Episode 179: William James’s Introspective Psychology (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: I'm fine.

0:00 Wes: Sure. Okay.

0:03 Dylan: That's a rousing endorsement.

0:06 Wes: That's pretty good.

0:08 Mark: So we are segueing into talk about the self.

0:11 Wes: Well, no, we were going to finish up this chapter actually.

0:14 Mark: All right, so before we actually jump to the self chapter, I mean, there's

0:18 Wes: too much that's so good in this. And to begin with, I wanted to mention this distinction between the substantive and transitive states of mind where he's sort of thinking that there's a rhythm to language. It's like we're. There are flights and perchings is another metaphor he uses. Or there's the sentence and then there's the closure in a period. And the resting places we could just think of as the typical types of ideas that psychology is traditionally concentrated on, like the experience of blue or something like that. Some sort of sensorial imagining, as he puts it.

But the places of flight are really the relations between those ideas and sort of the structure of the whole thing. And in language, we might think of the places of flight as all the syntactic stuff that goes on, including, as he explicitly mentioned, just to read a quote, we ought to say a feeling of. And. And a feeling of. If a feeling of. But. And a feeling of by quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. So he wants to get at the sense in which there's the structure or syntactic part of the stream of consciousness, these transitive parts which we don't normally acknowledge because it's not as obvious as the feeling of cold or something like that, but which still is part of our stream of consciousness and has an actual feeling to it, which.

1:32 Mark: As much as I want to applaud him for his general point that there are things about experience that we don't pay attention to because they don't have names. It's very hard for us to focus on things like. I think that's a deep, insightful point. The exact way that he puts it in terms of there should be a feeling that corresponds to the feeling of. And. Or. But. Or something like that, I think is probably wrong for kind of Wittgensteinian reasons that really the sentence is the unit. There's no reason to think the feelings would correspond to the elements of the sentence, etc.

2:02 Wes: You don't think there's a feeling that. So the difference. When you create a compound sentence and you say, I took the dog for a walk or something like and it was raining outside. Or but it was raining outside. Something like. It's not a great example. But obviously there are different meanings there for And. And. But. Right. But is trying to create a contrast of some sort. Don't you think that corresponds to a kind of feeling that goes along with that? It's not just a purely cognitive thing. Yeah.

2:28 Dylan: In fact, it's a way of trying to talk about the conjunction of those two thoughts and experiences. He's pointing to that anchoring of that unity. And that experience is distinct from them individually as a sum, as a heap. They're connectives. Yes. Relations.

2:45 Wes: Yeah. And. And. But constitute two different relations between what we're connecting, what we're conjoining.

2:51 Mark: Right.

2:51 Wes: And there are two different feelings that go along with him is. I think that's the thing that you're not necessarily.

2:56 Mark: Because as he Says himself. The fact that you can logically dissect the thing that you're thinking about into various components. Yes, the grammar includes an and or a but. And we can say exactly how those are different. That doesn't mean a good analysis of the experience would be to divide up this singular experience I have of thinking the whole sentence into the feeling that I have of thinking the and part. And the feeling that I have of thinking the different elements like that is exactly what he argues against at great length. That compounds.

3:26 Wes: We're not talking about conceptual analysis here. He's not saying that our conceptual analysis is reducible to those feelings, but there's still those feelings. It's not that we can analyze the meaning of the sentence in terms of what and feels like or what but feels like, but that doesn't mitigate against the fact that those feelings are still there.

3:43 Mark: Well, as we've said, the feelings, every single experience is different. So even the feeling of thinking one sentence and thinking the same sentence later are not going to be the same feeling. So talking about the feeling of but.

3:57 Wes: But they still fall within groupings and kinds. And, you know, the feeling of being cold this time is always different than last time. But that doesn't mean that there's not a general feeling of being cold, that they're not all alike in some important. The same thing you could do with.

4:13 Mark: And those substantives are things that we can meditate on. Whereas the if ness of things like we would be translating it no longer thinking the if as it appeared in a sentence like that, but like thinking about uncertainty, thinking about the condition, we'd be creating a noun out of it. We would not actually be recreating it.

4:30 Wes: Stay tuned for Mark's forthcoming book, the if Ness of Now.

4:34 Mark: Anyway, I'm being picky, but yeah, I

4:36 Dylan: think you're being too picky, Mark. I really do.

4:41 Wes: I thought that was important just because even though I was thinking of that as part of the fringe, which is not precisely right, but it sort of leads into that. Right. The next section is on the fringe, where there's the transitive states. He wanted to kind of tease that out, give us more than the substantive states, the perchings that most people concentrate on in psychology. But then there are what he calls other unnamed modifications which constitute what he calls the fringe. So, for instance, an attitude of expectancy that accompanies someone saying wait or hark or look.

And three different sort of kinds of that. One corresponding to wait, one to hark, and one to look. The other example he uses is Trying to recall a forgotten name, right? There's a weird. It's like Meno's paradox. In a strange way, to be able to try and search for the name, we have to in some sense know it. And if someone throws names at us, we can say, no, it's not that. And we feel like it's on the tip of our tongue or something like that. That's a really interesting. This is one of these fringe states where it's not like we simply have this.

We don't possess the name. We don't not possess a name. It's somewhere in between that and calls it a gap that's intensely active. And in that gap there's the wraith of a name, to use his metaphor.

5:49 Dylan: He says later that I thought this was a great way of characterizing what he's doing here. And one of the great virtues of it, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life, is what I'm so anxious to press on the attention. So this discussion about the feeling of and. And if. And that kind of thing. And then the discussion of the fringe and what that is, which then leads directly into how you pay attention to one thing or another. And the fact that our paying attention and pulling things out of the world is actually pulling a very small sliver of things out of all, all of the paths there are to be thinking about in the world is to really remind us about how much vagueness and inarticulateness there is in our mental life.

And to him, that's contrary to people like Hume and Berkeley and this idea of having very fixed objects in our experience and meditating on those. He wants to really talk about the fact that we just have a lot of vague and inarticulate stuff going on.

6:50 Wes: It's also anti imagistic in a way reminiscent of. Of Wittgenstein and Dennett. Even so, with Wittgenstein we saw that our use of concepts is not defined by anything imagistic. And even when we're reading or when we're using language, if we really were to pay attention to what we're doing when we use the word giraffe or lots of other different words like that, it's not that an image of the giraffe comes up in our minds. And our ability to use that is not predicated on connection to something definite to an image or to a substantive image. To really understand how language works and some of the stuff that James is talking about, how it works, you have to appeal to the concept of potentiality.

Right. You're able to use the word giraffe because you possess the ability to put it in the right place in a bunch of different sentences to use it properly. You have a grasp of all the different potentialities of that word and the places it would go. And that's your, in a sense, comprehension of the meaning of that. It appeals not to one of the perching places, but into something inarticulate in the sense that it's sort of concatenation of potentialities. So he even talks about what is it to have the intention to say something. It's not like we rehearse in our head what we're about to say.

And we can imagine it. You know, we imagine the words and what they would sound like and all that. It has nothing to do with it. We don't have any of that. It all comes out spontaneously. And we even sometimes surprise ourselves with what we say, even though we have that. That intention. So he's still working here against a very simple type of psychology in which the substantive prevails over the connective tissue of things. And the things that happen at the edge of awareness, let's say, which are far more important to our psychological life, I think, than he thinks.

I think a lot of psychologists understand, or would like to admit.

8:33 Mark: But he explains why we focus on the substantive. He has some diagrams in here. The one of, as far as communication is concerned, or even thinking is concerned, the conclusion that you get to, the thing that you can actually articulate is the important thing. And it's just that if you have two people solving the same math problem, say, in terms of what's actually psychologically going on in their head, could be quite a few different things. So this diagram just has the beginning and the end point. And then four different lines that are, like, careening.

Some people take a lot of jerky little steps to get there. And some people more or less go in a straight line. And that we're just overlooking the difference between people's thought patterns and just focusing on the substantive. And you can certainly think about just the chain of association in people's minds are very different. For an easy way to think about that, you know, if you're trying to have somebody, like, guess a pun. Even if you both got to the right answer, like, how many different weird things are you trying. And you're kind of, by a pun, you're looking for pronunciation connections between all sorts of different words.

And you and I are going to probably have different ones, are Going to be more obvious, more frequent, come more readily to mind. So, like, that would be a clear case in which, unless it's a really obvious pun, there's going to be some difference. If we were to write down the individual hypotheses we tried before we came to the right answer, we'd probably have a different list. Seemed a better example than a math problem, which probably we are taught a method of solving. And it might be more or less the same. But even in something with rules like that.

What's actually going on in the mind. As we sort of go from rule to rule to rule, is going to be quite different, of course.

10:11 Wes: So just to wrap up the fringe part of this. Just because I think it's important that we read this quote where he sort of tells us what it is. But he says what must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology. Form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. And then moving down. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations near and remote. The dying echo of whence it came to us. The dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it. So let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the image. By the name of psychic overtone or fringe.

10:58 Dylan: I guess it's the last section. He moves on from the aspect of the fringe that we're steeped in many different paths that each individual consciousness would get from here to there. That we actually are more interested in one part of an object than another. We welcome and reject and choose, all the while thinking. So we have this ubiquity of distinctions between this and that here and there, then and now, in our minds. That result in laying out a selective emphasis on parts and places in time. But we do far more than emphasize things and unite some and keep others apart.

We actually ignore most of the things before us. So he goes on to articulate this. That even though we. Again, emphasizing, on the one hand that we speak in terms of substantives and in terms of individual objects. What we end up doing in our experience is actually excluding way more than we end up pulling in. And that our mental experience and our mental interaction with the world. Is primarily one of excluding. Excluding individual things. And grabbing hold of far fewer specific things than are actually there. And he says this unity, harmony, convergence of characters which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature is wholly due to elimination.

So he links this up, this process of elimination with the way in which we. Is like a kind of an aesthetic determination that gives rationality to the world. I mean, he just makes all these great jumps.

12:34 Mark: Well, I'm wondering, since the press of that initial segue to the self has rather passed us by, I think we might segue just as well to what I think is the richer chapter of the two that are left is habit. In terms of what we were just talking about, in terms of associations. And why my mind would jump in a different way than your mind. Well, why was the associationist school. Why is that a goofy way to think about psychology? Well, because it's fairly uninformative. It doesn't really say why one thought consistently leads to another kind of thought.

And he thought that psychology could do better than that. That's one of the many things in this chapter on habit. He, interestingly, even tries to associate habit. It's almost like he's using that instead of the wor telos. He kind of starts off the whole chapter talking about, we might say, the habits of elementary particles to spin this way or that way or. That's a strange way of talking about elementary particles. Well, we don't talk about them that way because habits in organic stuff, we talk about developing a habit. It's not just instinct.

So, yeah, Seth, do you want to start us on habit?

13:41 Seth: So the phenomena of habit in living beings is due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed. He says in the same way that performing the same physical actions, for example, making coffee or swinging a golf club or driving a car, that by doing them over and over again, you essentially burn pathways, neurological pathways and muscle memory pathways that shift you. They develop expertise, which is what we typically think of when we talk about muscle memory. It's a certain competency in performing the act. But for him, it also signals a transition from conscious attention to unconscious attention.

The point he makes about habit, which I think is fairly profound, is that human beings couldn't function without habit because they couldn't function if they had to apply conscious attention to all of the things that we do during the course of even a regular day, in an uneventful, normal day. We breathe, we walk, we get up, we brush our teeth, we make coffee, we eat, we do all these things. And if doing all of those activities required conscious attention of the sort that we apply when we're doing something new or unknown, or we're in a circumstance which is unfamiliar, we would be unable to cope with all that energy expenditure and the conscious stimulation.

So habit is not just it's a way that human beings function, but it's also in some sense, the foundation of society. It's a foundation of our ability to function as human beings. And it's the foundation of society. And presumably, even though we didn't read the chapter on memory, it's the thing that makes the employment of memory possible. Because if we had to be totally present, applying our conscious selves to work out challenges every minute of every day, we wouldn't have the luxury of being able to call upon memory to repeat habitual things or to store the repeated experiences.

In essence, you know, it's like that memento memory somehow saves us from being like the guy in memento, which would be a tragic and horrible existence. So he concludes and doesn't conclude, but he kind of shifts by saying, given that this is the way of things that we see with physical exertions and childhood behaviors, because consciousness is determined by the brain, we should expect that it's not just physical activities, but also habits. Mental states follow the same pattern that you get burned into ruts or you have certain patterns of behavior and thought processes that are burned into your mind.

And it's much easier when you're younger and more pliable. And as you get older, you become stiffer and less pliable. So he has a number of brilliant quotes, which I threw out on Twitter, about how we should strive while we're young to inculcate positive and virtuous habits because we're going to be stuck with them for the rest of our lives.

17:13 Mark: So it's interesting that this chapter is before the stream of consciousness chapter that we're just talking about. That's because the basic structure of the book is to kind of go, at least in the principles as initially conceived. You know, he's got all these quite long chapter about the brain after the intro, before he even gets around to any of the things we've talked about here. And likewise, in the briefer course he has, he kind of works his way up through the senses. So he's kind of getting more and more to discussions that require talk of consciousness. So this is really the habit one is kind of. He's no longer doing introspective psychology. He's doing phenomenology, broadly construed in terms of. Yeah, this really lines up with my experience. But clearly animals have habits, and he even Again, wants to extend the metaphor to individual particles.

18:04 Wes: Well, yeah, the laws of nature are nothing but the immutable habits from which different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other. And I think it's not just meant to be metaphorical. Right. It forms the physical basis by which plasticity is out there in nature and non organic nature as well. But in the organic world we're especially plastic in this sense, and so we're especially susceptible to being able to develop different sorts of habits. The whole laws of nature thing is really a fascinating beginning to a chapter on habit. The habits, of course, of the atom cannot change, but once you get to compounds, you get this possibility of changing habits.

18:40 Dylan: But in that way, he wants to understand a law of nature as being a kind of asymptotic habit.

18:47 Mark: He's kind of making the Humean point that we're really talking about patterns. And that's why it's not so weird to talk about habit as law of nature, because all it just means is a regularity that we observe.

18:59 Wes: We're talking about changing the structure of something fundamentally. Right. So that's why he talks about compounds and how you change their chemical properties by combining atoms into different molecules. They behave in different ways now. So the habit is a structural thing and it's sort of, I think he's trying to reinforce. The point of the foundation of habit is really the structure of your brain, the different pathways that have been laid down in your brain such that energy is going to tend to move along them in different ways.

19:30 Mark: Well, so yeah, he's got this proto neurological language of nerve impulses that the only impressions that can be made upon us are through our brains, are through the blood on the one hand, and through the sensory nerve roots on the other. It is to the infinitely attenuated currents that pour in through these latter channels that the hemispherical cortex shows itself to be so peculiarly susceptible. The currents, once in, must find a way out. In getting out, they leave their traces in the paths which they take. The only thing that they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones.

And the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words, when we call it an organ, in which currents pouring in from the sense organs make with extreme facility paths which do not entirely disappear. The kind of language he's using, yeah, you could translate this sort of into modern neurological talk, but the idea that a current comes in and it has to get out somehow, like, no, that's not. I'M going to charitably say that this is not a serious attempt at a neurological description. And that this is a functional description. That we can think of the input output as if we are getting a certain amount of energy that needs to be released in some way.

And so the rest of this. He's using a metaphor, which is very much, I like the fact that we just did this thing on the economy and trying to think about it as the economy, like the action of hydraulics. And he specifically, I think, quoting this guy named Carpenter, uses this hydraulic language. A path once traversed by a nerve current might be expected to follow the law of most paths that we know. And to be scooped out and to be made more permeable than before. This ought to be repeated with each new passage of the current. Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from being a path should then little by little and more and more be swept out of the way until at last it might become a natural drainage channel.

So I don't know that he's committed to something exactly like that really happening in the brain on a neural level.

21:26 Wes: So on a neurological level, just to say this, it actually is not that far off. Like, when you have a memory, you are basically increasing the likelihood of discharge along a certain pathway or the rate of discharge. And any given experience, it produces electrical impulses moving in your brain. Fundamentally, it makes those changes. So he's not wrong, in a way, to think of those impulses as sort of carving out pathways. In a real sense, they do when they produce memories.

21:58 Mark: But it's not just the sort of law of conservation of energy sort of thing like.

22:02 Wes: No, the immediate discharge thing is not like it has to find a way out. It's, of course, not true.

22:07 Mark: Yeah.

22:07 Wes: I mean, for me, the value. The talk about plasticity is really interesting. And he has a very specific way that he talks about it. He says it means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. So each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we call a new set of habits. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort. If we were to think of ourselves as like, on a analogy to certain kinds of elements or materials in nature that have certain kinds of properties.

Really, the fascinating thing is that we can be. There's such a fine degree of detail to our structure, and it's so responsive. But not just responsive in the sense that we just obliterated by all the inputs and influences that come from around us, but they get incorporated into us in this really interesting way that changes our properties. We're like these elements where our properties are constantly. Instead of being fixed, like as with water or gold, you could say they're constantly being changed by the environment around us. It's such a fascinating idea in comparison to me.

So the downside of habit is just the. We can have bad habits and we can even. It's easy to be habituated in a direction that is completely pathological. So he even talks about diseases of the nervous system which their sole reason for existence is simply that the pathways have been laid down. And it's so hard to re. Habituate yourself out of those existing pathways. This chapter actually reads almost like a self help thing.

23:48 Dylan: One that would be written right now, right?

23:50 Wes: Yeah. How do you change your habits? He actually has good advice.

23:55 Seth: This one kind of struck a nerve with me because I have kind of an ongoing struggle with my wife where I'm the guy who always puts my glasses and my phone and my keys and my wallet in the same place. And I get up the same time every day and the first, you know, I get the coffee, I walk the dogs. Like I'm very much a creature of happiness and routine. And for me, what that means is I don't waste any cognitive energy on like, I never lose my phone, I never lose my phone, I never lose my keys, I never wonder where these things are. And I never have to go looking around the house.

But my wife four times a day says, honey, can you call my phone? Can you tell me. Because she just puts stuff down wherever she happens to be and she doesn't. He doesn't have that same habituation. So this idea that a habit relieves you from conscious cognitive activity around things makes a lot of sense to me. And his admonition that we should early on strive to build habits which are useful. The idea that habit is almost like a tool, that your own habitual action is something that you can consciously put into place in order to alleviate suffering, drama and wasted energy down the road makes a lot of it seems very sensible to me.

And I know that even though he has criticisms of Hume in the Stream of Consciousness chapter on the subject of distinct ideas, there's a philosophy of habit, maybe a psychology and not a philosophy at this point, but there's a thread in Western intellectual thought about habit and its critical importance in the way that we function as human beings. And the end of the chapter he talks, at least so to qualify, I read the principles version of habit and not the short course.

26:00 Mark: They're exactly the same.

26:01 Seth: I figured. It seems like in general they're exactly the same. But he talks about the ethics of habit and this notion that if most of what we do is habitual and isn't at the level of conscious thought, what are the implications for ethics? And he sort of raises it, and then it feels like it just sort of goes by without extensive comment before he goes on to other topics. But I think that's a rich vein that could have been mined. And perhaps is mind in some other location that I'm not aware of in his writing.

26:35 Wes: So as far as the importance of habit goes, there's a lot of places in the book where he talks about character. And of course, habit is one of these ways in which we build a certain kind of character. I mean, our character, in a way, is just sort of the sum of all those different dispositions that we have. So he says, habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society. Its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.

Reminds me of Nietzsche talking about with workers and letting them be satisfied with their existence. Rather than talking to them about rights and things like that. It keeps the fisherman and the deckhand at sea through the winter. It holds the miner in his darkness and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the moments of snow. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice. And to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees. Because there is no other for which we are fitted.

And it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing and so on and so on.

27:51 Mark: Russ Roberts asks, do the Idahoans wake up early to make the potatoes send to New York out of love or out of self interest? Neither, according to William James. Out of habit. Out of habit. Whether they're personal habit or my father was a farmer, it's not something. Even if you were rationally pursuing your self interest, that is not necessarily something you would end up with. It's that we slide into things.

28:19 Wes: The amount of energy to change ourselves is enormous.

28:23 Seth: Yeah. By the time you're a rational agent, which is somewhere on the order of 25. If we're to believe the current biological, psycho, whatever, that human Brains don't fully form until you're in your mid-20s and all that. The habits that you have are going to be determined well before that. By the time you're a teenager, most of the dispositions you'll have and the way in which you'll comport yourself in the world will be determined. And then you have a choice. You can, in your adult life live those things out and maybe that's exactly what you want and you're happy, or maybe there are the things that you don't want, but you don't have the will to change and so you have resentment and anger or maybe you fight against them your adult life. It's a grim but ultimately probably fairly accurate view of things.

29:17 Mark: James distinguishes between habits in the professional area, which are established more or less in our twenties, and habits in the personal area, which are earlier than that. In terms of falling into a certain profession, people hopefully do not develop their habits.

29:33 Wes: I think he gives us until 30. It says by the age of 30 the character is set like plaster and will never soften again.

29:40 Dylan: You just have to get it wet.

29:41 Wes: It is obviously true that yes, it's very hard to change character and habit, but it's not impossible. And he does give it some advice on changing habits, including going cold turkey and surrounding ourselves with the right support system, including the environment, circumstances that encourage the right habits and. And never suffering an exception till the new habit is securely rooted, and all kinds of good practical advice on how to do all that stuff. So it's obviously not impossible. And we probably all know from experience it's not impossible, but difficult.

30:15 Seth: Just out of curiosity, is anybody here versed enough in James's biography to be able to say whether he was a hypocritical bastard like Thoreau or did he actually go cold turkey and changed habits and lived his life according to these? Is he just an observer of human nature?

30:35 Mark: I don't know.

30:35 Wes: I think of him because he can write a 1400 page book or whatever it is originally. I think of him as someone who has at least some good.

30:44 Mark: He seemed to be a virtuous, consistent kind of guy.

30:47 Wes: Productive, at least very productive. He got lucky in the. The things that impress themselves on his organic plastic nature. But there's elsewhere where he talks about the sense in which our. In the chapter we were discussing before on the stream of consciousness, at an ethical level, when he's talking about selective attention, when we choose to pay attention to one thing over another, there's a sort of pregnancy to that. It can be. There's a momentousness to all of that, because each new experience that we're creating for ourselves, we're really choosing between.

So his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. So it reminded me of existentialism a little bit in the sense in which we ought to think of our actions. We tend to think of our actions, especially if we have some bad habit. We say, well, okay, just this once, and then the diet starts tomorrow. Is what my friend Lebec and I used to say all the time. The diet starts tomorrow. But of course, with each new action, it's not just an isolated thing. You're building a person.

And thinking of it that way is maybe that's another way to encourage.

32:01 Mark: Every donut you stuff in your mouth, you are literally building a person.

32:05 Wes: Yeah, of course. Every experience. It's not even just that you mark just choosing to listen to one indie band over another, to devote that hour or whatever to that. You've gone along a different timeline in your choose your own adventure story. And those are two different marks. Of course, one specific decision doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference, but all that stuff accumulates. And what lays before us is an infinite number of different possible selves. And what we do, for better and for worse, is a choice between those things.

32:39 Mark: And the important clarification that James adds to all this is that it's not necessarily. You might object to Sartre saying, well, you freely chose all this stuff. Like, no, I didn't freely choose all this stuff. James is saying, yeah, of course, only insofar as we are consciously selecting something, we actually say we're making a choice. But the fact that by habit, without thinking, we continue to do these things like that has just as much psychological effect. That is just that, in fact, there are many more instances of that that go up to building the person than conscious choices.

And you could point to you must have made a choice that set you on this road in the first place. And there is something true about that. And that's kind of, I think, the Aristotelian point that, you know, maybe is why James doesn't go on and on about the ethical implications here, because he's kind of pointing at this whole ancient tradition that he was very much well aware of that we've talked about on, like, our Aristotle on Incontinence episode where I might not be able to blame you for the kind of bastard you are right now, but maybe I could blame you for Taking the first steps towards bastardry long ago.

33:45 Dylan: Yeah. And getting the right education being it. Whether the education that's done to you or the education you give yourself so you can make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy.

33:55 Wes: The habit of excessive novel reading and theater going will produce true monsters.

34:02 Seth: It's also an interesting point in the sense that I don't know how prevalent and deep seated the American narrative was at the time of James and the concept of American exceptionalism and the whole Horatio Alger success story. This America, we embrace certain philosophers as American philosophers and pragmatists in particular, we like to think of as a uniquely American movement and that it ties in with this narrative that we have as a country of not just exceptionalism, but also this idea that people can overcome their circumstances of birth to become rich, famous, whatever. And it's an interesting nod by James to basically say, well, no, actually you can't, or it's extremely difficult to do so. He's not reinforcing that common American narrative with his analysis of habit.

35:06 Mark: And Alger is 1832 to 1899. So yeah, that probably was in the intellectual climate there.

35:12 Seth: I'm sure.

35:13 Wes: I'm sure physical study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter of which theology tells is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Just lots of great stuff like that in this chapter. Hell is bad habits.

35:37 Seth: Hell is in other people. It's your addiction to Cheetos.

35:41 Wes: We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

35:45 Mark: I like this specific directive about effort. Right. Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points. Do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand a test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return.

But if a fire does come, his having paid it will be a salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition and self denial in unnecessary things, he will stand like a tower and everything rocks around him when his softer fellow mortals are Winnowed like chaff in the blast.

36:38 Wes: Little dramatic there, James, but he's right, by the way.

36:41 Seth: I think that's why I walk the dogs and pick up the poop every day.

36:47 Wes: There's a sense in which you can become. You can get into a mode where you're just doing, especially in today's society and with smartphones and just everything that's so easily available to us that we can constantly do to please ourselves or distract ourselves. It's almost like our boundary between ourselves and any sort of stimuli in the world that might produce movement might elicit us to do something, like a piece of cake or whatever is broken down and just the act of. Even when it doesn't even matter. Just saying, I'm not going to do this. That exercise of notness, of being able to say no to things, you reinforce the sense that there's some distance between you and every little impulse, and it's empowering. So I say that as someone who's struggled with a lot of bad habits,

37:39 Seth: and yet my dogs do not respond positively. Irregularity. So maybe it's a uniquely human thing.

37:47 Dylan: Wait, you said they do not respond positively to regularity or irregularity.

37:51 Seth: Irregularity. Irregularity, yeah.

37:54 Dylan: So they like habits.

37:56 Seth: They like habit.

37:57 Mark: They don't respect weekends. Bastard animals.

38:01 Seth: That's true. They do not seize the first possible

38:05 Mark: opportunity to act on every resolution you make and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to give. So I like that. It's a terrible habit to get in. Like, as a songwriter, if I get the idea for a song, but then just let it pass. That's a terrible habit to get in. You need to get it down. You might not feel like it later. So, like, take advantage of the moments of inspiration that you have.

38:32 Seth: That's interesting to talk about being a songwriter in this context, Mark. I mean, somehow I don't know if it's accidental or consciously. Been thinking about and encountering David Bowie quite a bit recently. And, you know, if you want to talk about models of people who did not, you think of a lot of bands and they start off and they establish something, and then their career is a series of footnotes to that original thing. And then you think about Paul Simon or David Bowie, Paul McCartney, who are constantly reinventing themselves by being willing to expose themselves, to break those habits and to try something.

The Beatles as a group and the Beach Boys even. And that. That kind of being willing to say, let's do something different, let's challenge those habits of Being music is in a certain sense a really great illustration, maybe an archetypal version of that, or I should say where that the contrast is obvious and extreme between those who can and those who can't.

39:35 Mark: Well, the thing is, like, being even a prolific songwriter doesn't actually take like a full time job. If you actually are as your full time job, like these Nashville guys and spend four hours a day or whatever writing songs, like, you'd be ridiculously prolific. And that's like, I heard Neil Young talk about like writing a song every day. I don't know if that's really true. So there are definitely folks that have that. But then there are a lot of people with long illustrious careers that are very much not like that. Very much. Like inspiration has to strike me and I will just sit back and maybe I won't even put an album for five years because it's just I'm not in the mode or I don't have to share it with you anymore. The Peter Gabriel way, probably.

40:19 Seth: Yeah, no, I'm not talking necessarily about being prolific. I'm talking about producing different kinds of music. Like, I live in Austin, right. We love Willie, you know, and Willie's written 2,500 songs.

40:31 Wes: Willie Nelson, I think, is what Seth said.

40:33 Dylan: Yes.

40:33 Seth: Sorry. Nobody's gonna pretend like nobody's gonna say that Willie Nelson has a diverse musical sound. Like he's not in the way that, for example, David Bowie, who worked with Luther Vandross and had let's Dance and Ziggy Stardust. I mean, you know, those are just all over the map musically and culturally and visually and experience. And that's somebody who was not tied to their habits or maybe had cultivated the habit of being ahabitual early on.

41:05 Dylan: It makes me think that actually it was being good at changing habits, at least in terms of focusing and ingraining oneself on another piece of music. But I wonder if it involved a different way of daily being or not.

41:21 Wes: So we're talking about a tension between being creative and then having the habit of hard work. And I think those two things actually are intentioned. Right. It's nice to be in a routine and you get a lot done that way. But to be able to do that, and David Bowie and all these people too, they have tremendous work ethics. I mean, that's. If you read about any of these guys, it's that the work ethic always stands out. But yeah, to be able to have that ethic and also not simply go into a creative rut, I think is what's really interesting, because the two things really do work against each other in a way.

41:57 Dylan: Yeah. I know that it varies almost by as many authors or writers as there are. But that theme of having a tremendous work ethic also often goes together, I think, with throwing out a lot. You have writers who's like, I write for four hours every day. I get up, I have my cup of coffee. I write in the morning for four hours and then I'm done. Or another version is, I write three pages every day. But for most people like that, they end up then getting rid of a lot of it. Now, there are going to be exceptions. I'm sure that there are writers that just. There's very little revision.

42:32 Mark: Stephen King publishes every word that he writes.

42:34 Dylan: Yeah, that kind of thing.

42:36 Seth: Well, yeah. And I guess what I was trying to get at, I certainly all of these people have tremendous work ethics. I'm thinking in terms of not habit in terms of work ethic, but habit in terms of something around the creative process. So imagine the hard work. But, you know, somebody like Prince, who wasn't tied to a particular genre of music, right. Who was an omnivore as far as musical taste and influences and created music, was able to be adaptable. So I guess the idea I'm thinking about as habit as it relates to adaptability in the creative process and not so much the commitment to the hard work. All of these people are so subject

43:19 Wes: yourself to a lot of influences. So that seems to be not being

43:22 Seth: habitually tied to a particular beat, rhythm, meter, musical note, genre.

43:29 Wes: I mean, as James points out, your habits are sort of a function of all these pathways carved into you by experiences. So. So that's one way to stay creative, is to subject yourself to as many different, say, in this case, musical influences as possible, and somehow they get concatenated within you.

43:46 Dylan: I'm thinking that there's something different going on in this case. Right. I mean, it may be that there are ways to feed that. That are part of a habit. There are ways to feed that creativity. To have things that you do every day or that you have a habit of. Of recognizing that, oh, I've been doing the same thing for a long time, so I ought to change it up as a matter of principle kind of thing. But the way James talks about this, and we'll talk about it more, I think, in the next episode, about attention is a characteristic here, and he speaks of, like, in the case of geniuses, is that they pay attention to a lot of different things and are able to pay attention to.

To Things in a very, very deep and focused way. And so it's that ability to be captured by a variety of things that's going on, which sounds a little bit different than habit. And like I said, there might be a way that you can fuel that ability to pay attention and be captured by other things, but that itself doesn't sound like a habit. It sounds like a different kind of psychological activity.

44:54 Mark: So I do want to claim a link to between the stylistic variation and the work ethic kind of thing that I think that the folks that take as their life actually have a really good work ethic about whether creating any kind of stuff, their style is more continuous. Maybe part of their method is, as we're saying, like, I'm going to go listen to some different kind of music that I haven't heard before. I'm going to try a different thing. But the fact that it's sort of doing this that consistently says something to the body of work in a way that somebody who's really kind of relying on inspiration or I'm going to wait until I have something to say.

I mean, just think of how different the Tractatus, Wittgenstein's Tractatus versus his investigations were, that he's not necessarily a guy who is probably like William James getting up and writing in a steady way to then create this continuous body of work that at least I haven't read enough of.

45:53 Dylan: Wittgenstein, he surely kept journals, right?

45:56 Mark: Even Nietzsche, you know, Nietzsche writes a lot, but is very much, as we are saying because of his medical condition, has a very different dynamic in the way that he is writing in terms of. He's not like, I'm going to produce three pages a day. Like it's going to. I'm going to write furiously for a week straight, then I'm going to pass it out.

46:15 Wes: Yeah, I'm going to write a book this week that it's more thinking of

46:18 Mark: things in terms of projects. And if you think of things in terms of projects, not in terms of this is the way that I sculpt my life so that it is one ongoing routine of habit. If it's no I'm going to really try to remake myself, then I think that really is more akin to not having as steady habits. And this is something. I took Nietzsche very seriously when he said, pay attention to the wisdom of the body. And I use that as an excuse to I don't want to stand around at a job for this long or I don't even want to work hard athletically necessarily.

If I'm not feeling it. So I feel like James, I was really reading James as a very helpful clarification of some of the points that Nietzsche makes that Nietzsche on the one hand says pay attention to the wisdom of the body. Which probably would tell you if you're standing around doing a boring job, just stop it. But it would also he emphasizes the need to discipline yourself. He's not ascetic. He would not say what James is saying here of try being ascetic on unnecessary points every day to build in yourself a habit of asceticism. That doesn't sound like something Nietzsche would say, but maybe actually he would if Nietzsche thought about it.

47:31 Wes: No, I mean there is even in Twilight of the Idols, remember he was talking about the importance of being able to resist an impulse, you know?

47:40 Mark: Uh huh, exactly.

47:41 Wes: And all that stuff. So there's a larger meaning to the word ascetic for Nietzsche that that's a complicated issue. And I think Nietzsche acknowledged the importance of the kind of asceticism that James is pointing to. Just the ability to say no and to put limits on what you do. And all that stuff which James's is

47:57 Mark: looking like the Ben Franklin kind of self regulation that you just don't see in Nietzsche.

48:02 Seth: Well, Nietzsche's the adult resistance against the youthful habits.

48:07 Wes: Nietzsche is talking about maximizing the expression of a character type. Right. But there are higher and lesser character types. So yes, you want to let go, you want to be overflowing, you want to be who you are but be the right person first.

48:22 Seth: What could be more habitual than the slave morality, than the cultural norms that he chafed against? Yeah, he was chafing. He was fighting against habit because it's,

48:37 Wes: you know, in a sense when he's fighting against ressentiment and the effects of moralization within the society, he's fighting against the easiest thing that you can do, which is to that is in a way the path of least resistance. Right. And moralism. And it's a kind of conformity and it's a kind of succumbing to one's worst instincts, you might argue. So yeah, I think you're right, Seth. So I take it we're going to be doing the self and will next time. Right. Should we wrap up because I'm tired.

49:08 Mark: I guess so. So we're going to have a whole second discussion on this book because we just like it so much. We didn't talk about the self, we wanted to talk about the will. We wanted to talk about attention and emotions and whatever else people feel like looking over. I'm at least going to try to see in outline what he thinks about memory based on this discussion. But yeah, folks can look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com upcoming which will say exactly what we will have read for the next episode. But I'm glad we didn't just quote that. We finally got around toward the end here to relating to real life. You almost don't have to do that with a lot of because he's talking directly about real life. It's very non theoretical.

49:51 Seth: I wanted to listen to this because I wasn't in a position to sit down and read for a good portion of the last couple weeks and I was trying to listen. There is no Audible book or Librivox version of Principles of Psychology. So if we love his writing and his quotes so much, maybe I should do a Librivox reading or of Principles

50:16 Dylan: of psychology for, well, 1200 pages.

50:20 Seth: Yeah, sure, why not?

50:21 Mark: Let's set aside the next four months for that. The very first when I started doing audiobooks little somebody had on the Audible site they pitch projects and so somebody had pitched this Santayana autobiography that I own and I initially said yeah, I'll do that. And I actually got chosen for it and then I started looking like that the whole reason was it was somebody had taken a public domain text, written his own crappy introductions to the chapters. I was going to then spend six months reading this fat ass book and get half the royalties based on this guy having put three days of time into writing these intros and kind of initiating the project.

So I begged out. I did not do that. But these yes, somebody should produce a professional version, an audiobook of the Principles of Psychology. I agree. I like to imagine do I wish we had some recordings of him. I'd like to imagine what he sounds like. I kind of am picturing the Skipper from Gilligan or perhaps Wilford Brimley from his beard. There are many choices. One could fill one's imagination with perhaps a good Burgess Meredith.

51:36 Seth: Burgess Meredith?

51:38 Wes: Really?

51:41 Mark: He's not that intense. Join in the discussion with us. Go to our Facebook group. Go to our blog partialexaminedlife.com There are many options to say hello. Our closing song today is a blooming buzzing confusion called Drowning Mind Parentheses Feedback Overload by Amp from their brand new album Q Factors, a mixtape. I interviewed Richard Amp about it it for Nakedly examined music episode 57. Please see nakedlyexaminemusic.com to hear that. Good night everybody.

52:14 Seth: Good night.

52:14 Wes: Good night. Sam.

52:57 Mark: Us come

53:01 Wes: new light with some new some new light with some. New light with some of your light.

53:23 Mark: It. Sa.

54:14 Wes: Down. And. Jump high.

57:38 Mark: You

57:40 Wes: get, you get, you. Forget.

58:04 Mark: Sa.