combination thereof. But James doubts that the experience the
new philosophy makes available will itself be entirely separable
from the hopes, fears and anxieties now encoded into the soft
tissues of your life. Given the embodied character of human
being, to overcome one faith is to set the stage for emergence
of another, even if it, too, is punctuated by ambivalence and
hesitation. So James’s philosophy of a “pluralistic universe” is
simultaneously supported by comparative argument, infused with a
faith that inclines him toward it, and acknowledged to be
contestable. Late in the book we are reviewing, James
characterizes the standing that his “pluralistic image” of the
universe has in his own eyes:
The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it
{pluralism} is a fully coordinate with monism. This world
may in the last resort, be a block-universe; but on the
other hand it may be a universe only strung-along, not
rounded in or closed. Reality may exist distributively just
as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I
Where do I stand with respect to Smith, Derrida, Deleuze
and James? With Deleuze and Smith I am drawn like a magnet to
the idea of radical immanence, and I find the interpretations of
immanence given by many who do not participate in that
faith/philosophy to be deficient. Further, I find myself
Convention