Abstract
This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science (in particular biology and medicine) and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology.
Highlights
James and anthropologyMax Scheler, the initiator of philosophical anthropology in the twentieth century, follows William James in employing the term radical empiricism as the title for his approach to epistemology
Scheler is key contributor to philosophical anthropology in its classical phase in the twentieth century, but Kant’s Anthropology is one of at least twenty books published in the last decades of the eighteenth century with anthropology in the title
These often practically-oriented writings by philosophers and medics such as Ernst Platner, Gottfried Immanuel Wenzel, Karl Heinrich Pölitz, and Johann Karl Wezel offer a hybrid discourse comprising elements of popular philosophy, physiognomy, and psychology, which aim in part to address the perceived failure of abstract, a priori and logically constructed approaches to philosophy to either give access to absolute knowledge or guide us in more everyday questions of knowledge and action
Summary
Max Scheler, the initiator of philosophical anthropology in the twentieth century, follows William James in employing the term radical empiricism as the title for his approach to epistemology (see Scheler 1973, 138). James’s antipathy to the separations that he sees as necessitating such ‘transexperiential forms’ is expressed in various ways: firstly, in terms of meaning as an active process, such as his reference to an ‘active element in all consciousness, [...] a spiritual something [...] which seems to go out to meet these qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it.’ (James 1890 I, 285, original italics) Likewise he asks, ‘[w]hy insist that knowing is a static relation out of time when it practically seems so much a function of our active life?’ (James 1912, 75) He contends that ‘this activity of meaning formation goes on in the world where meaning comes into being It can be studied as it is directly experienced, described and analysed.’ (Wild 1969, 233) Secondly, it is expressed in terms of what we might call the ‘worldly’ quality of experience, as in the above characterisation of meaning formation as ‘go[ing] on in the world’. It is a hope that may be approximated by historical effort and struggle.’ (Wild 1969, 52)
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