그는 방향을 바꿔 생리학이 아니라 심리학(전통적인 '정신과학'이 아니라 생리학적 심리학)을 가르치기로 했다. 이는 혁명적인 결정이었을 뿐만 아니라 불가피한 결정이기도 했다. 이는 정신에 관한 기존의 관심, 특히 당시의 미국 대학들에서 확고한 위치를 차지하고 있던 신학적 관심에 대한 도전이었다. 또한 산타야나가 '우아한 전통'이라 부른 것과의 명백한 단절을 의미했다. 이제 심리학은 정신과학이 아니라 실험과학이 되었으며, 철학은 동의(同意)의 문법을 익히기 위한 훈련이 아니라 방법론의 창출과 형이상학적 발견을 추구하는 모험이 되었다.

With his marriage in 1878, to Alice H. Gibbens of Cambridge, Mass., a new life began for James. The old neurasthenia practically disappeared. He went at his tasks with a zest and an energy of which his earlier record had given no hint. It was as if some deeper level of his being had been tapped: his life as an originative thinker began in earnest. He contracted to produce a textbook of psychology by 1880. But the work grew under his hand, and when it finally appeared in 1890, as The Principles of Psychology, it was not a textbook but a monumental work in two great volumes, from which the textbook was condensed two years later.

제임스는 1878년 매사추세츠 주 케임브리지에 사는 앨리스 H. 기븐스와의 결혼과 함께 새로운 인생을 맞았다. 신경쇠약증세도 없어졌으며 전에 느끼지 못했던 열정과 정력으로 일을 추진했다. 마치 그의 존재의 깊은 곳에서 무엇인가 고동치는 듯했다. 독창적인 사상가로서의 삶이 본격적으로 시작된 것이다. 그는 1880년 출판 예정으로 심리학 교과서를 집필하기로 계약했다. 그러나 이 책은 〈심리학 원리 The Principles of Psychology〉라는 제목으로 1890년에야 나왔으며, 교과서가 아니라 두터운 2권의 책으로 되어 있었다. 이 기념비적인 저작의 요약본이 2년 뒤에 출간되었다.

The Principles, which was recognized at once as both definitive and innovating in its field, established the functional point of view in psychology. It assimilated mental science to the biological disciplines and treated thinking and knowledge as instruments in the struggle to live. At one and the same time it made the fullest use of principles of psychophysics (the study of the effect of physical processes upon the mental processes of an organism) and defended, without embracing, free will.

Interest in religion

The Principles completed, James seems to have lost interest in the subject. Creator of the first U.S. demonstrational psychological laboratory, he disliked laboratory work and did not feel himself fitted for it. He liked best the adventure of free observation and reflection. Compared with the problems of philosophy and religion, psychology seemed to him "a nasty little subject" that he was glad to have done with. His studies, which were now of the nature and existence of God, the immortality of the soul, free will and determinism, the values of life, were empirical, not dialectical; James went directly to religious experience for the nature of God, to psychical research for survival after death, to fields of belief and action for free will and determinism. He was searching out these things, not arguing foregone conclusions. Having begun to teach ethics and religion in the late 1880s, his collaboration with the psychical researchers dated even earlier. Survival after death he ultimately concluded to be unproved; but the existence of divinity he held to be established by the record of the religious experience, viewing it as a plurality of saving powers, "a more of the same quality" as oneself, with which, in a crisis, one's personality can make saving contact. Freedom he found to be a certain looseness in the conjunction of things, so that what the future will be is not made inevitable by past history and present form; freedom, or chance, corresponds to Darwin's "spontaneous variations." These views were set forth in the period between 1893 and 1903 in various essays and lectures, afterward collected into works, of which the most notable is The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). During this decade, which may be correctly described as James's religious period, all of his studies were concerned with one aspect or another of the religious question. (see also Index: religion, philosophy of, parapsychological phenomenon)

종교에 대한 관심

〈심리학 원리〉가 완성되고 나자 심리학에 대한 제임스의 관심은 시들해졌다. 미국 최초의 심리 실험실의 창설자이면서도 실험 작업을 좋아하지 않았으며 자신이 그것에 적합하다고 생각하지도 않았다. 그는 자유로운 관찰과 반성을 가장 좋아했다. 그에게 심리학은 철학과 종교의 문제들과 비교해 볼 때 '보잘것없는 고약한 분야'였던 것 같다. 그런 분야를 그는 기꺼이 견뎌냈다. 신의 본성과 존재, 영혼불멸, 자유의지와 결정론, 인생의 가치 등에 대한 제임스의 연구는 사변적이 아니라 경험적이었다. 즉 그는 직접적으로 신의 본성에 대한 종교적 체험, 죽음 이후에도 살아남는 것에 대한 물리적 탐구, 자유의지와 결정론에 대한 믿음과 행동의 영역 등으로 나아갔다. 그는 기존의 결론들을 논한 것이 아니라 이러한 것들을 탐구했다. 그는 1880년대말에 윤리학과 종교학을 가르친 적이 있었으나, 심령연구가들과의 공동연구는 훨씬 이전으로 거슬러 올라간다. 그는 사후의 삶에 대해서 결국 그것은 입증되지 않는 것이라고 결론지었다. 그러나 신의 존재는 종교적 체험의 기록에 의해서 확증될 수 있다고 주장했다. 그는 신을 다수의 구원능력, 즉 어떤 개인 자신과 '동일한 성질 이상의 것'이라고 보았으며 개인의 인격은 위기에서 이 다수의 구원 능력, 즉 신과 접촉할 수 있다고 주장했다. 자유란 사물과의 연관 속에 있는 일종의 느슨함이며, 따라서 미래가 반드시 과거의 역사와 현재의 형태에 의해서 규정되는 것은 아니라고 생각했다. 그에게 자유 또는 우연이란 다윈의 '자연발생적 변이'에 상응하는 것이다. 이러한 견해는 1893~ 1903년 각종 글과 강의를 통해 제시되었고, 이는 뒷날 전집에 포함되었다. 가장 유명한 저작은 〈믿으려는 의지 The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy〉(1897)이다. 제임스의 종교적 시기라고 할 수 있는 이 10년 동안에 그의 모든 연구는 종교적 문제와 관련되어 있었다.

His natural interest in religion was reinforced by the practical stimulus of an invitation to give the Gifford Lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh. He was not able to deliver them until 1901-02, and their preparation focussed his labours for a number of years. His disability, involving his heart, was caused by prolonged effort and exposure during a vacation in the Adirondacks in 1898. A trip to Europe, which was to have taken up a sabbatical year away from university duties, turned into two years of invalidism. The Gifford Lectures were prepared during this distressful period. Published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), they had an even greater acclaim as a book than as articles. Cautious and tentative though it was, the rich concreteness of the material and the final summary of the evidence--that the varieties of religious experience point to the existence of specific and various reservoirs of consciousness-like energies with which we can make specific contact in times of trouble--touched something fundamental in the minds of religionists and at least provided them with apologetic material not in conflict with science and scientific method. The book was the culmination of James's interest in the psychology of religion.

Career in philosophy.

James now explicitly turned his attention to the ultimate philosophic problems that had been at least marginally present along with his other interests. Already in 1898, in a lecture at the University of California on philosophical conceptions and practical results, he had formulated the theory of method known as Pragmatism. Originating in the strict analysis of the logic of the sciences that had been made in the middle 1870s by Charles Sanders Peirce, the theory underwent in James's hands a transforming generalization. He showed how the meaning of any idea whatsoever--scientific, religious, philosophical, political, social, personal--can be found ultimately in nothing save in the succession of experiential consequences that it leads through and to; that truth and error, if they are within the reach of the mind at all, are identical with these consequences. Having made use of the pragmatic rule in his study of religious experience, he now turned it upon the ideas of change and chance, of freedom, variety, pluralism, and novelty, which, from the time he had read Renouvier, it had been his preoccupation to establish. He used the pragmatic rule in his polemic against monism and the "block universe," which held that all of reality is of one piece (cemented, as it were, together); and he used this rule against internal relations (i.e., the notion that you cannot have one thing without having everything), against all finalities, staticisms, and completenesses. His classes rang with the polemic against absolutes, and a new vitality flowed into the veins of American philosophers. Indeed, the historic controversy over Pragmatism saved the profession from iteration and dullness. (see also Index: metaphysics)

철학에서의 업적

제임스는 궁극적인 철학 문제로 관심을 돌렸다. 그는 그동안 부분적이기는 하지만, 철학 문제에도 줄곧 관심을 가져왔다. 1898년 캘리포니아대학교에서 행한 철학적 견해와 실제의 결과에 관한 강의에서 실용주의로 알려진 방법론을 정식화했다. 1870년대 중반 찰스 S. 퍼스가 수행한 과학의 논리에 대한 엄격한 분석에서 비롯된 이 방법론은 제임스의 손을 거쳐 새로운 모습으로 일반화되었다. 그는 어째서 어떤 관념(과학적·종교적·철학적·정치적·사회적·개인적이든)의 의미가 그 관념이 인도하는 계기적 실험결과 이외에는 궁극적으로 어떠한 것에서도 발견될 수 없는가를 밝혀냈다. 다시 말해 우리의 정신이 진리와 오류를 파악할 수 있다면, 진리와 오류는 이 실험 결과와 동일하다는 것을 보여주었다. 종교체험에 관한 연구에 실용주의의 규칙을 사용한 바 있던 그는 이제 그것을 변화와 우연, 자유, 다양성, 다원론, 참신함 등과 같은 관념들에 적용했다. 이 관념들은 그가 르누비에를 읽었을 때부터 확증하고자 했던 것들이었다. 실재하는 것은 1개(함께 뭉쳐 있는 1개)라고 주장하는 일원론과 '블록 우주'에 반대하는 논쟁에 이 르누비에 실용주의의 규칙을 사용했다. 그는 또한 내적 관계(모든 것을 갖지 않고서는 어떤 것도 가질 수 없다는 관념)에 대항해서, 그리고 최종성·정태성·완전성에 대항해서 그 규칙을 사용했다. 그의 강의실은 절대적인 것에 대한 논박의 목소리로 가득 찼고, 새로운 활력이 일단의 미국의 철학자들에게 스며들었다. 실로 실용주의를 둘러싼 논쟁은 이제까지의 반복과 타성으로부터 전문성을 되살려놓았다.

Meanwhile (1906), James had been asked to lecture at Stanford University, in California, and he experienced there the earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco. The same year he delivered the Lowell Lectures in Boston, afterward published as Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Various studies appeared--"Does Consciousness Exist?" "The Thing and Its Relations," "The Experience of Activity"--chiefly in The Journal of Philosophy; these were essays in the extension of the empirical and pragmatic method, which were collected after James's death and published as Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). The fundamental point of these writings is that the relations between things, holding them together or separating them, are at least as real as the things themselves; that their function is real; and that no hidden substrata are necessary to account for the clashes and coherences of the world. The Empiricism was radical because until this time even Empiricists believed in a metaphysical ground like the hidden turtle of Hindu mythology on whose back the cosmic elephant rode.

James was now the centre of a new life for philosophy in the English-speaking world. The continentals did not "get" Pragmatism; if its German opponents altogether misunderstood it, its Italian adherents--among them, of all people, the critic and devastating iconoclast Giovanni Papini--travestied it. In England it was championed by F.C.S. Schiller, in the United States by John Dewey and his school, in China by Hu Shih. In 1907 James gave his last course at Harvard. In the spring he repeated the lectures on Pragmatism at Columbia University. It was as if a new prophet had come; the lecture halls were as crowded on the last day as on the first, with people standing outside the door. Shortly afterward came an invitation to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford. These lectures, published in 1909 as A Pluralistic Universe, state, in a more systematic and less technical way than the Essays, the same essential positions. They present, in addition, certain religious overbeliefs of James's, which further thinking--if the implications of the posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy may be trusted--was to mitigate. These overbeliefs involve a panpsychistic interpretation of experience (one that ascribes a psychic aspect to all of nature) that goes beyond radical Empiricism and the pragmatic rule into conventional metaphysics.

Home again, James found himself working, against growing physical trouble, upon the material that was partially published after his death as Some Problems of Philosophy (1911). He also collected his occasional pieces in the controversy over Pragmatism and published them as The Meaning of Truth (1909). Finally, his physical discomfort exceeded even his remarkable voluntary endurance. After a fruitless trip to Europe in search of a cure, he returned, going straight to the country home in New Hampshire, where he died in 1910.

Significance and influence.

In psychology, James's work is of course dated, but it is dated as is Galileo's in physics or Charles Darwin's in biology because it is the originative matrix of the great variety of new developments that are the current vogue. In philosophy, his positive work is still prophetic. The world he argued for was soon reflected in the new physics, as diversely interpreted, with its resonances from Charles Peirce, particularly by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and the Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr--a world of events connected with one another by kinds of next-to-next relations, a world various, manifold, changeful, originating in chance, perpetuated by habits (that the scientist calls laws), and transformed by breaks, spontaneities, and freedoms. In human nature, James believed, these visible traits of the world are equally manifest. The real specific event is the individual, whose intervention in history gives it in each case a new and unexpected turn. But in history, as in nature, the continuous flux of change and chance transforms every being, invalidates every law, and alters every ideal.

의의와 영향

제임스의 의의와 영향을 평가하기에는 아직 너무 이르다. 심리학에서의 그의 업적은 오늘날 행해지고 있는 아주 다양한 새로운 발전의 기원이 되는 준칙이 되었기 때문에 물리학에서의 갈릴레오나 생물학에서의 다윈에 버금갈 만큼 확정적이다. 철학에서 그의 긍정적 업적은 아직 예언적이다. 그가 논의했던 세계는 찰스 퍼스의 반향과 함께 새로운 물리학에 곧바로 반영되었는데, 특히 알베르트 아인슈타인, 버트런드 러셀, 그리고 덴마크의 양자물리학자 닐스 보어 등에 의해서 다양하게 해석되었다. 같은 계열의 근접해 있는 관계들에 의해서 서로가 연관되어 있는 사건들의 세계, 다양하면서 다면적이고 가변적이며, 우연 속에서 생기고, 습성(과학자들은 법칙이라 부름)에 의해 영속화하고, 파괴, 자연발생, 자유에 의해 변화되는 세계 등의 세계해석이 그것이다. 제임스는 인간의 본성상 가시적인 세계의 이러한 특징들은 모두 똑같이 분명한 것이라고 생각했다. 실재의 특수한 사건은 개별적이며, 역사에 대한 개별적 개입은 어떤 경우나 그 사건에 새롭고 예기치 않은 전환을 가져다준다. 그러나 자연에서와 같이 역사에서는 연속적인 변화와 우연의 흐름이 모든 존재를 변형시키고 모든 법칙을 무효화하며 모든 이상을 바꾸어놓는다.

James lived his philosophy. It entered into the texture and rhythms of his rich and vivid literary style. It determined his attitude toward scientifically unaccepted therapies, such as Christian Science or mind cure, and repugnant ideals, such as militarism. It made him an anti-imperialist, a defender of the small, the variant, the unprecedented, the weak, wherever and whenever they appeared. His philosophy is too viable and subtle, too hedged, experiential, and tentative to have become the dogma of a school. It has functioned rather to implant the germs of new thought in others than to serve as a standard old system for others to repeat. (H.M.K.)

제임스는 자신의 철학으로 살았다. 그의 철학은 풍부하고 생생한 문체의 질감과 리듬 속에 들어 있다. 그의 철학은 크리스천 사이언스나 정신치료 등과 같은 과학적으로 용인되지 않은 치료법, 군국주의 같은 혐오스러운 이념에 대한 자신의 태도를 결정했다. 그는 자신의 철학을 통해 반제국주의자가 되었으며, 언제 어디서나 출현하는 작은 것, 기형적인 것, 예기치 못한 것, 약한 것에 대한 수호자가 되었다. 그의 철학은 너무나 변화무쌍하고 미묘하며, 지나치게 양다리를 걸치고 있을 뿐만 아니라 지나치게 실험적이고 일시적이어서 어떤 학파의 교의가 되었다고 할 수는 없다. 오히려 그의 철학은 다른 사람들이 반복하는 낡은 체계에 하나의 표준으로 봉사하기보다는 다른 사람들에게 새로운 사고의 씨앗을 심어주는 역할을 했다.

H. M. Kallen 글

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The best and most comprehensive biography, richly documented, is still Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vol. (1935, reprinted 1974). Other works of biography and criticism include Gay Wilson Allen, William James (1967), a sympathetic popularization; Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (1983), an appreciation; Daniel W. Bjork, The Compromised Scientist: William James in the Development of American Psychology (1983); Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (1986); Daniel W. Bjork, William James: The Center of His Vision (1988), including a lengthy bibliographic essay; and R.W.B. Lewis, The Jameses (1991), a study of the family.

• 저서
  • 프래그머티즘 외 : W. 제임스 외, 박경화 외 역, 신화사, 1983
  • The Writings of William James : William James, John J. McDermott (ed.), Random House, 1967
  • Some Problems of Philosophy：A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy : William James, Longmans, Green &Co., 1911
  • The Varieties of Religious Experience：A Study in Human Nature : William James, Modern Library, 1906
• 연구서
  • 현대철학사(신학총서 철학 1) : F. 코플스턴, 차원석 역, 가톨릭대학 출판부, 1990
  • 현대영미철학 : 에이킨, 정해창 편역, 대한교과서주식회사, 1987
  • 현대철학 : I. M. 보헨스키, 한규숙 역, 정음사, 1979
  • William James : Gay Wilson Allen, 1967
  • The Creative Mind : Henri Bergson, 1946
  • The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vol. : Ralph B. Perry, 1935
  • The Three Jameses : C. H. Grattan, 1932 (reprinted 1962)
  • La Philosophie de William James : T. Flournoy, 1911