Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James

Sarin Marchetti

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137541789
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

Marchetti offers a revisionist account of James's contribution to moral thought in the light of his pragmatic conception of philosophical activity. He sketches a composite picture of a Jamesian approach to ethics revolving around the key notion and practice of a therapeutic critique of one's ordinary moral convictions and style of moral reasoning.

1

Pragmatism, Therapy, and the Moral Life

In the context of reading James, the very idea of “the moral philosopher” reflects an ambiguity that in turn indicates a duality of purposes that the present work aspires to investigate. Namely, the volume represents both a study of James as a moral philosopher, and a survey of James’s reflections on the moral philosopher. The moral philosopher stands in fact as a Janus-faced figure, who in James’s work in moral philosophy plays several roles and can be seen to act in different contexts. The chief purpose of the present work is to explore and gauge this intentional plurality of occurrences and meanings through a reassessment of James’s composite understanding of ethics.¹ James’s overall reconsideration of the contribution of moral reflection to the moral life, in which the semantic tension around the figure of the moral philosopher is most notable, is of the utmost importance when seeking to understand his distinctive conception of ethics, as explored in his writings and often accused of lacking substantial coherence. Hence, an effort at exegesis of James’s work in moral philosophy cannot but proceed from an analysis of this variety of applications and uses of the figure of the moral philosopher.

James will thus feature in this study as a moral philosopher primarily interested in the nature and role of the moral philosopher, described in both her reflective and ordinary embodiment, and whose views on this particular, meta-reflexive, issue will shape James’s most positive work in ethics. That is, James the moral philosopher will be the subject, and yet also the very object, of the investigation. Once approached from such a dual perspective, his texts will resonate with a whole novel rhythm. Unfolding such overlapping of intertwined levels of investigation and composition represents the key to rescuing James’s moral philosophy from the oversimplified and inadequate recounting that often spoils its value and use, the Jamesian “figure in the carpet” through which make full justice to the sophistication and liveliness of his work.

In the book such analysis will be conducted through the examination of the wider metaphilosophical framework against which his reflections on ethics make sense. It is in fact of the utmost importance to be mindful of James’s fine-grained conception of philosophical activity in which he framed his views and arguments in moral philosophy. Too often, in fact, the recounting of James’s contribution to ethics has been conducted ignoring, or at worst betraying, his most general understanding of the nature and aims of philosophical reflection widely informing his moral thought. These misgivings have vitiated a significant part of the literature on the topic, which the present work aims at amending. It is thus the guiding conviction of the book that it is only by appreciating the specificity of James’s philosophical method and interests, as well as his instructions about how and why to engage in philosophical reflection in the first place, that we can dislodge some of the superficial and problematic interpretations of his moral philosophy offered so far, opening the way to a more imaginative and rigorous reception of his work that might be of interest, not only for historians of philosophy but also for the current generation of moral philosophers and ethicists alike.

As such, the present work, far from constituting a blunt apology for James’s moral philosophy, aspires rather at reconstructing its distinctive flavor, giving prominence to some overlooked but most significant aspects and nuances of his work.² My challenge is to reconstruct James’s ethics in a novel and profitable direction that however is mindful of the internal constraints and presuppositions of its original formulation. This is in fact a book on James, that aims at the same time at being a book for us; a book which reveals some possibilities of understanding and practicing ethics, in a way emphatically indicated by James but almost gone unheard (or progressively forgotten), that might be useful and productive for the conduct of our moral lives. Once framed in a most congenial setting and returned to what I consider its proper fieldwork, James’s moral reflection would thus function as a model and source of inspiration for our own ethical investigations. The reconstruction of James’s work will thus be conducted with the goal in mind to see what his moral philosophy can still do for us, and how its regeneration can be of some use in our current situation. After being fully polished from the dust that covered them and adjusted to an optical focus congenial to ours, James’s philosophical lenses should be used to look into the moral problems still haunting us, his interested readers, as James himself in a certain degree foresaw.

The difficulty of reading James: a third way beyond system and inconclusiveness

The challenge of reconstructing James’s reflection on ethics in a way which is relevant to our contemporary investigations points to a difficulty which will introduce the reader to the journey that the present book shall cover. There is in fact a formidable problem of how to appreciate the compelling issues James was struggling with in a cultural context and sensibility that has changed radically. This difficulty characterizes the understanding of his philosophical production as a whole, of which ethics represents a particularly thorny case. James is in fact a thinker at once distant from and close to us, speaking to different kinds of soul and yet vitally present. His claims and arguments are imbued with his unique philosophical voice intimately addressing us. This is no great news for those who enjoy his reading and indulge in his texts: his style is appealing, his prose witty, his voice warm.³ And yet such features in a certain sense belong to a climate that is radically different from the present one; they were the result of conditions that no longer exist, and are meant to resonate with different hearts. When James speaks it isn’t us that he is addressing, at least at first. His writings consisted mostly of public lectures which he carefully tailored to his public; even his most polished publications originated as professional or general addresses.⁴

James was not a philosopher for the unclassified audience; he was always specific and never ecumenical even when he was confronting enduring philosophical problems which he considered as part of a certain human condition and form of life. The failure to appreciate the indexical character of his writings brought a great portion of the literature on his work to overlook James’s striving to address issues which were alive at the time in which he wrote. Many of the critiques that have been advanced toward James are in fact characterized by such unwillingness to consider the wider cultural and philosophical context in which he was moving and against which he directed his attention. As Bernard Williams (2000) noted, in a slightly different context, about the relationship of philosophy with its past, James is still widely read as if writing in the latest issue of some highly technical contemporary journal and condemned as inadequate because of his obsolete style, terminology and approach. This ahistoricist view is still widely adopted in learned circles, even if the customary opposite approach – that of radical historicism – appears to be equally unsatisfactory in its resistance to those features of his work which still grip us, despite the profound change in context.

Since it is a fact that we still go back to James to address our problems, then there is a serious issue of how to approach his work, and how confident we should be about what we can ask of him. Such preliminary warnings, far from discouraging any serious engagement with his work other than merely historiographical, are meant to register the complex dynamics that an author such as James inevitably triggers, the disregard of which has often been a major source of misunderstanding. This general situation surrounding James’s philosophy finds in the moral discourse a particular configuration that a study of his moral thought cannot but carefully investigate. What we should not forget is that when confronting his work we are engaging a thinker belonging to a cultural and philosophical atmosphere that is very distant, intellectually if not chronologically, from ours, and yet an author whose work largely contributed to a revolution in the way in which philosophy is conducted, of which our contemporary debate represents the momentary and provisional latest stage.

In order to appreciate and qualify the distinctive sound of James’s philosophy, there is thus a compromise we have to accept and explore; a compromise between the inevitable particularity of a certain way of doing philosophy dictated by the encounter of an exceptional spirit with some contingent unique conditions, and a certain aspiration to – and craving for – generality featuring our response to what are considered as enduring problems of human beings. This concern was thematized by James himself in his writings, and plays in the moral discourse a pivotal role for the understanding of the burdens and stakes of a philosophical account of the moral life, in which the opposite drives of singularity and universality create tensions and difficulties that can be re-absorbed only through a precise characterization of such diverging forces.

So far I have been arguing that our reception of James is somewhat problematic if not paradoxical: his texts were intentionally honed to fit some precise situations and circumstances that are not with us anymore despite their evident ability to provoke our thoughts in their most lively form. Such a déplacement is hard to characterize in detail, but an initial strategy is that of surveying and assessing the many reactions and responses that his work has provoked and still does.

One way of accounting for this situation – what I shall call the “substantive approach” – would be (and has customarily been)⁵ to argue that, despite the fact that the century that divides us from James has produced and witnessed a variety of switches in historical conditions, cultural climate, and philosophical emphasis, some of the problems he was struggling with are still alive in and with us. This is partially because James was a forerunner of his own age, of which, as said, he was able to both catch its spirit and foresee the revolutions and revolutionary possibilities that have became reality in our own. His innovative views and the timely conceptual apparatus mounted in his work still represent an appealing model to which we go back, updating and improving it. Notwithstanding his legacy is somewhat weak if compared with other prominent figures of analytic and continental philosophy, his standing still bears a certain weight in the established narrative of the constitution of our current philosophical practice and mindset. Both traditions and their respective philosophical masterminds – Bradley, Husserl, Bergson, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein among others – paid large tribute to his writings and oriented their thoughts with a critical eye to his original work.⁶

As a short aside, the evaluation of such presence is complicated by James’s partnership with a tradition that occupied (both historically and theoretically) the heterodox corners of the philosophical debate, and of which, moreover, he offered a radical version that has often been condemned by its very same professed adepts. Reading and understanding James thus means taking issues first and foremost with pragmatism: with its controversial theoretical baggage, its uncomfortable alliances, and bittersweet fortune. However, even if I won’t draw back from such a burden, which I think is fundamental to attaining a full grasp on James’s distinctive moral thought and overall philosophy – especially in the context of their peculiarity within the pragmatic tradition – I don’t think one should obsess with labels, but rather investigate and experiment their own possibility of compromise with the ideas they purportedly avow. In the case at hand, in the book I will survey in detail James’s usage of pragmatism, and to some extent his partnership with some fellow pragmatists, in his moral wonderings and wanderings. At the same time, I will resist the variously shared assumption according to which there would be an alleged true spirit of pragmatism that James honored, or failed to, in his writings. Debates over who is a pure pragmatist or only a spurious one should be dropped altogether, and I am here rather much more interested in understanding how and why James labeled himself as one. For me that and that only measures the degree to which one can and should evaluate his philosophical proposal in the light of its partnership to a tradition born to be inclusive and avoid those preconceived exclusions too familiar in the philosophical crusades still infesting our intellectual debate.⁷

This first way of accounting the contemporary relevance of James by making reference to, and in terms of, the legacy and fortune of his profitable substantive philosophical views has been a well-trodden path. Differing from either the perspective of the hardcore analyst with her conception of philosophical problems as carved in some fixed conceptual stone, and the perplexities of the radical historicist with her systematic admonition of our enthusiasm for remote views, this account has the merit of placing James’s lively presence in a complex meta-narrative of the transformation of our philosophical understanding of a series of questions and issues.

However, one might also take another route in investigating the unbroken appeal of James’s philosophical thought.⁸ According to a different approach and order of explanation – which I shall call the “methodological” approach – such interest would not have much to do with the content and subject matter, but rather with the form and purpose of what James wrote. There is in fact ground to argue that what makes James congenial today is his characteristic way of elucidating certain discourses and problematizing determinate philosophical assumptions. We keep reading James today, and are interested in what he has to say about certain particular conversations that took place in contexts apparently distant from ours, because he hit some familiar notes of our philosophical and ordinary sensibilities. The philosophical method and style he developed still sounds productive and his distinctive take on several of the central philosophical issues powerful. In particular, James speaks to us in a direct, revealing way because we are still held captive by certain philosophical pictures, even if dressed in different linguistic and conceptual clothes, which he strenuously resisted in, and fiercely challenged through, his writings. According to this alternative account, James compellingly individuated and diagnosed some problems featuring our approaches to several intellectual and ordinary issues that are still with us, of which he offered philosophical therapies for either their resolution or their dissolution.

This point is closely related to a crucial aspect of a possible reconstruction of James’s moral thought that would be mindful of his wider philosophical orientation, an approach and strategy which I will be endorsing and elaborating in this work. Such an alternative explanation has in fact to do with the qualification of the alleged systematic character of his ethical writings and philosophical reflection. There is in fact an important sense in which we can read James as a systematic thinker who voiced his philosophical concern on a series of assumptions governing our intellectual and practical activities, and suggested some methods to tackle and question them. Now this would be precisely what unifies his manifold philosophical tones into one coherent melody that still holds a grip on us. Instead of him offering us some unified theory about the world, the self or their encounters, in accordance with this alternative reading, James offers us something much more valuable: namely, a strategy to resist some temptations, intellectual and ordinary, which still haunt and trouble us when pondering such issues.

James would thus still represent an interesting philosophical option not because he consistently brought together a multitude of considerations on the central speculative questions under a integrated philosophical system that we still hold as valid or promising, but rather because he convincingly insisted on a variety of assumptions and expectations which still feature in current practice and conduct. We keep reading James and look into his work because we hope to find some philosophical strategies to unmask such assumptions and expectations, and thus instruct our approaches to some vital intellectual and ordinary difficulties. To use Benedetto Croce’s famous expression, what is alive of James today would be precisely what I will call a therapeutic and transformative register informing his work, the appreciation of which is crucial for its sound understanding.

In this work I shall claim how the methodological approach is much more promising than the substantive one as an explanatory strategy of the experienced actuality of James’s writings since it points to a central dimension of his philosophical reflection which is often overlooked, hence betrayed, when approached with the former.⁹ This difference of approach is of the utmost importance in ethics, where the choice in interpretative style marks the difference between radically opposite ways of looking at James’s moral philosophy as a whole, and thus assessing its vitality. As the short introductory digression at the beginning of this section suggests, there is in fact a problem of how to read James; a problem that any interpreter engaging in his work cannot avoid. The resolution of this difficulty, which I have presented as a difference in the way we portray his still-engaging philosophy, will in fact determine our entire understanding of his work as a moral philosopher.

There is, however, a necessary adjustment to make in order to harmonize the different general accounts just sketched with the diverse reactions that James’s work in ethics provoked. There are in fact some complications featuring the latter that have to do with the diverse and sometimes opposite ways in which even his philosophical estimators reacted to his moral thought. Some more classification is needed. The main options in James’s literature on ethics progressively solidified around the two extremes of systematization and inconclusiveness. Such a general classification calls ...