William James’ Agential Realism
William James, in his 1904 APA presidential address on “The Experience of Activity” (later reprinted in his Essays In Radical Empiricism), defined activity as “the bare fact of event or change” (161). Thus, the human experience is always marked by activity, as, even in observing an “otherwise inactive world”, “our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thing experienced there in the form of something come to pass” (161). This is to say, for James, the human and the range of human experiences are implicitly a part of the world, and the perception of those experiences (through the human capacity for self-reflexivity) are understood as changes to the world itself.
So for James, then, the question is less about locating, in the world, where agency “comes from”, because, as he points out, “each partial process, to him who lives through it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to an observer with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and the subjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objective activities that led far beyond” (173). That is to say, any specific point along a causal chain, while perhaps accountable to its own limited role within the larger network of causality, is never exclusively accountable, but rather entangled. Thus, the question for James is more productively put as follows: “What practical difference does it make if, instead of saying naively that ‘I’ am active now delivering this address, I say that a wider thinker is active, or that certain ideas are active, to that certain nerve-cells are active in producing the result?” (176). Ultimately, that is, James is searching for the practical import of these “halting-places”, where we can at least provisionally locate a discrete, goal-oriented actor.
In this sense, James’ notion of activity has, perhaps, less to do with assigning blame and more to do with clarifying why the world is experienced as it is: When I accidentally use my rent money to buy rare books over the internet, we would probably be unsatisfied if I tried to explain that, actually, my actions were rooted in my subjection to the neoliberal pressure to define myself through consumption, and therefore I can’t really be responsible. Similarly, I can’t imagine being able to pin this situation on an errant string of neurons that predetermined my actions. For James the appeals to both macroscopic ideological structures and the more basic firing of neurons encapsulates the “old dispute” between materialism and teleology: is the world produced through “elementary short-span actions summing themselves ‘blindly,’ or far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act” (179). He suggests that even while we naively believe that the world functions on some balance between both (and this still seems to be basically true), thus far we’ve been unable to produce a rigorous account of this precarious agential balancing act between micro- and macroscopic phenomena. As he observes, “how to represent clearly the modus operandi of such steering of small tendencies by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate upon for many years to come” (179).
Crucially, though, while James doesn’t have a direct answer to this problem, he does know where we should be directing our focus: “The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, but these elements things, or be they conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome in the world process, and in the meaning of the succession stages with the elements work out” (186–87). For James, the answer to “where effectuation in this world is located” (186) can not be revealed through exclusive examination of discrete parts (which serve only as “halting-places” for agential orientation) but rather in the dynamic entanglement of the system as a whole.
