Abstract

A number of recent essays and books have asked how pragmatism, since its inception, informs questions that are central to the theory and practice of rhetoric and communication. Paul Stob's book makes a significant contribution to that conversation, not least through a demonstration of the depth of William James's work as a public lecturer and the ways in which James's conception of public lecturing shaped his larger intellectual perspectives and commitments. John Dewey often gets most of the attention of rhetorical scholars, largely because of several cryptic passages that Dewey penned on the importance of communication. Stob's work offers an important corrective to those that overemphasize Dewey's role in founding pragmatism and its relevance to rhetorical studies. His book also offers perhaps the most thorough and detailed articulation of how rhetorical considerations were constitutive features in the development of pragmatism.Stob begins the book by citing a letter that James wrote to F. C. S. Schiller in 1903. In that letter, James states that he believes “popular statement to be the highest form of art” (xi). William James and the Art of Popular Statement is devoted to demonstrating the importance of this claim (and how it has often been overlooked in scholarship on James) and explicating how James developed his art of popular statement. The former argument is probably of most interest to philosophers and historians of pragmatism, while the latter argument ought to be of interest to rhetorical scholars. This book is a fully articulated argument for why and how popular public lecturing made James a unique and important philosopher. Put more broadly, this is an argument that rhetorical practice was a constitutive feature of William James's intellectual contributions to philosophy and a range of other subjects. As such, Stob shows how rhetorical practices, and not abstract philosophical principles, oriented all of James's intellectual endeavors, and that James's work on the public lecture circuit is not distinguishable from his roles as philosopher and scientist. This is not an argument traditionally found in scholarship on William James, and, therefore, Stob makes an original and important contribution to our understanding of James.To advance this claim, Stob positions James at the intersection of two historical trends. On the one hand, James was “reared in the culture of eloquence.” On the other, he was “trained in a culture of professionalism.” The culture of eloquence taught James about the importance of the “cultivation of the moral character of oneself and one's community” (36). At the same time, the culture of professionalism drove the development of his work in psychology and recommended attention to specific puzzles and problems only comprehensible to a trained expert. The tension between these two traditions provided the rhetorical resources for James to invent novel ways of relating to audiences and a novel philosophy that “centered on the experiences, perceptions, and predicaments of the man and woman ‘of the street’” (37). James constantly pushed back against the expectations of the culture of professionalism, even though he gained fame as a certified professional expert, through the intellectual commitments of the culture of eloquence. Furthermore, the culture of eloquence provided James with the intellectual support necessary for orienting his more expert insights into philosophy and psychology. Throughout the book, Stob argues that James purposefully engaged popular audiences and critiqued experts with the intention of empowering those audiences and bringing people into a participatory intellectual community.James's massively popular lecture series, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals,” is an excellent illustration of how James worked within these two traditions. A critical investigation of these lectures makes up the third chapter of Stob's book, and his insights here offer a serious contribution to one of the most often overlooked works of James's career. James delivered these lectures hundreds of times to audiences all over the United States. “Talks to Teachers” dealt with the themes and ideas of James's Principles of Psychology, but not in a way that simply tried to translate those ideas into simpler terms: “James tried to empower his teacher audiences, giving them a stake in the modern intellectual culture and helping them see their value in democratic society” (108). As such, Stob shows that these lectures enacted James's deep investment in “creating a new kind of intellectual community” (109). That intellectual community did not champion scientific knowledge at the expense of other forms of knowledge. Instead, James claimed that expert psychological knowledge was not more important than the artistry of the classroom teacher.This is where Stob is at his best—using the resources of intellectual history combined with rhetorical criticism of James's performance to advance a sophisticated argument about both the meaning of James's work and its larger significance for our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. To develop this further, Stob points to James's “oral style” as productive of “moments of interaction.” For James, “concepts were important, of course, but his prose aimed above all at fostering relationships in the unfolding of ideas” (97). “Talks to Teachers” highlights the ways in which style is constitutive of meaning and how James's style produced “participatory discourses” (97). Such an understanding of style clearly resonates with the philosophy of pragmatism, and part of the argument here is that James would not have gotten to his version of pragmatism without working through this particular style and without attempting to master the art of public statement.In chapters on psychical research and religious experience, Stob further elaborates these arguments about popular statement. He shows convincingly that all of James's intellectual contributions are shot through with a kind of oral style derived from his conception of public lecturing and his desire to create intellectual communities. In his work on psychical research, James deployed his own standing as a scientific expert while at the same time critiquing scientific research for being “impersonal, monolithic, confining, illiberal” and for advancing an epistemology that James thought inadequate (148). What is essential here is that James's epistemology, which would become a central feature of pragmatism, was born in and through popular statements about psychical research, theology, and psychology. The Varieties of Religious Experience was delivered as a set of Gifford lectures in Edinburgh (a prestigious lecture series associated with the universities in Scotland). Part of James's project was to address the prescribed topic of natural theology, which many at the time considered essential for true knowledge. Not surprisingly, James rejected the kind of theology oriented toward such true knowledge and instead focused the lectures on the religious experiences of individual, common people. To do this, James critiqued “the deficiencies of religious inquiry according to the standards of academic professionalism” (165). This allowed him to connect with the popular audience at the lectures. Also, by making “experience” the beginning and ending point of his inquiry, James argued that “everyone could contribute to the general storehouse of religious knowledge” (165). James's lectures were quite well received and he proved himself capable of connecting to a popular audience and contributing to the development of a populist intellectual culture.The final chapter of Stob's book deals with pragmatism more squarely. Focused on James's lecture “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” Stob is concerned with unpacking the oratorical beginnings of pragmatism. Just like the earlier lectures, this lecture was “at bottom a collaborative text because it made James's immediate audience leaders in the world of thought” by the ways in which James rejected professional philosophy and advanced a populist epistemology instead (202). Essentially, the lectures on pragmatism demonstrated the larger claim that “the character of the audience was a determining factor in the character of the discourse” (228). I can't imagine an insight more consonant with the rhetorical tradition. Rhetorical considerations, for James, came before the articulation of philosophical principles. James's rhetorical considerations included a deep attention to the kinds of experiences that his audience of non-experts had. In addition, James's lectures were oriented toward intellectual participation on the part of non-experts and personal empowerment. James wanted to “flatten hierarchies and break chains of authority” and to show that “the best kind of knowledge emerged from a pluralistic, accessible, egalitarian intellectual culture” (237). The result of this outlook was a “new level of engagement based upon horizontal vision,” and this level of engagement was also a product of James's consistent argument that individuals (despite the testimony of some experts) “were, in fact, responsible for determining the character of their world” (238). What James's pragmatism made clear was that personal empowerment entailed opposition to the stifling aspects of academic professionalism.Given the breadth of historical detail and the depth of both contextual and textual readings of a significant range of James's work, Stob's book should prove to be a major and enduring argument about the relationship between rhetoric and American pragmatism. At times, theoretical insight into rhetoric's role in constituting philosophical or epistemological claims is sacrificed in favor of historical and contextual detail. In other words, Stob does not make a full-blown argument about the function and necessity of rhetoric for pragmatism or for American democracy. And he does not advance any sophisticated argument about what a pragmatist rhetoric might look like. But this might be asking too much from a book that offers such a solid and well-reasoned argument about one particular figure in the history of pragmatism. For a vision of how best to defend and advance a pluralist, pragmatist epistemology, one should simply read Stob's interpretation of William James. There, in full detail, one finds a commitment to rhetorical practice as a thorough underpinning for a massive intellectual project that still stands as one of America's great contributions to the history of ideas.