William James and the Moral Will.

AuthorPolet, Jeff

Richard Rorty has characterized William James as an "aesthetic monist" whose orientation was away from philosophy and toward an artistic pose that addressed itself contemptuously toward dominant modes of discourse. In his view, James taught us what it is like to live in a world without metaphysical comforts, one where our notions of truth were no longer operative or relevant, and one where our beliefs were judged purely in terms of their utility. (1) Due to such interpretations, James has largely been considered a figure whose writings leave little room for traditional philosophical thinking or religious belief. (2) For Rorty, the most important category of thought is contingency, and any mode of thinking (or believing) which attempts to supercede the contingent state of affairs is necessarily guilty of useless philosophizing. Rorty takes this approach for the very good reason that ahistorical forms of thinking tend to undermine proper ethical decision-making. The proper result of ethics, according to Rorty, is to minimize cruelty as much as possible (though he is quick to point out that he can't defend this belief, only assert it). Since the American Left has long been opposed to cruelty, and the American Right embraces it, any truly ethical person will be a leftist and seek to expand the power of the state as the vehicle that "protects the weak from the strong" and insures equality.

Taking contingency seriously, however, also means attentive analysis of thinkers' historical circumstances and how their writing is a response to the world around them. Analyzing James in this fashion shows a thinker not simply dismissive of metaphysics and religion, nor one necessarily hospitable to leftist agendas, but a person who was deeply concerned that without religious belief and philosophical truth, individual freedom would be in grave danger, and human action would be misguided. While Rorty correctly identifies James's suspicion of absolutes, his analysis misses the main purpose of these suspicions: the development of the moral will.

The context for the emergence of James's thought was the development of science, the nineteenth-century belief in infinite progress, and the boredom accompanying the formation of mass society. Sensitive to the attenuation of religious spirit, given to fits of despair, and concerned about meaningful human action in a mass age--attempting to navigate between the Scylla of action without purpose and the Charybdis of purpose without action--James sought in the religious experience the resources to ward off civilizational ennui. In affirming not only the reality but also the efficacy of the moral will, James opened up a philosophical path that justified the attempt to exercise meaningful freedom. The pursuit of philosophical and religious thinking, as a means to effect the development of the moral will so that freedom could be meaningfully exercised, was the great struggle and result of James's reflections. To achieve this end, James de-absolutized the truth to service the de-socialization of individuals, in the s ense of freeing them from the coercive forces of mass civilization. This twin process of de-absolutization and de-socialization is reflected negatively in his response to science and religion, and positively in his development of pragmatic philosophy. In this article, I will examine James's contribution to the development of the idea of a moral will by looking at three issues: (1) the response to the problem of particularity, relating James's thought to philosophical monism and American Puritanism; (2) the response to positivism and subsequent claims about the nature of knowledge; and (3) James's analysis of religious experience and its relation to ethical action. I will conclude by looking at the political ramifications of his analysis, which demonstrate the connection between moral experience and action--the crux of the pragmatist impulse. My main thesis is that the moral will requires for its grounding a rejection of ahistorical absolutism as well as a suspicion of non-philosophical historicism. James demo nstrates how this can be accomplished.

Scientific and Religious Absolutism

Offhand, the relation between science and Puritanism is not obvious, but they constituted for James the two social realities at the core of his philosophical struggle. In modem science he saw the tendency to reduce knowledge to technique and mechanize the social sphere, and in Puritanism he saw the tendency to dogmatize. In both, he felt the tendency to subordinate experience to systematized knowledge; he saw them as truncated types of existence which could not do justice to the complexity and depth of our experience. In other words, he believed they both operated with improperly absolutist notions of truth.

Modern science assumes the separation of the self from nature and the belief that if reason, narrowly defined, can be brought to bear on any complex of problems, it will provide workable solutions. In short, rather than viewing nature as a revelatory text, it views nature as material substance to be controlled and manipulated. The sciences reach their apogee in the attempt to control not only nature, but also human nature. Science sets itself up as the cultural touchstone of any legitimate knowledge claim. It occupies the authoritative position at the center of our culture and recognizes no a priori or more embracing knowledge claim. Faced with the deterministic proclivity of science, the philosopher, as a human being, becomes concerned about the status of human freedom.

Kant faced the problem of scientific determinism squarely. Given the disturbing sense that scientific knowledge rendered talk of human freedom meaningless, Kant sought to protect the most cherished experiences of life from the claims of science. The purpose of the First Critique, as he notes in the Second Preface, is to determine to what degree, if any, scientific knowledge intrudes into the realm of metaphysics, here concerned with the experiences of immortality, freedom, and God. Kant's famous division between the phenomenal and the noumenal was designed to protect these experiences from the claims of science by engaging in a critique of scientific knowing which would subject it to strict limits. The Second Critique follows not just chronologically, but ontologically as well, for Kant wants to argue that "pure" reason must in some ultimate sense be subordinated to "practical" reason. In this way, Kant can rightly be regarded as the first pragmatist, though at the cost of gutting moral experience of its noet ic content. No longer can these experiences have any relation to reason--they are rather a projection of a felt moral need. The Kantian attempt to protect metaphysics from science failed; by the end of the century the subordination of science had been reversed to the point of disaster, leaving religious ideas and experiences in a most precarious position. James sought to right this balance again.

The relationship of James to Puritanism fascinates not least because of James's troubled relationship with his father. (3) Steeped in a non-doctrinaire Calvinism, James kept many of the formal traits of Calvinism, even if he rejected particular content. In his famous analysis of Calvinism, Max Weber stressed its element of "intramundance asceticism," working within the world without a particular love of it. Rather than seeing themselves as participants in the order of being, Puritans saw themselves either as strangers within the world, or beings endowed with the power to transform the world. Working within the world was a means of actuating the intense self-discipline required by faith and working out one's tenuously held salvation. In addition, the Puritans believed they had received a special commission from God, that they had been insured with a glorious trust and had received a glorious promise. As a laborer in God's vineyard, the Puritan sanctified work as a divine mandate. The doctrine of predestination promulgated this belief, for the Puritan saw it not as determinism of acts but as the guarantee of a telos. Nonetheless, the act of faith enacted itself dogmatically, leaving little room for disagreement.

The absolutist tendency of faith often masked the paradox of the Puritan, who found freedom to be as much a burden as a blessing. Without liturgical comforts or natural theology, the lonely soul was left face to face with the elusive will of God. This will could not be contemplated, but only served directly through practice (a foreshadowing of pragmatism). Calvinism took the greatest virtue to be humility (to the point of abasement), and the greatest vice to be pride. (14) In emphasizing humility, James, like the Puritans, attempted to create the condition for the recognition of the sublimity of--in the Puritan case--transcendence, and in James's case something closely approximating it. James notes, for example, that describing a Beethoven string quartet as dragging a horse's tail across a cat's bowels would hardly do justice to the beauty which transcends mere physical material and movement. (15) The following description of the Puritan sheds light on James.

Briefly characterized, the typical Puritan, in 1630 or 1930, reflected ideological assurance but was, at least in most areas and when at his best, open to new ideas. He was very much a moralist, a political activist, and an often repressive reformer who believed in the possibility of progress toward an ever more righteous social order. He venerated the rule of objective laws or principles, but he just as insistently believed in congregationalism and local democracy. He usually reflected a sense of mission, even of a peculiar destiny, and an atmosphere of seriousness and self-importance. Yet he was, or wanted to be, pious, ever mindful of his dependence upon an overarching but never quite fathomable reality, which he loved even without fully understanding...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT