Growing up zig-zag: Reassessing the Transatlantic Legacy of William James

Understanding James through his transatlantic conversations entails recognizing how these conversations emerge from “growing up zig-zag”, a description of his childhood experience moving between North America and Europe, in the process becoming proficient in French and German. This chapter draws together all the chapters of this volume to demonstrate how James pushed the limits of conversation in science, religion, and philosophy through engagement with such European writers as Mill, Spencer, and Darwin from Britain, Mach and Fechner from Germany, and Renouvier and Bergson from France. These zig-zags reveal James’s specific conversational strategy that pivots on the connections and disjunctions between Europe and America during his lifetime. The trauma of his childhood zig-zag life thus in the end becomes the resource through which he articulated a new intellectual vision and expanded the horizons not only of his own time, but for future transatlantic conversations.