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Abstract

May there not after all, William James once posed in a lecture, be a possible ambiguity in truth? This is the pervasive skepticism and thoroughgoing acumen and intellectual expanse with which this astonishingly brilliant scientific and philosophical mind begins, proceeds, and ends. In this brief reverie on James and complexity, the authors reflect on this essential spirit of the man (the spirit of complexity) and his natural affinity with the humanities, religion, and modernism—on the ever-proliferating interstices of the in-between and the reverberations of the beyond. Relentlessly, courageously, William James points us toward the significance of minutest observations and then onward to an awareness of the limits of our understanding, to an experience of things that is richer than words can say.

Keywords

William James Herman Melville Milan Kundera Franz Kafka Don Quixote existential-humanistic psychology complexity

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William James and the Spirit of Complexity: A Pluralistic Reverie

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