Abstract
“William James did not need to write a separate treatise on ethics,” John Dewey elegized upon his fellow pragmatist’s death, “because in its larger sense he was everywhere and always the moralist.”1 Dewey was defending the deceased from a charge still leveled today. For over a century James’s critics have deemed his philosophy ethically vacuous, providing no solid basis upon which to make decisions other than hedonistic utility or solipsistic dreams.2 Many who have acknowledged his pronouncements on specific ethical issues have interpreted them as the sentiments of a thoughtful and well-meaning man, reflecting a particularly cosmopolitan but otherwise unremarkable American liberalism rather than a conscious and consistent moral philosophy.3
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Notes
John Dewey, “William James” (1910), The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston et al., 15 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–83), 6: 92.
Two prominent examples demonstrating the persistence and per-spectival diversity of this critique are Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism” (1909), Philosophical Essays (New York: Longmans, Green, 1910), 87–126; and
John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
See, for example, Louis Menand’s assessments of James in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001). James’s ethics is typically ignored by scholars: the most recent intellectual biography of James,
Robert D. Richardson’s William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), devotes but a few scattered pages to James’s moral philosophy. Among James’s biographers, Ralph Barton Perry attended most closely to his moral thought in TC, particularly the second volume. Perry, however, overemphasized James’s individualism and ignored his tragic sensibility, inadvertently reinforcing views of James as a markedly sophisticated exponent of an essentially naïve and characteristically American optimism.
See, for example, WJ, “Does Consciousness Exist?” (1904), ERE, esp. 37. A stimulating account of James’s embrace of Darwinian methods, highlighting the influence and divergent conclusions of Peirce, is Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Vol. I: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Pragmatism, 58. The literature on the ideas summarized here is vast. A concise explication of James’s conception of truth, helpfully comparing and contrasting it with Peirce’s, is Hilary Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” in Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166–185.
Studies of James’s radical-empiricist metaphysics include John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969);
Charlene Haddock Siegfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); and
William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992).
A prominent example is Gerald E. Meyers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), esp. 398–399.
John K. Roth, Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1969).
Richard M. Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
WJ, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1898), TT, 229–264. The emphasis on solidarity as equal in importance to “sell-determination,” even il emergent from or psychologically secondary to our efforts to organize our personal energies in the most “ergonomically advantageous” manner, also separates the present interpetation of James’s moral thought from that of Sergio Franzese, The Ethics of Energy: William James’s Moral Philosophy in Focus (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2008), quoted 102, 130 (note).
Bernard P. Brennan, The Ethics of William James (New York: Bookman Associates, 1961), esp. Chapter 3;
John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1969), 293–329;
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 127–128;
George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), esp. Chapter 5;
Michael R. Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith; Henry Samuel Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981);
Bennett Ramsey, Submitting to Freedom: The Religious Vision of William James (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
See also David A. Hollinger, “William James and the Culture of Inquiry,” Michigan Quarterly Review 20 (Summer 1981), 264–283;
Hilary Putnam (with Ruth Anna Putnam), “William James’s Ideas,” in Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 217–231, esp. 218; and, for a particularly clear and provocative argument that James was “a deeply religious person,”
Ruth Anna Putnam, “Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective,” in Jeremy Carrette, ed., William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Centenary Celebration (London: Routledge, 2005), 149–160, esp. 155.
Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 57–59, 127–128; Thomas Carlson, “James and the Kantian Tradition,” in Putnam, ed., Cambridge Companion to William James, 363–383. Kloppenberg primarily emphasized James’s epistemological critique of Kant, but found evidence of Kant’s influence on James via British ethicist Henry Sidgwick. Joining Kloppenberg and Carlson in discovering affinities between James and Kant are Murray Murphey, “Kant’s Children: The Cambridge Pragmatists,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 4 (Winter 1968), 3–33; and
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
Two important and divergent analyses of HJ Sr.’s intellectual relationship to WJ are Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Chapter 2; and Giles Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Chapter 3. For discussion see chapter 1, note 28.
Along with the works by Kloppenberg and Cotkin cited above, see James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and
Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), esp. Chapter 1.
Contrast the admirable effort by Daniel S. Malachuk, “‘Loyal to a Dream Country’: Republicanism and the Pragmatism of William James and Richard Rorty,” Journal of American Studies 34.1 (2000): 89–113.
James was labeled a Mugwump by Perry and is described by Cotkin as exhibiting several tendencies characteristic of the tribe. Cotkin, however, notes James’s greater tolerance for difference and confidence in American democracy than typical Mugwump specimens such as E. L. Godkin, and elsewhere in his book joins Deborah Coon in classing James an anarchist. The emphasis on the dialectical character and corporatist implications of James’s writings is Livingston’s. See TC 2: 290–298; Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher, 127–130, 174–175; Deborah J. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation’: Anarchism and the Radicalization of William James,” Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 70–99; Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, esp. Chapter 7.
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Throntveit, T. (2014). Introduction. In: William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137068620_1
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