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Book Reviews and Critical Notices

Review of Alexis Dianda, The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn

Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2023
Sarin Marchetti
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Alexis Dianda, The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2023

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1Advertised by Cornel West as “the best philosophical treatment of the great William James in this generation,” Alexis Dianda’s The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn meets the reader with high expectations, which it indeed fulfills. Her volume is a seminal contribution to Jamesian scholarship in its defense of some of the most puzzling aspects of James’s conception(s) of experience for us readers past the linguistic turn. The task has been attempted before, with at least three generations of readers defending James from the manyfold attacks to his allegedly outmoded focus on experience as the better methodological tool and topic of inquiry, praising his healthy resistance to the intoxication with language which eventually diminished philosophical thinking if not compromised it altogether. The novelty of Dianda lies in trying the harder way of showing the virtues of the Jamesian bet on experience in light of the distinctive unfolding of pragmatism and philosophy at large in the century and half elapsed. That is, Dianda shows us the fecundity of the concept of experience elaborated by James, preventing our inquiries into mind, morals, and reality to fall prey of idealizations, either in the guise of the immediately given or of the linguistically sayable. Dealing with the varieties of experience is thus for James an inescapable fact of life and hence of philosophy. The book tackles the issue head-on, making it the very cipher of James’s contribution to the Western philosophical canon.

2James took language seriously, and yet he resisted the distrust of experience at the heart of the linguistic turn. The turn to language, which started to get traction in philosophical circles, analytic and continental alike, from the 1930s as a way out of the swamps of a helplessly amateurish (read: childish) and not-yet-professional (read: grown up) philosophy of experience, offered the promise of standardization. It could tidy up philosophical discourse, either in the direction of its axiomatization or in the attempt to free it from constraints other than human/conversational. This is a feature neopragmatism picked up from the 1970s thanks to the seminal work of Richard Rorty and others in his wake (and today represented by thinkers as diverse as Brandom, Price, and Misak). What we would need to appreciate, to get his conception of experience (as well as of language) right, would then be James’s very critique of the requests we pose on philosophical thinking itself: on its nature, purpose, and scope. James foresaw a number of philosophical adjustments that would feature in a great part of twentieth-century philosophy, and tried to balance the need for clarity exemplified by language with that of vagueness or even ambiguity provided by experience. Dianda’s book invites us to review our attitude towards James’s variegated treatment of experience as his attempt to get rid of a picture of philosophy as a tool for either the dependable foundation of our thoughts, words, and deeds, or their unbounded transformation. James’s focus on experience is one with his aim to portrait philosophy as an activity equally skeptical of outright (vertical) authority and disordered (horizontal) laissez-faire.

3Titling the book The Varieties of Experiences, Dianda puts the plural feature of James’s signature philosophical move within experience up front. Dianda aims to explore the richness and multi-faced character of that puzzling activity and state we call experience: experience as a making (experiencing, as Dewey would have said) and as an undergoing (being experienced, Jimi Hendrix style). The key charge to trusting, and trading in, experience raised by the linguistic turn has historically been the inbuilt incapacity of experience to account for the active and selective element in our mindedness and worldliness. The latter would have been otherwise secured by the emphasis on our being linguistic users, with language equally able to (genuinely) represent reality (being transparent to it, so to say) and assure our take on it (language being of our own making). Now, by depicting experience in active rather than in passive terms, as in experiencing and being experienced, James would have saved empiricism from itself – that is, from its passive classical versions – avoiding in this way the charges addressed to it by the linguistic turn. Dianda ventures to show the details and opportunity of such revision, and she denounces the dangers awaiting language and linguistic philosophy when they let experience go and play no role in constraining our thoughts, words, and deeds. As she writes at the very beginning of the volume, philosophy constrained by language alone falls prey of that vicious intellectualism consisting in the “reduction of the complexities of our existence to excessively limiting concepts or categories; it is vicious to the extent that by focusing on our abstract conceptions we cut ourselves off from engagement with the very things we purportedly attempt to understand or engage” (p. 15). Getting the world and ourselves at our feet by taming both through language (and hence sharp and linguistically articulable concepts) would mean for James to give way to the wrong (read: dangerous) kind of activity: one disrespectful of the resistances played on us by the world and by ourselves alike. The analysis of such resistances and their importance is at the heart of the volume under review.

4Dianda puts it quite clearly in the introductory chapter: by privileging the notion of experience as the best methodological tool and goal of inquiry, pragmatism of the Jamesian kind runs the risk of being accused of either trading in the processing of brute stimuli (as in “immediate sensory events”) or eventually falling back into the lap of enculturation, hence in the domain of language (acquisition and transformation): “either we abandon experience as a meaningful concept and any residue of realism, or we accept a form of foundationalism and givenism with all the paradoxes such approaches entail” (p. 22). There would simply be no space for a middle ground between being exposed to the world (and to ourselves) and calling the shots of those encounters, or so the rhetoric of the linguistic turn variously preached. Hence replicating the battle between experience-first and language-first philosophies which has driven the best part of the Twentieth Century, both within and without pragmatism, to an unfruitful stall. But such a middle ground is exactly what James eyed and struggled to achieve in his writings. What else was he looking for when he wrote his Principles of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), or A Pluralistic Universe (1909), if not a way to account for the life of the mind, the moral and religious life, or our epistemological practices via a notion of experience plastic enough to make space both for our contribution and for its frustration in the everlasting business of minding and meaning reality? Experience would work best precisely when we would expect it to disappoint us: namely, in showing when we might fail to get things right because of its being opaque to us and yet telling of our distinctive take on the world and ourselves. It would indeed be language, understood as something other than a dimension of our experiencing and our being experienced, to run the risky business of being incapable of failing to mean reality, because of its fully transparent character, equally capable of getting the world and ourselves right and of fixing itself when it goes astray. What allows experience to welcome both confirmation and rejection is its being a practice, a piece of conduct, the way we navigate reality and tentatively explore its dark places. Both experiencing and being experienced in fact suggest the idea of an active and mobile self, but also a fallible and tentative one. Hence the “existential character” bestowed by Dianda to James’s conception of experience: “It is central to my argument that James’s notion of experience is seen in an existential light – by existential here I mean simply that it is attuned to questions of conduct, belief, and our moral self-images” (p. 10). The suggestion is clear, and it is a pragmatist one: to get a glimpse at what experience is, let us see what it does for us. Let us see how it performs in deed. Let us see what it is of experience in our lives: psychological, ethical, religious, epistemological, or otherwise.

5After a first chapter on the advantages and disadvantages of dismissing experience from one’s philosophical landscape, where Rorty is taken as the staunchest of enemies within the pragmatist camp, hence qualifying his very affiliation to the tradition, Dianda dedicates three chapters to as many fields (or aspects, or topics) in which the Jamesian notion of experience turns its healthy (and healing) gaze: namely, psychology, ethics, and that peculiar blend of epistemology and metaphysics going under the name of “radical empiricism.” Each chapter shows how holding dear to a notion of experience as experiencing and as being experienced contributes to the disentanglement of philosophical and existential knots holding us captive: respectively, the character of consciousness (is it subjective or objective?), the willingness of beliefs (are they active or passive?), and the nature of concepts (are they fixed or rather mobile?). Where in each case what is at issue is precisely our availability to negotiate the range of control over our experience (that is, over what we experience in the first place, what we do when we experience at all, and what are the consequences of experience on ourselves) and accepting the compromise inbuilt in being in charge of experience without being guaranteed of the success of such leading.

6In closing, I would like to stress the novelty and promises of each of the four master moves performed in the chapters. In chapter one, what I find particularly compelling is the author’s charge of what according to her is Rorty’s unpragmatic prejudice against experience: rather than leaving the possibility to have philosophically interesting things to say and think about experience open, Rorty read the trajectory of pragmatism as a foreclosure on it via a progressive disenchantment of the world. Not only the Divine should be banned from our moral and epistemological horizons, but also Reality (with the capital letter, that is a Reality which simply imposes on us), with conversation as the only game in town (see in particular p. 36-44 on linguistic nominalism). But what about those situations (moral and epistemological) in which growth seems to be a matter of enduring or even abiding by forces external to one’s individual or communal horizons, so to put our conversation in check? The current global political situation, with several civil wars and as many humanitarian disasters, would suggest better.

7Chapter two is quite adamant in that the author refuses to portray consciousness as anything other than our way of experiencing the world and ourselves in it. Far from picturing the mind as a thing (the brain organ) or as a mere epiphenomenon (an incident of the brain organ), James understood it as the very seat of human subjectivity understood as the capacity for agency in light of experiencing and the experienced. A subjectivity which, the very minute it determines what to mind and what to ignore, faces the risks of meeting reality the wrong way and hence frustrates its best aspiration to navigate it successfully.

8Chapter three moves things from minding to acting: what it is that we do when we believe or disbelieve that something is the case is a matter of decision and choice as much as attention to the way we experience previous and past such resolutions. In depicting belief as torn between selection of and surrender to experience, Dianda claims that what is at stake in believing is our very capacity for self-transformation of and through action: “We are not led from belief to a transcendental meditation on the structure of reality but to a pragmatic description of human activity” (p. 142-3); “there is, and needs to be, a dialectic between the world and the possibilities for change, such changes and new modes of experience: this relationship is one that can only be captured through James’s specific treatment of experience” (p. 169).

9Finally, chapter four sheds light on James’s late understanding of “pure experience,” and hence of the relationship between percepts and concepts within experience. The gist of Dianda’s reconstruction is that, contrary to the common philosophical understanding, experiencing and being experienced are not processes of ascension from the merely subjective to the more objective, but rather of unfolding from what we consider evidence to its personal transformation. This means that, in making and undergoing experience, we enrich and deepen the world and self, rather than make them thinner and more rarified. But this is not because knowing is essentially a linguistic affair, but rather because we can only speak of something we have introspected and elaborated. As Dianda writes, “For James, we must experience differently before we can begin to speak differently” (p. 170). Concepts, then, far from ordering the chaos of experience, contribute to its plasticity, and the quest for purity cries for a reconstruction of past experiences which would impede it from being disproved by future ones. A world, and life, stuck in the moment, and cursed to stillness at pain of being either canceled by later developments or anticipated by earlier ones.

10All in all, then, Dianda’s James is a philosopher of practice and conduct, a philosopher of experience understood as readiness to be proven otherwise and yet encouraged to roll its contingent dices. We should then beware of language if and only if through it we dream of a world and self finally free from criticism and even delusion. We are pragmatists because we praise experimentation over conformity, but also because we are ready to let our experiments go as long as they do not meet resistance worth the name.

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Sarin Marchetti, Review of Alexis Dianda, The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic TurnEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XVI-2 | 2024, Online since 19 December 2024, connection on 09 March 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/4409; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12yw1

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Sarin Marchetti

Sapienza Università di Roma
sarin.marchetti[at]uniroma1.it

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