§73. The Empirical Reality of Relations

Modern empiricisms tend to understand experience in terms of simple ideas or impressions, simple qualities of which consciousness is compounded. This mental atomism is a legacy of Ockham's ontology of absolute individ­uals (§29), rather than any specifically empiricist motivation.

In Principles of Psychology (1890) he criticizes the same empiricism that Green did, but where the Hegelian concludes that empiricism is farrago of outlandish fallacies, James thinks it has been gratuitously saddled with bad psychology. He rejects mental atomism and is still a good empiricist because the heart of empiricism is elsewhere, mental atomism being a legacy of nom­inalism, not empiricism. It was nominalists who insisted on the preeminence of the individual and the unreality of extra-mental relations, which were never themes of empirical philosophy in its first fifteen centuries.

James criticizes the mental-atomist account of relations. “Unable to lay their hands on any coarse feelings corresponding to the innumerable re­lations and forms of connection between the facts of the world, finding no named subjective modifications mirroring such relations, they have for the most part denied that feelings of relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone so far as to deny the reality of most relations out of the mind as well as in it.” Disavowal of real relations goes way back in philosophy (§30).

“Nominalism” is not one of James's words, and whatever he understood about it he gleaned from his friend and mentor, C. S. Pierce, for whom the baleful influence of nominalism vitiated modern philosophy. I find only a single allusion to nominalism in James when, writing in 1881, he refers to Ockham and “the knights of the razor.” Their malign negations have acquired prestige and authority. “I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our mental barbarism were beginning to be rather strong, and need some positive counteraction.”⁶

The gist ofnominalism is semantic reduction and its putative consequences for ontology. The ideal, the program, is that modes of being reduce to modes of logical syntax, with existence limited to absolute individuals, all else being just a way of talking, a mode of discourse, a conclusion Peirce found intoler­able. If nothing apart from individuals exists, then nothing in what the sci­ences class together makes them belong together. Their consistency is merely our forgetfulness of their inconsistency, the togetherness being all our doing, determined by convenience, and ontologically fictional. Take this idea seri­ously and it is difficult to think of natural science as an objective theory of na­ture. In Ockham's day there was no such science, but by Peirce's time natural science had become a fact of modern life which philosophy must acknowl­edge with an adjusted ontology.

What Peirce called “the Ockhamistic prejudice” is the idea that “in thought, in being, and in development the indefinite is due to a degeneration from a primary state of perfect definiteness.” Something indefinite, like a ge­neral term or universal concept, is held to arise by abstraction, and does not exist in things, in reality, only ideally or intentionally. The truth, Peirce says, is the reverse. “The unsettled is the primal state,” while “definiteness and de­terminateness, the two poles of settledness, are, in the large, approximations, developmentally, epistemologically, and metaphysically........ All the evolu­

tion we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite. The indeterminate future becomes the irrevocable past.” Nominalism disallows this; it cannot happen in nature, only with words in imagination.⁷

Peirce's Scotist realism retrieves the idea from Duns Scotus of real qualities as real accidents in the category of quality, fundamental features of reality that are qualitative in being neither relational, existing apart from their subjects, nor quantitative, hence not reducible to motion. Returning to this long-forgotten theory, Peirce deposes nominalism’s absolute individual and unfolds an ontology of generality, capacity, potency, and tendency in nature, which scientific laws adumbrate. Peirce calls them habits, a usage that does not presume vitality but only tendency. “The stream of water that wears a bed for itself is forming a habit.” Any object of scientific inquiry, indeed, any thing at all, “is a cluster or habit of reactions,” a “center of forces,” where “center” means tendency, and “tendency” means virtual, potential, not present or actual.⁸

Peirce is at this point close to Bergson and the concept of virtual existence (§79). James sought a way of his own to think through Peirce’s discontent with modern empiricism. Medieval logic not being his style or competence, he joins the opposition in psychology, scoffing at “the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley,” the “ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objec­tive qualities are revealed to our knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not.” He rejects the notion of the simple idea, the mental atom.

Consciousness “never shrinks to the dimensions of a glow-worm spark. The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or re­mote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.” Relations are as empirical as any impression, being given to experience as feelings, which intend not terms but their connections. “We cognize relations through feeling,” he says, it being the nature of feeling to take in many, to paint many with one emotional tone. James finds “a feeling of and, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by” these feelings of relation being “con- substantial with our feelings or thoughts of the terms ‘between’ which they obtain.” He cites several earlier psychologists making the same point, then draws his conclusion. “So surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natura, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known.”⁹

Ockham introduced mental atomism because psychical items cannot be any less absolute individuals than anything else. Simple concepts receive signification one by one on the basis of intuitive acts that trigger their for­mation in advance of application in a proposition. Having absorbed late- medieval nominalism, modern empiricists consistently disallow real relations, while advocates of real relation tend to be antagonistic to empir­icism. Real relations are what real definitions, the goal of classical science, make explicit. Understand the real definition and you can unfold all the re­lations of the reality it comprehends, including its causes and effects forward and backward in time.

The alternative to an internal relation is an external relation. Relations are external where, despite empirical evidence of relation, no logical analysis of the terms discovers it in their concept, the relation being contingent, an acci­dent, but also a fact. James advances an unexpected argument about relations. Most philosophers who think relations are real (e.g., Leibniz) also think they are internal to their terms, whereas most who think they are external to their terms (e.g., Ockham, Hume) also think they are not real but fictive mental intentions without actual counterpart in the nature of things. Now James says that relations are (or can be) real, extra-mental, yet also external, that is, really relating really different terms, and discerned only with experience, not folded up in the relata for logical analysis to uncover. Such relations are felt consistencies and continuities or interruptions in the stream of experience, and no less indicative of empirical reality than other perceptions.

Hans Blumenberg observes Locke and Hume to reoccupy the position of the subject of theoretical observation in Aristotle. The theoretician is at rest and everything moves around him. Aristotle did not take his concept of time from an agent’s practical need to act, expressing instead the position of a disinterested onlooker at a spectacle. Science requires that we settle our­selves and let the world come to us without the disruption of activity. “For it is by the soul coming to a standstill from the natural turbulence that some­thing becomes understanding or knowing.” Locke and Hume adopt the same stance toward their different objects, sensory ideas.

James replaces a contemplative present with the time of action, and this orientation on practice diminishes the appeal of immediacy, of the “now.” For an agent, “now” is typically a phase in a process, not a finality, with prac­tice introducing duration into the given. “The practically cognized present is no knife-edge,” James said; it is “a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.” This is consistent with his theory of external relations. If external relations are empirically real and empirically cognized, then duration must be real and cognized too, for only duration—an interpenetrating succession without separation—can endure through time and make really different items consistent, continuous, and empirically, effectively, even nomologi- cally connected. Peirce expressed this point with penetration. “Continuity and generality [are] two names for the same absence of distinction of individuals.”¹²

Philosophical thought about relations long stumbled over subject­predicate logic and substance-attribute ontology. Relations are not individ­uals, not terms, not substances, or accidents of a substance. If an absolute individual is the standard, relations must seem scarcely real, through the problem comes from trying to think about something temporal in timeless terms. Relations, empirically real relations, are continuities and durations. They do not timelessly “exist,” “hold,” or “obtain”; they endure and endow their terms with duration’s continuity, which is what “being related” is. Endowing relations with empirical reality dilutes the exclusive share for­merly enjoyed by nominalism’s absolute individuals. If empirical relations are real, then so is duration, and terms themselves have to be relational and enduring. “The concrete pulses of experience... run into one another con­tinuously and seem to interpenetrate. What in them is relation and what is matter related [i.e., term] is hard to discern.”¹³

Empiricism thus reconfigured overcomes a notorious refutation of rela­tions that may have originated in Islamic philosophy but had been forcefully articulated in James’s time by F. H. Bradley. If relation is real and different from its terms, then it has to be related to those terms, requiring a new rela­tion, and with that yet another relation, and so on, reducing the concept of relation to absurdity. “The problem,” Bradley said, “is to find how the relation can stand to its qualities; and this problem is insoluble.” Hence his conclusion that nothing in the experience of relations is true.¹⁴

Basically this argument says, relations are not individuals; but everything is individual; therefore relations do not exist. It is no less logical for Peirce and James to conclude that since not everything is individual, empirically real re­lations are admissible. The ontology of real external relation shatters absolute individuality, which becomes instead a matter of degree and a quality of pro­cess, not the primitive unity of a simple term. The relation is the temporal fact of their continuity, and we do not require another relation to relate a relation to its terms. The terms come to be (externally) related; the relation arises with their empirical becoming, not their individual being. What makes them re­lated is not natural self-identity or essence, but a contingent yet no less effec­tive history. Becoming related is more fundamental than being related.

James's theory of relations destroys nominalism in psychology and implic­itly everywhere in philosophy. External, extra-mental relations are not abso­lute individuals, and their empirical reality means that nature is not a world of such individuals, as Ockham deduced and Hume presupposed. This whole argument about relations plays out in the early Principles of Psychology, and though it is a radical departure in empiricism it did not occur to James to de­scribe it as radical empiricism. However, when he begins to use this term, the argument about relations from Principles accounts for most of what is radical about it.

A precis of radical empiricism appears in The Meaning of Truth (1909), where James explains that it is first of all a postulate—properly debatable is­sues in philosophy should be defined in terms drawn from experience—to which he adds what he calls a statement of fact, and that turns out to be the theory of relations from Principles. The fact is that relations among things, conjunctive and disjunctive, are as empirically real as their terms. Finally, radical empiricism is a conclusion to be drawn from that fact, which is that parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The “directly apprehended universe” requires “no extraneous trans-empirical support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.” In other words, a duration, an immanent endurance. Where modern, nominalistic empiricism cannot fail to accentuate disjunction and neglect conjunction, James's more con­sistently empirical empiricism promises to be “fair to both the unity and the disconnection.”¹⁵

The new theory of relations is also consistent with James's pluralism. Really external relations imply an original multiplicity in nature, a multiplicity that is not merely the multiplication of a monad but an aboriginal manyness. While things “are ‘with' one another” in many ways, “nothing includes every­thing, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and' trails along, after every sentence. Something always escapes.” This is pluralism, but it is also radical empiricism. “Radical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things may never actually be experienced or realized in any shape at all, and that a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance is the only form that reality may yet have achieved.”¹⁶

This is the empirical world of poets, in love with particularity, “everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’ ” James was probably unaware of radical empiricism’s Epicurean pedigree, though Deleuze sees it, and his epitome of Epicurus’s natural philosophy cannot fail to recall James. “Nature is not attributive but rather conjunctive: it expresses itself through ‘and’ and not through ‘is.’ This and that—alternations and entwinings, resemblances and differences, attractions and distractions, nuance and abruptness.” Nature for the Epicurean is a sum without finality, no combination encompassing all of nature all at once. There is no total universe, no absolute. Epicureans criticize monism (the regime of internal relations) as a superstition of which philosophers are the victim. It is mystifying, false, an obsessive (Nietzsche would say decadent) conviction of predetermination. For Epicurus, there is no Being or One or Whole, no Deus sive natura, only many bodies, var­iously corrupt and porous. Everything that we experience “is formed out of connections, densities, shocks, encounters, concurrences, and motions.” That sounds like James, but it was Lucretius.¹⁷