Abstract
This chapter continues the ‘anti-theodicist’ articulation and development of Jamesian pragmatism by introducing some previously unnoticed comparisons between Jamesian pragmatism and Hans Jonas’s approach to ethics and metaphysics, which largely emerges from the need to deal with the Holocaust. For example, James’s and Jonas’s accounts of the ‘finite God’ are examined against this background. Their conceptions of the relation between ethics and metaphysics are strikingly similar but also point toward important differences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For his explorations of James and pragmatism, see Richard Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)
Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
Lawrence Vogel, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Hans Jonas’s Exodus: From German Existentialism to Post-Holocaust Theology,’ in Jonas, Mortality and Morality, pp. 1-40 (here p. 15). Jonas more comprehensively deals with natural existence and the responsibility it yields in some of his previous books (not to be discussed here), including especially Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Delta, 1966)
Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
On pragmatism and environmental ethics, see Eric Katz and Andrew Light (eds), Environmental Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
For a pragmatist analysis of the human capacity to construct and use tools, and its philosophical significance, see, for example, John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1929) (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986).
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1961).
Douglas Davies, personal communication. Davies’s recent views are available in, for example, Douglas Davies and Hannah Rumble, Natural Burial (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
By this phrase we do not have to mean what Levinas means when he regards our ethical duty toward the other as something that is ‘otherwise than being,’ irreducible to ontology. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1969), trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1974).
On James’s debates with Bradley in particular, see T.L.S. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993).
Ibid., pp. 139-40. For a helpful comparison of Jonas’s rethinking to some other Jewish proposals to ‘limit’ divine omnipotence, see Berel Lang, ‘Evil, Suffering, and the Holocaust,’ in Lang, Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 32–51.
However, it has been argued by Peter Dews — insightfully invoking Jonas — that it is more difficult to get rid of the theological vocabulary associated with the problem of evil than some secularized thinkers suppose. See Dews, ‘Disenchantment and the Persistence of Evil: Habermas, Jonas, Badiou,’ in Alan D. Schrift (ed.), Modernity and the Problem of Evil (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 51–65.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 46
James, ‘The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life,’ in The Will to Believe. See also Ruth Anna Putnam’s discussion of this Jamesian idea, for example, in her ‘The Moral Life of a Pragmatist,’ in Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (eds), Identity, Character and Morality (New York: Brandford Book, 1990), pp. 67–89.
We should, in my view, react with horror to attempts to argue in all philosophical seriousness for such a conclusion, as, for example, in David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Jonas, Mortality and Morality, p. 95. For the concept of natality, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Sami Pihlström
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pihlström, S. (2014). A Suffering God and Post-Holocaust Pragmatism. In: Taking Evil Seriously. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412669_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412669_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48965-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-41266-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)