William James (1842 - 1910) ontleende pedagogische principes aan #Spinoza

Terwijl ik bezig was aan een blog over Brian Massumi (dat misschien nog komt), kwam ik het volgende hoofdstuk tegen:

Een latere reprint van het 1899 boek

Kate Stanley, "Affect and Emotion: James, Dewey, Tomkins, Damasio, Massumi, Spinoza," Chapter 2 in: Donald R. Wehrs & Thomas Blake (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan imprint of Springer Nature, 2017, p. 96 – 112 Chapter 2 books.google; [Pdf van het hele boek te vinden op BookSC]

Kate Stanley wil in haar hoofdstuk laten zien dat verschillende stromingen (of ook “generaties”) in het affect-onderzoek eigenlijk alle teruggaan op William James, die op zijn beurt veel ontleende aan Spinoza. Het volgende deel uit dat hoofdstuk neem ik hier graag over; daarmee heb ik dan (eindelijk) ook een blog over William James en Spinoza. Zijn naam viel wel eens (het uitgebreidst in dit blog), maar het was nog nooit tot een blog gekomen over deze (mede-)grondlegger van de psychologie.

In het volgende gaat het vooral over het werk, dat ik hier naar voren haal en van een link en afbeelding van de titelpagina voorzie:

William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899 –cf. archive.org

[Hierna volgt een deel van het hoofdstuk van Kate Stanley]

[…] fewer affect scholars have noted Spinoza’s formative force in James’ thinking and writing.

At Harvard in 1890, James taught a philosophy class on Spinoza alongside a psychology course that used his recently published The Principles of Psychology as its textbook. A year later, he began to bring these two streams of investigation and pedagogy—the philosophical and the psychological—into direct contact with each other, through two lecture series that form the basis of his practical theory of education. James frames his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals as an attempt to put his psychological model of emotion to work in the classroom and in daily life. Spinoza guides this endeavor, supplying the basic insight at the heart of all these talks: “action and feeling go together.”[44] Addressing an audience of Cambridge teachers, James looks to Spinoza to suggest that the primary aim of education should be to cultivate feelings that give rise to positive and productive actions. In “The Will,” the concluding lecture of the series delivered to teachers, James cites Spinoza to argue that positive thoughts and feelings are more hospitable to the exercise of a freer, less constrained will:

Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good.[45]

Following Spinoza, James argues that the best way to transform students from “slaves” into “freemen” is to teach them habits of introspection; only those who are introspectively attuned to the positive or negative valence of their feelings are equipped to distinguish good from bad guiding “notions” of how to act.

The pedagogical principles that James derives from Ethics are founded on Spinoza’s fundamental claim that there is “no absolute, or free, will” for those who “do not know any cause of their actions.”[46] Such ignorance is, for Spinoza, the definition of “human bondage,” which can only be countered by an intimate awareness of the workings of affective life. He writes, “a man does not know himself except through the affections of his body and their ideas. So when it happens that the mind can consider itself, it is thereby … affected with joy, and with greater joy the more distinctly it can imagine its power of acting.”[47] In short, the “power of acting” stems from the “power to understand” both one’s own affective capacity and one’s own affective action.[48] An increased understanding of how affects arise and operate in turn increases our capacity to act upon them so that, in turn, we are “less acted on by them.”[49]

Spinoza’s influence on James can be heard throughout Talks to Students in his affirmative calls for a freer and fuller life. In the first lecture of that series, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” James invokes Spinoza as an antidote to the problematic underside of the American “national ideal” of rapidity, vivacity, and incessant activity toward progress. This “bottled-lightening quality” of the “American Character” has fostered “bad habits” manifested in “those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety …. Present and future, all mixed up in our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success.”[50] James recommends a Spinozian “plan of living” to correct this “defective training” and to usher in “‘acquiescentia in seipso,’ as Spinoza used to call it.”[51] As Spinoza insists, this “blessed internal peace and confidence” can only be achieved through an integrated “union of mind and body,” where there is “no essence of the mind” independent of “an actually existing body.”[52] James echoes this teaching, attributing Spinoza’s “healthy-mindedness” to his fundamental understanding of an integrative mind-body loop, which two hundred years later will become the basis of Jamesian emotion.[53]

In Spinoza’s understanding of the body’s capacity for action and the  mind’s capacity for reflection, James finds an action-oriented “plan of life.”[54]

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[44] William James, Writings 1878–1899 (New York: Library of America, 1992), 826.

[45] Ibid., 821.

[46] Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. Edwin M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 53.

[47] Ibid., 53, 98.

[48] Ibid., 164.

[49] Ibid., 164–65.

[50] James, Writings 1878–1899, 831, 833.

[51] Ibid., 829.

[52] Spinoza, Reader, 40, 160.

[53] William James‚ Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 121.

[54] Spinoza, Reader, 3–4.