William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic

Trygve Throntveit

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137068620
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. This book overturns such thinking, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.

1

The Ethical Origins of James’s Pragmatism

“To hate evil does not mean to indulge in a brooding feeling against particular evils; that is, to be possessed by it,” wrote 26-year-old William James in a private moment in 1868. “No, it is to avert the attention, till your chance comes, and then strike home.”¹ Few of James’s early writings are more revealing of the deeply personal roots of his philosophy, or so eerily foreshadow its development over the next 42 years; its roots a tangle of his gnawing fear and his practiced confidence, its development shaped by his contempt for the former, suspicion of the latter, and thirst for the life he discovered in between.

James’s youthful meditation captures a moment and illuminates a lifetime all at once. At the time James was in a deep depression—an experience that recurrently defined his life but never consumed it, due to his own resilient though oft-battered will. The “tough-minded” temperament he later ascribed to himself in his most famous work, Pragmatism (1907), infuses his injunction, above, to be always active, never “possessed” by circumstances but ever ready to confront them. Yet the advice to “avert the attention” from evil until a chance to “strike” presents itself is incongruously passive, while the rest of the passage evokes all of the naiveté, but none of the optimism, that the mature James ascribed to the “tender-minded” idealists with whom empiricists like himself locked philosophical horns. “My trouble is that its existence has power to haunt me,” he admitted of the evil he would fell. “I still cling to the idol of the unspeckled, and when evil takes permanent body and actually sits down in me to stay, I’d rather give up all, than go shares with her in existence.”²

The ideas that would make James’s name as a psychologist and philosopher sprang from this confused yearning to seek the “unspeckled” in a world of seemingly permanent, and perhaps even increasing, evil. The US Civil War was only three years ended when James wrote the above. Some 600,000 lives had been lost. With them expired the faith of many more Americans who had assumed the ineluctable moral, political, and material progress of their nation, and more vaguely, their world. The most momentous event in the nation’s history had challenged the Jeffersonian ideal that individual freedom bred social harmony, suggesting instead that freedom was secured through power over others, whether masters over slaves or North over South. These doubts were fed by the rise of an industrial economy that not only glorified the subjection of the material environment but seemed to reward the self-regarding and unscrupulous; a rise so quickly accelerated after the war that the lifeways it obliterated appeared doomed by the forces of nature itself. The sciences appeared to confirm this outlook. Charles Darwin’s epochal study On the Origin of Species (1859) demonstrated to a growing number of scientists and laymen that all animals had evolved from lower organisms by natural selection: a process by which the inherited characteristics of certain organisms favored their survival, and that of their offspring, over others—whether of a different species or their own. Complex animals, including humans, were merely accretions of such biological advantages, not creatures of divine design, and they owed their existence to out-competing their rivals in the struggle for scarce resources.³

Of course, not everyone believed or even thought about all this. Many who did, moreover, were not distraught in the least. A significant number of Americans thought that Darwinian science neatly explained the nation’s increasingly competitive and often brutal social order, under which crushing labor and poverty were the lot of many, especially in the growing cities. In this view, the struggle of all, the suffering of many, and the success of a few was not just necessary, but natural, and thus good. The English philosopher and psychologist Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” to describe such a theory, claimed a host of disciples in the United States as the evolutionary perspective spread in the post-Civil War decades.⁴ For many Americans, however, the world revealing itself in those years was an uncertain one, made positively revolting by the implications many drew from Darwin’s ideas. It was difficult to shake the thought that it might be utterly devoid of moral content. Blind nature had ousted a just God, iron laws of matter assailed familiar social orders, and homo economicus was shredding the façade of community. Things changed constantly, but nothing could be changed—except by the strong, who were mere agents of a cruelly impersonal universe.

This potential world led William James to the brink of suicide, and his decision to strike against it by believing in another was the genesis of his pragmatism. Having “touched bottom” in the early weeks of 1870, he realized that however torturously he deliberated over the possibility or impossibility of resisting evil, he was left in the end to conclude one way or another and see what came of it. That spring, he came across French philosopher Charles Renouvier’s definition of free will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—and it crystallized the paradoxically obligatory voluntarism of consciousness as James experienced it. It seemed only logical to choose volition over determinism until he was proved wrong. “My first act of free will,” he declared in his diary on April 30, 1870, “shall be to believe in free will.”⁵

It would take years before the most impressive effects of this choice were apparent, and James would experience many more crises of faith and will. Yet in important ways, James’s troubles shaped the cosmic optimism for which he became famous. Even the fragile young man’s confused notion that “to avert attention” from evil was somehow compatible with an active stance against it sheds light on his mature work, in which James insisted that by choosing to attend to one thing rather than another we all actively construct our pictures of the world, and thus in some way determine our actions in it. The seemingly incoherent scribblings of a depressed young man, therefore, evince James’s early suspicion—and hope—that thinking, even at the most basic level of attention, was action; even, as he wrote two decades later in The Principles of Psychology (1890), “the only moral act.”⁶ For James, the multistranded philosophy of knowledge, truth, and experience that came to be known as pragmatism was originally, and remained essentially, a tool in the quest to imbue human life—not least his own—with moral significance.

Father’s ideas

All major phases of James’s youth and early adulthood reveal his ethical bent: his need to discover a field for meaningful human action. His upbringing, however, was in many ways ill-suited to this need; an irony considering that his father, Henry James, Sr., believed that he had opened just such fields of possibility for his children through the family’s transatlantic peregrinations. Between William’s birth in 1842 and his nineteenth birthday, Henry Sr. had transplanted and re-transplanted his family from New York City to London, then Paris, and eventually back to New York City (after an extended stay in Albany); again to Europe for spells in Geneva, London, Paris, and Boulogne before heading back across the sea to Newport, Rhode Island; and once more to Europe, for a year, before returning to Newport in the fall of 1860. By that time William had lived in some 20 houses and countless hotels, attending at least 9 different schools amid long stretches of home tutoring.⁷

The funds for these travels were inherited from William’s grandfather and namesake, William James, an Irish immigrant who made a fortune as a merchant and land speculator in upstate New York. “William of Albany” raised his son Henry in the Presbyterian Church but the Christian life did not take, at least not right away. Indeed, Henry’s later geographical and spiritual wanderings reflected the determination of a former dissolute to live a moral life, informed by constant study of humanity’s fallen state and the conditions of its future redemption. As a teenager, a terrible burn and the loss of a leg fostered a morbid streak in Henry—a vivid awareness, prefiguring his son William’s, of the evil in the world. Later, boredom with school and vocational indecision led him to drinking, gambling, and eventually, a conversion experience. In his early twenties Henry joined his parents’ church and entered Princeton Theological Seminary, where he grew committed to strict Calvinist ideas about sin, justification, and predestination, and sharply critical of liberal Protestantism—including nearly every theological and ecclesiological doctrine he encountered through his exasperated teachers.⁸

In 1842—the year of his son William’s birth—Henry’s intellectual and spiritual moorings were once again loosened upon meeting Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose willingness to challenge all traditions in the search for truth impressed him in a profound but disorienting way. Increasingly confused and growing ill, he traveled to London in 1843 to clear his mind, but suffered a nervous collapse and wound up at a water cure east of the city. There, through a Mrs. Sophia Chichester, he was introduced to the thought of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Henry came to believe he was undergoing what Swedenborg called a “vastation”—a hollowing out and breaking down of the self that was a necessary stage in the course of redemption. He concluded from his subsequent studies of Swedenborg and scripture that human beings were separated from God, each other, and indeed all creation by their delusions of an independent existence and subjective relationship to an objective universe. Redemption would be collective, coming when all human egos entered crisis, experienced vastation, and dissolved together through an outward- and forward-looking focus on social and spiritual unity through and with God.⁹

From then on, Henry’s travels (and acquaintance with Emerson) brought him into contact with some of the great minds of the late Romantic and early Victorian eras, including Thoreau, Fuller, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Tennyson. At various times he espoused aspects of Charles Fourier’s socialism and other utopian philosophies as means toward encouraging individuals’ awareness of their ultimate absorption in a larger human whole. But Henry James was too contrarian and intellectually restless to become a disciple of any other thinker, or to cease his constant inquiry into the mysteries of creation. The worth of the seers he admired lay not in their doctrines, but in their ability to spur him to his own philosophical task.

In that way, Henry Sr. (after the birth in 1843 of Henry Jr., the future novelist) was an inspiring model for a young man like William, who feared that his own mental life might comprise mere epiphenomena of fixed material laws. William himself viewed his father as an intellectual model, even while acknowledging their differences. “All my intellectual life I derive from you,” he wrote his father just before the latter’s death in December 1882; “and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I’m sure that there’s a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine.” Not long after, in his introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1884), William contended that his own “hot fight” to affirm the moral agency of the individual would depend on the kind of zeal with which his father had challenged it.¹⁰

In other ways, however, Henry Sr.’s parenting took a toll on William. The haphazard education of his sons reflected Henry Sr.’s deeply held belief that life must be lived spontaneously and experimentally, unconstrained by worries about what one should or should not be—worries reflecting ignorance of the soul’s true nature as a direct expression of God’s creative impulse. That belief was made very clear to his children, even if its practical implications were not. As William’s brother Henry Jr. recalled in 1914, “What we were to do . . . was just to be something, something unconnected with specific doing, something free and uncommitted, something finer in short than being that, whatever it was, might consist of.” Yet in encouraging experimentation, the father discouraged choice, in the sense of a conscious decision to commit to something concrete and define one’s personal and social character. Such choices, it seemed to the James boys, were never worthy in their father’s eyes; the doors of experimentation, wrote Henry Jr., had “a tendency to close . . . before any very earnest proposition in particular.”¹¹ Meanwhile, paradoxically, their philosopher father gave the impression of unstinting devotion to a cause, leading William to remark of his father that “probably few authors have so devoted their entire lives to the monotonous elaboration of one single bundle of truths.”¹²

The sharp edge of this statement reveals the disorientation and anxiety William felt in attempting to meet his father’s high yet maddeningly vague expectations. Unwitting but not exculpable, Henry Sr. helped create a series of vocational crises during William’s young adulthood that exacerbated the latter’s long-running moral crisis: a gnawing worry (and periodic terror) that his life was in the hands of fate and not his own, rendering futile whatever ideals he held, choices he made, or actions he took. The earliest and perhaps most important of these crises concerned William’s desire to be an artist—on the surface, a perfect choice to please his father. “The aesthetic man, or Artist,” wrote Henry Sr., was one who “reconciles in himself all the conflicting elements of humanity,” bridging the distance between his personal self and the great collective self that would ultimately unite with God.¹³ Such an artist was not, however, one who practiced “the crawling thing which society christens Art.” Nor did the true artist pursue Emerson’s self-creation, or Charles Eliot Norton’s cultural conservation and rehabilitation, or even Walt Whitman’s democratic harmonization of self, nature, and nation. Rather, the true artist channeled “the gush of God’s life into every form of spontaneous speech or act.”¹⁴ In seeking this path for himself, Henry Sr. struggled to be an artist who did not struggle, but simply let the spirit of God and universal man rather than his own ego, inherited traditions, or fellow citizens guide his actions. As his eldest later recalled, despite Henry Sr.’s commitment to the coming creation he was “willing to cast the whole burden on God, who would be sure to order it rightly when all the conditions were fulfilled.”¹⁵

William, by contrast, at age of 19, wanted to draw and paint pictures of creation as he found it, and felt he could do so quite satisfactorily on a human rather than cosmic scale. During both the James family’s Newport stays he had studied drafting and painting in the studio of William Mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 The Ethical Origins of James’s Pragmatism
• 2 Religion and the Refinement of James’s Pragmatism
• 3 The Ethical Republic
• 4 Citizen James
• 5 Legacies and Prospects
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index