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Abigail Modaff 1 WILLIAM JAMES's SOCIAL 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.
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