A New Look at New Realism by Charles Eric P

Author:Charles, Eric P.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A New Look at New Realism
ISBN: 9781412845618
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Radical Empiricism in Holt’s Works

Then, in 1914, Holt at last came out with the “little book” The Concept of Consciousness that he had first discussed with James back in 1904. In his preface, Holt identified his various influences:

Every reader who knows the works of Professor James, Professor Royce, and Professor Münsterberg will be aware how much I owe to them for my general drift of thought. The definition of consciousness proposed in the following pages is in no small part inspired by the Radical Empiricism of Professor James; and is, I believe, consonant with that view. To professor Royce, and to studies undertaken with his guidance, I owe my notions of the conceptual nature of the universe—a verity which to me argues not for idealism, but for a realism of perhaps, even, a thoroughly naive sort. And to Professor Münsterberg, it will appear, I owe my ideas as to the purpose of psychology and the way, more particularly, in which that science may hope to fathom the relations between the body and the soul. To him also, as is lightly hinted in the dedication, I owe indeed the project of this volume. (pp. xiii–xiv)

In this work Holt argues for signs of a new renaissance of interest in logic, by which he refers to the new developments in symbolic logic, promulgated by Royce and exemplified by Whitehead and Rus­sell’s Principia Mathematica, published in 1905. This was a distinctly unJamesean movement, however. Taking a decidedly Roycean turn toward the elaboration of symbolic logic in his first chapter “The Concept of Consciousness,” there is not one mention of the concept of consciousness in that chapter. After one hundred pages on the nature of symbolic logic, Holt mentions James again, but in the context of James’s claim that there can be no exact differentiation between subject and object (cf. James, 1905, on “Affectional Facts in the World of Pure Experience”).

Holt cherry-picked from James’s writings but talked a completely different epistemology than what James had posed. Holt said he sought to present only a deductive account of consciousness. His tack was to deduce consciousness from physiology and at the same time banish introspection from experimental psychology. This then was, he intended, but a stepping stone to rejection of the new developments at the time in dynamic psychology of subconscious processes. His targets were particularly Boris Sidis and Morton Henry Prince and the ideas of subconsciousness and coconsciousness. As an alternative, two thirds of the way through the book Holt proposed that consciousness was not introspective but was rather “a cross section of the infinite realm of being” (p. 208). This was, he said, the only way to avoid the problem of defining consciousness when it is trying to include all of experience and also attempting to observe itself. It was also a way for him to articulate a very Jamesean idea that subject and object coalesce with each other, a major point Holt hoped to use to overthrow the introspectionists:

The latter presents no question for

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