Abstract
In the year before he died William James summed up the “philosophy of humanism” that his psychological, metaphysical, and religious inquiries had led him to embrace. “Our thoughts determine our acts,” he wrote in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), “and our acts redetermine the previous nature of the world.” Through years of intellectual effort and emotional struggle, James had convinced himself that the world is dynamic and unfinished, known only through its diverse and ever-changing impressions on particular human minds, altered by those same minds as they select, synthesize, and add to the data of reality through their concepts and actions—a “world of pure experience,” as he titled a 1904 essay. This world is irreducibly plural, yet practically continuous; James once described it as a “plurality of fields,” overlapping and mingling so that nothing is entirely insulated from anything else.1 As James himself would admit, it is the kind of world he deeply needed, containing no sharp barrier between the mental and material realms, granting the “function” of human consciousness a role as determinative of the character of experience as the objects and relations it perceives. Our thoughts, actions, beliefs, and choices are neither dictated by the whole nor isolated from it; consequently, they are both free and meaningful.
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Notes
Contrast the reading offered in Richard M. Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Interview with Edwin Bjorkman, reprinted in TC 2: 478–480, quoted 479; SPP, 96. On James’s ethics as procedural and revisable, see Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “William James’s Ideas,” in Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Pace, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 217–231.
Graham H. Bird, “Moral Philosophy and the Development of Morality,” in Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 263–264;
Bernard P. Brennan, The Ethics of William James (New York: Bookman Associates, 1961), 62–63.
Examples include James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 116; and
Robert B. Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. 72–73. The tragic nature of James’s ethics is one of the lew aspects of his thought on which these two scholars agree.
Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 127–128; Richard M. Gale, The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4–6, 8–10.
John K. Roth, Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1969), 67 ff.; Gale, Philosophy of William James, 7.
Ibid., 109; WJ, “Moral Philosopher,” 184; Pragmatism, 224–225. Contrast Gerald E. Meyers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 398–399. Meyers argued that James’s goal of maximum individual satisfaction destroys the “alleged sciencelike progress” of the “ethical experiment,” dooming it to interminable subjective “checks.” Yet James never envisioned a moral experiment with “predefined aims,” as Meyers suggested; the myriad decisions facilitated by pragmatism constituted no systematic program by which “moral order” would be “revealed.” For James, the individual checks Meyers thought derailed the experiment were inescapable aspects of experience and vital tests of morality’s relevance to it.
José M. Medina, “James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity,” in John J. Stuhr, ed., 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 124–143, esp. 130 (WJ quoted) and 131. The passage quoted by Medina is from WJ, “The Teaching of Philosophy in Our Colleges” (1876), in Frederick H. Burkhardt et al., eds., Essays in Philosophy: The Works of William James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 3–6.
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© 2014 Trygve Throntveit
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Throntveit, T. (2014). The Ethical Republic. 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_4
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