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Pragmatism and Anthropology

William James’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence

Christian Frigerio

Abstract

The ontological turn is one of the most debated issues in contemporary anthropology, but what it means for anthropology to become ontological is rarely made clear. Bruno Latour’s suggestion that anthropology should revolve around “modes of existence” is arguably the most robust proposal to date, but the connection between modes of existence and properly anthropological concerns remains obscure. This paper argues that William James is a key figure for getting a better understanding of what ontology and modes of existence mean, and that in particular “The Perception of Reality” – chapter XXI of the second volume of the Principles of Psychology – offers many possibilities for linking a framework centered on human being-in-the-world, such as anthropology, with properly metaphysical concerns. In this paper, the content of “The Perception of Reality” is summarized, and James’s proposal to ground modes of existence on belief is discussed, to show how, once we are clear about what we mean by “ontology,” anthropology can (and should) engage in metaphysical debates in order to make its stakes explicit. The conclusion suggests that James’s grounding of modes of existence on individual belief can compensate for ontological anthropology’s tendency to erase the internal differences of a collective in order to speak of a supposedly unified and homogeneous “cosmology.”

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1. Introduction: Anthropology, Modes of Existence, and William James

1One of the most distinctive and controversial features of much contemporary anthropology is that it is gone ontological. The basic insight behind the “ontological turn” is that each “culture” should be studied in the terms of its “cosmology,” i.e. the kinds of beings to which it is committed. The ethnocentric idea of a uniform “Nature” as the background to cultural differences is abandoned: “multiculturalism” is replaced by “multinaturalism” (Viveiros de Castro 1996), the assumption that there are as many different natures as there are cultures.

2However, the “Neo-Copernican claim that other people’s worlds do not revolve around ours” (Bessire & Bond 2014: 440) leaves the meaning of the adjective “ontological” obscure. If this adjective is to have any meaning, then anthropology must look beyond human ways of “being-in-the-world”; but for anthropology to remain such, ontology must remain internally related to such being-in-the-world, and this is why most anthropologists are unwilling to engage with ontology in the traditional philosophical sense (Heywood 2012; Maniglier 2014). Among the proposals for clarifying what ontology means for anthropologists, arguably the most robust has been Bruno Latour’s framing of ontology in terms of “modes of existence.” Latour did not see the ontological turn as a significant issue because, for him, anthropology has always been about ontology (Latour 2014, 2015). In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012/2013), the “work which goes furthest in blurring the boundary between philosophy and anthropology” (Charbonnier, Salmon & Skafish 2017: 17), Latour defines modes of existence – a concept taken from the French philosophers Étienne Souriau (1943) and Gilbert Simondon (1958/2017) – not as different “domains,” but as ways in which “actors” move or pass through, relate to and affect each other. Through this concept, he conveys the idea that being is not univocal, and that once we are done with Nature, the ground is cleared for new and unprecedented kinds of entities. In particular, Latour is concerned with providing the pars construens of We have never been modern (Latour 1991). While in that work he attacked the category of Modernity, i.e. the belief that practices such as Science draw a distinction in kind between “our” collective and “amodern” collectives, the Inquiry provides an alternative “anthropology of the Moderns” (this is the subtitle of the book) by distinguishing fifteen modes of existence that should allow the (former) Moderns to give an account of their practices that, unlike the one based on univocal Nature, enables them to engage in a diplomatic activity with other collectives.

3The “modes-of-existence account” of what ontology means allows the adjective “ontological” to be taken seriously without obliterating the heterogeneity of the ways of worldmaking, which is why it has become standard in the wake of Latour’s Inquiry and has been endorsed by figures such as Philippe Descola (2014a) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2016). The central idea is that “the roots of human diversity must be sought at [the level] of the differences between the basic inferences humans draw about the kinds of beings that populate the world and the way these beings are linked to one another” (Descola 2014b/2024: 111). Thus

[…] by revealing the many ways of worldmaking, the ontological turn forces us to accept the reality of ontological pluralism, of pluralities of premises and practices, and the need to allow different ways of being, different modes of existence, the right to formulate in their own terms how they might interact with others. (Gille 2017: 322)

4However, it is still not clear how this view of ontology relates to the properly anthropological concerns of those interested in it. Markus Gabriel has noted that philosophers of modes of existence “do not dedicate much attention to the concept of a ‘mode of existence’ itself” (Gabriel 2015: 172). This is all the more true for anthropologists. Latour’s definition of modes of existence does not explain what it means for a collective to be committed to certain kinds of entities. What is the relationship between a “cosmology” and the practices that characterize a collective? How can modes of existence be distinguished from one another? Can we erase the social, sexual, economic differences within a collective, in order to define a general “ontology” that characterizes it?

5In short, the very concept of “mode of existence” that should have clarified the meaning of ontological talk is not at all clear when used by anthropologists. Formal reflection on the meaning of modes of existence is needed, and anthropology should engage in ontological debates about what this concept means if it is to make its stakes explicit. This is the general claim that underlies this paper. While making a significant contribution to these debates is well beyond our scope, this paper also defends a more specific claim: that William James is a key figure if one is to get a better understanding of what it means that there are modes of existence, and that a rediscovery of some of his insights could contribute to an anthropological understanding of ontology.

  • 1 Against the “rather enucleated” version of pragmatism proposed by Rorty and Putnam, Latour urges a (...)
  • 2 The derivation of “reference” from James’s “deambulatory knowledge” is explicit in Latour 2007a; se (...)

6While James lacked the anthropological sensibility that would become popular in the twentieth century, no one insisted more strongly on some ideas that have become part of the toolkit of contemporary anthropology. Latour came to know James through the work of Isabelle Stengers and David Lapoujade, and in time came to identify himself as a pragmatist and to see pragmatism’s attention to experience as anticipating the ontological turn.1 In fact, his Inquiry is “the most deeply Jamesian of Latour’s books” (Hennion 2018: 9). Not only are two of Latour’s modes – reference and habit – explicitly derived from James,2 but there are at least three Jamesian insights that Latour makes central to it. First, his pluralistic universe. Against the monistic view of the world as an absolute unity, James appeals to “the legitimacy of the notion of some: each part of the world is in some way connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts, and the ways can be discriminated” (James 1910: 36). Second, radical empiricism, which asserts that “an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” and that, in contrast to classical empiricism, relations are directly experienced (James 1912: 42). Latour conveys this “second empiricism” with the motto “nothing but experience, but nothing less than experience” (Latour 2012: xxv), meaning that everything we experience must be given a proper mode of existence.

7Finally, the form taken by experienced relations is a conjunctive or prepositional form: “We ought to say a feeling of 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” (James 1890a: 245-6). The relevance of prepositions characterizes many speculative thinkers of this kind. Souriau (1943: 174) takes up James’s idea to develop a genuine “grammar of existence,” and another of Latour’s heroes, Michel Serres (2003), has sketched out the project of a comprehensive prepositional metaphysics: the world is relationally constituted, and prepositions are the grammatical rendering of these relations. Latour takes this idea with the utmost seriousness by making “preposition” a mode of existence and modelling his “regimes of enunciation” on James’s insistence on the conjunctive nature of being. Prepositions exist in themselves as a kind of “meta-mode” that accounts for the difference between all other modes by dictating the “trajectories” they must follow.

  • 3 Whitehead is important for Latour’s Inquiry, particularly for his attack on the modern “bifurcation (...)
  • 4 The credit goes in particular to Isabelle Stengers. Although James is not always mentioned, his con (...)
  • 5 The second volume of the Principles of Psychology (James 1890b/2019) is henceforth referred to as P (...)
  • 6 The only exception, to my knowledge, is Kevin Mulligan 2019. The reason for this neglect is probabl (...)

8“From James to Latour, we find the same critical diagnosis of the categories of modern thought, the same vision of a reduction of the plurality of worlds to a single abstract sphere, and the same need to provide a critical evaluation” (Debaise 2023: 410-1). James, however, has much more to contribute to our understanding of what “mode of existence” means than the dictation of this general tone of the Inquiry. Our choice of James, rather than other key figures such as Souriau or Alfred N. Whitehead,3 stems from the fact that James has been quite influential in contemporary anthropology,4 and that unleashing the potentialities to be found in a familiar author seems a promising strategy if one wants to push anthropology to be more reflective about the use of “ontology” and “modes of existence.” In particular, this paper focuses on “The Perception of Reality,” the twenty-first chapter of the second volume of the Principles of Psychology (1890)5 and the most explicitly philosophical of the whole work. While books such as A Pluralistic Universe or the Essays in Radical Empiricism are often cited, the way in which the Principles anticipated many insights about modes of existence remains unrecognized.6 Some of the insights that James develops there – for example, the discussion of Kant’s view that existence is not a predicate, which James endorses and modifies according to the position that being is plural – were genuine metaphysical breakthroughs. This will be the occasion to do justice to a text that has much to contribute to our philosophical understanding of “what there is.” But it is from an anthropological point of view that “The Perception of Reality” bears the most relevant potentialities, since it seeks to account for the solidarity between the human ways of being-in-the-world and the way the world itself is divided into many modes. In short, James maintains an internal relationship between his disciplinary field, psychology, and philosophy, and from this point of view he is in a situation similar to that of ontological anthropologists. The fact that he moves from psychology to philosophy through the plurivocity of being shows that the concept of “mode of existence” needs to be clarified in this passage.

9More specifically, there are three insights into the relationship between ontology and human being-in-the-world that James develops in “The Perception of Reality.” First, modes of existence are made dependent on belief. The importance of this concept is demonstrated by the fact that “The Perception of Reality” was first published in 1889 as “The Psychology of Belief.” The change of title is revealing. James could have chosen a simpler title such as Belief, which would have also been more in keeping with the other chapters of the Principles. Instead, the reference to “reality” shows that he is consciously moving from psychology to ontology, with a metaphysical attentiveness from which contemporary anthropology has much to learn.

10The second is James’s insistence on the genetic differentiation of modes of existence. “The Perception of Reality” can be seen as a kind of pragmatist rewriting of the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology, a thought experiment explaining how our sense of what is real gradually emerges from an initially undifferentiated ground. The result is an understanding of “ontology” that is much more dynamic than the classical one, and that might defuse protests against talking about ontology in anthropology.

11Finally, James’s account of modes of existence is based on individual belief. This is due to his interest in psychology, but it also reflects the ethical and political insights that he will develop in his mature philosophical works. On the one hand, this puts him at odds with the anthropological use of modes of existence to denote the way in which collectives relate to the world. On the other hand, it should make it possible to compensate for one of the main problems of ontological anthropology: the danger of erasing the internal differences of the collective. No collective is so homogeneous that it can be spoken of as if it were a single person. Many differences that affect the political impact of anthropology are ignored. If the concept of mode of existence is to be consistent, “endo-pluralism” and intra-collective differences must be taken into account alongside “exo-pluralism” and inter-collective differences.

12If anthropology is to become ontological, it has much to learn from this text in psychology from one hundred and thirty years ago. This paper summarizes the content of “The Perception of Reality” and mentions the subsequent development of James’s pluralism of modes of existence. It then assesses some of the problems raised by the decision to ground the sense of reality in belief. The confrontation with possible criticisms coming from both philosophers and anthropologists shows that, once a definition of modes of existence is found, it can be debated and confronted with alternatives in order to seek cooperative improvement. Anthropology should not be afraid to engage in metaphysical debates, especially if it wishes to maintain its specificity, rather than being absorbed into pure metaphysics.

13Finally, the paper reassesses that “The Perception of Reality” remains necessary for understanding James’s pluralism of modes of existence and his possible contribution to ontological anthropology, although James himself did not consider its upshots definitive. Formally, James shows that the transition from psychology to metaphysics cannot be made without clarifying the concept of “mode of existence.” Materially, the key difference between psychological and anthropological accounts of modes of existence – the former grounding ontology in individual beliefs, the latter in collective “cosmologies” – can also serve to prevent ontological anthropology from repeating domination and colonization by obscuring socially and politically relevant differences.

2. “The Perception of Reality”: A Psychologist’s Breakthrough in Metaphysics

14The chapter on “The Perception of Reality” in the Principles of Psychology is actually about belief, a fundamental concept in pragmatism. James defines belief as “the sense of reality” (PP2: 286), the “psychic attitude” we reserve for things we hold to be real. As a rule, however, our belief attaches itself to any idea that comes to our mind: “we believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we only could” (PP2: 298). If our attention is absorbed by a candle, then we cannot help taking that candle as “absolutely” real; the content of the dream is the absolute reality while we are asleep. Only a different, stronger belief can dispel this instinctive belief: “The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only come, then, when that thing is contradicted by some other thing of which we think. Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality” (PP2: 288-9).

15This does not mean that everything exists in some kind of flat, undifferentiated reality. James guards against “category mistakes” by raising sensitivity to modal differences: “A dream-candle has existence true enough; but not the same existence (existence for itself, namely, or extra mentem meam) which the candles of waking perception have. A dream-horse has wings; but then neither horse nor wings are the same with any horses or wings known to memory” (PP2: 290). The fact that the ultimate reality of some objects excludes that of others, without the disbelieved things disappearing, leads to a pluralism of modes of existence in which the things that remain in the background still exist, but in a different way from what we take to be actual: they “still have existence, though not the same existence, as the real things. As objects of fancy, as errors, as occupants of dreamland, etc., they are in their way as indefeasible parts of life, as undeniable features of the Universe, as the realities are in their way” (PP2: 291).

16“The total world of which the philosophers must take account is thus composed of the realities plus the fancies and illusions” (ibid.). There are many “sub-universes” within the world, and James lists the most important ones: the world of sense, that of science, that of ideal relations, the “supernatural” world of myth and art, the worlds of individual and collective error, of abstract or ideal reality, of opinion and of sheer madness. Every idea has an object that is real in one of these worlds: “Every object we think of gets at last referred to one world or another of this or of some similar list. […] Propositions concerning the different worlds are made from ‘different points of view’ […] Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion” (PP2: 293; italics added).

17Because of the connection between the concept of belief and that of reality, the subject is enabled to make an active contribution to the definition of “what there is.” James’s enrichment of ontology is rooted in individuality: “reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life […] The fons et origo of all reality, whether form the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves” (PP2: 296). The self is the “hook,” the “supporting branch” (PP2: 311) on which all reality hangs, transmitting its reality to all that relates to it. The following passage deserves to be quoted at length:

Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point – first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related with these. It only fails when the connecting thread is lost. A whole system may be real, if it only hang to our Ego by one immediately stinging term. But what contradicts any such stinging term, even though it be another stinging term itself, is either not believed, or only believed after settlement of the dispute. We thus reach the important conclusion that our own reality, that sense of our own life which we at every moment possess, is the ultimate of ultimates for our belief […] The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term. That is the hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support. And as from a painted hook it has been said the one can only hang a painted chin, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain can properly be hung. Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt. Whatever things fail to establish this connection are things which are practically no better for me than if they existed not at all. (PP2: 297-8)

18At first sight, this subjectivism runs the risk of depriving the idea of “reality” of any specificity: “in the strict and ultimate sense of the word existence, everything which can be thought of at all exists as some sort of object, whether mythical object, individual thinker’s object, or object in outer space and for intelligence at large” (PP2: 294). But the point is that because being is not univocal, the attribution of reality as such is quite irrelevant: we need to specify which mode of reality we are talking about. James’s point becomes clearer if we think of it in genetic terms, as an account of the progressive differentiation of modes of existence from an initially “unmodalized Urdoxa”:

If I have no experience at all, the very first experience must have the character of reality for me because I have no reason to doubt. […] What would be the point of doubting the reality of the candle? Here, where there is no experience yet, seeing must coincide with “believing,” with accepting the candle as reality. (Linschoten 1961: 189)

19As soon as “reductives” appear that contradict the objects of our beliefs, our commitment to them must be relativized: “the real things are […] the reductive of the things judged unreal” (PP2: 291), meaning that the more modes are considered, the more they tend to form some “system,” the more our sense of reality becomes sophisticated and differentiated. “Unreal” things do not really fall out of reality, but this does not contradict James’s commitment to a form of realism. Modes of existence are defined in their relations to each other, and they are ultimately arranged in a world of many worlds that is disclosed in the long run.

20“The perception of reality” provides a basis for the pluralism of modes of existence that is at once psychological, epistemological and ontological. James came to see the aim of philosophy itself in the study of intermodal relations:

The popular mind conceived of all these sub-worlds more or less disconnectedly; and when dealing with one of them, forgets for the time being its relations to the rest. The complete philosopher is he who seeks not only to assign to every given object of his thought its right place in one or other of these sub-worlds, but he also seeks to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world which is. (Ibid.)

21It is no exaggeration to say that, for James, modes of existence are the primary object of philosophy. The fact that in the final chapter of the Principles, “Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience,” James uses the results of “The Perception of Reality” to develop an elaborate system of modes of existence that has little to envy those found in Souriau, Simondon or Latour is a striking demonstration of this. From the “paramount” reality, the world of sense, many worlds branch out: there is the world of science, which does not contradict the concrete relations of experience even if it does not reproduce them (PP2: 641, 667, 668); the world of ideal and immutable relations, which emerges from the world of sense as independent of it (PP2: 661); the worlds of aesthetic, ethics and of metaphysical postulates, which have a “normative” function, pushing the perceiver towards the performative realization of their “utopias” (PP2: 639, 670-1, 677).

22James will never be as confident about the possibility of developing a true “system” of modes as he is in the Principles, but the idea that being comes in many flavors is repeated throughout his philosophical work. To take just two cases from his last books, in Some problems of philosophy and in the Essays in radical empiricism, he writes that:

Philosophy must thus recognize many realms of reality which mutually interpenetrate. The conceptual systems of mathematics, logic, aesthetics, ethics, are such realms, each strung upon some peculiar form of relation, and each differing from perceptual reality in that in no one of them is history or happening displayed. Perceptual reality involves and contains all these ideal systems, and vastly more besides. (James 1911: 101-2)

[T]here is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are “natures” in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: “It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not” […] Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you like, for “being”) there appears no universal element of which all things are made. (James 1912: 26-7)

23“The perception of reality” was a metaphysical breakthrough, the results of which remained central to James’s mature philosophical outlook. Through its genetic ontology and its grounding of modes of existence in human ways of being-in-the-world, it points to many ways in which anthropology could clarify its understanding of ontology. However, this account is not without its own problems. Before returning to anthropology, let us address some of these to show how metaphysical debates are needed if anthropology is to clarify its ontological stakes.

3. Is it Belief that brings Universes Into Being?

  • 7 It is no coincidence that phenomenology was strongly influenced by “The Perception of Reality”: see (...)

24James presents his concept of belief as a reworking of Brentano’s concept of judgement (Kerstner 1969). This is important from a historical point of view, because contemporary philosophies of modes of existence began when Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong took up their master Franz Brentano’s characterization of mental acts in terms of intentionality to ground their view that being has many modes: Husserl’s “regional ontology” and Meinong’s “object theory” begin with the recognition that there must be as many kinds of being as there are ways of (intentionally) relating to it (Schmidgen 2016). Modes of existence entered philosophical discourse because of a “referential constraint” that forced all kinds of thought to have some kind of intentional object. “The Perception of Reality” anticipated both Husserl and Meinong by giving a pragmatist account of the grounding of the differentiation of modes of existence in the intentional relation between the subject and the world.7 Moreover, by reducing psychic life to “belief,” James made the link between intentionality and ontology even more explicit, since belief implies commitment to what it refers to.

  • 8 See Oskar Kraus’s introduction to the 1924 reprint of Brentano’s Psychologie, which is entirely dev (...)

25The coupling between the univocity of belief and the multifariousness of reality is the most characteristic and potentially problematic point of James’s account. Despite his work on Aristotle, Brentano was a radical defender of the univocity of being. He was angered by Husserl and Meinong’s pluralizing use of intentionality and sought to reformulate it in order to reassess univocity,8 and he would probably have reacted in the same way to James. It is no coincidence that another of his students, Anton Marty (1892), reviewed The Principles of Psychology by laying great stress on the “tangle of equivocations” of “The Perception of Reality,” on the “sheer chaos” caused by its generalization of belief, and on the need to return to a form of univocity of being. This is not the place to explore Marty’s reading in detail, but we can state his central claim as follows: by making all intentional acts univocal on the model of belief, James is forced to account for the diversity of phenomena by postulating that this diversity lies in things themselves, i.e. that there are different modes of existence.

26Indeed, this is a good way of conveying what anthropologists seem to mean when they talk about the “ontological turn.” Differences are not merely in our mental states, nor are they merely “cultural differences,” but they are to be found in things themselves. Ontological anthropology affirms the internal relation between the constitution of the world and the way the anthropos relates to it, which Marty criticizes in James’s account because of his Brentanian endorsement of univocity.

27However, some anthropologists have also stressed that ontological commitment cannot be taken as univocal, or rather that human beings are not necessarily “committed” in an ontological sense to what they include in their cosmology. Even if we admit that belief is a viable route to the heterogeneity of things, can we also take it as a route to the reality of that heterogeneity? In real life, people often act according to something they do not, strictly speaking, hold to be real. Commitment may only be a “pretension,” and the “existence” to which it is bound may be an “as if” existence (Walton 1990). “Fictionalist” accounts based on a distinction between true belief and mere “acceptance,” the latter being compatible with agnosticism or even positive unbelief, have a remarkable genealogy in Western philosophy, from Pyrrhonism through Kant, Nietzsche, Vaihinger, and some forms of pragmatism itself. If belief does not bind us to what is believed, then James’s foundation for the pluralism of modes of existence seems to fall.

28Let us take two examples. In a brilliant study of myth as a regime of enunciation, Paul Veyne (1983), drawing on Michel Foucault and Alfred Schütz (who was directly influenced by “The Perception of Reality”), argues that the Greeks did not, strictly speaking, believe in their myths, which did not prevent them from behaving as if their world were populated by Olympian gods: “How is it possible to half-believe, or believe in contradictory things? Children believe that Santa Claus comes down the chimney, bringing them toys, and at the same time believe that these toys are put there by their parents” (Veyne 1983: xi). David Graeber, in an important paper drawing on a considerable body of anthropological material, has similarly argued that it is actually the value we place on certain sub-universes of reality that brings them into being:

Whether anyone believes in the reality of these universes is usually inconsequential. This, in turn, is what makes it so easy, in contexts characterized by complex and overlapping arenas of values, for so many actors to simply stroll back and forth between one universe and another without feeling any profound sense of contradiction or even unease […] ordinarily, we assume that for those who embrace these cosmic systems, all this is the very definition of reality. But while this is clearly true in some cases, it does not necessarily have to be. (Graeber 2013: 231-2)

29Myths are often intended as a kind of “cosmic play” rather than as true cosmologies. As a result, Graeber adds polemically, “the anthropological fascination with ‘cosmologies,’ like the later fascination with ‘ontologies’ that largely grew out of it, might seem to entirely miss the mark” (ibid.).

30It is difficult to see how James’s univocal view of intentionality as belief can admit that some beliefs do not imply ontological commitment without forcing one to postulate that no beliefs imply commitment. The point, however, is that Veyne’s and Graeber’s accounts imply a demarcating conception of existence: either the gods exist or they don’t; either cosmologies are believed to be real or they are “cosmic plays.” On the contrary, in the light of subsequent philosophy and of ontological anthropology, we can say that James’s point is precisely that existence is always modally qualified. Pretense implies commitment to a mode of existence other than the actual – in James’s terms, pretense is a subclass of belief, and “as if” existence is a mode of existence in its own right. The Greeks did not believe that their gods actually existed; Zeus and Aphrodite nevertheless existed in a different, “mythical” mode. The same is true of the collectives Graeber examines: in order to counter an ontological anthropology that would allow “amodern” collectives to express their cosmologies in their own idiom, Graeber superimposes on them the typically modern dualism between commitment and pretense.

  • 9 Veyne is among those accused by Latour (1996: 127, fn 5) of believing too much in belief.

31A defender of a Jamesian account of belief should insist that fictional or agnostic commitments do shape the way we relate to the world in ways that modernism and “mononaturalism” have blinded us to. Ontological commitment should never be thought of exclusively in terms of the mode of actuality; it should be multifarious, as the world is. James’s univocal view of belief is meant to allow the heterogeneity of the real to proliferate without being ruptured by essentialist differences between what there is and what we merely believe in: in Latour’s words, “differentiation” begins when “demarcations” are abandoned. In this way, the pragmatist concept of belief can also be saved from criticism coming from the opposite direction: in particular, Latour (1996) attacked the concept of belief used by the Moderns to denote the mere beliefs of other collectives as opposed to the real, univocal Nature defined by Science. Belief is needed when reality is nowhere to be found. For Latour, in order to allow non-modern cosmologies to contribute to the definition of “what there is,” we have to stop believing in belief.9 James’s distinctly “amodern” use of belief allows the pragmatist vocabulary to be retained while acknowledging the legitimacy of Latour’s concerns.

4. Conclusion: James and Contemporary Anthropology

32The fact that his psychological grounding of modes of existence did not present insoluble problems did not lead James to embrace it dogmatically. When his interest in pure psychology began to wane, he felt the need to give up psychological accounts in order to move directly to metaphysics. The abandonment of the idea that modes of existence are grounded in intentionality is best seen in the conferences “The Function of Cognition” (1884) and “The Tigers in India” (1895), both printed in The Meaning of Truth (1909). The influence of Brentano is evident in statements about the “intentional inexistence of the tigers in our mind” and the possibility of “mentally pointing towards them as we sit here” (James 1909: 853). However, James’s dissatisfaction with this intentional basis is evident both in the coda he added to “The Function of Cognition” for publication and in “The Tigers in India” as a whole. The crucial point is that James rejects any transcendence of the object of thought. This is what James wrote in 1995, five years after “The Perception of Reality”:

The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. […] In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there. In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume’s language, as any two things can be; and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields. […] in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies. (James 1909: 853-4)

33James calls this understanding of knowledge “ambulatory,” as opposed to “saltatory,” a view that Latour (2007a) will adopt to ground his view of “reference” as a mode of existence. Thought does not “point” to something that transcends it, because it emerges with its objects from what James will later call the world of “pure experience.” This is the “connective world” that this understanding of knowledge requires. The transcendental subject is fused on the plane of pure experience as one part of experience among others, and verification takes place within the field of experience. The plurality of modes of existence is now encountered directly in this world, and belief becomes an unnecessary mediation.

34Intentionality was needed to introduce James to the pluralism of modes of existence but proved unnecessary once his concerns became exclusively metaphysical. It is precisely for this reason that a discipline like anthropology cannot overlook what James did in “The Perception of Reality,” the text which first elaborated the idea that the multiplicity of human ways of relating to the world must correlate with the multifariousness of the world itself. James’s attempt to build a bridge from psychology to ontology was underpinned by an awareness of the need for a consistent understanding of modes of existence as a foundation. His belief-centered account of modes remains only one option among others, and anthropologists need not necessarily adopt it. However, “The Perception of Reality” is a reminder that anthropology cannot avoid ontological debates if it is to appropriate the ontological vocabulary, and one of the best examples of how this can be done without abandoning a disciplinary framework centered on our being-in-the-world.

  • 10 This difference can be seen in Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958/2017) (...)
  • 11 “Transindividual” means, roughly, that relations are prior to both individuals and the “whole” they (...)

35There is another lesson that anthropology can learn from a psychology textbook from a hundred and thirty years ago. It seems that accounts of modes of existence as grounded in human relations to the world can be divided into two groups: either the differentiation of modes is grounded in individual or collective intentionality.10 James and ontological anthropology are at opposite ends of this spectrum: for the former, the source of the differentiation of modes is individual belief, whereas for the authors of the ontological turn modes of existence are relative to some “collective.” A middle ground between their accounts could be sought, for example, through the mature James’s concerns about solipsism, or through concepts such as Simondon’s “transindividual.”11 However, given the scope of this paper, a better use of the little space we have left is to ask if and how James’s individualism can contribute to the ontological turn.

  • 12 This is why “The Perception of Reality” has been used to interpret phenomena such as schizophrenic (...)

36One of the most common criticisms of ontological anthropology is that, by flattening the “Others” into a single static “cosmology,” it renews colonialism and masks the exclusion of those who, for various reasons, cannot be integrated into the collective (Ramos 2012; Fortun 2014; Watson 2014; Todd 2016; Gamberi 2019). This applies to the modern collective itself, of which Latour in particular has an unrealistically homogeneous view (Elam 1999; Mallavarapu & Amit 2006). By highlighting the psychological mechanisms at the root of any systematization of modes of existence, “The Perception of Reality” can serve as a critical constraint on this claim of ontological anthropology. It is almost trivial to stress that individual belief is always filtered through social and cultural conditioning. But James’s account reminds us that individual belief is something through which a cosmology must always pass in order to be reproduced. This reassesses one of Latour’s lessons, that what we call “social” has no intrinsic inertia, that it must pass through each of its mediations again and again in order to be maintained. In this process, the exclusion of those who cannot be made to share the collective cosmology can become apparent. James’s account draws attention to those fragile beings that cannot reach beyond a single mind, but that are nevertheless parts of what some would call their cosmology.12 Ontological anthropology must always keep the risk of violence and colonization as one of its criticalities. Returning to belief before moving on to cosmology might allow the excluded back into anthropological theory.

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Notes

1 Against the “rather enucleated” version of pragmatism proposed by Rorty and Putnam, Latour urges a revival of the classical pragmatism of James, John Dewey and, more surprisingly, Walter Lippman, who were able to make politics and thought turn around thingspragmata in Greek (Latour 2007b, 2011). He traces a pragmatist genealogy of his work as follows: “There is clearly a vast distance between the experience moderns have and what they are supposed to experience – as if they could never get what is happening to them. Yes, as if moderns were constantly distracted, unable to give attention to their attachments […] Pragmatism as a philosophical school had attempted to direct our attention to experience […] Indeed, pragmatism also tried to reset the modernist project as it had developed from Kant onward through the industrial revolution and colonization, but it failed to build any middle ground. Today, largely because of ecological mutations, moderns are trying to escape from the pseudo-problems they have multiplied to avoid being of this earth. So, in a sense, pragmatism comes to fruition a century late when the ‘earth’ begins to replace ‘the globe’” (Latour & Leclercq 2016: 408). On Latour’s pragmatism, see also Wilde 2013, Salinas 2014, Debaise 2023, Hennion 2023.

2 The derivation of “reference” from James’s “deambulatory knowledge” is explicit in Latour 2007a; see also Sheehey 2019. Latour’s definition of habit is evidently Jamesian in character: see Frigerio 2024.

3 Whitehead is important for Latour’s Inquiry, particularly for his attack on the modern “bifurcation of nature”: see Weber 2016.

4 The credit goes in particular to Isabelle Stengers. Although James is not always mentioned, his concept of the “pluriverse” has become standard in anthropology: see Querejazu 2016, de la Cadena & Blaser 2018, Escobar 2020.

5 The second volume of the Principles of Psychology (James 1890b/2019) is henceforth referred to as PP2, followed by the page number.

6 The only exception, to my knowledge, is Kevin Mulligan 2019. The reason for this neglect is probably the notoriously convoluted influence of the Principles of Psychology (Bella & Trochu 2022) and in particular of “The Perception of Reality.” Souriau was familiar with the Principles, but he never refers to “The Perception of Reality.” On the other hand, Alfred Schütz’s work was influenced by “The Perception of Reality,” and Schütz’s influence on Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology provides a link to the ontological turn, since ethnomethodology is the tradition to which Latour returns to follow the modes of existence defined by modern practices (see especially Latour 2005).

7 It is no coincidence that phenomenology was strongly influenced by “The Perception of Reality”: see Edie 1987.

8 See Oskar Kraus’s introduction to the 1924 reprint of Brentano’s Psychologie, which is entirely devoted to defending univocity against the equivocations of Husserl and Meinong.

9 Veyne is among those accused by Latour (1996: 127, fn 5) of believing too much in belief.

10 This difference can be seen in Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958/2017). Henning Schmidgen has noted how, in the third part of this book, Simondon abandons the phenomenological analysis of technics in order to incorporate it into a comprehensive philosophy of culture: “the concept of the mode of being is not limited to a phenomenological or ontological characterization of a specific type of object, but rather turns into a consideration – grounded, ultimately, in sociology and/or history – of how the object is embedded in particular modes of thought and action.” In this way, the framing of the problem of modes of existence based on intentionality – Schmidgen mentions Husserl, but James should be included – “is itself revealed to be a problem. What it has always lacked is a critical understanding of the fact that objects’ modes of existence cannot be separated from societies’ historically specific modes of production and reproduction” (Schmidgen 2016: 326).

11 “Transindividual” means, roughly, that relations are prior to both individuals and the “whole” they form, and that modes therefore emerge along with the subjects attached to them.

12 This is why “The Perception of Reality” has been used to interpret phenomena such as schizophrenic delusion (Gallagher 2009).

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References

Electronic reference

Christian Frigerio, “William James’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence”European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XVI-2 | 2024, Online since 19 December 2024, connection on 17 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/4292; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12yvl

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About the author

Christian Frigerio

University of Milan
christian.frigerio1[at]unimi.it

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