Abigail Modaff

WILLIAM JAMES’S SOCIAL ETHICS This essay seeks to re-center the study of James’s ethics on his published works of the 1890s, especially “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891), “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899), “What Makes a Life Significant?” (1899), and “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine” (1898). Whether by the scope of James’s writings, or the allure of his vulnerable and compassionate character, or the flights of his poetic style, interpretations of James’s moral theory have been drawn to various corners of his oeuvre and the intellectual-historical world. They are unified only by their tendency to reduce James’s ethics to familiar categories, whether deontological, existentialist, religious, pluralistic, or utilitarian. But James’s moral works of the 1890s defy easy reduction: they presented a genuinely innovative via media between utilitarian and deontological approaches to ethics, informed by the pragmatic theory of truth and the Romantic and Emersonian traditions. The key to James’s ethics, and the focus of this essay, is his pragmatic account of obligation, first developed in 1891 and underscored in his works of the late 1890s. An immediate consequence of this pragmatic conception of obligation was the importance that sympathy assumed in James’s moral works – a move that rendered “William James’s social ethics” not only a category of philosophizing, but an apt description of a moral theory which demanded interpersonality at every juncture. Thus, overall, James’s ethics collapsed into a plurality of positive obligations to the realization – not just the toleration – of others’ demands and ideals. This pluralism formed the basis for a moral life focused around sympathetic communication and the cooperative integration of disparate desires. James’s pragmatic conception of obligation has largely been overlooked in secondary literature. While most accounts of James’s ethics either focus upon interrogating his limited activism, 1 rendering him a defender of freedom, 2

1 Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 422-45; James Campbell, “William James and the Ethics of Fulfillment,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17, no. 3 (Summer, 1981): entire, accessed February 13, 2013, www.jstor.org/stable/40319924; Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 216-52. 2 John K. Roth, Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), entire, especially 7, 14-19, 36-49, 56-8, 62-3, 72-7; John Wild, The

1 Abigail Modaff elevating the role of religion in his moral universe,3 asserting his “individualism” and “toleration” to the detriment of his interpersonal ethics,4 or, most often, squaring James’s deontological allusions with their own utilitarian interpretations,5 this essay locates a clear and cohesive moral vision in James’s own language when it is placed in its pragmatic context. Utilitarian readings, while not baseless – especially given James’s dedication of Pragmatism (1907) to John Stuart Mill – do not specifically explore the Millian connection, and their resulting gloss of James as a generic desire-satisfaction utilitarian obscures his pragmatic naturalization6 of ethical terms and the authenticity that he accorded to obligation and duty. 7 This essay thus focuses upon the pragmatic and Emersonian contexts of James’s 1890s work not necessarily to the exclusion of utilitarianism, but in order to provide a firmer basis for future explorations of James’s utilitarian aspects. This reading is supported by the content of James’s letters, lectures, and publications during the 1890s. Following the success of The Principles of Psychology (1890), James’s time was occupied with teaching, lecturing, and an

Radical Empiricism of William James (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), 266-92, especially 270, 275-84, 289-92. 3 Wild, The Radical Empiricism, 293-329; Michael R. Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), entire, especially 2-3, 5-16, 26-9, 45, 55-9, 65- 93. 4 Campbell, “William James,” entire; Perry, The Thought and Character, 216-7, 221, 223-4, 226-9, despite allowing some latitude for sympathy. 5 Slater, William James, 70-1, 74-5, 78-82; Richard M. Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10-12, 25-49; Graham Bird, William James (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 154-6. John Roth takes this line regarding “Moral Philosopher,” though he feels that essay is unrepresentative of James’s ethics as a whole: Roth, Freedom and the Moral, 59-71. Arguing against such readings is Wesley Cooper, The Unity of William James’s Thought (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 222-39. 6 “Naturalization” is a difficult word to manage (see Gale, The Divided Self, 335-6). I intend it in the most general sense: as the rendering of moral qualities, concepts, and truths into the experienced, concrete, phenomenal world. No implication of scientific or social-scientific measurability is intended. 7 William James, “Pragmatism,” in William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 4. On James and obligation, in addition to the discussion below, see Edward H. Madden, Introduction to The Works of William James, Volume 6: The Will to Believe, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), xxxii, on the fact that Dewey was inspired by “Moral Philosopher” to insert obligation into his own ethics; James’s 1900 letter to Francis R. Morse criticizing Oliver Wendell Holmes for ignoring duty, quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character, 216; and William James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, in William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 232.

2 Abigail Modaff increasing distaste for psychological research. 8 In the decade his son characterized as “Turning to Philosophy,” James finally broke with Josiah Royce’s absolutism, admitted the philosophical nature of his psychology, assumed the mantle of pragmatism, and by most accounts reached his “mature” views.9 The roots of these new commitments, however, ran deep. Though he would not write Pragmatism until 1907, James had been steeped in a generally pragmatic viewpoint since the Metaphysical Club, and he traced the core of his own pragmatism to an 1884 essay that he republished in The Meaning of Truth (1909).10 It was in the 1890s that he attracted his two foremost disciples, Oxford’s F.C.S. Schiller and Chicago’s John Dewey, to the pragmatist approach, and he wrote to Schiller in 1897 that “we must fly a banner and start a school”; in addition, James always attributed the foundation of pragmatism to an 1878 article by Charles Peirce, to whom he dedicated the 1897 volume, The Will to Believe, that contained the republished “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.”11 James’s son wrote that “if his time and energy had not been otherwise

8 Robert D. Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 301-9, 341, 373-87; Perry, The Thought and Character, 221; Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1977), 180-1, 186. See also both the letters and the editorial material for chapters 10-13 in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd, 1926), vol. I: 300-334 and vol. II: 2-127. Hereafter this collection will be referenced as “Letters,” with the proper volume noted. 9 Henry James, editorial materials in Letters, vol. II, 2; William James to Dickinson S. Miller, November 19, 1893, in Letters, vol. II, 18; James, “Pragmatism,” 25-6; Kuklick, The Rise, 181-3, 264-7; Wild, The Radical Empiricism, 277; David Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5; H.S. Thayer, Introduction to The Works of William James, Volume 2: The Meaning of Truth, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), xxi-xxii; William James to Josiah Royce, December 18, 1892, in Letters, vol. I, 333: “I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental palsy that has been over me for the past year, and to take a little ‘notice’ in matters philosophical.” 10 Kuklick, The Rise, 47-54; William James, The Meaning of Truth, volume 2 of The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 32. Thayer echoes James’s assessment of pragmatism’s source: Thayer, Introduction, xxi. 11 William James to F.C.S. Schiller, October 23, 1897, in Letters, vol. II, 66; Cooper, The Unity, 31; Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom, 304, 367. For James’s closeness to Dewey and Schiller, see William James, “The Chicago School,” in The Works of William James, Volume 5: Essays in Philosophy, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), entire; James, Meaning of Truth, 4, 37-60, 70-7, 93; James, “Pragmatism,” 5, 30. By 1903, Schiller already felt confident enough to proclaim in the preface to his Humanism: Philosophical Essays that pragmatism and humanism were the future of philosophy and James’s Will to Believe was at their center: F.C.S. Schiller, Humanism: Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1903), viii-xxiii, especially xv-xvi, and ix where he traced pragmatism back to an 1879 essay of James’s.

3 Abigail Modaff consumed, the nineties might well have witnessed the appearance of papers which were not written until the next decade.”12 In this decade of transformation and continuity, moral issues were on the fifty-year-old James’s mind. Reading Tolstoy on trains that carried him to lecture engagements which “serve[d] as the occasion for casting philosophical conceptions in more or less popular form,” James produced two volumes containing important ethical works: The Will to Believe (1897), which contained “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” and Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899), containing “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant?”.13 Though “Moral Philosopher” was originally written in 1891 based on lecture notes James compiled in 1888-9, its presence lingered through the 1890s.14 James lauded it to his brother after its republication, and many of his letters through 1899 were preoccupied with responses to that 1897 volume. 15 Even in 1891, James anticipated “Moral Philosopher”’s poor reception in imagery that presaged his themes of 1897-9, referencing the Romantic poet Musset’s allegory of the pelican in letters to his brother and to F.W.H. Myers.16 This Romanticism and the pluralistic obligation James had outlined in “Moral Philosopher” carried through to the end of the decade, when James – preoccupied with the course he was teaching on Kant and the “pretension of awful holiness” by the anti-Dreyfusards, and primed for the extraordinary “Walpurgis Nacht” of “spiritual alertness” he

12 Henry James, editorial material in Letters, vol. II, 5. 13 Ibid., 6. On the importance of Tolstoy to James’s thought during this period, see several letters: William James to Ellen Emmet, August 11, 1897, 63; William James to Henry James, June 11, 1896, 37-8; William James to Mrs. James, July 24, 1896, 41; William James to Rosina H. Emmet, August 2, 1896, 44; William James to Charles Renouvier, August 4, 1896, 45; William James to Theodore Flournoy, August 30, 1896, 48; William James to Henry James, September 28, 1896, 51; all in Letters, vol. II. 14 Perry, The Thought and Character, 221; William James to F.W.H. Myers, January 30, 1891, 307; William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 242; Roth, Freedom and the Moral, 59. 15 Myers, William James, 396 and endnote on 585; See also Perry, The Thought and Character, 221. On responding to criticism of Will to Believe, see William James to E.L. Godkin, August 17, 1897, in Letters, vol. II, 64-5; William James to Dickinson S. Miller, December 3, 1898, in Letters, vol. II, 85; William James to Henry Rutgers Marshall, February 7, 1899, in Letters, vol. II, 87. 16 James to Myers, January 30, 1891, 307; William James to Henry James, February 15, 1891, quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character, 227. In addition to the simple link to Romanticism noted here, deeper implications of James’s link between his moral essay, Musset’s poem, and Kipling’s first novel The Light that Failed in the letters cited above would be fruitful objects for future study.

4 Abigail Modaff would experience in 1898 – turned an 1897 lecture on immortality into a meditation on the moral value of individuals and their claims.17 In the midst of this decade of coming into his own, impressed but troubled by the vastness and variety of America, mind “borne up” by Tolstoy as he emerged self-consciously into philosophy, William James articulated his “fundamental moralism.”18 This moralism was anchored in a pragmatic explanation of moral terms and concepts which empirically defined moral obligation as the result of actual inquiry on the part of the moral philosopher. This essay details this argument and shows how it resulted in the foregrounding of sympathy as a means to understand and appreciate the multitude of demands upon those seeking to live the moral life. My aim is to demonstrate that all four of James’s essays that I consider make essentially the same point: that obligation, to its fullest possible extent, lives in the desires of concrete individuals, and it is that to which we must respond if we seek to live the moral life. The first half of this essay closely reads “Moral Philosopher” in order to show the continuity between goods, ideals, demands, desires, and claims in James’s theory, demonstrating that they all derived their essential character from his metaphysical association of goods with desires. The second half will incorporate James’s 1897-9 essays to show how this metaphysical rendering of moral obligation brought the content of ethical truth into the public sphere, where it could be transformed, integrated, and brought to bear upon previously unwilling hearts.

The Moral Philosopher

17 On Walpurgis Nacht, William James to Mrs. James, July 9, 1898, in Letters, vol. II: 76-7. On the Dreyfus affair, William James to William M. Salter, September 11, 1899, in Letters, vol II, 99-101; William James to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899, in Letters, vol. II, 89; William James to Mrs. E. P. Gibbens, August 22, 1899, in Letters, vol. II, 97-8. On the course on Kant, Henry James, editorial materials in Letters, vol. II, 3; James to Flournoy, August 30, 1896, 47; William James to Theodore Flournoy, December 7, 1896, in Letters, vol. II, 54-5. On the “Human Immortality” lecture, see William James, “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine,” in The Works of William James, Volume 11: Essays in Religion and Morality, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 96-101; and John J. McDermott, Introduction to The Works of William James, Volume 11: Essays in Religion and Morality, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), xvii on the oddness of James’s chosen theme. 18 James to Rosina Emmet, August 2, 1896, 44; Perry, The Thought and Character, 216. See also James to Mrs. James, July 24, 1896, 41-3; Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom, 380-1.

5 Abigail Modaff

This section considers James’s 1891/1897 “Moral Philosopher” in order to trace James’s construction of his central ethical tenet: the argument that, when one’s world was structured by the beliefs and objectives of the moral philosopher, moral truth and obligation revealed themselves to be lodged within the demands and desires of living individuals. A first essential portion of this was the positive contribution of the moral philosopher to ethical investigation, to which I will return at the end of the essay when discussing motivation. “First of all,” James asked at the very beginning of “Moral Philosopher,” “what is the position of him who seeks an ethical philosophy?”19 A survey of the pragmatist position provides good reason to take this question seriously. Seven years earlier, James had written that reality is the “faith of the present critic or inquirer…At every moment of his life he finds himself subject to a belief in some realities, even though his realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the next.”20 He expanded upon this viewpoint throughout his life. Though “what we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it,” James saw accusations of subjectivism as “slanderous,” for “the temporarily satisfactory is often false” compared to “truth taken abstractly and verified in the long run.”21 However, “pragmatically,” it was “idle” to deal in terms of the eternal and absolute truth that the intellectualists craved, or even speculate upon possibilities of future convergence, for “at each and every concrete moment, truth for each man is what that man ‘troweth’ at that moment with the maximum of satisfaction to himself.”22 “Of any deeper more real way of [knowing] we have no positive conception, and we have no right to discredit our actual experience by talking of such a way at all,” James concluded.23

19 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 242. 20 James, Meaning of Truth, 16. 21 James, “Pragmatism,” 108; James, Meaning of Truth, 8, 54. See also James, Meaning of Truth, 127-8. 22 James, Meaning of Truth, 143, 54. Cooper notes this on pages 225-6, but persists in framing his account of James’s morality around eventual consensus (Cooper, The Unity, 3, 223, 224-5, 226-7, 229, 232, 235-6). 23 James, Meaning of Truth, 63. See also Ibid., 47-8, 54-6, 190-111, 114 (incl. footnote), 147, and cf. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 207: “Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?” My emphasis upon temporally contextualized reality here consciously diverges from the focus of Thayer, Introduction, xxvii-xliii.

6 Abigail Modaff

Entering the moral realm in the persona of the “Moral Philosopher,” we therefore see the moral world from his perspective, and James was careful to inform his readers of what that entailed: the moral philosopher “will not be a sceptic…[his] aim is to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system.”24 This “ideal of his own” was “a factor in ethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked…a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily makes to the problem.”25 James was thus careful to let his readers know that they were encountering ethical truth and moral obligation only because they were doggedly and uncompromisingly seeking it.26 In this light, James’s four comparisons of the ethical philosopher to the physical scientist in “Moral Philosopher” are revealing.27 A physicist writes his hypothesis, prepares his experiment, and analyzes his results based upon beliefs – such as theorems of calculus and the concept of an “atom” – that have proven effective for him, and which he thereby holds to be true. 28 He seeks his results through experimentation because he believes that the interaction between the elements he has combined will help him to act more effectively, whether his action takes the form of writing an equation, conducting a further experiment, or building a jetliner.29 When the physicist gets his results, they will be no less true for having been shaped by his belief that atoms exist and his desire to base his future actions upon the results of his experiment.30 In a legitimate but transformative sense, the philosopher, like the physicist, calls his ethical truth into being by inquiring after it in the first place – by believing in it.

24 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 242. 25 Ibid. 26 Compare to those who see James’s moral truth as problematically abstract and universal: Madden, Introduction, xxxiii; Bird, William James, 155-6; Slater, William James, 77-8, 81-2. Closer to this account is that of Roth, Freedom and the Moral, 67. One may also note the similarity here to Dewey’s concept of philosophy as an “intellectualized wish,” John Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy,” in The American Intellectual Tradition, Volume II: 1865-Present, ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209-16. 27 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 242, 253-4, 258. 28 James, “Pragmatism,” 21, 32-3, 85, 108; James, Meaning of Truth, 40-5, 51, 53, 60, 86, 141. 29 James, “Pragmatism,” 24-8, 96-101; James, Meaning of Truth, 23-9, 128-30. 30 Cf. James, Meaning of Truth, 60: “Pragmatically, virtual and actual truth mean the same thing: the possibility of only one answer, when once the question is raised.” See also James, Meaning of Truth, 48-9, 86-7, 91-2, 99-101; James, “Will to Believe,” 208-9, 211-2.

7 Abigail Modaff

We will return to the simile of the physicist at the close of this essay, but for now we must ask after his experiment. What are the atoms here? With what was James’s moral philosopher confronted upon entering the moral world? Interpreters of James disagree on the “currency” of James’s ethical life, for, at times, James appeared to blend the language of “claim,” “demand,” “desire,” “good,” and “ideal.”31 James’s vagueness on the subject, however, arose from the fact that these moral concepts were not in fact different in kind, but were all underpinned by desire. This began with James’s naturalization of “goodness.” In his section on the “metaphysical” question of ethics in “Moral Philosopher,” James asserted that goodness cannot inhere elsewhere than in living minds. “Surely there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient world,” James argued, before defending this claim with rhetoric that presaged the relationship between good and demand: “In its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful…Physical facts simply are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires.”32 It is important to note that James has so far made only a metaphysical point, not a normative one.33 The ethical philosopher, seeking to collect his materials for his experiment, has located them in the minds of sentient beings; James’s conclusion that “goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist” has arisen from a pragmatically required investigation into what good is “known-as,” that is, in what capacity it manifests itself in the experienced world.34 Metaphysically, James argued, “the same object is good or

31 See Myers, William James, 399, 402-3; Slater, William James, 80-1; Gale, The Divided Self, 44-6; Cooper, The Unity, 225-33; and Julius Seelye Bixler, “Two Questions Raised by William James’s Essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’” in The Harvard Theological Review 35, no. 2 (April, 1942): 117-129, accessed January 30, 2013, www.jstor.org/stable/1508373. Examples of James blending his vocabulary occur in James, “Moral Philosopher,” 244, 248-50, 252-3, 253-4 (“the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand…The various ideals have no common character apart from the fact that they are ideals”), 255 (“that howling mob of desires, each struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings”), 256, 260. 32 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 246. 33 Compare to Gale, The Divided Self, 28-32, who alleges that James’s association of good with demand is an “ultimate objective moral truth” that contradicts his professed “anti-Platonism.” On calling this argument “metaphysical” throughout the essay, I follow James’s terminology in “Moral Philosopher,” though throughout his career he made differing statements regarding pragmatism’s role in metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology (for example, James, “Pragmatism,” 24-5, 29; James, Meaning of Truth, 37-8, 78, 97, 100-1). 34 James, ”Moral Philosopher,” 246; James, Meaning of Truth, 3 and 48.

8 Abigail Modaff bad…according as you measure it by the view which this one or other of the thinkers takes.”35 The metaphysical character of this discussion is crucial to James’s subsequent identification of good with demand. Though James did not explicitly claim that “the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand” until his casuistic section, it was evident in the language and logic of his metaphysical analysis.36 James, ever the optimist, thought that the coextensiveness of “claim” and “obligation” became obvious “the moment we take a steady look at the question,” as long as we are not “too accustomed to…the superstitious view…that something which we call the ‘validity’ of the claim is what gives it its obligatory character.” 37 However, the point is often overlooked, and thus requires belaboring.38 The reason that “every de facto claim creates in so far forth an obligation” arose from the metaphysical fact that the moral qualities of good, bad, better, and worse “cannot float in the atmosphere, for [they are] not some sort of meteorological phenomenon…[their] esse is percipit.”39 Every “ought” must be traceable to “the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness,” because otherwise we are left with the absurd situation of physical entities having demands and desires.40 But once we accept this, we are suddenly unable to locate anything external to existing consciousnesses with which to determine which of these demands attain “ought” status – which truly manifest “good” – and which do not. If we want to locate a moral imperative in the world – and, as ethical philosophers, we do41 – we must recognize that claims experienced and leveled by concrete actors are the sole possible source of obligatory power. Validity does not “[rain] down upon the claim…from some sublime dimension of being which the moral law inhabits,” because “how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness, additional to the imperativeness which is

35 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 246, emphasis added. 36 Ibid., 253. 37 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 249. 38 In particular, compare the perspective presented here to Myers, William James, 398-404; Slater, William James, 75-6; Cooper, The Unity, 225-30; and Gale, The Divided Self, 46-7, who tells a similar story but with moral truth as a language-game rather than a metaphysical reality. 39 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 249, 248. 40 Ibid., 248. Cf. 246. 41 Cf. ibid., 252: “we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is a truth to be ascertained.”

9 Abigail Modaff in the concrete claim itself, exist?”42 If “the various ideals have no common character apart from the fact that they are ideals,” then “any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact that it exists at all.”43 This is the self-actualizing nature of James’s moral world: the search for obligation, when undertaken pragmatically, reveals that obligation must inhere in all claims qua claims. Upon this quickly follows the essential continuity between demands, desires, goods, and ideals. Though he sometimes spoke of “ideals” as existing on a solely individual level, James may have intended the term to indicate a stance regarding which goods are preferable to others.44 But this distinction had little effect upon his theory, for “like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better and worse must be realized in order to be real.”45 Some sort of existing consciousness “must make the one ideal right by feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong”; that is, any test of ethical propriety “must be incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person.”46 Even the ideal moral order envisioned in the hypothetical mind of God was described in terms of “demands” which were obligatory only because “they are actually made.”47 After all, James argued, “the only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist” – with “phenomenon” including the moral hierarchies sought by ideals – “is that such a phenomenon is actually desired.”48 From “the largest obligations” clothed in resplendent ideals down to “small desires…put forward by insignificant persons,” the materials of James’s moral world were anchored in living individuals’ desires for the universe to be a particular way.49

42 Ibid., 249. 43 Ibid., 254, 249-50. 44 For example, James, “Moral Philosopher,” 244-5 on desires and “moral perceptions,” 246-7 on the “ideals” of a solitary individual, 252 uses “ideals” in discussing moral pluralism. 45 Ibid., 248. 46 Ibid., 248, 252. In general, see from the bottom of 247 through 252. 47 Ibid., 250. 48 Ibid., 249. 49 Ibid., 250. Cf. William James, lecture notes from 1888-9, quoted in Campbell, “William James,” 224: “So far as I feel anything good, I make it so. It is so, rather, for me…”; William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 267: “Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us.”

10 Abigail Modaff

This has immediate consequences for the debate over James’s social ethics within the secondary literature. In particular, it explains why, as Michael Slater, Richard Gale, John Roth, and Gerald Myers all note in various ways, James introduced “deontological” concerns into his “utilitarian” argument. 50 Most commentators uphold James’s “lost soul” example – which he used early in “Moral Philosopher” to critique associationist epistemology – as an illegitimate appeal to deontological ideas that interfered with James’s utilitarian calculus.51 But this reading accords James two positions that he never actually espoused in abstraction – the wrongness of sacrificing the lost soul for others’ happiness, and the injunction to desire-satisfaction. First, James condemned the lost-soul situation because he assumed that his fellows would “immediately feel…how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment.”52 James and his audience were repelled by the plight of the lost soul; they did not desire for the true ordering of goods and obligations to validate such a situation. Therefore, because the true ordering of goods and obligations arose from the desires of living minds in the first place, moral truth necessarily included this intuition about the lost soul. Furthermore, this did not lead to a conflict between deontology and utilitarianism because neither rule applied in advance: James’s utilitarian-sounding maxim to “satisfy at all times as many demands as we can” arose solely as a casuistic response to the metaphysical identification of good with desire. 53 It provided the moral philosopher with the unified ethical truth he demanded while recognizing the fundamental plurality of real obligations, including deontological claims. James’s assertion that “claim and obligation are…coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly” was thus an argument straight from the playbook of pragmatist metaphysics, and the grandest level of his ethics was merely a response to this discovery of the nature of obligation in the phenomenal world.54 James thus lured the moral philosopher into the world of ethics with the dream of “unified moral truth” and a “genuine [ethical] universe” and then trapped him into a fundamental pluralism with the results of his metaphysical

50 Myers, William James, 398-400; Slater, William James, 74-5,78, 92-3; Gale, The Divided Self, 37- 41, 48-9; Roth, Freedom and the Moral, 69. 51 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 244-5. 52 Ibid., 245. 53 Ibid., 256. 54 Ibid., 249.

11 Abigail Modaff investigation.55 He did provide his philosopher with a conciliatory gesture: the flexible and almost content-less, but nevertheless unified, injunction to “seek incessantly, with fear and trembling…to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.”56 But underneath the abstract surface of this good lay the “howling mob of desires,” the “exuberant mass of goods with which all human nature is in travail,” and their fundamentally obligatory power formed the true content of James’s social ethics.57 James’s conclusion that “the guiding principle for ethical philosophy [must] be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can” is not the best summary of his moral theory: the real work of his ethics was done by concrete demands, which wove themselves into ethical truth once they breached the bounds of individual life and called for some actions to be right and others to be wrong.58 Like a mathematician whose subsequent algebra is firmly ordered by his acceptance of the abstract entity “three,” James’s moral philosopher’s search for obligation required him to recognize its presence in each and every demand for “anything under the sun.”59 The practical consequence of this aggressively pluralistic obligation was that anyone who intended to live morally needed to know these obligations before he could act upon them – know, in other words, his fellow humans’ inner lives. The difficulty and centrality of this sympathy is the focus of James’s work in the late 1890s, and the next section of this essay.

The Moral Life In the preface to his 1899 Talks to Teachers, James defended “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” as a work of philosophy. It “is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism which it may seem,” he wrote; “it connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the same.”60 The moral view of the world James intended was the “pluralistic or individualistic” one

55 Ibid., 262, 242. 56 Ibid., 259. 57 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 259, 255. Cf. James, Meaning of Truth, 71-2, where he aligned his pluralistic ethics with Dewey’s as “a philosophy of ‘co’, in which conjunctions do the work.” 58 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 256. See also ibid., 247-8, 251. 59 Ibid., 253. On the ability of abstract entities to constrain truth, see James, Meaning of Truth, 106 (footnote), 112-3, 129; James, “Pragmatism,” 93. 60 William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, v, quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character, 222.

12 Abigail Modaff outlined in the preceding paragraphs, and its implication was rendered in his works of the late 1890s: the positive duty to the realization of others’ ends, comprehended through sympathetic and open-hearted communication.61 The purpose of this section is to show that these late-1890s essays retained and strengthened the obligatory power of each claim qua claim that James first developed in “Moral Philosopher.” This occurred despite the initial appearance in “On a Certain Blindness” that James dampened his pluralistic obligation in favor of simple toleration, and it relied upon his appropriation of the Emersonian and Romantic idea of morality-transcending significance into his concrete moral duty. All of this centers around the key corollary of James’s pluralistic obligation: the indispensability of sympathy and communication in living the moral life. This discussion of the moral life that reached its apogee in James’s 1897-9 work begins at the tail end of “Moral Philosopher.” Where did the ethical philosophy James presented there leave men who intended to live morally? As has been noted by John Roth, this moral life was intensely situational.62 “No philosophy of ethics is available in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term...there are no absolute evils, and there are no non-moral goods,” James cautioned.63 While “the laws and usages of the land” have proved satisfactory in “an experiment of the most searching kind,” there is always truer morality to be found in the future, for “pent in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it weighs upon, and goods which it represses.”64 As we have not yet figured out how best to accommodate “that exuberant mass of goods” that already exists, let alone how to face those which will arise between now and when “the last man has had his experience and his say,” predetermined rules of action other than “to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see” are only provisional rules of thumb that may well prove to be false.65 James realized the unhelpfulness of his overarching dictum in daily situations, and he admitted as such in an often-overlooked demotion of ethics

61 Ibid. Compare to Myers’ interpretation of sympathy as a source of optimism and personal enrichment rather than ethical truth, Myers, William James, 406-9. 62 Roth, Freedom and the Moral, 19-20. 63 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 258-9. 64 Ibid., 256, 257. 65 Ibid., 255, 242, 259.

13 Abigail Modaff near the end of “Moral Philosopher.” “The philosopher,” James wrote, “qua philosopher, is no better able to determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men” – for, while “he sees…somewhat better than most men what the question always is,” his position affords him no special insight into which possibility will actually realize the most desires and thus the most good.66 At the heart of the issue was an epistemological problem: “the very best of men must not only be insensible, but be ludicrously and peculiarly insensible, to many goods.”67 The sole immutable ethical imperative James could offer soared to unhelpfully grand heights above the thicket of actual obligation; but ethical treatises any more precise than “Moral Philosopher” were merely approximations of the truth contained in living minds, and only the “cries of the wounded,” not consultation of an abstract rule, could tell you whether you had done good or ill.68 “Books upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and more ally themselves with…novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform,” James concluded.69 The content that came to bear upon the day-to-day living of the moral life in James’s ethical universe dealt not with ethics, but with sympathy – accessing the values and obligations locked within alien minds.70 When we turn to James’s explicitly sympathy-focused works, however, the positive dimension of his social ethic initially appears to fall away in the face of simple toleration and a version of Mill’s harm principle.71 “On a Certain Blindness,” filled with lengthy quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson, William Wordsworth, and Walt Whitman,72 set out “to make you feel how soaked and shot through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of

66 Ibid., 259-60. 67 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 255. 68 Ibid., 259. See also 257-60. 69 Ibid., 260. 70 Compare to Gale’s account, which focuses solely on the role of social science and therefore does not call upon 1897-9 essays: Gale, The Divided Self, 33. 71 This is the stand on the essay taken by Perry, The Thought and Character, 221-4, and by Campbell, “William James,” entire, especially 233, on James’s ethics in general. Myers recognizes the relationship between sympathy and truth in the essay, but relates it to optimism, not ethics: Myers, William James, 406-9. 72 James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 270-2, 274-5, 277-9.

14 Abigail Modaff our external and insensible point of view.”73 To convey “the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives” and convince us that “the subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see,” James described the inner exultation that can attend upon unexpected circumstances and imbue them with meaning.74 The upshot of this meditation upon sympathy and plurality in “On a Certain Blindness,” though, was a plea in favor of toleration, with no mention of the intrinsically obligatory nature of each desire that he had originally established in 1891. “And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations?” James asked: It commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off…It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.75

An ethics centered around “hands off” leaves little room for moral action or positive obligation. Instead, in light of man’s congenital blindness, James seems to have taken a more Emersonian line, severing “the occasion and the experience” from “the capacity of the soul to be grasped” and challenging how much can be learned from one’s fellow men.76 Given this prominent theme of toleration and ignorance, then, did James abandon his metaphysical argument for pluralistic obligation in favor of the simpler, safer injunction to live and let live? Despite the weight James gave to his plea for tolerance, the underlying philosophical framework of his late 1890s work actually underscored the

73 William James, “What Makes a Life Significant?”, in William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 286. 74 James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 267, 268. 75 Ibid., 285. Cf. the conclusion of “What Makes a Life,” 303: “If the poor and the rich could look at each other this way…how gentle would grow their disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and let live, would come into the world!” 76 James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 281, 276. Larzer Ziff, Introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 15, 17-9, 21-5; William A. Clebsch, American Religions Thought; a history (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 74, 78, 93-4, 101-2, 109-10; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), entire, especially 149, 153-4, 160, 168; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in the same volume, 209, 211-13, 222-3; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in the same volume, 175, 178, 181, 185.

15 Abigail Modaff compulsory power of each individual desire. One must take James at his word that “one can only make one point in one lecture” and recall that he first delivered “On a Certain Blindness” and “What Makes a Life” to university students vulnerable to the hegemonic pretensions in moral philosophy that James feared.77 Indeed, James singled out academics for chastisement in “Moral Philosopher,” railing against Zeno, Epicurus, Calvin, Kant, Schopenhauer, and others as “schoolmasters deciding what all must think.”78 Despite this felt need to encourage caution in overly self-confident moralists, all three essays of 1897-9 were rife with references to the “truth,” “meaning,” and “value” of others’ joys and ideals – vocabulary which follows the naturalizing metaphysics of “Moral Philosopher” in according full moral validity to each person’s desires. “Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it…there is…importance in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be,”79 James wrote in “On a Certain Blindness,” and noted of the lovers Jack and Jill in “What Makes a Life” that “Jack’s way of taking [Jill’s inner life] is the true and serious way.”80 Hours of joy “tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself.”81 Indeed, “in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour…consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?” he asked, making essentially the same metaphysical point as he made in “Moral Philosopher.”82 When James, quoting Royce, wrote that “if though [sic] hast known [your neighbor’s inner life], thou hast begun to know thy duty,” he was not simply asserting that others valued their joys and ideals, but also that those self-accorded valuations constituted value itself.83 “On a Certain Blindness” and “What Makes a Life” were pluralistic and individualistic in the particularly

77 James, “What Makes a Life,” 303. 78 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 255. Cf. a similar treatment of religion, Wiliam James, “Preface to The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,” in William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 197: “it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalist and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm.” 79 James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 269. 80 James, “What Makes a Life,” 301. Emphasis added. 81 Ibid., 284. 82 Ibid., 276. 83 Ibid., 273. Emphasis altered.

16 Abigail Modaff

Jamesian sense: they disclosed a plurality of real obligations lodged in the feelings of real individuals. This was also a dominant theme of the much-ignored “Human Immortality,” upon which James riffed while arguing against an overcrowded heaven.84 James’s focus upon this issue shows that the coextensiveness of claim and obligation was lively in his thought at the time. Perhaps inspired by his own difficulty sympathizing with the people he encountered in his 1890s travels,85 James pleaded with his audience to accept that strangers’ inner lives were just as vibrant as their own: “all the while, beyond this externality which is your way of realizing them, they realize themselves with the acutest internality, with the most violent thrills of life,” and “‘tis you who are dead, stone-dead and blind and senseless, in your way of looking on.” 86 This was no mere exercise in appreciation; it was directly relevant to the validity of other humans’ claims upon God’s eternal devotion.87 Though “the inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight,” their demands are no less obligatory for it: “since spiritual being, whenever it comes, affirms itself, expands and craves continuance, we may justly and literally say…that the supply of individual life in the universe can never possibly…exceed the demand.”88 “That you have a saturation-point of interest tells us nothing of the interests that absolutely are,” James chastised: “if we feel a significance in our own life which would lead us spontaneously to claim its perpetuity,” then other claims, “however numerous, however unideal they may seem to be,” must have the same significance.89

84 James, “Human Immortality,” 96-101. The only sources I have encountered that mention this essay are Perry, The Thought and Character, 223, who briefly noted that it defended toleration, and McDermott, Introduction, xvii, who mostly finds it odd that James would focus on the idea of an overcrowded heaven. 85 This was the opinion of Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom, 380, and Perry, The Thought and Character, 221. It is borne out in his letters: James to Mrs. James, July 23, 1896, and James to Rosina Emmet, August 2, 1896, both in Letters, vol. II, 40-4. 86 James, “Human Immortality,” 99. As well as being very similar to James’s language in “On a Certain Blindness” (quoted above, n. 75), this resembles Larzer Ziff’s description of Emerson’s (and Whitman’s) focus on individual members of a group rather than the collective: Ziff, Introduction, 22-4. 87 James, “Human Immortality,” 97-8, 100-1. 88 Ibid., 101, 100. 89 Ibid., 99, 101.

17 Abigail Modaff

This role of others’ lives as the sole currency of James’s ethical universe is further illuminated by attending to the way in which James transposed the Emersonian and Romantic idea of meaning-suffused moments into his moral thought.90 James referenced Romantic writers and Emerson throughout the 1890s, rendering it likely that his moral works grappled somehow with their ideas. 91 In particular, he quoted Emerson’s “The Over-Soul” at a revealing moment in “On a Certain Blindness”: regarding the times at which we appreciate the significance of life, including the richness of our neighbors’ ideals, James wrote, “As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.”92 The weight such moments carried for Emerson, however, derived from the fact that they represented communication with the Absolute Soul, an idea which echoed Romantic preoccupation with the trans-material ideal.93 Though morality was worthwhile for Emerson so long as it did not needlessly constrict great men, the importance of right action was eclipsed by the “influx of the Divine into our mind” that “sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood.”94 But James claimed no such Absolute, and thus the

90 On this idea in Romanticism, see Lilian R. Furst, Romanticism (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1969), 12, and James’s quotation and treatment of Wordsworth’s Prelude in James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 274-5. On Emerson and Romanticism, see Clebsch, American Religious Thought, 90, and compare Furst, Romanticism, 37-8, 49-51, to Emerson’s Over-Soul. 91 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 245, 255, 261; James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 274-6, 279, 281-4; James, “What Makes a Life,” 290, 292; James, “Will to Believe,” 213; James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, 220, 226, 228, 239; James to Myers, January 30, 1891, 307; William James to Theodore Flournoy, August 13, 1895, in Letters, ed. James, vol. II, 23. These references do not include quotations of Stevenson, Blood, Whitman, and Tolstoy, though they arguably addressed similar themes. One may also perhaps note James’s use of “Walpurgis Nacht” to describe his extraordinary night camping in the summer of 1898 (James to Mrs. James, July 9, 1898, 76-7), as Walpurgisnacht figures in both parts of Goethe’s Faust. For James writing explicitly on Emerson, but not until 1903, see William James, “Emerson,” in The Works of William James, Volume 11: Essays in Religion and Morality, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), entire, especially 111-2, 114, and 115, on the significance of individuals. For secondary perspectives on Emerson and James, see Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom, 433; McDermott, Introduction, xxi-xxii; Clebsch, American Religious Thought, 123; John J. McDermott, “Spires of Influence: The Importance of Emerson for Classical American Philosophy,” in History, Religion, and Spiritual Democracy, ed. Maurice Wohlergenter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 181, 190-7. 92 James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 274. 93 Emerson, “Over-Soul,” entire, especially 205-6, 208-15, 223-4; Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 175, 183, 187-8; Clebsch, American Religious Thought, 78, 97-8, 106-7; Furst, Romanticism, 36-8, 49- 51; Geoffrey Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,” in Romanticism, ed. Cynthia Chase (Harlow: Longman Group UK Limited, 1993), 46-7, 49-52. 94 Emerson, “Over-Soul,” 214, 222. See also ibid., 210-11; Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 179-81; Clebsch, American Religious Thought, 95-9.

18 Abigail Modaff depth of the moments he used Emerson to describe was a part of individuals’ inner lives – and thus of morality.95 While, for Emerson, “The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past…and so is society, and so is the world…The soul knows only the soul,”96 facticity was the ultimate of James’s moral life: “this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the [urban scenes] over which his eyes so carelessly pass.”97 James appropriated transcendent significance into his concrete morality by equating it with the spontaneously-created value of individuals’ claims, reinforcing the fact that one’s duty to others was the highest metaphysically possible obligation. The message that “On a Certain Blindness” conveyed about James’s social ethics, then, was not simply “hands off.” On the contrary, it and its companion essays reinforced, in their poetic but careful way, the obligatory power of the desires, demands, claims, and ideals of each individual that James had made metaphysically explicit in 1891. James thus provided ample ammunition for the reorganization of society in any manner that advanced inclusivity, and he bore this out by noting the downsides of private property, asserting the need for redistribution of wealth, and proposing a civilian corps to preserve martial virtue while preventing war.98 Moreover, this pluralistic obligation had a crucial consequence: in order to “know thy duty,” each man must engage in open- hearted conversation with his fellows, for their ideals determine the content of the good. Only when “the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate[s] our mind” does “the whole scheme of our customary values [get] confounded”; and “from this unsparing practical ordeal

95 As a thorough consideration of the religious dimension of James’s ethics is not within the scope of this essay, I will simply note James’s insistence that ethics was independent of God (James, “Moral Philosopher,” 248-51, 262) and his mark of disagreement next to merging with the Absolute Soul in his copy of Emerson, Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom, 434. For a different perspective on religion, see Slater, William James, entire, and Wild, The Radical Empiricism, 291-329, though both still acknowledge James’s argument in “Moral Philosopher” that he did not need God for his ethics to be real. 96 Emerson, “Over-Soul,” 210. See also 208. 97 James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 279. See also James’s criticism of Carlyle, the English Romantic, for being blind to the value of this facticity (ibid). 98 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 257; James, “What Makes a Life,” 302; William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in The Works of William James, Volume 11: Essays in Religion and Morality, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), entire. James also noted his approval of the ethical humanism laid out by the more radical Dewey, at least in 1905 and 1909: James, Meaning of Truth, 70 (footnote).

19 Abigail Modaff no professor’s lectures and no array of books can save us,” for the content of morality is inextricably interpersonal.99 Its ability to motivate, however, is inextricably personal. The internal character of pragmatically rendered moral obligation has been implicit throughout this essay, but to render it explicit before concluding we must return to the moral philosopher. As previously discussed, none of James’ ethical claims were presented as eternally true in advance; instead, they were encountered through the persona of the moral philosopher, who, like the physicist, undertook his investigation based upon his own beliefs and desires. Therefore, Slater’s assessment that, for James, “I have at least some obligation wherever there is a claim, regardless of my desires and goals,” is not quite right.100 Upon receiving the results of his experiment, only the physicist himself is aware of the truth he has discovered. While he may immediately begin to act upon it, no one else can until he publishes; and even afterward, those who hold to a different paradigm of physics will never base their actions upon it, and it will never be true for them because it is maladaptive to their reality.101 As pragmatic truth is always “truths in the plural…processes of leading, realized in rebus,” James’s moral philosopher finds himself in the same situation.102 The ethical truth he has discovered – the need to maximize desire fulfillment – is true in the fullest sense of the word, and yet only he will feel its pull until he manages to convince others of its truthfulness.103 Obligation is thus indeed dependent upon one’s desires and goals: it can have no effect without the belief in unified moral truth being a “live” one,104 and, even given that, it requires each individual claim to negotiate with

99 James, “On a Certain Blindness,” 273; James, “Moral Philosopher,” 263. Compare to Gale’s reading that obligations occur behind a “veil of ignorance” (Gale, The Divided Self, 27). 100 Slater, William James, 77. Emphasis in original. 101 See James, The Meaning of Truth, 8-10, 123, 130; James, “Pragmatism,” 28, 33, 38, 85-6, 88- 108; and James’s account of belief as willingness to act in James, “Will to Believe,” 199. For a concise account of pragmatism’s pluralistic epistemology, see James, Meaning of Truth, 109-14. 102 James, “Pragmatism,” 96. 103 Cf. James, “Will to Believe,” 213: “If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.” Despite interpretations like Cooper’s, who references “half-truths” (Cooper, The Unity, e.g. 223, 227), and Thayer’s, with his focus on cognitive versus pragmatic truth (Thayer, Introduction, xxvii-xliii), I follow James in according the “fullest sense” of truth to that with which men grapple in their temporalized reality: “all discarnate truth is static, impotent, and relatively spectral, full truth being the truth that energizes and does battle…[abstracted truth] is less real, not more real, than the verified article” (James, Meaning of Truth, 110). Cf. discussion above, page 6-7. 104 James, “Will to Believe,” 199, 201, 204-5, 216-7.

20 Abigail Modaff the “dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of our interior characters.”105 In other words, the obligation inherent in others’ desires and ideals simply does not exist for us so long as we capitulate to our human blindness and miss the significance of their seemingly mundane moments. This pragmatic plurality of truth is what allows James to admit the existence of real moral obligation without formulating an abstract moral doctrine. Though we as external critics may recognize a claim’s validity, “the only force of appeal to [each person]…is found in the ‘everlasting ruby vaults’ of our own hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and not irresponsive to the claim.”106 Just as the rogue scientist operating under another paradigm may be proven wrong, but will nevertheless have remained unmoved by the truth he failed to acknowledge, individuals do not experience the moral obligations arising from claims whose significance and truth they do not recognize.107 Therefore, the primary injunction of a moral theory whose sole applicable content resides in the intractable plurality of others’ inner lives must be to cultivate the openness of those ruby vaults such that one’s moral duty can be understood, felt, and acted upon. In emphasizing this sympathy and the pragmatically constructed pluralism upon which it is built, this essay has endeavored to provide a foundation for a new reading of James’s social ethics. In the face of secondary literature that generally overlooks the pragmatist content and implications of “Moral Philosopher” in order to debate the extent and coherence of James’s utilitarianism as though it were established abstractly, I have focused instead upon James’s location of obligation within concrete claims alone (including both personal demands and generalized ideals), and the corollaries that this metaphysical naturalization provided. In particular, these corollaries were the insufficiency of toleration and negative liberty as glosses upon James’s general

105 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 263. Cf. James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, 240: “The deepest thing in our nature is this…dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears…in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise.” As well as linking interior character and action, the similarity of language here shows continuity between “Moral Philosopher” (originally 1891) and “Will to Believe” (originally 1896), a relationship that would bear exploration in future study. 106 James, “Moral Philosopher,” 250. Cf. James, Meaning of Truth, 150-1: “For the believer, Caesar must of course really exist; for the pragmatist critic he need not,” and see also ibid., 97-8, 132, and James, “Will to Believe,” 204. 107 On the possibility of proving things wrong in pragmatism, see James, Meaning of Truth, 8-10, 54-7, 131-2.

21 Abigail Modaff theory, and their replacement with the injunction to investigative sympathy, underpinned by an appropriation of the Emersonian Absolute. This injunction was the most concrete consequence of James’s social ethics: the need, if we desire any sort of moral life at all, to become aware of the multitude of desires and significances locked within alien minds. This essay thus presents James’s ethics as neither utilitarian nor deontological, but pragmatist. His theory is flexibly robust, cautious but filled with the power to compel reform. Bulwarked by the sometimes poetic but nevertheless sturdy foundations of his metaphysics and epistemology, James’s social ethics lodged man’s duties firmly in the hearts of one another, building ethical truth from the countless teeming goods and ideals for which moral men must always strive.

22 Abigail Modaff

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