William James and the rhetoric of popular philosophy

Inspired by a resurgence of interest in pragmatism, recent literary theorists have begun appreciatively rereading William James. Although some works of James answer readily to the linguistic, social and political concerns of these admirers, the full scope of his career reveals other concerns as well, which change from text to text and from audience to audience. An analysis of James\u27s writings thus benefits from attention to the rhetorical considerations which influenced his work. Immediately obvious after such a review is the divergence between James\u27s technical works addressed to professional philosophers and the popular lectures and essays he offered general audiences. The technical and popular works promote two strikingly different versions of pragmatism, and imply two opposed assumptions about literary function. To his colleagues James speaks of pragmatism in terms of the mirroring of objects by ideas; in popular discourse James emphasizes the subjective and instrumental character of verification. Accordingly, James\u27s objective in his technical works is to communicate what he termed knowledge about philosophy, while he invites the audiences of the popular writings to appropriate acquaintance with whatever experiences lead to practical consequences. The Principles of Psychology and The Meaning of Truth address a limited community of inquirers by means of special concepts and vocabularies. A work like Pragmatism, while directed toward a broader community, still conveys primarily a knowledge about philosophical and religious ideas. In The Energies of Men and The Gospel of Relaxation, however, James frankly relinquishes his text to therapeutic application by individuals. I thus perceive some relevance of reader-response theories to James\u27s popular rhetoric, although the discourse he produces, in its resemblances to numerous practical manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, might best be conceived of as initiating a dialogic or a hermeneutics of self-help. When generated under the auspices of an institution, as were James\u27s popular writings, self-help discourse produces inevitable anxieties. One current site of such anxieties is the composition classroom, where students attempt to accommodate individual projects to institutional expectations. For participants in this conflict, James\u27s career and writings remain exemplary and instructive