The History of Evil in the Early Twentieth Century

1900–1950 CE

Victoria Harrison, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351138345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The fifth volume of The History of Evil covers the twentieth century from 1900 through 1950. The period saw the maturation of intellectual movements such as Pragmatism and Phenomenology, and the full emergence of several new academic disciplines; all these provided novel intellectual tools that were used to shed light on a human capacity for evil that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. An underlying theme of this volume is the effort to reconstruct an understanding of human nature after confidence in its intrinsic goodness and moral character had been shaken by world events. The chapters in this volume cover globally relevant topics such as education, propaganda, power, oppression, and genocide, and include perspectives on evil drawn from across the world. Theological and atheistic responses to evil are also examined in the volume.

This outstanding treatment of approaches to evil at a determinative period of modernity will appeal to those with interests in the intellectual history of the era, as well as to those with interests in the political, philosophical and theological movements that matured within it.

1 Pragmatism and evil

Charles Peirce and William James

David L. O’Hara

Peirce and James, founders of pragmatism

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910) are the two main founders and representatives of Classical American Pragmatism, and respectively they represent the two main strains of American Pragmatism as it has developed since the nineteenth century. While they were active throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, their philosophies came into mature flower in the opening decade of the twentieth century and have remained what has been called America’s most original contribution to philosophy.

While their philosophies differ in some important ways, it might be helpful to begin with an overview of some of the main ideas in Pragmatism as they developed it and then to examine what each of them had to say about evil.

Peirce and James knew one another as members of the “Metaphysical Club” that met in 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their fathers were both prominent figures in Cambridge: Benjamin Peirce was a distinguished professor of mathematics at Harvard and Henry James, Sr., wrote on religious themes, deeply inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg. After the Metaphysical Club disbanded, William James and Charles Peirce carried on an epistolary relationship for the remainder of their lives.

Peirce outlined some of the basic doctrines of Pragmatism in a series of articles in 1877–1878 entitled “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”, and in an early paper “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”. James later popularized the name. James wrote, in his book Pragmatism:

A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word pragma, meaning action, from which our words “practice” and “practical” come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878… It lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address … at the University of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion.

(James 1947: 199–200)

Later Pragmatists include Peirce’s student John Dewey, James’ Harvard colleague Josiah Royce and a growing list of others like George Herbert Mead, George Santayana, W.V.O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas and Cornel West.

What is Pragmatism?

As Peirce first conceived it, Pragmatism was a rejection of Cartesianism within the discipline of epistemology. As a theory of inquiry, pragmatism does not aim at producing certainty. Rather, it espouses a phenomenological approach that is akin to the methods of the natural sciences, aiming to discover the meaning of terms through an examination of the functions and consequences of things. In an article Peirce published in 1878, he described what he called the “Pragmatic Maxim”: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (Peirce 1992: 132).

By focusing on our conceptions of the practical effects of objects, Pragmatists chart a course between the extremes of essentialism and relativism. If the strict essences of things turn out to be inaccessible to us, Pragmatism nevertheless offers a means of understanding those things without despairing of understanding real relationships between things that do not depend exclusively on our whims. Similarly, in the absence of objective and certain ethical principles, Pragmatism adopts a fallibilistic and experimental approach to determining rules for ethical conduct. Pragmatism does not expect to arrive at final and incorrigible propositions about the world, but neither does it lack hope that progress can be made and that lives can be improved by communal inquiry and research. Pragmatists understand inquiry as transactional, rejecting theories of knowledge that regard a mind as a blank slate and wherein the learner is, as Dewey put it, a mere “spectator” of nature. Pragmatists are not troubled by scepticism, especially when sceptics like Descartes express what Peirce called mere “paper doubts”, for example, when the sceptic claims to doubt her own existence for the sake of experiment, while in fact she does not really doubt it.

Peirce on evil

Before looking more closely at Peirce’s view of evil, it will be helpful to highlight a few of the key terms in his philosophy in order to see what philosophical tools he found most useful and in order to see some distinctions between the Pragmatism of Peirce and that of James. Although they are close in many ways, they differ in a few important features of their philosophies.

Peirce’s earliest training was in the chemistry laboratory, and he held that training in the physical sciences was one of the best ways to learn to reason. One reason for this assertion certainly had to do with Darwin’s Origin of Species, which was published while Peirce was an undergraduate at Harvard. Evolutionism exerted a strong influence on his philosophy throughout his life, and he extended Darwin’s idea of growthful change well beyond biology to include the growth of ideas and even of laws of nature. Peirce concluded that what we call laws were more likely to be habits of nature, or generalities that describe the ways in which matter wound up acting. The universe began in some pure possibility and over time possibilities became actualized, and series of actual events took on generality. Evolution is not completely random, however, nor is it completely predetermined, since both of those scenarios would prevent the possibility of science: a purely random universe is one in which there is no real generality, while a purely determined universe is one in which there can be no real discovery or free action of choosing to investigate natural phenomena. Peirce concluded that it was likely that we live in a universe in which real possibilities are driven by growthful love – which he called agape – and in which generality results from the repeated actualization of those possibilities. This agapic love underwrites both the growth of the universe and the real relationship between nature and the natural inquirer. The growth of real generality also ensures that natural phenomena participate in real relationships with one another. Nothing is completely alien to anything else. Rather, all phenomena are caught in a complex web of relationships that we may investigate and discover.

Peirce’s laboratory experience impressed on him several other aspects of inquiry. Peirce said that his own philosophy seemed to grow as ideas came into relationship with one another. Peirce referred to the interrelation of ideas as synechism, from the Greek word for “continuity”. Ideas spread generally and influence one another; just as natural phenomena are related to one another, so ideas do not exist in a vacuum or atomically. Every idea exerts some influence on all other ideas, spreading generally, forming connections, and growing. Peirce saw the history of language as a helpful illustration of this: words slowly shift and change as they are used in new linguistic relationships over time. Science is not a body of knowledge but an attitude of the inquirer. Peirce said that it would be better to think of science as “the desire to find things out” (Peirce 1955: 4).

Given the propensity of the universe to grow and evolve, no individual scientist and not even any community of scientific inquirers can lay claim to a final version of the truth. Rather, the truth, for Peirce, is what would be discovered by an ideal community of researchers over an infinite amount of time. The best we can hope for is to make our knowledge grow and to subject our thinking to the scrutiny of other researchers. This is clearly another lesson learned in the laboratory, and for Peirce the obvious upshot is that inquiry is the activity of a community, not of an individual researcher. For this reason, the first law of logic is this: “do not block the path of inquiry” for yourself or for others. Dogmatic opinions tend to be formed in order to block the path of inquiry by excluding others from our deliberative community. In one of his early papers, “The Fixation of Belief”, Peirce observed that we do not tend to want to know the truth so much as to find relief from the “irritation of doubt” and the satisfaction of our “social impulse” (Peirce 1992: 109–23). That is, we tend to stop asking questions when the community around us agrees with us. Peirce urged that what we needed was not creedal purity but a “great catholic church” of inquiry that strove, as much as possible, to include others (Peirce 1958: 6.443). Of course, this is quite difficult, since it means including people with whom we disagree. Peirce nonetheless insisted that fallibilism, or the willingness and desire to be proven wrong, was essential to any scientific inquiry, because unless we cultivate such an attitude, we will lapse into comfortable and comforting beliefs rather than try to understand the way things really are.

One more biographical note about Peirce needs to be mentioned here: Peirce’s interest in evil, perhaps not surprisingly, has deep roots in his own personal sufferings. As Joseph Brent has documented, Peirce suffered from some fairly severe lifelong health issues, at least one troubled marriage, several painful and controversial professional situations (including his dismissal from his teaching post at Johns Hopkins University) and serious financial difficulties in his old age (Brent 1993). This biographical matter may seem irrelevant, but Peirce himself regarded intellectual biography to be an important part of the development of ideas. He frequently included short autobiographical sketches in his writing in order to illustrate his ideas and also to give them context. The upshot of this is that for Peirce, the sufferings in which the philosopher writes matter and the particularities of life also matter.¹ This is not mere reductionism or relativism, such that we could explain away what they believed as the necessary consequences of their circumstances. Biographical details are not the sole reason for belief, but they are among the causes of belief.

All of this lays the groundwork for understanding how Peirce regarded evil. First of all, synechism means that in some sense nothing can be quite wholly evil, since everything is related to everything else. Second, there are multiple kinds or aspects of evil, some of which are to be avoided and some of which are to be embraced. Certain methodological approaches, like strong individualism, lack of sympathy for others and blocking others’ inquiry, are to be avoided. Some things that will appear evil to us must in fact be good and so are to be embraced. For example, those people who most irritate us and those ideas that most challenge our own are precisely the ideas that most rouse our dozing minds and therefore the ones we need most if we ourselves are to grow. From all this we can foresee how Peirce came to his own tentative solution to the philosophical problem of evil.

The “normative sciences”

Peirce held that there are three “normative sciences” that are nonetheless related to one another: aesthetics, ethics and logic. These correspond to feeling, willing and thinking. Aesthetics concerns ideals and “that which is objectively admirable without any ulterior reason” (Peirce 1998: 260). Ethics depends upon aesthetics, because ethics concerns the choice of ends and self-controlled conduct. Aesthetics provides us with ideals, and ethics is the science how we should conduct our lives towards those ideals. Logic concerns the conduct of self-controlled and deliberate thought. Just as ethics looks to aesthetics, so logic looks to ethics for its principles. Since there are three normative sciences, Peirce distinguishes between three types of evil: aesthetic, ethical and logical. We deem a quality to be aesthetically evil when we are repelled by it. An action is ethically evil when it leads to ends contrary to those we are prepared to adopt as ideals. Similarly, reasoning is logically evil when it fails to conform to those ideals of thought that recommend themselves as choice-worthy for their own sake. With these distinctions in mind, it should become apparent that we cannot know something to be evil in itself, but we may associate a quality of feeling or a principle of action or thought with evil. Peirce admitted that the most difficult of these three normative sciences to grasp is aesthetics. At the same time, he insisted that he could see no other way to explain how we determine which ends are themselves choice-worthy.

It may appear to us that there are things that are evil in themselves, for instance a toothache, that are in fact not evil but only apparently so. The toothache appears to be evil because we experience pain and we consider pain to be evil. But Peirce distinguishes between pain and evil. In an ideal observer, evil and pain would perhaps be identical, but as fallibilists we may not be certain of their identity. Pain is aesthetically bad; we find it repellent. But it may also be good, as when it moves us away from what is harmful to us. We are not ideal observers, as we find it impossible to consider a quality of feeling in abstraction from the concrete reality in which it appears to us. Similarly, we cannot easily attain the ideal of considering an aesthetic quality for its own sake. So we should not identify pain and evil even if they are closely and repeatedly associated with one another. The phenomena occur together, but we should be careful about making final judgments about what would be the case were we ideal observers. Peirce discusses this in a way that illustrates the Pragmatic Maxim’s concern with understanding meaning in terms of the action that results from our conceptions:

Esthetic good and evil are closely akin to pleasure and pain. They are what would be pleasure or pain to the fully developed superman. What, then, are pleasure and pain? … They are secondary feelings or generalizations of such feelings; that is, of feelings attaching themselves to, and excited by, other feelings. A toothache is painful. It is not pain, but pain accompanies it; and if you choose to say that pain is an ingredient of it, that is not far wrong. However, the quality of the feeling of toothache is a simple, positive feeling, distinct from pain; although pain accompanies it. To use the old consecrated terms, pleasure is the feeling that a feeling is “sympathetical”, pain that it is “antipathetical”. The feeling of pain is a symptom of a feeling which repels us; the feeling of pleasure is the symptom of an attractive feeling. Attraction and repulsion are kinds of action. Feelings are pleasurable or painful according to the kind of action which they stimulate. In general, the good is the attractive – not to everybody, but to the sufficiently matured agent; and the evil is the repulsive to the same.

(Peirce 1958: 5.552)

This might seem to endorse a sort of pragmatic relativism; what is morally good and not evil is that which is in conformity to ends we are prepared to adopt deliberately. But this apparent relativism is modified by logic and aesthetics. We must be willing to deliberately adopt this position, that is, to adopt it because it “reasonably recommends itself in itself, and aside from any ulterior consideration” (Peirce 1958: 5.130). To this Peirce adds that it must be an “admirable ideal”. Since the three normative sciences are related to one another, we may not declare something good which our reason or our aesthetic sense militate against. Additionally, the principle of reasonableness is a communal principle. Peirce said that “he who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is illogic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Pragmatism and evil: Charles Peirce and William James
• 2 Education and approaches to evil
• 3 Phenomenology
• 4 Psychology and evil: from Freud to Skinner
• 5 Science and evil
• 6 Theological currents
• 7 Death of God
• 8 Suffering and liberation
• 9 Philosophical perspectives on suffering and evil in colonial India
• 10 Pacifism and non-violent resistance
• 11 Power and freedom
• 12 Genocide
• 13 Anarchism and evil
• 14 Marxism, Stalin, and the question of evil
• 15 The Maoist perspective on evil
• 16 The charisma of evil: Hitler and propaganda
• 17 Representations of evil in early film
• Index