Illuminating a Life of Truths

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

The philosopher George Santayana once declared that William James’ “way of thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultramodern, radical world.” Yet, who today—apart from perhaps a few professional philosophers and a handful of graduate students—reads William James or recalls him as the premier American philosopher?

Robert Richardson, the award-winning biographer of Thoreau and Emerson, sets out to remedy this situation in this masterful intellectual biography. He draws less on the day-to-day details of James' life and more on nuanced, in-depth critical readings of James’ rich psychological, philosophical and religious writings.

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin; $30) is a sure-footed tour of James’ lively intellect. The biographer gives us three central reasons to reacquaint ourselves with the Harvard professor who lived from 1842 to 1910 and was the brother of novelist Henry. “First, as a medical doctor and a laboratory-based, experimental physiologist and psychologist, he was a major force in developing the modern concept of consciousness.” In the young field of psychology, James described consciousness as an unceasing flow of impressions, coining the term “stream of consciousness” in his first book, The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.

We should also remember William James as a figure who made “philosophy interesting to everybody” through his accessible writing and his views about where truth can be found in the world. He is “famous as one of the great figures in the movement called pragmatism, which is the belief that truth . . . must work for you and it must not contravene any known facts.”

Finally, Richardson reminds us that we need to remember James as the author of one of the founding texts of the modern study of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902: “James's point is that religious authority resides not in bibles, inherited creeds, or authoritative figures but in the actual religious experience of individuals.” This pioneering book offers an especially rich portrait of religious conversion, one that inspired the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Although Richardson chronicles the more pedestrian facts of James’ life—his relationships with his famous family, his doomed early love of a young woman who died before he could marry her, his eventual marriage to Alice Howe Gibbens and his friendships with philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce—his brilliant readings of James’ writings make this book worth attending to all 620 pages.

We read philosophy in vain if we merely toss it aside and it doesn’t help us in our lives, James argued, a point that Richardson enhances by focusing anew on James’ work. This fine, readable biography should illuminate the way for a new generation to pick up and ponder William James’ luminous prose and groundbreaking ideas.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it