7

PLURALISM

When James had retired from his Harvard professor-ship in 1907, he had hoped to devote the last years of his life doing for philosophy what he had done for psychology. But this was not to be: he never succeeded in composing an authoritative, systematic treatise in philosophy. External pressures and temptations joined with James’s own temperament to defer his intentions to write such a work, intentions that were finally dashed by illness and death. James was constitutionally unable to refuse invitations to deliver popular lectures; the challenge to state his philosophical views for a broader audience than professionally trained philosophers would provide proved to be an irresistible temptation. Pragmatism was the product of such a series of popular lectures, and while it widened the scope of James’s influence, it also implicated him in the fatiguing controversies that followed upon its publication. In the autumn of 1907 James received another invitation to assume the role of popular lecturer, and once more he was unable to refuse. Thus in May 1908 he delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, on “The Present Situation in Philosophy.” These lectures were later published under the title, A Pluralistic Universe.

In his account of “the present situation in philosophy” James sought to furnish a viable alternative to the absolute idealism that then flourished in Anglo-American philosophy.

In his initial statement of the issue between absolutism and pluralism James employed strictly metaphysical language. Both absolutism and pluralism may agree in conceiving reality to be substantially spiritual; both may, in effect, “identify human substance with the divine substance.” But as James went on to assert:

... whereas absolutism thinks that the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of totality, and is not its real self in any form but the all-form, the pluralistic view ... is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the each- form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing.¹

This metaphysical issue was, of course, pregnant with practical meaning for James. The struggle between absolutism and pluralism is conducted in terms of religious and moral considerations.

James was especially delighted by the prospects of confronting absolute idealism in its world capital—Oxford. There T. H. Green had taught the principles of idealism in moral and political philosophy half a century earlier, having founded what in fact became a school, of which F. H. Bradley was its latest spokesman and most vigorous dialectician. James went forth to greet his audience with all his faculties tingling for combat. En route he hastily wrote his brother, Henry: “I have been sleeping like a top, and feel in good fighting trim again, eager for the scalp of the Absolute. My lectures will put his wretched clerical defenders fairly on the defensive.”²

But for absolute idealism James did not have to go to Oxford for his targets; he had only to stroll in Harvard Yard and greet his own colleagues. Certainly the most constant target for James’s gravamen against monistic idealism was his colleague, Josiah Royce (1855-1916). As James wrote Royce in 1900: “You are still the centre of my gaze, the pole of my mental magnet.”³

Royce, by his own admission, owed his Harvard career to William James. Born in a California mining town of pioneer parents in 1855, Royce was thoroughly a child of the American frontier. Educated at the University of California in Berkeley, Royce had won the financial support of a group of San Francisco businessmen to do advanced study in Europe. After imbibing German idealism from Windelband and Lotze, he returned to the United States to earn the Ph.D. degree in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University. Academic circumstances compelled Royce to accept a post teaching English composition at the University of California, and there he would have perished in obscurity, had it not been for James’s efforts. James arranged for Royce’s appointment to teach philosophy at Harvard, and he served as Royce’s mentor, at least in those affairs attaching to the advance of a professional career.

James applauded his young colleague’s feats of publication. When Royce’s Religious Aspects of Philosophy appeared in 1885, James deemed the argument for the Absolute from the existence of error to be unassailable. No doubt, in all their cordial years as colleagues stretching nearly three decades, James was to some extent intimidated by Royce’s erudition, his unabated lecturing, and his prodigious publications; in the early years especially he was overwhelmed by Royce’s seeming mastery of logic and mathematics for philosophical usages. By the time Royce’s major work, The World and the Individual (1899-1900), appeared, however, James was somewhat disenchanted. In a letter to the American philosopher Dickinson S. Miller, to whom credit is often given for having liberated James from the spell of Royce’s early argument for the Absolute, James wrote concerning The World and the Individual:

... as far as cogent reasoning goes, it leaks at every point.... In spite of the great technical freight he carries, and his extraordinary mental vigor, he belongs essentially among the lighter skirmishes of philosophy. A sketcher and popularizer, not a pile-driver, foundation-layer, or wallbuilder.⁴

Had James lived longer, he might have rejoiced to find in Royce’s neglected masterpiece, The Problem of Christianity (1914), a social theory of the Absolute as a beloved community in which, within limits, the demands of pluralism for a multiplicity of unique individuals are met. Then, too, he might have been saddened to observe his old, expansive colleague contract and suffer a sense of isolation as a consequence of the demise of absolute idealism in the presence of the rise of pragmatism, realism and naturalism and, in ways yet to be measured, at the hands of the events surrounding and issuing from the First World War. Certainly the climate of American thought had so radically altered that George Herbert Mead (a student of Royce at Harvard in the late 1880’s and afterwards a leading pragmatist and social psychologist at the University of Chicago until his death in 1931) could, on the occasion of Royce’s death in 1916, dismiss Royce’s “Teutonic idealism”⁵ as alien to the mainstream of American thought and culture.

But in 1908 absolute idealism was far from dead, and when James set out to attack it, he naturally kept Royce in mind. To take “the scalp of the Absolute” James had to employ as weapons many arguments.

By applying the pragmatic test to the Absolute James found its practical meaning to consist in the guarantee that, no matter what happens in the course of experience, “All are one with God, and with God all is well. The everlasting arms are beneath ....”⁶ For the sick soul this assurance is invaluable; yet, on the other hand, for the healthy minded it may have a debilitating effect, as James wryly pointed out. The conviction that all is fundamentally right excuses relaxation; it furnishes the occasion for moral holidays.⁷ When defenders of the Absolute took offence with James’s analysis of the pragmatic significance of absolutism, he playfully retorted: “The absolute is true in no way then ....”⁸

In A Pluralistic Universe James charged the Absolute with uselessness and meaninglessness. Despite its “formal grandeur,” it is “remote” and “sterile,” furnishing “a pallid outline for the real world’s richness .... [Thus] the Absolute is useless for deductive purposes. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but it is compatible with every relative danger ....”⁹

Further, James set out to demonstrate the utter absurdity of the Absolute. One by one he smashed the particular arguments advanced by the monistic idealists. When, for example, the Absolute is represented as an all-knower, James sharply remarked: “One would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity, plethora, and superfetation of useless information.”¹⁰ The absurdity of the Absolute is more than its silliness; it has to do with logical inconsistency: Absolutism must be monistic or it is incoherent. Yet absolutists inevitably contrast the Absolute with the Finite, Reality with Appearance, the One with the Many; and this kind of contrast undoes the monism, splitting the world up into two distinct orders of being.¹¹

James’s hostility to absolutism stemmed not merely from metaphysics and epistemology but more deeply from his moral and religious sensibility and considerations. The moral and religious issues do, of course, relate to metaphysics and epistemology. Absolutism represents the world as a block-universe, in which time and change are apparent only. Every thing or event is determined by antecedent causes. According to this metaphysics, the world is a whole of necessary parts, all internally related, and caught within the grip of rigid determinism. This picture of the world, James insisted, is alien to moral experience. For moral experience, like all lived experience, is temporal: man acts in a present moment, which, while feeding on the past, moves toward a goal that is future, Moral action displays a freedom which no determinism, regardless of its plausibility, can chain, although the belief in determinism may discourage moral ardor. Thus a metaphysics suited to moral experience will oppose the monistic metaphysics of the block-universe.

Absolutism not only obscures the structure and process of moral experience and action, it also spawns the theoretical problem of evil. For absolutism, the problem of evil is a speculative problem of explaining why evil is not real and how apparent evil has arisen. James has little patience with this view. He himself had suffered too deeply the anguish of the “sick soul” to dismiss evil as an appearance overcome in an eternal beyond. How-ever strongly men may yearn to transcend evil, it possesses an actual quality in the here and now which no eternal ideal order can mitigate. As James said in Pragmatism: “The scale of evil defies all human tolerance, and transcendental idealism in Bradley or Royce carries us no further than the book of Job.... A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to.”¹²

Whereas absolutism generates the perplexities of the block-universe and the problem of evil, pluralism offers a route of escape.¹³ Sticking close to lived experience, as radical empiricism requires, pluralism recognizes the temporality and freedom implicated in moral action, and places these categories in the forefront of its meta-physics. Pluralism faces the problem of evil not as a dialectical exercise, but as a practical problem. Evil, whenever it occurs, becomes the occasion for action; it poses a task to be performed, a defect to be removed, a situation to be improved. Pluralism, therefore, finds immediate pragmatic verification in moral experience.

At the same time pluralism offers a comprehensive philosophy. James’s case for pluralism rests on more than clearing the ground of its monistic alternative. Not merely negative, pluralism is a philosophy growing from many sources: the humanism of F. S. C. Schiller, the creative evolutionism of Henri Bergson, the individualism of Thomas Davidson, the pluralistic mysticism of the obscure B. P. Blood, the critical idealism of Charles Renouvier, and the panpsychism of Gustav Fechner. By pluralism James meant the description of reality as the “strung-along variety,” the theory of “a world imperfectly unified still.”¹⁴ Nor did James intend to shatter the world into a chaos of unconnected parts. The world exhibits some separation of parts, but considerable connection as well. Thus pluralism is the theory that “the sundry parts of reality may be externally related.”¹⁵

James identified pluralism with radical empiricism.¹⁶ That conjunctive relations are real is a major thesis of radical empiricism. Thus for pluralism the world remains a universe as much as a multiverse. Radical empiricism, moreover, equates reality with pure experience. Consequently as Julius Bixler has observed, James seems to be “qualitatively a monist.”¹⁷ Nevertheless, James spurned the temptation to transform this qualitative monism with spreading conjunctive relations into an absolute monism. True, in his Ingersoll lecture on immortality James almost lost the finite, individual selves in a sea of cosmic consciousness. And in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he had suggested that God exists as a kind of consciousness normally at the borders or in the depths of our own finite consciousnesses and as the ultimate source and support of these finite consciousnesses. But as early as The Principles of Psychology James denied that finite consciousnesses could flow together to form a unified whole of consciousness. At best, there would be, he surmised, a sequence of separate consciousnesses, strung together like the letters of the alphabet, but never combining to form a whole, as letters do to articulate words and sentences. In A Pluralistic Universe James was persuaded at last that consciousnesses could combine into larger wholes. Here he followed the teaching of the panpsychist Fechner; just as bits of experience may coalesce and compenetrate to form a particular finite consciousness, so confluences of the experiences of finite consciousnesses may produce other wholes of consciousness. In these freely formed combinations, furthermore, not only can the component experiences separate as occasion allows, but also they “keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.”¹⁸

Although James had held in radical empiricism that the same object of perceptual consciousness may simultaneously exist in two or more contexts, surprisingly he was convinced that pluralism violated the logical law of identity, the law which rules that a thing can be itself only and not its other. Pluralism allegedly breaks this law by maintaining that a part of experience retains its unique identity and independence even when it is absorbed in a wider whole. In James’s account, therefore, pluralism is tantamount to anti-intellectualism. If Fechner taught James the principle of compounding experiences, Bergson, whose writings were compared to “the breath of the morning and the song of birds”¹⁹ won credit for his critique of intellectualism. When intellectualism treats a name (word) “as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails positively to include,” James called it “vicious.”²⁰ On the one hand, vicious intellectualism crops up in the philosophy of atomism which prohibits combination on the grounds that as self-same an element can enter into no context in which it would differ from what it is in its original context. On the other hand, vicious intellectualism comes into its own in absolutism, for this philosophy considers the uniqueness and independence of the components of the whole as apparent only and reduces this plurality to a homogeneous unity. For James, Bergson was the undoing of intellectualism. The flux of experience and life broke down the intellectualiste restrictions of logic and Ianguage. Of Bergson, James said: “In my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitely and without hope of recovery.”²¹

In appealing to Bergson, James actually expanded his own doctrine of the stream of consciousness into a full-scale metaphysics and cosmology. If reality is pure experience, and experience flows, then reality is the concrete flux of experience. Experience is a continuum; at least parts of it coalesce to form continua. No definite limits can confine these “concrete pulses of experience.”²² Just as the parts of experience flow together to form my consciousness, so in turn my consciousness may overlap with other parts of experience, at present perhaps beyond the center of my consciousness but dwelling on its fringe, to constitute yet wider fields of consciousness and experience. In this vein James could reflect:

Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the wind rose on a compass, and the actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight. And just as we are coconscious with our own momentary margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really central self in things which is coconscious with the whole of us? May not you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently active there, tho we now know it not?²³

Of course James refrained from answering these questions in any fashion that would comfort monistic absolutism. Combine experiences without limit, and still the process is unfinished. Pluralism, after all, is “the belief that the world is still in process of making.”²⁴ The temporal distinctions are real, not apparent. Further, the process is not governed by necessitarian causal laws. Here James borrowed from Peirce as well as from Bergson. He took from Peirce the doctrine of tychism the theory that there is objective chance in the world, and held it to be synonymous with Bergson’s devenir réel.²⁵ Accordingly, objective chance is needed to account for change, for spontaneity and for novelty. James also adopted Pierce’s doctrines of synechism and agapism. As tychism maintains that experience evinces novelties which are uncaused, so synechism is the principle of continuity whereby novelty, instead of breaking abruptly into the flux of experience, creeps in. Further, this entire developing stream of experiences creative of novelty and value exemplifies agapism—the principle of evolutionary love.

While James fell back on Bergson and Peirce for some of the metaphysical notions to elaborate his pluralism, his basic motives remained moral and religious. Consider the pluralism intrinsic to his ethics, best expounded in his 1891 essay, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” reprinted in The Will to Believe and Other Essays. In this essay James insisted that “the essence of the good is simply to satisfy demand,”²⁶ demand existing only in beings with sentience. Unless there are sentient beings who make demands which are satisfied, there is no good; and unless there are sentient beings who make demands on one another, there is no obligation. No matter how minute the demand or the sentient being who makes it, that demand has a role to play in the moral universe. Morality arises because demands conflict, and moral choice is required to decide among demands. The standard for moral choice is the principle which calls for the most inclusive satisfactior of demands. It holds as best that course of action or that situation in which all demands are satisfied. Of course this state of affairs is an ideal, never a reality. Still the moral imperative commands the election of acts which maximize satisfactions. On James’s account the moral universe is inveterately democratic. Each demand has an equal claim with every other demand for satisfaction. This moral universe is, consequently, pluralistic. The good is rooted in the demands of singular sentient beings; the moral imperative develops from a concern to furnish the maximal satisfaction of these demands.

The moral universe is pluralistic in yet another sense. For James the real universe never realizes, or at least has not yet realized, the perfect ideal of goodness in which every demand is satisfied. Imperfection, evil, is an undeniable feature of present reality. The fact of evil was one of the strong dissuaders that kept James from absolutism. As a pluralist who accepted the principle of the compounding of consciousness James was ready “to accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once.”²⁷ He continued:

We are internal parts of God and not external creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system. Yet because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts—as similar to our functions consequently.²⁸

Hence, pluralism is metaphysical evidence to James’s ethical conception of God as man’s Great Companion in the struggle against evil and for a better world.