William James (1842-1910): Popularization Against Hegel
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Life and Position
William James, brother of the novelist Henry James, was the thinker who made pragmatism popular. His books—The Principles of Psychology (1890), Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909)—reached a broad audience and established pragmatism as an independent American philosophy.
James’s Critique of Hegel
James criticized Hegel sharply. He accused him of an “absolutism” that forced the diversity and openness of experience into a closed system. The world, James held, is a “pluralistic universe,” not a monistic totality.
But does this criticism really hit Hegel?
First: James’s “radical empiricism” holds that only what can be experienced is philosophically relevant. But is it not precisely Hegel who turns against the “thing-in-itself” and says that essence must appear, otherwise it is not essence—or rather, not distinguishable from something merely invented? Hegel’s philosophy is, in this sense, radically empirical: it begins with the immediately given and displays its inner development.
Second: the charge of a “closed system” misunderstands what systematization means. Every science systematizes its findings—James himself does so as well. The question is not whether one systematizes, but whether the system remains corrigible. And Hegel did in fact correct and further develop his system—for instance his statements on the number of planets, which led to a notorious misunderstanding.[1]
Third: James often criticized a caricature of Hegel, mediated through the British Idealists (Green, Bradley, Bosanquet), rather than Hegel himself. British Idealism had already transformed Hegel in a particular way—what James criticizes is not always what Hegel actually wrote.
James’s Achievement and Its Limits
James’s achievement lies in his emphasis on concrete experience against scholastic abstractions. His insistence on the openness of the future, on the role of action, on the relevance of feeling and will alongside intellect—all of this constitutes an important corrective to a fossilized rationalism.
But these correctives do not necessarily hit Hegel. Hegel’s “concrete universality” is precisely the attempt not to play the universal off against the particular. His objective spirit is not an abstract idea but is realized in concrete institutions, practices, and forms of life.
The “planet misunderstanding” refers to Hegel’s alleged derivation that there could only be seven planets—supposedly refuted by the discovery of further planets. In fact, Hegel’s position is more complex and evolved over time. ↩︎